Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/Michael Ney's Cyberculture/Cyberculture/Claims To Fame- J. Gamson

Text File | 1994-09-02 | 11KB | 206 lines

Topic 379       "Claims To Fame" J. Gamson (essay)
visionary       cyberculture zone        1:57 AM  Jun 29, 1994
(at peg.UUCP)

From: <peg!visionary>

Subject:      REVIEW 22 CTHEORY <[e-mail]> electronic review of books

CELEBRITY AS SIMULACRUM
=======================

Joshua Gamson, _Claims To Fame: Celebrity In Contemporary America_,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

~Deena Weinstein~

Celebrity exists as a product of the media-net to seduce bodies into the
Net. The celebrity is the way that cyber-space invades perceptual space:
the celebrity's body is the media body, cloned in every possible way
(tv, photo, radio, ~ad nauseum~). And then in "personal" appearances the
image is made flesh, invades the world of perception as a living
hologram, becomes **virtual**. Finally, the flesh is sacrificed to the
image in rituals of criminal justice (O.J. Simpson).

Joshua Gamson does not approach the celebrity through the media-net and,
therefore, fails to understand why celebrity looms so large in the life
of people, who consume celebrities via tv, radio, and magazines in the
"privacy" of their homes (that is, when they are ~wired~). What Gamson
does understand, and this is no mean accomplishment, is the capitalist
structure that both generates and parasites off the Net.

We are more than waist deep in the big mud of commercial culture. It is
the environment in which we swim, and like those apocryphal fish, we
would be the last ones to discover water. In this culture of hype,
celebrity is king.

Celebrities, those known for "well-knowness," are walking commercials,
advertisements for their selves/personae and for any product to which
they are (via agents) connected. But celebrity is more than a noun; it
is a form, in Simmel's sense, of social interaction. The analysis of
celebrity needs, then, to consider not only the famous but also their
fans and the mediators of the celebrity-fan interaction.

Gamson nicely details the history of this interaction, and the celebrity
discourse in which it is embedded. In the early modern era fame was
"deserved and earned." "By the seventeenth century the pursuit of fame
was clearly becoming democratized." [p.17]  The "talented and virtuous"
rose to the top, at first without, and later with, the aid of
promotional machinery. Heralding the 20th century the first independent
publicity firm began in Boston in 1900, signalling the crystallization
of promotional culture.

During the 1930s the mediator between the famous and their fans came to
dominate the relationship, bringing the phenomenon of celebrity to the
third order of simulation. Gamson indicates how the publicity apparatus
churns "out many admired commodities, called celebrities, famous because
they have been made to be." [p.16] That is, in Simmelian terms, a
~famousness~ as a pure form is ~produced~.

During this time of the triumph of ~mediation~ the celebrity text also
changed: "...celebrities were being demoted to ordinariness in
narratives" [p.34] and from posed photographs to "candid' shots. Also
changing was "the audience [which] was being promoted from a position of
religious prostration."[p.34] Enter the weak polytheism of postmodern
culture where the worshipper can glean ~abuse value~ from the celebrity,
in addition to cheap grace.

Gamson provides few clues as to why the changes occurred. For example,
how has the form of television, whose celebrity crammed shows dominate
its content now more than ever, influenced the celebrity discourse? He
does provide assistance to active readers, such as: "Sitting in the dark
under a movie screen, watching Charlton Heston as Ben Hur, a viewer
might feel as if Heston could reach right down and pull her in; sitting
in front of a television screen watching Heston in a sweat shirt
chatting with Joan Rivers, the viewer could almost reach down and pluck
HIM out."[p.43-44] Gamson does not realize that the relation of the
viewer to the tv image, which he describes correctly, is ~ironic~: it
only seems that we could "pluck" the celebrity off the screen; in fact
we are wired to the screen.

~Its a helluva start,
it could be made into a monster
if we all pull together as a team.
And did we tell you the name of the game, boy,
we call it Riding the Gravy Train.~
Pink Floyd
HAVE A CIGAR

In the famous-fan interaction Gamson is clearly most interested in the
mediators, the element of capitalism, the virtual class. He has
interviewed and read about those who "...form support industries around
the development of celebrity products: personal publicists and public-
relations firms handle the garnering of media coverage and help manage
the packaging of celebrity: agents, managers, and promoters handle
representation, affecting the pricing and distribution of celebrity;
coaches and groomers of various sorts help with the presentation."[p.62]

Gamson is especially good at showing how media journalists are fully
coopted into the publicity machine. Celebrity writers are sucked in as
they suck up to publicist-scripted celebs in order to maintain their
meal-ticket to access. Going further, Geoffrey Himes, a rock journalist
writes: "Pressured by celebrity-driven record companies, encouraged by
gossip-hungry readers, and seduced by the fact that it's easier to write
about personalities than art, we spread the lie that music is the
inevitable result of the way musicians lead their lives." (1) Of course
it is a "lie," but when it comes to celebrity the "life" is part of the
image and so is the "music."

Gamson appreciates the irony that it is the sleazy tabloids, with their
army of papparazzi (who shoot actual, rather than staged, candids) that
produce the only uncoopted celebrity journalism. Refusing to go along
with the expensively crafted fakery they are refused easy access to the
celebs and become their genuine antagonists, the agents of sacrifice.

Had Gamson extended his frame to include politicians as celebrities, he
could have noted that the White House press corps is in the same
position as the non-tabloid journalists are - either they file stories
that further the narrative constructed by White House publicists or they
are denied access to their material of production.

When politicians appear on talk shows and play saxophone to late night
tv viewers, or respond to questions about underwear preferences to an
MTVidiot query, they are (playing at) celebrity. And of course they also
garner votes and "public opinion" ratings as celebrities. Celebrity has
become the currency within all areas of society (politics, education,
religion etc.), a fully generalized medium of exchange, comparable to
money as Simmel conceptualized it. That the rhetoric of persuasion
replaces epistemology in a third-order simulacrum takes on a
significance that Gamson misses by confining himself to the arena of
entertainment and failing to venture into political economy.

~Living in the limelight
The universal dream
For those who wish to seem.~
Rush,
LIMELIGHT

The types of celebrity can also be historized. Prior to this century and
paralleling the changes in the economy, Gamson indicates that "by the
1920s the typical idols in popular magazines were those of consumption
(entertainment, sport) rather than production (industry, business,
natural sciences)."[p.28] Rationalization, in Weber's sense, has also
affected fame: "...people known for themselves rather than for their
achievements are more commercially useful because they can be attached
to any number of products."[p.78] (Floating signifiers, generalized
media.) "Celebrity itself is thus commodified; notoriety becomes a type
of capital. Famous people are widely referred to within the
entertainment industry simply as 'names'..."[p.62] (Reduction to the
pure self-referential sign.)

Because he privileges those entertainers who are interchangeable between
tv talk shows and sitcoms, Hollywood movies, and any advertisement,
Gamson fails to analyze the relationship between the person and his/her
persona. Had he broadened his scope to include rock stars, who are self-
scripted, the discourse of this relationship with the master name
Authenticity, would need to be part of Gamson's work. He would have had
to accept the sacrificial or even "tragic" side of celebrity, understood
by Neil Peart and other "serious" rockers.

~I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us.~
Nirvana
SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT

The audience too can be historized. In "...early celebrity texts ... the
'public,' modeled as a unified, powerful near- person forever casting
its votes for its favorite personalities, became a crucial character in
its own right. The notion of the public as an entity that 'owned' both
space and the public figures inhabiting it runs consistently though both
general and fan magazines."[p.34] (Again we see the reversal in which
what seems to be empowerment of the (democratized) possessive individual
is actually the production of the possessed individual.)

Gamson notes that the publicity industry is not knowledgeable about its
audience, despite its dependence on that audience. He concludes that for
them it is "...not necessary to know, while working on a project by
project basis, WHY certain performers appeal, only THAT they do, for the
moment."[p.118] That is, the celebrity is a throwaway currency - endless
supplies can be generated on the Net, later to invade the world.

Unfortunately Gamson shares much of the mediator industry's ignorance
about the audience. His research includes participant observation with
studio audiences and autograph hounds at awards ceremonies. He details
these activities but understands the celebrity-mad audience no better
than does the publicity machine. Gamson notes that "the amount of energy
constantly poured into 'warming up' and monitoring live television
audiences is stunning."[p.110] He fails to wonder why people want to be
cheerleaders for celebrities. He is still in the second-order simulacrum
of production, rather than the third-order simulacrum of the sign
economy, of the triumph of culture over "man."

Celebrities are the gods (or at least god simulacra) of our polytheistic
pomo pantheon. In the aftermath of the death of god, we worship
celebrities. Is that all we need to know about fans of the famous?

NOTES
1. Himes, Geoffrey. "Why it doesn't matter if Kurt Cobain, Snoop Doggy
Dogg, and Axl Rose are jerks in their personal lives (and why it does if
they're jerks in their songs)," Request (May 1994):41.

------------------------------------------
Deena Weinstein, Professor of Sociology at DePaul University, is a
cultural theorist and sociologist, and a rock critic. She is author of
_Heavy Metal: A Cultural Sociology_ and _Postmodern(ized) Simmel_.