Maybe Now We'll Start Taking Celebrity Seriously

“Donald J. Trump has snuck up on most of us, spending a lifetime building up his celebrity identity, refining Brand Trump, accumulating not just cash, but a huge pile of attention capital that he has cashed in at just the right time, when the discontents of globalisation reached fever pitch.”

“In looking for the historical origins of the Trump Republic, one could pick different starting points.”

“George Monbiot, for example, thinks we should start with 1975, the year that Margaret Thatcher became leader of the British Conservative Party and declared her intellectual allegiance to the neoliberal economist, Friedrich Hayek.”

“Another possibility, though, is 26 September 1960, the day of the first televised presidential debate between Kennedy and Nixon, and the beginning of a profound shift in how politicians, votes, and the mass media interact.”

“Trump has been described as a master of the pseudo-event, but what is a pseudo-event?”

“The concept was introduced more than half a century ago by the American amateur historian, Daniel J. Boorstin. His book, The Image, originally had the subtitle “or Whatever happened to the American Dream” (in the 1992 edition it became “A Guide to Pseudo-Events”), which is significant because of Trump’s own claim to be breathing new life back into the American Dream.”

“It is worth taking a closer look at Boorstin’s arguments because they cast light on the deeper historical roots of Trumpism in the workings of the modern mass media, but also because the differences tell us a lot about what’s changed in the meantime, and how much more volatile and powerful the celebrity, as the human pseudo-event, is today than back in 1962.”

“Boorstin is best-known for his account of celebrities, who he described as ‘human pseudo-events’, entirely manufactured by public relations and the mass media, to be contrasted with genuine ‘heroes’ – someone who did ‘great’ things or displayed ‘great’ qualities.”

“Once a celebrity entered public consciousness via some pseudo-event, they then became well-known just for being well-known, a formula that became popularized as ‘famous for being famous’.”

“Boorstin’s book had a broader focus, though, on the illusory character of American social and cultural life, on the influence of the mass media on how people think and feel. He thought it was important to distinguish between real, authentic, actual events, and the illusory, manufactured ‘pseudo-events’ – ‘publicity stunts’ – that had become so widely used by the mass media to manipulate public opinion in the course of the 20th century.”

“Boorstin recognized Edward Bernays, who explained both how pseudo-events are manufactured and their place in modern politics and social relations, as probably the first important theorist of the central role of public relations in a complex, modern society.”

“Unlike Bernays, however, he adopted a critical stance towards the ever-expanding role of public relations techniques, what would today be called ‘spin’.”

“The world created by public relations and advertising was so much more interesting, dramatic and consistently novel than reality. For Boorstin, the American people appeared to be hopelessly captured by that artificial world of fake images and characters, to a large extent because their insatiable hunger for ‘news’.”

“Celebrity was a product of ‘the machinery of information’, but it was fed by the apparent desire among ordinary Americans to be ‘seduced’ by advertising.”

“He saw the historical origins of this characteristic of American society in ‘the Graphic Revolution’, by which he meant the period following the mid-nineteenth century, when there was a massive expansion in the capacity to create and disseminate images as well as information. There were, he wrote, increasingly ‘new machines to make accurate and attractive replicas of face, figure, and voice, of landscape and events, and by new machines to disseminate these images, by newspapers, magazines, cheap books, telephone, telegraph, phonograph, movies, radio, television.’”

“The machinery of information has only become more and more sophisticated and effective, and this increasingly powerful capacity to generate images, thought Boorstin, had actually transformed human perception and imagination, altering the general conception of truth and reality, with increasing emphasis placed on the representations or images of reality, becoming more and more independent of that reality itself.”

“This dynamic extended to individuals, so that the synthetic, celebrity person becomes more captivating than the real one, the hero, and the figures that populate our consciousness are increasingly ‘products’ of the Graphic Revolution.”

“He felt that politics had become organised around images at the expense of ideals, and that political success had come to revolve around how well imagery was projected and manipulated.”

“The power of pseudo-events derives from what Boorstin called the ‘extravagant expectation’ of constant novelty, almost a desire to be sold some new idea or product, as long as it is new.”

“The poisonous charm of the pseudo-event ‘tastes so sweet,’ he complained, that ‘it spoils our appetite for plain fact’.”

“He also noted the power of the self-fulfilling prophecy, of how saying something often enough makes it, effectively, ‘true’. In effect Boorstin was suggesting we were already in a ‘post-truth’ society in 1962.”

“The world of pseudo-events was also founded on a desire to have feelings confirmed, rather than any concern with what was ‘true’ or ‘false’.”

“Even critiques of pseudo-events end up becoming pseudo-events themselves, the insatiable appetite of the PR apparatus knows no limits. ‘By the law of pseudo-events,’ he wrote, ‘all efforts at mass disenchantment themselves only embroider our illusions’.”

“Equally important, though, are the points where Boorstin’s analysis does not resonate all that well with what is happening today, where we can start to see what is genuinely new about the Trumpist world.”

“To begin with, there is in any case a problem with the term ‘pseudo-event’ itself, because in suggesting an essential falseness, this also implied a certain lack of substance in the real world. But pseudo-events are very real, and real in their effects, so the concept of being ‘manufactured’ or ‘produced’ might be more useful.”

“the whole point was that the world of politics and government – the real world – had become organised around the production of images and illusions, that it was in fact becoming impossible to distinguish between an image on the one hand, and a genuine ideal on the other.”

“What has changed since 1962, and what Trump embodies, is the fact that new channels of connection have opened up between different categories of celebrity, in popular culture, the world of business, and politics, so that attention capital can be converted not just into either economic capital (Trump before 2015) or political capital (Bushes, Clintons, Obama), but into both at the same (Trump after 2015), and indeed into political power (Trump after 2016).”

“The pseudo-event has suddenly become reality as well as illusion.”

“Although he had undermined this idea himself in pointing out that being a student of enchantment was no barrier to enjoying and going along with enchantment, he also noticed that ‘pseudo-eventfulness’ did not always elicit a positive response, and that there can also be a yearning for authenticity and sincerity.”

“Trump has shown how even this desire can itself be harnessed to his own pseudo-eventfulness, so there are no guarantees in that respect, but Boorstin’s analysis still provides a number of important insights into the rise of Trump.”

“We must not forget the PT Barnum principle: it is possible for people to know they are being sold a fake, but it does not always bother them that much, in fact they get a kick out of knowing it, so the problem becomes not how to expose the fakery, but how to address the pleasure people get from the show.”

“Second, Trump is not that new, he is drawing on characteristics of the role of mass media in politics that have been present at least from the introduction of television, arguably from the appearance of radio, and for Boorstin from the spread of mass-circulation newspapers in the mid-1900s, even if he is also taking things in new directions.”

“If Donald Trump is a great salesman, that is clearly the game that we are in, and the challenge becomes how to outperform figures like Trump. The public relations theorists like Edward Bernays and Walter Lippman are basically correct in their understanding of how the public sphere works, so that opposition to pseudo-eventfulness requires a mastery as much as a critical understanding of its techniques.”

“Celebrity is not mere mindless diversion, or distracting illusions, under certain conditions its attention capital can be leveraged to link up with various other sorts of economic, social and political capital, to create a perfect storm of world-altering societal transformation.”

“It is important to remember, for example, that it was the media coverage of Hitler’s 1924 trial following his failed putsch which turned him a celebrity for right-wing nationalists, one of the factors launching his career as a political superstar.”