Page 164 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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The culture of celebrity 149
bewitcher, and the detached student of witchcraft’ (Boorstin [1961]
1992: 227). The complicity required from the audience is calibrated
in the advertising process as enough to diminish any resistance to
the commercial project, but not so complicit as to obtain a full
critical view of the social process as a whole – which might lead to a
fundamental questioning of the commodity project itself. Most
troubling of all from Goldman and Papson’s analysis is their
highlighting of how critical resistance itself tends to be co-opted
back into the process even if such a fundamental questioning does
take place. They describe how Nike’s ‘aura of authenticity’ is
paradoxically created by their ability to manipulate as yet another
element of the production of profit, the very feeling of alienation
felt towards their own profession.

Ideological manipulation: playing with aura

Celebrity is a never-ending series of images to be read, so that
even those whose truth appears to be that they are in control
of their own manufacture cannot be known to be so and must
also be read as essentially fictional. Reading the celebrity text
from this angle is like encountering mirrors facing one
another: there is no end-point, no final ground.
(Gamson 1994: 158)
As we have watched and marvelled in ways that used to be
reserved for shocking fictions, the frames that separated the
real and the contrived are continually being shattered, making
us less able to distinguish the public from the private, friend
from stranger, and legal due process from merely the televised
version of crime, trial and punishment – in short, everything
that frames our lives and gives it meaning and predictability.
(Abt and Mustazza 1997: 49)
Gamson’s above interpretation of the disorientating effects of celeb-
rity and Abt and Mustazza’s assessment of Banality TV’s (celebrity’s
democratized form) effect upon US culture contrasts sharply with
Benjamin’s savouring of photography’s explosion of the everyday.
Both suggest that the disorientating effects of the media inspired
explosion do not result in a radical reappraisal of the status quo as
Benjamin hoped. Rather, in the midst of these disorientating effects,
reliable, formulaic and ultimately conservative tropes are enlisted to
help reorientate what would be an otherwise confused viewing
public. The ideological move thus consists of a simultaneous reliance
upon the more mature media-induced fragmentation of meaning
that began with photography along with the provision of commodi-
fied formulaic formats that provide reorientation. In this way ritual

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