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148 Now
are but individual manifestations. There is thus a twofold process
that cultivates deep-rooted consumption practices in relation to
celebrity culture:

1 The consumer of celebrity culture identifies closely with the abstract generic
notion of celebrity – this makes him/her particularly predisposed or
culturally aligned to more general commodity consumption.
2 The consumer’s identification process with the manipulative overarching
celebrity superstructure is an active and ongoing one. Pleasure is
derived from being media literate enough to recognize the
commercial nature of the manipulation and, rather than under-
mining the whole celebrity structure, exposure of the process
reinforces the effect.

Using the Nike company for their focus, Goldman and Papson
(1996, and 1998) describe in detail the various processes by which
the cultivation of commodity values in the individual takes place
through this mode of active identification:

The advertisers … sensed that they must buffer Nike from the
logic of the spectacle, the logic of commercialism, and the logic
of advertising, even though they are enmeshed up to their ears
in these logics … Nike ads draw attention to metacommunica-
tion in order to distance Nike from the processes of commer-
cializing sport and thereby legitimize its own contradictory
commercial practices which contribute to the corruption of
sport.
(Goldman and Papson 1998: 44)
The metacommunication Goldman and Papson refer to above relates
to the way in which the Nike company incorporates a multilayered
(for example, commercials within commercials), self-conscious aware-
ness of the ultimately bad faith nature of their advertising. For
example, within its own adverts, the company makes fun of its
contribution to the commercialization of sport despite its simultane-
ously contradictory message that Nike represents the true spirit of
sport. Goldman and Papson term this element the knowing wink –
possible resentment is disarmed by full acknowledgement of the
manipulation taking place. The contemporary culture industry
exhibits an inherently ambivalent social atmosphere to produce a
paradoxical situation of ambiguous transparency. Products are adver-
tised using deliberately obfuscatory or exaggerated language, yet
often this process is deliberately left open for detection by the
consumer so that it mirrors McLuhan’s axiom, the medium is the
message, to the extent that admiration of form supersedes attention
to the ideological effect of its content: ‘The citizen-consumer enjoys
the satisfactions of being at the same time the bewitched, the

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