Culture, as we know it, is driven by a variety of machines, one of which is the media machine. The media machine perpetuates itself through a process called machinic subjectification, wherein individuals are subjectified, or placed into certain roles, as consumers of machine culture through the manipulation of the celebrity system.That celebrities are, in themselves, commodities should not come as any real surprise. They sell us magazines, movies, hair product; we do not need Veronica Mars to point out that amongst these products there is only one common denominator. The image and idea of the celebrity has become a commodity itself, to be bartered, sold, and even used directly to re-mortgage a house.

But what are they selling? It seems clear that, despite having changed in miniscule ways, celebrity-as-commodity has always sold a dream life, either as an image of what life is like for the rich and famous or more recently as the (deceptive) opportunity to become so. Firstly, I will explain how machinic culture functions, with emphasis on understanding machinic subjectification through celebrity-as-commodity. As a case study we will explore the dream lives of Vince, Eric, Drama and Turtle in the television series Entourage.

Culture: Apparatuses and Machines

What is subjectivity? [from screenmachine: - the roles that are predetermined by our cultural/socio-political sphere and reinforced by culture industries (education, communities).] We can clarify this concept through political philosopher Louis Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). An ISA is very similar to Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion of a culture industry (Adorno and Horkheimer 1993, 30), it is an apparatus which seeks to propagate values and ideologies of the state in which it exists. These values and the position/roles/identity of the subject can be called its subjectivity.
Schools, the family, communities, the media, these are the most obvious ISAs. Althusser makes the distinction that an ISA is always directly linked to a state, because it is from these states that set ideologies, or the socio-political sphere, is derived. These days, however, with the onslaught of global imperialism, I think we can see the culture industries as almost autonomous, re-instigating values and subjectivities that, while perhaps originating from a few key states (the US, France, and China, for example), the culture industries are so global now that they seem to exceed the bounds of nationality.
The goal of any Althusserian State Apparatus, whether Ideological or the single Repressive State Apparatus [the entity which uses force instead of ideology, read: police/military], is the continuation of its state. In this sense, it’s easy to see who they serve. But if a culture industry expands beyond an affiliation to a state, the only values it seeks to propagate are those which continue and validate its own existence.

Guattari and Machines

For Guattari machines include the literal: computers, telephones, cranes, and can also include any non-human entity which magnifies, expands, and speeds up our productive abilities: a machine is little more “than hyperdeveloped and hyperconcentrated forms of certain aspects of human subjectivity” (Guattari 1995, 113). Guattari uses the example of the monastic orders which were precursors to the libraries, databanks, and hard-drives of today: while less a literal machine, these orders expanded our ability to store memories and knowledge in a way that an individual could never achieve.

However, Guattari notes that “today’s … machines do not merely convey representational contents, but also contribute to the fabrication of new assemblages of enunciation” (Guattari 1995, 113). In other words, machines actually redefine the ways in which we think of and represent ourselves, and interact with the global community around us. From the advent of YouTube, which in many ways wrested the reigns of digital representation from the media giants, to technologies of communication such as Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) phones and audio and video chat programs, machines have had a fundamental impact in our ability to engage in the world.

From this principle it is easy to understand how the growth of the culture industry, including its entities in television, film and the internet, has led directly to a redefinition of our modes of existing in the global world. The expansion of our ability as consumers to engage with material on a variety of levels has led in kind to an expansion of the means by which the culture industry can communicate, and thus subjugate, individuals as consumers. This agency on behalf of the machine is what Guattari called machinic subjectivity, which we can describe as the ways in which the roles and places in society dictated to us are affected by machinic culture (Guattari 1995, 123). The manipulation of celebrity is one of the most potent means by which the media machine subjectifies individuals, as we can see in the television series Entourage.

The Use(less) Value of Fame

The idea of celebrity as a commodity is an interesting one, as there is no real use-value that can be attached. While Marx (1999, 42) notes that use-value is of little relevance to the “mystical character” of a commodity, it is difficult to attach any form of value to celebrity: to what is essentially an image of an individual. Ultimately, celebrity-as-commodity has two values: the commercial value (being the additional monetary value that celebrity can bring to existing commercial structures) and the machinic value (being the ability of the celebrity to propagate the culture industry). I want to look quickly at how the celebrity’s machinic value has changed in the last fifty years before we talk about Entourage and the mass deception of fame.

Several writers have tackled the idea of fame and celebrity, particularly in the golden Hollywood eras of the 30s, 40s and 50s, but I think Edgar Morin’s discourse on stars as modern mythology is the most relevant. Morin remarks that stars are contemporary society’s gods and goddesses, at once dependant on and transcendant of their contemporary cultures (Morin 1957, 28). They represent a paradise, an idyllic dream life that exists beyond the sphere of reality. Marilyn Monroe is not and never will be Norma Jean Mortensen/Baker.

What is important is that the dream that these celebrities represent is seen as somehow distant from regular life, for better or for worse. Ladies may style their hair like Marilyn, gentleman may feign a Cary Grant accent, but the notion that an everyday consumer could become one of these stars is small, to say the least, and usually the domain of idealistic, aspiring actors. In comparison, the celebrity industry today seems obsessed with increasingly shrinking gap between celebrity and civilian. This process seems largely the result of a single, amorphous media phenomenon: reality television.

While shows such as Candid Camera and, to a lesser degree, Cops, the style of reality television aimed at making celebrities out of “ordinary folk” was born with the MTV series the Real World. The Real World spearheaded the genre of observational reality television, which came to include shows such as Survivor, Big Brother and a variety of inverted celebrity-reality shows, the best of which would have to be the Osbournes. With celebrities and civilians on television in similar sorts of shows, the gap between the two was becoming marginal yet still tangible until the Idol series.

Shows based entirely around creating a pop-star, [Insert-Nation-Here] Idol shows are hugely successful at selling a false hope of fame, a false connection with celebrity, the that-could-be-me syndrome. And yet, at the same time, those winners of Idol do, often enough, become commercial recording artists, some very successfully. But of greatest importance, to both the industry and the viewing audience, is the dream of success: Idol-style shows highlight far more the journey than the destination.

Entourage presents the dream life of a celebrity from an insider’s point of view. David Swerdlick (2005) calls Entourage the “once a week, summertime advertisement for a lifestyle that you’re not living.” Note the log line on the poster: “A lifestyle is a terrible thing to waste.” Interestingly, while Entourage satirizes the Hollywood lifestyle both through the inanity of the characters and the hilarity of the cameos, it doesn’t stop the show from selling the same dream of fame seen anywhere else. Additionally, Entourage is interesting because at the same time as the show’s content is based around the lives of four young men enjoying the vicissitudes of their newly begotten fame, also the show works in a pseudo-reality where famous stars play themselves, or caricatures thereof. Entourage therefore uses its ability to push the boundaries of reality to simultaneously satirize and glorify the Hollywood lifestyle.

Entourage is loosely based upon the life of Mark Wahlberg, the executive producer, but in reality is as much based upon the lives of its actors. Vincent Chase, an actor on the cusp of stardom, mirrors very much the life of Adrien Grenier, who never quite made it past the cusp. Kevin Dillon, playing the Donnie to Vincent Chase’s Mark, is himself the brother of another mid-tier star, Matt Dillon, and has had previous success in his own past career. With these characters, whose lives so closely mirror their characters, the pseudo-reality of Entourage starts.

It continues with one of the most popular aspects of the show, its incredible array of cameos. Individuals as vastly different as Val Kilmer

and Bob Sagat

play roles ranging from a scraggly-haired sherpa to, more frequently, themselves. The cameos (the boys comment on the cameos here) serve in the same way as the actors themselves, to extend the reality of the show to encompass what is ostensibly a potentially real world.

At the end of the day, “Entourage makes fun of Hollywood, but protects and promotes its mystique at the same time” (Swerdlick 2005). Swerdlick compares the show to a rap film, which although a bit close-minded, has a kernel of truth: the show’s content is absurd, sarcastic even, but it “also makes them look cool.” And by making Vince and the boys look cool, Entourage is able to not only sell its dream life, but to make us want, if guiltily, to be those boys. And when a television show, or a film, or any machine, is able to dictate to us the roles we are supposed to play or the preferences we are supposed to have, it embodies the process of machinic subjectivity: the way in which machine can rearticulate our relation to the world. Not too difficult!

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max (1993), “The Culture Industry: enlightenment as mass deception”, The Cultural Studies Reader, Simon During (ed.), London: Routledge, 29-43.

Guattari, Felix (1995), ‘Regimes, Pathways, Subjects’, Soft Subversions, S. Lotringer (ed.), New York: Simotext(e), 112-130.

Marx, Karl (1867), ‘The Fetishism of the Commodity and the Secret Thereof’, Karl Marx Capital: An Abridged edition, David McLellan (ed.), London: Oxford University Press, 1999, 42-50.
Morin, Edgar (1972), ‘Gods and Goddesses’, The Stars, Richard Howard (trans.), Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 27-55.

Swerdlick, David (2005), ‘Typecast’, Popmatters, visited at 28 March 2008, http://www.popmatters.com/tv/reviews/e/entourage-040714.shtml.

For an example of celebrity taken not so seriously, turn to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.