Avatar Obama in the age of liquid celebrity

Abstract

Barak Obama, orator extraordinaire, the embodiment of the American success myth, ‘global’ prophet of the adoring masses and multi-media auratic figure, is the leading illustration of what is the expanded nexus of celebrity, spectacle and politics in the age of what Zygmund Bauman refers to as liquid modernity or ‘the era of disembedding without re-embedding’ (2001, p. 89). This is the era in which a traumatic sense of fear, uncertainty and transience defines one's relationship to the nation state, and social (media) centre, as they lose their economic singularity and cultural coherency and cohesiveness in a world system ever inter-connected and driven increasingly, incessantly by supra-corporate concerns and spectacular celebrity-based presentations. In this world of ‘togetherness dismantled’ (Bauman 2003, p. 119), the disenfranchised individual feels they cannot meet the trans-capital intensive, show reel-like, boundaryless world on solid ground. That adoration, or a liquefied definition of it, is key to this imagined and affective communion between Obama and those who adore him, suggests that there is a terrible wanting and simultaneous waning to those who look for such rootedness and the promise of deliverance in the celebrity political figure. This is a charismatic authority figure who promises this solidity yet streams in and out of material view, unable to fix or properly propagate their communion beyond triumphant spectacularism. Their ‘lightness of being’ (ibid, p. 123–9) is powerfully seductive and decidedly empty because it echoes the instantaneous (instant) way in which all lives are increasingly led. I will suggest that liquid celebrity is one of the cornerstones of liquid modernity, and Barack Obama is the epitome of this ‘runniness’.

Keywords:

• Obama
• liquid celebrity
• spectacle
• avatar
• charismatic authority
• emotion

Introduction

Obama loves New Zealand

The ZMFM Breakfast Show with Polly and Grant is one of New Zealand's most popular radio shows. Irreverent, mainstream, topical and occasionally softly political, Polly and Grant provide the soundtrack to the start of the weekday. During the American Presidential Election campaign in 2008, which ran at the same time as New Zealand's General Election, Barack Obama became a constant topic on the show, with Polly and Grant regularly playing snippets of his speeches, commenting on his extraordinary aura and charisma and championing his political message. During one show (22 October 2008), Polly re-tells the following story that she had been relayed: a New Zealand student on exchange at an American university had been on campus and part of the celebratory crowd when Barack Obama had come to envision their political future. The student, straining to be heard above the chants, whistles and applause of the 15,000-strong crowd, had shouted out: ‘New Zealand loves Obama’. On hearing this he reportedly turned and responded, in what is read as that persona-defining mercurial voice: ‘Obama loves New Zealand’. That Obama was valorised on this radio show (and much of the mainstream, virtual and social media in New Zealand), and that his key campaign themes of hope, change and transformation had travelled to New Zealand (as it had across much of the world), begins to locate him as a spectacular celebrity politician who resonates profoundly and prophetically at a global level. That his auratic iconicity and message of hope and renewal is ultimately liquid or transient, as I will go on to explore, defines not only the condition of late modernity but the core quality of celebrity culture as it manifests itself today.

For this inaugural issue of Celebrity Studies I will contend that Barack Obama is the leading illustration of what is the expanded nexus of celebrity, spectacle and politics in the age of what Zygmund Bauman refers to as liquid modernity, or ‘the era of disembedding without re-embedding’ (Bauman and Tester 2001, p. 89). This is the era in which a traumatic sense of fear, uncertainty and transience defines one's relationship to the nation state, and social centre, as they lose their economic singularity and cultural coherency and cohesiveness in a world system ever interconnected and driven increasingly, incessantly by supra-corporate concerns and spectacle-based presentations.

In this world of ‘togetherness dismantled’ (Bauman 2003, p. 119), the disenfranchised individual feels they cannot meet the trans-capital intensive, show reel-like, boundaryless world on solid ground. That love, or a liquefied definition of it, is key to this imagined and affective communion between Obama and those who adore him suggests that there is a terrible wanting and simultaneous waning to those who look for such rootedness and the promise of deliverance in the celebrity political figure. This is a charismatic authority figure who promises this solidity yet streams in and out of material view, unable to fix or properly propagate their communion beyond triumphant spectacularism. Their ‘lightness of being’ (ibid, p. 123–9) is powerfully seductive and decidedly empty because it echoes the instantaneous (instant) way in which all lives are increasingly led. I will suggest that liquid celebrity is one of the cornerstones of liquid modernity, and Barack Obama is the epitome of this ‘runniness’.

What is this love of which the Kiwi student speaks, that Polly and Grant cherish and share and which Obama requites? It is love high on the oxygen of the media event; a love born of uprootedness and a longing for connectedness; a love fashioned in promotional strategising and consumed in the glare of cultural intermediaries, bean counters and Youtube downloaders. When the post-human, shape-shifting avatar Obama (all things to all people, as I will go on to argue) uses the words ‘love’ or ‘hope’, or the words ‘change you can believe in’, he commodifies their sensibilities and extends their connotations into the folds and flows of transient commodity possession, and to the self that self-loves. While this is a love that seemingly knows no bounds or acknowledges no boundaries, it is also one that knows no bonds and has no lasting ties, as it is created and consummated virtually; furnished by deep-seated needs that cannot be met on these parasocial terms; articulated through hard-nosed politicking; made on unequal but effaced power geometries; and mobilised to serve ever-shifting consumption needs.

Consequently, this love is a watery love, an absence of love, even if it is love imagined to be fulsome, liberating or ‘blindingly intense’ (Bauman 2003, p. 62). This is, in the end, a hopeless love, one that will eventually return the devotee to existential anguish and dissatisfaction because the love interest (Obama) cannot commit or consummate except in cliché symbols, commodity signs and grand gestures, or through higher-order claims to be beyond simple earthly love (to be a man of destiny, a God-man). When this love perishes – when destiny fails or does not live up to the prophecy mandated – the Obama devotee moves on to the next higher-order celebrity figure, never fully re-embedding, as this relationship will also inevitably liquefy. Obama, too, will be consumed by liquid capital and the routinisation of political life, brought back down to earth, so to speak. Similarly, the socially conscious celebrities who currently invest in his divinity (Oprah, De Niro, Damon) will find other personages, causes or movements in whom to believe.

To summarise, then, in this article it will be my contention that Barack Obama is the epitome of the liquid celebrity, embodying the floating nature of capitalism in the global age, commodifying the concept of hope and offering the disenfranchised devotee/fan/worshiper – albeit fleetingly – the chance to embrace change and to live fully again in a world that has been found hitherto to be cut free from meaning and belonging. It is through Obama that I intend to find the fluid pulse of celebrity culture today; its arterial-like qualities that emanate from the social centre and which promises each and every one of us (so ‘inclusive’ is its imagined reach) solidity and belonging but which ultimately confirms our recurring or returning alienation from the modern world.

This article focuses upon the publicity and promotional material created by Barack Obama's presidential campaign team, and on the news reports, articles, interviews and blogs produced in the mainstream media and the virtual social networking sites. My central critical framework will be Zygmund Bauman's concept of liquid modernity (Bauman and Tester 2001), mapped onto the figure of Obama, and celebrity culture more generally. However, I will also be drawing upon and fusing together Doug Kellner's work on media spectacle (2003, 2008); Nick Coudry's myth of the media centre (2003, 2009) and the celebrity as the privileged point of access to its glittering and empowered arena; and Emile Durkheim's theory of charismatic authority (1968). The concept of liquid celebrity will run into all these articulating positions, so that it (and Obama) emerges as contingent upon a watery modern landscape where, to appropriate Marx and Engels (2002), all that is solid melts into liquid.

While, for the most part, my position equates liquid celebrity with existential lack, a crisis in political authority and late capitalist commodity dreaming, I conclude by assessing the potentiality of what might also be understood to be the sublime nature of its embodiment. The article will finally, if briefly, turn to phenomenology to re-engineer its negative approach to this sticky concept called ‘liquid celebrity’.

Liquid celebrity spectacle

According to Doug Kellner, the cultural world is organised around the production and consumption of media spectacles, or:

… Those phenomena of media culture which embody contemporary society's basic values, serve to enculturate individuals into its way of life, and dramatize its controversies and struggles, as well as its modes of conflict resolution. They include media extravaganzas, sports events, political happenings, and those attention-grabbing occurrences that we call news – a phenomena [sic] that itself has been subjected to the logic of spectacle and tabloidization in the era of the media sensationalism, political scandal and contestation, seemingly unending cultural war, and the new phenomenon of Terror War. (2003, p. 2)

A media spectacle has aesthetic and technological dimensions: it utilises special effects, costume, set, setting, music, graphics, pyrotechnics, consumer goods endowed with special significance and exaggerated, binary storytelling arcs to present the event as awesome, overpowering, easy to comprehend and consequently essential to emotional pleasure or self-centredness. Media spectacles are also highly public social events, ritualistic in form, hierarchical, and require certain types of act and action by those taking part (Dayan and Katz 1992). One is asked to take part in the ‘show’ that one is watching in a celebratory or condemnatory manner. There will often be VIP areas, celebrity hosts, compères and guests, and event triggers or signifiers (music, fireworks, conflict, dancing, a limousine arriving) for the type of behaviour required at any particular moment (boos, whistles, clapping, awe, wonderment, silence, applause). Spectacle events build to a crescendo or defining sublime moment in which the orchestrated, collective response is seen, felt to be breathtaking. This response is itself presented to be spectacular: images of the spectacle are cross-cut with panning and tracking, aerial and close-up shots of the mesmerised or enrapt crowd, in a dizzying alignment of celebratory participation and spectacular excess. One has only to think of the mega-spectacle rock/pop concert by a band such U2, or a solo artiste such as Madonna, to gain a sense of this imagined wonderment captured in the close-up shot of the desiring, star-truck or joyfully screaming face. ¹

As Kellner suggests in the above quotation, there is an ideological dimension to media spectacle. It tries to seduce the individual and efface or naturalise its own architecture so that the spectacle seems non-political while it depoliticises its consumers. A media spectacle is very often a fun-filled, decidedly consumerist, leisure-based culture of attractions which asks for a purchasing/purchaser mentality, and attempts to shape or effect identity formation so that it hinges upon the belief that one is a possessive individual who lives in a showtime universe (Pateman 1988). This is an ideology, then, wedded to an ‘entertainment economy’ and, more broadly, consumer culture, as the spectacle is produced to sell itself and selling and buying in general, in a high-octane ‘vortex of publicity’ (Wernick 1991). As Kellner suggests, this structural shift ‘to a society of the spectacle involves a commodification of previously non-colonized sectors of social life and the extension of bureaucratic control to the realms of leisure, desire, and everyday life’ (2003, p. 3).

Celebrity spectacle is a particular and perhaps over-determining version of this mediated, culture of attractions. When in the public sphere, celebrities exist in heightened states and they appear at events that are televised, orchestrated and designed to exhibit, to show off, their glamour and status and the range of ancillary products or services to which they are tied, or which have made the event possible. The celebrity sells their image, the goods and services to which they are connected, the event itself, and spectacular culture more generally. As Kellner argues:

Media spectacle is indeed a culture of celebrity who provide dominant role models and icons of fashion, look, and personality. In the world of spectacle, celebrity encompasses every major social domain from entertainment to politics to sports to business. (2003, p. 4)

It is Oscar night. Crowds of fans scream their pleasure at the arrival of their favourite film celebrity. ² The celebrity exits their sleek black limousine, and begins the walk up the red carpet, cordoned off to everyday people. Their Yves Saint Laurent or Versace dress shimmers in the wall of warm lights that surround them, and a multitude of Nokia mobile phones click and click, relaying images, videos, the sights and sounds of the awesome event to friends and fans through interfaces and portals global and instantaneous in reach. This is a space/venue endowed with special significance (Couldry 2003). The paparazzi crowd around frenetically, jostling to capture the authentic shot of the night, to sell on to celebrity-spectacle-obsessed magazines such as Hello! (who will then devote a spectacular special edition to the event). Lights flood the immaculate, reflective entrance area, and immaculately dressed TV hosts (from all corners of the world) clamour to interview the bejewelled celebrity in an imagined intimate one-to-one moment, in a special section of the foyer. Channel or CNN-sponsored helicopters fill the night sky, gathering panoramic shots to visualise metonymically the enormity of the event. This ‘entrance’ event is followed by the truly spectacular Oscar night show where the dreamscape of Hollywood is recreated in the staging of the awards ceremony. Lights. Camera. Spectacle.

I would like to argue that media spectacles such as these are also particularly liquid modern in form. They are transient, a part of a must-see, must interact-with, schedule of spectacle events that structure the media/public calendar, demanding of the audience that they passionately invest in it (as if it is the event to end all events) and to then move on dispassionately once it is finished, so that they can get ready for, and welcome in, the next spectacular on the social horizon. This, in essence, is the motor of spectacular commodity consumption. Such transience, such a constant switching of one's affections, such incessant cultural movement based on seemingly surface-level attractions and purchase-based driven interactions, is one of the fear-inducing terrors of the age, to paraphrase Bauman and Tester (2001). The social centre cannot hold in terms of principles of faith, rationality and economic certainty, and while its liquidity paradoxically sustains it as a symbolic centre, its impact on the individual is felt as one of watery loss.

In this age of transient spectaculars, the social centre becomes filled with what Karin Knorr-Cetina calls media-produced ‘unfolding structures of absence’ (2001, p. 527–529) in which the void at the centre of mediated life is filled with the disposable, the frivolous –the wasteful events and personages presented as higher forms of social life. Celebrity spectacle sits at the kernel of this conundrum. There is a further double-bind to this symbolic centre-without-a-real-centre fissure. In the liquid modern one only matters, one only really exists, if one finds oneself in a media spectacular – a part of the show. This is the myth of the media centre, or as Nick Couldry argues:

… the claim that ‘the media’ are our privileged access-point to society's centre or core, the claim that what's ‘going on’ in the wider world is accessible first through a door marked ‘media’. The myth of the mediated centre enfolds another myth, ‘the myth of the centre’, the idea that ‘societies’ nations have not just a physical or organisational centre – a place that allocates resources, takes decisions – but a centre in a different sense, a generative centre that explains the social world's functioning and its values. Both myths obscure other realities and sources of value, other scales on which communications might connect us. (2009, p. 2)

The liquid modern individual is asked not only to believe and invest in the transient nature of the spectacle, which never quite fills them up, but to accept its higher-order status while exiling them to the banality of ‘ordinary’ life if they are not actually a part of the show. The figure of the celebrity is at the apex of this lack-filled paradox: they head the attraction and are the gateways to life in front of the lens, to the power it affords, or else they are the constant reminder that one is powerless if one is not a famous person in a famous show. There may well be a triple bind in operation here: the celebrity spectacle, endlessly scheduled and re-packaged and re-played becomes the epitome of banality, but a banality that none the less is compulsive/repulsive viewing.

Media spectacles are also often nationalist creations, bringing the positive histories and meta-symbols of the Nation State into one supercharged media event. This is a spectacular gathering designed to bring together and validate the imagined community of the country in question. In England, for example, there is the pomp and circumstance of the Last Night of the Proms; in the United States, the Super Bowl; and in France, Bastille Day. Such nationalist events appropriate the iconography and histography of the homeland and they are framed within a closed discursive register that essentialises and universalises participation (everyone in the country is in tune, and always has been, with the event). None the less, their aestheticisation and commodity appeal transcends national borders and territories. In fact, the nationalist spectacle is always simultaneously internationalist, because its sense of cohesion and collective communion has global appeal (to its own diaspora, to the disenfranchised across the world); and its branding of the Nation State is for tourists and commodity investors world-wide. In a very real sense, this multiplicity in purpose and reception renders the spectacle porous, polysemic, and contributes to the sense that it is a transient thing that cannot be rooted or rooted into, particularly in terms of a national identity that appears fleetingly, and as nothing more than seductive symbolisation within the overall ‘show’ that is taking place. This ‘suspension of disbelief’ (Dayan and Katz 1992) in which, lost nostalgically in the spectacle of the nation, one forgets that the symbolic centre of the/a nation no longer exists, is coupled with a near-simultaneous subjunctive awakening that what one is consuming is already gone or is past tense. This is nationalist/internationalist spectacle that is always on the verge of disappearing and then re-appearing as phantom without substance.

The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games offered a global, broadcast audience of some one billion people a spectacular feast of Chinese history and culture, ending with a closing ceremony where ‘Heavenly drums, silver bell dancers, light wheels and flying men took center stage to greet guests at the National Stadium Sunday for the closing celebration of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games’ (http://en.beijing2008.cn/). Modern, confident, commodity-driven China appeared in the guise of its spectacular historical past, effacing, among other things, its human rights atrocities, and re-imagining its global capitalist reach as hyperbolic, intensified picturisation and ritualisation into which the local, national and global audiences can buy. The spectacle of Brand China is conjured-up, but the very liquidity of such a presentation/representation loses its hold as meaningful communication, if not its power to hold one in its sway.

Nationalist spectaculars are, of course, often hosted by (trans)national celebrities, or they are given a prime slot within the event, or they are involved in its construction and marketing. The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games' opening and closing ceremonies were directed by star-auteur Zhang Yimou, while Jackie Chan starred in a promotional movie about successful Chinese athletes. At the Super Bowl XLIII (1 February 2009), Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band played during the game's half-time show. In a post-Bush era, with Barack Obama's Presidency ushering in an age of hope, healing and transformation, Springsteen's appearance is particularly symbolic of new nationalist sentiments. A spectacular stage performer, who performed spectacularly at Barack Obama's inauguration, Springsteen gives musical truth to the New America being reborn in 2009. He also gives commodity truth to the album that has been released and the tour that will take place. In 2010 (2011, 2012 … ), of course, a different performer will headline, with a different performance style and pop-political mandate, and with a different (but similar) range of products to be sold. This is liquid celebrity in the age of liquid capitalism. As I will now go onto argue, this is how one can and should make sense of spectacular Obama.

Spectacular Obama

Barack Obama's presidential campaign was full of spectacle and spectacular campaign events, presented particularly through the mass rally and the key ‘speech’ moment which anchored such tumultuous gatherings. The Obama presidential campaign was played out spectacularly on talk-shows, magazine front covers and numerous other sites that gathered around him. For example, auratic photographs of Obama were found on the front covers of Vanity Fair in July 2007 (called the ‘Africa’ edition), Rolling Stone in March 2008 (the first time the magazine came out in favour of a particular candidate), US Weekly in June 2008, Ebony in August 2008 (the ‘Black Cool’ issue), GQ in December 2008 and Time in December 2008 (named person of the year, and analysed below).

Collectively, these front pages offered the reader a metonymic and cohering representation of Obama as one who could or would lead the nation, so seemingly perfected and refreshingly honest was the man imaged before the reader. His face, presented generally in close-up, was in fact often more than enough to suggest the visionary and the enlightened: the man of and for these troubled, liquid times. This was a solid, human face that one could directly access and in which one (was told through various ‘framing’ mechanisms) could believe. This was a celebrity face: ideal, affective and inclusive, not least because it was also a blank, de-raced face, an argument I will also develop further below. Obama's was a spectacular face, blown up to be larger than life and any identity politics that might get in the way of its affecting signification.

The spectacle of Obama did not simply emerge, however, through such hyper-iconic settings, broadcast live or tracked in news bulletins, and written about in the mainstream media. Obama's spectacular campaign colonised the internet and social networking sites and interfaces such as Youtube, Facebook, My Space and Twitter; and it sent (around the world) live text messages and updates to subscribers/devotees, via their mobile phones, about upcoming speeches, rallies or as a call for donations or active support. Obama posters, art prints, videos, t-shirts, mugs, books and transcripts of speeches were visible across all these sites and often re-engineered or transcoded by fans who would spread Obama graffiti and poetry and who produced short internet advertorial trailers that were a homage to him and which called on people to join the communion. As Kellner summarises:

There has also been an impressive Internet spectacle in support of Obama's presidency. Obama has raised unprecedented amount money on the Internet. He has over two million friends on Facebook, and has mobilized youth and others through text messaging and emails. The YouTube (UT) music video ‘Obama Girl,’ which has a young woman singing about why she supports Obama with images of his speeches interspersed, has gotten over 5 million hits and is one of the most popular in history. (2008, p. 4)

It is 2 August 2008, and from my New Zealand home I am watching the spectacular Youtube footage of Senator Barack Obama accepting the Democratic nomination for President of the United States at Denver's Invesco Field at Mile High. Set in a coliseum-type sports venue, where the Denver Broncos’ National Football League team plays, the suite of cameras cut between wide, panoramic shots of the immense crowd and medium shots of Obama smiling and waving: returning the affection that he has been bestowed. Photography flashbulbs light up the night as 85,000 people chant his name, his campaign slogans and, with absolute delight, wave American flags and ‘Change’ banners.

Obama delivers his speech from an elaborate columned stage resembling a miniature Greek temple. The plywood columns are also reminiscent of Washington's Capitol building or the White House. Two giant plasma screens relay images of Obama as he delivers his speech. Shots of the adoring crowd are rhythmically inter-cut as awe and wonder ‘response moments’ to an important truth he has touched upon, or to a piece of rhetorical flourish he has countenanced. The public ritual inherent in such events of, for example, clapping spontaneously, is a cultural known, but embodied as if it is not known but instantaneously ‘lived’. The circular stage on which he stands is neon-lit and encircled by mounted cameras, and gently raised steps lead from its raised centre down into the crowd or the VIP area (where his wife, children, running-mate and dignitaries sit). This is as much television quiz-show aesthetics and theme-park iconography as it is political theatre. The setting pastiches and mixes together ancient history, key US governmental institutions and Disneyland imaging to create this liquid entertainment environment. A neon CNN advertorial is placed conspicuously in one of the prominent structures, confirming the commodity and infotainment-based (Kellner 2003) nature of this event. The key commodity is of course Obama: Brand Obama or liquid celebrity Obama.

This runniness can be found in the slogans that ran across his campaign, repeated by the crowd and in the speech he made that night. Slogans such as ‘Change we can believe in’, ‘Yes we can’, ‘A new beginning’ and ‘We must pledge once more to walk into the future’ are self-referential, without content, ideographs or higher-order abstractions, ‘representing commitment to a particular but equivocal and ill-defined normative goal’ (McGee 1980, p. 12). Consequently, these worked well ‘because they were empty boundary objects – different groups could project their own concrete hopes for a better future on the signifiers offered' (Knorr Cetina 2009, p. 132). Such slogans were above or beyond class, ethnic, religious and gender lines and attempted, therefore, to create the sense of a national cause – a mythical imagined centre – in which all Americans had an investment.

However, the purchase in these slogans of aperture, their ‘glittering generality’ as intangible nouns that embody universal ideals, meant that groups from across the world could find their selfhood embedded in them. Their liquidity in form and content met or mixed with the watery nature of modern life so that, for example, Kenyans could appropriate and transcribe them as, ‘Sing Obama’, ‘Obama for Africa’, ‘Walk thinking Obama’ and ‘Obama for families’. In New Zealand, John Key's right-wing Nationalist Party was able to riff/rip off such slogans, aligning themselves with the mantra of ‘Change’ (after 10 years of a Labour government) that Obama was prophesising. That New Zealanders could be seduced both by the liberal politics of Obama and Key (who won the election by a sizeable margin) confirms the liquidity of the message and the looseness of attachment in the liquid modern world.

The slogans are also advertorial or shaped in the shadow of commodity advertising and celebrity endorsements. They mimic or take place alongside the metaphoric, playful, heightened language found in advertisements for everything from weight-loss products (‘a new you’) to fizzy drinks. In fact, Obama's campaign slogans resemble or replay Pepsi Cola's (1984–91) ‘Pepsi. The choice of a new generation’, and 2008/9 ‘Something for everyone’ and ‘Every generation refreshes the world’. In terms of the social networking sites Obama was intent on hitting, the slogans not only fit the reduced format perfectly but echo the way in which celebrities write themselves online and through mobile technologies. For example, Miley Cyrus sloganises: ‘Find ur voice; take action; change ur world’ (http://www.mileycyrus.com/get-ur-good-on/). This is a spectacular commingling set of articulations.

Obama's campaign slogans tap into the way in which celebrities communicate increasingly with their fans through hyperbole, suggestion and allusion and transformative rhetoric. Celebrities with a social conscience, for example, will often lend their names to green campaigns organized around a worthy slogan: Josh Hartnett and ‘Global cool’ (a charity that is trying to encourage 1 billion people to reduce their carbon footprints over the next 10 years); Brad Pitt and ‘Make it right;’ (an adopt-a-green-home campaign that he hopes will help to restore the Lower 9th Ward of Katrina-ravaged New Orleans); and Jay-Z, the founder of the United Nations' ‘Water for life’ programme (aimed at giving people world-wide access to clean drinking water). Such endorsements and campaigns are also envisioned spectacularly as they will be accompanied by forums, conventions, launches and trips or visits to the effected area, with the press, broadcasting and publicity teams present to capture the celebrity-healing now under way.

The celebrity ambassador (Littler 2008) will be seen trying to help, assist and transform the degradation (of whatever kind or magnitude it is) into something hopeful. However, again, the incongruity between this persona (the hands that will get dirty, do-gooder, who can do good things with their fame and wealth) and the glamorous celebrity life from which they have come and to which they will return, are decidedly liquid in form. While celebrities have always combined the life of glamour with visits to see a sick child at a hospital or to support the troops, and so on, the self-reflexive and ironic ways in which celebrities view themselves and are viewed today (Gamson 1994) means that there is a spilling-over and constant shattering of persona. For a celebrity (politician) to rise above such a tide they need charismatic authority that effervesces, and the rooted (even if temporary or transitory) adoration of devotees.

Charismatic Obama

If we return now to the ending of Obama's acceptance speech, we can see a desire on his part to create a mythic or symbolic centre or social union in which all Americans (and hopeful people from across the world) can access, invest and belong to:

But what the people heard instead – people of every creed and color, from every walk of life is that in America, our destiny is inextricably linked. That together, our dreams can be one.

‘We cannot walk alone,’ the preacher cried. ‘And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back.’

America, we cannot turn back. Not with so much work to be done. Not with so many children to educate, and so many veterans to care for. Not with an economy to fix and cities to rebuild and farms to save. Not with so many families to protect and so many lives to mend. America, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone. At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise – that American promise – and in the words of Scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.

Thank you, God Bless you, and God Bless the United States of America.

In the first paragraph (cited above) Obama calls upon the mythos of America's manifest destiny and the American dream to create a sense of a shared past and a collective trajectory of becoming (although he also making an allusion to Martin Luther King's ‘I have a dream’ speech’, on the 45th anniversary of its delivery). In the second paragraph he alludes to a religious parable and the idea of looking forward and forward momentum, conjured-up in the idea of the union march that leads to progress, change and renewal. In the third paragraph he offers his devotees not only a literal picture of the problems they face on a day-to-day basis but a (symbolic) way out of the crisis based on collective belief. This path is again one to be marched, shared and inter-connected, religiously sanctioned and, ultimately, dependent upon him. This is his promise (to them) and the promise he wants his devotees to keep for him; action and an action in an abstract belief he has sanctioned. When Obama finishes this speech, when the fireworks begin to colour and heat the night sky, and as the country music sounds of ‘Only in America’ fill the stadium, one can still hear the ecstatic applause of the crowd and the chanting of Obama's name. As I will now go on to argue, this is a form of charismatic authority and collective effervescence in the age of the liquid celebrity and liquid modernity.

Weber defines charismatic authority as ‘resting on devotion to the exceptional sanctity, heroism or exemplary character of an individual person, and of the normative patterns or order revealed or ordained by him’ (Weber 1968, p. 215). The charismatic leader is imagined to be supernatural, divine and/or superhuman, and to naturally possess exceptional powers or qualities – such as that of a religious prophet. Weber saw a charismatic leader as one who emerged in times of anomie or dislocation, heading a new or revolutionary social movement that promised respite from such woes. Although the charismatic leader may have a special gift, be countenanced with a particularly seductive oratory or performative style, the basis of their authority rests with the devoted conferring this status upon the leader. A charismatic leader is defined as such by those who utter their name, who express their belief and faith in their power over them, and who pour them into their hearts:

If you watched Obama's victory speech on 4 November 2008, or download it now and look at the faces of those present, you can see what he meant. It was in their eyes and not in his – the love, the tears, the adoration. (Knorr Cetina 2009, p. 137)

Such adoration and devotion is a marker, I would suggest, of liquid modernity and the emotional and ontological crisis it creates for the individual. In a world unstable in its relations, uneven in its distribution of resources, driven by spectacular presentations that mask commodity capitalism logic, figures who appear to be beyond such disintegration and capable of renewal draw one in completely. The relation is imagined or felt to be one-to-one and personal (he speaks to me and the issues that mark my life) and collective (he speaks to and for all of us). The collective sense of the relationship, of course, is felt as intensely (as it is as ‘personal’ as an individuated response) and holds powerful sway because it offers that sense of shared belonging lost in the liquid age.

The intensity emerges, to repeat but extend my earlier refrain, because it comes from the spectacle arena in which Obama is sited/sighted, and because it/he operates from within the (myth of) the media centre. His symbolic calling to gather people together, to re-find themselves in the nation, takes place in front of the lens in all its fragmentary and multiple guises and so the access he has, and we have to him, is privileged.

That this devotional politics acts in symbiosis with celebrity culture, as I have suggested, profoundly deepens the affective connectivity while lessening its ability to hold that connection for any length of time. Celebrity culture exists very often in the spectacle of emotion and confession, and the promise that self-expression, revelation and feeling is the route to happiness and security (Redmond 2008). The adoration given to Obama (and his affecting mode of address for that matter) is a part of an ‘emotional democracy’ (Dovey 2000) in which feeling is the currency of power. Of course, feeling does not pay the bills or stop capitalism expanding its networks. Feeling rises and falls, dissipates and is transferred. Feeling is lost. Similarly, the charismatic leader, once/if they are elected or assume power, find they are ‘routinised’ and that political life demands rational–legal mechanisms (Weber 1968). In effect, they find that liquid modernity cannot be solidified.

None the less, it can be argued that Obama is a gifted speaker, one who because he orates through emotive symbolism lies outside the rationalist rhetoric of much of contemporary political communication in the West. He has a wonderfully deep but silk-like voice that gives gentle birth to the ideographs and glittering generalities from which he builds his speeches. He does not move like a politician; his corporeality has an air of grace about it (Knorr Cetina 2009, p. 135); but Obama also has superhuman qualities that take him beyond the everyday and the conventional rags-to-riches narrative that the American dream prophesises. In fact, as Edward D. Bacal suggests, Obama trades in superhero mythology. Society is weak, the economy is faltering, politicians are bankrupt, the police inept and corrupt and the world order is near collapse and it needs, calls upon, a superhero to intervene and save the day. Obama thus becomes SuperObama. Bacal suggests, however, that Obama's struggle to be accepted as a serious candidate is also racially inflected and mirrors to a degree John Hancock's (played by Will Smith, Hancock, 2008) struggle to be accepted as a superhero:

… to be elected into power and deliver change for the better, he has had to gain the trust and support of so much of an American population that still, on a conscious level or otherwise, typecasts blacks into the roles of an inferior other (which is to say not as their president). (2009)

None the less, the superhuman qualities that Obama possess render him more like a (alien) Messiah figure with a transcendental power to affect change. This is not the same type of healing power practised by television evangelists who miraculously cure followers of arthritis or cancer, but one who can rid the world of its political, social and economic ills. Obama seems not to be of this world (hence the idea of the alien), even if his well-documented and read autobiography grounds him so. Such a figure necessarily needs to be beyond race, while being seemingly connected deeply to a raced history; to be both human and yet superhuman; to be liquid in form.

Avatar Obama

The liquidity of modern life can be read in terms of the crisis in subjectivity in a world in which binary and fixed subject positions have been called into question (Woodward 2004) and where biotechnologies, cybernetics and information technologies question the parameters of the human, extending their reach into new post-human domains. For example, one can multiply and fragment oneself in online worlds (Turkle 1995) or re-inscribe the body through transformatory surgery. The experience of liquid modernity, then, can be read in terms of the way the body and mind have been rendered borderless and open, on a more apocalyptic note, to invasion and continual disorientation. The self in one reality, one time zone, with one set of spatial coordinates has been torn asunder. One can place Obama in this framework in terms of how he seems to offer one self-security while being someone that repeatedly shape-shifts, and who plugs into those virtual technologies that are partly responsible for the deterritorialisation of the self.

According to Frank and McPhail, Obama experiences a ‘twoness or double-consciousness of being both African and American’ (2005, p. 572). This is a splitting of the self that haunts the African American imagination and one's sense of history and roots. During the campaign Obama seemed to steer clear of politics that addressed the race issue, and yet he also drew upon his African ancestry to evidence the success myth: here I stand, he conferred, proof that in a multi-racial country colour is no bar to what one can achieve. There seemed to be a degree of colour-blindness at key moments in the campaign, and a foregrounding of race when it could be used to validate America's present. In one sense, Obama functions in a similar way to super-icon Tiger Woods; ‘a commercial emblem who makes visible and concrete late Modern America's narrative of itself as a post-historical nation of immigrants’ (Cole and Andrews 2001, p. 72). ³

The media were implicated in this present/absent representation of Obama as raced/not-raced. If one returns to the front covers of Vanity Fair in July 2007 and Ebony in August 2008, the issue of race is foregrounded and championed: the former unites Obama with other successful black Americans under the biologically essentialist union of descendents of Africa, while the latter brings together Obama and the ‘coolest’ black men on the planet. By contrast, the heavily reported campaign by ‘birthers’ such as Stefan F. Cook, Philip J. Berg and Jerome Corsi to discredit the legitimacy of Obama's birth certificate pointed to the Othering of Obama as Foreigner and not therefore a legitimate son/President of America. Obama was a non-American who was either born in Kenya or Indonesia, depending upon the conspiracy theorist promoting the story. Of course, conspiracy theories are a core part of the liquid modern; now rampant or dominant in terms of scope, they point to the sense that truth is elusive while a desire for truth (to be told) is all-consuming.

I think one can profitably extend the idea of Obama, and the media's double-consciousness, outwards into multiplicities or liquidities, where in the realm of the digital and virtual media it(he) exists as an avatar or a person with multiple identities not limited to a fixed corporeal self, grounded in one nation state or a narrow set of political circumstances. Obama's ability to connect globally with so many different and diverse social groups points to the fact that he was able to reach across porous barriers and borders – be they identity- or nation-based – and ground a relationship through being (and in spite of being) a liquid entity. The virtual and mobile sites, interfaces and portals he commandeered brought him to people in quick or real-time simultaneity, in designated ‘social’ sites, so that the context seemed intimate and personal, while also being clearly collective and shared.

Such activities connect him to contemporary celebrity promotion, where the internet and mobile virtual technologies are employed to provide the fan with immediate and proximate access to the (private) thoughts, (exciting, spectacular) activities and trials and tribulations of the celebrity. That ‘mobile youth’, often the most disaffected and disenchanted inhabitants of liquid modernity, gravitated towards him (the celebrity) confirmed their need for fixedness and at the same time, perversely, the watery nature of the messenger and message. This liquid celebrity politician communicated through liquid technologies to liquid moderns in global sites, promising solidity, while washing away his truth through the very liquidity of his celebrity being.

The December/January 2008/09 edition of Time magazine named Barack Obama as their Person of the Year. The full-page photograph of Obama is retro-scoped so that it appears animated. Obama is tinted red, white and blue, becoming the American flag, with the imprint of other key historical moments shaded in behind him. He is looking off into the distance (the future) in classical auratic pose: he has a vision and he intends to march us towards it. The image recalls pop-art and the celebrity portraits of Andy Warhol. This is a spectacular celebrity image, mass-reproducible and therefore a part of the Obama brand and the infotainment world to which he connects so readily; but the image also, and consequently so, conjures up the spectre of the avatar. ⁴ Obama is all colours to all people, rendered blurry and impressionistic, post-human, wet not dry, and liquid not solid. He can only, surely, ultimately disappoint?

Loving Obama: reprise

Doug Kellner has suggested (2003), although not explicitly in relation to the Obama campaign, that political spectacle can be progressive and lead to positive, transformative outcomes. Two recent examples spring to mind, both of them spearheaded by Twitter. The first involved an injunction against the Guardian newspaper from reporting on a leaked report that had suggested a link between oil-trading firm Trafigura and Ivory Coast toxic waste. The Guardian editor, Alan Rusbridger, posted a tweet referring to the injunction and the knowledge (and disquiet over the injunction) snowballed until it was lifted. Following a ghastly homophobic article by Jan Moir in the Daily Mail, in which she called Stephen Gately's death ‘strange, lonely and troubling’, and ‘Whatever the cause of death is, it is not, by any yardstick, a natural one’, Scott Pack, publisher at Harper Collins's The Friday Project, launched a Twitter campaign to have the Press Complaints Commission investigate. With tweet support by Stephen Fry, within 48 hours they had received more than 1000 complaints, a record number (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8311499.stm). Both examples, reported in the wider media, show both active agency on the part of the celebrity and those who follow their lives.

If one was to re-engineer the reading of Obama's spectacular campaign, one might want to make a claim that while being a show of immense proportions it was borne out of progressive politics and a shared love of liberal values; not non-political, or deploiticised, then, but an example of progressive spectacle politics in the making (Kellner 2003, p. 177). If ‘progressive’ is taken to mean the foregrounding or transmission of radical ideology or counter-hegemony, then I think that this would be a mistake for all the arguments presented in this article. However, the progressive qualities of Obama's campaign, of his charismatic leadership, may be found in the sensuous connectivity of spectacle, although as I will now conclude these are decidedly liquid properties.

Media spectacle is a sensory and sensuous phenomenon; its appeal resides in the realm of the senses, in the moment of the experience as it takes place. One feels exalted, deeply touched, as those moments of splendour and special effects and, in the case of Obama, higher-order oratory, bombards the senses in an overwhelming or awesome tidal flood. One is put back in touch with the carnal self in the moment of the media spectacle even while the body seems to (further) lose its materiality. One feels that one's entire sensorium is being re-charged and torn asunder. When this spectacle is led or is centred by a celebrity (hypersensory being) then the intensity or shock of the experience can be sublime. The celebrity presented in a media spectacle produces hysteria, an uncontrollable outpouring (tears, screaming, fainting and chanting). The overriding effect of this sublime experience, then, is the inability to verbalise or rationalise the encounter because it exists (at that moment) as that which cannot be comprehended. One is lost in the transcendental, over-powering ‘show’ as it takes one over.

The sublime moment may be felt as a flash of insight in which one re-sees something familiar as if seeing it for the first time; it may be the familiar rendered strange, uncanny, as less or more than the representation of it has signified previously. This feeling of firstness may occur in front of a gesture, a look, a movement, an object, a location or a site. It may manifest at a spectacular political rally in front of a charismatic leader whose abstract ideographs and glittering generalities (not rooted in concrete language at all), or whose voice, body movement and facial expression seem new or unique, and which in summation carries you away. Love is born in such sublime moments, as the intensity of the experience is of the highest degree. However, this was a love, to bring my article full circle, created out of the liquid modern world. This was liquid love in a liquid celebrity show.

To end on a personal note, I cannot help but remember the intense and incommensurable level of affect that Obama's speeches and presentations had on me at the time. He moved me deeply, profoundly, and in watching others being moved by him in similar ways I felt a belonging and a sharing that was politically orientated, or that manifested itself in the politicisation of the senses. I felt a sharing in the injustices of capitalism, the history of slavery and racism, and the opportunity we had (that Obama said we had) to make the world anew again. One feels stronger, almost superhuman, when one is taken over by a belief or a conviction such as that. Surely, this sensorial transformation is something? Surely, and to move the ground to active policy making, the liberal agenda he has begun to action is important; it will positively transform ordinary lives? But such imagined strengthening of the self, and of the consumerist world, is the exact way in which liquid celebrity and liquid modernity manages to ensure that it holds the imaginary or mythical centre together. I, we, have to believe passionately in the glittering ‘thing’ we invest in, even while its effect/affect on us wanes, disappoints or ultimately confirms our status as isolates in a dislocated world. As I reflect upon my love for Obama now, as I re-watch his spectacles and speeches, the transient nature of the connection and the emotional seduction he once offered but no longer does is what I most feel. Avatar Obama, ultimately, will disappoint, and it is time to move on.

Notes

1. As Kellner (2003) suggests, there are other forms of media spectacle. For example, there are spontaneous ‘events’ that are rendered spectacular through the way they are reported in the media – the O.J. Simpson ‘pursuit’ (1994) would be a case in point.

2. In this article I make no attempt to differentiate the star from the celebrity, opting instead to use the latter term only. Numerous authors have suggested the star now exists within, or has been subsumed under, a broader celebrity framework (Marshall, 2007, Rojek, 2004). While I am uneasy with this position, it is beyond the scope of the article to wrestle with the complexities the argument necessarily suggests.

3. Given the sex scandal that has recently engulfed Tiger Woods it will be interesting to see how his celebrity shifts.

4. During the run-up to the release of Star Trek in 2009 Obama was compared to Spock both in terms of his logical mind and mixed-race background. Images of Obama appeared with Vulcan ears.