Modern media—in its role as our current native ecosystem—has put us in a situation in which the inside and the outside of the world are constantly con-fused. Since the early 20th century propaganda, public relations and marketing have assumed and increasingly important role in western civilization. The result: for some time its been difficult to tell which of our thoughts, ideas and motivations are products of our own mental and emotional processes and which are imposed on us from without; to the point that the very stability of the system depends on the confusion of our inner and outer worlds. Of course, humans are not sealed units and a certain degree of this “interference”—the encounter of two waves—has always taken place in a complex society. The difference between us and the pre-modern bicameral civilizations is qualitative: whereas the inside of their world can be described as either “psychic” or, following Merleau-Ponty, “intra-corporeal,” the inside of ours has become as artificial, false and “outer” as the media images that populate its surface. Regardless of its components, the specular relation persists.

This factitious media world is another configuration of the world of things described by Owen Barfield (2.16), no longer “an exterior expressing an interior, but simply a brittle exterior surface, which is however not the surface of anything.”¹ The celebrity, as the sovereign of this media world, is at the epicenter of this perceptual shift.

1. Owen Barfield, History, Guilt & Habit, 47. ↩︎