Apart from a few surface differences -- I'm a middle-aged anthropology professor who grew up on "The Cosby Show," not "Hannah Montana" -- I am Miley Cyrus. So are my college students. You may be, too.
My students say they need to choose how famous they want to be. They need to manage their profiles and reputations. They must be available to their publics at all times, even during my class. They endure and sometimes hurl vengeful and humiliating images, truths and lies that require management and clean-up. They sometimes can't bear to Google themselves.
As for me, I'm told I need a platform, and a brand for my products (what used to be called "books"). It's hard for academic triple threats -- teacher, writer, public speaker -- to maximize our public effect. I need exposure. I need to package my scholarship in sound bites, then costume myself with make-up and hair spray and deliver those sound bites on a screen. I need a FirstNameLastName.com website and a headshot that removes 10 years and 10 pounds. I need to tweet. I need not twerk, so I'm told.
During graduate school in Washington, D.C., I biked home after class at 11 p.m., a downhill journey from upper Northwest to lower Shaw. I coasted by women working the streets, most of them thin and tired-eyed. Now there's a platform, literally, the street beneath their feet. The brand is easily recognized ("prostitute") and the product's supply creates its own demand. They didn't look happy, rested or well-fed, but they did successfully make themselves available for consumption.
There's a degree of prostitution -- what Karl Marx called alienation -- inherent in working for cash. We either sell our labor or purchase the labor of others: That's life in a market economy. In the "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844," Marx writes, "The laborer sinks to the level of a commodity and indeed becomes the most miserable commodity possible." Even worse, the more stuff we make and consume, the more its value overtakes ours. "With the increase in value of the world of things arises in direct proportion the decrease of value of human beings."
Which is more valuable: Miley Cyrus herself or the media products she creates and all the jobs and profits associated with them? The market clearly values the commodity more than the human. What voice could more authoritatively offer a different measure of value?
Marx writes of alienation in categorical terms, but it seems to me it has degrees, degrees that matter a lot.
I sell my labor to a nonprofit institution of higher education, a relatively mild flavor of capitalism. I like what I do, get paid sufficiently and feel good about my contribution.
Yet while academics eschew celebrity for celebrity's sake, sexiness, appearance and popularity, we aren't separate from the systems we critique. Our taste is for influence, thought leadership and intellectual prestige -- potentially noble purposes, but often at the same time, softened forms of celebrity. However noble our goals, the price of achieving influence and leadership is often very high, and while payment varies with the nuances of individual lives, it has something to do with placing commodity over personhood, making more than just our labor available for sale.
I want for both me and my students, and the women working the streets in D.C., and Miley Cyrus as well, I suppose, that we all could go home at the end of a workday and rest, eat and relax with loved ones. There we'd luxuriate, every day and for hours, in a place where our inestimable worth is reflected back to us by people who love us.
I still want to put my ideas out there and, when need be, my image, and I am often glad when others do the same with their talent, products, songs, videos, selfies and everything else. Let's toss it all out there like hats in a ring, holding back for ourselves a solid sense of self that never enters the ring because it cannot, or should not, be thrown.
First Published: October 20, 2013, 12:00 a.m.
Updated: October 20, 2013, 12:18 a.m.