Page 149 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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134 Now
celebrity faces effectively distract us from the much less glamorous
and more mundane structural economic causes that continue to
dominate social relations within the heavily mediated West and the
wider global political order. As embodiments of the enigmatic and
irrational aspects of commodity culture, even their various well-
intentioned charity campaigns ultimately serve to reinforce the
system as they appear to challenge it.
Just as the medium becomes the message for McLuhan, so the
specific qualities or use-values of both commodities and celebrities
have been supplanted by their status within the realm of circulation.
In both cases, the mode of circulation (the general) is more
important than the content being circulated (the particular). Our
routine interaction with familiar yet unknown (in any meaningful
personal sense) celebrities mirrors our similarly ambivalent yet
routinized relationship with the branded commodity. Both are
premised upon abstract desire. Any use-value they might have is
subordinate to their primary appeal as iconic representations and
the value of this appeal stems from an essentially circular and
self-regarding process. The logo on a sports shirt or shoe has no real
usefulness beyond the status it derives from being instantly recogniz-
able. There is no inherent reason why the Nike swoosh logo has to
be a swoosh, or why this should make its running shoes more
desirable, and so too beyond the particularly talented or charismatic,
the cultural value placed upon celebrities is predominantly arbitrary.
Part 1 demonstrated the roots of this now highly developed social
valuation of circulation for its own sake and how its cultural tipping
point arose with the advent of photography. In the mechanically
reproduced images of then lie the origins of the celebrity culture we
inhabit now.
Adorno argued that the culture industry relies upon an unhealthy
denial of the marginal nature of the supposed differences between
what are essentially the same commodities. The illusion of difference
is created by the advertising industry’s manufacture of superficial
distinctions and purported attributes. This aspect of the culture
industry’s output is equally true in relation to celebrities and brands.
Successfully advertised goods mean that inanimate objects become
celebrity products. For a human celebrity well-knownness creates its
own justification, while for commodities ‘best-sellerdom’ fulfils the
same function: ‘As a celebrity of the book world, a best seller has all
the dignity and appeal of other pseudo-events’ (Boorstin [1961] 1992:
164; emphasis added). A key aspect of celebrity is its ideological
function as the human face of this otherwise alienating and tauto-
logical process. The pseudo-event is labelled pseudo because its mean-
ing derives only from the media system for which it was created.
Within advanced capitalist culture, the increased irrelevance of an

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