Celebrities, Please!

Advertisements often lead us to believe that celebrities are ideal human beings, flawless forms worthy of mass envy due to their social status. In the eyes of a consumer, they sit at the pinnacle of a capitalist society. And yet, I often wonder how these supposedly “superior beings” receive advertisements; if they have everything, then how do advertisements work their magic by proposing that their lives lack certain commodities? How do they project anxiety onto the object of perfection? And do celebrities even see themselves within altered photographs that purport their flawlessness? In other words, what are you really advertising as a celebrity: the product or yourself?

I tend towards the later interpretation, and I feel as though celebrities do receive mixed messages from advertisements. Being able to purchase any commodity that associates its usage with love, friendship, and truth doesn’t necessarily guarantee these experiences. "Money can’t buy happiness," as the old saying goes. As a result, celebrities are equally susceptible to feeling depression and low-self worth that advertisements engender in the common man; just look at how many celebrities have died from drug overdose and alcohol abuse. (Need I mention anorexia for the ladies?) They know the true emptiness of consumer culture, because they are able to buy everything. The insatiability of their desires and continuance of commonplace human anxieties showcases the hollow promises advertisers are willing to make just to make a buck.
Now maybe this idea of the depressed upper class, or bourgeoisie, is a myth propagated in order to make the proletariat more appreciative of what they have. Then again, it could hold some water. A few days ago I looked up Japanese advertisements with famous celebrities in them on YouTube. These celebrities know no shame. They are willing to sell their identities to advertisement agencies in order to push products in a foreign country full of consumers willing to gobble up anything they tout. I can only imagine what it must feel like to have your sense of self chipped away at by vulture-like capitalist societies around the world! Sturken and Cartwright say, “When we consume commodities, we thus consume them as commodity signs—we aim to acquire, through purchasing a product, the meaning with which it is encoded.” (206) Therefore, if a celebrity associates himself with a certain product, then consumers of that product are in a sense eating away at the celebrity’s identity. Before the advent of the Internet, celebrities could hide their self-defamation from fans back in the States, but now it’s out in the open. I suggest you watch some of these Japanese ads; they’re hilarious (and sort of sad), especially the ones with our esteemed governor in them.

Silenus' Worldview

Postmodernism poses the same problem that cultural relativism poses to ethics. Cultural relativism is basically this: if different societies and cultures have different practices, who’s to say that one culture’s practices are better or worse than another’s? It’s a valid point, and yet instinctively I feel as though cannibalism is a bad thing. Of course, according to cultural relativism, a culture that practices cannibalism is no better or worse than one that doesn’t. Like ethics, society has to move past the philosophical quagmire that is postmodernism.

You have to move past this way of thinking because it is stagnant. And not that stagnation is a bad thing (perhaps I’m simply holding onto a modernist concept that progress is good), but to be honest we only have a limited amount of time to live. If it’s all been done before, and there’s no way to critically analyze anything (no ‘critical distance’), then what’s the point of it all? What’s the point of life? And maybe like Silenus taught King Midas, there is no point and it would be better if we had never been born at all. But then again we are alive, we are conscious, and me must deal with it!

Modernism may have been a pipe dream, but we can't live without the hope it provides. After all, Prometheus’ gift to man (alongside fire) was blind hope. Postmodernism is an acceptance of a world without hope, without some sort of foundation (because structure and form are illusory). Is that really what we want, to keep hope trapped inside Pandora’s box? (All of these references to mythology indicate to me my own longing for some sort of historical precedent; perhaps that is because our generation rests between modernism and postmodernism.) Postmodernism, on the other hand, leaves every question unanswered and a pungent sense that originality is a fallacy.

Although I’m reminded of a lot of contemporary plays where these issues are hotly debated, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is the quintessential example. The play takes place during the turn of the millennium. There is fear that the world will end, or worse, remain as is. Many of the main characters describe life in America as evoking motion sickness while remaining perfectly immobile. Ideas on justice, history, religion, race, politics and love are challenged in a postmodern world. Harper, an agoraphobic married to a closeted republican homosexual, sits inside all day cogitating these paradoxes. In a mutual dream sequence she shares with Prior, a prophet dying from AIDs, they discourse over “the limitations of the imagination.” (I.vii.) She says, “Imagination can’t create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions… So when we think we’ve escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it’s really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable. Don’t you think it’s depressing?” (I.vii.)
That’s right! Postmodernism is depressing. I’ve heard tirades similar to Harper’s from frustrated screenwriters, who claim that there are only a fixed number of plots within human consciousness and that all stories are merely remixed versions of these finite plot lines.

So, let’s say that we accept the nonexistence of objective reality (that everything is relative and originality is a myth); what does that society look like, where we no longer strive to be gods but resign ourselves to the nonpartisan position of the satyrs? Someone needs to stop this before we all become cynical Sileni!

Beware of Hikikomori!

I’d like to narrow this chapter down to one specific quote: “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” (Andy Warhol) His prediction certainly seems to be coming true. Since the advent of the Internet in conjunction with standard modes of communication (like television, radio, and magazines), hierarchal structures in entertainment and elsewhere are flattening out. Thomas L. Friedman, who wrote The World is Flat, spoke last week about how this same trend is occurring in the buisness world as well. Anyone and everyone can compete. As a result, the media, which has generally been controlled in the past by either corporations or governments, is now in the hands of the populace (or, I’d go so far as to say the proletariat). This level playing field has advanced all cultures worldwide one-step closer to a utopian society where everyone is equal. But is equality really a good thing?

In the animated movie, The Incredibles, Helen Parr tells her son, “Everyone’s special, Dash.” To which he retorts, “Which is another way of saying no one is.” If everyone is allowed his or her fifteen minutes of fame, then stardom will cease to be desirable; communal validation of self-worth will cease to be a tenet of our modern society. Instead of self-worth being determined through meritocracy, it’ll have to be engendered internally. The noted increase in narcissism in today’s youth can be seen as an unconscious reaction to the horizontal societal structure upheld by the Internet. As this horizontal structure clashes with Western ideals of individuality, self-discovery may even be forced into realms of complete isolation. In order to preserve self-worth, individuals may close themselves off from the rest of the world, neglecting the presence of others, while clinging to an illusory notion of uniqueness.

This trend has already started to take hold in Japan. Hikikomori are adolescent males who have completely withdrawn from society, basically refusing to come out of their rooms. I watched a whole anime series on this “sociological phenomenon” called NHK ni Yokoso! Although it may sound like an amusing prospect, locking yourself away in your room (in your parent’s house, no less), it is a serious all consuming form of depression. And if my hunch is correct, this new horizontal societal structure may have something to do with it.

“Yay!” for communists. “Boo!” for capitalists. Of course, then again I could be wrong about this whole thing and simply expressing my own fears of digital Maoism. However, let me warn you by saying that Jennifer Hudson winning the Oscar for best supporting actress is only a foretaste of the feast to come.

Theory of Everything

First off, I must admit that I have never read a science fiction book. My high school physics teacher attempted to introduce us to the genre by making it a class assignment: give a PowerPoint presentation on a science fiction book. Of course, I chose How To Build A Time Machine by Paul Davies, which ultimately concluded that time machines were a captivating improbability. But I do have an appreciation for movies like The Matrix and unsolved astrophysical quandaries (like string theory), so I didn’t feel completely out of the loop.

In fact, during both of the panel sessions I was able to draw a lot of parallels to theatre. Briefly, theatre and philosophy have been at odds since Plato’s time (and thanks in large part to Plato’s The Republic). The conflict fundamentally boils down to the difference between wisdom and knowledge: knowledge being facts and information, while wisdom is learnt through experience. Theatre gives you wisdom through the experience of other characters, while philosophy sadly gives you ineffectual knowledge.

However, intelligence in today’s society suggests a vast accumulation of knowledge. Nathan Schurr, who sat on the first panel, is a graduate student currently funded by the government to research teamwork between artificial intelligence (agents) and humans. As a side note, the term agent for artificial intelligence connotes for me the agents in The Matrix; so when he talked about agents and humans working together I immediately thought “Fat chance!” They might want to consider revising their terminology.
After the panel I approached Mr. Schurr and asked him, “Why aren’t scientists tackling artificial wisdom instead of artificial intelligence?” In short, his response was that wisdom is hard to program. Agents are great at gleaning pertinent information during a crisis, but are unsure as to which strategies to implement. They can’t choose. Inevitably, that’s where the human falls into the equation, to make these decisive decisions. Also, artificial intelligence is versatile; it can be attached to a robot, palm pilot, computer, whatever. Another intriguing question is “Would human/agent interaction improve if the human didn’t know he was communicating with an agent?”

In the second panel, the speakers talked about how science fiction evokes the sublime. Like the images from the Hubble telescope of nebulae, which are basically playful coloring books for scientists, who make numerous aesthetic decisions in choosing their color palette to represent different gases. These breathtaking images of outer space often reflect the paintings of the American west; probably stemming from or feeding the slogan, “Space: the final frontier.”

This dialectic struggle between the individual and the cosmos reminds me of Nietzsche’s Apollonian vs. Dionysian. The idea of being swallowed whole by the divine, a complete loss of individuality, which these images evoke, falls into the realm of the god of theatre, Dionysius. Then again while you’re swimming in the euphoria of nonexistent self-consciousness (proclaiming, “Objective reality is a lie!”), you’ll find yourself only moments later stressing out over a midterm or some boy. In conclusion, when attempting to comprehend the divine, it is a never-ending cycle of hope and despair, originality and rhetoric.