A Genre Approach to Celebrity Politics

Global Patterns of Passage from Media to Politics

Nahuel Ribke

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137409393
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Exploring the transition of celebrities into institutional-electoral politics, the book argues that many insights developed by genre theorists could be highly instrumental to understand the celebrity politics phenomenon. It analyzes the historical and cultural specificity of celebrity politics as it evolved through different countries and cultures.

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Celebrity Politics: a Theoretical and Historical Perspective

From its early beginnings in the early 1950s until today, the study of celebrities as a social phenomenon has been linked to the rise of the mass media and entertainment industries. The pioneering works in this field were particularly emphatic regarding celebrities’ lack of power in comparison to other influential groups within society, resulting in the perception that issues regarding celebrities and institutional power or party politics were not discussed not because they were neglected, but because celebrity politics is a relatively recent phenomenon. While there is a broad consensus among researchers on the impact of mass media on celebrity culture as a whole, it is quite illuminating to note that the first academic essays and references to celebrities as a social group appeared only with the emergence of television as mass consumption product.

C. Wright Mills’s seminal The Power Elite (1953) may be considered the first academic work to devote a whole chapter to the analysis of celebrities as a social category. Setting the tone for future analyses of celebrities, Mills contrasted the economic and professional elite of the United States with ‘The professional celebrities of the mass media (which) are without power of any stable sort and are in fact ephemeral figures among those we celebrate.’¹ Celebrities, according to Mills, lacked autonomy and effective power, being dependent on the mass media industries to sustain their existence in the public sphere: ‘They are celebrated because they are displayed as celebrities. Often they seem to have celebrity and nothing else. Rather than being celebrated because they occupy positions of prestige, they occupy positions of prestige because they are celebrated.’²

From a conservative cultural perspective, Daniel Boorstin’s 1961 book The Image: a Guide to Pseudo-Events in America made similar tautological claims about celebrities’ lack of agency and power, defining the celebrity as ‘a person who is known for his well-knownness’.³ Boorstin compared the ‘old heroes’, who appeared before the graphic revolution, with ‘modern heroes-celebrities’, arguing that while the former earned their fame and prestige through ‘real achievements’, the latter lacked any particular merit, being the product of mass-media machinery. Francesco Alberoni’s 1973 essay, The Powerless Elite, completes the early celebrity studies trilogy, referring to media stars as a status group that emerged alongside industrialization, urbanization, and economic development processes. Celebrities, according to Alberoni, were a new group in the social structure, occupying a peculiar and ambivalent position in between those who held the institutional power and the disenfranchised masses. While they enjoyed the fame and admiration of the crowds, their charismatic presence was detached from any real power.⁴

Richard Dyer’s seminal work on film stardom (1986) offered a compelling analysis of Hollywood stars’ appeal during the 1950s. According to Dyer, films stars’ appeal emanates from their ability to resolve issues that are perceived by us as unsolvable contradictions of our times, such as the private against the public sphere, nature and artifice, production and consumption.⁵ From the perspective of celebrity politics analysis, Dyer’s examination of Hollywood stars differs significantly from the previous analyses of celebrities. For him, celebrities are not mere ‘decorative’ artifacts, but significant figures whose images, sometimes against their own will, tend to reinforce the dominant ideology of their time. In this sense, celebrities may be seen as instrumental for the maintenance of the hegemonic order, but devoid of agency. They may be important bolts in the status quo legitimization machinery, but they are, after all, disposable spare parts. Their subjectivity is irrelevant, since their images and the messages they carry are totally beyond their control.

Celebrity politics as a historical phenomenon

The passage of celebrities to the political sphere has yet to be fully studied from a historical perspective. In recent years, several works have analysed celebrities’ involvement in politics, mainly in the United States, but until now there has been no systematic study of celebrities who have turned into politicians.⁶ While several studies have discussed the impact of celebrity culture on the way politicians shape their public images,⁷ the present book’s aim is to construct a parallel history of the movement of celebrities towards institutional politics in several countries around the world during the last four decades. The question, then, is how far back we need to dig into history in order to explain the developing relation between celebrity and politics. We can identify two distinctive, but not necessarily colliding approaches regarding the history of the celebrity phenomenon: a structural-historical approach that identifies elements of continuity in the way celebrityhood has been pursued and reproduced since ancient times, and a poststructuralist/mass-media-based approach that explains celebrity culture as a twentieth-century phenomenon.

Within the structural-historical approach, Leo Braudy’s monumental book on the history of fame is one of the most extensive and detailed works on the topic. Braudy confronted the dominant views on the celebrity phenomenon, tracing a cultural history of fame in Western civilization dating back from Alexander of Macedon to the early decades of the twentieth century. Although Braudy acknowledges the significant changes in the reproduction and distribution of fame since the Industrial Revolution, his project emphasizes the structural elements that foment the pursuit of fame through human history, such as the search for recognition from our peers and the individual’s urge for distinction from a collective identity.⁸ While Braudy’s book is enlightening on the uses of media technologies in the reproduction of fame and political power during ancient times, such as the impact of the imprints of leaders’ visages on coins, and the impact of the works of historians and poets on the public images of generals and rulers,⁹ his analysis of the links between the celebrity phenomenon and the spheres of power in modern times seems to be one-dimensional, lapsing into the same dichotomist approach that juxtaposes modern celebrities with past heroes.

Lacking the detailed historical account of Braudy’s work, and although his analysis is mainly focused on late twentieth-century pop music and film idols, Chris Rojek’s inspiring book Celebrity identified the structural elements in the celebrification process of modern stars. According to Rojek, there are several parallels between the religious experience of worshipping gods and saints and the contemporary devotion to celebrities displayed by fan groups. If there is in our contemporary society a lucrative machine that produces and encourages the rites of celebrity consumption, this is because, Rojek argues, there are still spiritual needs that must be filled.¹⁰ However, Celebrity doesn’t methodically explore the examples given, and certain aspects linking the religious features of celebrity worship and power remain unexplored. Is the consumption of merchandising the only channel through which celebrity power is expressed? What roles could celebrities play in times of social and economic unrest and/or political turmoil?

On the other side of the scale, Richard de Cordova’s 1990 book Picture Personalities: the Emergence of the Star System in America locates the beginning of celebrity culture in the appearance of a new type of discourse on picture personalities. According to de Cordova, the emergence of the cinematic celebrity was the result of a radical change in the circulation of information regarding cinema actors’ off-screen personalities and private life. De Cordova points to the cross-feeding action of film studio executives, PR agents and the printed press as a turning point in the transformation of the stars’ private lives into a ‘new site of knowledge and truth’.¹¹ Although de Cordova focused on Hollywood film stars only, his findings on media intertextuality and the erosion of the boundaries between stars’ private lives and their on-screen persona are useful for thinking about the passage of celebrities to politics. After all, isn’t the migration of celebrities to the political field a merging of previously separated spheres, such as reality and fiction, private and public, entertainment and politics?

However, a global history of celebrity culture remained unwritten. While most of the existing studies focus on the American film industry, the analysis of media history in Latin America can shed light on other patterns of celebrity culture that have emerged around the world. In the absence of a robust film industry, until the emergence of television, the intersection between radio and theatre personalities and the entertainment press had played a similar role in the rise of a local star system in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.¹² While mass media had been crucial to the emergence of celebrities as an influential social formation, in order to decipher what kind of social function celebrities played in each locality, and the kinds of symbolic and material capital local celebrities are endowed with, we should look at the particular local-national cross-media configuration and sociocultural setting.

The same kind of wide perspective should be applied when trying to trace the beginning of the passage of celebrities from entertainment media to electoral or institutional politics. While Ronald Reagan’s career is emblematic for the national and global impact of his political career, there are indications that the transition from entertainment media to politics had already begun in other geographies some decades earlier. The rise to power of Eva Peron in 1940s Argentina, from her humble beginnings as a minor radionovelas and photonovelas actress, through to her personal and political partnership with Argentine’s populist leader Juan Peron, already possessed all the basic ingredients that communication and political science scholars have identified as characteristic of the political and media industry configuration of the late twentieth century.¹³ In this sense, the present work calls for a decentring of the analysis of celebrity politics in particular, and celebrity culture in general, not as compensation for the asymmetrical power relation between nations, but because it provides us with a richer and more complete understanding of the phenomenon under study.

Celebrity power, the cultural industries, and Field Theory

During the 1990s and 2000s, the study of celebrities gained force with the appearance of several major works that emphasized the impact of celebrity culture on our society and the mechanisms through which fame and prestige are produced and consumed.¹⁴ Joshua Gamson’s 1994 book Claims of Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America defined celebrities as multilayered and dynamic texts, shaped interactively by industry producers and executives, the stars themselves, the media, and audiences.¹⁵ Although Gamson, importantly, acknowledges the role of audiences in affecting the way stars are understood, his work did not leave much space for the stars’ autonomy. While the impact of celebrities on their audiences relies on their ability to be perceived as authentic, PR agents and talent agents are constantly vying for control over the public image of ‘their’ stars, thereby undermining the latter’s credibility as individuals and turning celebrities into prefabricated commodities that are undistinguishable from one another.

Distancing himself from the Frankfurt School theorists’ totalizing claims on culture under the capitalist production mode, David Hesmondhalgh also focused on the distinctive features of the cultural industries since the late 1960s, pointing to the technological and economic changes behind the predominance of particular products and contents. In his view, genre formats and the creation of the star system are among the most effective strategies adopted by the cultural industries in order to cope with the economic risks involved in their enterprise.¹⁶ Following Hesmondhalgh’s observation, one of the main questions I raise throughout the different cases analysed in this book is whether celebrity politicians fulfil the same function that genre formats perform in the cultural industries. Do they guarantee ‘sales = votes’ for their ‘corporations = political parties’ in the same way that genres and formats are perceived as guidelines for facilitating audience choices and ensuring high ratings or box-office success? While this is by no means a proven recipe for electoral success, the participation of celebrities, celetoids, and accidental celebrities in Brazil, Argentina, and Israel as candidates for parliamentary office¹⁷ could point to analogous processes and strategies in both the cultural industries and party politics.

David Marshall’s seminal book Celebrity Power (1998) is perhaps the first work that attempted to directly dissect the complex mechanism through which fame that is acquired through media exposure is converted into other types of symbolic and economic capital.¹⁸ Influenced by Bourdieu’s theoretical work on the fields of cultural production, Marshall analyses the links between different fields of the cultural industries and the distinctive forms of power attained by celebrities. Examining the celebrity construction process within the film, television, and popular music industries, Marshall accurately describes how the internal logic of each field and its particular relations with its specific audiences have conditioned the power and influence of its respective stars, as well as their ability to venture out into other fields and activities. Despite the fact that Marshall did not analyse the conversion of celebrity capital into political or electoral power, and his analysis of the political field is limited to the influence of entertainment industry practices on the way professional politicians communicate with their voters, his basic thesis has deeply influenced the logic underpinning the present book.

While Marshall’s analysis leads to general ideological claims about celebrity power, Bourdieu’s analysis of the field of literary production¹⁹ may help to decipher the specific capital that media entertainment stars are endowed with. Until now, most definitions of celebrities tend to place only a vague emphasis on the gains and privileges guaranteed by media exposure. Marshall has defined celebrity as a ‘system for valorizing meaning and communication’.²⁰ Much in the same vein, Robert Van Krieken defined celebrity as ‘quality or status characterized by a capacity to attract attention, generating some “surplus value” or benefit derived from being well-known (highly visible) in itself in at least one public arena.’²¹ While such definitions seem to point in the right direction, we still need to ask further questions regarding the ‘alchemical’ conversion process of media exposure into political or electoral power. How is media attention distributed among celebrities? What...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Celebrity Politics: a Theoretical and Historical Perspective
• Part I Television Celebrities and Israeli Politics
• Part II Making Music Matter: the Electoral Politics of Pop Celebrity in Latin America
• Part III Cinema Celebrities in American Politics
• Part IV Celetoid Politics: Victims, Heroes, and Ordinary People as a Valuable Electoral Asset
• Conclusions: Celebrity Capital and the Transition to Politics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index