creatures of the simulcast

 

 

Andy Kaufman did a funny stand-up routine back when he was funny and, even, alive. He would come out and stand, shifting from one leg to another, his eyes bright and idiotic, and in that funny unplaceable high pitched foreign accent he would tell the audience that he was going to do some imitations, as comics do. Then he says: this is my aunt X, and proceeds to do an imitation of a figure from his, or at least his persona’s, household.

The humor here, like most of Kaufman’s schtick, is all about pranking the routine of the prank – about stripping away the comic staple and making comedy of it. Here, of course, the expectation that is disappointed into laughter is that the imitation will be of a celebrity. That the aunt is not a celebrity sort of misplaces and transduces the motif. It is a de-vaudeville vaudeville act.

The imitation is parasitic on celebrity culture, which is a good entrance into celebrity culture and our “episodic, anonymous relations” with celebritries – to quote “celebrity studies” scholar Chris Rojek. The fame of the celebrity is defined by some quantitative threshold of episodic, anonymous recognitions. It is possible that Kaufman’s aunt – or Kaufman’s character’s aunt – is recognized by everyone in the family and on the street,  but she is not recognized to the point that a random audience can recognize her.

Celebrity, to this extent, and money share similar structures, and it is hard to imagine, so firmly are they built into modernity through the quotidian, what life would be like outside of them.

Just as the vast majority of people have never studied the way the Treasury issues money on the promise that the face value is a value, so, too, the vast majority have never met in any meaningful way the celebrities that we all talk about and read about all the time. Perhaps you become an economist if you feel compelled to understand how the issuing of money could possibly work. If you are compelled to actually meet the celebrities you “know”, you are more likely to become a stalker.

Mostly, we settle for having a feeling we know what this or that celebrity is like “in real life”. This is a clue, I think, about modern life. As Georg Simmel pointed out – again and again and again – in The Philosophy of Money, money, in its historical development, tends to a more and more quantitative existence, to become a self-claimed marker of value. This is what Simmel meant by abstraction as a social process. Similarly, although celebrity seems utterly sunk in the particular – the particular of Elvis, of Queen Elizabeth, of Prince – the aura of celebrity is an abstraction of the always deferred meeting – the confirmation of what they are “like.” Celebrity without fame, as in the case of Kaufman’s aunt, is possible only in a small world format, where the abstraction of meeting becomes many degrees less – actual meeting becomes many more degrees possible. To be a famous poet, for instance, given the small world of poets, means that others in that world are likely to run into you.

These abstract relations to real people are, once we think about them, a little uncanny. It is as though we were dealing with ghosts, or demons, or gods. How much of our existence should we devote to these people?

There is, too, a temporal aspect. The three celebrities I named are all dead. Yet I’d contend that they still exist in our simultaneity – they exist as they have always existed, as images.

The important thing, within the societies that within the temporal dimension of simultaneity,  is that the public and these publics form out of the same principle – the subordination of haptic space to another kind and degree of proximity, which is mediated by this social mode of temporality. The French 19^th century sociologist Tarde mentions this in connection with the news. News, in French, is actualité. Between the English and the French word, an important movement is captured. Tarde speaks of the newspapers giving their readers a ‘sense of simultaneity.”  He does not, unfortunately, disinter the phenomenon of simultaneity, instead  vaguely pressing on the idea of “at the same time”. But ordinary simultaneousness is transformed in the social mode of simultaneity. We speaking of catching up with, keeping up with, or following the news, or fashions, or tv, or books, or sports. It is in this sense that we are not simply conscious of being simultaneous with, but as well, and more strongly, that the simultaneous is moving ahead of us even as we are part of it, like a front. Tarde picked up on that movement as a crowd phenomenon.

The anthropologist Johannes Fabian coined the term allochrony to speak of the peculiar way in which Europeans, starting in the seventeenth century, started to divide up the contemporary world into different cultural time zones. Europe, of course, appropriated the modern to itself. Other contemporary cultures were backward, savage, stone age, traditional – they were literally behind their own time. Modernity exists under that baptism and curse. But Fabian’s concern for cultures exogenous to Europe blinded him to the effect of modernity within Europe, and America, where we witness another allochronic effect having to do with the new. Simultaneity is the horizon for a temporal competition – one in which the new, the young, the latest compete against the old, the laggard, the out of touch.

This is how celebrity, far from being some trivial, aleatory thing, is really a symptom of what modernity is all about.  Celebrity contains our multitudes.