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On Fame: What the Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity by Tom Payne (2010).
What’s the deal with our f’ed up relationship with celebrities? Payne says that celebrities serve a social need that’s equal parts religion and and aggression. TV’s Lucy Lawless (Xena, Spartacus, Battlestar Galactica) joins us to discuss the accuracy of this thesis, along with her obsession with philosophy (and our podcast), the relation between fandom and mental illness, the drive for fame, sacrificial heroes, celebrity encounters, fame for fame’s sake, infamy, celebrity philosophers, mentally ill philosophers, and what Nietzsche’s will to power has to do with all of this.
Read more about the topic and get the book.
End Song: “Celebrity” by New People, released on Might Get It Right (2013).
Other new thing I was introduced to because of Lucy Lawless.
I just love the way she is. She is so smart and beautiful.
I am glad I learned about this. I will be tuning in again.
So agree!!!!!!♥♥♥
something in the air-waves?
http://onpoint.wbur.org/2012/10/05/the-strange-power-of-celebrity
I’m bailing out at a little over an hour, the gravitational powers of texts is obviously is no match for the star-powers of celebrity personality. Does anyone know if philosophers other than Kierkegaard and Heidegger take on the issue of gossip?
Thank you for having Lucy on the podcast. Very interesting discussion. It proves that she is more than just a pretty Hollywood face. Lucy is a very articulate person too.
Gossip? Yes! Simon Critchley’s “The Book of Dead Philosophers.” He distills a variety of tragic and comedic events in the lives of the ‘Great Philosophers.’ A splendid book.
By the way, Lucy Lawless is magnificent!
does he discuss gossip as a subject or just dish some up?
I own the book and I say it is mostly comprised of dishing it out. The book’s primary aim is to be a catalog of the ways in which many philosophers died. Of course, for many of them (particularly those in Ancient Greece), there’s not a whole lot to go on so it’s just rumors and legends.
Additionally, it serves as a short biography for many of them. It goes into more detail with pretty much all the “celebrities” of the history of philosophy.
A book in a similar vein is Great Philosophers who Failed at Love by Andrew Shaffer. That book chronicles the misfortunes and failings in love across many philosophers.
It sounds as though you own a different book..
Philosophers Behaving Badly by Nigel Rodgers and Mel Thompson is also quite an entertaining piece of toilet reading on philosophers. I wonder what Zizek think about toilet reading?
I’ve listened to the whole episode and I want more. I pray to the flying spaghetti monster that we’ll see a true expression of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and Lucy will be present in future episodes. This was very entertaining, thank you.
Long time listener, first time caller…
Horrible… Why is Lucy Lawless on this show again? I liked her on Larry David, but this is supposed to be a podcast apart from Hollywood, no? There is so much serious ground to cover and you go this way, the first thing you do, going 100,000,0 (congratulations by the way) listeners? What about George Santayana, Karl Marx, G. Jung, Martha Nussbaum, the pre-socratics, the early Freud? This show was the first one I had to terminate before half-time. Since you broke good ground into literature, why not do a show on some homegrown talents like David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon or Melville; a show on Moby Dick would be nice! Do a show on Emerson or the UNA bomber, not Brad Pitt and Jolie, please!
There, I hated on you! Now I’ll give you a buck, you American sophists! Thank you for an otherwise great show!
Barring any scheduling changes, the next three will be back to the old format (Federalist Papers, Quine, Carnap), then a philosophy guest (Chalmers). Lots of stuff you’ll like planned for 2013 too…
Personally, I like it when there’s a guest who’s relevant to the topic, such as Lucy Lawless for celebrity and Jennifer Dziura for humor. I’d say Dylan for scientific topics but he’s a regular now. It gives a different view on something from somebody who may be especially close to the topic.
Would you guys have come to some of the ideas without Lucy’s perspective thrown into the mix? The one that immediately comes to mind is the notion that the audience is a kind of beast you have to feed with Twitter updates and the like, and fulfilling their expectations of you by not changing what it was they loved about you. Or when she discussed how the comment about her hands started to become a self-fulfilling prophecy when she read it.
They’re all interesting insights that I believe might not have been present without her.
It seems to me that ‘fame’ might have something to do with our instinctive animal attraction to natural ‘alpha’ individuals. ‘Alphas’ are usually both sought after for protection and nurture by the lesser individuals, as well as constantly challenged by the level right below them. The greater the celebrity success – the more ‘alpha’ they appear, many a time manufactured by publicity and public interface. The larger the fan base – the greater the likelyhood that not everybody will be impressed in the same fashion.
I think a lot of the fan discontent stems from a feeling that they offered support to a talented person, only to have them, in turn, become someone who attempts to exert some kind of power over them. Not everybody desires to give power away, only admiration for one’s talent. Respect is something each individual celebrity needs to earn on his/her own, a fact many seem naive about.
As much as I dislike paparazzi, I have a feeling that they, being the ones who literally come face to face with them, are the first ones to sense the nuances of what ‘celebrities’ are all about, and probably specifically target them because of it, be it with real or imagined stories.
The alpha idea goes far in explaining famous individuals we love to love, but I don’t think it’s broad enough to cover the individuals we love to hate.
Personally, I never understood the ‘love to hate’ phenomenon, so I’ll venture a guess that it’s culturally based. It offers all of us something to connect over on a superficial level without sharing too much of ourselves.
It’s much easier to manufacture some form of ‘dislike’ for someone/thing/group than ‘like’. Probably based on some level of envy and/or fear. I’d say religion works on the same principle – a good part of what keeps the community cohesive is the fear and/or dislike of Satan/evil, as well as of other ‘bad’ religions.
Also, in the case of people we first liked then we began to hate, a quality of ‘alphas’ is that they are always challenged by ‘betas’ who think they might stand a chance. In essence, the media and the paparazzi act as that ‘beta’ level, and the rest of us just eat it up because we need something to talk about around the water cooler. We are the lesser forms who will follow the winner, whoever that is.
Yep, I think your last point is what I meant by the whole Will to Power thing. I don’t recall Payne actually describing it as “loving to hate,” but more of strictly an “I love you, now I hate you” deal. Payne certainly did think that the baseless fame of reality TV is covered by his thesis, but didn’t that I remember deal with ironic fandom (which is what the “love to hate” thing is); perhaps our overreflective culture, which is so self-hating regarding its own dealings with fame (self-disgusted? It’s not exactly “self,” because we all blame it on the rest of the dumbasses out there), we’ve developed some interesting inversions of the thesis. Worth exploring.
Gossip has always been an instant connector and equalizer among people who hardly know each other – bad about friends, but socially acceptable about strangers, and after all, celebrities are strangers to the average fan. It’s not so much that the fans hate them, I think, it’s just that they don’t really care about their feelings as ‘real’ people, mostly because they aren’t, in terms of everyday life.
The more supposed knowledge fans have, the more they can impress in a conversation. The more restricted the information they’re not supposed to have, the more powerful they feel, cause knowledge is power. The more basal the topic is, like Honey BB for ex, the more people can ‘get it’, and the easier it is to talk about it. Not many people could even understand intellectual gossip about a respected philosopher, unless s/he did something basal, like getting out of a car with no underwear on, or molesting children or something.
Quite right! I didn’t explore it. Definitely worth exploring!
I was thinking more along the lines of people who seem to start off as infamous and never really get a positive view held by the public. Scott Peterson and Casey Anthony immediately spring to mind. But I think there are other more traditionally famous people who have never really held general favor, such as Paris Hilton.
At least in the cases of Peterson and Anthony, I think I can agree with Mark (at least I think he’s the one that said it) that that’s about a sort of social abhorrence. I’m not so sure in the case of Hilton. In all cases I think your idea that it’s a form of connection works.
I think a lot of the feelings towards the ‘infamous’ are directed towards what they represent, more than to them as a person. They offer us an outlet for various preexisting feelings, which the media capitalizes on.
I’m sure that in her personal circle Paris Hilton is viewed highly for being a rich heiress, but to the rest of the world she represents a social segment which puts a lot of people off. We don’t just ‘love to hate’ her, but everybody similar to her. Same with the likes of Honey bb, or any guest on the Springer show, they make us feel superiour.
Same can be said about criminals – first off, we love a mystery, as indicated by the large # of crime shows we watch. Second, while murder or abuse are generally upsetting things, each one of us will have a slightly different feeling and interest in each case, based on our own experiences. Watching them burn could be very therapeutic. imo
Surprised Hegel never got brought up. Struggle for recognition and all that. Have those of us slavishly buying the tabloids achieved self-consciousness while our celebrity masters have yet to gain true freedom? Or, now that we live in an “attention economy,” where our clicks translate to ad dollars and so the very act of gawking might be construed as “work,” is it time for the gossip-etariat to rise up and demand a world where everyone is famous for like, fifteen minutes, or whatever?
As for Zizek not being “famous to the famous”… with one exception!
Oh, and re: memes, Honey Boo Boo and philosophy, see here: http://www.iheartchaos.com/post/31505894344/honey-boo-boo-does-nietzsche
Well, what’s weird about this is that (as with Kierkegaards attempting to get the Hegelian self out of “interactions” with God) any attempt to gain self-consciousness out of a celebrity is going to be f’ed up, along complimentary lines to what I was sketching out via Sartre: http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2012/10/08/the-existential-weirdness-of-fandom/. You’re right, bringing in Hegel would definitely help here, though I feel like I’ve brought that up in so many episodes that it was due for a break. 🙂
…Maybe if we get Adam Arnold on with us to talk about Mead: http://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2012/08/31/name-dropping-an-apologetic-mead-and-the-intersubjective-self/
Greetings! A good show indeed. Started while trying to fall asleep, finished when I woke up. I was listening close for someone to refer to some of the research on terror management theory (TMT) and its central mortality salience hypothesis. I know this is a philosophy podcast, but I thought that the insights from TMT research are indispensable to the topic of fame. In particular, Ernest Becker (influenced by Freud) posited that it is our innate fear of death, the subsequent drive for immortality, then striving for various paths that lead in the direction of immortality that drive our predilection for a mortality-proof world view i.e. one way toward immortality is to associate ourselves with the larger-than-life, etc. Experiments have shown that fame becomes more attractive to participants who experience death/mortality-prime conditions. Search: Greenberg, TMT, mortality salience, fame. Thanks for the show!
I love Becker and his work, wouldn’t mind an episode on his work if they could find an appropriate guest.
On the other hand, Becker is not quite philosophy, in my opinion. But he could definitely be drawn on for an episode on death.
Becker was a philosopher, just more on the pop end of the spectrum, might be more useful in lines of thought hereabouts relating to folks who take bits of philosophy and run with it in ways that have mass appeal (in relative terms) than in thinking thru our relationships to dying and or denial.
I never thought of him as on the pop end of it, either. Technically, he was an anthropologist, but his work is so interdisciplinary that I don’t know what I would consider him. I still think he’s valuable and worth reading, just not sure exactly what his work is.
Interesting. I know I’ve been contemplating (for next summer at this rate) Bataille on sex and death… I’ll try to remember to look into Becker at the time. Thanks for the input.
There was a documentary on Becker’s work released a few years ago. I never got round to it, so am unsure of quality, but might be a quick way to review Becker’s flight-from-death thesis:
http://youtu.be/62RwQKszNA0
If you’d like, can try to thumb through all the stuff of his and see if I know of any particularly relevant chapters. Or perhaps scan what I have and send it your way. Of Becker’s work I have The Birth and Death of Meaning: An interdisciplinary perspective on the problem of man, The Denial of Death, and Escape From Evil.
Somewhat related to this episode’s discussion, there is quite a bit of Becker’s work that talks about heroes and the idealization thereof. But it’s specifically on “cultural heroes.” I think Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer talks about heroes as in leaders.
Becker came to my mind several times during this podcast, mainly because it seemed you guys were dancing around the subject of heroism, which is the theme of his book The Denial of Death. It won the Pulitzer, which makes it a little bit more than a mere pop psychology text. His survey of the history of psychology starting with Kierkegaard as the first modern pre-psychologist ties into so much of 20th century thought via existentialism. Since celebrities are portraying heroic acts or acts that are failed heroics, we identify them with their characters. From what I understand of Lawless’ character Xena was that she was a reformed tyrant set to use her power for good after some kind of trans-formative experience. It would be interesting as she becomes more familiar with philosophical tools how she would interpret her own show.
Even more relevant is Becker’s concept of the Universal Immortality Ideology i.e. Money, which was invented about the same time as organized religion. It seems this is tied to celebrity, both our worship of them, contempt for them, and our interest in the tiniest details of their lives.
I enjoyed Lawless although I don’t know her work very well. Seemed like a regular grounded person who has decided to expand her sophistication by studying something other than her chosen profession. It’s heroic in the sense she doesn’t have to “do” anything having made enough money to last her for the rest of her life. That’s the double bind of money as a form of immortality ideology. Why attempt anything heroic when all your economic needs are taken care of. I submit the fascination with zombies is somehow related to this. Also the fear of socialism. Once ones money problems are over, what then. Eat brains, take drugs, buy things.
As for Seth Paskin as a celebrity, I am going to be recording an album in Elgin, TX soon and will try to track him down and ask him for his autograph. I really enjoy his contribution as well as the rest of the group. The interesting thing about this podcast’s growing celebrity is that it is a textual record that can be studied later by digital archeologists and not really like anything else out there.
why does an award for “General Non-Fiction” signal something other than pop-psychology?
http://www.newappsblog.com/2012/10/how-political-commitment-led-lucy-lawless-aka-xena-the-warrior-princess-to-study-philosophy.html
First, thanks for the great podcast/blog.
Okay, now for all the mean criticisms (not really). This was kind of a rambling conversation that didn’t seem to go anywhere…. more than usual, I mean. 😉 It was a little hard to follow.
You never really dealt with the meat and potatoes of what fame per se is, but more of the way people tend to respond to whether or not famous people meet “our” (usually high) expectations. But they have to be known first –perhaps not for anything in particular or anything “significant,” but at least widely known or it isn’t “fame” — and I think that by itself needs a closer to look to understand what fame does in a society. Grasping for all these other theories, or relying so much on opinions, just seems gratuitous if we haven’t gotten that sorted out. Not to mention that this stuff about “human sacrifice” and so on just seems kind of bizarre to me, at least how much it dominated the discussion if it isn’t missing the point.
People judge each other (often unfairly) whether they’re famous or not. The thing famous people have which distinguishes them from non-famous people is simply recognition. People can therefore make a meaningful reference to something others could probably understand. That’s a very practical (and obvious) reason why famous people get such scrutiny: talking about them is a useful, easy, shorthand way of talking about stuff people care about. I admit you sort of touched on this line of thought at various points, but it seems like it got buried in a lot of banter and weird speculation, not so much approached in depth as a philosophical or sociological issue.
(I would also say many people crave that sort of social recognition and relevance, which is understandable and often beneficial given how social we are as a species; but communication in modern society tends to exaggerate the effects of it.)
If I say something to you (given that we’re strangers) about my grandmother — or a friend or colleague or acquaintance, or whoever else you’re not familiar with — you’re not really going to know what I’m talking about, nor will you have any reason to care about her. You’re going to have a pretty cloudy mental picture unless I share lots and lots and lots of information, which would often be jointly known (or assumed) for famous people. Whatever it is, it’s probably not going to seem relevant because you probably won’t recognize information about her as public knowledge. For most people, she’s automatically going to be considered an anecdote, and my relationship with her will be put into question, whatever point I might have been making (valid or not) going out the window or getting derailed for a long time. So you may not believe me, or you may believe me even though you shouldn’t. You don’t know much about my grandmother other than what I tell you, and while you probably have a stereotypical grandmother in mind that may even be fairly accurate and agreed upon between the two of us, there’s not much there to work with. You can’t expect to talk about her with me in the same way you can talk about another sort of third party (like a famous person), who has the same sort of relationship (epistemically, personally, etc.) to each of us.
The point is that I don’t need to have a strong positive or negative opinion about a famous person for them to be salient. I think that does the most of the work here: they’re simply a more salient phenomenon to more people, good or bad, warts and all, which is what you need for people to start judging them, treating them like abstractions, stalking them, idolizing them, or doing any of the other silly things people do to one another. I don’t think that sort of interaction needs to be explained for the famous as if they were a special case, because they’re not, as far as I can tell. They and the way they’re treated is just (often) an exaggerated case, but it’s more of the same.
I don’t need to like them, hate them or anything else. People just can’t avoid thinking or talking about them for very long while having being part of our society: we know they’re part of reality, like it or not, so we think (like everything else in reality) they have to be dealt with in some way or another. I don’t want to think about “Honey Boo Boo.” In fact, I’d rather basically no one did, given the circumstances, so she has the slightest chance for a less-than-disastrous life. There’s just no way for me to ignore that she’s out there in the world doing whatever she does, as opposed to the way I can ignore most of the personal/professional lives of the billions of other people on the planet.
In this sense at least, famous people are treated more often as “real” or “objective” than others because we share them (as if they are public property!) and take more of what they do and what happens to them seriously (sometimes too seriously). On the other hand, in another sense, they’re treated as less “real” and more of an abstraction than a non-famous person, because people tend to do that too when some aspect of the person seems most salient. The famous person is idolized or dehumanized (depending on how their perceived characteristics are valued) as representing the thing they’re (primarily) known for. You not only get actors who are typecast, but a lot of people assume that they’re like the characters they play (presumably a lot of people either don’t understand acting or they think actors tend to be terrible at their jobs, or both).
I’m not saying it should be that way, but I think that explains most of it, without any of these other (pretty wild) ideas involving us wanting to fatten them up for the sacrifice, punishing them, demonizing them or whatever. That’s because we tend to do that sort of thing to everyone, not just the famous. We’re just biased to remember it when we hear that sort of thing (whatever it is) when it happens to famous people.
Thanks for weighing in, MT. We certainly use the text to shape the discussion, and in this case, Payne wasn’t asking “what is fame?” in the abstract but about its cultural significance and the psychologies of all involved, which I think we did take on, starting of course with his view and trying to come up with counter-examples to show that it didn’t really capture the phenomena.
Loved this episode. Nice change of pace and it was just interesting and fun. One of the better guests you’ve had on. Time to stop all the frivolity now though and get back into some deep metaphysical musings.
Thank you for lightening my commute today! I haven’t read the text — and I probably won’t — I found the idea that celebrities are made to be raised up and then crushed as a syphon for our aggressive natures to be inadequate. It seems to me that the level of fame we’re talking about — the exalted level beyond folks being recognized for their achievement — is a sort of enervated, pale version of mythic stories. Outsized, overwrought, absurd morality stories — apparent vices are shamed, virtues are lauded, treasure is sought, and drama the true measure of a story’s value. On the podcast, you did mention celebrity having a religious dimension. Think of Princess Di’s wedding. Think of her final ride through the tunnel in Paris. These are mythic stories. Honey Boo Boo would be at home in any Greek myth. The fact that they are tawdry is a reflection on the state of civilization. Was it Joseph Campbell (who could probably be sourced for everything I just said) … was he the one who pointed out that first we told stories about Gods, then about heroes, then about Kings, then about the nobility, then about the middle class, then about the impoverished?
Thanks for doing what you do, guys.
From your discussion it sounds as though Payne was rehashing the hypothesis of “Mimetic Desire”, without once referring to Rene Girard – which is odd, since it is Girard’s hypothesis. He even followed Girard’s approach of using novels and ancient stories.
It would take a lot to discuss Mimetic Desire, but Girard uses to discuss things like blood sacrifice, atonement and also scapegoating. He explores the context in which blood sacrifice, include human sacrifice, occurred and also scapegoating (from the Tanakh).
According to Girard, an important sociological aspect of this is to control the cycle violence due to retributive punishment, including feuds and revenge killings and punishments. Thus, it becomes sacrilised and therefore above society.
There are also many other aspects, and I could not do justice to Girard in a comment. You might want to read the entry on him in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (René Girard ) for a fuller discussion.
Girard discusses many of the aspects you alluded to, for example, the “honour” of becoming the human sacrifice, our complicity in the sacrifice &c. And that was an interesting discussion.
What is interesting in your discussion is that in post-sacral societies celebrity has become much more important, and it seems fills some of the function of Mimetic Desire. That would certainly make a fascinating discussion.
Girard live the USA – I think that he would make a fascinating guest.
I couldn’t help but think during the “What is the most famous philosopher?” segment of the podcast, that a couple of interesting thoughts were completely missed. Some Philosophers simply are really important and quite famous as historical figures in their own right, but I think this is only to the extent they function as political or economic thinkers. Ayn Rand was thrown out as the most famous philosopher ever (before it was declared that the discussion was focused on living philosophers) but this is obviously not true: The most famous philosopher of all time is Karl Marx. And while maybe Marx has become mostly a historical figure, as opposed to a current cultural figure, I cannot imagine that for most of the twentieth century he was not one of the 10 most globally well-known people in the history of the world.
It is an interesting observation though that no “real” philosopher right now, with the possible exception of Zizek, are particularly famous. But what makes Zizek famous? Wouldn’t you say it is his politics much more than anything else? The only philosopher of the last two hundred years who strikes me as famous for anything other than a directly political theory is Nietzsche.
Confucius isn’t a Philosopher or famous? Or Socrates?
And famous where? Bernard-Henri Levy is rather well known in France and the US. When he was alive Jacques Derrida was the most famous “intellectual”…
Wes, i was waiting for your anecdote regarding your encounter with R. Rorty and being awestruck. Or at least your despair at his lack of interest in communication.
I think the episode was painful at times but there were enough redeeming (laugh out loud in fact) moments. Particularly the Wes comment about any stalkers being on the fence/ with a sort of implicit hope of having stalkers that would it seems corroborate fame attainment. .
I was hoping you would touch on specifically individuals vain or unconscience pursuit of fame with the whole “Facebook” phenomena. I guess since the podcast participates in it, than you dont acknowledge it.
………..facebook and desire for fame/acceptance continued
As a means of putting out an appearance of a self, while hiding behind a screen. The appearance reflects what an individual wants to convince ‘friends’ and others approving. It is a secret hope and attempt at fame and also an ongoing public diary of what the individual hopes the external world will approve and admire. An infintile search for acceptance. How many responses/likes did I get today?
The difference of course is that a real human interaction requires others to confront and contest our inner being and the strength of our personality.
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/gilgamesh-to-gaga.php
Hello everyone. I only recently started listening to your podcasts (at episode 11 now), and I’d like to thank all of you for allowing me to once again experience the joys of participating (in an indirect, voyeuristic manner) in the sort of intelligent (yet stumbling), focused (yet meandering), objective (yet passionate) discussion I have chiefly associated with the philosophy classroom. To Seth in particular, you have my deepest admiration for having wrested yourself free from the nefarious clutches of Heideggerean dwelling on “being”, and attained what seems to be a healthy, productive, meaningful life. I wish to one day emulate this achievement, and this very disposition is a central topic of this post.
At one point in this podcast Kristen Stewart’s affair is brought up and Lucy states that people should regard this event as a woman committing an adult mistake and going through the process of growth that every human being is subject to. I understand Lucy’s (if I read that right) hostility to the sort of non-reflective, self-righteous, judgmental criticism that people are given to. The sentiment here it seems, is that Kristen is being held to unfair standards, and the punishment of having your personal failings / misadventures displayed in public is disproportionately harsh.
My initial reaction revolved around all the impressionable teenage girls out there who, influenced by Kristen’s (media represented) decisions, are going to be further entrenched in a world view which leads to the sorts of problems associated with careless intercourse. I am of course very aware that there are incredible leaps in logic required before it can be argued that Kristen is to blame for any of her fans who end up having to deal with an abortion, single parenthood, etc. At the same time, I am unable to look away from the fact that somewhere out there a young, impressionable girl is about to make a rather risky decision with serious consequences because she reveres Kristen as someone worthy of emulation.
There were two upshots this preoccupation led me to consider. The first of these relates to the fixation we have on celebrities. In the spirit of phenomenological self analysis I asked myself why I was so inclined to regard Seth as worthy of admiration. I had clearly created a narrative in my head of the rough course of his life given snippets that were revealed throughout the course of the podcasts. (What was surprising to me is what little information was required in order for me to create this narrative – He studied Heidegger. He gave up on academia. He eventually became happy and is leading a fulfilling life helping others while carving out a respectable career. I think it only fair to acknowledge the enormous disjunction between this deified Seth and the real Seth, and to refer to deified Seth as {Seth}.) This initial inclination (of Seth deification) strongly figures in my present process of self-discovery and finding motivation to correct the wayward course of my life. appeals to me through recognizable traits that I identify with {Seth}, and through Humean induction I come to the supposition (irrationally and non-reflectively) that the chain of cause and event that led him to where he is could apply to me. Ideally, the attempt to emulate {Seth} is what spurs me into action in the face of uncertainty. If it is true that the primary mode of (practical?) learning in such situations is mimicry (this sounds almost trivially true), then I think we can get a better handle on the phenomena of celebrity worship and it’s leviathan like stature in social consciousness (apart from merely accessibility by virtue of celebrities being public domain). Our primary mode of navigation as it were, is to follow the stars (Cringe! Now!), and not in utilizing a logically imposed superstructure of longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates (Writhe! In pain!). In concert with Aristotelian learning by doing, it is this attempt to mimic {Seth} (and other analogous entities) and not contemplation that propels me towards making a particular decision in unfamiliar situations. I want to say that far from being a bad thing, it might be the only recourse we have to deal with this problem.
The second upshot focused more on the perspective of the celebrity, and primarily raises a question. I toyed with the notion that all celebrities ought to have a proviso on all contracts stating that part of what their being paid all those millions for, is the role of deified entity to be emulated. (I am working on the assumption outlined earlier, that all of us base our decisions in situations of uncertainty on the model provided by figures we adopt as exemplars.) I suppose Lucy (I am still fighting the impulse to refer to her as Ms. Lawless) would be able to speak to the matter of how celebrities are ‘thrown’ into this situation of bearing such a weighty responsibility (I use this term only in the sense that she has to deal with a multitude of individuals reacting directly to media representations of her – a fact that she and so many others in such circumstances have quite wisely chosen to ignore) without an inkling of the scope and nature of it, let alone a say in the matter. I recognize how facile any solution of the sort proposed would be. I think however, the celebrity experience of this crystallizes the problem of authenticity in the face of our ‘facticity’. If Kristen were made to confront her status as paragon of teenage-girl-aspirations, what would allow her to cope with the fact that she can’t live like other people (hold herself to standards of conduct more amenable to carefree recklessness, experimentation and self-indulgence.)? Google informs that she just purchased a 2.2 million dollar abode to be ‘closer to her boyfriend who is recovering from her betrayal’ and I am suddenly sympathetic to Peter Singer’s position, much as I am loathe to admit this. If I am to be authentic about my indignation to such activities, I would have to admit it stems from my own insecurity and that the optimal solution is to ensure Kristen gets more money so that, as Wes eloquently reasoned, she can get her mansion and at the same time spare a couple of grand on charitable causes. Wait…….
TL;DR – Seth, you are my hero and exemplar of how I might possibly achieve happiness. Don’t you dare let me down or I will fling myself into a spiral of self-destruction and wanton excess. You have a new acolyte in your cult (Although can we negotiate the content of what will constitute the holy corpus of texts? I have reservations about Wittgenstein, and the golf book. More so on Wittgenstein).
I second Bear Mathun’s comment above, that it is strange there was no mention of the French-American scholar Rene Girard whose fame as a theorist rests on his major discovery of mimetic desire. He stumbled on this discovery in his researches in comparative literature, and his theory has incredible explanatory power, on a par with Freud and Marx, for the behaviour of groups and societies, especially with reference to scapegoating, violence, sacrifice etc. His major thesis is that the scapegoat takes on the ambivalent role of both revered sacred figure and flawed, so necessary, sacrificial victim. In Ancient Greek, the word for scapegoat is pharmakon, which also means medicine, healing, so the victim plays the role of bringing the inherent violence of social groups into some kind focus, diffusing it and recreating order (there is more to it, based on the fundamental mimetic character of desire which makes us follow exemplars, but also tends to violent competition and destabilisation). The Nietzcshean idea of ressentiment is not enought to explain this, nor is Hegel’s theory of recognition or the master slave dialectic. Freud comes close to this idea in his Totem and Taboo but misses the non-psychological import of it, its deep social dimension, since for him, the sacrifice is sublimated in the psyche and the drive, and does not persist in the actual violence of the world and in religious rites. The most important and foundational of Rene Girards’s texts is Violence and the Sacred written in the late 1960s at the end of the wave of structuralism and Levi-Strauss-style anthropology. But his interpretation of myth is a literary and comparative, not a structural one.
Nice, thanks for the concise explanation.
A very interesting discussion. It’s nice once in a while to hear you all discuss an issue which is not so abstract and is more tangible. Lucy was brilliant on it.
a little bit of a lighthearted episode this one was. I agree with Wes that maybe the book was partially to fault. Loved having Lucy on your show and although she dismisses her fame as Xena as being passé I still get starstruck by her. When she popped up in Curb your enthousiasm or in Burn notice for instance I was always delighted by her presence.
Naughty I know, but I did enjoy Lucy giving Wes some stick.
I would have liked to hear more about being famous for something vs being famous for the sake of being famous.
PAIN-FUL! I don’t know who Lucy is, and she seems lovely, but I don’t think I can finish this episode. There are 39 minutes left. You guys are totally famous to me though and I’ve had the unfortunate fan issue of feeling like I know you and yet….I don’t! This episode convinced me of that! Oy. On a positive note, Tony D. is the first name drop I wasn’t pissed about. I’m sharing how awful this one was so you know I don’t just like everything you do. Painful.
Yeah, that’s OK. We tried something… You can see what you think of the Karl Jaspers one, which was our next celebrity guest; that worked better, I think. It was fun for us.
I have a thousand questions I want to ask a thoughtful celebrity about celebrity. They all bubbled to the surface listening to this. I would have loved so much to be able to pick Lucy’s brain.
I feel like there’s a major biological aspect to celebrity that could fill an episode all by itself: supernormal stimuli.
The episode touched on this when Lucy brought up the fact that her screen presence is really the product of a collaboration that she’s only one part of. Hair people, makeup people, lighting people, and the editor who only shows us the best takes. So the parts of our brains that respond to charisma are being overloaded by this impossibly charismatic primate we see on screen.
There’s the beauty side of things. As Ted Chiang put it, Hollywood beauty is “pharmaceutical-grade” beauty. There’s a process of distillation and concentration going on between when a celebrity’s image is captured and when it’s seen by the public. The product of that process is designed (intentionally or not) to hijack all those circuits inside us that our ancestors used to figure out whose genes they wanted in their babies. Our brains perceive celebrities as having supernormal degrees of genetic fitness. The more we’re exposed to these images the more we become like the beetles who would rather mate with beer bottles.
And there’s the social side of things. In a small tribe some people have more social currency than others, and I guess we have an impulse to interact with those people in certain ways because there’s some survival advantage in doing so. A celebrity has impossible amounts of social currency. There’s the currency they get just from being impossibly charismatic. But there’s also the currency they get from being so recognized. We take cues from people around us when we evaluate someone’s social standing, which means the phenomenon of social standing is ripe for feedback loops. On a tribal scale maybe you never see the runaway effect. A person can only become popular, not famous. Our ape brains were never prepared for a world where billions can all become intimately familiar with a single individual. What does that do to that cue-taking circuit? Are celebrity-worship and obsession just a proportionate response to a social standing that has reached supernormal levels?
I know I caught this episode six years late. I hope Lucy got to do all the schooling she wanted to do since then and I hope you guys have been able to stay in touch.