Routledge Handbook of Celebrity Studies

Anthony Elliott

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138022942
• eBook ISBN: 9781317691471
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Ours is the age of celebrity. An inescapable aspect of daily life in our media-saturated societies of the twenty-first century, celebrity is celebrated for its infinite plasticity and glossy seductions. But there is also a darker side. Celebrity culture is littered from end to end with addictions, pathologies, neuroses, even suicides. Why, as a society, are we held in thrall to celebrity? What is the power of celebrity in a world of increasing consumerism, individualism and globalization?

Routledge Handbook of Celebrity Studies, edited by acclaimed social theorist Anthony Elliott, offers a remarkably clear overview of the analysis of celebrity in the social sciences and humanities, and in so doing seeks to develop a new agenda for celebrity studies. The key theories of celebrity, ranging from classical sociological accounts to critical theory, and from media studies to postmodern approaches, are drawn together and critically appraised. There are substantive chapters looking at fame, renown and celebrity in terms of the media industries, pop music, the makeover industries, soap stars, fans and fandom as well as the rise of non-Western forms of celebrity. The Handbook also explores in detail the institutional aspects of celebrity, and especially new forms of mediated action and interaction. From Web 3.0 to social media, the culture of celebrity is fast redefining the public political sphere.

Throughout this volume, there is a strong emphasis on interdisciplinarity with chapters covering sociology, cultural studies, psychology, politics and history. Written in a clear and direct style, this handbook will appeal to a wide undergraduate audience. The extensive references and sources will direct students to areas of further study.

Part I

Theories and Concepts of Celebrity

1

Celebrity and contemporary culture

A critical analysis of some theoretical accounts

Anthony Elliott and Ross Boyd

Celebrity is at once astonishingly mesmerizing and mind-numbingly dull, crazily libertarian and depressingly conformist. Our culture of celebrity feigns the new, the contemporary, the up-to-date, as it recycles the past. Celebrities are constantly on the brink of obsolescence, of appearing out of date. Today Beyoncé, the day before Justin Bieber, and before that Lady Gaga. Celebrities are radically excessive in this respect: in a world teeming with images and information, celebrities trade in sheer novelty as a means of transcending the fame of others with whom they compete for public renown. To a large extent, celebrity represents a central driving force behind the cascade of individualized, liquid and reflexive societies of reinvention. In contemporary cultural conditions where lifestyles and life strategies in the advanced cities are increasingly rendered light, plastic and adaptable, is it any wonder that celebrities should be worshipped as sacred icons?

In his pioneering study of fame The Frenzy of Renown (1986), Leo Braudy traced the many different ways in which representations of the famous have been disseminated. From traditional societies in which gods, priests and saints were famous, through to the era of Hollywood and its invention of film stars, different societies and cultures have developed particular methods for the dissemination of information on public figures. Braudy focused especially on how fame is dependent on media dissemination, and highlights how the urge to fame is increasingly personalized with the advent of mass communications and popular culture. He underscored, for example, the complex ways in which personal authenticity, artistic originality and individual creativity have shaped, and been shaped by, forms of public attention. From Laurence Olivier’s dramatic talents to John Lennon’s lyrical brilliance, the true artist of the modernist era was one who distinguished themselves through the expression of their personal gifts, their ‘inner genius’, lifting them out from the surrounds of the wider society.

Braudy’s study, whilst historically comprehensive in scope, traced celebrity only until the advent of radio in the 1920s and television in the 1940s. His book is widely regarded as a key reference work in the area of celebrity studies, but it is interesting to compare celebrity in the early twenty-first century with even the period of the early twentieth century. Today’s globalized world of new information technologies and media transformations turns both the production and reception of fame upside down. We have witnessed in recent years a large-scale shift from Hollywood definitions of fame to multi-media-driven forms of public recognition. This new field of ‘publicness’ (Thompson 1995) signals a general transformation from ‘fame’ to ‘celebrity’. This has involved a very broad change from narrow, elite definitions of public renown to more open, inclusive understandings. This democratization of public renown has gone hand in hand with the rise of celebrity culture. Celebrity today hinges increasingly on the capacity of the celebrated to create a distance (however minimal) from what originally brought them to public notice, thereby opening a media space from which to project their celebrity in novel and innovative ways. In a sense, celebrity might be described as fame emptied of content, or artistry. We are, arguably, at a considerable remove from the world of fame as analysed by Braudy. What is striking is not simply how celebrities transform and reinvent their identities today, but how many of them embrace and indeed celebrate a culture of inauthenticity. If originality and authenticity were the hallmarks of traditional notions of fame, then parody, pastiche and, above all, sudden transformations in a star’s identity are the key indicators of contemporary celebrity (Rojek 2004).

Why are we so spellbound by ideas of celebrity, yet so often dismissive of the celebrated? Given the increasingly fleeting nature of fame, what are the broader cultural consequences of celebrity culture? What does celebrity tell us about society, and in particular what might it reveal about our possible social futures? How does celebrity express and contain cultural contradictions, especially differences of sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity and multicultures? And what does celebrity, and our fascination with it, say about our own lives? What does celebrity reflect about changing conceptions and practices of self-identity, interpersonal relationships, sexuality, desire, affect and the body? One aim of the Routledge Handbook of Celebrity Studies is to engage these questions from different intellectual traditions and theoretical standpoints. Another aim is to ponder the various cultural practices and social transformations associated with celebrity culture. Yet another aim is to introduce readers to the very broad research conducted in the social sciences and humanities on celebrity and its social and cultural consequences, and to connect these strands of research more systematically than previously.

In this introductory chapter, we aim to develop a reasonably comprehensive – though necessarily provisional – account of the development of celebrity studies along the twin interdisciplinary axes of social theory and cultural analysis. In the first section of the chapter, we contextualize the phenomenon of celebrity in terms of culture, communications and media more generally, and examine the rise of the interdisciplinary field of celebrity studies. In the second section of the chapter, we shift focus to the intricate connections between globalization, modernity and capitalism, and reflect on how celebrity cultures are produced, reproduced and transformed across time and space in the wider frame of complex institutional systems and transnational corporations. The final section of the chapter considers an array of recent debates on celebrity culture, everyday life and processes of identity-formation in our social media age of endless reinvention, do-it-yourself makeovers and short-term identity projects.

Situating celebrity and the rise of celebrity studies

Celebrities stand apart from the crowd. Celebrities are necessarily different from mere mortals. Celebrities are unique. To be part of the world of celebrity is to be elsewhere and other. If we stop to pause and reflect on this mediated world of the famous – whether the artefacts under consideration are, say, artist, performance or digital simulation – celebrities are revealed as shaped to their roots by culture, capitalism, communication and the circuits of desire, imagination and fantasy. But how do we get behind the celebrity-maker machinery? How might we best conceptualize celebrity as a reference point (and cultural resource) for how we understand our self-identities and enact our bodies, our anticipations and expectations of the world and our living with others, our modes of ordering social relations and generating forms of shared belonging across often vast physical, social and cultural distances, or the ways we give expression to our pleasures and desires, frustrations and fears (Turner 2010; Sandvoss 2005). Likewise, but from a more Olympian height, how might we understand the complex ways celebrity is so heavily implicated in the processes and institutions of democratization, individualization, commodification, secularization, mediatization, nation-state formation and so forth (Marshall 1997; Couldry 2000; Rojek 2001).

Thinking celebrity seriously requires celebrity studies. The study of celebrity has emerged as an interdisciplinary field, which engages social and cultural theory in order to give analytic shape and direction to its important questions and probings about the ongoing public significance of celebrity, and processes of mediatization more generally, in contemporary society. From this angle, thinking celebrity seriously means thinking complexity, fluidity and instability. Celebrity is, like the world of which it is a part (see Thrift 2005), inherently dynamic, shot through with contingency and contradiction, interpretive confusions and accidents, always in the process of becoming, unfinished and unfinishable. At the outset, we need to be cautious about underplaying historical continuities that do exist in the rush to declare the emergence of something new. Marcus (2015), for example, warns of the risks of a form of technological determinism wherein the advent of new media technologies, and the new communication channels and formats these afford, is said (on the basis of the close relationship between celebrity and media) to lead directly to some or other radical disjuncture in the historical trajectory of celebrity. The risk here is one of confusing what may at most be quantitative adjustments – say increasing the speed or extending the reach of existing or some or other renewed practices – for profound qualitative transformations. Bearing this in mind, part of our argument will be that tracking the advancing cultural fronts of celebrity and its futures invariably adds insights that enhance our understanding of the past – in this instance, of how the celebrated and famous of yesteryear shape and reshape both the present and future of celebrity.

These are more than just historical niceties, as Robert van Krieken makes clear with respect to the development of a genuine history of celebrity (Chapter 2), one that captures social-historical change over time. According to van Krieken, any historical analysis that works with a model of celebrity freighted up with a maximum of current elements and characteristics is most likely to yield a rather shallow history: a history wherein one either sees celebrity as it currently obtains, or one does not see celebrity at all. The alternative approach that van Krieken suggests, and subsequently demonstrates in a necessarily partial and provisional manner, is to break celebrity down into its component aspects – ranging across visual culture, conceptions of self and subjectivity, the public sphere, power imbalances, imagined communities, market dynamics and communications media – and then observe how the arrangement of these aspects, by dint of each of them being caught up in the histories of other social processes, has been configured differently in different periods, producing a variety of historically unique forms of celebrity. In van Krieken’s chapter, this approach enables him to situate the history of celebrity from around the 12th century and the emergence of the medieval Christian cult of the saints (see also Lilti 2017). It should be noted that conceptualizing celebrity in terms of such complex, ever-shifting configurations of relatively discrete elements offers considerable analytic purchase with respect to current fields of celebrity, as well as for examining the multiple celebrity futures nested within, and attendant upon, developments in the present.

The history of celebrity studies, as an identifiable, self-aware field of scholarship is, unlike the history of celebrity itself, a relatively recent development. Richard Dyer’s Stars (1979) is often taken by many critics as a foundational text, with the subsequent steady flow of monographs throughout the next few decades relatively quickly providing the field with definition and breadth (Braudy 1986; Dyer 1986; Gamson 1994; Marshall 1997; Elliott 1999; Giles 2000; Rojek 2001; Turner 2004). The phenomenon of celebrity itself, being of much longer provenance, had certainly not wanted for attention prior to this point. Braudy (1986), for instance, reports on much of the 19th-century writing on the topic, and a range of notable figures in 20th-century social thought gave the topic serious consideration. C. Wright Mills, for example, included a chapter on celebrity as an identifiable category of social elites in his major work The Power Elite (1957), and in so doing (alongside Alberoni’s contrary 1962 essay, The Powerless Elite) drew attention to the relevance of Max Weber’s classical theoretical works on “status” and “charisma” as essential to the study of celebrity. This influence of Weber’s social thought continues to the present day in celebrity studies – both explicitly, in Milner’s (2010) creative repurposing and elaboration on the analysis of status, and the work of Rojek (2001), Marshall (1997) and Giloi and Berenson (2010) on charisma, and also more obliquely in the development of the idea of “celebrity-capital”, extrapolating from Bourdieu’s work on the various forms of capital and social power (Driessens 2013a; Couldry 2015). However, the two antecedent texts that have left the greatest and most lasting impression on the field of celebrity studies are, arguably, Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno’s The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception – possibly the most read chapter in what is without doubt the most influential publication from the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) – and Daniel Boorstin’s 1964 study, The Image, or, What Happened to the American Dream.

Horkheimer and Adorno locate their analysis of celebrity – the culture industry and associated star system – within a much larger world-historical narrative. This narrative is complex, and as it is well-charted terrain in social and cultural theory we only touch here on aspects of the work of Horkheimer and Adorno which are relevant to celebrity studies. According to this account, the arrival of the Enlightenment brought with it the hope that people, through exercising their capacity for reasoned thought, might free themselves from the dead weight of tradition and myth. That is to say, the Enlightenment ushered in a promise of freedom from dependence upon, and hence subordination to, the capricious whims of nature as well as non-negotiable social hierarchies of privilege and power, along with the mythical systems of thought that underwrite these. Such a promise, however, was not translated into actuality. Horkheimer and Adorno argue that this emancipatory Enlightenment impulse was bled white as reason revealed itself to be serviceable only in an instrumental-rational fashion, leading to a return of myth in the form of a compulsive preoccupation with exercising dominion over nature, society and self. Against the backdrop of the emancipatory promises of culture, according to this story, the serious strivings of ‘high’ art and the rebelliousness of ‘low’ art have been assimilated to the imperatives of a culture industry with its mass production of routine and repetitive cultural commodities for a mass of passive consumers. Celebrity, or the star system, performs a crucial role here. For, alongside the production of cultural goods according to well-tried, ‘standardized’ formulae for ‘successful’ popular music, film or literature, the culture industry borrows from the aesthetic repertoire and the techniques of individualistic art to affect a quality of uniqueness and originality in its products. This ‘psuedo-individuality’ – the claims to originality being at best only minor variations (as with locks and keys) – is most evident in the star system, in the ‘virtuoso’ jazz improvisation (or its equivalent in subsequent genres) or the distinctive traits and gestures that testify to the specialness of the movie star. Aside from the obvious commercial reasons for wanting to produce ostensibly new effects, Horkheimer and Adorno argue that this pseudo-individuality performs important ideological functions. Where culture once took the side of radical critique, in its creative strivings raising a protest on behalf of a subordinated and suffering humanity, it now works to deceive – very much in keeping with the original Scottish meaning of “glamour”. The culture industry/star system keeps alive the original emancipatory dream in the form of free choice, whilst everywhere reducing this to little more then the “freedom to choose what is always the same”.

Boorstin’s analysis, by contrast, is informed by (and carries forward) a more conservative intellectual tradition. His basic organizing structure – hero-celebrity/authentic-inauthentic – rehearses a line of cultural criticism descending from Thomas Carlyle, John Rushkin and Matthew Arnold, and where the ascent of the celebrity at the expense of the hero provides evidentiary warrant for the thesis that the Modern West, for all its advances against material deprivation, squalor and disease, is locked into a long process of cultural decline (Carroll 1993). Central to Boorstin’s (1964) account is the ‘Graphic Revolution’ – a period, commencing around the midpoint of the 19th century, when techniques for the mechanical reproduction of images, photography being most prominent, along with the rise of telegraphic communications, led to a massive increase in the capacity to make images...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Theories and Concepts of Celebrity
• Part II The Culture of Celebrity
• Part III Non-Western Celebrity
• Part IV The Conduits of Celebrity
• Index