Celebration: A World of Appearances
- Celebration: A World of Appearances
The current times are increasingly illegible. We need to establish a new reading matrix.
We are entering unpredictable times. Twenty years ago, I introduced the concept of speed to understand the landscape of events. Today, we are entering a time when celebration is going to replace celebrity. Let me explain: this is because history and celebrity go hand in hand. History, or the “long run,” is real celebrity; it’s the fame of Plato or Shakespeare. Simply put, since the nineteenth century and especially the twentieth, we have entered upon the acceleration of history. As everyone knows, Daniel Halévy revealed this in his book of 1947.1 Celebrity itself is entering a process of acceleration with the acceleration of history, and so celebrity is also entering what I have called “the aesthetics of disappearance,” in the same way as happened with the arts. With abstraction, and with cinema, art has moved into the aesthetics of disappearance. This is the age of cinematics. It is the age of what I’ve called the “energy of the visible,” meaning, the real has become like images being unfolded in a film, in a [End Page 61] sequence shot. And reality has been modified by this acceleration of history, to the point that it itself is accelerated. From now on, we are in the twenty-first century’s acceleration of the real, that not only calls into question Braudel and the Annales school’s notion of world history but also challenges the event-based history that we know through great events, such as May 1968, 1914–18. . . . History is accidental now, instantaneous, it cancels out—and this is an event without reference or equivalent—the tripartite division of past, present, and future. It is an unparalleled event, an event without reference, which philosophy has not yet dared analyze. Without reference not just in the present, as [François] Hartog and others have claimed, a kind of present-ism. No, it is, rather, an instant for the sake of instantaneity.
We live in the instant of the real, which is the acceleration of reality that completely effaces historicity. It is no coincidence that there has been much talk about memorial history, a law of memory, of identity. It’s because historicity is disappearing. It is disappearing entirely, and celebrity, in turn, is ceasing to be, leaving only pure celebration. By celebration, I mean an industry of appearance and disappearance, with its automated procedures that dissociate the event that is the presence of a man or a woman, an artist or a genius, from his or her work or writing and its value. The work itself has become useless. Let me remind you of what a young man said on a reality TV show. He was asked what he wanted to do in the future. His response was: “I want to do celebrity.” He didn’t want to become a Picasso, a Shakespeare, or a Godard. He wanted to “do celebrity.” And he had perfectly understood that celebration would allow him to become a celebrity without any works to his name.
After the era of abstract, nonfigurative art comes the era of abstraction from the work and its merits, but also from the author. The work disappears: it is useless. The merits of the work, good or bad, are useless, and the author is useless too. Genius, hero, and historical figure are no longer. I repeat: the genius, the hero, the life-size historical figure are no more. Instantaneity has supplanted eternity. This is fundamental. Eternity was the domain of the spiritual. I don’t mean the religious. It was also the domain of the Greek philosophers, with the immortality of the soul. Well, instantaneity has now replaced eternity. The eternity of the famous “Immortals” of the Académie française, which now must be dissolved immediately. Stop. Eject!
In the same vein, one of the largest commercial TV channels brought Aimé Césaire to meet the young winner of Star Academy, both being from Martinique, and Césaire, flummoxed, asked him, “Are you an academician . . .?”
Becoming a celebrity...
