Celebrity. Andrea McDonnell
culture over the past several decades is the establishment in the 1980s and beyond of what scholars call “neoliberalism,” but might just as well be termed neoconservatism or small-government market fundamentalism. Advanced especially by the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher administrations, and fervently embraced by the Trump administration, this was a new common sense about limiting the role of government and the absolute centrality of individual responsibility to personal success. Neoliberalism attacked the general acceptance, which emerged during the Great Depression and was cemented in the post–World War II period, that the state has a responsibility to mitigate inequality, to provide basic services, and—through a combination of monetary and fiscal means—to even out capitalism’s boom-bust cycle.
Prior to the New Deal in the 1930s, there was barely any governmental safety net that protected those who had lost their jobs, were unemployed widows with children, or older people who could no longer work. The Great Depression, with a 25 percent unemployment rate in 1933 alone, drove home how brutal and untenable this laissez-faire approach was.41 With the New Deal, it now became a given that the state should focus on full employment, economic growth, and the welfare of its citizens, and that “state power should be freely deployed” alongside of or even intervening in market processes to achieve these ends. Thus, over a thirty-year period, we got Social Security, unemployment benefits, pension funds, and Medicare and Medicaid.
But in the wake of the various economic problems of the 1970s—“stagflation” (high inflation plus high unemployment), the OPEC oil embargo that limited oil and gas imports into the United States, soaring interest rates—and the election of Reagan here and Thatcher in England, market fundamentalism became the new gospel. This religion consists of the following core tenets: a belief in what was called “trickle down” economics (cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy will allegedly prompt them to produce more jobs, so that benefits “trickle down” to everyone) and efforts to limit or eliminate the government’s role in redistributing wealth, which rests on cutting taxes, especially for the wealthy. There is a complete faith that the market, not the government, is the best arbiter of wealth distribution. Thus, the government should stay out of providing services, especially for the needy, the poor, or retired people, because the state is allegedly less efficient, and more corrupt than, say, Wall Street or corporate America. To justify this, neoliberalism glorifies individualism and individual responsibility. As David Harvey succinctly put it, “All forms of social solidarity were to be dissolved in favor of individualism, private property, personal responsibility and family values.”42
How are we everyday people meant to internalize the market fundamentalism mantra? What persona must we assume here? And how is it related to celebrity culture? Neoliberalism insists upon and promotes the need for an idealized, productive citizen who must learn how to govern himself or herself. It is up to us to achieve self-mastery, and if we do we will control our own destiny and be autonomous and fulfilled. So our very selves must become an ongoing project, something we must work on, transform, and improve, so we can compete effectively and even succeed in this environment.43 In this worldview there are no structural, institutional obstacles that might thwart such choices for some or, conversely, offer opportunities and advantages that make them possible for others.
Celebrities, whether ones with genuine admired talent or those created through reality TV or Instagram, are such people. They personify the benefits of constant self-cultivation, self-monitoring, and self-transformation. The ones who seem to work hard, take individual responsibility for their careers and behaviors, and succeed are exemplars of—and role models for—the ideal neoliberal subject. More to the point, their prominent success as distinct, self-fashioned individuals legitimates neoliberalism as a system: they supposedly did it on their own, and definitely without help from any government or social services. Conversely, those celebrities who fail to take responsibility for fashioning a productive, individually responsible self are castigated and personify the dangers and humiliations of lacking self-mastery. In celebrity culture, there are no structural impediments to success and no need for governmental safety nets: it is all about individuals and individual agency.
In addition, for everyday people, self-actualization comes through buying the right stuff: being a persistent and shrewd consumer, not just of goods but also of services, like gym memberships, financial advice, and private health care. Neoliberalism relies crucially on consumerism, and vice versa. The media—whether The Oprah Winfrey Show, Judge Judy, or Keeping Up with the Kardashians—have been full of advice about how to govern, discipline, and reinvent oneself, and provide a road map for how to be a successful subject of the market fundamentalism ethos.44 And celebrity gossip magazines, with their features on how you can get the same look, go on the same diet, get the same furniture, buy the same baby clothes, all drive home that copying celebrities’ consumer choices can be a central component of your own success when, indeed, it’s all up to you.
At the same time, most celebrities who gain a certain level of visibility and respect feel they need to be involved in at least one charitable organization. Some, like Elton John or Annie Lenox or Ellen DeGeneres, have donated to over forty organizations.45 Although many celebrities are genuine about and often deeply invested in their concerns—Michael J. Fox and his Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, for example—they also understand that not being philanthropic, especially given the amounts of money some of them make, will hurt their image. But widespread celebrity support of charities as diverse as the Breast Cancer Research Foundation or Feeding America or Make Poverty History—all completely noble causes—also emphasize the necessity of private funding to combat social problems in the face of government inaction. If we have so many celebrities giving to or championing private foundations or nongovernmental organizations, do we really need government programs to support the sick and the needy?
Fandom and the Pleasures of Celebrity Culture
While scholars like Josh Gamson, Paul McDonald, and others have emphasized that we have such an overblown celebrity culture because it is a huge business with a constant need for new raw material, they and others have also explored the consumption side of the equation. Why do we as individuals pay attention to them, even need them? Being a fan of one celebrity or another has become an utterly routine part of everyday life now. We use their biographies (however invented) as guideposts for our own lives: By what age did they do such-and-so, and can I do that too? We want their relics—the towel they used, the glove they wore, the pen they held—to somehow shorten the distance between us and them.
Early writing about fans—drawing from the word “fanatic”—mostly dismissed them as “obsessed individuals” or members of a “hysterical crowd” (think images of young women in the 1960s gripped by Beatlemania). This drew, in part, from late nineteenth and early twentieth century anxieties—based on large-scale immigration, rapid urbanization, and the explosion of popular entertainments—as working-class people, having enjoyed a degree of improvement in economic, living, and labor conditions, sought opportunities to savor the newly created weekend. As new pastimes emerged and people flocked to the boardwalks, amusement parks, and movie houses, so, too, did concerns surface about the emergence of irrational and impressionable “masses.”
In the 1940s, communication scholars working in the Marxist, Frankfurt school tradition, Adorno and Horkheimer, mentioned earlier, were deeply skeptical of the impact of new media—from recorded sound to film and radio programs to magazines—on fans’ abilities to see the world, especially power relations and inequality, clearly and critically. They lamented mass culture’s standardization and dilution of culture and argued that passive consumption of such content served as a form of ideological manipulation. Scholars such as Paul Lazarsfeld, influenced by socialism but not a Marxist, also took a paternalistic attitude toward the audience, worrying whether or not radio listeners were tuning in to “serious” broadcasts—folks of lower economic and educational achievement, it turned out, were not. Even as radio researcher Herta Herzog’s study of nonelite, female radio listeners pioneered the gratifications approach—a method that emphasizes a desire to understand the rationale and meaning-making process of audiences—Herzog nevertheless argued, from a Freudian psychoanalytic position, that the uneducated listeners were primarily motivated by a compensatory desire to fulfill their own personal lack; that is to say, a sense of resentment toward those who were more educated than themselves.
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