I am two weeks late to this conversation, and probably wouldn’t even be aware of it if my beloved wife didn’t enjoy Ariana Grande a musician and as the subject of gossip.
But I’ve jotted down a few of my thoughts on the issue, should anyone want to know. I doubt any are really original.
Celebrities are not people. They are not human beings.
Reach for a book. Any book you’ve got handy—something by a single author, living or dead. Hold it in your hand.
Is what you’re touching right now a human being? A living creature? Is it the person whose name is printed on the spine?
Every celebrity is a creature with two bodies. The second of the two bodies is entirely metaphorical—and that’s the only one that 99.999 percent of us know, and the one we’re almost always talking about.
There exists a person named Ariana Grande (born Ariana Grande-Butera), born in 1993 to Joan Grande and Edward Butera. We can adduce a particular DNA sequence, a boundedness in space and time, or whatever else we’d like as evidence of her unique personhood, her particularity as an individual entity belonging to the species Homo sapiens. I won’t presume to guess what activities her day-to-day comprises, but she is involved and the writing and production of recorded music. She performs for audiences. She acted on the set of the Wicked movies. She breathes, eats, and sleeps.1 She uses the bathroom. She has conversations with people to which we are not privy; she enacts small gestures and personal tics that pass unnoticed.
But this is not who we’re talking about when we talk about Ariana Grande—assuming none of us belong to the 0.001 percent excluded from the 99.999 mentioned above.
Much of the hand-wringing and vacillating moral conversation about Ariana Grande stems from this confusion, and from our ascription of personhood to media objects.
In the digital epoch, we commit a fallacy of misplaced concreteness by referring to them as “objects.” A song is not an object. A tweet is not an object, nor is an Instagram photograph. A pattern of light on a smartphone or television screen is not an object, even if it is in the likeness of a human being.
Perhaps to understand life in the digital epoch, we need to catch up with Alfred North Whitehead in recognizing the fundamental unit of experience (and of reality) as the event instead of the object or thing.
Not unrelated: a voice emanating from a Bose speaker is not a human voice. It is a simulation of one.
With a nod to Georg Cantor and his exploration of transfinite quantities, let’s identity the Ariana we know as Ariana א. This thing we call “Ariana” is not human. It—and the pronoun is appropriate because we’re not talking about a living entity—is not any one thing at all. It’s a pattern, a meme made manifest on millions and millions of backlit screens, through earbuds and speakers, and on magazine covers, ads, and posters. We recognize it when we see and hear it, and we call it “Ariana Grande.”
The way in which Ariana א issues forth from Ariana Grande somewhat resembles the emanation of intermediary entities from The One in the later Platonic worldview.
If it seems gross to compare a rich and famous singer-songwriter to a deity in theory, it is worse to invite the comparison in actual practice. Scroll back up and contemplate that photo again for a moment.
A figure such as Jesus Christ—an entity that people speak of, see represented in visual art, feel they relate to, and perhaps yearn for, though is rarely (most likely never at all) encountered as a person in the material world—is a low-tech version of the modern celebrity.
At the same time, a remark of Leo Tolstoy’s in War and Peace about Napoleon and the other Great Men of history applies neatly, though imperfectly, to contemporary celebrities:
When it comes to events in history, so-called ‘great men’ are nothing but labels attached to events; like real labels, they have the least possible connection with events themselves.
The causal connections between (1) Grande entering a recording booth and my wife listening to Petal, and (2) Napoleon issuing commands and the French army routing its foes at the Battle of Austerlitz are vanishingly remote and indirect.
Ariana א can be ubiquitous. It can be seen by a million different people, doing or saying or singing something completely different in each instance. In earlier epochs, this would be regarded as superhuman, supernatural. From a certain point of view, perhaps it still should be regarded that way.
Two thousand years ago, the only living person in European society with such a ubiquitous image and a dedicated publicity engine working on his behalf would have been the emperor of Rome. Coinage stamped with the likeness of the reigning princeps, the practices of the imperial cult, public displays of adulation, and so on, are the tools of an order in which power is centralized in the person of a military dictator at the top of a command chain. In a society where the methods and means of social control are depersonalized, technologized, and applied more or less constantly and ambiently, that power is more effectively represented by the face of the young and beautiful starlet than that of the somber autocrat.
It stands to reason that a modern American Evangelical Christian with a time machine, visiting the Roman province of Judea, would find it impossible to relate to the historical Jesus of Nazareth. Probably an admirer of Ariana א would come away from a brief meeting with Ariana Grande convinced of a dissonance between the media entity and the human being. Possibly the fan would ultimately consider the media entity the more real of the two, all things considered. With the first they have hundreds and hundreds of hours of experience. They only spoke to the other for ten minutes, and it probably wasn’t what they expected.
In a section of The Gutenberg Galaxy examining the switchover from manuscript culture to print culture, Marshall McLuhan hovers over historian Ernst H. Kantorowicz’s book The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. A brief but relevant excerpt:
The division between the ruler’s private and his corporate Dignity, elaborated by Italian jurists for centuries, flourished in France, also. Kantorowicz quotes (p. 422) a French lawyer, Pierre Grégoire, in the later sixteenth century, writing (as if he were commenting of King Lear): “The Majesty of God appears in the Prince externally, for the utility of the subject; but internally there remains what is human.” And the great English jurist Coke observed that the mortal king was God-made, but the immortal king man-made.
We can say the same of Ariana Grande and Ariana א. Ariana Grande was the product of insemination, meiosis, gestation, birth, and all manner of developmental biological processes I won’t pretend to understand. Ariana א, on the other hand, is a spectral pseudo-entity made manifest through electricity, fiber-optic cables, carrier waves, silicon wafers, LCD screens, etc.
Joan Grande and Edward Butera made Ariana Grande. Where Ariana א is concerned, Ariana Grande is but one of its “parents.” Someone might discover a dozen or a hundred others.
If Ariana Grande had been surrounded by—and was the employer and client of—a totally different set of people throughout her career, Ariana א would be a completely different “person.”
The enigmatic dedication page in the first edition of Shakespeare’s collected sonnets refers to a mysterious “onlie begetter” who is usually presumed to be either (1) a patron of Shakespeare’s (2) the male youth to whom [some of] the amorous verses were addressed, or (3) both. The printing of the sonnets, proclaims the dedication, promises a form of immortality for the “begetter.” McLuhan cites the sonnets’ dedication as a particularly famous example of “the theme of eternizing by means of the printed word,” though he seems to be of the mind that it was authored by Shakespeare himself, and not the volume’s publisher:
The ever-living poet lives ever in print, that is, and promises that eternity of the printed word (ever so much more assured than the manuscript eternity of a message in a bottle) to the “onlie begetter.” It is only proper that the identity of the begetter should be as mysterious as the poetic process by which the sonnets were created. Since, however, eternity is now assured for the begetter as he sets forth on a new life of printed poetic existence, the poet wishes him well, even as he is wishing himself well, in his printed voyage through eternity. And so follows the setting forth of (and in) the text of the sonnets, just ten years after the Elizabethan sonnet vogue had passed.
Here we see a fantasy of transmutation—or a metaphor run amok. But a form of it is experienced by anyone logging into a social media platform an checking their dashboard. One’s social [media] profile is their homunculus, their horcrux, their invented child (à la Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?).
Regarding neo-orality, or whatever we wish to call it, it is interesting to observe that artists, writers, musicians, influencers, etc. do not appear to entertain hopes of achieving immortality through their work. They are more like Homeric heroes, fanatically seeking a fame and glory that will last, for a time, before following them into oblivion.
A young female pop star—or actor, athlete, novelist, influencer, etc.—can’t but be acutely conscious of having a sell-by date. Making it in the entertainment industry stamps upon the successful star an awareness of the inexorable treadmill on which its operations rely.
As print culture, widespread literacy, and private authorship intensified in the West, a terrifying and monumental feat of abstraction became a commonplace assumption. Personhood need not be exclusively afforded to embodied human entities, but can be extended, in effect, to encoded records of what certain persons “said”—and what they seem to keep saying to us as we move our eyes across a symbolic visual pattern believed to originate from the Author.
Homer א was the shared imaginary friend of the citizens of classical Athens—spoken of in reminiscence.
If perhaps the civilized “moderns” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took pride in being less superstitious than the “pagans” they sought to civilize, Christianize, and bilk for all their lands were worth, the Western intellect was altogether blind to the animism towards which literacy and print technology bent it.
The author is the spirit that haunts the book, just as a water-nymph or a minor deity is the spirit that lives in the river. We commune with each by way of immersion.
From the written words attributed to dead author, or to a living stranger whose novel, memoir, or treatise we read in bed or on the train, we fabricate an imaginary person post hoc.
If you and I have never met, you’re doing this right now.
“Hollywood,” McLuhan writes, “could rise quickly because it built on the nineteenth century novel.” Similarly, public fascination with Hollywood stars during the first half of the twentieth century had a contiguous precedent in the feting of Charles Dickens and other popular authors.
The difference between someone with a parasocial fixation and the fantasy of a child who believes Bluey is her friend (and/or an adult man or woman with a cartoon “waifu” or “husbando”) is that in the first case, the entity to whom a person imagines they relate actually and incidentally exists in the world. But they do not relate to that person; they relate to simulacra of that person.
It is frightfully easy to conflate the two. Most of us seem to do it instinctively, automatically.
I am reminded of a Simpsons episode where Bart and Lisa get on their knees to hug and kiss the living room TV set. (This is after they tell their father, more or less, that they have an easier time believing in the media’s distorted, vilified caricature of him than trusting in their direct knowledge of him.)
By the same token, the millionaire recording artist whose name is known around the world just as naturally assumes that when people talk about her simulacrum, her doppelganger meme, they are actually talking about her.
For Ariana Grande, the immaterial and infinitely divisible Ariana א must be like a voodoo doll that has been given over to the public. The plaudits, adoration, and attention we direct towards Ariana א seem, mysteriously, to redound to Ariana Grande. So does our opprobrium, derision, leering scrutiny, etc.
But that’s essentially the bargain a mega-celebrity is offered. You get to be rich. You get all the mobility and security and luxury money can buy. You get the satisfaction of knowing that when you open your mouth, people listen to you. You will never in your life have to clean a toilet or worry about dinner because you’ll have people for that. You can, with just cause, look down on ordinary slobs and nobodies from incredible heights they can never hope to attain. In exchange, thousands of thousands of those nobodies get to sink their claws and teeth into an imaginary chew-toy version of you whenever they please, whenever they have a problem with you, and for whatever reason. When the chew-toy you gets damaged badly enough, so do you.
If a young Ariana Grande had decided to back out while she still could, someone else would have been chosen instead. All of the people who made their own incomes facilitating the creation and sustenance of Ariana א would form concentric rings around a different young person with talent and ambition.
There is always someone else. There will always be someone else.
Somebody has got to work a sewing machine in a garment factory sweatshop for a subsistence wage. Somebody has got to be manufactured and processed and presented as the voice and face of a generation. We’ve set things up so as to ensure an inexhaustible supply of candidates for both roles.
Like Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four, the hoary old line about celebrities being “products”—or, better, commodities—became a well-worn cliché for a reason. Ariana א and the smartphone on which we read the latest updates about its “life” are each a material expression of social relations concealed behind a curtain of mystification.
The mystification becomes obvious when one asks of the smartphone: Where did this come from? How and from what was it manufactured? Where did the materials to make it come from? Who made the components it was assembled from, and who assembled it? By what processes did it find its way to me, and what institutions preside over them? Why is its market value what it is? What negative externalities of its production, distribution, and disposal am I not seeing? The same questions may be asked of any of pop star, young actor, mega-influencer, etc.
It is occasionally surprising that Guy Debord spends so little of The Society of the Spectacle zoomed in exclusively on celebrities. But—in the early 1960s, the celebrity as we know the celebrity did not yet exist. Nevertheless, Debord’s encapsulation of the star as an avatar and representative of a social order still holds up today:
The agent of the spectacle placed on stage as a star is the opposite of the individual, the enemy of the individual in himself as well as in others. Passing into the spectacle as a model for identification, the agent renounces all autonomous qualities in order to identify himself with the general law of obedience to the course of things. The . . . celebrity superficially represents different types of personality and shows each of these types having equal access to the totality of consumption and finding similar happiness there . . . The admirable people in whom the system personifies itself are well known for not being what they are; they became great men by stooping below the reality of the smallest individual life, and everyone knows it.
If “everyone [knew] it” during Debord’s lifetime, I don’t believe we do now—or perhaps we are unaware that we do.
The photograph at the top, again, suggests that for all the feverish screaming adoration distorting the faces of the singer’s audience, they are not terribly concerned that she looks like she’s killing herself for their amusement. So is each individual audience member pictured a sociopath, a sadist, and/or a calloused, morbid degenerate? Probably not.
(Probably not.)
A more likely explanation might be that nothing in their experience has trained them to think of the performer as a human being in the sense that they are human beings, and in the sense that their own friends and loved ones are human beings. Even though much of the performer’s appeal as an imagined bosom companion, counselor, psychopomp, life coach, secret crush, etc., depends on fans believing they perceive her simulacrum as a person, in actual practice they do not.
As a result, even in the presence of the performer—the living motion-capture “actor” on which the more familiar virtual entity is based—the fans still see a supernormal pseudo-person.
For all I know, of course, the picture could be dishonest. Maybe it’s not as bad as it looks. Maybe it was AI-generated. I have no way of knowing for certain, do I?
Monica Hesse of the Washington Post is correct in her observance that “we have no idea how to talk about any of this.” But the Ariana Grande matter is a special and extreme case of a general phenomenon. About thirty-five years into the digital revolution, our reformatted personal and social identities, modes of relating to others, and the upscaling of our outlook on the world are still fraught with confusion and misperception.
Ah, Jean Baudrillard. You might have spared us this entire outing:
Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.
Baudrillard published Simulacra and Simulation in 1981. By dint of a continuous increase of intensity and scale, the situation of hyperreality is more apparent to us now than during his lifetime. But if perhaps we’ve gotten hold of Baudrillard intellectually, we have not done so instinctively, emotionally. Perhaps we cannot.
For whatever else it accomplished, the digital revolution brought about the impossible union of two irreconcilables, joining the mundane and banal with the unreal and the supernatural.
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