The Boulevards of Extinction. Andrew Benson Brown

celebrity: embodiment of the new greatness, a light bulb that brightens and shortens its filament life with each new perceptual leap in technology.

      ***

      “Fame—its ideal type,” says the professor, “is a natural outgrowth of sociability based on the unequal distribution of merit. In this sense the desire for it is instinctual, evolutionary, and functional. Widespread praise is a result of fulfilling one’s potential and meeting a shared need in a way that few others can.”

      “Thank you for clearing that up for us, professor. Please continue.”

      “But what is fame, metaphysically?” he asks, pausing to tuck in his beard. “It is for one’s body to transcend itself and become an object in the consciousness of everyone, to usurp people’s thoughts and direct them outward, from self to other.”

      “Excellent! Where would we be without your rigor, doctor? Oh wait, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to presume. You are a credentialed philosopher, aren’t you?”

      “Uhh . . .”

      “What a silly question, of course you are—you have a job! Anyway, the question that’s really on my mind is, what is this obsession for fame that has ballooned into the mania of our age?”

      “Elementary, my boy, elementary.” He pauses to blow pipe smoke in the boy’s face. “It is a desire for every person to want to become an object in the consciousness of others. A society of monads, where substances are reduced to appearances, each striving to make itself into ‘the one true appearance,’ to dominate all of mental space and render everything else a series of modes. For a person who rockets to fame, it is as if the universe of Leibniz suddenly becomes that of an empirical Spinoza. Monadology becomes a material monism, where the persistence of God’s existence—that is, the existence of the famous person—is dependent on the continual observation of all the little modes.”

      “This is all very confusing. But if you keep going on like this I might understand something.”

      “Naturally. But to continue . . . democracy, you see, in creating the equal opportunity for everyone to be an object unto others, causes the desire for it to run rampant in each person, while simultaneously making the possibility that any one person will actually become so miniscule. Such a person can increase the chance of discovery by forming a standardized personality, that is, a person fulfilling the criteria of averageness. If such a person is born average, then they are all the more likely to want to generalize themselves, and all the more likely to succeed—having been born with commonly shared traits, they think it natural to sweep themselves outward into the minds of others and popular culture at large, to standardize themselves into a universal superego lording over the psyches of all. A success story is nothing but a gloss of accident. It is a tale for the limp and lame, an inspiration to the hopeless. It pushes down the top to provoke the dream that the cornerstone can be a floating parapet. In practice everyone is made average, but in ambition no one is a brick in the wall. These two conditions, though contradictory, sit in the democratic mind side by side.”

      “I get it! You’re talking about reality television.”

      “Well . . .”

      “Does it really make viewers stupid like everyone says?”

      “Not quite. It creates the hope that, by being superior in averageness, they are worthy of their obsession: to be worshipped.”

      “I see. That’s good it doesn’t make them stupid. Say, what do you think are the mental and emotional implications of all this? But try and hurry it up. Dancing with the Chefs comes on at eight.”

      “It is a fact of human psychology that one can only emotionally handle knowing a relatively small group of people intimately. Sympathy can only be dispensed within a close circle. Could not, then, assuming intimacy is mutual, the reverse be true—that one can only handle being known among a relatively small group of people? It would seem that the mind is radically unequipped to deal with the consequences of being at the focal point of widespread attention disseminated through modern technology. Of having one’s image projected around the world, talked about by millions, thought about constantly, inhabiting the mass cultural consciousness. To not know anything about people, to know merely that they know you, that your every behavior is a subject of their curiosity and amusement, can be overwhelming. Megalomania, in the form of the development of manifold personality disorders, is the common upshot. Celebrities often substitute their intimate personal relationships for their fan collective. In a sweeping philanthropic gesture, they bestow their image of themselves to the world and shut themselves away to spare past contacts the disagreeable impulses they always wanted to unleash upon them. The result is either to retreat into their mansions in Sunset Boulevard-style, or to turn one’s network of personal associations into a mutual support group composed solely of other famous people . . .”

      “Hey, wouldn’t that be great?” the boy sighs. “My friends are so normal, so . . . boring.”

      “ . . . and it is the people who most crave this fame whose breakdown is most absolute, who become imbalanced—or rather, more imbalanced—when their coveted object does not bring them the happiness and contentment they expected it to. They find that the adoration they sought is both conditional and continual: their every gesture is subject to constant scrutiny. Anything unconventional or eccentric is immediately exploited. Fame genericizes the person beyond the bounds of realism (he must be able to be encompassed by the ego of every person, and therefore must be relatable to all), to an extent that the personality cannot handle: to be normal in every conceivable way, to be ‘perfectly normal,’ in the sense of being the embodiment of all standardized characteristics.”

      “How does somebody become like that? Good enough to be famous?”

      “For a person of real potential these characteristics are no mean feat to attain—it is as difficult to suppress ability as to cultivate it. To become famous, one must incubate qualities that are the antithesis of Castiglione’s courtier. Where the courtier has vast cultural knowledge, the celebrity is oblivious to all but his ego. Where the courtier has wit, the celebrity flaps platitudes with a silver-plated tongue. Where the courtier has military prowess, the celebrity is ready to get in a drunken bar fight to defend the honor of his one-night stand. Where the courtier is proficient in several musical instruments, the celebrity once held a violin while a recording played in the background. If the courtier was the model Renaissance man, today’s model figure is the peasant suddenly granted a noble title on the condition that he don a jester’s jingly hood and motley speedo—left out is the critical function of the jester, the divine right of the nobility, and the peasant’s stock of useful everyday knowledge. The result is a figure of charm rooted in a useless beauty devoid of any classically sublime aesthetic.”

      The boy looks at his watch. A quarter to eight. He tiptoes out of the room. The professor doesn’t notice. Gesticulating wildly, he continues:

      “And then, after the triumph has faded and the weight of routine threatens total breakdown, comes the negative epiphany: that fame is not about adoration, but envy—though not at first of the sort you imagined. For it is not your achievements they are envious of (there are none), nor you (you have no talent). It is, rather, your fame itself they envy (or rather, the fame momentarily descending to inhabit you), and the effect of your fame. They imagine your fame soothes you to sleep at night, while it in truth it has become an unending torment to you. Secondarily, they envy your wealth, which they imagine brings you pleasure, but which at best is an inadequate consolation. And if this unlikely realization comes to you, it may be followed by this rare pearl: that there is no ‘long view.’ Fame in our age involves a contraction of time, both subjectively—in the Warholian fifteen minute sense—and historically: out of unworthiness, your actions are inscribed in no annals, rest in no cultural memory. So when Silenus says that the best thing for mankind was not to have been born, we could perhaps amend his carpe mortem admonition as the next-best alternative: ‘to be forgotten soon!’ And in fact, Silenus’s statements of ought are facts for the celebritas species: the people of the present forget you soon, and for the people of the future it is, for all practical purposes, as if you never existed at all.”

      World