Attention, Capital and Celebrity
While advice manuals have existed for hundreds of years prescribing how to live ‘the good life’, today’s lifestyle gurus offer advice on how to achieve acceptance, approval, social impact and self-validation as made manifest in happiness, financial success and well-being. There is a shift in orientation here from ‘being good’ to feeling good. The Ancient Greeks’ concern with moral virtue is replaced by a type of moral emotivism in which feeling is perceived to be the barometer of success. The primary cause of this doctrine – which reduces all moral judgements to ‘expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling’ – is liberalism with its emphasis on individual rights and freedom over a determinate conception of the human good (MacIntyre 1981: 11–12). The central idea driving this doctrine is that it is our individual right to select moral values that accord with our feelings. The self-help movement develops this doctrine further. Here, our moral values are based on the pursuit of subjective self-esteem and validated by having meaningful social value in the sight of others and one’s capacity to generate attention capital.
The term ‘attention capital’ was coined by van Krieken (2012). It emerged in relation to an investigation of celebrity and refers to ‘the accumulation, distribution and circulation of the abstract form of capital that is attention’ (van Krieken 2012: 10). The clear parallel is with money. As with monetary value, attention is desired, subject to variation in value (inflation/deflation) and the laws of demand and supply. The analogy helps us to think of lifestyle citizenship as a type of coinage. By the term lifestyle citizenship we mean a deterritorialised form of social belonging based around shared values of openness, tolerance of difference, recognition of personal vulnerability, planetary responsibility and devotion to personal well-being. The analogy also usefully reiterates the importance of the just-in-time principle that underlies lifestyle management today. The internalisation and display of lifestyle attributes that convey acceptance and approval, which translate into the attainment of impact, are means of exchange that can fluctuate in value. Although lifestyle gurus typically urge that motivation must come from within, their position as guides and role models confirms the continuing importance of significant others in learning how to succeed in the school of life.
It is by no means an accident that many of the most popular and influential advocates of lifestyle citizenship are celebrities. Super-stars such as Oprah Winfrey, Martha Stewart and Gwyneth Paltrow present themselves, and are widely regarded as, lifestyle polymaths. The attention capital they have generated in the sphere of entertainment carries over into wider realms of self-engineering and virtue signalling in which ordinary people participate and innovate. There is a reason for this. Super-stars are at the top of the tree of attention capital because the rewards assigned to them are valued as public confirmation that they possess talents and people skills that are in short supply, and therefore highly valued. Since ‘people skills’ are indispensable for nearly every walk of life, from successful family relationships to achievement in the labour market, celebrities are readily absorbed as role models for upgrading and polishing lifestyle. Like celebrities, lifestyle gurus exploit and develop techniques and conventions of ‘informal life coaching’ (Rojek 2012, 2016). That is, a sphere of dedicated knowledge combing the spectrum of intimate relations, and expressing insights regarding behaviour, self-presentation and social impact. Revealingly, sharing experience, and offering accessible practical solutions to life problems and life opportunities, is often presented with conspiratorial overtones. When Oprah Winfrey advises her audience about how to deal with weight issues, we forget that in 2015 she bought a ten per cent stake in ‘Weight Watchers’ and joined its board of directors or that her net worth in 2018 was estimated to be $3 billion (Wiener-Bronner 2018). Instead, she communicates with the audience as if she were outside of the system and living on equal terms with them, traversing the ostensibly contradictory values of religious piety and consumer capitalism (Lofton 2011). For the most part, social and economic distance is a requirement for the attention capital of celebrity status. However, when celebrities present themselves as lifestyle advisers they take care to step off their pedestal and espouse the philosophy of being accessible and on a level playing field, not only with ordinary people, but in the case of celebrities who advocate environmental responsibility, with the Earth itself.
Celebrities who engage in expanding lifestyle consciousness generally do so on the presumption that they are, in the end, just ‘one of us’. The marginalisation or absence of recognisable party political affiliations is a crucial part in this process. In privileging ‘humanity’ over ‘race’ and ‘party politics’, celebrity lifestyle campaigners boost their apparent integrity and, in doing so, have an easier job of bringing people ‘into confidence’. Additionally, while claiming to have real and relevant knowledge about the human and environmental issues that they address, they are at pains to avoid being labelled as ‘experts’. In cultivating informality, the apparatus of celebrity life coaching is defined as offering an alternative route to the ‘us and them’ polarity that is often thought to mar transactions with professionals and experts. Lifestyle gurus also make a virtue of being non-judgemental. They appear to offer a world that is beyond ‘us and them’. Informal coaching fetishises the value of ‘native’ knowledge drawn from lay experience rather than training or professional expertise (Keen 2008). The race to win in life is the final arbiter of trust and useful knowledge. Lifestyle gurus appeal directly to ‘common sense’ and ‘plain speaking’ and contrast this with the ‘abstraction’, ‘aloofness’ and ‘insensitivity’ of the professional canon.
Digitally ‘Sitting Next to Nellie’
We can perhaps illustrate the point with an example from work relations. Lifestyle gurus frequently offer a variation of what is known in human relations management as the ‘sitting next to Nellie’ phenomenon. The notion developed from the nineteenth-century factory system. According to the Oxford English Dictionary it refers to on-the-job training by unqualified instructors (fellow workmen and women) who have been doing the job for years. Instruction is unplanned and unsystematic. While trainees may learn the nuts and bolts of the job, they may also acquire the good and bad work habits of the instructor. All of this can be extended to apply to lifestyle gurus. For them, lifestyle issues, rather than work practice, are the crux of online transaction. Lifestyle gurus offer the chance to copy and learn from receptive strangers who position and advance themselves as significant others. The passport of their attention capital is the claim either to have directly experienced identical lifestyle challenges that perplex the audience, or to have devised resources to overcome them. They appear not just as knowledgeable practitioners, but as successful role models in overcoming life’s hazards and hurdles. Following the rise of reflexive modernisation, a series of ordinary people with ‘know-how’ today claim the authority to advise people on how to live. The example of ‘sitting next to Nellie’, also helps to consolidate another important point about the character of lifestyle guru dynamics. The apparatus of self-improvement is often presented as the basis for play, self-discovery and self-revelation. Whatever truth rests in these perceptions must not be permitted to obscure the equivalent characteristic that lifestyle gurus provide people with an additional form of work. Acceptance, approval, social impact and self-validation are not achieved at the drop of a hat. They require planning and labour. It might be said that the original lifestyle advisers and guides such as Smiles, Beecher and Beeton in the nineteenth century also understood this. Smiles’ Self-help, Beecher’s Treatise and Beeton’s Household Management are paeans to hard, muscular, organised work and the moral superiority of Christian values. They led readers to believe that being faithful to the enunciated principles of self-help will result in full graduation from ‘the school of life’ – entry to heaven. This implies that, once learning is complete, successful life management will simply consist in the robust application of the same learned principles that are fit to match any occasion until the end of one’s days. Today’s lifestyle gurus offer not so finite a scheme in their compass of advice. They