Neohelicon XXXIV (2007) 1, 6977

DOI: 10.1556/Neohel.34.2007.1.7

CALIN-ANDREI MIHAILESCU

AN ASTROCENTRIC UNIVERSE

The star system, or the astrocentric universe characteristic of mass culture, is analyzed
through a sequence of three daily experiences which are common to the contemporary
North American. In the wake of Nietzsches and Adornos critiques, this dispersed universe is shown to have emerged on the ruins of older systems of valuation and to have expanded via its insistent exposure to the uncritical mass and via the marginalization of otherness. In an astrocentric universe highbrow and lowbrow phenomena are exposed to
each other to the point of non-distinction, which is instrumental in propelling the
popCulture star in the sphere once occupied by high art. This article delivers, in philosophical prose, a combination of comparative and cultural studies, critical theory and cultural history.

Youll take me for a ride, I feel, and this is how I think you will

SHOPPING SPREE AT THE MALL

Now that youre done shopping and you cart is so close to full that you had it, your
turn has come to join the waitline of fulfilled buyers. You push your cart and way into
the tight passageway to the cashier. Looking sideways through this fake arcade, you
are to notice the faces through which the world of the tabloids scans you, and your fingertips are given the itch: to buy or not to buy? Light question, meant for light-perversions. Consumer, you, potential buyer whom art made free by that potential alone:
these are the faces constellated unto fame in North America; these are the stars which
accompany your slow walk through the wind tunnel of exchange. Before money and
merchandise will have changed hands, you get distracted by the faces you have seen
many times too many. You get news from the other world the world of fame. They
are there-for-here: Britney Spears is a star, Michael Jordan was a star, as were the
sturdy Rolling Stones; Bill Gates is a star, Brad Pitt is Angelina Jolie is a star To the
bulky book sellers of the day, Paolo Coelho is a star, and so are J.K. Rowland and Dan
Brown. To the sports aficionados, Ronaldinho is a star and Michael Schumacher is a
Calin-Andrei Mihailescu, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, University of Western
Ontario, London, ON N6A 3K7, Canada, E-mail: cmihails@uwo.ca
03244652/$20.00
2007 Akadmiai Kiad, Budapest

Akadmiai Kiad, Budapest

Springer, Dordrecht

70

CALIN-ANDREI MIHAILESCU

star, Venus and Serena Williams are star sisters, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal are
co-stars, and Tiger Woods, what a star he is!
The skies of popCulture are star full not exhaustive but exhausting, the inertia of
enumeration leaves no room for the Copernican void; those stars shine down on you
with entertaining twinkles which jam Pascals silent, infinite spaces. They keep coming at you from TV and computer screens; you can cruise the pages of glossy, gossipy
tabloids with your fingers close control: they, the icons of popCulture are everywhere. They give you little jolts out of the conceptual tunnel of exchange you are
crossing now. Stars come from above, dont they? to offer you a glimpse at the ecstatic other of money. They come and come down again and rain over you the fervor
of that repetition which is the mother of pop.
Under this siege of shooting stars of which you are the target, the tables turn: your
spirit opens up the bottle; you see the Heideggerian 7Up bubbles going always up,
from an origin too light to fathom. The highbrow culture of the bubbles appears to
shine as an exasperated reversal of the lowbrow culture of the stars; Heideggers origins the reverse of, resistance to, and disemployed essence of the bulk of Britney
Spears. With each reiteration of the stars presence, popCulture reasserts its disdain
for uniqueness, for that old and revered original whose distance Benjamin calls
aura. The highbrow sacred cows of the original work of art (stand up to enlist Leonardo, Virgil, Dante & comp!) are chosen to match that One that generates it all. Yet,
an uninhibited inhabitant of cultures pop and not Gilles Deleuze tells us that the
One, the first One, is nothing more than a unit subtracted from a multiplicity. Highbrow art and its systems of support such as critical theory, comparative literature,
and philosophical aesthetics will be regarded as the willing suspension of the multiplicity from which the high One, once subtracted, erases its tracks to take over the
world. In turn, popCulture knows with a low brow but not with downcast eyes that
the One is not enough: One is depressing. Einmal ist dismal. The star twinkles an intermittently blinding play between one, many and no Other. The one that is the many
is the star. It lures the many consumers into the trap that it is, into the happy identification that gives them a partly playful identity: to be one with it through the manifolds of
limp life. The star mends auras: it represents as many of you as there are there, it elicits your desire as a multitude restored in one your self.
What, you dont go for it? Does Cline Dion make you cringe? You cant stand the
face of best-selling Tom Cruise? You dont buy Britney Spears for a sec? You think
that she sublimates suburbia as a Dasein made of plastic must? That she is a concoction of the Sony corporate musical executives? Youre ready to submit that stars bear
the empty touch of fame? Why not? Its a free country, after all (have been subjected):
its your right not to go for these Big Brothers and Kinky Sisters, and to rebuff the extended family from heaven and hell given to you by God! culturally. Le got
oblige taste is for the strong, the weak and the atypical but you still have to cross
the tunnel to the cashier and pay to stay legal while you shell yourself out of the tabloid shiny shadows gate of ivory. Money and stuff change hands at the apex of exchange, that moment out of time when hands become claws in the ecstasy of the law

AN ASTROCENTRIC UNIVERSE

71

of grabity. After the petite catharsis that has just cleansed you of the star flakes, you
get out of the mall, free like a bird. You are now in the parking lot.

GOING FOR A SPIN

Driving farther on the street of delight and dejection, you look in the mirror. Its time
to maybe ask: What counts? What am I buying? And, then, conceptually and
proudly, How can one buy the schlock of popCulture?1And then, with a strategic
wink: By not buying into the star system, arent we tricked into another economy?
A bit of conspiratorial paranoia may sting you on this phenomenological trail: what if
my rejection of the star system has been calculated in advance by the Elders of the
Shopping Mall? What if, for instance, by defying Angelina Jolies lip-glossy face, the
probability of me buying a book by Alice Munro is already calculated to increase tenfold, while that of purchasing a Bergman movie on DVD gets a 450% boost? What if
the exchange value of a particular star is measured in this perverse way? What if,
when I buy highbrow, my refined aesthetic subject buys it against Angelina? (Well,
not really; I am actually buying against Brad Pitt.) And how far can this aesthetic of
resistant consumption go against the over spilling of conformity up to the bottom pit
of the unconscious? How far should I push my paranoid considerations? Should I
guess that, to buy against Matt Demon, gives out a 50% probability of me getting two
packs of gum and one tube of Colgate toothpaste, but neither canned black beans nor
holy wood incense? Must I suspect that there are subliminal rays coming my way
from the stars, to sway consumption, according to ready-made, secret scenarios, even
in alternate shopping universes such as mine (which are not alternative in the least)?
Should I let go, let myself be gripped by the belief that there is a black aura cast by the
stars which the Elders of the Mall calculate as market niches? Adorno was not the first
to intimate that, to see a star, one must not look directly at it, but slightly sideways.
Glancing is the proper way of gazing at the star. To look directly at it is the way to
miss it, and thus collapse within your fascinated, glance-less gaze that folds the Basilisk upon yourself. One notch up, the selling power of the stars is surreptitiously directed to the highbrow worlds that reject their plain view. That lowbrows limit the visual field does not entail that highbrows let your eyes open properly. Mysterious are
the highways of capital!
1

Also called mass culture or, more hurtfully, culture industry, by Theodor Adorno, for whom
[t]he commodification of art ends up in the aestheticization of the commodity (Dialectic of
Enlightenment, New York: Continuum, 1974, pp. 162163). His culture industry was the
purposeful integration of its consumers from above; it reconciled high and lowbrow art,
which had been separated for millennia, in a peace treaty that damages them both. High arts
seriousness is damaged because its effect is programmed; low art is put in chains and deprived of the unruly resistance inherent in it when social control was not yet total. The vanishing point of the culture industry is human dependence and servitude. (Culture Industry Reconsidered, in The Culture Industry, ed. J. M. Bernstein. (London & New York: Routledge,
1991), pp. 98106, passim).

72

CALIN-ANDREI MIHAILESCU

However else they may be understood, stars are articulated in a bottomless cum
topless system: they dont discriminate everybody can buy their icons. Stars provide
the nexus between capital and democracy in the same sense in which Santa Claus goes
between capital and ritual (and Satan, just one metathesis away, lurks in the details,
the stars details which the devotee gazes upon while just glancing at the star:
Angelinas lips, Tigers swing, Britneys gown Eliciting the gaze within the glance,
stars articulate the double stand of fetish. This madness of seeing unfolds at the antipodes of the baroque glance within the gaze. How fitting is this for the traffic jam you
got yourself into?
Santa is not quite real; neither are the stars. Both belong to a daimonic or angelic
interregnum mediating between blunt shopping and utopian desires. Hegels universal mediation would pigeonhole the popCulture stars as anthropomorphic idols, but
these are salient elements of coherence in contemporary popCulture, while falling out
of the focus of critique. In order to understand them, the critic should stash some basic tools (critical distance, phenomenological focus on the object of interpretation, interpretation as such) and join the mass. I mean the uncritical mass necessary for the
star system to set itself in motion and endure. If the critic were to attempt a vast reconsideration of the universe of (pop)Culture, rather than putting up, from the outset, a
crafty resistance to the cunning rain of stars, s/he would better join the uncritical mass.
This move may hold a different promise for the later course of critique, including the
overcoming of Adorno and of the culture industry whose champion loather he was.
The astrocentric universe is fabricated without recourse to criticism; this is to
shout that astrocentrism is necessarily uncritical. Stars are born in the chasm opened
between the artwork and its concept: in Kantian terms, they spring forth in the sublime moment, which renders imagination impotent to link artwork and concept.
Geopolitically, stars are sublime, both mathematically and dynamically. They interrupt judgment and prevent it from pushing again its ceaseless pendulum move between artwork and concept. Through their flawless stream of hiccups, stars embody
the failure of the Kantian Einbildungskraft, 2 on which they feed with an impetus that
is no less ferocious than it is recurring. Because the valuation of the star cannot be effected at a critical level, the star must belong to the heavenly realms of culture industry's scenarios, where it is paid astronomical amounts to stay. In those starry skies
reminiscent of van Goghs vortexes, representation engulfs any trace of presence.
Stars are made to absorb a multitude of gazes to make them brighter. Certainly,
some division of labor is required to single out each stars vortex. The Dixie Chicks
wont sing and fly on Harry Potters magic broom such a star-collision could entail
the risk of the nil sales. In all, the astrocentric universe is multi-centered, it allows for
category mistakes, and it avoids critique with godly smile or wrath.
Then, how can you not ask the melancholy question, How do stars dim within an
astrocentric universe? Famous sportsmen and -women retire to be waxed into halls
of fame and other mausolea; after all, the sports stars are the most real of them all: the
2

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1987) , The Analytic of the Sublime, 2229.

AN ASTROCENTRIC UNIVERSE

73

trade of these sublating warriors is empirically validated by a competition mostly resistant to manipulation. Their stardust leaves traces which show no direction for the
return (Hnsel and Gretels system of orientation for the return will be made up of either kitsch or camp nostalgic drops). But the loss of stars shows some sense, and in
that stardust is persistent. There is a bit of it on your car mirror, and as you drive with
the mirror on, you try to give this star a glancy gaze.
It is then that a cow jumps out of nowhere in the middle of the road. You swerve,
avoid its moo, the adrenaline kicks in (slightly late, as usual), and you have what alcoholics call a moment of clarity: you understand that gazing at a star is not only indirect but double, too. It covers the spectrum of (1) the fixed distance between your
eye-subject and a steady object, and (2) the vacillating distance expanding and contracting like an accordion between the voyeur and the object of desire. The fixed distance is footnoted as the ontological difference between the one touched by fame and
the viewing rest and here the epistemological distance between subject and object is
turned into an ontological one, which cant be absorbed and comprehended within
knowledge. Otherwise put (you also like to move around the furniture in your apartment), the existence of the star overwhelms its understanding. No subject of modernity will be more than a star sticker, unless it is Kants transcendental subject looking
at a monadic star (which, truth be told and not forgotten, would be a case of lowbrow
episte-mishmash). The enigmatic light of Creation, and the suns blinding light are
now dimmed by crimson carpets of stars. That, you see.
And the voyeurs gaze? To it, the star is a fetish and the surroundings where it actually is and cannot be found. Ob/scenenly, in the astrocentric universe the star both
foregrounds and backgrounds the mirror/stage at which you gaze. By backgrounding
itself, the star partakes of mythological shady arrangements; by foregrounding itself,
it mimics the narcissistic ego of any philosophy of the world as representation. The
obscenity of the star lies in that its positionality as back/foreground of this staging is
as perverse as the forced immanence imposed on the world by technology: the star is
the myth, the ego and a limit. It is staged, so that the double gaze finds it always beside
its staged self. This double gaze, switching desire on and off, might as well be called
the double determination of any valuation.
Then you shake your head: too much ado about this clear bleakness! You remember the cow episode, another, smaller shudder hits, as if Madeleine Proust were offering you a bit of mango sorbet in an empty envelope. Here is where you try to lift the
handy shield of self-defense. Here are they, the superstitious binaries: there is no comparison between Dante and Dan Brown; Raphael is a giant on whose shoulders the
minnows of the day collate tin installations; how can you match The Redhot Chili
Peppers with Mozart? The redemptive return to the outmoded aesthetic taste (which
has always been explained gnostically as emerging to resist its real, evil brother bad
taste), would partake of the same lachrymose pattern characteristic of nostalgic kitsch
and steadfast fascism. This would be blind-born axiology theory of aesthetic values
on the go. Being blind, it must stay superstitious because this axiology on the go is
predetermined to necessarily not understand its determinations. Dont get too tough
on popCulture or on highbrows magic amulet held fast against it! The blindness to its

74

CALIN-ANDREI MIHAILESCU

own predetermination is the given of any axiology. Maybe you want to go dialectical
on this issue. Maybe you get the itch to say that the double gaze is both the expression
and the effect of blindness to the determinations of axiology. Let it be so! So what?
Let it be so what! You still dont know what to believe in. You look in the mirror
again, but the mirror is somewhat dark. Maybe you should trust that objects in the
mirror are cleaner than they appear. Stars, for instance Dantes maybe but not the
ones of redemption.

STOPPING FOR REFRESHMENTS

A bit shaky, you need props. Stop at the bookstore, get the umpteenth espresso, buy
another copy of Nietzsches Will to Power, get reassurance from the moustachioed
man who could stand on the tip of a needle with another ten like him (but whos like
him?). Good choice! Who else could say, I relate the history of the next two centuries: the advent of nihilism, which [according to its gospel], has become necessary
Nihilism means that the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking;
why? finds no answer Nihilism as an increased power of spirit: active nihilism [is
the] active force of destruction? 3
As to why there is no why left, Nietzsche says that you see little more than pretence when looking back in the mirror: There are no moral actions whatsoever: they
are completely imaginary there are only immoral intentions and actions. (786)
Our religion, morality and philosophy are decadence forms of man. The
countermovement: art. (796) and then, that the world [seen] as a work of art
gives birth to itself. And beauty, that beauty which cannot any longer take care of itself for it has the world in charge, that is what he drops in the artists lap: Beauty for
the artist is something outside all orders of rank, because in beauty opposites are
tamed [this power of the artist is] the highest kind of power, namely power over the
opposites (803).
Whats unartistic, and thus weak, must be the egos greedy power: that the individual owns things, that he has property, is an afterthought engendered by the egos rapacious will, now on its way to acquire domestic citizenship. What one owns is the
intimation, proof and shield of the egos existence; it is the interface between the ego
and the world, both of which are spoiled; and the spoils are there objective counterparts for all to see without paying attention to the selfs fake face.
Whats artistic is not a synthetic or rapacious clustering of all the moral, etc. values
that have been unvalued in the overarching genealogy named die Umwertung aller
Werte, but rather the last resort of judgment. Only in aesthetic terms can the world be
forever justified, Nietzsche repeated in The Birth of Tragedy. Sixteen year later, in
1888, arts uniqueness remains to name the countermove to those sediments of judgment called ersatz values, as its shortcut telos. Non-aesthetic judgments will no longer
3

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Harper&Row, San Francisco,
1969), pp. 2, 4, 14, 22.

AN ASTROCENTRIC UNIVERSE

75

justify the world. The potentiality of the Christian Judgment day is thus turned off, as
is any form of closure leading from the human affairs (of the courts and, thus, of any
other evaluating agency) to transcendental self-legitimation. That only in aesthetic
terms can the world be forever justified seems to mean that the sole available justificatory judgment remains that of the Kantian Urteilskraft, which wanders precisely
and universally between the artwork and its concept. The particulars in anxious
search of their general, and the generals surveying the troops emptied of their
singulars, are judgments two tunnels fated to never meet. This is as open-ended a
judgment as the coming of the Jewish Messiah, and thus unable for unwilling to
fake its ground as the sediment of values. Nietzsches two centuries of nihilism are
aesthetic in this tight sense; to him, aesthetic taxonomies are instances of taxidermy:
stuffed still lives.
What are left in the value-less world are forces and quantities, but not (those interpretations called) facts. Facts and values are equally faked, forms of non-existence
brought to life by their mutual contradiction. You trust Nietzsche. You trust Nietzsche
said that the world of forces and quantities (that you call the world of quanta), leaves
very little to the discourse of their qualities, or the world of the qualia, if you will.
Why dont you have a sip of that?
Quanta and qualia: every thought regarding value splits itself into a qualitative appreciation and its quantitative excuse. The latter sometimes tolerates description, at
times begets description, and always begs it. To describe and explain are activities
that do not cross into the world of qualia. They have to smuggle themselves into it,
and look as foolish there as an always-smiling recent immigrant. To interpretation,
quanta and qualia are parallel universes, whose points of inter-crossing belong to science fiction (this would, perhaps, be the appropriate definition of SciFi, with some futuristic add-ons). While other doublets (or couplets, like body and soul, or soul and
spirit) have been historically co-mingled into the organimism of the last few centuries, quanta and qualia have stayed: they split the ground and ground the split of indecision. A technically flawless sonnet is as value-free as a let-it-be collage. The value
of technique never leaves the realm of technique. Yet, techno-composite forms such
as film deftly suck in the techno-viewer into its realm of value, at least for one hit.
Under the cathartic shock of the hit, the uncritical mass unleashes its fears to, in the
engines second move, be pleasantly released.
The technological trick called functionalism, that projects a description, explanation of form onto the world of value, is nothing more but also nothing less than an
analogical extension of Technik to realms it has made impossible.4 Value remains relegated to a trans realm: as both opposite to quanta (in a double-decked Weltanschauung) and carry-over into a realm always beyond itself, in hysterical search of its
Master(s) name: qualia. The description of a value inherent to the describable ex4

That is, if we follow Heideggers argument from The Age of the World Picture, and The
Question Concerning Technology. See his The Question Concerning Technology and Other
Essays, trans. William Lovitt (Toronto, etc.: Harper, 1977), pp. 115154, and 335, respectively.

76

CALIN-ANDREI MIHAILESCU

presses a definite exposure to the belief in technology; the belief in a functional projection of the describable quanta onto the qualia is as humorous as natural philosophy after Socrates: applied silliness, not unlike that of Flauberts received ideas.
Value, says Nietzsche, is belief, and we believe him. So, if value is self-grounding, it
is forever justified in and by itself. The tables of values mask the anxiety-filled spots
of blood and ink that have made them possible.
It is worth taking a look at the quantifiers attempt to deal the exceptional (that
which goes into the stratosphere of qualia). Such a telling attempt came from the reformulation of Karl Poppers case of radical induction, or black swan theory. Unlike the events of traditional uncertainty, black swans are extremely rare, unexpected
[occurrences, which] command a large impact.5 Accordingly, the success of this or
that book is determined by for lack of a better word luck, and only very few of a
large population of books will enjoy the public spotlight, while the great majority will
die in and of anonymity. You see the range of issues involved here, from the cultivation of an authors image to the array of lobbies that mediate between the general and
the singular, and between the anonymous and the famous. However, regardless
whether this selection process is fair or not (and if one were to take a poll, it could
never be shown as fair), this explanation makes the aesthetically exceptional be precisely statistically exceptional. You would not be wrong to say that, as if all literary
texts were all born equal and Gelassenheit-like open to ideological, bureaucratic or
5

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, "The Roots of Unfairness: The Black Swan in Arts and Literature", Literary Research/Recherche littraire 21(4142) (2004): 241254. Also see his predecessors' and
co-conspirators' contributions: Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (New
York: W.H. Freeman & Co., 1982); and Didier Sornette, Critical Phenomena in Natural Sciences, Chaos, Fractals, Self-organization and Disorder. Concepts and Tools, 2nd ed. (Berlin &
Heidelberg: Springer/Springer Series in Synergetics, 2004). According to Taleb, absence of
measurability implies weakness of our statistical methods We are plagued by epistemological
opacity The contemporary formulation of this mechanism is now called the
Pareto-Lvy-Mandelbrot processes, providing their own class of statistical modeling. Consider
wealth in America. The number of people with assets worth more than $2 million will be around
a quarter of those with more than one million. Likewise the number of persons with wealth in excess of $20 million will be approximately the same in relation to those with more than $10 million. This relation is called a scaling law because it is retained at all levels. So far we have no
clue about the underlying process leading to Pareto-Lvy-Mandelbrot scales and to bell curves
[] for instance, nothing can explain why the success of a novelist (quantified and measured,
say in mentions in the scholarly and literary press) bears similarity to the bubbles and informational cascades seen in the financial markets. There is a remarkable regularity to these ubiquitous
Black Swan dynamics. They are visible across disciplines and human activities. They are pervasive in biology (particularly molecular biology), economics, sociology, linguistics, networks,
the stock market, showing similar attributes. Literally anything that contains luck will be subjected to it. The spread of ideas and religions, the success of innovations, and historical events
also follow these dynamics. Strangely, while (against much of the misconceptions of Protestant
ethics) economic life is ruled by a larger share of luck than commonly accepted, intellectual life
is even far more unfair much of the credits and the attributions go to a disproportionately small
segment of winners.

AN ASTROCENTRIC UNIVERSE

77

market appropriation, the items under statistical scrutiny are deemed contentless.
This sentimental valuation of measurement itself, based on the disregarding of the inner worth of the objects selected, renders futile literary criticism, history and theory.
This is by no means a singular case, you would say; even less nave attacks on established literary institutions stumble upon the aporia of valuation: that qualia are the
blindfold of quanta, and that this folding over is the constitutive blindness of value
judgments. In this sense, value is the ecstasy and modern cover up of quantas
imperial drive.
It is now that you zap. Your artsy values get out of responsibility: their playing
field, unbound by moral casts, repels the grip of moral-tedious discourses. And that,
my friend I can tell you, now that you are taking the last sip of espresso, ready to
leave this bookstore , that is weak and pleasurable. After Fausts desire to fry his
brains and mortgage his soul for more knowledge, after Pascals aporias of faith and
reason, after Dostoevskys crossings of the chasm between belief and unbelief, if
there is any sense of tragedy left to knowledge, it must lie within the rift open between
quanta and qualia. The very notion of value embodies this tragedy. Value is not introspective; if anything, it is a prospective disaster.
As deferred disaster, value cuts itself off from the misguidance of the stars: it shuns
them to give itself to itself, to orient itself after itself and to cover up its infernal work.
The emergence of the implosive character of values coincides with the emergence of
the astrocentric universe. As the uncritical mass was taking centre stage as the dissolvent of community ties and the peoples sacredness, values were losing their granting
counterparts: the establishments of the Old World were shattered by the Great War,
money were split from the gold standard, babbling, then muteness came to cut experience from its tell/ability. This age, foretold by Nietzsche and told by Benjamin and
Adorno, has been around for close to one human century. As you are leaving this book
shop and perhaps dreaming of pushing the age of the astrocentric universe to some
precipice, you find yourself, again, in a parking lot. Whats left to do? Drive on!
Youll never make it back home; the shoppies will get spoiled; but not you, nor I.
Well get lost, like highway mystics.