Page 210 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

STAR CULTURE

those who seek renown. Once fame is granted, the famous know they will be
rewarded with political, material, or cultural influence.
While this ‘will to power’ may be constant throughout history, the means by
which fame is spread and the conditions under which it is received by audi-
ences have changed drastically. These processes have altered the nature of the
quest for fame. Braudy suggests that substantive changes have taken place in the
motivation for fame and the time span within which renown is granted:

Although the urge to fame originally was the aspiration for a life after
death in the words and thoughts of the community, it has evolved over
the centuries into the desire for fame in one’s own lifetime, fame not as
the crown of earthly achievement but as psychic medicine for a per-
vasive sense of loss and personal failure . . . For the ancient Romans,
your genius was in the stars. Now, with little thought for either
posterity or transcendence, genius is entirely within.
(Braudy 1986: 605)

Braudy argues that the very psyche of modern culture has been altered by
changes in modern communication technology and the culture industries. He
writes: ‘Through the media of sound, sight, and print individuals can aspire to a
dream of ubiquity in which fame seems unbounded by time and space: con-
stantly present, constantly recognizable, and therefore constantly existing’
(1986: 553). Yet, for Braudy, the consequences of these changes are purely
negative, particularly for the famous person, who is the true subject of his
investigation. The modern famous person becomes alienated from his or her
own nature in a web of communication technology, and metamorphosizes into
a mere image that circulates without links to the ‘authentic moral self’. Braudy
mourns this loss of ‘authenticity’, which he believes characterized earlier
heroes and gave moral force to their actions. Braudy suggests that today’s stars
are ‘performers’ instead, and ‘the performer’s lesson [is] that to be caught in the
attention of others is in great part to mean what they want you to mean’, often
‘intimately accessible, unthreatening, enclosed – turned by [media] into an
ironic version of [one’s] self’ (Braudy 1986: 583).
This condemning view of modern renown fails to accept the fact that time
and space have always been implicated in fame, and that it is audiences – not the
famous themselves – who are the final arbiters of who will or will not win
fame. Because celebrity status depends so much on currents of time, space, and
audience involvement, any changes in the ways time and space are experienced
by the public will also change the specific nature of fame. For instance, if one
looks up to a famous person in a culture where time is elongated and spatial
borders cannot easily be transcended, that will be a very di fferent experience
from idolatry in an instantaneous, ‘global society’. The impact of the relation-
ship between star and consumer will differ in intensity, in reach, and in the
manner it shapes the self-image of the audience member or ‘fan’. To place a

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