Charlie Brooker Speaks to the Nation

It is not hard to write in a disparaging fashion about why the 'popularity' of X-Factor and I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here - with their icons such as 'Jedward', 'Jordan' and the unspeakable thing that is called Simon Cowell - are merely cultural reflections of the dehumanizing alienation of 21st-century British capitalist society, but there is still something distinctly satisfying about the manner and style in which Charlie Brooker does it. As he notes, 'one day we'll emerge on the other side of this unprecedented cultural drought and wonder how the hell our imaginations survived'.

The Place of the Celebrity in Late Capitalism

The celebrity, then, is a bundle of paradoxes. It has no function other than as an appendage to the process of capital accumulation and no meaning or significance other than as a vehicle for capital at a certain stage in its circulation - and yet, celebrities are also the focus of wish-fulfilment and projection on the part of great swathes of the population. They are invested with all kinds of concentrated, intensified meanings and significances on the part of the voyeuristic-oppressed consumers of the celebrity commodity and yet in order to function properly they must function without meaning other than the circular, sui generis logic of accumulation for accumulation's sake.

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