Celebrity Society

Celebrity Society JESSICA EVANS The Open University, UK The study of celebrity represents a significant interdisciplinary growth area in social sciences and humanities over the last 20 years, a field in which a constellation of concepts, such as “celebritization,” “the celebrity-commodity,” and “para-social interaction,” have become commonplace. Early definitions of stars as a “powerless elite” (Alberoni 1972) have been overturned by various taxonomies of fame and celebrity personae that show how these most powerful forms of identification within modern society provide a structure not only for the organization of all persons operating in public but also for concepts of individuality and models of modern subjectivity (Marshall 1997; Rojek 2012; Van Krieken 2012). It is widely agreed that fame has come to constitute a form of power itself (Gabler 1995: 184–185). Film theory’s interest in the 1970s in the ideological content and systems of beliefs embodied by “stars” (Dyer 1979) has bequeathed much to today’s research – taken forward within cultural studies and dominated by the term “celebrity culture” – not least a focus on the mediatized processes of “celebrification”: the mechanisms by which individuals are transformed into celebrity personae. The idealizations and identifications celebrities represent and stimulate for their viewers and readers are understood as intimacy at a distance (Gamson 1994; Rojek 2001). Accounts of a sociological persuasion have focused on the historical development of “celebritization,” delineating how the power of the system of celebrity has “infiltrated” whole areas of public life, from politics, literary publishing, sport, and business to the academy (Corner and Pels 2003; Van Krieken 2012). For example, the personalized quality of politics and the reconstruction of the electorate as a media audience in an age of television has the consequence of “convergence in the source of power between the political leader and other forms of celebrity” (Marshall 1997: 19), underlying the importance of both Weberian and psychoanalytic investigations into the emotive and irrational aspects of celebrity power. Some argue that as a status system celebrity has a function of social integration, filling the gap of sacredness in a post-religious world (Braudy 1986; Frow 1998; Rojek 2001), organizing the forms of recognition and belonging in a secular society and creating common bonds between groups: just like saints, celebrities attract holy locations, worship, death cults, rituals, and relics. Those pursuing empirically based sociological research focus on the internal everyday operations of media organizations in the production and marketing of celebrity. Concepts from political economy are used to explain the increasing circulation of celebrities-as-commodities (Marshall 1997) – the commercial importance of “name branding,” “formatting” (Ryan 1992), and more recently “content streaming” (Murray 2003) across multiple platforms – as a consequence of the vertical integration strategies deployed by media conglomerates to mitigate commercial risk and uncertainty. Many of these accounts mine the seam opened up in Boorstin’s (1962) attack on celebrity as the epitome of the American mass media “pseudo-event,” followed by Sennett’s (1977) critique of the intrusion of personality performance in public life. They The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Edited by Bryan S. Turner. © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781118430873.est0586 2 CELEBRIT Y SO CIET Y assess the extent to which post-celluloid forms of celebrity, beginning with the invention of the “picture personality” and the close-up in the 1910s, and the evolution into the Hollywood motion picture “star” who came to be regarded as having an existence outside his/her film characters (deCordova 1990; Schickel 1985; Gamson 1994), are less authentic and more illusory than in centuries past. A normative question underlies these accounts: is modern celebrity and its “viewer society” therefore symptomatic, or even a contributory cause, of a cultural decline where simulation and surface trumps substance? This question rests partly on the assumption that today’s mass media and hyper visually oriented societies represent an epochal step-change in the reach, power, and saturation of celebrity in public life. Another approach suggests they are the extension of a long-standing set of conditions which nonetheless work their way out unevenly across different social institutions, legal constraints, and techno-media platforms each of which fashion celebrity–audience relations in specific ways. This is the starting point for the conceptual framework of “celebrity society”; while drawing on much of this literature it moves away from what it sees as an over-reliance on textual analysis and individual celebrity case studies in order to provide a theorization of celebritization as historically, socially, and institutionally determinate (Turner 2014; Gamson 1994; Van Krieken 2012). Questions of wider systemic significance, distinctiveness, applicability, contextualization, and generalizability – conceptualizing a particular instance to the general social pattern – require formulation and this is the springboard for the celebrity society approach. From a starting point that celebrity – via the long-term “meta-process” of celebritization (Driessens 2013: 643) – is a particular type of rationality in the structuring and organization of social relations, Van Krieken (2012: 138) foregrounds the complex “chains of interdependence” between long-term historical and institutionally specific processes. Celebrity society is understood by social theorists as an historically specific social form in its own right, yet underpinned by the interdependencies of individualization, mediatization, democratization, and commodification. In order to relativize the modernity of celebrity, and influenced by Braudy’s forceful proposition in The Frenzy of Renown (1986) that fame and the deeds it represents have always depended on image management, a number of authors locate the tropes of modern celebrity to at least as far back as the eighteenth century (Morgan 2011; Briggs and Burke 2002; Van Krieken 2012). Briggs and Burke (2002) point out that the celebritization of politics into a public spectacle is not the consequence of the relatively recent medium of television. And Van Krieken argues, via Elias, that celebrity society is the modern heir to court society and today’s mass mediated celebrities are “democratized aristocrats” (Van Krieken 2012: 8), competitively performative, permanently visible, and subject to the blurring of their personal and public lives. Celebritization of society is a development of individualization such that social institutions, social interactions, and the individual sense of self have, over time, become increasingly organized around an ever more differentiated network of increasing numbers of highly visible and recognized individuals (Van Krieken 2012: 5). It seems indisputable that celebritization is a form of “attention capital” (Van Krieken 2012) associated with the social mobility afforded by the rise of democratization and concomitantly the decline of inherited status positions. However, a question remains about the extent to which the attention capital enjoyed by the “celebrity function” is a neurosis of modern life; or, to take a Foucauldian CELEBRIT Y SO CIET Y view, a necessary assertion of the calculating “enterprising self” for whom destiny is a matter of individual responsibility achieved by continual self-assessment in comparison with significant others (Rose 1996); or essentially progressive because it represents a lower threshold for individualization allowing an increasing opportunity for the many to gain the assets associated with recognition. Notwithstanding the answers to that, what seems important to advocates of “celebrity society” is the consequence of not assuming a priori definition of celebrity’s meanings before having analyzed the various components of celebrity production, distribution, and consumption across several of its subfields, the historical relationship between celebrity and “society” being diverse and piecemeal rather than singular and monolithic. Accordingly, “celebrity society” emphasizes key moments of discontinuity as well as the long-term continuities marking the history of celebrity and celebritization. SEE ALSO: Audience Research; Charisma; Culture; Foucault, Michel; Freud, Sigmund; Mass Media, Theories of; Mass Society; Meritocracy; Saussure, Ferdinand de; Social Status; Society REFERENCES Alberoni, Francesco. 1972. The Powerless “Elite”: Theory and Sociological Research on the Phenomenon of the Stars. In Sociology of Mass Communications, edited by Dennis McQuail, 75–98. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books. Boorstin, Daniel J. 1962. The Image; or, What Happened to the American Dream. New York: Antheneum. Braudy, Leo. 1986. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York: Vintage Books. Briggs, Asa and Burke, Peter. 2002. A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Corner, John and Pels, Dick, eds. 2003. Media and the Restyling of Politics. London: SAGE. 3 deCordova, Richard. 1990. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Driessens, O. 2013. The Celebritization of Society and Culture: Understanding the Structural Dynamics of Celebrity Culture. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 16(6): 641–657. Dyer, Richard. 1979. Stars. London: BFI Publishing. Frow, John. 1998. Is Elvis a God? Cult, Culture, Questions of Method. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 1(2): 197–210. DOI: 10.1177/13678779980010020301. Gabler, Neal. 1995. Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity. New York: Vintage Books. Gamson, Joshua. 1994. The Assembly Line of Greatness. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 9, 1–24. DOI: 10.1080/ 15295039209366812. Marshall, P. David. 1997. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Morgan, Simon. 2011. Celebrity: Academic Pseudo-event or a Useful Concept for Historians? Cultural and Social History, 8(1): 366–368. DOI: 10.1177/135485650300900102. Murray, Simone. 2003. Media Convergence’s Third Wave: Content Streaming. Convergence, 9(1): 8–22. DOI: 10.1177/135485650300900102. Rojek, Chris. 2001. Celebrity. London: Reaktion Books. Rojek, Chris. 2012. Fame Attack: The Inflation of Celebrity and its Consequences. London: Bloomsbury. Rose, Nikolas. 1996. Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power and Personhood. New York: Cambridge University Press. Ryan, Bill. 1992. Making Capital from Culture. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Schickel, Richard. 1985. Common Fame: The Culture of Celebrity. New York: Fromm International. Sennett, Richard. 1977. The Fall of Public Man. London: Faber and Faber. Turner, Graham. 2014. Understanding Celebrity, 2nd edn. London: SAGE. Van Krieken, Robert. 2012. Celebrity Society. New York: Routledge. 4 CELEBRIT Y SO CIET Y FURTHER READING Evans, Jessica and Hesmondhalgh, David, eds. 2005. Understanding Media: Inside Celebrity. Maidenhead, UK: The Open University Press. Pels, Dick. 2003. Aesthetic Representation and Political Style. In Media and the Restyling of Politics, edited by John Corner and Dick Pels, 41–66. London: SAGE. Rein, Irving, Kotler, Philip, and Stoller, Michael. 1997. High Visibility: The Making and Marketing of Professionals into Celebrity. Chicago: NTC Business Books. Turner, Graham, Bonner, Frances, and Marshall, P. David. The Production of Celebrity in Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.