2 :: THE REINVENTION OF PERSONS
Beyoncé, the day before Madonna. Celebrities are radically excessive in this respect:
in a world teeming with images and information, celebrities trade in sheer novelty as
a means of transcending the fame of others with whom they compete for public
renown. To a large extent, celebrity represents a central driving force behind the
cascade of our reinvention society.
The conduit of celebrity arises, in sociological terms, from massive institutional
changes throughout the West, involving a wholesale shift from industrial manufacture
to a post-industrial economy orientated to the finance, service, hi-tech and
communications sectors. As the economy becomes cultural as never before, ever
more dependent on media, image and public relations, so personal identity comes
under the spotlight and open to revision. The new economy, in which the globalization
of media looms large, celebrates both technological culture and the power of new
technologies to reshape the order of things. The current cultural obsession with the
remaking and transformation of the self is reflective of this, and arguably nowhere
more so than in the attention that popular culture lavishes upon celebrity. The
relentless media scrutiny of the private lives of celebrities – especially the shape,
size, exercise regimes, addictions, recoveries, cures, cosmetic enhancements and
surgical alterations of celebrity bodies – runs all the way from paparazzi and gossip
magazines to entertainment news and YouTube.
In any case, today’s celebrity-led recasting of reinvention is pitched on an altogether
different terrain to yesteryear’s notions of fame. The historian Leo Braudy, in his
pioneering study The Frenzy of Renown (1997), contends that the era of Hollywood and its
invention of glamorous film stars served to personalize fame, with public renown arising
as a result of such factors as personal uniqueness, artistic originality or individual
creativity. Fame, in a sense, was tied to genius. From Laurence Olivier’s dramatic talents
to Rudolf Nureyev’s ballet grace, from Groucho Marx’s comic mastermind to John
Lennon’s pop virtuosity: fame was primarily cast in the sense of value, art, innovation and
tradition. Yet such an understanding of public renown has, to a large extent, fallen on
hard times today. Thanks to technological advances and the spread of digital culture, the
terrain of public renown has migrated from Hollywood-inspired definitions of fame to
multi-media driven forms of celebrity. This has involved a very broad change from narrow,
elite definitions of public renown to more open, inclusive understandings. This is a shift,
in effect, from the Hollywood blockbuster to Reality TV, from lifelong stardom to 15
minutes of public renown, and from pop music to Pop Idol.
Reinvention comes into its own in this context. If fame was about the cultivation of
talent, artistry and originality, celebrity embraces instead the inauthentic,