It seems there really are stars and celebrities really do occupy another realm. The everyday lies beneath the communication networks which wrap themselves around the planet. It abides; meanwhile, there is a celebrity cosmology, a collective dream (or is it an advertising campaign?) alive above us like the aurora borealis. Sometimes a few of us are allowed into the celebrity cosmos; sometimes, a few of us return.
Take X., with her ample bust, an attractive face and stardom was hers almost instanteously. She accepted an agent's offer; she became uniquitous, earning thousands of pounds an hour for public appearances and hundreds of thousands a year writing columns for men's magazines. She appeared on the front of dozens of red top newspapers earning money from the photos used to illustrate the latest scandal in which she had been involved.
Terror as you hear the words, who blames her? She knows it won't last; she works hard. Men like her, it is said, because they feel they have a chance with her; she is not a goddess. Women like her apparently because she should would be like them, admitting to sexual fantasies (she is launching a series of women's erotica) - a liberator of sorts.
Meanwhile at work there is some crazy new initative. What can you do? Nothing at all, you tell yourself. The ride is prepared, ready, the tracks will run from here to perdition. The seat warmed for you which is the correlate of the place X. keeps for you in the world of celebrity. There is heaven of celebrities and there is earth; the one only mimics the other. Who blames you? You know it won't last. Redundancies loom. Your contract will come to an end. And in the meantime ...
But the meantime is all time. You're a placeholder for any other employee. Anyone could take you place and anyone would do exactly the same as what you'll do. 'If you don't want to do it, we'll find someone else ...'
There is a pragmatism operative which takes no heed of you. A strategy which works through you and everyone. This is capitalism cyncism, as Sloterdijk calls enlightened false conscousness. We know what we're doing, but we're doing it anyway. After all, anyone would do the same in our place.
Who is X.? Each of us, any of us. For a moment, a glorious moment - you've been following the story from the start - she was the no one in particular in whose place we could all imagine ourselves or a version of ourselves. If she is admired, it is because she has achieved what each of us would want. If she is despised, it is for the same reason.
It is not that the dream machine of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment supplant what used to be called real engagement with the world. There was no such engagement, the great bedrock of certainty and security is another myth.
What was there, then, that is vanishing now? Time, perhaps? The time of strikes and power cuts - the marvel of a few hours escape from time the dispenser. The time, too, of the great slackening of activity when computers crashed or, before mobile phones, the few hours you could spend outside contact as you travelled from one company site to another.
But now the slack has been taken up. The world advertises its efficiency to itself. But what is being sold as X.? The servo-mechanisms of publicity sell the one who is along for the ride back to herself. Yes, you know everything, you know what matters most - the ecological catastrophe, suffering allowed to become invisible - but you also know - although this is only the phantom of knowledge, it's ideological substitute - that you can do nothing.