The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role. Being a star means specializing in the seemingly lived: the star is the object of identification with the shallow seeming life that has to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations which are actually lived… [Celebrities] embody the inaccessible result of social labor by dramatizing its byproducts magically projected above it as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption, which are the beginning and end of an undiscussed process. In one case state power personalizes itself as a pseudo-star; in another a star of consumption gets elected as a pseudo-power over the lived.

"The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought into the definition of all human realization is the obvious degradation of being into having. The present phase of total occupation of social life by the accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having into appearing, from which all actual 'having' must draw its immediate prestige and its ultimate function. At the same time all individual reality has become social reality directly dependent on social power shaped by it. It is allowed to appear to the extent that it is not."