Fame, by Mark Rowlands, Stocksfield, Acumen Publishing, 2008, 128 pp., £9.99, ISBN 184-465-1576

Fame, by Mark Rowlands, Stocksfield, Acumen Publishing, 2008, 128 pp., £9.99, ISBN 184-465-1576

Fame opens with an anecdote about its author, Mark Rowlands, sitting in his office watching online film clips of ‘real’ young women, including college students, exposing themselves to camera – and the spectator – of their own volition. He declares that the young women's behaviour is ‘the quintessence of [a] new and peculiar sort of fame’ (p. 2): the undeserved fame of those who are famous merely for being famous. They are wannabe Paris Hiltons and aspirant Jordans. They aspire to be those female celebrities so often derided as talent-free, celebu-tart cash cows that flash flesh, spill out, have hysterics and come clean all over mainstream western media. Although there are seemingly no male equivalent websites (really?), Rowlands notices that even men can get in on the self-objectification act. The example given is of a saddo eagerly humiliating himself on prime-time TV in the un-mannish beautification ritual of waxing. Fame, the book seems to infer, has been rudely, objectionably ‘feminized’. Wilfully exploiting the ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ of objectified femininity, soliciting the gaze, over-narrating subjective experience, over-emphasising interpersonal relationships and exaggerating displays of affect in public and media spheres now almost guarantees valued social recognition. Yet there is too much emphasis on feminine emotionality and physical sensation in contemporary media, such that the West has lost any sense of objectivity or of meaningful reference outside of the self and its desire of the self. So, the young women in the clips electively strip for camera for no gain except the fame of ‘reputation’. They do it because they are symptomatic of a now nihilistic western culture the once progressive ideals and objectives have apparently collapsed in an orgy of narcissistic excess. The women are desperately aspirant sirens, caterwauling on the rocks of progress.

Astonishingly, the ‘C’ word – celebrity – hardly appears in this book, even though Rowlands is apparently taking seriously the phenomenon of celebrity in contemporary western culture as ‘the most pronounced cultural phenomenon of our time’ (p. 5). Rather than turning to the wealth of literature in celebrity studies, or film, media and cultural studies, Rowlands formulates his own term for the insidious spirit of contemporary celebrity: ‘vfame’ or ‘New Variant Fame’. Like new variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease (CJD), he claims, a perceived breakdown of enlightenment values has spawned a rogue cultural prion that rots the collective brain. This ‘vfame’ apparently causes ‘severe dementia followed by death’ (p. 26) by breaking a perceived bond between merit and fame. This is because of a nihilistic, classless ‘levelling’ of fame that lays fame open to the bovine spongiform encephalopathy endemic in herd culture.

Apparently, ‘real fame’ was typified by male sports stars like [Sir] Stanley Matthews whose achievements, not his personal life, were the measure of a man. Moreover, his achievements were objective and therefore rightly respected in socially superior communities of interest of the sports world and the British establishment. In contrast, this ‘vfame’ is typified by female celebrities such as Britney Spears, reality TV wannabes and cam-girls, whose ‘achievement’ is to subordinate objective values to their own subjectivity. In this way, they are noticed by others in an inferior community of interest: mass culture. It apparently follows that ‘pure Fame’ is typified by the fanatical terror campaign of Osama bin Laden and Islamic suicide bombers whose achievement is their ‘extra-human’ will to subordinate individuality and compassionate humanity to external values and thereby terrorize others. Celebrity-celebrity Paris Hilton, who became famous for an amateur porn video leaked online, is then equivalent to celebrity-terrorist Osama Bin Laden, whose online video dispatches from the caves of fundamentalism are a kind of politico-porn. She is a terrorist. He is a porn star. They are both degenerative, post-Enlightenment famous.

Fame is part of Acumen's ‘The art of living’ series that intends to ‘open up philosophy to the wider public once again through philosophers' personal reflections on everyday themes and issues’ (other topics include work, clothes, illness, pets and sport). The majority of this book – more than two-thirds – comprises an introduction to philosophy by way of a rehearsal of some key ideas in western philosophy – objectivism, individualism, relativism, etc. The book pays particular attention to internal contradictions of the western world if that world is founded solely in Platonic objectivism and Enlightenment individualism, as Rowlands claims. As is typical of the pop-philosophy genre, the book's ‘wacky’ observations – here on Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Osama bin Laden – form a loose framing device for an argument for the magnitude of philosophy in social life. The book is not intended to be academic, as such, and its short, gimmicky riffs respond to the series theme of ‘How should we live’? When it comes to fame, Rowlands asserts that we should live more modestly.

We now live valueless lives of pornographic aspiration, the book argues, because of the failure of the Enlightenment project: uncommitted individualism, unchallenged fundamentalism, unlimited subjectivism and untrained relativism have caused the decline of objectivity, rational evaluation and distinction. Western culture has degenerated to the point that we have ‘a fundamental inability to distinguish quality from bullshit’, and contemporary fame is proof positive of this deterioration. The cult of fame is the new ‘opium of the masses’. People simply want fame, and are rewarded unjustly for ‘bullshit’ exhibitionism. Apparently, this is ‘levelling’ in the Kierkegaardian sense of a breakdown of hierarchical distinctions of quality and value, effort and achievement. It is a breakdown of the hierarchy between the ‘[wayward] student and her teacher’ which ‘empties [fame] of any significance’ (p. 6). We ought to un-level fame justly by returning to some age of humility like remorseful naughty students who now r.e.s.p.e.c.t. the teacher, i.e. some authority should bestow fame only on those who deserve it.

In some gestured-at golden age, fame was not only significant but also deserved and essentialised. Quality and distinction afforded fame, and was justly gifted to (typically male) sports personalities, artists, scientists, explorers, philosophers, etc.; but there is a problem here in that ‘quality’ or ‘distinction’ do not characterise the apparently ‘just fame’ of the ruling classes, socialites, politicians, intellectuals or even the Hollywood star system. Perhaps ‘eminence’ and ‘privilege’ are more suitable than ‘fame’ as descriptors for this idea of a meritocratic system that has apparently collapsed. Previously, ‘respect’ was apparently ‘guaranteed’ through ‘hard work’, and not gifted by systems of power like class, the market, ethnicity, patriarchy and gender bias, as one might have thought. Rowlands seems to assert that fame ought to remain such a privilege for such a privileged few. What differentiates distinctive fame from contemporary fame, seemingly, is an absence of interest in, or access to, ‘the real man’. Contemporary fame is predicated on shallow exhibitionism, fallacious confession and excesses of affect; or, as Jo Littler (2004) has put it, ‘intimacy, reflexivity, and keeping it real’.

But Fame fails to address the ways in which contemporary celebrity, or even fame as such, is produced by material conditions within mass cultures and globalised media industries. The celebrity market is driven by the exchange of products and services for money and is clearly reflective of the social production of hierarchical class, race and gender roles. The notion of ‘Enlightenment individualism’ could be explored in terms of a culture in which the work of being a ‘self’ is of manufacturing a commodifiable personality and/as image. In fact, the book's overall argument is obstructed by these sweeping and unsupported generalisations such as ‘all cultures are the products of philosophy, so only philosophy can help us’ (pp. 31–32). Similarly, the phenomenon of reality media is explained without labour of argument: ‘You watch it because you are a sad loser who has become addicted to the spectacle of human suffering’ (p. 4). Long-winded anecdotes about favourite sportsmen that stand in for examples do not serve the argument either; they are not backed up by any evidence, or any sound argument that the allegedly natural ratio between the men's talent and their fame is representative of either innate, objective capacities or significant social tendencies.

Despite claims to an objectively non-misogynistic and non-judgemental stance, the analogy of online female exhibitionism as the embodiment of a nihilistic orgy of feelings and self-referentiality nihilism of the post-Enlightenment does not succeed (p. 111). Indeed, that exhibitionism equates to a strategic aspiration for ‘vfame’ is not clearly established, so it does not follow that these young women embody the ills of modern ‘bullshit’ culture. The book could have tackled the issue of how women's bodies have become commodified such that exhibitionism could be an acceptable means of escaping fame-lessness. In Female chauvinist pigs, Ariel Levy discussed the mainstreaming of porn in terms of the rise of ‘raunch culture’, and her argument is particularly interesting in terms of the cult of exhibitionism. In contemporary western culture, women's ostensibly feminist sexual assertiveness can veil female misogyny, whereby women attempt to empower themselves by objectifying themselves, as well as other women, sexually. Post-feminist ideals of sexual freedom are recuperated by the sex industry such that exhibitionism and self-porn are seen as an empowering, lucrative and acceptable career choice.

Whatever exposure the women in Rowlands' example obtain is not straightforwardly entrepreneurial or lucrative, as the video clips are associated with a reality-genre porn franchise that trades on branded merchandising, including a magazine. The current-to-this-review edition of that magazine is entitled ‘The back to school issue’, with photo sets and articles such as ‘Field guide to the American college girl’, ‘Sex on campus’, ‘Freshman disorientation’ and ‘Drinking games 101’. And anyway, the career progression mapped out for those female students apparently leads to playing ‘tramp in a Nickleback [sic] video’ and empty dreams of a reality TV career (p. 2).

Sadly, the opportunity to explore how women are configured by contemporary celebrity culture or how exhibitionism, and amateur and reality-genre porn fits into the economic drive to provide content for the celebrity and reality media, as well as the ancillary tabloid and gossip products that produce and perpetuate the cult of celebrity, is not seized. Moreover, the cultural emphasis and focus on the inner-life is merely ridiculed; Hilton's thoughts on her own life are likened to ‘a rather clichéd crossroads narration of a hormonal twelve year old’ (p. 110).

Nor is the apparently nefarious move towards unfairly egalitarian and undesirably feminised celebrity discussed in terms of its being engendered by more common access to the technological means of publicity and the dissemination and consumption of culture. That the vogue for exhibitionism, and amateur and reality-genre porn, comprises an important part of the broader celebrity and reality-product industries has also slipped under the book's critical radar. All in all, it seems tenuous to use these young women to substantiate a thesis on the degeneration and cheapening of western culture as such. Any value judgement about fame-as-such that is based on accomplished masculine ‘star’ versus materialistic feminine ‘celebrity’ exemplifies the ‘cultural hierarchy implicit in the use of these two terms [that is] based on discourses of gender’ (Holmes and Redmond 2007, p. 4). As Catherine Lumby (2007, p. 346) notes, young women are often used in this way as ‘ciphers for broader tensions over the relationship between cultural and personal authenticity [and they] frequently surface in both popular and scholarly texts as a kind of social body over which debates about citizenship, agency, globalization and consumerism are fought’.

Finally, it is doubtful that the catchphrase ‘vfame’ will catch on when we can just use the ‘C’ word.

DOI: 10.1080/19392390903519172