“Now we’ll go shopping!” says Paris Hilton, heiress-celebrity of the moment, on her debut cd. Or maybe not. The artist-celebrity Banksy remixed and repackaged her cd, with the help of dj-celebrity Danger Mouse, and slipped a few copies into chain music stores.∗ It didn’t take long for them to turn up on auction websites, or for Paris’ record company to threaten legal action if they were not removed from auction. In the end it worked out pretty well for everybody. Publicity for Paris, for Banksy, for Danger Mouse. A moment’s amusement in the news. A chance for lawyers to do what lawyers do best. And, almost as an afterthought, all of the above have produced the perfect object of desire for jaded consumers who have heard of the Situationists.
“Every cd you buy puts me ever further out of reach” says Paris, or rather Paris ventrilquised by Banksy. “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. The function of these celebrities is to act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner. George adopts causes Angelina adopts babies from exotic realms of poverty. Celebrities embody the inaccessible results of social labor by dramatizing the by-products of that labor which are magically projected above it as its ultimate goals: power and vacations — the decision-making and consumption that are at the beginning and the end of a process that is never questioned.” (SoS60)
The celebrity is the opposite of an individual; he or she is an enemy of his own individuality as of the individuality of others. Stars are subsumed into a celebrity syntax entirely independent of their corporeal selves. Angelina exists to be the bad-girl version of Jennifer. Brad is the bad-boy version of Vince, who was, for a while, Jennifer’s loyal rebound-guy. The star enters the spectacle as a unit in a self-perpetuating narrative, in which each unit is functionally equivalent with, and exchangeable for, the next. The star renounces all autonomous qualities in order to identify himself with the general law of obedience to the succession of things. George and Brad vie for the title of sexist man in the world, but nothing comes of it. They are simply superceded by Matt. Or some other.
Much the same applies to the stars whose acts are decisions as to those whose decisions are acts. In politics, however, there is some change introduced with the coming of the disintegrated spectacle. Where once the stars who acted out decision-making possessed between them the full range of admired human qualities, now they possess the full range of human flaws. George is a drunkard, Bill a horndog, Hillary a prig. Official differences between them are thus canceled out. The admirable people who personify the system are well known for not being what they seem; they attain greatness by stooping below the reality of the most insignificant individual life.
In the spectacle, appearances really do have a form which animates them, and of which they are but representations. Appearances are everywhere and always representations of the commodity form. The problem with appearances in the spectacle is not that they are false, or that nothing stands behind them, but quite the contrary, it is that the commodity is everywhere and always their essential form. Actual commodities always have about them something sordid and shop-soiled. They pale in comparison to the images of them that populate the spectacle. Those images in turn are but pale copies of the pure form of the commodity. The name of that form was once logos, or the word. Its place is taken by logos, stylized signs of the brand, pure form of commodifed being.
The celebrity is the subjective counterpart of the commodity, and once again there is a hierarchy of being. On the bottom rung is the body of the celebrity itself, the mere existence of which is something of an embarrassment. Closer to perfection is the image of the celebrity, which is in turn a mere representation of the idea of the celebrity, the pure form of being within the spectacle. Or, the holy trinity: the body of Elvis, the image of Elvis, the idea of Elvis. 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.