Page 154 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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The culture of celebrity 139
1 Social Distance: renown is traditionally associated with a person
whose uniqueness is derived from their standing within a social
network that has direct experience of their celebrated qualities.
Celebrity in contrast involves a much greater social distance
between the celebrity and the admirer, a distance that has evolved
from the proscenium arch of the theatre to the separation
provided by the cinema or television screen (see Chapter 8’s
discussion of the ob-scene [against-the-scene]).
2 Transience: celebrity is more closely associated than renown with
the pace of change in social life. While some celebrities develop
into ‘idols’ or ‘icons’, most have a short shelf-life related more to
the fickleness of fashion than any personal talent.

Based upon space and time, these differences between then and now
forms of fame illustrate Benjamin’s account of the decline of aura
and its loss of a unique point in both the physical and temporal
realms. Celebrity’s dual attributes of distance and transience are
closely aligned to media technologies that are also inherently based
upon these premises. The powerful force of abstraction that domi-
nates both creates a deeply imbricated mix between the media’s
manufacture of celebrity and the preordained readiness with which
it is received by a mass public trained for consumption of the
short-lived and instantly forgettable (à la Barker’s holiday reading).
Benjamin’s political optimism rested in the masses being able to
develop a form of radical political consciousness from their interac-
tions with the mass media, but the likelihood of this occurring
through his poorly defined notion of distraction would seem to be
further away than ever given the much more highly sophisticated
forms of distraction now employed by the culture industry. It is the
seamless nature of the integration of personalities produced by the
culture industry and the uncritical acceptance of the wider commod-
ity culture that make Debord’s Society of the spectacle such an
important ‘hinge’ piece between relatively early analyses of media
culture then and the latest theories of the now. The spectacle becomes
such a powerful culture-forming entity because of its ability to
assume the status of a general background against which social
meaning is then constructed. Because there is a relative lack of
critical recognition that our dominant cultural values are so deeply
commodified in advance and why this should matter, culture conse-
quently suffers from a loss of symbolic, non-commercial values. It
becomes industrial in ever more immaterial yet effective/affective
ways and celebrity plays an important supporting ideological role in
this process.

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