Celebrity Society

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of launching Robert van Krieken’s Celebrity Society, at Sydney's great bookshop, Gleebooks.  It’s a terrific piece of sociology, throwing light on important issues, covering an amazing amount of ground, clearly and crisply written.

Van Krieken argues that it isn’t enough to contrast shallow celebrity with real achievement, and groan about Paris Hilton.  There’s much more going on here.  There is a pattern of politics and business, a pedagogical process in which selves are shaped, and a kind of economic system based on a struggle for the scarce commodity, attention.  (In academic life too.)  That’s why van Krieken speaks of “celebrity society” rather than just “celebrity culture”.

These patterns aren't entirely new.  In fact, van Krieken traces many features back to the hot-house “court society” of the ancien regime in Europe – top celebrity, Louis XIV of France, the Sun King.  Court society also had a cut-throat struggle for status and an obsession with image; courtiers had to work hard at self-presentation.  Modern celebrity society is, in a sense, court society democratised and industrialized.  Working-class people too can get famous (witness Elvis Presley) and images and information are spread on a mass scale through newspapers, photographs, radio, TV and the Net.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is the chapter on business and management.  The rise of celebrity managers in the grey shark-pool of big business is fascinating, and it’s connected with the staggering growth of top managers’ “packages” – we can’t call them salaries any more, they have got into the tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars.  There’s a compelling argument that this is linked to the growth of institutional ownership of company shares, to the nature of media reporting about business, and perhaps also to the legitimacy problems of modern capitalism.

But Celebrity Society also has an interesting analysis of celebrity as seen from below – about the investment made by fans and followers.  If there is an economy of attention, there has to be an audience by whom the attention is given.  One of the great puzzles about celebrity is what do the audiences get out of it? I won’t give the plot away, but as a teaser I’ll mention that a key piece of evidence is provided by one fan of a mercifully forgotten band, the Bay City Rollers.

I’m hoping for Celebrity Society II, revealing dramatic evidence from fans of an even worse band, the Monkees.

[Celebrity Society, London and New York, Routledge, 2012.  Robert van Krieken is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sydney.]

sociology

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Mourning and activism

I have recently been at a sociological congress in Buenos Aires, and on my last morning in the city, a Sunday, I walked to the Plaza de Mayo.  The name of the square celebrates the start of the independence struggle against the Spanish empire.  The cathedral there – its facade looks like a Roman temple – has the tomb of the Liberator, San Martin.  At the opposite end of the Avenida de Mayo, which leads out of the square, is the imposing building of the national Congress.  The place is a powerful symbolic site for the Argentine republic.

Picture taken 2009 by Paula

That’s doubtless why it was chosen for the extraordinary action by the women known as the Madres de Plaza de Mayo – the Mothers of May Square.  In sight of a cathedral full of images of the Mother of God, the Madres broke the silence imposed by Argentina’s military dictatorship about the arrest, torture, and murder of thousands of left-wing activists in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  Even the generals found it hard to deny a mother’s right to ask what had happened to her child. 

I guess many of the women at the first gatherings must already have known.  If so, what they were doing was a first stage of public mourning, as well as criticism of the dictatorship.  The death of that generation of young intellectuals is still felt in Argentina’s universities and public life.  After the dictatorship ended, the Madres continued a long campaign to document the ‘disappearances’ case by case.

I mourn them too, and not just abstractly.  They were part of my generation of intellectuals, the new left of the sixties and seventies.  Though an ocean and a continent away, I understand something of what the Argentine comrades were about, something of the energies and hopes that went under in many parts of the world, in that decade of repressions from the Prague Spring to the Argentine darkness.

I’ve been wondering if there is a more general interplay between mourning and activism.  Some forms of activism, at least, are deeply coloured by loss.  AIDS activism, indigenous land rights activism, and campaigns about femicide, all deal with irrecoverable loss.  Activism in such circumstances involves public mourning as well as social change.

The campaigns against nuclear weapons, which now seem to have faded, surely involved an anticipatory mourning for the end of human life.  And in the environmental movement there is mourning for the habitats, species and experiences already gone, as well as for the losses to come.

I don’t think this is a bad thing.  A politics that has no space for mourning would be unbearably cheerful, and we have enough of that in the self-help section of airport bookshops.  Politics is about constructing social futures, for good or evil.  I think a transformative politics has to respond to the full range of social experience, not just a narrow band.  There are versions of progressive politics that leach out the emotion: a mechanical marxism is one, an obsession with measurable outcomes is another.

The difficult side is that a transformative politics has to grapple with the destructive as well as constructive possibilities in human life.  Politics has to do this at a collective level, as intimate relations, and therapy, do at a personal level.  That means engaging with the emotions that destruction produces.  There’s a book by W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, which I’ve thought about a lot; it reflects on the mass bombing of World War II Germany, and pulls no punches about the effects.  Well worth a read; not for the faint-hearted.

The Plaza de Mayo, it turned out, was not a good place to explore these thoughts, even on a Sunday morning.  It’s now a tourist hub, with buses of sightseers, a souvenir market, a museum.  There is a political demonstration there, but it’s not about the disappeared.  It’s a camp set up by veterans of the Malvinas war, with belligerent banners against the English, and declarations of patriotism.  “Patria o muerte”, one of the slogans said, Fatherland or Death.  Thirty-five years ago, Argentina got both.

Argentina, intellectuals, Political writing

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Antonio Negri as a social theorist

Connell, Raewyn. (2012), 'The poet of Autonomy: Antonio Negri as a social theorist', Sociologica, 6(1): 1-23.

Antonio Negri was perhaps the most brilliant theorist produced by the European  and  North  American  New  Left  in  the  1960s  and  1970s.  He  is  now,  on  the strength of books published since he turned sixty, internationally famous, and one of the most influential analysts of global power. His joint book Empire stirred huge debate, being fiercely attacked by orthodox Marxists and neo-conservatives, while enthusiastically embraced in the anti-globalization movement.

In this paper I explore the aspect of Negri’s work that has been underplayed in  the  controversies,  yet  is  arguably  the  most  important  key  to  its  political  value: the social theory it contains. I try to specify the main ideas Negri offers about contemporary world society and its dynamics, explore the sources of those ideas, and offer an evaluation.

Appropriately, this paper began in a controversy. Several years after the publication of Empire, Negri was invited to give the keynote speech at a conference at the University of Sydney. Reviving charges from the 1970s, the right-wing Murdoch press – which controls most of Australia’s print media – called Negri an apologist for terrorism and attacked the University of Sydney for inviting him. The speech was cancelled, and a local controversy arose as to whether Negri had been censored, or was simply ill. To vindicate the invitation, I gave a public lecture about Negri’s work, in a series sponsored by the University. 

The lecture was published in the Australian literary journal Overland no. 181 in 2005; and a shorter version in Confronting Equality (Allen & Unwin and Polity Press). The new paper develops its ideas.

The article is available here, and on the Sociologica website.

Negri, Recent publications, sociology

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