CELEBRITY AND SCHADENFREUDE

Abstract

This paper explores the popularity of contemporary expressions of delight in celebrity downfall, or Schadenfreude towards celebrity culture, and questions to what extent they can be understood as cultural critiques of economic inequality. For just as the economy has its own parables, so do ‘cultural’ expressions contain parables of normativity about economic life. We argue that Schadenfreude's relationship to ‘equality’ can be read in terms of social, cultural and economic blockages, and investigate some of the history to this feeling by exploring different arguments over the meaning and status of ‘equality’ in modern and post-modern societies. This survey of its contested meanings highlights the distinctions which have been made and elided between property and identity, the economic and the cultural, and the political and the private. These geneaologies are used to interpret Schadenfreude, and to highlight the tension between two different aspects of contemporary subjectivity: ‘integrity’ and marketability of the self. By drawing on these contested genealogies and theories of equality, we are also arguing that Schadenfreude toward celebrity in its most common contemporary form cannot be seen merely as a superstructural phenomenon of a neo-liberal base but rather as stitched into and as of a piece with this neo-liberal culture. We argue that whilst Schadenfreude is able to be articulated in different directions, it overwhelmingly works to express irritation at inequalities but not to change the wider rules of the current social system, and its political economy often actually entails it fuelling inequalities of wealth. In these terms, Schadenfreude can be perceived as being intimately related to autistic economic culture and as being able to be perpetuated by coasting on its own status as an autistic response.

Keywords:

• celebrity
• cultural economy
• equality
• Schadenfreude

Notes

1. ‘Civilian’ is the term used by celebrities for ‘non-celebrity’ members of the public.

2. Here Ahmed follows one convention in cultural studies/the humanities of using ‘economies’ as a descriptive term to indicate the circulation of something other than money. (If we apply this to the recent growth of analysis of ‘the economy’ using other frames of reference than that of neo-classical economic theory, or, in Fullbrook's (2005) terms ‘post-autistic’ economics, then such work in these terms functions to analyse economic economies, or economies of economics.)

3. http://www.popbitch.com/home/category/latest-issue/ (accessed 24 April 2009).

4. If relationship to the celebrity is experienced through the subjectivizing property of ‘emotion’, the relationship can become ‘personal’ and take on a ‘pathological’ quality marked by forms of over-identification or fantasies of personal familiarity. In its pathological over-investment however adulation is equally prone to reversal as the obsessive fan morphs into the murderous stalker. This operatic intensification of the more depersonalized economy of affect in relation to celebrity nonetheless highlights something of affect's own disavowed negative potential; a potential that is manifest in Schadenfreude.

5. The discourse of equality is something which emerged in the contingent circumstances of the Greek polis:

 … ever since Solon had abolished slavery for debt in Athens, all cities had included a mass of poor people who, though unsuited to the practice of law or leadership, were nonetheless present in the city as free men, possessing the common name, the common title of the political community: freedom. (Ranciere 1995, p. 13)

6. This instability is the essence of Lefort's characterization of the ‘democratic form’.

7. http://www.bbc.co.uk/celebdaq/ (accessed April 2009).

8. Itself originally an ‘industry’ rather than an academic term.

9. Connell cites sex outside marriage, an example which now dates the piece given that celebrities’ extra-marital sex is today usually taken as the norm than the exception.

10. Naturally, ‘volitional’ here is itself entirely arbitrary. This might range from classic narrative tropes of talents squandered, getting ‘above oneself’ in acts of hubris that misread the scale of one's talent, being ‘found out’, or simply being a woman where this is deemed to require a permanent and often contradictory set of vigilances around personal appearance etc.

11. The post-autistic economic movement began in 2000 when French students created a petition lambasting their curriculum, stating that, instead, they wanted a curriculum based on a pluralistic approach to the subject, and has since influenced a wide range of critical approaches to economics from a variety of viewpoints. Such paralysis also resonates with David Harvey's account of how today the political left predominantly exists in a state of ‘cultural paralysis’ at the current recession and of articulating ways beyond the dominance of neo-liberal economics (Harvey 2008, ICA talk).