Why go back to the eighteenth century to study celebrity? Isn't this anachronistic by its very nature, even provocative? Obviously stars today, given reality television and the internet, have nothing to do with famous writers in the age of the Enlightenment. Is this not just another example of the irritating tendency of historians to look for antecedence in the past?
I am certainly aware of the specific nature of our hypermedia world and contemporary mass culture. And yet I do believe that a historical view which takes into account the entire duration of a phenomenon makes it possible to avoid clichés and platitudes. The subject of this book can be easily summed up. Celebrity is not a recent phenomenon, a vulgar derivative of postmodernism, as the most common response has it. It has been developing since the eighteenth century and its first golden age was in the nineteenth. It is a particular form of notoriety, distinct as much from the glory of heroes, universal and ageless, as from mere reputation, which is always concentrated in a particular time and place. Its development is linked to the economic and cultural changes which have affected European society since the eighteenth century. The explication that I have developed rests on three elements: technological (the development of the printing press and the reproduction of images), cultural (romance literature, an interest in private life), and economic (the rise of privately sponsored shows and the beginning of consumerism). In studying these elements, I have relied on the work of numerous historians and have tried to show how the conjunction of these factors in the eighteenth century gave birth to a new public figure: the celebrity, who aroused the curiosity of an immense public.
Why is it important to date the development of celebrity from the eighteenth century? Because our contemporary myopia makes us think that the phenomenon of celebrity is a radically new one. Discussions about celebrity, especially in public debate, but also in the intellectual world, usually rest on the idea that it is a novel phenomenon that relates to an ethical decline in the public sphere, where heroes have been replaced by stars and then by simple celebrities. There are numerous versions of these moralizing critiques. Conservatives find that the celebrity culture promotes banal individuals and confuses the hierarchies of meritocracy. For progressives, it dumbs down the people and distracts from political issues. Criticism of the society of the spectacle and the media industry are the common denominators for all adversaries of modernity, the cliché of cultural criticism. In reality, all these discussions that oppose celebrity to real merit were already common in the eighteenth century, and knowing this helps us revise our relationship to the present. Isn't this why history is useful?
By studying the culture of celebrity from its beginnings, going back to the very moment when the issues that we continue to raise today were identified and formulated for the first time, we can improve our understanding of the contemporary culture of celebrity at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Given that celebrity appeared in the eighteenth century at the same time as the democratization of Western societies and the ideals of the Enlightenment, its actual development points not to a crisis in the public sphere, but rather to a deepening of its internal contradictions. This book is in line with a number of works undertaken recently by cultural sociologists or specialists in media studies1 concerning the contemporary nature of celebrity. It adds a historical dimension that covers a longer period of time.
The modern public sphere, as it has developed since the eighteenth century in Europe and the United States, rests on several factors: an optimal and free access to information where each person is welcome to give an opinion about current events; a society that defends equality and where every individual can hope to achieve success or prestige; media development that has profoundly transformed social interactions. Whereas societies during the Ancien Régime were founded on powerful class inequalities, a strict control of information, and face-to-face interactions, modern societies are characterized by a wide circulation of information, social mobility, and a great deal of long-distance communication. Of course, negative forces exist, like censorship or large social inequalities. But the most powerful forces are not exterior and hostile to this development, they are internal. The problem is less about censorship and more about the economic organization of media and the limited attention span of the public. We are not without access to information. To the contrary, we are drowning in it.
Celebrity culture is the direct consequence of these developments where individual renown is concerned. In the era of WikiLeaks, reality TV, and the internet, it has never been easier for an unknown person to become a celebrity, or for the public to know everything about the lives of celebrities. Celebrities embody most modern promises of democracy: anybody can become a celebrity, whatever their birth and sometimes whatever their merit, and achieve an enviable way of life. On the other hand, the public has a right to know about the life of prestigious people: celebrities can no longer hide in castles or palaces, but are now in the spotlight.
Has the internet revolution greatly changed the mechanisms of celebrity? This question is raised in Birdman, a film by Alejandro González Iñárritu. The film recounts the fate of a cinema star whose superhero roles have made him famous and who is now trying to make it as a Broadway actor. It is a parable about the effects of notoriety, opposing Hollywood stardom, which is big but not much valued, and the artistic reputation symbolized by the theater. No matter how different the two seem, they both come across as artificial, inauthentic worlds run by arbitrary rules, but which both offer great narcissistic pleasures. At one point, the young daughter of the hero contrasts these two forms of recognition, by the public and by the critic, and suggests that a new form of celebrity is rising: visibility online, popularity in the world of social media. With biting irony, she assaults her father by insisting that real celebrity is elsewhere now: “Things are happening in a place that you willfully ignore, a place that has already forgotten you. I mean, who the fuck are you? You hate bloggers. You make fun of Twitter. You don't even have a Facebook page. You're the one who doesn't exist.”
It could be, however, that the internet is simply accentuating the mechanisms of celebrity by emphasizing its most ridiculous effects and speeding up the rotation of celebrities. But one can also see it as a profound mutation of the celebrity culture through social media, now that new media forms are producing not unilateral distribution, from broadcasters to the public, but a much more diffuse dissemination in which consumers themselves are producers.
Celebrity is a major aspect of our mediatized societies, but it is not easily defined by the usual sociological categories. Celebrity is not a status. Celebrities do not make up an elite in the traditional sense of the term, with implications of power or the ideology of superiority. Stars and celebrities do not possess power, they do not have a position in institutions. They are admired, sometimes, but they are also mocked, criticized, sometimes detested. Since the eighteenth century, celebrity has fed on scandal. Above all, it is not stable: it is fragile, often ephemeral, because it only exists as long as the public stays interested. And this interest, as Samuel Johnson already noted, is fluctuating and limited.
This is no doubt the reason that angry feelings toward elites in our democratic societies touch celebrities very little. The public sees in their way of life not the symbol of an unequal caste system, but rather an object of fascination, potentially available to everyone and which only depends on the goodwill of the public. And perhaps this is why stories about fallen stars are so successful. The public takes pleasure in seeing stars suffer. Their weakness is the public's power. Celebrity is not capital possessed by only a certain number of people; it is above all a relationship, fundamentally asymmetric, between an individual and the public.
One of the principal results of this book on celebrity is that as an experience and a value, celebrity appears ambivalent. It has been ambivalent since the outset and has never ceased to be so. Avidly sought after, it is a sign of prestige and success, the guarantee of access to an enviable way of life. But it is also often a very painful experience. It is paid for by the absence of a private life, being permanently on display, and, often, psychological instability. From Marilyn Monroe to Kurt Cobain or Britney Spears, one can no longer count the stars who are depressed, closed in on themselves, sometimes pushed to suicide. Sarah Siddons or Lord Byron, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, already described the upsetting effects of celebrity, which at times seemed like a burden or a curse.
Celebrity is also ambivalent for the public, which is both fascinated by the life of celebrities and ironic in regard to them. Much of the press that focuses on celebrities adopts a playful and distanced view of them. The interest that the public has in the life of celebrities also takes a variety of forms, from simple and superficial curiosity to emotional identification. The reader who is amused by tabloid revelations is countered by the teenager who is writing passionate letters to her favorite star. These two extremes exist. As Joshua Gamson has rightly pointed out,2 spectators (celebrity watchers) are rarely incredulous or cynical; their response is generally half-way between these two reactions, an amused commitment, a benign skepticism.
The history of celebrity forces us to look at one of the principal mysteries of modern societies: the linking of mass culture and individualism. How do mediatized interactions encourage the affirmation of individual subjectivities? Celebrity is at the heart of this change. In modern societies, anonymous individuals who constitute the “public” are regularly confronted with the image and the name of people they will never meet but whom they know a lot about. At the same time, “private” life is contrasted with our public image, the way in which others perceive us. Privacy, the intimate self, is founded on a new principle of personal affirmation, that of individual subjectivity, interior feelings. These two changes, when studied separately, can appear to be contradictory; actually, they are the two sides of modernity. This explains why public curiosity carries over into the private life of celebrities, including their emotional life or the most ordinary details of their existence, while the glory of illustrious men was a matter of public feats or accomplishments. Celebrities must be both distant and close: they must be ordinary people living extraordinary lives. The paradox of modern celebrity is this: the more a person is a public figure, the more his or her private life becomes interesting for a great number of people.
In this way, celebrity culture exercises a double function in society. It permits the public to be aware of itself. It is part of what is happening. It is current events, the news, whose principal value is linked to its ephemeral nature, and the coordination of time which is permitted between members of the same society. But the life of celebrities also highlights the changes happening at the very core of society. Since the fifties, stars in show business, from Elvis to Madonna, have embodied sexual freedom. They are not the cause of it, but they go along with it, accelerate it, and make visible the phenomenon that is taking place. More recently, homosexuality, notably female homosexuality, openly displayed by certain stars, accompanies the public recognition of gay rights. The public exposure of celebrities allows them to make visible little transgressions which accompany societal changes and furnish their fans with new models. The death of David Bowie brings this to mind: the successive characters that he embodied allowed him to expose the metamorphosis in masculinity that marked the changes in Western societies since the seventies. For many of his fans, Bowie was not simply a singer or a star; he was an important person who was part of their personal life.3
There is obviously an enormous distance between the detached curiosity and irony that come with following the peripatetic life of stars, and the powerful emotional attachment of the public for certain celebrities. This tension is inherent even in the curiosity excited by a celebrity, with its highs and lows. It was the same in the eighteenth century, as this book has shown. Rousseau's celebrity was amusing and surprising for some, even the subject of bitter irony. Others felt deep emotion for him; he became a model of morality and they followed his example.
Rousseau's case might be seen as problematic, perhaps, because he was celebrated for his writings while celebrities today are the result of media production, without merit in their own right. From Rousseau to Paris Hilton, from Lord Byron to Kim Kardashian, the gap seems enormous. It is true that show business, more than in the eighteenth century, has a tendency today to be independent and to produce its own stars. Celebrity most often seems to come to those who are already known for their way of life and their ability to expose it publicly. But certain celebrities in the eighteenth century were actors, courtesans, or bandits. Inversely, many famous personalities today have gained success for their talents before becoming real celebrities: David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo, George Clooney and Julia Roberts, Jay Z and Beyoncé have respectively proven themselves on soccer fields, in films, and in concert halls, even if their fame today goes beyond their initial activity. As in the eighteenth century, certain writers and artists have become true celebrities: Michel Houellebecq, Andy Warhol, or Jeff Koons. One can argue about the way they constructed a public persona, which fed their work and became in itself an advertising tool, but one cannot deny that they enjoy a kind of recognition in their respective areas, beyond their celebrity.
Most of the examples I have cited show the importance of the economic stakes in celebrity culture. The culture industry has become extremely powerful today and certain authors talk about a celebrity industry itself coming out of the entertainment industry. The image of famous people is a consumer product and new professions arose out of this consumerism: managers, press agents, paparazzi, who live off of this industry. Certainly, the change that accompanied the mass entertainment culture is much different from the celebrity I have investigated in this book. However, here again, returning to the past can teach us a lot, because the mechanisms of celebrity preceded the development of the culture industry. The culture industry and celebrity fed each other: the culture industry encouraged celebrity, but celebrity at the same time encouraged the culture industry.
The rise of celebrity in the eighteenth century was linked to the first developments of a consumer society: spectacles independent of court subsidies, the rise of publishing entrepreneurs, as well as the spectacular ascendancy of fashion. Many historians today are rediscovering the enormity of capitalist changes that accompanied the development of public space in the eighteenth century. This merchandising tended to blur social hierarchies and individual identities. People were no longer subjected to class differences; they could freely choose their clothes, their books, their entertainment, their stars. The consumer revolution is dialectical: it allows for freedom but also has the potential to be alienating. From the eighteenth century onward, the possibility of consumer abuse as we know it today was evident, but also the possibility of freedom from the society of the Ancien Régime. Curiosity around celebrities works the same way: it can be solely the effect of social imitation, benefiting mostly the entertainment industry, but it can also be a resource for those who find that through attaching themselves to a star they can affirm and deepen their self-awareness and individual tastes.
It is necessary, then, to give up the idealistic and intellectual notion of the public sphere that was meant to be, in theory, a place for rational, dispassionate argumentation, like a philosophy seminar. In reality, the modern public sphere in capitalist, mediatized societies is, by its nature, full of passion and desire. It is a complex place, subjected to media flux and part of other emotionally charged forms (images, sounds, text), which produce both emotional and symbolic communities as well as separate individuals.
In this light, political celebrity must be reconsidered. Political celebrity is in great evidence today. Film and television stars can have political careers, and political figures are treated like celebrities, their names turned into brands and their private life exposed in the press. Donald Trump's recent election has shown how a businessman and former reality TV star could successfully use the worst devices of celebrity self-fashioning in favor of his political ambition. But here again, a historical investigation shows that this evolution has its roots in earlier periods, even if there has been a radical acceleration since the development of “infotainment.” Consequently, the principle of political representation, since the time of democratic revolutions in France, the United States and England, has raised questions about popularity: John Wilkes, Ben Franklin, Mirabeau, were the first “political celebrities.” Democratic policy is not simply a question of rational debate, but is also the embodiment of symbols: celebrity, which is based on a fiction of intimacy, seems to promise a closeness between the people and politicians, a fundamentally ambivalent closeness because it can easily be manipulated. Even so, this kind of celebrity, which does not always translate into votes, must not be confused with the cult of personality that is orchestrated by totalitarian regimes. The importance of celebrity in modern political life is not an aberration from the democratic ideal: since the beginning of modern political representation, it has been at the heart of it. Does this mean that it is not dangerous? Certainly not. All aspects of political representation that derive from the aesthetic, emotional, and affective dimension are particularly susceptible to being used to the detriment of rational discourse. They can veer off into despotism or toward a fanaticism that is incomprehensible to the elites. But these dangers at the heart of the democratic principle have been identified and discussed since the Atlantic revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. We cannot take refuge in a nostalgia for an ideal democracy that has never existed. We must face the congenital fragility of what we have inherited.
Celebrity is a cultural phenomenon that is difficult to study, certainly in our societies, where it seems to penetrate every domain of social life. On the one hand, celebrity is seen as nothing but superficiality, spectacle, theater, for the profit of the media industry: given this, it arouses amused curiosity and cynical irony. On the other hand, it plays an important role in the aesthetic and symbolic organization of our public sphere. These effects merit the greatest attention on the part of social scientists. Historians, up until now, have kept a distance. Things are changing. This book has tried to make a contribution.