This post is about intimate immensity. Carles seizes the opportunity presented by a paparazzi photograph of some marginal popular culture figures to explore the issue of space. As Carles mentions, in an unusually direct formulation, he is concerned with the "blurred ’sense of proximity’" that has resulted from the collapse of the distance between celebrities and those who consume their images. Because of the intensified coverage of celebrities to support ever more omnivorous media formats, and the increased efforts of celebrities themselves to leverage modern communication techniques to enhance their marketability by seeming to "do ‘normal things’", the charismatic qualities of the celebrities have been blunted.
Carles feigns being puzzled by the staged quality of these moments: "I am not sure if they are ‘real friends’ having ‘real fun’, or if this was a moment that was coordinated by an indie Public Relations firm." What he is suggesting is that the culture of celebrity has co-opted the once sacrosanct space of everyday life to stage pseudoevents. The safe distance once created by the otherness of celebrity existence has been obliterated. The space for the quotidian has evaporated; we must constantly recognize our own insignificance in relation to the popularity of the cultural industry's faces. We must compete for attention with culture industry strategies to compete with actual celebrities, and thereby become assimilated to the culture industry machine while still serving as its consumers. We become both the subject and object of the culture industry, depleted on all sides. Critical distance itself vanishes along with the very possibility to imagine such a thing. Instead a free-floating insecurity attaches to everyone -- the scrutiny that elevates celebrities, even the minor celebrities photographed, now catches us in its glare and shrinks us to further insignificance. Carles illustrates this by pointing the the figures in the periphery: "(Wonder if the latinos in the back realize that they are part of a larger meme)." They have no choice; they are caught in the process of celebrity unwillingly, as we all are now. He notes that this can lead to an all-encompassing paranoia about the nature of reality itself. "It’s like everything was just made to be blogged about." Reality ceases to confirm itself until it is mediated by a channel of the culture industry.
But at the same time, the close proximity of celebrity need not register as only a threat. It need not simply destroy the structuring separation between celebrity and quotidian life, rendering each without a stable definition. Instead, it can put us in touch with immensity. As Bachelard explained in The Poetics of Space, "Since immense is not an object, a phenomenology of immense would refer us directly to our imagining consciousness. In analyzing images of immensity, we should realize in ourselves the pure being of pure imagination." Carles suggests that something like this happens when celebrities interject themselves into our lives at the intimate level. "Feels ‘almost surreal’ that two indie superstars would hang out and do ‘normal things’ like ride rollercoasters, eat funnel cakes, and ‘gawk’ at a freak show full of carnies." The world dissolves into possibility -- the ordinary takes on a new sparkle of surreality; the funnel cake, for example, becomes an objective correlative for a supernal world of sensual beauty. The immensity of the rollercoaster, of the fame of those riding it -- our ability to contemplate such images without having to depart from the quotidian elevates the quotidian to the realm of the supernal. Carles quietly extends the optimistic possibility that there has taken place a transfiguration of the commonplace in our very midst, mediated by the most humble and unlikely media sources -- indie meme generators.
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