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//-->Cultural Sociologyhttp://cus.sagepub.com/The Celebrity-IconJeffrey C. AlexanderCultural Sociology2010 4: 323DOI: 10.1177/1749975510380316The online version of this article can be found at:http://cus.sagepub.com/content/4/3/323Published by:http://www.sagepublications.comOn behalf of:British Sociological AssociationAdditional services and information forCultural Sociologycan be found at:Email Alerts:http://cus.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsSubscriptions:http://cus.sagepub.com/subscriptionsReprints:http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navPermissions:http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navCitations:http://cus.sagepub.com/content/4/3/323.refs.html>>Version of Record- Nov 18, 2010What is This?Downloaded fromcus.sagepub.comby Anna Dom on October 14, 2012Cultural SociologyCopyright © The Author(s) 2010, Reprints and permissions:http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navBSA Publications Ltd®Volume 4(3): 323–336[DOI: 10.1177/1749975510380316]The Celebrity-Icon■Jeffrey C. AlexanderYale University, USAA BS T R AC TThis ar ticle develops a non-reductive approach to celebrity, treating it as aniconic form of collective representation central to the meaningful constructionof contemporary society. Like other compelling material symbols, the celebrity-icon is structured by the interplay of surface and depth. The surface is anaesthetic structure whose sensuous qualities command attention and compelattachment; the depth projects the sacred and profane binaries that structuremeaning even in postmodern societies. While celebrity worship displayselements of totemism, it also reflects the eschatological hopes for salvationthat mark post-Axial Age religion. The attacks on celebrity culture that informcritical public and intellectual thinking resemble iconoclastic criticisms of idolworship more than they do empirical social scientific study.K EY WO R D Scelebrity / cultural sociology / Durkheim / icon / sacred/profane / totem / transitionalobjectFifty years ago, in ‘The Face of Garbo’, Roland Barthes described the filmstar’s make-up as ‘an absolute mask’ whose ‘snowy thickness’ gave her a‘totem-like countenance’ (Barthes, 1972 [1957]). Barthes’s descriptionexudes wistful adoration, yet there is irony, too. His breathlessness casts doubton the barrier erected by his master, Lévi-Strauss, between cold and hot socie-ties, the totemic and the mechanical, or ratiocinative (Lévi-Strauss, 1967).Moderns associate rigid and stereotyped visages with primitive societies,with the Inuit totem poles and African masks that stare out lifelessly in themuseum spaces dedicated to dead societies. Once, these wooden carvings wereDownloaded fromcus.sagepub.comby Anna Dom on October 14, 2012323324Cultural SociologyVolume 4■Number 3■November 2010regarded as totems, religious symbols of the sacred and profane that sustainedmeaning, ritual, and solidarity. It seems easy to agree with Lévi-Strauss thattotemism marks only the earliest and most irrational societies. We see suchwooden visages as distorted representations, badly carved, far from the realismof contemporary information societies.When sophisticated moderns approach celebrities they see neither totemnor meaning, neither ritual solidarity nor symbolic form. When their realismis sympathetic, they see deserved fame and great achievement, as in a JoeDiMaggio or Denzel Washington. When their realism is critical, which is moreoften, they see celebrities as products of fakery, as deflated symbols, manipu-lated puppets.Perhaps we should not so quickly separate ourselves from ancient peoplesand their cold societies. Might it be possible to understand celebrity in an iconicmanner, as a sign of the primitiveness of the modern or the modernity of theprimitive? In what follows, I will contend that celebrities are, in fact, amongthe most powerful icons of our times. Whether we characterize these times asmodern or primitive, totem-like material symbols continue to structure ourculture and economy today. The reality of this iconic structuring is invisible toreductionist theories that take a realist approach, which make culture a depend-ent variable that can be explained only by other, non-cultural, more materialthings. To understand the iconicity of celebrity, we must move beyond thesociology of culture to a cultural sociology, to a strong program (Alexander andSmith, 2003, forthcoming) that gives meaningful patterns and the emotions thatunderpin them the autonomy and attention they deserve.Like other compelling material symbols, the celebrity-icon is structured bythe interplay of surface and depth.1The surface of the celebrity-icon is anaesthetic structure whose sensuous qualities command attention and compelattachment. Describing Garbo’s face as ‘at once perfect and ephemeral’, Barthesasserts that it is ‘set in plaster, protected by the surface of color’. Ephemeralperfection engraved into a permanent form – we are in the world of Kant’s thirdcritique, outside of truth and justice, the world of the beautiful (though not yetthe sublime).2If color and light constitute one dimension of the aesthetic, shapeand symmetry define the other. Barthes extols Garbo’s image for its ‘thematicharmony’, tracing ‘the relation between the curve of her nostrils and the archof her eyebrows’. The sensuous and beautiful surface of the Garbo-icon triggersabsorption. Its aesthetic force sustains mystical rather than ascetic experience.By ‘capturing the human face’, Barthes attests, Garbo’s image ‘plunged audiencesinto deepest ecstasy’, allowing ‘a kind of absolute state of the flesh’. The subject/object distinction that sustains rationality is obliterated, for ‘one literally lostoneself in a human image’.Yet, behind the aesthetic structure of Garbo-surface there is the moralstructure of Garbo-depth. The Garbo-icon is a sign, consisting of signifier andsignified. ‘Garbo’ stands not only for beauty but for the sacred. It/she has areligious significance, commiting us to moral ideals. Here, we are in the worldnot of the third but the second of Kant’s critiques, the world defined sociologicallyDownloaded fromcus.sagepub.comby Anna Dom on October 14, 2012The Celebrity-IconAlexander325by Durkheim as resting upon the division between sacred and profane(Durkheim, 1996 [1912]). As Barthes reminds us, Garbo was called ‘LaDivine’.She had, it was thought, not only a beautiful but a ‘deified face’, a sacred visagethat suggests ‘the essence of the corporeal person, descended from a Heavenwhere all things are formed and perfect in the clearest light’. As icon, Garborepresents not only aesthetic but moral power. The Garbo-icon communicates‘an archetype of the human face … a sort of Platonic idea of the humancreature’. The beauty of Garbo-surface, the visible signifier, connects us to theinvisible meaning of Garbo-depth, the sacred signified, the spiritual essence ofthe human being.Subjectivation and ObjectificationCelebrity-icons are objects of worship. Social observers and the lay public alikespeak of the ‘real hunger’ they experience for celebrity images and information;of their ‘insatiable appetite’; of how the extraordinary expansion of print, dig-ital, and television celebrity coverage3has provided an ‘opportunity to indulge’,to finally ‘sate the desire for celebrity news and gossip’. As one young womanenthused about the increasing number of weekly celebrity magazines, ‘I don’twant to have to wait a whole month to find what celebrities are wearing!’ Anentertainment journalist describes the intensified coverage as an ‘all-you-can-eatbuffet’ (quoted in Davies, 2005; Maurstad, 2005). A celebrity actor’s sonexclaims, ‘Go look at the magazines. Go look at the grocery store … There’s acrazy, insatiable lust for celebrity in this country’ (Bentley, 2005).Celebrity-icons are transitional objects for adults, mediating betweeninternal and external reality, between the deepest emotional needs and contin-gent possibilities for their satisfaction.4Yet, while saturated with emotion, thecelebrity object carries a thoroughly cultural effect. The magnetic attraction ofits material-aesthetic surface allows its depth-significance to be subjectified, tobe taken into the heart and flesh. Worshippers describe this introjection processas if the celebrity-icon actually becomes part of their internal self. Speakingabout her fellow actress Gwyneth Paltrow, Julia Roberts remarked, ‘She’s got aface you want to look at for a very long time; you want to absorb it’ (Hichman,1996, quoted in Gilligan, 2000).One day after George Harrison died, a 39-year-old British fan came tomourn outside Abbey Road Studios, which the Beatles had ‘immortalized whenthey crossed the street for the iconic photograph on the cover of the “AbbeyRoad” album’, in the words of the American reporter observing the scene.Acknowledging ‘I never met George Harrison,’ the British fan still declared ‘I’veknown him since I was 10 years old.’ Another mourner at the shrine, a 23-year-old law student from Irvine, California, described Harrison as ‘part of the mostinfluential group of people in my life’. Insisting ‘that’s not an overstatement’, heexplained there are ‘my parents, of course, that goes without saying. But thenthe Beatles’ (Lyall, 2001).Downloaded fromcus.sagepub.comby Anna Dom on October 14, 2012326Cultural SociologyVolume 4■Number 3■November 2010If introjecting the celebrity-icon allows both the outside and the inside ofthe material sign to be subjectified, it paradoxically stimulates a process ofexternalization. By turning their newly formed subjective self feelings intoobjects – objectification in Hegel’s sense – supplicants materialize the surfaceand depth of their iconic consciousness.5When a 19-year-old American womanwas asked why she had cut and pasted a picture of the paper-thin actress Mary-Kate Olsen into her journal, she explained ‘Iadmireher’ and added, ‘Thisis what I am striving to be like’ (Wulff, 2004). In February, 1998, GwynethPaltrow appeared on the cover of BritishVoguewith her new look, a messybob of blond, ear-length hair. It triggered a ‘stampede to the hair salons’ bywomen demanding ‘a Gwyneth’ (Maxted, 1998). Two years later, whenPaltrow’s premier inThe Talented Mister Ripleydisplayed her newly chestnutbrown hair, women’s magazines trumpeted advertisements such as ‘Look likeGwyneth for just $6.99.’6WhenRipleybecame the official film of LondonFashion Week, material iterations of her clothing from the movie appeared inBritish shops from Harvey Nichols to Etam, ‘with mid-length skirts, capripants and fitted tops filling the shop windows’.7No wonder that Paltrow wasdescribed by aVogueeditor as ‘the actress every designer wanted to dress’(Katz, 1996). Only by purchasing and wearing copies of her garments couldfan-worshippers materialize their Gwyneth-subjectivities. They could touchand display the same material surfaces as the icon-celebrity herself. At onceexperiencing aesthetic absorption and projecting a new materiality, they couldbecome ‘Gwyneth’ themselves.In November, 2006,Harper’s Bazaardevoted their cover story to NataliePortman wearing the ‘Little Black Dress’ (LBD) that Hubert de Givenchy haddesigned and Audrey Hepburn had worn as Holly Golightly in the 1961 filmBreakfast at Tiffany’s.In her ‘Editor’s Letter’ introducing the issues, GlendaBailey played the now familiar chords of celebrity-iconicity. From her first sen-tence, the powerful fashion journalist confesses and celebrates the experience ofabsorption. ‘Channeling Holly Golightly on my very first trip to New York,’ sherecalls, ‘I dropped off my bags, jumped in a cab, and went straight to Tiffany’s’(Bailey, 2006).8In passing we should note the reference to the movie persona ofthe Audrey-icon rather than to the actress herself. As we will see later, thisreveals something about the deeply layered quality of the totem-constructionprocess. But what concerns us here is subjectification, or ‘channeling’, andBailey suggests that, after successfully establishing herself as a professionalwoman, her money and power allowed this absorption process to be experi-enced in an even more vivid and powerful way. ‘Many years later,’ she writes,‘after I had moved here, my team surprised me on my birthday by kidnappingme on my way to work. When the blindfold came off, I found myself havingbreakfast at Tiffany’s!’This account of subjectifying the celebrity-icon is literally framed by imagesof its objectification. Three photographs surround the editorial content ofGlenda Bailey’s letter. On the lower right of the page is the famously incandes-cent still fromBreakfast at Tiffany’sshowing ‘Audrey Hepburn as HollyGolightly’, paper coffee cup in hand, bopped hair on top and oversized sunDownloaded fromcus.sagepub.comby Anna Dom on October 14, 2012 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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