life by publicity

Music: The Black Heart Procession: 3 (2000) I don't know about y'all, but I've been anxiously awaiting Paris' impending "live woman walking" into prison coverage on Monday. Here the celebrity who was catapulted into the popular imaginary because of a leaked (and unleaded) "sex tape" is now preparing for---you know---prison sex. Or at least that's the perverse underside of the justice fantasy that the legal authorities reasoned such a punishment would buoy. Paris Hilton going to prison is about as hot as celebrity culture can get, especially since she has announced that her 23 day prison diary will be published! I can already think of a title: No Holes Barred! Har har har.

More (or rather, somewhat more) seriously, however, I've been thinking this week about how I might approach the "Rhetoric and Celebrity Culture" class that I want to develop (I'm thinking Fall of 2008 at the earliest). In some of my previous and current work I've been obsessed with "death by publicity," or the way in which the ideology of publicity always works toward the exhaustion of specificity or content---the way in which publicity formalizes the social world. I've been doing a lot of newspaper interviews for this and that popular culture event recently and finding myself saying some surprising things---you know, you're talking along and then something exits your mouth that surprises you. I was speaking to this reporter out in Las Vegas about YouTube and social newtworking sites. We were discussing whether YouTube and MySpace were potentially progressive because of self-publicity, that these technologies were somehow meeting the "public resource" requirement of communicative space.

Although I am skeptical (and this is why when given the choice of possibility or Adorno, I often go with Adorno), there is a progressive kernel to self-publicity: the net does provide an infrastructure for "Temporary Autonomous Zones" and for community-specific content and information sharing. So although publicity tends to kill that which it exposes (what is publicity but a technology of death?) it also simultaneous promotes a kind of life.

So I've been thinking lately about "life by publicity," about how Hilton's life is given positive substance by the fact of its radical exteriority (what else is Hilton but an imago of the popular/political unconscious?)---and I don't mean Hilton the person, but Hilton the figure (like Madonna the figure, Bush the figure, and so on). Similarly, I'm thinking about all those MySpace pages in which various celebrities of the Social Network have thousands of "friends." Some of those folks---and I've read this somewhere---some of those folks depend on NetLife to give themselves content. Life by publicity is the Avatarification of something, a kind of splitting of the ego into figures, as it were. I keep having this image of Melanie Klein's description of the "splitting of the ego" in confrontation with some fantastical brute reality---a doubling for survival. Well, I dunno where I'm going with this. Just typing aloud today. Or then again, perhaps that's the issue: Maybe I dunno where I'm going because blogging is a publicity of splitting?