Reconstruction Vol. 12, No. 1

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Afterword / Barry King

<1> The essays in this issue make an interesting contribution, from a variety of angles and through a variety of contexts, to the development of a spatial theory of stardom. Such a theory would address the mechanisms of transcendence from whatever location is marked as relevant and formative in the public career and imagery of a particular star or celebrity. At first sight, the space of stardom and celebrity is inextricably circumscribed by a dependence on the physical body of the star. But this body is of a special kind, raised to the level of a supranormal sign before it has the capacity to be noticed. So as the vogue for digitally exhumed stars serves to demonstrate, the most decisive feature of the star or celebrity body is the manner and mode of its location in the realm of the symbolic and the discursive. As David Harvey observed:

<2> “The study of the body has to be grounded in an understanding of real spatiotemporal relations between material practices, representations, imaginaries, institutions, social relations, and the prevailing structures of political-economic power.” (Harvey (1998) p 420)

<3> One of the virtues of the essays in this issue is to recognise this material complexity and work to delineate its various articulations or, as Deleuze might say, its folds.

<4> My own concern has been to explore the evolution of stardom - encompassing in its last phase, celebrity as absolute fame - as a commodification process and the development of a universal human referent. I see the “monetization” of identity as process, which has deep historical roots - as Richard Sennett and John Brewer, to mention just two examples, have demonstrated - in early modernity. I suppose it would be fair to say that I am more concerned with setting out the formal theory of the relationship between stardom and capitalism – a relationship that has been part of the heritage of stardom as a field of study as evidenced in the writings of Edgar Morin, The Frankfurt School and Richard Dyer.

<5> In distinction, the various essays here work to unpack the processes that in particular cases advance and impede the subsumption of stars and celebrities to the “poetics of marketability”. In so doing they offer qualifications and suggest amendments to my own work. This is entirely as it should be and will be useful in encouraging further discussion and research.

<6> If I have to make a general comment I would just wish to emphasize that the poetics of marketability is not about the complete expunging of cultural use values (what audiences want from stars and celebrities) but about the selective articulation and framing of such values in order to render them viable for exchange. As Rosa Luxemburg long ago argued, capitalism depends on external, pre-capitalist modes of production to sustain its unceasing search for surplus. But what was once in the age of Imperialism a horizontal global process of colonialism has now been extended by the internal colonisation of the interstices of the life sphere, into the depths of nature, including human nature. So it becomes necessary to recognise, as the quotation of David Harvey given above suggests, that the body itself has become increasingly the lynchpin and location of the accumulation process within the so-called “creative” industries. Stardom and celebrity today is both an example and a codifying mystification of this development.

<7> Speaking more generally, Locations of Stardom can be seen as part of an emerging paradigm in the study of fame and its vicissitudes, which is marked by a geographical or spatial “turn”. There are precursors to this approach – some relatively distant, for example Regis Debray’s, Teachers, Writers and Intellectuals and Bourdieu’s work on the field of cultural production. Some are closer to hand, for example the work of Elizabeth Currid-Halkett and Sandra Williams on the geography of “buzz” which focuses on mapping celebrity networks and by implication the processes by which the exercise of power creates and privatizes the assay points of fame and publicity, weighing the gold of presence. Again, in their own way, factually unreliable accounts of the work of publicists or “six degrees” mapping of celebrity liaisons testify to the power of a spatial imagination. Of no less importance (some would argue of more) is the examination of the processes that sustain and inflect the ceaseless search of fans for moments of authenticity, where so to speak, they strive to touch the inner “essence” of their idol. Evidently the tribulations of stars and celebrities (and the fans who seek to bond with them) are “first world” problems. But as the reach of Hollywood extends to encompass the globe and rival systems sustaining even more massive economic disparities such as Bollywood stardom have developed, the ratification of steep inequalities has become central to the contemporary aesthetics of stardom- an aesthetics of social relationships, prestige and privilege, which is premised, far more than it was in the past, on a geography of exclusion, a gulag of glamour.

<8> A key advantage of this collection is, therefore, is that it reminds us that there is not a location of stardom or celebrity, though clearly enough Hollywood in the days of the Studio System strove to route the field of fame and its denizens back to itself as a monotonic institutional referent. Rather there are locations of stardom, which vie in tournament space for pre-eminence. To evoke a present example, hardly anyone today could entertain the idea that the Oscar ceremony is primarily about moviemaking. Rather it is a spectacle that no longer cares to hide its own artifice; making no secret of obtrusive grandstanding on the Red Carpet, the spectacle of star and starlet rivalry that weighs the reputations of haute couture designers and the soundness of male stars’ choice of trophy partners and wives. But this is just one of the folds, the evanescent and fluid locations that create, cathect, distend and extend the space of stardom.

<9> The essays in this issue insightfully and productively engage with others. Barry King

Works Cited

E. Currid and S. Williams, The geography of buzz: art, culture and the social milieu in Los Angeles and New York, Journal of Economic Geography 10 (2010) pp. 423–451.

D. Harvey, The Body as an Accumulation strategy”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1998, Volume 16, 401-421.

R. Debray, Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France , trans David Macey, Verso, 1981.

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