By the beginning of the modern age, celebrating the fame of a human being or a god seemed to have become impossible. This is made evident in Hölderlin’s last hymnal fragments, in which eulogies and praise shatter and split into unrelated, paratactic phrases, as though a deep, visceral fracture prevented the full development and celebration of memory. The same difficulty is described, with a disillusioned tone, in one of Leopardi’s Operette Morali [Small Moral Works]: ‘Parini on Glory’. This addresses the fame of writers, philosophers and poets, but its observations remain relevant today, if we substitute the word ‘spectator’, for Leopardi’s word ‘reader’: in the modern world the public prefers ‘fervour to modesty… mediocrity to perfection’, but above all – and this refers to the prevalence of the imaginary over the actual – ‘the apparent to the real’.¹ In big cities the situation is worse, because even in Leopardi’s time these were the places that saw the emergence of such aimless, frantic movement; the restlessness as an end in itself which would become the subject of Simmel’s analyses, and which prevents opinion taking shape around the qualitative value of a human being and a work – that is to say, a movement that reduces fame to a phenomenon of fashion. Leopardi notes ‘the riot of these places, and the sight of the tinselled splendour’,² and then recalls the shallowness and the vacuous shifts from one belief to another. We are dominated by distractions, as he terms them, and frivolous gossip. This comes from the supremacy of the imaginary, from the fact that we allow ‘our imagination’ to prevail rather than ‘the inherent qualities of the things that please us’.³ Hence, fame is a phenomenon that ‘may be compared to a shadow which you can neither feel when you hold, nor yet keep from fleeing away’.⁴

In the society of the spectacle described by Debord, fame is bestowed on those who have best succeeded in giving an affirmative appearance to material vanity. The glory that attaches to the spectacle’s well-known characters no longer resides predominantly in their specific activity, but in a form of appearance that they all have in common and that transforms them into stars. Whether or not they are writers, politicians, dancers, street fighters or doctors has little importance, so long as they are conspicuous and present themselves in the uniform way that the spectacle demands: ‘As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that they actually live.’⁵ Apparent life is a substitute for actual life, and stars specialise in appearances. Their virtuosity consists in their constant existence in the realm of the possible, in endless mutation, creating the utopian illusion that everything is granted to those who accept the rules of the show (no matter whether they are heroes, politicians, ham actors, dancers, popes or footballers). They inhabit a domain of bustling, empty euphoria, a state of permanent exhilaration within a state of permanent distraction: ‘The stars of consumption, though outwardly representing different personality types, actually show each of these types enjoying equal access to, and deriving equal happiness from, the entire realm of consumption.’⁶

In the emergency situation created by the recent pandemic, have we not seen scientists performing on talk shows with the same narcissism as politicians and second-rate actors? The basic rule that determines a star’s fame in the society of the spectacle can be articulated as follows: the more that intellectual vocation and professional activity become devalued in reality, the more their spectacular performance offers a seductive and powerful surrogate. This is a consequence of the most deep-rooted characteristic of this form of life: the more a phenomenon loses in terms of material quality, the more its image-phantasm acquires splendour and glitter; the more artificial it is, the more it must appear natural and plausible; the more it is the result of economic necessity, the more it appears to be delegated to individual free choice.

Furthermore, a star cannot become a star without stimulating deep-seated psychic processes of identification and pseudo-recognition. The society of the spectacle is not a purely repressive structure. Instead, it produces a regime of desire, of euphoria-inducing fantasy, and ultimately, a particularly seductive form of voluntary servitude. The society of the spectacle is a ‘symbolic order’ that expresses every possible form of subjectivity.

The spectacular surrogate presents an inverted image of the real world: the more extreme the empty and desolate existence that must be compensated for, the more intense, brighter, and more assertive it must be. The affirmative power of celebrities is directly proportional to the erosion of organic life they must replace: ‘The spectacle cannot be abstractly contrasted to concrete social activity […] The spectacle that falsifies reality is nevertheless a real product of that reality. Conversely, real life is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, and ends up absorbing it and aligning itself with it.’⁷

The phantasms of commodity – and stars and celebrities are very clearly commodities produced by the cultural industry –, occlude the emerging void, the crisis of presence in the face of the obliteration of physical, sexual and emotional relations, making it sustainable. As Lacan put it, the symbolic order of capital – in its basic structure a strong steel cage – survives by continually producing an uncontrolled and irresistible domain of imaginary enchantments: a ‘mirror stage’ that extends to the dimension of the collective unconscious. This is where individuals rendered poor, debt-ridden and desolate by capital, externally project their own unattainable totality in an illusory way, identifying themselves with the ideal Ego embodied by celebrities and thus compensating for their own psychological poverty.

In this way, a form of imaginary takes shape that does not aim to transcend existence, but to reflect it back like a mirror: ‘When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings – dynamic figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic behaviour.’⁸ However, it would not be correct to say that these images confirm what exists, like timeworn ‘ideologies’. In reality, they replace it and accelerate its disappearance. The spectacle is not a ‘superstructure’ – in traditional Marxist language – nor is it ‘simulation’.⁹ The spectacle is simultaneously a state of mind of the collective unconscious, a mode of production, and an agent of the circulation of capital.

In his series dedicated to the stars of show business and politics (from Marilyn Monroe to Elizabeth Taylor, from Mao Tse-tung to Jackie Kennedy), Warhol analysed, took apart and exposed the artificial fantasy world of celebrity. These series represent ‘prominent people: artists, collectors, film stars, politicians – and criminals. In a media-conscious society, fame is almost a natural indicator of social success […]. In his own lifetime Al Capone was one of the most popular figures in his hometown of Chicago.’10 Stars offer themselves up to desire as fetishes. Desire – within capital’s domain – reaches fetishistically for dream images that prefigure total success and satisfaction. Celebrities offer a model for the Ego’s fulfilment that is destined to be disappointed, yet appeals to subjects willing to believe in the utopian happiness promised by capital. In the language of Freud, capitalist alienation negates civilisation’s unease and its negative product, and subjects’ limitations and servitude, while compounding them ad infinitum: it produces and disguises them in a protracted and increasingly excruciating contradiction.

The validity of a star’s image rests on it becoming a phantasm that modulates desire. As such, it appears fictitiously endowed with a unique quality and aura that real people do not possess. The very tissue of life itself, with its mixture of desires and fears, is used directly in the spectacle as a value-adding function of the commodity. Without this constant distraction and destruction of the organic fabric of life, there would be no spectacular process. For the spectators, their own social movement assumes the form of a movement of images in which they are controlled rather than being in control. Desire for and consumption of spectacular images, whose fame is celebrated, is accompanied by the negation and abstraction attached to the living being. Contemporary biopower is not just control over the living: it extends to the erosion of the organic by the spectacle’s phantasms.

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*Translated by Emma Mandley / Kennistranslations