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Introduction: The Mirror of Idols and Celebrity 19
Often this entails presenting a discrepancy between what the audience
expects and what the news story actually specifies about the celebrity.
Because the audience is already well acquainted with the overpromoted
image, these teasers generate audience attention by promising greater
knowledge, such as details about the personal life of the idol or celebrity.
Even in the physical space of urban Japan, saturated with advertising
images, one becomes immersed in a culture of celebrity. The private
space of media consumption in the home and the public space of
the urban landscape converge to promote a constant diet of celebrity
images. From television and magazines to outdoor digital screens and
billboards, these images appear almost to return the gaze of the consumer.
Walking the streets and other public spaces in Japan, one is
always being watched—not in the Orwellian sense of surveillance society,
but by the look of celebrities in a society of spectacle (Debord 1994).
In Japan, the technologies of governmentality produce a citizenry to
serve the policies of neoliberalism through the linking of the capitalist
state and the ideology of consumerism. The state does not police
these policies through the threat of force, but relies on corporations
and the techniques of marketing and advertising to achieve disciplinary
control and the subjugation of bodies. The biopolitics of this regime
cultivates the mimetic desires of the masses by channeling their energies
into ritualized forms of consumption. Celebrities are the enforcers of the
regime of capitalism through their signification of the ideology of consumption.
The mimetic desire to appropriate the image of the celebrity
operates in the sphere of economic processes for the controlled insertion
of bodies into the routinized repetition of the consumption of goods.
Cracks in the mirror and fan frustrations
In recent scholarship on fan cultures, efforts to avoid pathologizing
fandom have given rise to a new orthodoxy that celebrates the active
and productive agency of fans. Nearly two decades ago, Joli Jenson
(1992) lamented how the literature on fandom was haunted by images
of deviance; the fan was seen as an individual whose behavior was
excessive and obsessive; the stereotype of the frenzied fan adhered
around images of lonely, socially awkward men or hysterical women.
In countering this image by considering fandom a “normal, everyday
cultural or social phenomenon” (Ibid., 13), criticism of the culture
industry’s exploitation of fan communities has receded to the point of
near obscurity. Though cultural studies originated as a critique of capitalist
relations, today fan studies is almost complicit with the culture