Page 162 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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The culture of celebrity 147
equate to a decrease in its power. Increased cultural commodifica-
tion in such forms as celebrity would not seem to promise the
‘greater equality in the balance of power between social classes’ that
Rojek seeks. The tyranny of tradition that Benjamin and later
cultural populists have claimed is undermined by mass culture, has
been replaced by a much more subtle and voluntaristic, but never-
theless, still freedom-denying regime of commodification all the
more effective for its apparently radical properties.

7
Voluntary servitude and the knowing wink: practising
commodity magic upon ourselves

Why such widespread interest and consumption in the face of
what ought to be extremely damaging, even shameful, revela-
tions of technique? How does the celebrity system survive, even
thrive, under these conditions?
(Gamson 1994: 144)
Nike and its advertising agency, Wieden and Kennedy, have
built their reputation on advertising that is both distinctive and
avoids claims of packaged individualism. Their ads have gar-
nered public admiration because they seem to speak in a voice
of honesty and authenticity. Paradoxically, their aura of authen-
ticity has been a product of their willingness to address
alienated spectators about feeling alienated from media-
contrived images.
(Goldman and Papson 1998: 3; emphasis added)
It has been argued that a strong element of the culture industry
thesis is the way in which the surreal power of commodities relates
less to overt ideological manipulation and much more to the way in
which we practise their magic upon ourselves. Commodity culture is
thus premised upon the profuse circulation of generic, frequently
cross-referencing, image-based brands and the manufacture of desire,
all to cultivate the type of individual consumer who will demand
such products. What makes this process so insidiously effective is not
that deception or false consciousness occurs but, rather more disturb-
ingly, the way in which the individual consumer is voluntarily
co-opted into the ideological process. In a closely related manner,
Gamson (1994) describes how celebrity fans are sophisticated inter-
preters of the manufactured nature of postmodern celebrity and in
fact become fans, of not only particular celebrities, but more
importantly, the skilful management and reinvention of their images
that takes place within the broader process of celebrity production.
The fans thus positively identify with an abstract overarching atmos-
phere of manipulated inauthenticity of which particular celebrities

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