The Two Bodies of Achieved Celebrity

From Medieval to Tudor times, the doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies was fundamental in government and the reproduction of social order. The doctrine held that the body of the monarch is simultaneously mortal and immortal. In terms of the hegemony of the power regime, this was given by God. It has long been assumed that the rise of Liberal Plebiscitary Parliamentary Democracy put an end to Royal absolutism. This paper uses the political thought of Carl Schmitt and Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz to examine if this assumption is valid. The paper argues that the doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies survives in greatly translated form. The highest achieved celebrities today have two bodies, the one (biological and incorrigible), the other (mediated and incorrigible). The paper uses data from the posthumous existence of the highest achieved celebrities to substantiate this proposition. In turn, this leads to the beginnings of an enquiry into what the role of achieved celebrity in Liberal Plebiscitary Parliamentary Democracy, i.e., a society based on the principle of homogeneous equality, might be

Fame Attack

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The follow up to Chris Rojek's hugely successful Celebrity, this book assesses celebrity culture today. It explores how the fads, fashions and preoccupations of celebrities enter the popular lifeblood, explains what is distinctive about contemporary celebrity, and reveals the psychological, social and economic consequences of fame both upon the public and celebrities themselves. The book develops the framework for looking at celebrity culture which Rojek set out back in 2001, by showing how ascribed celebrity, achieved celebrity and celetoids overlap. The book gives a new emphasis to the role of the media and public relations in engineering fame, and the psychological consequences of celebrity - notably Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Celebrity Worship Syndrome. The book is a landmark contribution in explaining how celebrities dominate the social horizon and why we need them

Ways of escape : modern transformations of leisure and travel

This thesis challenges the conventional assumptions that leisure and travel are associated with experience of freedom and escape. It argues that leisure behaviour has been shaped by programmes of moral regulation. The thesis argues that these programmes are deeply rooted. For comparative purposes, moral regulation in the middle ages and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are discussed. However, the main historical focus is on moral regulation in bourgeois society. It is argued that bourgeois culture sought to divide modern society into segments of experience: Private life was divided from public life, work from leisure, the female role from the male role, the bourgeois class from the working class, and so forth. The underlying aim behind these divisions was self realization. Through the `rational' bourgeois ordering of things it was hoped that the individual would maximize his or her capacities. Leisure and travel were part of the programme of self making. So far from being `free activities' they were self conscious activities geared to the aim of self realization. This thesis argues that there was a contradiction between the ambition of bourgeois culture which was to create a permanent rational order of things, and the action of modernity, which operated to neutralize or overturn bourgeois divisions. This contradiction is explored in the second chapter where the leisure of bourgeois women is discussed. The chapter attacks the feminist orthodoxy in the sociology of leisure which maintains that women's influence in leisure and travel is negligible. It examines the experience of bourgeois women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It submits that modernity operated not merely to subordinate women but also to activate them. Examples of the influence of women in shaping the aesthetics of metropolitan culture are discussed to illustrate the point. The thesis maintains that modernity is still the essential context for understanding leisure and travel experience. Chapter three attempts to compare modernity and postmodernity. In chapters four and five examples of leisure and travel forms in the last twenty five years are discussed in order to test the fashionable postmodern proposition that we have now moved into a condition of postmodernity. The thesis closes with an attempt to drawn the main themes of the thesis together. It reassesses the contradiction between the ambition of bourgeois society and the action of modernity. It concludes that the debate on modernity and postmodernity does not suggest the emergence of a new social condition. Rather its main effect has been to help us to understand the action of modernity more clearly

Discrete element modelling and simulation of sand mould manufacture for the lost foam process

This paper presents a numerical model of mould manufacture for the lost foam casting process. The process of mould filling with sand and sand compaction by vibration are modelled using spherical (in 3D) or cylindrical (in 2D) discrete elements. The motion of discrete elements is described by means of equations of rigid body dynamics. Rigid particles interact among one another with contact forces, both in normal and tangential directions. Numerical simulation predicts defects of the mould due to insufficient sand compaction around the pattern. Combining the discrete element model of sand with the finite element model of the pattern allows us to detect possible distortion of the pattern during mould filling and compaction. Results of numerical simulation are validated by comparison with experimental data

The iconicity of celebrity and the spiritual impulse

Celebrity has a powerful material presence in contemporary consumer culture but its surface aesthetic resonates with the promise of deeper meanings. This Marketplace Icon contribution speculates on the iconicity of celebrity from a spiritual perspective. The social value or authenticity of contemporary celebrity, and the social processes through which it emerges, are matters of debate amongst researchers and competing approaches include field theory, functionalism, and anthropologically inflected accounts of the latent need for ritual, myth and spiritual fulfillment evinced by celebrity “worship.” We focus on the latter area as a partial explanation of the phenomenon whereby so many consumers seem so enchanted by images of, and stories about, individuals with whom they, or we, often have little in common. We speculate that the powerful presence of celebrity in Western consumer culture to some extent reflects and exploits a latent need for myths of redemption through the iconic character of many, though by no means all, manifestations of celebrity consumption

“A Cathartic Moment in a Man’s Life”: Homosociality and Gendered Fun on the Puttan Tour

Rarely addressed in academic scholarship, the puttan tour is a well-known form of entertainment in Italy where young men drive around in small groups with the aim of spotting street sex workers. On some occasions, the participants will approach the sex workers to strike up a conversation. On others, they will shout out insults from their car then drive away. This article aims to advance a detailed analysis of this underexplored cultural practice drawing on a diverse body of scholarship exploring the intersection of masculinity, leisure, and homosociality. By analyzing stories of puttan tours gathered mostly online, including written accounts and YouTube videos, our aim is to explore the appeal of the puttan tour through an analysis of how homosociality, humor, and laughter operate in this example of gendered fun. To this end, we look at the multiple and often equivocal meanings of this homosocial male-bonding ritual, its emotional and affective dynamics, and the ways in which it reproduces structures of inequality while normalizing violence against sex workers

F.J. Turner’s ‘frontier thesis’: the ruse of American ‘character'

American society was transformed by the expansion of capital Westward and the explosion in opportunities that ensued for land grabbing and agricultural and industrial investment. In Turner’s (1961) frontier thesis this was portrayed as resulting in the emergence of ‘the new man’ i.e. the fulfilment of American character. The frontier thesis is a neo-Darwinian contribution. It posits exceptionalism and transcendence as the keys to American character. The gene pool of the Americans, thriving in a new geographical and social environment, is depicted as achieving a higher level of development than the stratified societies of Old Europe. What the thesis ignores is the importance of orthodox Eurocentric strategies of colonization and land appropriation. Turner portrays pioneer/settler society as a heroic departure, but in many ways, it is a continuation of European precedents. Analogously, the proposition that the push West crystallized American character obscures the role of personality, especially in urban-industrial settings, in establishing the parameters of American life. Turner conceived of character as emerging from a struggle with the spatial frontier. But the struggles of personality with the social frontier of repression and establishment values is no less significant. The paper examines the tensions between character and personality by using some ideas developed by Carl Schmitt on the significance of ‘the opportunity’ in competitive advantage. The importance of the opportunity and personality in developing the American way of life are examined by the vaudeville and celebrity traditions. The exploitation of contingency for personal advantage, the use of melodrama to engineer social impact, the social validation of forthright behaviour are examined in the context of the careers of the film actress Mae West and the comedian Bob Hope

What a girl’s gotta do: the labour of the biopolitical celebrity in austerity Britain

This article debunks the wide-spread view that young female celebrities, especially those who rise to fame through reality shows and other forms of media-orchestrated self-exposure, dodge ‘real’ work out of laziness, fatalism and a misguided sense of entitlement. Instead, we argue that becoming a celebrity in a neoliberal economy such as that of the United Kingdom, where austerity measures disproportionately disadvantage the young, women and the poor is not as irregular or exceptional a choice as previously thought, especially since the precariousness of celebrity earning power adheres to the current demands of the neoliberal economy on its workforce. What is more, becoming a celebrity involves different forms of labour that are best described as biopolitical, since such labour fully involves and consumes the human body and its capacities as a living organism. Weight gain and weight loss, pregnancy, physical transformation through plastic surgery, physical symptoms of emotional distress and even illness and death are all photographically documented and supplemented by extended textual commentary, usually with direct input from the celebrity, reinforcing and expanding on the visual content. As well as casting celebrity work as labour, we also maintain that the workings of celebrity should always be examined in the context of wider cultural and real economies