Society
Ulrika is a sign that we've got it all
Published 28 October 2002
Celebrity sells. But it's more than a marketing tool: it is an expression of our unprecedented democracy and prosperity - and boredom. By John Gray
Tony Benn and Jeffrey Archer do not have a lot in common. The pious parliamentarian and the flamboyant former Tory party chairman come from very different backgrounds. Their careers are incomparable. Aside from a shared lack of irony, their personalities could hardly be more discrepant. Despite these differences, there is one crucial respect in which they are alike. Each is now marketing his personality and life experience as a media commodity.
Each has recently published a diary - Archer's covering the first 22 days of his prison sentence, in Belmarsh jail, Benn's the decade from 1991 to 2001. Each has taken to performing a sort of theatrical impersonation of himself - Archer in a play staged not long before he went to prison, in which he appeared as a fictive version of his public persona, itself partly invented, and Benn in a one-man show he is putting on throughout the country, in which he appears with his trademark pipe, mug of tea and inimitably quaint opinions.
Long blurred, the borders between politics and entertainment are now virtually non-existent. It is no longer true - as Enoch Powell claimed - that all political careers end in failure. Rather, failed politicians end up as entertainers. In the current media culture of revelatory diaries and confessional memoirs, kiss-and-tell journalism and voyeuristic television, ex-politicians are no different from anyone else in seeking to turn themselves into marketable commodities. Even more than Tony Benn and Jeffrey Archer, Edwina Currie and Ulrika Jonsson picked up the trappings of celebrity in different worlds; but the fact that one of them was once a politician and the other a television presenter is insignificant in comparison with the use each has made of her past. Each has recycled her life experiences as a commodity and is selling it to a public hungry for the vicarious intimacy that comes from self-exposure in the mass media.
Why the media should have developed in this way is a difficult question, but part of the answer is that the cult of celebrity has become one of the chief drivers of the economy. We are long past the time when the major part of economic activity consisted in the manufacture of industrial commodities. In societies in which affluence can be taken for granted by the majority of people, the core of the economy has come to be entertainment. Cars are still bought as means of transportation and books on the supposition that they may contain useful information, but in each case they are sold on the strength of the new experiences they promise. The chief risk facing such an economy is the mood of boredom that comes with satiety. New experiences become passe even faster than new physical commodities - particularly when, as is commonly the case, there is actually nothing terribly novel about them. Consumer fatigue threatens falling demand - the nemesis of a mode of production that starts to collapse as soon as it can no longer grow.
In an economy driven by the need to manufacture demand, fame sells everything else. This is most palpably true when anyone can be famous. What is novel about the entertainment economy is that it holds out the prize of fame to everyone. In the past, luxury goods were sold to the masses by linking them with the lifestyles of the famous. Today, it is the belief that anyone can be famous that sustains mass consumption. Celebrity has been made into a sort of People's Lottery, whereby the majority of people are reconciled to the tedium of their daily lives.
The mass media have always had this function. As George Orwell notes somewhere, the escapist film extravaganzas created by Hollywood in the Thirties played a significant role in dampening down mass discontent during the Great Depression. Through the spectacle of stardom, Hollywood created a phantasmal parallel world, which compensated for the drab insecurity of everyday life.
Today's entertainment economy, however, has gone further than Hollywood ever did. It has generated the myth that anyone can be a star. When Andy Warhol remarked that in future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, he did more than project his own narcissism on to the larger world. He forecast the version of capitalism we have currently reached, in which economic growth is sustained by the popular belief that we can all be winners in the lottery of fame.
It is surprising how few people anticipated the rise of the entertainment economy. Those who did were rarely social theorists or economists, or for that matter academic intellectuals of any variety. Perhaps the most clear-sighted vision of what was to come can be found in the work of J G Ballard, who predicted Ronald Reagan's rise to president in a short story published in 1967, and whose experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition - a visionary anticipation of the role of images of catastrophe and violence in the new media economy- was, astonishingly, first published in 1969. Around the same time, Guy Debord, the most gifted thinker of the group of provocateurs and avant-garde artists who called themselves situationists, developed the theory of the society of the spectacle.
Debord anticipated one of the most curious features of the entertainment economy. Foreseeing a time when roles and identities would be continuously reshuffled in the media, he looked to a future in which the accelerated flow of media imagery would altogether block popular access to the past. In this account, the constant circulation of new fashions does more than sustain demand. It creates a corrupt media surrogate of the "eternal present" invoked by mystics. In the entertainment economy, the past is systematically erased, while the future is closed off from view. As Debord put it: " The manufacture of a present where fashion itself, from clothes to music, has come to a halt . . . is achieved by the ceaseless circulation of information, always returning to the same short list of trivialities, passionately proclaimed as major discoveries. Meanwhile, news of what is genuinely important, of what is actually changing, comes rarely, and then in fits and starts."
As a Marxist, Debord cannot help trying to explain "the society of the spectacle" in economic terms, but it may well be that the roots of the entertainment economy are cultural. This is George Walden's argument in his translation of Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's On Dandyism and George Brummell (published by Gibson Square Books under the title of Who's a Dandy? and reviewed by Jason Cowley in last week's New Statesman). In a profound and penetrating analysis of the contemporary scene, Walden argues that the aristocratic cult of dandyism, which the 19th-century French writer Jules Barbey examined through the figure of Beau Brummell, has now become a mass movement. As he makes clear in his introductory essay, dandyism is not just a mode of dress. It is an attitude of mind, a philosophy or even a religion, that celebrates impermanence and living for the moment, a wilful detachment from ethical and political concerns, and the cultivated display of a provocative individuality.
In Brummell's time, dandyism was an exclusive cult. The attitudes it expressed were inaccessible to most people. Today, Walden observes, it is the habit of millions. The studied nonchalance of Warhol, the well-rehearsed impassivity of Gilbert and George and the languid stylishness of a pop musician such as Jarvis Cocker are not the privileged affectations of a few media icons. They are the culture of the masses. With the unprecedented increase of leisure and affluence in Britain and other post-industrial societies since the end of the Second World War, the dandyish obsession with clothes and the minutiae of personal appearance has re-emerged. Once confined to a small, self-admiring coterie, it is now one of the dominant trends of the age.
Walden does not attempt a full explanation of this development. As he notes, dandyism is not - as Barbey believed - an unrepeatable feature of aristocratic life in Regency England. It is an attitude to the world that can be found in many times and places. The question is why it has come to be so pervasive today. Walden offers a couple of suggestions. He speculates that the contemporary cult of the dandy may be an attempt to stave off boredom: "Mass societies," he writes, "can be as oppressed by feelings of taedium vitae and satiety as aristocracies (more, perhaps, since they are oppressed by their own weight and sameness)." This suggests that the restless quest for novelty in fashion which dandyism expresses may be a reaction against the very condition of security that makes dandyism possible. Walden captures a similar paradox when he identifies Andy Warhol as the prototype of the democratic dandy. Warhol's genius, he writes, "consisted of glorifying the ordinary, of making celebrities of the people, of dandifying the masses". Walden concludes: "Today this means giving mass man what he most needs and desires: an illusion of individuation." Here Walden follows de Tocqueville in commenting on one of the ironies of modern democracy - when it becomes a mass philosophy, individualism almost inevitably mutates into a new mode of conformism.
The cult of celebrity is a product of the imperatives of the entertainment economy interacting with the values of a democratic society. It is not an aberration - an inexplicable mark of cultural decline that we are at liberty to condemn but have no obligation to understand. Where affluence is the normal condition of the majority of people, continued economic growth depends on manufacturing insatiable needs. This is the mechanism underlying the incessant proliferation of new products, and in itself it is familiar enough; but in the entertainment economy it operates in a new way. Commodities are sold not simply as new products, but as new experiences that will somehow attach themselves uniquely to each consumer. Mass consumption is maintained by breaking up consumers into a multitude of shifting niche markets, each catering to a carefully crafted and continually refined illusion of individuality. This strategy is most highly developed in interactive television programmes such as Big Brother, which instil the illusion that celebrity is a universal entitlement that everyone can enjoy if they are lucky enough to be selected by everyone else.
One of the most striking features of the participants in Big Brother is their idleness. Aside from relating to one another, they have nothing to do. It is this condition of redundancy, I believe, that is the ultimate source of the culture of celebrity. The trend of the most advanced economies is to render the majority of people superfluous to the production process. That does not mean they are headed for life on the dole. On the contrary, in the economies where this trend is most clearly developed - Britain, for example - something like full employment has been achieved. The distinctive feature of the entertainment economy is not an increase in joblessness, but rather that increasing numbers of people work to keep others - and thereby themselves - amused. The booming markets in every variety of therapy and spirituality, the proliferation of designer drugs and designer religions illustrate the urgency of the impulse to resist the taedium vitae of which Walden speaks - and to do so in ways that satisfy the need for a simulacrum of individuality.
It may well be that the culture of celebrity and the entertainment economy of which it is a part will turn out to be unsustainable. After all, they developed in a period of unparalleled peace and prosperity, when democracy was unchallenged by extremist movements, and continued improvement in the average standard of living could be taken as given. It will not be surprising if they go into a retreat when these historically abnormal conditions pass away. Staving off boredom is a pressing need only in rare and privileged times. With war and terrorism, financial collapse and the return of unemployment, more mundane needs come to the fore. Security ceases to be a burden, and the taste for individuality is lost. The chief business of life is subsistence. In such circumstances, the media are likely to revert to supplying simple escapist fantasies, as they did in the Thirties.
For the time being, the economy is geared to the marketing of personal experiences and fantasies. In this carnival of illusions, celebrities are at once alluring ciphers of personal fulfilment and the most fungible of commodities, created and consumed in a mechanical process by the logic of media competition. Inherently transitory, contemporary celebrity consists chiefly in an exchange of privacy for money. It is a harried and servile existence. A life subject to the whims of the media can hardly be described as free. To this extent, the democratic ethos that is embodied in everyone having the chance of being famous for 15 minutes is necessarily fraudulent. As Chris Evans is reported to have observed: when you get to the top, you find there is nothing there.
John Gray's latest book is Straw Dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals (Granta)
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