[Previous entry: "kairos review"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "CCC Position"]

09/19/2004 Archived Entry: "Celebritacy"

More Celebritacy
In another nice moment of celebritacy, Madonna takes up Kabbalah. Now, lots of folks point out the silliness of Madonna thinking herself a Kabbalist (In Judaism, you can't study Kabbalah until a certain age, for example), but I'm more interested in the kinds of knowledge Madonna is producing through celebrity. Of course, this isn’t really Kabbalah, but that is irrelevant. Authenticity in the age of mechanical reproduction is not an issue any more. There is something else being generated here as a form of literacy. Madonna has created a squad of folks who have invented their own meaning system based not on Kabbalah, but on Madonna. From the article:

In recent years, celebrities like Madonna, Britney Spears and Demi Moore have embraced Kabbalah, increasing its profile within a non-Jewish framework and making the mysterious branch of Judaism more accessible to the public.

That these meetings are taking place in Tel Aviv (metropolitan city of techno, hip bars, Sheinkin Street, Paris of the Middle East) and not in Safed (home of mysticism in Israel) is important because it demonstrates how popular culture embodied in the celebrity status shifts our places of learning.

The Madonna example teaches us a great deal about how we learn in the digital age: through the actions, performances, references to, usage of, iconic display (etc) of celebrity (And see Zadie Smith’s novel The Autograph Man for more of this..). The modern textbook was meant to bring literacy to a populace in need of performing the tasks of a society developing economic professionalization (Graff’s “literacy myth”). Now we need textbooks which handle the desire to embody entertainment as both the professional and life experience (the “Warhol myth”). This is the textbook I offer to any publisher interested: a handbook of celebritacy which teaches grammatological principles around what Ulmer calls “the star persona.” A whole chapter on Madonna and Kabbalah should be in it, no?