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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
It is a truism to suggest that celebrity pervades all areas of life today. The growth and expansion of celebrity culture in recent years has been accompanied by an explosion of studies of the social function of celebrity and investigations into the fascination of specific celebrities. And yet fundamental questions about what the system of celebrity means for our society have yet to be resolved:
Is celebrity a democratization of fame or a powerful hierarchy built on exclusion? Is celebrity created through public demand or is it manufactured? Is the growth of celebrity a harmful dumbing down of culture or an expansion of the public sphere? Why has celebrity come to have such prominence in today’s expanding media?
Milly Williamson unpacks these questions for students and researchers alike, re-examining some of the accepted explanations for celebrity culture. The book questions assumptions about the inevitability of the growth of celebrity culture, instead explaining how environments were created in which celebrity output flourished. It provides a compelling new history of the development of celebrity (both long-term and recent) which highlights the relationship between the economic function of celebrity in various media and entertainment industries and its changing social meanings and patterns of consumption.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Table of Contents
Dedication
Title page
Copyright page
Acknowledgements
1: What is Celebrity? The Changing Character of Fame
Introduction
Celebrity and the Cultural Decline Narrative
Celebrity and Commodity Fetishism
The Transition to Capitalism and the Origins of Celebrity
The Age of the Personality and the Contradictions of Revolution
Celebrity and the Ideology of Individualism
The Structure of the Book
Notes
2: Celebrity and the Theatre: Modernity and Commercial Culture
Introduction
Celebrity and Restoration Theatre: the Wider Context
The British Theatre and Early Celebrity: the Birth of Modern Fame
Touring and the Establishment of Theatrical Stardom
Theatrical Reform, Power and Celebrity
The Rise of the Actor-Manager, the ‘Long Run’ and the Industrialization of the Theatre
The Fame of Women in the Theatre and the Private/Public Paradox
Conclusion
Notes
3: Celebrity and the Industrialization of Cultural Production: The Case of the Mass Press and the Cinema
Introduction
The Rise of the Mass Circulation Press: Standardization of the Circulation of Celebrity 1850–1900
Celebrity, the Mass Press and Popular Taste: Catering to the Public or the Advertisers?
Celebrity and the Political Economy of the Early Mass Circulation Press in the US and UK
The Cinema and the Production of Stardom 1900–50
Film Stardom and Popular Taste
Competition and the Cinema: the Transition to Narrative Film
The Star Commodity and Product Differentiation
Conclusion
Notes
4: Celebrity and News
Introduction
Celebrity News and the Democratization Debate
Celebrity News, Gossip and Scandal: the Cultural Politics of ‘Tittle Tattle’
The Political Economy of Celebrity News
Conclusion
Notes
5: Ordinary Celebrity
Introduction
Ordinary Celebrity and the Rise of Reality TV
The Exploitation of ‘Ordinary’ Celebrities
Ordinary Celebrity and Representation
Conclusion
Notes
6: Social Media and Celebrity: The Internet of ‘Self’
Introduction
Social Media and the Production of Fame: DIY Celebrity?
From Cyber Culture to Celebrity Culture: Fame, Popularity and the New Media Self
Social Media, the New Tech Start-up Scene and the Rise of the Celebrity Self
Online Celebrity and the Politics of ‘Participation’
Conclusion
Notes
Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
CHAPTER 1
Index
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Dedication
To Emmeline with all my love
Copyright page
Copyright © Milly Williamson 2016
The right of Milly Williamson to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
350 Main Street
Malden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4104-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-4105-8(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
I am lucky enough to have excellent friends in academia, whose emotional and intellectual support is unfailing. I would like to thank them for their friendship and much laughter – and for reading draft chapters of this book, which has, without question, been improved as a result. I would particularly like to thank Natalie Fenton, Des Freedman and Gholam Khiabany. Natalie spent long hours discussing the ideas in this book on our travels to and from swimming pools, rivers and ponds, helping me to clarify my ideas and sharpen my arguments. She also made invaluable comments and suggestions on two chapters and pointed me in the direction of important ideas and further work which were essential to the latter half of the book. Des, with characteristic insight, explained to me what my book was about, which was handy. He also provided invaluable feedback on chapters, pointed me in the direction of new evidence and, with well aimed questions, got me to look at things in a new way. Gholam has, with great generosity, read every draft chapter of this book (some more than once). He has provided me with endless encouragement, critical commentary, and new ideas. He has been a great resource for Marxist thought and has helped me to clarify my ideas through our many conversations.
I would also like to thank Jo Littler who kindly read two chapters of this book and for making wonderful suggestions and much needed encouraging noises as the work on this book was coming to a close. Thank you also to Mila Steele for reading the opening chapter of the book and for her excellent suggestions. Thank you to Geoff King for reading and commenting on the second chapter, and for good advice. Thank you to Sheela Banerjee for our many conversations and laughs in the British Library while we were both working on our respective projects. I also want to thank Chris Williamson who read the whole manuscript, which must be beyond the call of duty for a sibling – thanks for being a great brother.
I would very much like to thank all of my colleagues and friends in Film and Television Studies at Brunel University whose understanding of the mad realities of our world, including as they appear in the Higher Education system, make day-to-day working life in neoliberal times possible. A special thanks to those colleagues whose humour and tendency to gently take the mickey out of me, manage also to make it fun – Mike Wayne, Leon Hunt, Sean Holmes, Caroline Ruddell, Piotr Cieplak and Craig Haslop. Without the supportive environment created by all of my Film and TV colleagues, research, thinking and writing would be impossible.
Brunel University provided me with a sabbatical which enabled me to complete the manuscript for this book, for which I am grateful. A special thanks and love to my parents, Nancy and Joe.
1What is Celebrity? The Changing Character of Fame
Introduction
Every epoch has its own form of fame, and celebrity is a form of fame commensurate with capitalist society, both economically and culturally. The rise of celebrity corresponds to the enormous social changes wrought by the emergence of capitalism: the rise of bourgeois modernity, the commercialization of culture, the development of technology and the processes of industrialization, the growth of democracy and its curtailment. In particular, celebrity is seen to be intimately bound up with the development and extension of the mass media.
But fame has been a feature of society throughout the history of civilization. Different periods of history in different parts of the globe possess ways of being well known and publicly renowned, which are shaped by the structure of public life as it is created by the particular social, political and economic conditions that prevail. Fame is not an unchanging human condition, attached inevitably to ‘Great Men’ and the occasional ‘Great Woman’. Instead, fame is part of the historical process, and as such it helps to illuminate the balance of power in any society between different social forces and values. Perceptions of fame and its social meanings change in times of social transformation often highlighting the transition between epochs.
Famous figures from history can tell us a great deal about their period, the values of their society, the shape of power and challenges to it. Leo Braudy's (1986) epic history of fame charts the key changes in the ideas and practices of fame since ancient times. According to Braudy, we find in Alexander the Great the origins of fame, for he was the first person in Western history to have the urge to be seen as unique and to be universally known (although perhaps not the first person, for 900 years prior to the life of Alexander, the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses II immortalized himself in his lifetime as the greatest pharaoh of all time). Braudy argues that Alexander presented himself as the direct descendent of the Homeric Gods – his grandiose persona corresponding with his status. His career became a guide for future generations of conquerors, and even centuries later Roman emperors emulated Alexander in their quest for absolute power, while the Roman aristocracy considered Rome to be superior by divine providence. In this atmosphere, every ‘true’ Roman strove to make himself worthy of his place in the Roman order, producing what Braudy terms ‘the Roman urge to fame’ (1986: 49).
The ostentatious and god-like fame inspired by Alexander remained the model for renown in the West for many centuries until it was challenged by the Roman emperor Augustus. Augustus did not emulate the heroes of the past, but instead developed a new form of fame which stressed civic duty and loyalty to Rome as the basis for public prominence. In this context Augustus presents himself as an imperial symbol, his importance tied to the destiny of Rome and its empire rather than to the gods. This marks one of the earliest shifts in the meanings of fame – from god-heroes to imperial-heroes, from grandiose display to an emphasis on civic duty.
Zygmunt Bauman (2005) also identifies the broad shifts in the changing patterns of fame but offers an alternative historical analysis. While for Braudy transformations in fame are related to social values, for Bauman, fame is also connected to social function and reveals the human condition in any period. Bauman contrasts the prominence of the ‘martyr’ figure in early Christian societies with the fame of the emerging ‘hero’ figure of early modern societies in the throes of nation-building. While the death of the martyr suited a world predicated on the self as a sacrifice to God and the salvation of the immortal soul, the death of the hero is a sacrifice, not to the immortality of the soul, ‘but the immortality of the nation’ (2005: 44). For Bauman, like others (Anderson, 2006; Calhoun, 2007), the nation must be understood as an ‘imagined’ community, the consolidation of which needed patriotic heroes prepared to die to ensure its success. Echoing but updating the Augustan link between public prominence and service to the state, the promotion of the early modern hero figure served the interest of nation states wanting to become stable and ‘solid’ at a time when the success of nation-building was not a foregone conclusion. The patriotism and the possibility of the death of the warrior-hero figure enacted and legitimatized these aims (Bauman 2005: 43). This period required patriotic heroes.
But for Bauman, if the hero embodied the needs of fame for a ‘solid’ modernity, then celebrity is the figure par excellence of what he terms ‘liquid modernity’. He characterizes our era as one in which community is not only ‘imagined’, as in the society of the ‘solid’ modern era, ‘but also imaginary, apparition-like; and above all loosely knit, frail, volatile, and recognized as ephemeral’ (Bauman 2005: 50). All is unstable in this characterization of the present, including, according to Bauman, the sovereignty of the nation state itself, which is no longer seen to entirely control culture and the economy and thus no longer commands the commitment of patriotic heroes. Bauman suggests that celebrities are symptoms of a new set of conditions; ‘celebrities are so comfortably at home in the liquid modern setting’ because they are ‘as episodic as life itself’, as are the ‘imaginary communities’ that wrap around ‘eminently restless celebrities who hardly ever outstay their public welcome [and] call for no commitment; still less for a lasting, let alone “permanent” commitment’ (2005: 50). For Bauman, then, celebrity comes to be an emblem of contemporary ephemera and is an expression of profound social changes.
Bauman's account perhaps overemphasizes the reduction of the role of the nation state in contemporary capitalism as a political, economic and particularly military entity, but also as a force for identification. But this is part of his diagnosis of the present as one in which huge changes to the human condition have occurred in the shift away from the ‘solid’ modern and towards the ‘liquid’ modern era. However, once must consider whether Bauman's insight about the ongoing ‘cavalcade of celebrities, each one leaping out of nowhere only to sink shortly into oblivion’ (2005: 51) is a symptom of a shift to a new epoch, or, as this book argues, a continuing and intensifying product of capitalist modernity. We must ask what the function of ephemeral celebrity is. Is it a symptom of a total cultural transformation, or an ongoing product of commercialized culture which extends back to the late eighteenth century? This book argues the latter; that it is a form of fame that emerges with the transition to capitalism and which first becomes a system in the commercial Georgian theatre in the latter half of the 1700s as a result of the growth of commercialism at the time.
Celebrity and the Cultural Decline Narrative
However, Bauman is not alone in his characterization of the present as a decisive break from the past, one that privileges the momentary and favours appearances over content. Nor is he alone in suggesting that the celebrity is a symbol of the prevailing zeitgeist. A number of commentators have suggested that contemporary celebrity is a symptom or a symbol of these cultural transformations and indeed represents cultural decline (Boorstin 1961; Debord 1984 [1967]; Gitlin 2002; Lowenthal 1961; Schickel 1985; Walker 1970). Perhaps the most frequently quoted is Daniel Boorstin who bemoans the decline of greatness that once purportedly characterized fame. For Boorstin, the ‘man of truly heroic stature’ (1961: 62), who scorned publicity, has been replaced by the image-obsessed publicity seeker. Boorstin argues that the graphic revolution in the nineteenth and into the twentieth century led to an increased valuation of style over substance. According to Boorstin, the widespread dissemination of the image through photography, film and television has meant that the circulation of the image has superseded the circulation of ideas, so that the media now rely on pseudo-events – events staged in order to be reported upon in the media – often before they occur. For Boorstin, celebrities are human ‘pseudo-events’ because, unlike heroes of the past who performed great deeds in the real world, celebrities since the early twentieth century are entirely constructed for media consumption. Boorstin claims that in the past the famous were known for their great achievements while today's celebrities are simply ‘well known for their well-knownness’ (1961: 58). They are no longer great, he claims, but mediocre mirrors of ourselves.
Boorstin has been identified, rightly in my view, as a conservative cultural elitist and a pessimist by more than one critic for harking back to an age that never was (Evans and Hesmondhalgh 2005; Ponce de Leon 2002). However, while there is a great deal of validity to this criticism, Boorstin's concept of the pseudo-event does point to an important dimension in the structure of information circulation which often relies on planned press conferences and prearranged events rather than spontaneous happenings. Nonetheless, it is important to recognize that concerns about ‘cultural decline’ are not new, but instead have a long history in modernity's language of critique, setting the ‘serious’ against the ‘frivolous’ at a time when both were emerging as important elements in an emerging contradictory structure of feeling that characterized a period in great turmoil. Celebrity has from its inception produced both sides of the coin, fame as achievement (serious) and fame as personality (frivolous). And, this duality still persists today.
For even as early as the sixteenth century, as a harbinger of debates to come, the Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne expressed deep concerns about the dangers of the ‘mediocre’ in art and culture. In his work Essais (2015 [1580]), de Montaigne values the ability of both folk culture and high art to alleviate inner pain through diversion, but he considered the ‘in-betweeners’ (by which he probably meant various forms of theatrical performance) to be dangerous because of their perceived mediocrity. Interestingly, Montaigne was criticized at the time of publication for the endless digressions in his essays and for insisting on making himself their central subject matter (Sichel 1911). A century later, Montaigne's successor, Blaise Pascal advances the critique of mediocrity by suggesting that diversion itself is dangerous. In Pensées, Pascal (1983 [1670]) criticizes the entertainment afforded by the new forms of art of his day because he considers them to be a diversion from inner contemplation and elevated pursuits. Pascal considered the theatre to be the most dangerous diversion of all, because he thought it could deceive man into believing he has all of the noble qualities he sees portrayed on the stage. As we shall see below, the theatre is one of the earliest arenas for modern fame so perhaps it is not coincidental that early concerns about diversion and identification should originate there. Leo Lowenthal (1961) argues that Pascal's critique of entertainment, ‘prefigures one of the most important themes in modern discussions on popular culture: the view that it is a threat to morality, contemplation, and an integrated personality, and that it results in a surrender to the mere instrumentalities at the expense of the pursuit of higher goals’ (1961: 17). Hence the discourse on ‘cultural decline’, the concerns about the disintegration of the ‘solid’ for the ‘fragmented’, and the ‘serious’ for the ‘frivolous’, the ‘great’ for the ‘mediocre’, are themselves part of the transition to modernity rather than a new language with which to describe its perceived decline. Celebrity does not point to social transformation that has moved beyond capitalism into liquid or postmodernity; instead, celebrity is the condition of fame that emerges with the development of capitalist modernity, including its complex structure of feeling, and its consolidation with the rise of the mass media and the industrialization of the fields of art and culture.
However, this is not to suggest that because celebrity has a history as long as capitalism that we ought not to offer critiques of its meanings and functions. Instead, this book offers a critical view of celebrity as a significant factor in the industrialization of culture and the commercial character of media. It is also worth noting that there are critiques from the left which share some of the concerns set out above. The Marxist cultural critic, Guy Debord, writing just a few years after Boorstin in France, also suggested that authentic social life has been replaced by representation. In his book The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Debord outlines 221 theses on contemporary culture in which capitalism, or more specifically, the consumer capitalism inaugurated in the twentieth century, has colonized social life beyond the arena of production and has expanded into leisure time and all areas of civil society. For Debord, this is because we now live in a society which is dominated by consumption and by the image – the society of the spectacle. Consumer capitalism presents a spectacle of the good life that depends on the separation of the individual from the collective, and rests upon the alienation of work. Because the individual is divorced from the collective, s/he is reduced to consuming corporate ideas and images. Writing about Debord, Richard L. Kaplan puts it thus:
In these media-packaged and corporate-supplied depictions of the good life, all the social attributes actually denied to the general populace – independent power, freedom, social connection and meaningful social action – are repackaged as ‘consumer choice’, or as features of the lives of celebrities in Hollywood and Washington, DC suitable for vicarious consumption.
(Kaplan 2012: 461)
Debord was one of a number of critics who theorized late modernity or ‘postmodernity’ as characterized by the dominance of simulation on social life, the descent of the population into passive consumption of the spectacle, and the subsequent destruction of the cultural fabric of society, or the ‘real’ (Baudrillard 1983; Jameson 1991; Ritzer 2007). Figures like Debord provide a much needed critique of our increasingly corporate-dominated, commodity-saturated and mass-mediated world, particularly now, when many celebrate the consumer power of audiences and users of new technology, embrace relativism, and rewrite the language of consumerism in the rhetoric of rebellion, while media capital consolidates its dominance even further. There are valuable insights in these works that are worth revisiting. Still, there are a number of issues too. For example, Debord privileges the power of media over and above all other powers, including the nation state, its institutions of coercion, such as the prison system and the military, supranational organizations such as the World Bank, the European Bank and the International Monetary Fund, or other sectors of corporate capitalism, including powerful sectors such as pharmaceuticals and the arms industries. This is a problematic formulation which overemphasizes the power of the media and the dominance of spectacle. Also, the collapse of the banking system in 2008, and the wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan are horrifying reminders that there is life (and death and destruction) outside of the image. While the spectacle and the image are highly significant social forces, they are not the only ones.
Celebrity and Commodity Fetishism
The Frankfurt School also provided an important critique of modern media culture which sought to explain the role of culture in the maintenance of the existing order, which they argued was characterized by a lack of freedom. Two of the most prominent members of the Frankfurt School were Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, whose critique of the culture industry is well known. For Adorno and Horkheimer, the industrialization of culture and the emergence of the cultural industry (from which celebrity grows) is not a break with modern capitalist society, but a continuation and intensification of its logic. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1973 [1944]), Adorno and Horkheimer argue that capitalism is not on a linear march towards greater freedom, as its apologists often claim, but is moving towards greater domination and the integration of every aspect of life into capitalist rationalism. The cultural industry plays a key role in domination because it has expanded into the last arena of freedom – culture itself. The culture industry now organizes ‘free’ time and has integrated it into the logic of capital, that is, production for exchange (rather than need) and standardization (rather than genuine individuality). In the process, the culture industry silences the reflective and critical essence of art and replaces it with an homogenized mass culture which is only an ‘escape from the mechanized work process …to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1973 [1944]: 135).
For Adorno and Horkheimer, culture has lost its critical capacity because ‘it had become commodified, a thing to be bought and sold’ (Hesmondhalgh 2007: 15). They argue, from a Marxist perspective, that culture under the system of capitalist commodity production is characterized by production for exchange rather than for use. This has resulted in a universalizing of things that should be particular. By treating everything as a commodity, the intrinsic values of things are displaced onto a universal exchange value (Adorno 1973, 2008). Adorno and Horkheimer argued that the products emanating from the culture industry are subject to this logic and so produce an illusory universalism or unity which not only promotes the dominant ideology, but also represses the idea that there is any alternative to the status quo, to the logic of capital, or to unfreedom.
Adorno reiterates this view in his essay ‘Culture industry reconsidered’ (1991 [1963]): ‘The cultural commodities of the industry are governed …by the principle of their realization as value, and not by their own specific content and harmonious formation. The entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms’ (p. 86). For Adorno, the star system is central to the fusing of the economic to the ideological. He argues that:
Each product affects an individual air; individuality itself serves to reinforce ideology, in so far as the illusion is conjured up that the completely reified and mediated is a sanctuary from immediacy and life. Now, as ever, the culture industry exists in the ‘service’ of third persons, maintaining its affinity to the declining circulation process of capital, to the commerce from which it came into being. Its ideology above all makes use of the star system, borrowed from individualistic art and its commercial exploitation. The more dehumanized its methods of operation and content, the more diligently and successfully the culture industry propagates supposedly great personalities and operates with heart throbs.
(1991 [1963]: 87)
Adorno and Horkheimer have been heavily criticized by academics (see During 2007) who refute the view of the pervasive manipulation of the culture industry. Such critics wanted to re-examine popular culture for moments of opposition to domination, often locating subversion and transgression in the practices of audiences. We shall see how some of the inheritors of such a perspective discuss celebrity news in chapter 4. However, Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis of commodity fetishism in the cultural industries points to the key organizing principle of culture in modern capitalist society – that is, that the production of culture is primarily a pursuit of profit. But this does not mean it is a straightforward business, for we have seen above some of the complexities and specificities of celebrity image-making. Also, cultural industries sociologists, such as Bernard Miège (1989), criticized the Frankfurt School for collapsing together what are quite different industries which produce different types of products (for a film is different from a newspaper) and also for refusing to see the innovative possibilities in new technology, although Miège conceded that industrialization did lead to greater commodification (1989: 11). But Adorno points out that he is suggesting that the term industry not be taken too literally, ‘It is industrial more in a sociological sense, in the incorporation of industrial forms of organization even when nothing is manufactured – as in the rationalization of office work – rather than in the sense of anything really and actually produced by technological rationality’ (1991 [1963]: 87).
Murdock and Golding also offer an important critique of the Frankfurt School. While they agree that Horkheimer and Adorno's critique is an indispensable starting point for any Marxist analysis of the production of culture under capitalism, they suggest that it is
not sufficient simply to assert that the capitalist base of the culture industry necessarily results in the production of cultural forms which are consonant with the dominant ideology. It is also necessary to demonstrate how this process of reproduction actually works by showing in detail how economic relations structure both the overall strategies of the cultural entrepreneurs and the concrete activities of the people who actually make the products the ‘culture industry’ sells.
(Murdock and Golding 1977: 18–19)
One of the central tasks of this book is to examine the business decisions made in particular cultural industries at specific times which resulted either in the increase of celebrity-based content, or the heightened prominence of celebrity in promotional strategies. This book examines why these decisions made sense in context and asks what the consequences were.
For me, though, the main problem with Adorno and Horkheimer's account of the cultural industries is not their identification of the dominance of commodity fetishism, which seems fairly indisputable; instead, it is the evacuation of the notion of contradiction central to Marx's writings, including his writing on the character of the commodity. The perception of the populace as passive, atomized and sutured into consumer capitalism, due to alienation and separation from the collective, only presents one side (although an important one) of the relations of production under capitalism which are at their heart, contradictory.
For Marx, capitalism is essentially contradictory, not because of contradictory ideas, as the philosopher Hegel had previously argued, but due to its contradictory material reality. For instance, those forces which atomize and alienate workers (in particular the division of labour and the processes of exploitation) are the same forces that bring workers together in collective labour, the springboard for collective working-class organization, solidarity and the extension of rights. In the pursuit of profit, capitalists must try to keep wages low to keep profits high, while workers must organize to defend wages in order to live. Capital cannot progress without labour and labour cannot eat unless it is employed by capital, and yet their interests are opposites. Thus, a central material contradiction in the relations of production can never be fully resolved through the operations of cultural or ideological domination – oppositional material interests confront one another.
There is also a contradiction in the character of the commodity (that which is the product of the worker's labour), which Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis omits and which pertains to the question of the function of celebrity. In capitalism, products are commodities because they are produced for exchange (profit) rather than use. For Marx, as for Adorno and Horkheimer, there is a generalized or standard value to a commodity, despite its specificity, which is its exchange value, that is, how much it can be sold for and still make a profit once all of the costs of production have been accounted for. For Adorno and Horkheimer, use value and exchange value are unified, and it is this which leads to standardization – products seem to offer uniqueness when all they really offer is the same standardized product whose basic value is its selling power. But for Marx the commodity form is more contradictory in itself, and this contradiction resides in the opposition between use value and exchange value. In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (2014 [1859]), Marx argued that the use value of a commodity appears to be independent of its exchange value. Its use value seems to be based on its ability to satisfy a need and therefore is understood in qualitative terms. That is, the quality of the commodity seems to have an independent existence. However, use values can only be realized in the process of exchange, i.e. in the process of being sold. In the process of being sold, the commodity loses its specificity as a use value because the seller and the system of selling are only concerned with its exchange value; that is, its quantitative value – its profitability in relation to other commodities. So far, Marx and the Frankfurt School seem to be in accord. But Marx goes on to point out that on the other hand the product cannot be exchanged at all unless it has a specific use value. Its generalized or standardized value (profit) can only be generalized through exchanging specific use values for money or its equivalent. Use values are not illusions – a car is not a telephone. But under capitalism, their use value is only meaningful once it has entered the market and becomes a generalized exchange value. Both use value and exchange value, which are opposites, can only be realized in the exchange relationship. We have to understand the generalized system of exchange value if we are to have any hope of understanding how capitalism works. Still, use values do not disappear, the specific value of a commodity is part of the selling process. It seems an obvious point that commodities are not all the same, even though at a fundamental level they all are because they only have value if they can be sold. Marx considered that the commodity was based on a ‘whole complex of contradictory premises, since the fulfilment of one condition depends directly upon the fulfilment of its opposite’ (2014 [1859]: 112). Adorno and Horkheimer treat the specificity or use value of a commodity as a pseudo-reality, an illusion in the face of standardization. But for Marx, while standardization dominates, it is also predicated upon its opposite.
Marx returns to the commodity and its dual existence as something with a specific property (use value) and also something with a general property (exchange value) in the Grundrisse (1993 [1858]). Exchange value is the property that all commodities share, despite their specificity, and that specificity can only be realized if a commodity can be exchanged. But specificity also matters, because exchange could not take place without it – there is no point in selling cheese sandwiches to a micro-processing plant – electronic components would be more appropriate. But capital invests in the production of cheese sandwiches not to satisfy a need per se, but to make a profit, and this lack of planning in the economy has had, and continues to have, dire consequences of overproduction and underproduction, including the grotesque reality of starvation when substantial amounts of food is wasted because it is not sold. Here we see the complexity and the instability of the commodity form. For capital, the rationale of production is profit rather than use, but it depends upon sets of (use) values that it is not designed to address as a system – despite claims to the contrary, and so contradiction is internal to the commodity form.
Cultural production is even more complex because the use values of cultural products are more complex, as are the needs they address – the desire for meaning itself. Predicting the kind of cheese that makes for a profitable sandwich is not straightforward, but it is not as complicated as predicting which story, accompanied by which images and/or sounds, will address a set of far more intangible needs. We shall see that one of the functions of celebrity has been to assist in the process of unifying use values and exchange values in the media and cultural industries, but that this is a complex process which can and does go wrong. This is an important point. A major feature of cultural commodities is precisely the unpredictability of demand. Star and celebrity systems are one approach to the reduction of risk and for addressing unpredictability, as we shall see throughout this book. But this is also a complex process because celebrity in itself does not guarantee success – films and television shows can flop spectacularly despite starring popular celebrities.
Thus what specific celebrities and types of celebrity mean is not irrelevant in this process, for their specificity has a role to play in the process of exchange. All celebrities have a value in common – to sell products, media and otherwise. But celebrities are not identical; there are typologies of celebrity (Dyer 2004 [1986]; Geraghty 2000; Rojek 2001); their specific types are not an illusion and unlike other commodities, they are far more unpredictable because they are also living breathing humans, with all the complexity of our species.
Contradiction is also realized in the relations of production. Workers lose control over their labour and over the products of their labour (commodities) because they do not have control in the production process. Their labour and the products of their labour belong not to them, but to the capitalist. For this reason, labour itself is a commodity; it is bought from the worker and controlled by capital.
Celebrities are commodities in both senses discussed here. Their labour is commodified; it produces performances which are only realized in the act of exchange and, unless they are producers themselves, they have no control over the final product. But celebrities are commodities in a third sense. As Richard Dyer argues, ‘Stars are involved in making themselves into commodities; they are both labour and the thing that labour produces’ (2004 [1986]: 5). All labour is commodified, but while most labour produces either things, or knowledge, or cultural works, stars and celebrities produce themselves as commodities too. The image they construct and the persona they produce are central to their value as a commodity, that is, as a figure that can help to sell a film, or a perfume, or a television show.
There has been important scholarship on the differences between stars and celebrities, such as the difference between cinematic aura and televisual immediacy (Langer 1981), and on the specific and changing meanings of individual stars and celebrities (including the pioneering work of Dyer 1979, 2004 [1986]). The specific meanings of stars and celebrities are necessarily multifarious and complex. But they also all have something important in common, for all that variation; what they have in common is that ‘they are made for profit’ (Dyer 2004 [1986]: 5). In Marxist terms, we can say that they have exchange values in common, and despite the huge variety of specific (use) values (what we might call their meanings), those values are realized in the relationship of exchange. In this book, while I acknowledge important difference in the meanings of stars and celebrities, I am also concerned with the function of stars and celebrities and thus what they have in common – their role in the exchange process in media and cultural industries. Sometimes in this book I use the terms stars and celebrities interchangeably, particularly when I am discussing the scholarship on stardom, not because I want to suggest that stars and celebrities have identical meanings, but because the focus of this book is the role that modern fame has played in the development of the media and cultural industries and the reasons that these industries made use of modern fame (called both celebrity and stardom) at particular historical moments in that development. I am focusing therefore on what is shared in common, the function of celebrity in the system of profit. However, also important is the way that this function is realized in very different cultural industries and in specific sets of circumstances, which this book seeks to investigate. This necessarily means examining the specific economic conditions in which it made sense for businesses to develop their celebrity systems and grow celebrity-based output and also necessarily to examine the specific and differing social meanings of celebrity that are tied to these contexts.
In general, celebrities are a central part of the way that media commodities are sold. But as Dyer argues, the image-making system is complex, different agencies inflect images differently, as do different media organizations. A studio may want a polished image of a celebrity to circulate while a tabloid newspaper will invest significant resources into capturing ‘unkempt’ images of celebrity (Holmes 2005). Even the image of a single star or celebrity is complex, as Dyer reminds us, ‘not only do different elements predominate in different star images, but they do so at different periods in the star's career. Star images have histories, and histories that outlive their own lifetime’ (Dyer 2004 [1986]: 3). And so too do celebrities; Jade Goody is a prime example of this. Goody became famous during her appearance on the UK version of Big Brother in 2002. Goody's early image was as a figure of derision to poke fun at, and she provided many column inches with her lack of education. This image changed in 2007 when she was accused of racially abusing Indian actor Shilpa Shetty when they both appeared on the UK Celebrity Big Brother. Her image changed again when she became terminally ill with cervical cancer and died in 2009, and her final depiction was as a dignified mother battling cancer. What Goody shares with the stars that Dyer analysed 30 years ago in Heavenly Bodies, is not the historical specificities of image content and how they speak to and of their moment, but her image as a selling point for media. Indeed, that is what unified her own chequered career, and even after her death Sky Living profited from these changing images by broadcasting five tribute shows about her life between 2009 and 2012.
Goody's specificity, however, is also tied to the rise of ‘ordinary’ celebrity, which became an important cultural and economic phenomenon in the 1990s, as we shall see in chapter 5. We shall examine why this form of celebrity becomes a key factor in the restructuring of the television industry and we will also look at the balance of class forces that are articulated by the spread of this form of fame.
The commodity form and the celebrity commodity are contradictory phenomena; cultural value in capitalism is fundamentally economic, but is also reliant on specific cultural meanings. This form is the consequence of relations of production that arise with capitalist society. But the transition to capitalist modernity is a much broader transformation that impacted on the economy, politics, society and culture. It is therefore important to examine the transition to capitalism, which produced both new relations of production and also new social relations which enable new ways of being famous, and so we will now turn to that history.
The Transition to Capitalism and the Origins of Celebrity
By the end of the eighteenth century, the cultural politics of fame had altered drastically because of the enormous political, economic and social transformations that mark that period of history. This was a turbulent time that was beginning to shake the old order to its foundations. It was marked by widespread dissent and rioting across Europe, and in France it culminated in the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, which inaugurated the first French Revolution. In August of that year the French National Assembly declared the abolition of feudalism and decreed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. This swept aside the power of the feudal monarchy and the clergy and replaced it with a system reaching for democracy, equality and freedom. Insurrection has a tendency to spread and the British establishment were deeply troubled. Indeed, prominent Whigs feared that the 1791 celebrations of the fall of the Bastille would lead to ‘widespread sedition and disorder’ in England (Rogers 1998: 192).
A number of scholars identify the French Revolution as inaugurating the social conditions that made modern celebrity possible (Braudy 1986; Inglis 2010; Rojek 2001). In the fixed society of pre-Revolutionary France, fame was predominantly the property of the monarchs, lords and ladies of Court society. Fame and social prominence was inherited or, in Chris Rojek's term ‘ascribed’ (2001: 28). The revolutionary movement that did away with old forms of power and prominence, he suggests, also elevated the idea of the ‘common man’. In this age, ‘ascribed’ fame gives way to ‘achieved’ celebrity; that is, fame based on achievement rather than bloodline. For Rojek then, ‘celebrity only becomes a phenomenon in the age of the common man’ (2001: 28), so that celebrity is the direct descendent of the ‘revolt against tyranny’ (2001: 29). This may seem to speak to celebrity as a democratized form of fame as some claim (Ponce de Leon 2002), but the reality is more complex.
The new social mobility arising from this revolutionary period gave rise to new ideologies of the self; crucially, alongside the ideology of the common man grew the ideology of individualism. These new ways of understanding the self began shaping new modes of public prominence that broke with the ideologies of the old order. In addition, the explosion of print culture in the eighteenth century marked the rise of public culture and the widespread dissemination of the image. In this context, European society saw the rise to fame and renown of people from many walks of life, including, significantly, those associated with the incipient mass entertainment industries. Some even suggest that this was the age of the personality as much as it was the age of reason (Luckhurst and Moody 2005). However, this is not to suggest that celebrity is simply a more democratic version of fame as we shall see below.
It is also important to recognize that the revolution sped up political and social tendencies that were already in motion throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. So while the French Revolution altered politics and society irrevocably, the social movements that culminated in revolution had already began shaping bourgeois notions of public prominence in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and we can begin to discern competing values for legitimate public renown.
Joseph Addison, for instance, who was famous in the early eighteenth century for his play about classical heroism, Cato (2004 [1713]) identifies the existence of two competing forms of fame in an article in the literary journal The Tatler (Addison 1987 [1709]). For Addison, fame can be ‘that which the Soul really enjoys after this Life, and that imaginary Existence by which Men live in their Fame and Reputation’.1
