Part Six

Emotional Celebrity

Introduction
Sean Redmond

Celebrity is a passionate creature; it leans towards the frenzy of feeling

It would seem an obvious observation that celebrity culture is intimately tied to the
activation of emotions. Through its core practices and processes, celebrity is an emo-
tive apparatus that engages with common modes of feelings and delirious forms of
affect. Celebrities situate themselves within broad economies of intimacy, creating
para-social relationships that seem particularly strong and heartfelt but which may
ultimately disappoint so dependent are they on loose, mediated, and ephemeral con-
nections (Rojek 2004; Redmond 2014). All the subsets of emotion, from love to anger,
surprise and sadness, are made manifest through the way celebrities enter our lives.
We cry with and for them. They dance in our dreams. They occupy the spaces of
event spectacle calling forth our emotions to receive and exalt them. Celebrities reg-
ister as key moments in biographical and memorial exchanges where fans and con-
sumers story and remember through the event moments they help shaped. The emo-
tion of celebrity matches or catches the emotional encounters we go through, pro-
viding the metasetting for love, romance, heartache, and desire. We live emotional
lives in and through the emotions of celebrity culture.
Emotional celebrity is tied to the myth of the media center, inviting us to gravitate
toward the public as if that is where organic and intensified life takes place. Access
to this emotional control center promises liberation and intensification but may
ultimately serve to ensnare us within regulated and conformist sets of sensuous
expression. Politics operates within this arena of adoration: it has been celebritized,
and celebrity politics trades and traffics in the representation of “authentic” emotion
and appeals to the ethical feelings inscribed in democratic life. Political rallies are a
mark of this cavalcade of affect. O Obama you have spoken to us through your heart
and through emotive abstractions that suggest democracy is to be felt and experi-
enced as much as made meaningful through policy and action. In the liquid modern

A Companion to Celebrity, First Edition. Edited by P. David Marshall and Sean Redmond.
© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
352 Sean Redmond

age, just feeling something replaces active agency, although charismatic leader
figures, charged by the embodiment of passionate intensity, have always led people
to protest, to fight, to go to war, to kill and be killed.
The passion and frenzy of feeling that celebrity ignites and attaches itself to is part
of a wider culture where sense and sensation, revelation and confession, outpour-
ing and gossip have begun to shape the pulsating veins and arteries of everyday life.
Celebrity compels us to feel but such feeling may well be in the service of late capital-
ism and liquid modernity. Emotional celebrity pricks us to feel but in limited ways,
creating the conditions for the manufacturing of the neoliberal self that restricts and
channels our egos so that we work well, consume well, reproduce well. Celebrity pas-
sion and commodity relations go hand-in-hand: the value transference crafted out
of emotional appeal and short-form desire.
This is particularly true of the confessional mode of feeling, since the revelation
and outpouring serves as a form of the return of the repressed, letting out the carni-
val of emotions that might otherwise lead to wrack and ruin if left unchecked. The
gendered nature of this will to emotional truth is often telling: the confession and its
associated forms of gossip are “female” centered, signified by dominant discourse to
be inferior modes of expression, and so positioning women within patriarchal frames
that limit their access to, and involvement with, the more serious, more “rational”
public world. Emotional celebrity, then, is a Janus-faced creature: on the one hand,
it creates the conditions for emotional attachment and engagement; on the other, it
attaches itself to gendered discourses that devalue those within its callings. This is all
context based: emotional celebrity shifts its affecting ground to foreground emotion
when it needs to, and to devalue or limit its reach when it threatens normative social
and political relations. Too much emotional celebrity is presented as a bad thing,
toxic in its impact and import.
There is something syncretic, then, in the way emotional celebrity operates,
framed I would suggest between Apollonian and Dionysian forces – between
restraint and reason and those impulses which are marked by their frenzy of feeling mmm
and vitality – which when brought together create the conditions for the production Han
and consumption of fame to take place. Purchasing a celebrity-endorsed product is Comunida
both a rational choice and the buying (into) of desire.
2020
Nonetheless, to turn the feeling wheel one more time, emotional celebrity also
leads to extreme forms of attachment and outpouring: ultimately, emotions can-
not be simply tamed. The instances of stalking, the phenomenon of celebrity
worship syndrome, and erotomania point to the condition where an overinvest-
ment in emotional celebrity threatens the stable self and undermines familial rela-
tions. In the age of liquid modernity where “togetherness has been dismantled”
(Bauman 2000: 21), and social and emotional bonds have been largely rendered
ephemeral, people are particularly susceptible to suffering, to anguish and the pains
of alienation. They long for connection and are implored to find that emotional
attachment to celebrity figures is the answer. Celebrities become the emotional
stream of the modern age, steeped in passion, wet with representations that are
decidedly experiential, even if all is still held in the iron cage of liquid modern
conditions. Este es el párrafo que buscabamos
 Introduction to Part Six 353

Emotion and affect are related if not simultaneous phenomena. As Eric Shouse
(2005) argues,

it is important not to confuse affect with feelings and emotions … Affect is not a per-
sonal feeling. Feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social … and affects
are pre-personal … An affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity; it is a moment
of unformed and unstructured potential … Affect cannot be fully realized in language
… because affect is always prior to and/or outside consciousness … Affect is the body’s
way of preparing itself for action in a given circumstance by adding a quantitative
dimension of intensity to the quality of an experience. The body has a grammar of
its own that cannot be fully captured in language.

Affective celebrity, then, is not the same as personal feeling: it exists outside of lan-
guage and representational discourse, and rises in somatic and asemiotic realms.
Celebrity affect offers up a different set of intensified possibilities for those who
employ cross-modal senses to feel beyond feeling. Ultimately, if one embraces the
logic of sensation and the vibrations of affect in and through the figure of the
celebrity, there is the opportunity to become animal, to be set free on the wild plains
of modern life.

I am a passionate creature. I live in the frenzy of feeling

The chapters included in this part approach the theme of emotional celebrity
through contrasting and sometimes opposing critical and theoretical frames. The
three authors capture, then, the way that emotion has been written about within
celebrity studies while also situating their position with exciting new case studies
and contexts. As scholars of the field, Rojek and Redmond exist at polar ends of
these emotional discussions, the former drawing upon the idea of the para-social to
suggest the inherent distance between celebrity and fan, and the latter drawing upon
phenomenology and sensory aesthetics to champion experience as has having meaty
and transgressive attachments. Driessens places his analysis within field theory and
the operations of the body politic, but making a place for affect to be taken seriously.
In Chris Rojek’s “Frontierism: ‘the frontier thesis,’ affect, and the category of
achieved celebrity,” the focus is closely on the complex relationships between
achieved celebrity, affect and social mobility. His method involves contrasting the
meaning of conquering boundaries expressed in late nineteenth-century theories of
American spatial expansion with the role of achieved celebrity in destabilizing the
categories of stratified society. Rojek uses the term “frontierism” to refer to the part
played by achieved celebrity in challenging social convention and background expec-
tations. He argues that “achieved celebrity unavoidably involves testing boundaries,
since the character of the personal qualities that attract attention capital are honored
as unusual and meriting social license. For these reasons, achieved celebrity comes
with a degree of what might be called boundary leverage.” To illustrate and thicken
his analysis of the boundary-breaking role of achieved celebrity, Rojek explores
the self-promotion and exposure management innovations developed by the artist
354 Sean Redmond

circles around Charles Dickens and Richard Wagner. Rojek concludes his chapter by
suggesting that in pushing back the barriers of ascribed celebrity in the nineteenth
century the reelevated frontier of achieved celebrity allowed in networks of experts
on the presentation of personality that quickly became decisive in the accumulation
of attention capital. This transformation took the form of breeching the barriers of
stratification and building the cult of personality.
In Olivier Driessens’s “The democratization of celebrity: mediatization, promo-
tion, and the body,” he develops a thesis around the increased ubiquity of celebrity.
He argues that set against a general background of “secularization and moderniza-
tion the spectrum of possibilities to become a celebrity has relatively widened, while
new technologies of attention simulate intimacy to exert affect, and intensified and
globalized capitalism has increasingly commodified the celebrity body.” Driessens
uniquely places his analysis of the democratization of celebrity over an extended
period of history, composed of three main historical shifts or waves, each corre-
sponding loosely with certain periods in time. First, there is the shift from ascribed
to achieved celebrity; second, is the shift from achieved to attributed celebrity; and
third, is what is read as the recent shift to the growing but often temporary popular-
ity, both for the audiences and the celebrity and media industries, of reality TV and
DIY celebrities. Driessens applies to each of these waves the complexities of what
democracy, democratic and demotic might mean and how they have uneven trajec-
tories. At each stage, affect becomes increasingly crucial to the politics and poetics
of celebrity democratization.
In “Sensing celebrities,” Sean Redmond explores celebrity through the lens of sen-
sory aesthetics and embodied phenomenology. His position is that one can and
should make sense of celebrities as a certain type of corporeal experience, composed
of, and involved in circulating, clusters of affects and intensities. Redmond draws
upon the unique concept of the celebaesthetic subject to address what he sees as the
intersubjective relationship between fan and celebrity. He undertakes a sense-based
textural analysis of American TV, film and pop star Miley Cyrus in terms of the
way she embodies and sensorializes a heightened form of being-in-the-world. Using
Miley as a case study also allows Redmond to draw into his analysis the issue of gen-
der and race, and the way conductive “skin” can be made to function as a sensory
stereotype. However, he finally concludes that the poetics of the skin can act as a way
of liberating the body from its conditioned docility. In sensing celebrities we liberate
ourselves.

References

Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.

Redmond, S. (2014) Celebrity and the Media. London: Palgrave.
Rojek, C. (2004) Celebrity. London: Reaktion.
Shouse, E. (2005) “Feeling, emotion, affect,” M/C Journal 8 (6), at http://journal.media-
culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php (accessed Apr. 2015).