Celebrity and fame: a process analysis, FT Amy Winehouse and the Queen
1. Introduction
Hollywood, Bollywood, awards, A-list: all names associated with the notions of fame and
celebrity in the entertainment industry, an industry that builds its success and profits around
such notions. In this article I explore these concepts, developing the thesis that fame and
celebrity are engineered constructs that are embodied in specific individuals and
representations and disembodied in broader cultural, economic and performative categories.
Both embodiment and disembodiment operate in counter-point or synergy, as immanence and
transcendence. This interaction of the various elements of fame and celebrity are theorised
using the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, the British-American philosopher
and mathematician. The case example of Amy Winehouse, the late British folk rock singer
and composer, is used to illustrate the function of celebrity, fame and knownness, and the
economic,
cultural and performative categories, together with the Queen, the British
Monarch..
2. Elaborating the terms, constructing an ontology
What is the difference between fame, celebrity and what I term ‘knownness’? The term
‘knownness’ means tacit public knowledge about and appreciation of a performer, usually
gained through a body of work and accomplishments, and a set of affirming interactions,
networks and relationships accumulated over time. Celebrity and ‘known-ness’ overlap and
have common features but are not the same. ‘Celebrity’ I take to mean a particularly striking
prominence and recognisability in the various media forms, including Twitter and other
social media. It is especially palpable and concrete, imbued with an individual’s personas,
and linked to public reception and resonance in consumers’ visual mindstreams through
facial, name and brand recognition. Celebrity is thus a collocation of embodied phenomena
with a disembodied set of mediatised images which become distributed and a commoditized
in global media outlets. Thus, at least partially, celebrity is manufactured and constructed in
response to public taste and target markets.
Its semantics also revolve around the
associations of the word itself with particular public figures and it designation to certain types
of people. Fame, however, is a state of being famous or having renown forged in a society’s
collective consciousness, by which I mean a society’s sense of itself that is shared by
individuals and groups within that society. It is a conceptual category that centres on
enduring notions of public success or an attribution of particular valuableness that emerges
from what a society deems as important. One can speak of a person having fame as a state of
being sustained in a particular cultural matrix; but one can also postulate fame as a meta-
cultural frame of valuing within a society. Thus, the notion of fame forms the socio-cultural
ground in which celebrity is actuated.
It is entirely possible for an individual performer (whether in the media, the Arts, sport or
public life) to embody and be manufactured as celebrity, to be known tacitly as performer
with accomplishments, and to be attributed with notions of fame as a state of being that
evokes a certain consciousness.
3. Considering fame and celebrity as embodied performance
Fame and celebrity
-performance ability
-codification of performance expectations, performing celebrity
-reception as desire: to-be-like, to-be-with
4. Considering fame and celebrity as disembodiment
-set of
5. Fame as an economic category (the media and fame)
6. Fame as a cultural category
-interesting how fame and celebrity are most associated with film and TV, not theatre, and is
linked with the 20th century emergence of media in consciousness and cultural expression
-perpetuation of the grand narrative of success. Success stories.
7. The notion of visibility
The term ‘visibility’ can be conceived as one indicator of the the degree of celebrity. This
term is taken to mean both the overt representations in media forms and the reception of such
representations by consumers, leading to how heightened the celebrity is in a consumer's
consciousness or a distinct conjuration associated with a celebrity. It is this coming-together
or gestalt of representation and reception that creates visibility. The term implies five
dimensions which are understood as operating synergistically:
1. Frequency. How often the representations and products of a performer are seen in
mainstream media. This suggests demand and so a strong positive reception for the
person.
2. Scatter. The scatter or spread of representations and products across media outlets,
including online media forms
3. Earnings generation. The direct and indirect earnings potential of the person and how
cashable representations and products are in the media
4. Persistence. The enduring nature of representations or their persistence in
consciousness. This can be related to the notoriety of the person behind these
representations.
5. Recognisability.
what makes someone famous (is it the sheer ‘visibility’ of someone) or is it the coming
together of an assortment of factors that coalesce into a profile of fame
In terms of these five dimensions High, medium and low visibility
8. Whitehead’s process philosophy
In consideration of the factors and processes involved in the construction of celebrity and
fame, there is indubitably a complex inter-play of essential and contingent elements, some of
which have already been noted above. These elements come together to form a unique, nonrepeatable whole that begins in potentiality and concludes in actuality. Theorising about this
‘coming together’ requires a comprehensive philosophical platform. I find such a compelling
and useful platform in the work of mathematician, astronomer and philosopher, Alfred North
Whitehead (Lowe, 1985). Whitehead formulated a process philosophy or process ontology
about how phenomena in the universe are formed and the patterns of their ‘coming together’
(see Hosinski, 1993). It is my contention that this cosmic or universal scale of
conceptualisation about formation has direct application to other phenomena, including those
at the level of the social and cultural, as seen in the notions of fame and celebrity. In other
words, the formation of complex clusters as described by Whitehead is useful, analogously,
to complex social phenomena, including celebrity.
While his primary vision was the physical sciences (Epperson, 2004), I am applying his
ideas, phenomenologically and culturally, to the especially human and creative context of
celebrity and fame. Whitehead’s terminology, such as “creativity”, “novelty” and the
principle of “concrescence”, is particularly useful, I argue, in theorizing processes involved in
manufacturing celebrity. Whitehead conceived the universe in terms of events rather than
particles. This suggests a happening, a space and a time as integral features of his analytics,
features that, in my view, have this wider socio-cultural application. His is a descriptive
generalisation about the nature of the universe that contains within it useful ontological
categories, though he does not appear to speak explicitly to human existence and experience.
However, scholars such Van der Veken (2000) point especially to Whitehead’s notion of
‘prehension’ as revealing the existential potential of his ideas. Van der Veken takes
prehension to mean the givenness of a something, together with an ability as humans to be
consciously aware of and grasp events in the physical world causally. It is this link between
the intentional relation of an object to a person and its causal antecedents that is quite unique
in Whitehead. While Whitehead’s primary concern is with an ontological understanding of
the physical universe through a set of definitive categories, he does provide a distinctive
epistemological conjunction between humankind and nature. The idea of prehension provides
a means of understanding the causality that constructs nature while at the same time
accounting for human experience and intentionality, but without implying a deterministic
world.
One of Whitehead’s most important categories is “novelty”. According to Whitehead, in
Process and Reality (1978, PR hereafter), the “production of novelty”, and creativity as the
“principle of novelty”, is a category for understanding the function of entities (objects or
states of being that exist or potentially exist).
Through novelty the many become
differentiated by the “one actual occasion” and creativity introduces novelty into the unity of
the many (PR, 21). By “novelty”, Whitehead is referring to the intrinsic property of elements
to form in unique patterns and be constituted in creative formations. This is part of his
category of the ultimate, where Whitehead is expounding on universal principles about
entities. Together with this “principle of novelty”, which implies the “one actual occasion”
and distinguishes the one from the disjunctive many, Whitehead also suggests the term
“togetherness” (PR, 21) to describe the conjunctive occasion in which many entities come
together or experience togetherness in what Whitehead suggests is a complex unity. So, the
many are unified as a whole but also differentiated by the principle of novelty or creativity.
Moreover, the unity of entities has a novel togetherness in being uniquely together, a concept
that Whitehead calls “concrescence” (PR, 21).
What a celebrity embodies become the “one actual occasion” (PR, 21) based on novelty and
difference from the ‘many’. This concept suggests that each express of celebrity is unique,
but at the same time there is a complex unity of broader social factors, representations and
discourses about fame that binds the many entities together and is itself unique and novel. In
effect, the unique and the individual of celebrity are also juxtaposed and in opposition to the
composite and the whole, and both make up the idiosyncratic nature of celebrity. ***Any
examination of the phenomenon of an actor’s performance experience should also be
described with recognition of the contingency of the whole. One of the implications of
Whitehead’s work for understanding performance is that the “one actual occasion” of an
individual actor and that which is contingent to it and part of the ‘many’ (the other human
and non-human entities in the performance space) are seen as both dependent and in a
differentiable relationship. The phenomenon of-itself and the influences that shape it can thus
be identified and described.
Whitehead establishes in his “twenty-seven categories of explanation” (PR, 22—30) another
concept that also seems to have significant application to performance. He states that “the
actual world is a process…the process is the becoming of actual entities” (PR, 22). In their
potential for unity in an actual concrescence (in the many) there is a ‘becoming’, whether or
not a particular entity is actual or not actual. However, to be ‘actual’ means that an entity
“has significance for itself” (PR, 25). It is self-functioning and has its own identity, which in
turn allows it to experience the immediacy of its own subjectivity. This process of moving to
actual identity constitutes the category of ‘becoming’. The condition that surrounds or causes
this process of becoming for an entity of itself and in concrescence (as part of the many) is
what Whitehead calls an “ontological principle” (PR, 24). Furthermore, one actual entity can
cause another actual entity to form and each can be objectified in terms of the other, not as
subject-object but as subject-subject.
When an actor creates a character and takes on a role in performance, there is a becoming (a
bringing into perceptual existence) of a creative entity that has the potential for
transformation, change and serendipity. In theatre, the event of a performance causes a
becoming of this creative entity: a perceptual object, which we might call ‘a performance’ or
‘a character’, finds its self-identity in the performance itself because the performance is the
ground of this ‘becoming’. Rehearsal could be conceived as a preparation of this ground such
that ‘becoming’ is given its substance. Before an actor enters the space of the performance
the role of the actor is not yet ‘actual’. It only becomes such in performance, and ceases to be
actual when the performance finishes. More broadly, the actual world (the world of the stage)
is a system of entities that are ‘becoming’, and while each entity of performance finds its own
subjectivity and its own ‘becoming of itself’, there is also a ‘becoming’ of the ‘many’ (the
concrescence). The ‘becoming’ of each role and the ‘becoming’ of a performance itself are
distinctly co-dependent, yet differentiable. The process notions of actuality and potentiality
that constitute what Whitehead conceives as ‘becoming’ are thus more than useful as
categories to describe the actions of an actor juxtaposed with the constitution of an ensemble
in a performance space.
In practical terms, an ensemble (through co-presence) in performance creates a unique
existence and state of being in performance because actors (and by extension the non-human
components) combine in a process subject to novelty and unexpected combinations. The
unique existence of an ensemble is contingent on the inimitable existence of each actor as
they create the entity of a role on stage. In effect, the process of ‘becoming’ for an acting
performance leads to an idiosyncratic state of being in the actual performance both on the
level of the whole and in the case of each component (each subjective part) of the whole. One
cannot see the subjectivity of the individual without also seeing the being of the whole. In
performance we do not have a set of objects in a performance space but a set of subjectivities
that react and interact to create the new and the novel. This creation of the new and the novel
is inextricably a process of ‘becoming’.
From the previous discussion, the following possibilities of Whitehead’s analytics for
theatrical performance emerge:
1. It is the novel and unique performance and experiences of each actor as a single entity
that are essential for the formation of a novel and idiosyncratic composite entity that
is a performance of a dramatic work.
2. The singular entities of an actor’s experiences while performing, and the work of an
ensemble in performance, are differentiable from but also in unique juxtaposition to
the composite entity of a whole performance event. Nothing exists for itself and of
itself, but it has uniqueness only as it is positioned in relation to the other.
3. There is a process of becoming in performance that implies the coming into being of a
unique set of entities in subjective relationship that creates a distinctive experience
and formation. Each entity (a role, for example) has a distinct subjectivity, but there is
a collective subjectivity especially contingent on the individual, which is prehended in
a physical space through an ensemble.
4. In considering an ontology of conditions that create performance, we must account for
the role of experience and what emanates from experience. The notion of prehension
suggests that experience is the core of the novel and the creative that are the
constitutive ground for making performance. Put simplistically performance does not
exist without experience and awareness of experience.
Whitehead’s usefulness to my phenomenological analyses is especially seen in his notion of
juxtaposition. Through an understanding of a performance as a novel event I have come to
appreciate each performance as being constituted creatively with many inter-dependent
aspects, including the formative role of human experience and the co-subjectivity of the
ensemble. While I acknowledge the differences of Whitehead’s approach with
phenomenology, existential claims must also be claims that encompass a human relationship
with nature. Indeed, much of the nomenclature of Whitehead’s naturalism implies a link
between inner human expressiveness (creativity, novelty and the like), awareness and action
(in prehension) and the external world. The contiguity of humans with the world is to me a
compelling position. Finally, Whitehead’s focus on processes as events implies a close
affinity of performance and the Arts with its natural expression in event.
9. Whitehouse. A process analysis
Winehouse as a novel and idipsyncratic pheomenon containing a collocation of
-her distinctive style and voice
-connected soulful music
-the archetypal story of the working class girl made good—the rags to riches
-celebrity as a caustic phenomenon that shaped her subjectivity
-notoriety and
10. The Queen. A process analysis
fame built on the
11. Conclusion
References
Celebrity and power: fame in contemporary culture P. David Marshall
Claims to fame: celebrity in contemporary America Joshua Gamson