Political Psychology, Vol. 19, No.

4, 1998

Celebrity and Political Psychology:

Remembering Lennon
Anthony Elliott
Department of Political Science
University of Melbourne, Australia

This article is a contribution toward the task of constructing a distinctive political

psychology and social theory of celebrity. The article begins by noting some recent
approaches to the analysis of mass communications in political theory, and moves to
consider what these theories mean for the conceptual analysis of celebrity. A substantive
example of the political construction of celebrity is given in a case study of the ex-Beatle,
John Lennon—specifically, the social drama surrounding his death in 1980. A number of
issues, ranging from the denial of death in modernity to the multiplex modes of cultural
remembering, are discussed as they relate to celebrity.
KEY WORDS: celebrity; social and political theory; denial of death; modernity; Lennon, John.

“In the last hundred years,” wrote Leo Braudy (1986), “the nature of fame has
changed more decisively and more quickly than it has for the previous two
thousand. Visual media became the standard-bearers of international recognition,
giving art, religion, and politics shapes they never had before” (p. 584). What are
the political dimensions of fame and celebrity? How does celebrity affect self-
identity and social relations? What personal and institutional dynamics underlie
the role of celebrity in the late modern age?
This article arises from research conducted into the impact of mediated
symbolic forms, specifically the phenomenon of celebrity, on processes of self-
formation and political reproduction. My central concern is neither an exhaustive
analysis of processes of self-constitution nor a systematic treatment of key issues
and debates about political and systems reproduction, although both of these topics
are touched on throughout. Instead I focus on the way in which mediated symbolic
materials function as objects of identification in the framing and perpetuation of daily
political life. In particular, my concern is the complex, contradictory relationship

833
0162-895X © 1998 International Society of Political Psychology
Published by Blackwell Publishers, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford, OX4 1JF, UK.
834 Elliott

between mediated symbolic materials on the one hand and the political construction
and reception of celebrity on the other.
As an entry point into celebrity, this article focuses on the ex-Beatle John
Lennon, or more precisely cultural rememberings of Lennon, in order to connect
celebrity as a concrete social process to broader political patterns arising in the late
modern age. From the emergence of Beatlemania in the early 1960s to the time of
his tragic murder in 1980, Lennon can be viewed as an appropriate figure—a very
public hero—for examining how our general culture uses celebrities to understand,
and reflexively incorporate, conflicting ideologies that seek to contain, repress, or
transform societal configurations of personhood, desire, sexuality, and culture.
Using Lennon as a case study, I have discussed in detail the relationship between
celebrity and modernity (Elliott, in press). My focus here is on the social drama
surrounding Lennon’s death, and in particular what the death of a celebrity tells us
about mass culture and its powers to attract, inflect, recast, displace, and transform
our personal and political self-understandings.
It should, of course, be stated at the outset that a study involving a single
celebrity has several analytic limitations for theorizing celebrity more generally.
However, the present discussion focuses less on personal details of Lennon than
on a range of psychocultural reactions and responses to his tragic death, and this
particular case study can be instructive for analyzing the self/society reproduction
of celebrity in the late modern age. It is my view that such a combination of
self-reflective theory and detailed profiles is most likely to illuminate the impor-
tance of celebrity as a political, institutionalized phenomenon.

Mass Communication, Celebrity, and Social and Political Theory

In one form or another, most individuals in contemporary societies establish

relations of intimacy with non-present or distant others. Actors and actresses, pop
stars and politicians, news readers and talk show hosts are, to varying levels,
incorporated into subjective self-understandings as well as routine aspects of
everyday social interaction. Indeed, celebrity has been analyzed as a central
structuring point for self-constitution, and as a phenomenon that shapes narratives
of the self and of interaction with others (Lewis, 1992; McCann, 1988). “As visual
and verbal communication wraps and rewraps itself around the world,” wrote
Braudy (1986), “and the rapid dissemination of information implies the creation of
an international culture, the ideal of twentieth-century fame has become charac-
terized by an effort to yoke even more firmly than before previously opposed
elements of visual, theatrical fame (historically set in civic and political life) with
spiritual, intangible fame (with its roots in the Christian conception of the audience
not of this world)” (p. 555). In Braudy’s view, modernity has unleashed “a
democratization of fame.”
According to the social and political theorist John B. Thompson (1995),
celebrity is part of a broader communicative process that he calls “mediated
Celebrity and Political Psychology 835

quasi-interaction.” As Thompson puts this, “mediated quasi-interaction is stretched

across space and time, it makes possible a form of intimacy with others who do not
share one’s own spatial-temporal locale; in other words, it makes possible what has
aptly been called ‘intimacy at a distance’” (1995, p. 219). The intimacy at a distance
of quasi-mediated interaction plays a core role in the constitution and reproduction
of the self, self-identity, and subjectivity; indeed, it can be regarded as part and
parcel of the expansion of social reflexivity that late modernity amplifies and
radicalizes (Beck, 1991, 1996; Giddens, 1990, 1991, 1994). In this view, individu-
als reflexively draw on mediated symbolic forms—such as images of celebrity—in
order to fashion their day-to-day lives, their conceptions of their own selves,
understandings of others, and their broader relation to the social and political world.
The reflexive organization of media communication becomes routinely internal-
ized and acted on by lay individuals in the course of their own biographical
self-framings. As Thompson (1995) writes of the interconnection between medi-
ated quasi-interaction and reflexivity:
It is precisely because the individual is able reflexively to incorporate
mediated symbolic materials into the process of self-formation that these
materials can become an end in themselves, symbolic constructs around
which the individual begins to organize his or her life and sense of self.
Hence the absorption of the self in mediated quasi-interaction is not a
phenomenon which is qualitatively different from the reflexive organiza-
tion of the self: it is a version of it, extended to the point where mediated
symbolic materials are not merely a resource for the self but its central
preoccupation. (pp. 218–219)
The role of communication media is viewed by Thompson as providing individual
subjects with a continual, complex source of advice about how to live in the world,
how to cope with it, and how to understand oneself and others. The development
of global communication networks intensifies this process and drastically alters
our daily experience of time and space in the transactions we make with mediated
symbolic forms.
But as Thompson also hints, reliance on symbolic mediated forms can also
turn into dependency, the kind of dependency whereby people become strongly
emotionally attached to mediated quasi-interaction for a sense of ontological
security and personal identity. Thompson calls this the “paradox of reflexivity and
dependency” and likens it to the conundrum of Ulrich Beck’s reflexivity thesis
around individualization and institutionalization (see Beck, 1996). As Thompson
(1995) writes: “Just as the increasing availability of media products provides
individuals with the symbolic means to distance themselves from the spatial-
temporal contexts of their daily lives and to construct life-projects which incorpo-
rate reflexively the mediated images and ideas they receive, so too individuals
become increasingly dependent—in respect of their self-formation and what one
might loosely call the life of the imagination—on complex systems for the
836 Elliott

production and transmission of mediated symbolic forms, systems over which most
individuals have relatively little control” (p. 215).
But what, we might ask, is the exact cost to “the life of the imagination” of the
sort of increasing cultural standardization that manifests itself in a highly technolo-
gized society? What is the cost of increasing channels of mass-mediated repre-
sentation with systems of content delivery that are often homogeneous? Is the
answer, as postmodernists such as Baudrillard (1983) have argued, simply the
“hyper-reality” of the media itself? Or is the diffusion of mediated symbolic forms
connected to the reproduction of social life and the exercise of political power in
more nuanced and insidious ways?
As many commentators have stressed, political psychologists and social
theorists need to recognize the influence of ambivalence in the cultural reception
of new technologies and rapid globalization of media cultures (see, e.g., Morley &
Robbins, 1995; Stevenson, 1995). This means, with respect to conceptualizing
celebrity, that technologies of communication both sustain and transform local,
regional, national, and transnational cultural figurations and identities. Against
those postmodern political theorists who fancifully imagine that celebrity is little
more than a textual practice of irony, however, the global flows of information that
frame the field of celebrity and its reception affect and limit the conscious
capabilities of human subjects (Castoriadis, 1997; Elliott, 1996; Stevenson, 1995,
pp. 178–179). This limiting of the human subject, either individual or collective,
needs to be understood in terms of both institutional dynamics (economics, glo-
balization, the nation-state) and symbolic forms (psychic interiority, cultural loca-
tions, linguistic positionings). The task of a theoretically reflective social and
political analysis of celebrity, I want to argue, is to place the phenomenon within
the context of societies, cultures, and polities of the transnational global system of
late modernity.
A possible misunderstanding about celebrity as it interconnects with social and
political contexts should be clarified at this point. To argue that the social identifi-
cations that human subjects make with (and against) celebrities is part and parcel
of an increasing self-fashioning and self-construction in the late modern world is
not to argue that this is an exclusive means for the sorting of relations of identity
and difference. Clearly, that would be absurd. There are an endless variety of forms
of social interaction, such as those facilitated in the familial and educational realms,
that play a prime role in the ongoing process of socialization. But to underscore the
increasing importance of celebrity to processes of self-formation, self-construction,
and self-reflection is, certainly, to grasp the fundamental political importance of
the mass media to individuals today, and in particular the role of media industries
in disseminating sociosymbolic forms within networks of communicational ex-
change worldwide.
Celebrity and Political Psychology 837

Theoretical Reconsiderations: A Summary

Although this article is intended as a prelude to the development of a frame-

work for rethinking celebrity in the late modern age, some key political dimensions
governing celebrity should be considered. These dimensions, I argue, are important
for understanding celebrity at both the personal and institutional levels. Though no
doubt more can be found, these core dimensions include:
1. Celebrity should be analyzed as a political phenomenon that involves certain
institutional and communicational means of media diffusion. It is part and
parcel of the development of media industries, and is of prime significance in
the transactions among communication networks, symbolic forms (their dif-
fusion and appropriation), and everyday life.
2. The globalizing impact of media radicalizes the impact of celebrity, primarily
in terms of despatialized simultaneity [see Nowotny 1994]—that is, the
decoupling of time and space through mediated communication. For example,
the global diffusion of celebrity images today involves instantaneous and
simultaneous access to gathered information about the lives of others, infor-
mation that human subjects who are spatially widely separated from one
another can experience through telecommunication.
3. Celebrity is a central structuring point in self and social identification, per-
forming as it does an increasingly important role in self-framings, self-
imaginings, self-revisions, and self-reflection. At the same time, celebrity can
have worryingly negative consequences for self-understanding, interpersonal
relations, and culture and politics more generally. Contemporary technological
developments, and particularly the globalizing of celebrity, can undermine
sources of ontological security, the sense of personal identity as well as the
capacity for critical self-reflection.
4. The interplay of individualization and institutionalization identified in the
quasi-mediated field of celebrity needs to be placed in the context of a general
social and political theory of modernity. This is necessary to comprehend both
the facilitating and limiting characteristics that celebrity unleashes. In this
article, the institutional forms of modernity affecting celebrity are those of the
sequestration of symbolic experience—specifically, the denial of death. In a
more comprehensive social and political theory of celebrity, attention should
be devoted to forms of economic power (commercial enterprises, commodifi-
cation, reification); political power (public policy, institutions governing
media laws); and psychological processes (motivational behavior, uncon-
scious sources of tension, self and self-identity).
In this essay I shall now shift gears and look at a case study of celebrity: the
ex-Beatle, John Lennon. My discussion is framed not so much from the perspective
838 Elliott

of the constitution of his fame, but more particularly from the cultural crisis
surrounding his death—the question, that is, of the mourning of celebrity and its
broader social and political consequences.

A Mysterious Disappearance: Remembering John Lennon’s Death

Various political commentators have attempted to understand celebrity as a

transaction between media production and cultural consumption (Braudy, 1986;
Lewis, 1992; McCann, 1988). But rarely have analysts sought to place the phe-
nomenon of celebrity in the frame of social and political theory more generally. In
what follows, I attempt to remedy this neglect in a modest fashion by developing
an analysis of celebrity through reference to contemporary social and political
theory. In particular, I examine reactions to the death of mega-celebrity John
Lennon as both inspired and warped by the institutional dynamics of modernity.
Because of space limitations, I concentrate specifically on one institutional influ-
ence in the “sequestration of experience” (Giddens, 1991, pp. 144–180) permeating
the field of celebrity and its reception—namely, the denial of death. My approach
involves a depth psychological hermeneutics (Gadamer, 1975; Ricoeur, 1981; for
an analysis of how depth hermeneutics applies to media culture, see Thompson,
1990): By drawing on social-theoretic conceptualizations of the denial of death in
modernity, I attempt to uncover and contrast different latent political meanings of
Lennon’s death.
Since his death in 1980 at the age of 40, John Lennon has become strangely
representative of loss in our culture—an object of mourning, of fantasy, of intense
feelings of hope and dread. Lennon is for many people a figure of idealization: the
creator and leader of the most successful pop group of the century, the Beatles. He
is also championed as poet and musician, avant-garde artist, political radical, and
world peace activist (Coleman, 1984; Norman, 1981; Wiener, 1984). In other
places and contexts, though, Lennon excites a more negative evaluation: a fraud or
phony, a man who claimed to speak for peace but who was often violent and hateful
toward others and himself (Goldman, 1987). In this view, Lennon is revealed as
angry, self-destructive, and depressed, all of which fuse to damage (and perhaps
even destroy) the idolized picture of the former Beatle. Above all, it seems that
Lennon confronts us with too much: It is as if he won’t fit into the usual categories
by which people make sense of celebrities and stars; it is as if Lennon himself
troubles our culture and the assumptions that inform our social practice. At once
idealized and denigrated, Lennon demonstrates the ambivalence of cultural pro-
duction in the late 20th century—in particular, that of the difficulty of making
evaluations of the positive and negative with any degree of certainty.
In the case of Lennon, awareness of this cultural ambivalence is especially
painful. This is not simply because of the push and pull of conflictive images of
Lennon’s celebrity status, nor because of the immense difficulty of holding in mind
that Lennon both created and reflected complex, contradictory aesthetic dimen-
Celebrity and Political Psychology 839

sions of our general culture. Rather, the cultural ambivalence surrounding Lennon
is painful because it embodies most powerfully the violence through which modern
society constitutes and perpetuates itself.
One of the most striking things about Lennon’s death was the way that, despite
endless media information about the shooting, it remained incomprehensible,
inconceivable, as if cut off from cultural self-knowing. Nowhere was this made
clearer than at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City, where Lennon’s death was
announced to the world on 8 December 1980. Dr. Stephan Lynn, director of the
emergency service at the hospital, addressed the media; yet the opening of the press
interview threatened to turn into a kind of comic drama, such was the level of
anxiety. Reporters were unable to spell Dr. Lynn’s name, and asked for it to be
repeated half a dozen times. Trying to read his statement, Dr. Lynn began by saying
“John Lennon,” but then fell silent, unable to speak. At this point, it was intuitively
understood, the news was dire. Visibly shaken he tried again, this time saying:
John Lennon was brought to the emergency room of the Roosevelt, the
St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital, this evening, shortly before 11 p.m. He
was dead on arrival. Extensive resuscitative efforts were made, but in spite
of transfusions and many procedures, he could not be resuscitated. . . . He
had multiple gunshot wounds in his chest, in his left arm and in his back.
There were seven wounds in his body. I don’t know exactly how many
bullets there were. There was a significant injury of the major vessels
inside the chest, which caused a massive amount of blood loss, which
probably resulted in his death. I’m certain that he was dead at the moment
that the first shots hit his body. (Flippo, 1982, p. 200)
Even the certitude of medical knowledge, however, could not limit the shock,
disturbance, pain, and suffering engendered by this news. Reporters, floundering,
could only ask further questions about Lennon’s shooting. Significantly, the media
maintained a strong focus on the bloody details of Lennon’s death, and of the arrest
of his murderer, Mark David Chapman. Smashed glasses, blood streaming from
the mouth and chest, contorted face: These were the images with which the press
traded. In all of this, it is as if the media were trying to get some understanding of
the tragic irony that Lennon, who contributed so much to the advancement of world
peace, should himself become a victim of violence.
News of John Lennon’s death shocked fans and critics alike. The shock was
profound. Seemingly secure distinctions between the real world and the world of
illusion, between meaning and nonmeaning, as well as between sanity and mad-
ness, began to blur. The collective conviction of absolute truth and of the mean-
ingfulness of life—of Lennon as somehow remaining true to himself—became
troubled, thrown into doubt, questioned. The world’s attachment to Lennon’s sense
of humor, his warmth and charm, his arrogance, his creativity, and his imaginative
social vision—all of this rounded back upon itself to produce a disturbing sense of
violation, suffocation, dread. Lennon was, suddenly, no longer; but his death, and
840 Elliott

in particular our relation to it, remained a problem. A difficult problem. A problem

that would not go away. For those straining to cope, let alone seeking to understand
the reasons for Chapman’s murder of Lennon, the world had become seemingly
unmanageable.
Perhaps not since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 had
such a profound sense of loss haunted our general culture. One key difference
between the assassinations of Lennon and Kennedy is, of course, that the latter was
at the height of his career at the time of his death, a career that involved the political
management of a nation. Lennon, by contrast, was making a comeback in pop
music, seeking to find a new place for himself and for Yoko Ono in the artistic
environment of the 1980s. As for a career, Lennon made it abundantly clear that
he was returning to music on his own terms; and he also made it clear that he had
retained his interest in, and commitment to, other artistic, cultural, and political
matters. But it was perhaps Lennon’s authenticity, his very public misgivings and
doubts about himself and his work, that made him more available to the world as
a figure for identification. And, ultimately, as a figure to be mourned. Scott Spencer
(1982) described the sense of intimacy that springs from such authenticity well:
Because he allowed us to know him, to love him, John Lennon gave us
the chance to share his death, to resume the preparations for our own.
Because we were so used to the way he thought, the habits, the turns, the
surprises of his mind, we can enter him as we remember his last moments,
to let it be us in the car, pulling up to the curb, opening the door, stepping
out, breathing the night. Someone said he was happy that night, and we
somehow know what his happiness felt like, and we can imagine ourselves
resurgent, electric with energy. (pp. 209–210)
Nostalgic idealization? Perhaps, although to some extent Spencer’s comments
reflect the painful contradictions implicit in psychic identification. I do not think,
however, that these sentiments are simply illusory; they instead capture real
emotional dynamics called into play in the mourning of Lennon.
The taking in of Lennon’s death, its emotional registration, called for some
kind of collective integration—an integration that permitted people to acknowledge
and to share the depth of their grief and despair. In the immediate days after
Lennon’s shooting, people joined together in mourning throughout the world. A
gathering of some 30,000 people joined in prayer and sang “Give Peace a Chance”
outside St. George’s Hall on Lime Street in Liverpool. In cities across America,
vigils were held to commemorate the life and work of Lennon. In New York’s
Central Park, a crowd of more than 100,000 joined together in a minute of silence
to remember Lennon. In Toronto, 35,000 people gathered in the snow for a
candlelight vigil. Radio stations everywhere played the Beatles and Lennon. The
buying of Lennon’s records, from his late 1960s and early 1970s solo records to
Double Fantasy, skyrocketed. But, for many people, the need to communicate
something of their shock remained. It is estimated, for instance, that more than a
Celebrity and Political Psychology 841

quarter of a million letters of sympathy arrived at the Dakota for Ono and 5-year-old
Sean Lennon in the months after the shooting. At a more extreme level, there were
also several suicides during that time, with Lennon’s death cited as the reason why
life had become meaningless.
What can be gleaned from all this? For my purposes, one of the core features
of the social registration of Lennon’s death is that it is closely linked with the
process of despatialized simultaneity (Nowotny, 1994). The experience of despa-
tialized simultaneity is one involving the decoupling of time and space, such that
information and communication originating from distant sources filters into everyday
consciousness instantaneously, or virtually so. In this connection, it can be said that
the actual distance of Lennon’s death, in geographical, psychological, and political
terms, became eclipsed through its mediation in electronic communication. Mes-
sages of Lennon’s death transmitted across the world set in motion processes that
framed a single “televisual world,” from San Francisco to São Paulo to Sydney.
Let me be clear about the implications of this. I am not saying that the globalized
communication of Lennon’s death produced “one world” of response. On the
contrary, there were many diverse modes of consciousness and culture in the
registration of Lennon’s death and in cultural rememberings of Lennon. What is
significant, however, is that the despatialized simultaneity that constitutes the
globalization of communication is intimately interwoven with the psychological,
social, cultural, and political modes of consciousness generated by such media.

Modernity and the Psychosocial Dynamics of Death

In the case of Lennon’s murder, a profound sense of collective loss was

experienced via the coverage of this news in the media and its global networks. But
the reflexive registration of loss provoked by Lennon’s death was a phenomenon
also exacerbated by a denial of the existential significance of death in contemporary
culture. From this angle, the news of Lennon’s death is inseparable from the
sociosymbolic forms in and through which human subjects construct under-
standings of themselves, others, and the social world more generally. Accordingly,
the individual and collective registration of Lennon’s death became a fundamental
psychic problem in terms of a repression of moral questions posed by death.
Anthony Giddens, in Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), locates such institu-
tional repression under the banner of “the sequestration of experience.” Giddens
explains this as follows:
Processes of institutional sequestration appear in various areas. In each
case they have the effect of removing basic aspects of life experience,
including especially moral crises, from the regularities of day-to-day life
established by the abstract systems of modernity. The term “sequestration
of experience” refers here to connected processes of concealment which
set apart the routines of ordinary life from the following phenomena:
842 Elliott

madness, criminality; sickness and death; sexuality; and nature. In some

cases such sequestration is directly organizational: this is true of the
mental asylum, the prison and the medical hospital. In other instances,
sequestration depends on more general characteristics of the internally
referential systems of modernity. Broadly speaking, my argument will be
that the ontological security which modernity has purchased, on the level
of day-to-day routines, depends on an institutional exclusion of social life
from fundamental existential issues which raise central moral dilemmas
for human beings. (p. 156)
How closely is celebrity tied to such sequestration? Considerably, or so I shall
suggest. Celebrity at once reproduces the sequestration of which Giddens speaks,
through the commodification of art as well as the repressive social logics of the
entertainment business, and transgresses this kind of moral and ethical closure,
through permitting fans to wonder about other forms of life and types of human
experience. To develop this point, we now consider how the denial of death affects
personal and political understandings of celebrity.
Death can be regarded as a transhistorical point zero in every society: It is a
“radical otherness” that haunts human existence. But, as Philippe Aries (1974) has
pointed out, modernity has brought with it a new relation to death.1 In Aries’ view,
death was “tame” in premodern times—that is, contact with illness and death was
a fairly commonplace feature of everyday experience. In modern times, death
becomes increasingly hidden away, shrouded in secrecy, concealed; it is trans-
formed from something “tame” to something “wild,” a wildness that social practice
attempts to control and master. Everything connected to illness and death becomes
increasingly subject to technical, medical control—including, ultimately, the proc-
ess of dying itself. The painful contingencies of death are increasingly erased from
human awareness in modern times, removed to the expert hands of the medical
profession. We seek, in other words, to render death unobtrusive in a world of
rational design and social control.
But the other side of this emphatic repression is the unpredictable nature of
death itself. The drive to master our relation to death is brought low by the ugly
underside of biology, of mortality and finitude. Not surprisingly, contact with death
and serious illness, when measured against its social repression and colonization,
is experienced as devastating. Death, wrote Michel Vovelle (1983), is a “major
scandal of the whole of human adventure” (p. 382). The scandal is that death returns
to consciousness something of the horror that was meant to be exiled or banished
in the act of social design and rational control. Death tears apart our trained capacity
for rational calculation and reasoning; or, put more accurately, it functions as the
vanishing point of all thinking and knowledge, stripping human selves back to an

1 The best recent discussion about death and its repression in contemporary culture is that of Zygmunt
Bauman (1992), especially chapter 4. Also see Bauman (1996).
Celebrity and Political Psychology 843

irreducible core of human impotence. Death appears here as a brake or limit to

self-mastery, and it is surely for this reason that our general psychological reaction
to death is one involving painful feelings of guilt, rage, hate, and shame. Death,
according to Geoffrey Gorer (1965), “is treated as inherently shameful and abhor-
rent, so that it can never be discussed or referred to openly, and experience of it
tends to be clandestine and accompanied by feelings of guilt and unworthiness”
(p. 171).
Death is as frightening as it is in contemporary culture because it is “detached”
from life, disconnected from the routine continuity of social activities, and because
this detachment springs out of a psychological repression of our awareness of
human mortality. Indeed, one might say, following the late Freud of Civilization
and Its Discontents (1930), that culture is a trade-off of the forces of life and death,
of primary narcissism and primary aggressiveness—a trade-off in which men and
women exchange a portion of collective self-knowledge for a share of social
security.2 But within a framework of culture bent on security, protection from
human experience has become equated with self-preservation itself. In a tragic
irony—an irony that Freud saw as both psychologically and historically com-
plex—the more culture is constructed within the imagined splendors of security,
the more depleted men and women find themselves in their inner resources for
managing the strains and stresses of everyday life. Where individuals are brought
face to face with the dislocating effects of experience, as with the death of a loved
one, they are likely to experience a sense of failure and humiliation. Such narcis-
sistic injury is not only a natural consequence of the pain of loss; it is also attenuated
by the loss of certitude and security that culture is meant to protect against. In sum,
then, death reveals the suffering that the pleasures of security are meant to filter
out of awareness.
The murder of John Lennon stands as a painful reminder of the defensive mold
of our culture of security, because Lennon plays a key role in both perpetuating
and challenging some of our most cherished cultural ideals. Lennon functions as
an ideal figure of both identity and difference: He is identified with a seductive
otherness that is felt to be lacking elsewhere; he is inserted into dreams of autonomy
and independence that people project into that “beyond” of their own cultural
imagining. But it is in relation to the death of Lennon that something like a cultural
inversion operates, an inversion of the demand for security. For death, it might be
argued, re-individualizes Lennon, tearing his image away from the narrow confines
of celebrity. The horrifying scene of his death—of the bullets Chapman shot into
Lennon’s arm and back, Lennon’s collapsing in the entrance of the Dakota, his

2 “Civilization is built upon a renunciation of drives” (Freud, 1930, pp. 64–145). This aspect of Freud’s
argument about civilization (read: modernity) has often been misunderstood, with criticism directed
toward the biologism of the Freudian typology. But this line of criticism, in my view, is based on a
reductive interpretation of Freud and fails to appreciate the complexities of the concept of drive, a
concept that falls between psyche and body, invoking as it does a radical questioning of modernist
conceptions of representation. For further discussion, see Castoriadis (1987).
844 Elliott

moaning and pain, Ono’s screams for help—forces open certain ontological and
existential questions, as well as reestablishes points of connection between social
experience and questions of mortality. It is not simply that Lennon’s violent death
avoids that stereotypical media construction of the “dead body” as entertainment
(see Paige Baty, 1995). On the contrary, the treatment of Lennon’s death in the
media was, to some considerable degree, subject to a reificatory logic of both
“entertainment” and “news.” But Lennon’s death brings low the proscriptions and
prescriptions of the entertainment industry and of the ideology of celebrity; and,
from this angle, the problem of our relation to his death unavoidably raises
existential concerns. This is a shift from the pleasures of security to the uncertainties
of contingency: a deconstruction of Lennon as celebrity, and a reassembly of our
understanding of Lennon’s personhood as something more contingent—an under-
standing that is always eccentric to itself.
In a culture that seeks to limit mourning in the name of security, to dwell on
death—the pain of the past, but also death’s haunting of the present and future—is
a dangerous matter, and it is one that (more often than not) occasions moral
denunciation. Consider, for example, Ono’s album Season of Glass, her first
recording after Lennon’s death. The cover sleeve showed Lennon’s blood-covered
spectacles, and for this Ono was morally condemned in many sectors of the media.
But the accusation of bad taste to which Ono was subjected might, from another
angle, be retained as a more troubling question: Who and what, exactly, are caught
up in this polluting, degrading logic? Ono, for remembering the death of Lennon?
Or might this so-called moral indifference to the integrity of Lennon reveal
something about the self-concealment of our social practice itself? Ono reflected
on these difficulties:
People are offended by the glasses and the blood? The glasses are a tiny
part of what happened. If people can’t stomach the glasses, I’m sorry.
There was a dead body. There was blood. His whole body was bloody.
There was a load of blood all over the floor. That’s the reality. I want
people to face up to what happened. He did not commit suicide. He was
killed. People are offended by the glasses and the blood? John had to
stomach a lot more. (Quoted in Coleman, 1984, p. 458)
The death of Lennon, Ono seems to be saying, cannot be put at a secure distance
from the difficulties of everyday life. For it is death itself that infiltrates the domain
of the everyday, structuring the unbearable emotion caused in the very cultural
pressure to lead life free from the “disturbance” of death. The truth of Lennon’s
death for Ono, by contrast, is something that is always in process; it is a loss borne
in mind in the creative activity of remembering, in the active construction of
memory. Facing up to the reality of death, of Lennon’s death, involves facing up
to the nature of death itself—to the cessation of life, to the pain of the dying body,
to that “load of blood all over the floor.”
Celebrity and Political Psychology 845

But to consider death meaningfully requires the suspension of preestablished

ways of thinking. Death demands, so to speak, a giving way to grief, a toleration
of mourning, and a recognition of the painful, disabling effects of shock. This, in
turn, requires human contact: People need to forge emotional connections with
others in order to link death to the broader cultural realm. And yet this immersion
in emotion, in interpersonal relations, and in the cultural realm demanded by the
process of mourning is precisely that which is devalued or diluted by rationalistic
ideologies and practices of contemporary culture. Death, and specifically the
experience of death, is absented from social and political relations of the cultural
field. However, although death itself is absented from daily life, the subject of death
becomes increasingly vivid and omnipresent in contemporary culture. Media
representations of death, especially violent death, are increasingly available as
articles of consumption across the global order: death is transformed into an object
of spectacle, it is relayed through new communication technologies, it is con-
structed and circulated as an object of consumption, knowledge, and desire. Media
simulations of death drastically rearrange cultural perceptions of death itself.
Graphic representations of the dying in the electronic media reconstitute death as
a consumerist object. In this commodified space, “the pornography of death” (to
invoke Gorer’s memorable phrase) rules supreme.3
It is as if death is not only increasingly detached from everyday life (as Aries
claimed), but that its horror comes to be “lifted out” from the cultural context in
which it occurs. Such lifting out arises in and through the standardized, repetitious
presentation of death in the mass media, from television programs involving street
shootings to news images of war; the effects are a fading of the emotional
significance of death as well as its reconstruction as something trivial. This
trivialization of death lies at the very heart of our cultural difficulty in treating
seriously matters such as bereavement and loss. Indeed, the despair trivialization
occasions gives rise to a dramatic sense of death as an obscene event in itself. Gorer
(1965) wrote of that “pleasurable guilt or guilty pleasure” caused by death in a
society that has turned death into something unmentionable. Perhaps it is not so
much that death is unmentionable today, but rather that there is a never-ending
discourse on trivialized death. Death is “on show” everywhere—it is the spectacle
of our information age—and yet it functions as spectacle only to the extent that the
proper distance is maintained. This is the distance of generalization, of repetition,
and of objectivity, all of which are crucial to the trivialization of death. Trivialized
death is death rationalized. And death rationalized is death cut off from self-expe-
rience and self-knowing, a deadening of experience that leaves self and society
caught in the realm of pleasurable guilt.

3 Gorer (1965) wrote of this “pornography of death”: “While natural death becomes more and more
smudged in prudery, violent death has played an ever-growing part in the fantasies offered to mass
audiences” (p. 151).
846 Elliott

It is now possible to see why Ono’s selection of Lennon’s blood-covered

glasses for the cover of Season of Glass generated such anxiety: The image in
question—that peculiarly shocking collision of glasses and blood (and, by impli-
cation, the soul and body of Lennon)—simply brought death too close to home.
The objective distance proper to death had been broken. The trained, contemporary
urge to locate death as external reference (“the shooting of a superstar”) was
thwarted by the Season of Glass photograph. What was raised for consideration,
by contrast, was the death of not simply a “great man,” but a living presence (the
blood in this sense “breathed life” into Lennon’s death, standing for an interior
space, a private realm, which had been violated and destroyed). This raises the
thorny issue of violence once again, and in particular the question of the location
of violence. Did the Season of Glass photograph, in transgressing that objective
distance proper to death, do violence to the memory of Lennon? Or did it simply
serve as a painful reminder of the violence of Lennon’s death? Or might it be that
in questioning our cultural reactions to Lennon’s murder, Ono touched on that
tabooed, obscene fantasy which is nothing less than the guilty pleasure derived
from death?

The Loss of the Ideal: Celebrity and Its Tribulations

It may be the case, however, that a more defensive function is kept in check
by such political rupturing. For if memory encodes specific cultural modes of
negotiating pain, then it would appear that mass-mediated rememberings of Lennon
elaborate some sort of psychic bridging of idealization and depression. Whether
desire gives rise to culture or vice versa, the relationship in both cases is one in
which the function of idealization is essentially a defense against destructive urges,
drives, fantasies, ideas, representations. For the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein
(1988), high priestess of the Freudian death drive, idealization is itself a means of
blocking from awareness those persecutory traits of the bad object or negative
experience; awareness is subdued by the logic of expulsion and projection. The
importance of Klein’s work for the social-theoretical analysis of celebrity is her
emphasis that all reflective thinking, undertaken in the depressive position, will
necessarily lead to a renewed splitting of images and representation. That this
splitting will of necessity reactivate paranoid, schizoid processes is fundamental
for the critical analysis of the ego achievements of the individual, but it is also of
core importance for grasping the psychic dimension of political and ideological
representation. This is not simply a matter of saying that psychic dislocation is
embedded in all mass-mediated cultural rememberings; that much is certainly true,
but it only captures part of the dynamic between self and society. Rather, the
interplay of paranoid, schizoid, and depressive modes of thinking is constituted and
reproduced within the cultural matrix of mass communications, and from this angle
the practice of representation itself is always an interweaving of imaginary and
sociosymbolic forms. The unconscious, then, is less a particular affective form or
Celebrity and Political Psychology 847

libidinal realm, to which it is all too often displaced in much present-day social
theory, than a kind of deeply layered ontological presence of both continuity and
disruption in the perpetuation of our cultural discourses, social practices, political
institutions, and technologies.
Mass-mediated rememberings of Lennon are therefore predicated on tangled
and contradictory psychosocial influences—relayed through technologies of
power and knowledge, overdetermined by the repressed political unconscious. To
examine the unconscious ideological dimensions of celebrity is therefore to invoke
the general and the specific together: modernist fantasies concerning the mastery
of death have a formidable power in contemporary culture, but this does not mean
that individual subjects react in uniform or standardized ways to the cultural
political order. On the contrary, people are implicated in a mobile assemblage of
psychosocial relations, an assemblage in which individuals and collectives develop
distinct modes of negotiating desire and object-loss, anxiety, and dread.
Alert to some of these psychological and political problems, Fred Fogo offers
us in his I Read the News Today (1994) an intriguing catalogue of cultural modes
of remembering in and through which people have sought to come to grips with
John Lennon’s death.4 Fogo’s starting point is that the death of Lennon has come
to be symbolically equated with “the death of the sixties.” On the symbolic level,
this is a death of cultural ideals of love, peace, and understanding, as well as of
political dreams for social integration and consensus. But, as Fogo notes, the 1960s
was not simply an exploration of the ideal; on the contrary, it was a decade that
generated much confusion and anger. Division and dislocation at the personal and
political levels also deeply marked the 1960s, as profound political conflict arose
around issues of sexuality, the environment, corporate power, and militarism.
Lennon stands as a central cultural symbol of the 1960s, according to Fogo, because
he reflected the contradictory, change-oriented nature of the times. And it is against
this backdrop, he asserts, that people increasingly reach an “understanding” of the
significance of the Beatles in a stronger sense: We have developed an intuitive
conviction that the very rich aesthetic impulses and codes of the 1960s are deeply
embedded and have survived in the Beatles’ music and indeed in Lennon as a
cultural symbol. So too, with respect to the framing of our post-Beatle culture,
Lennon is central to the reawakening of our sense of political possibility and the
excitement that images of utopia can generate.
Fogo, rightly in my view, stresses the advantage that is to be obtained by
contrasting separational and reintegrative forms of identification in the remember-

4 Fogo analyzed reactions to Lennon’s death in the theoretical frame of Victor Turner’s social drama
perspective. This perspective advances the view that social and cultural meanings are readjusted as a
consequence of social drama, and thus grants some recognition to the social complexity of ideological
forms. This recognition is limited, however, to the sociocultural reconstruction of a breach in the social
order. No significant weight is accorded to the internal complexities of ideological formations, such
as the role of fantasy and the unconscious, and it is arguable that the social imaginary (Castoriadis,
1987) is also accordingly stripped of its indeterminacy as a consequence.
848 Elliott

ing and mourning of Lennon. Fogo sees separational forms of identification with
Lennon operative at the level of a retreat to nostalgia and in expressions of
scapegoating. Such moments of nostalgia about Lennon and the past involve an
absorption in the counterculture ethos and, in particular, in desires to reconstruct
and relive the good memories of former, ideal times. The separational forms of
scapegoating involve high levels of anger and seek to “explain” Lennon’s murder
in terms of extrinsic, social dimensions; the social marginalization of Mark
Chapman and the politicization of gun control are key examples. But in both cases
the separational impulse is driven by a sense of shared antagonism: A rigid narrative
about the past, and of the importance of Lennon to that past, is subject to endless
repetition; and the function of such repetition is to maintain a powerful sense of
collective self-affirmation rather than to examine loss in terms of its own emotional
dynamics.
But this tension or contradiction is not absented from reintegrative forms of
remembering Lennon, and indeed the loss of the ideal is reinscribed in negotiating
the relations between self and society as part of the process of cultural discovery
and learning in this mode. What is lost is lost for good in the reintegrative mode
that Fogo (1994) calls “resignation.” As he explains, this “discourse saw the death
of the sixties as final. The old values, in this view, were ineffective, the old feelings
dead. . . . [Here] there was nothing left but reintegration. In Lennon’s death, the
group finally had dissolved, and hope had been lost” (p. 84). The “achieved” sense
of ideological closure evident in separational constructions of the 1960s is missing
here. Instead, loss is reacted to as overwhelming and final; it cancels out former
selves, pasts, and times, propelling an engagement with the future by necessity.
This raises the question of whether loss has been recognized as such, or whether
the sense of hopelessness generated in this mode of remembering serves as a form
of psychic protection against loss.
Beyond resignation, Fogo (1994) introduces a final mode of cultural remem-
bering: acceptance. In this mode, loss does not equal defeat; rather, it signals
creativity and the future as open-ended:
. . . voices of acceptance view generational identity more in the material
and historical context of the larger society, not as a manifestation of
emotional communion. These voices for incorporation elegize Lennon in
three primary ways: (1) They emphasize Lennon’s post-Beatle life and
his personal and artistic progress and development. (2) They consider
Lennon’s and Yoko Ono’s relationship, apart from structural roles, as an
example of growth, experimentation, and artistic collaboration. In doing
this, some also address the issue of sexism in the counterculture. (3) They
explicitly criticize the use of Lennon as a symbol for communitas. (p. 92)
It does not follow from this, however, that the personal and cultural examination
of Lennon equals a working through of loss itself, nor that the psychic dislocation
of loss is brought into cultural awareness in the shift toward social reintegration.
Celebrity and Political Psychology 849

Fogo’s book is illuminating in several respects because it breaks from the idea
that the impact of celebrity—from the realm of identification to the dislocation of
death—simply works upon culture in an ideologically dominant and cohesive form.
According to Fogo, social reactions to the death of Lennon are part and parcel of
a psychological and cultural balancing act played out as modes of defensive control
and reactive adaptation. At the same time, there is much in Fogo’s interpretation
that should be resisted. To begin with, the separational and reintegrative modes of
cultural remembering are more tangled and contradictory than Fogo seems to
admit. His analysis ignores the point that cultural rememberings operate within
multiplex, contradictory social formations, and that ultimately people move in and
out of various political discourses and spaces as individual subjects. From the
perspective I have proposed in this article, there is an internal or psychic fragmen-
tation of the individual subject in the negotiation of cultural rememberings and in
dealing with the dynamics of loss. The individual is fragmented first in terms of
the radical otherness of the unconscious; this decentering is constituted as other in
the imaginary order and as Other in the symbolic register, to invoke Lacan (1977);
and the upshot is the construction of a subject in representational terms, which is
always punctured and traversed by the force of desire, even though I have argued
(against the pronouncements of much contemporary theory) that the energetic
signals of desire are of capital importance to the process of critical self-reflection.
But, secondly, the individual is also fragmented in terms of its insertion into specific
social roles and cultural discourses, and here the weights of discursive practices,
gender relations, and political technologies are of key importance. Taken together,
this doubled fragmentation suggests that the relation between the individual subject
and cultural context is considerably more volatile and turbulent than Fogo’s
writings recognize.
Although one main area of personal and cultural struggle over Lennon’s death
is certainly that of idealization and its difficulty, an excessive concentration on
cultural forms (whether signified as the 1960s, the counterculture, or the New Left)
limits the grasping of the psychic construction of experience and, particularly, the
nature of experience in the making of self and society. What qualifies for this
specifically psychoanalytic stress on the dimension of experience is that coordina-
tion between personal and social forms of pleasure (or what Freud termed the
fulfillment of wishes) and of the scars imprinted on the cultural political order that
arise from lost opportunities, moments, possibilities, selves, worlds. How, then, is
one to remember the scars of loss at the heart of our personal and cultural worlds
that have been inscribed through the murder of Lennon? The raw emotional
material of pain is perhaps a central starting point because it brings into view that
which is felt most intensely in the private and public realms, and it underlies the
defensive markings of identification in any event. The narcissistic identifications
registered in cultural rememberings of Lennon are secured, not only through some
guarantee for aesthetic experience, but also as an intuition of authenticity. I have
suggested that Lennon represents, among other things, an affirmation of faith, trust,
850 Elliott

and the true. Idealization? Certainly, or at least this is so to the extent that cultural
rememberings of Lennon function as an idealization of a loved object. But what
activates this identification is that composition of imaginary recognitions and
investments in the authenticity of Lennon as a primary source of meanings,
realizations, successes, failures, joys, sorrows, sufferings. Such psychic elabora-
tions may be correlative to the establishment of a mode of thinking about experi-
ence, which, although brittle, permits a self-holding of “separation” and of the
representations that accompany it.
Put more simply, it is as if there is a kind of cross-tracking in and through
which we can link and compare our private and public worlds with the figure of
Lennon. This can take any number of forms, from wondering about the delights
and perils of fame to probing the hopes and dreads of withdrawing from public life
in order to rediscover the self in the context of familial relationships (as Lennon
did after the birth of Sean). Whatever the variation, the point is that these imaginary
and symbolic constructions are engagements with unimaginably rich alternative
worlds, and not simply further elaborations of preestablished cultural rationaliza-
tions.
I should make it clear that I am not suggesting that the personal element or
psychic dimension be privileged over the social and cultural contexts in which life
history is located. To do so would simply reinstate the oppositional logic that Fogo
deploys, although this time in reverse: of psychic processes fully structuring social
life. Against both psychic reductionism and social determinism, Lennon’s death is
better approached, I argue, as a complex, contradictory social-historical interweav-
ing of cultural crisis and psychological mourning. Cultural reactions to the murder
of Lennon bring the question of crisis into view insofar as the loss of Lennon is
represented as a collapse of social meaning, of generational hopes, dreams, and
ideals, of the struggle for authentic living. This much of Fogo’s argument, I think,
is right. But the actuality of the event, of Lennon’s murder, does not simply “cause”
a cultural crisis. Rather, the crisis of meaning surrounding Lennon’s death is a result
of specific psychic investments—of identification, idealization, and love—which
have their own internal coherence and organization. It is this psychosexual dimen-
sion that complicates the story of our cultural reactions to the loss of Lennon,
precisely because the field of psychic life is radically imaginary and therefore a
realm that transfigures or outstrips the raw materials of cultural life. Cultural
imaginings of Lennon, from this angle, affect the furthest reaches of our personal
and social lives.

Concluding Remarks

With the expansion of global communication networks today, celebrity has

become an increasingly unavoidable as well as problematic phenomenon for
political psychology. By looking at some recent social-theoretical contributions to
the study of mass communications, I have considered some of the ways in which
Celebrity and Political Psychology 851

the interlinking of institutional reflexivity and closure, dynamism and repetition,

affect individual and collective engagements with the mediated quasi-interaction
of celebrities. In analyzing some aspects of the social drama surrounding the death
of John Lennon, I argue that the reflexive monitoring of celebrity at once repro-
duces and distorts, frames and beclouds, the symbolic fabric of daily political life.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This article is, in part, based on research from my The Mourning of John
Lennon (in press). The arguments developed here, though, are only briefly touched
on in the book. I thank Elliot Mintz and Jon Wiener for their assistance with my
research on Lennon in Los Angeles. Thanks also to William Murphy, Anthony
Giddens, John B. Thompson, Nick Stevenson, Andrew Newton, Nicola Geraghty
and Anthony Moran for their comments on this project more generally. Thanks
also to two anonymous reviewers, as well as the co-editors of Political Psychology,
for their comments and advice. Correspondence concerning this article should be
addressed to Anthony Elliott, ARC Research Fellow, Department of Political
Science, University of Melbourne, Victoria 3052, Australia.

REFERENCES

Aries, P. (1974). Western attitudes to death. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Baudrillard, J. (1983). Les strategies fatales. Paris: Grasset.
Bauman, Z. (1992). Mortality, immortality and other life strategies. Cambridge: Polity.
Bauman, Z. (1996). Postmodernity and its discontents. Cambridge: Polity.
Beck, U. (1991). Risk society. London: Sage.
Beck, U. (1996). The reinvention of politics. Cambridge: Polity.
Braudy, L. (1986). The frenzy of renown. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Castoriadis, C. (1987). The imaginary institution of society. Cambridge: Polity.
Castoriadis, C. (1997). The Castoriadis reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
Coleman, R. (1984). John Lennon. London: Warner.
Elliott, A. (1996). Subject to ourselves: Social theory, psychoanalysis and postmodernity. Cambridge:
Polity.
Elliott, A. (in press). The mourning of John Lennon. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Flippo, C. (1982). The word spreads. In J. Cott & C. Doudna (Eds.), The ballad of John and Yoko (pp.
200–203). New York: Rolling Stone Press.
Fogo, F. (1994). I read the news today: The social drama of John Lennon’s death. Maryland: Rowman
and Littlefield.
Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its discontents. London: Hogarth.
Gadamer, H.-G. (1975). Truth and method. London: Sheed and Ward.
Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity. Cambridge: Polity.
Giddens, A. (1994). Beyond left and right. Cambridge: Polity.
852 Elliott

Goldman, A. (1987). The lives of John Lennon. New York: Bantam.

Gorer, G. (1965). Death, grief and mourning in contemporary Britain. London: Cressant.
Klein, M. (1988). Envy and gratitude and other works. London: Virago.
Lacan, J. (1977). Ecrits. London: Routledge.
Lewis, L. (1992). The adoring audience: Fan culture and popular media. London: Routledge.
McCann, G. (1988). Marilyn Monroe: The body in the library. Cambridge: Polity.
Morley, D., & Robbins, K. (1995). Spaces of identity. London: Routledge.
Norman, P. (1981). Shout! The Beatles in their generation. New York: MJF Books.
Nowotny, H. (1994). Time: The modern and postmodern experience. Cambridge: Polity.
Paige Baty, S. (1995). American Monroe: The making of a body politic. Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press.
Ricoeur, P. (1981). Hermeneutics and the human sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Spencer, S. (1982). Hearing the news. In J. Cott & C. Doudna (Eds.), The ballad of John and Yoko (pp.
209–211). New York: Rolling Stone Press.
Stevenson, N. (1995). Understanding media cultures. London: Sage.
Thompson, J. B. (1990). Ideology and modern culture. Cambridge: Polity.
Thompson, J. B. (1995). The media and modernity. Cambridge: Polity.
Vovelle, M. (1983). La mort et l’occident: de 1300 a nos jours. Paris: Gallimard.
Wiener, J. (1984). Come together: John Lennon in his time. New York: Random House.