A joint theory of value for commodities and celebrities:

The value of a commodity and that of a celebrity is essentially the same, it is not an essence or substance, but something abstract and immaterial that it acquires when entering the market and being compared with other commodities, be it traditional or human. In the case of traditional commodity, this value is an abstract parameter expressed in money; in the case of human commodities, that is, celebrities, it is an aura of prestige or status resulting from its physical appearance or talent, which being compared within the market with that of other celebrities derives in its translation to money. In the same way in which the abstract and immaterial in a commodity, its value, is projected inside out upon entering the market (2.12), the status of the celebrity is externalized and crystallized in a surface that, nonetheless, is no longer the surface of anything (2.16, 4.4, 5.1).

Now, it is important to note that as we disappear from the polis and reappear in the market (3.2), we lose the “political” character that binds us to our bios, but no longer to Agamben’s idea of bare life, but to a form of life that, paradoxically, has been dehumanized and transformed into a commodity that is susceptible to being exploited by our corporate masters. The first step in the process of becoming commodities was our loss of interiority, as exemplified in the early 19th century in Beau Brummell (2.8, 2.10). As the most recent secularized version of the sovereign, contemporary celebrities no longer aspire to the divinity that used to invest his or her ancestors and, instead, go down the path opened by the dandy: to legitimize his position by elevating himself to the dignity of objects (2.12).

In its most recent phase, a celebrity becomes a human-commodity completely stripped of subjectivity, a medium so to speak, that channels the operations that were previously carried out exclusively by traditional commodities. In fact, it would not be off the mark to asure that, as a human-commodity, the celebrity has absorbed its metaphysical qualities and given them a human countenance (2.9). Moreover, since a celebrity is a human figure that must have emptied itself of interiority in order to become a thing—let’s take Tom Cruise or Jared Leto as prototypical examples—it has made the commodity’s metaphysical operations even more effective.¹ Thus, the celebrity is a fundamental piece of contemporary biopolitics: its role is to transfer the abstraction of political life (bios) to the market, where it can be commoditized and sold like any other good or service.

The dehumanization implicit in this matter represents the culmination of the secularization process of our culture which, far from the reins of religion, ignores diversity and human interiority (1.12) and massifies the population in order to turn it into “natural resource” for its leaders. Celebrities in their role as sovereign-commodities are an essential part of this process: as aesthetic and behavioral models, they are responsible for disseminating the norms and standards with which power is exercised in our societies. They are, in short, the vector of transmission through which we are dehumanized and prepared for our condition as spectators and media slaves.

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1. When I say that human-commodities like Tom Cruise or, for that matter, any other celebrity has “emptied itself,” I am not implying that these people lack “inner experience,” but that the source of this experience is completely alien to themselves. George Orwell succinctly recorded this matter in 1984: “You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”↩︎