Before one can understand the importance of interpretation, symbol, and art in the midst of a hypermodern mass commodification of the person, one must engage and uncover the practices that constituted a narrative permitting such communication ethics questions to emerge in the particularity of a historical moment. Arnett and Holba point to Richard Rorty to
understand narratives. According to Rorty, narratives are stories, dependent upon a set of
practices that find common agreement between and among groups participating within that given story. The unification of narrative and practice emerge through what Calvin O. Schrag in
Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity offered as the metaphor of communicative praxis, inviting of texture and learning from difference. Textured learning from difference emerges from communicative praxis, uniting theory and action between and among others. as Three major metaphors guide the active process of communicative praxis—human
communication is about something, by someone, and for someone else (Schrag). For Schrag, historical contexts embed communicative praxis within narratives, within temporality, and within a given historical moment.
Practices are constituted by habits of the heart (Bellah et al.), foundational and formative patterns that shape “communicative meaning” in particular historical moments (Arnett and Holba 11). One’s active engagement of meeting existence and the human person rest upon one’s
commitment to the repeated patterns and practices that shape meaningful human communication, an extension of philosophy of communication ethics. Narratives take root in historical moments, which, according to Arnett and Holba, are communicative dwellings that paint communication ethics pictures detailing particularity of questions and textured responsiveness. Specifically, and in the philosophical lineage of Charles Taylor, Arnett and Holba understand communicative dwellings to be “historical periods […] that embody questions relevant to a unique moment in time” (Arnett and Holba 35). Thus, Arnett and Holba advocate for an approach to philosophy as a historical enterprise. Again, Arnett and Holba turn to Rorty, who understood that philosophy historically essentially suggests that a historical moment, particularly those embedded within that moment, take for granted that historical time because of communication ethics questions
grounded within given narratives (Rorty). Alasdair MacIntyre also contends with this historical mode of being, suggesting that distance permits one to truly understand those particular
questions within a historical moment (distance, perhaps, obtained by Warhol, who was capable of such judgment).
Arnett and Holba’s understanding of philosophical pictures yields significant and impactful insight for Schrag’s notion of narratival neighborhoods. These neighborhoods are comprised of the unification of both philosophy and communication grounded within history and time, revealing deeply communicative interactions between ideas that help shape and illuminate human capacity to understand and engage historical moments. Thus, philosophical pictures, comprised of practices that yield insight into narratives, formed within these neighborhoods, clarifying the co-creation of meaning by “revealing the emergence of a lived historical memory”
(Arnett and Holba 41). These neighborhoods suggested that our worlds are shaped by the Other, and that we engage that world through “perspectives, behaviors, and communication conditions”
that necessitate interpretation and attention (Arnett and Holba 41). Thus, one’s responsiveness to a historical moment shapes, and reshapes, practices, constituted by one’s commitment to a particular moment.
A given philosophy of communication ethics points to practices that shape narratival patterns, hinged upon a historical moment. In the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics, according to Arnett and Holba, the interpreter, the text, and the historical moment unite as three coordinates influenced by narratives. The unification of these three coordinates resonate within a philosophy of communication ethics, which “informs one’s approach to interaction and works as a fulcrum that gives energy, direction, clarity, and strength to one’s communication” (Arnett and Arneson xi). A philosophy of communication ethics presupposes that communication ethics questions requite weight through our communicative practices, dictated by our given historical moments. For example, Charles Taylor, in his 2007 work A Secular Age, suggests that historical moments allow for interpretive lenses. This lends itself back to his 1989 masterpiece Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Age. Both works contend that man’s search for being
manifests in and through a human’s capacity to discern and make sense of communication ethics questions dictated by history.
Arnett and Holba suggest that philosophical pictures create windows into practices that constitute narratives. Furthermore, the inclusion of history and historical moments shapes our own interpretative understanding, opening up a hermeneutic entrance for interpreting a given text further. These major metaphors shape the philosophical background (or the “why” of given narratives) privileging foreground behaviors (or the “how” of narrative practices). The practices that constituted Warhol’s hypermodern moment emerge in description of three primary
individuals most formative for Warhol’s life and career: 1) the icon (Julia Warhola), 2) the
superstar (Edie Sedgwick), and 3) the celebrity (Billy Name). These three individuals exemplify the primary metaphors of this chapter, metaphors offered by Warhol himself.
The “icon” has had a profound impact on Warhol’s work for its Byzantine orthodox influences and shaped his hypermodern narrative from beginning to end. The “icon” has a number of complex meanings, ranging from philosophical understandings to semiotic signs. A number of scholars including Erwin Panofsky (1955), Dana Cloud (2004), and Lester Olson (1987) have defined “icon” as an image that carries cultural currency. Eric Jenkins, who uniquely synthesizes the communication field’s definitions of icons, contests that icons refer to visually suggestive images that call forth significant social meanings and affect cultural landscapes.
Jenkins points to Pierce and Eco, suggesting that an icons acts as a “signifier that bear[s] a resemblance to their signified” (469). However, his most important contribution is his turn to Eastern Orthodox theology, which understands a more potent definition of icon with roots in Byzantine iconography rising in response to the reign of Emperor Constantine V. The icon became a “unique mode of seeing,” unifying form and content to create a “nonarbitrary
relationship between the signifier and the signified” in both spiritual and earthly realms (Jenkins 473). The icon establishes a visual practice inherent within particular narratives. An icon with cultural currency translates into the relationship between icon, superstar, and celebrity—each metaphor, in a hypermodern context, suggests a visceral commitment to revering and
celebrating.
Warhol directly utilized the notion of ‘superstar,’ the term most closely associated with Warhol’s Factory. Throughout Popism: The Warhol Sixties, Warhol utilizes this terminology to refer to the vulnerable and, often, out of control individuals that he worked with during the years of the Silver Factory, directly reflecting a hypermodern mass consumption of the actor or star.
Steven Watson, one of the principal biographers of Warhol during the 1960s, contends that
‘superstar’ specifically refers to the movies made by Warhol beginning in 1965, although the term had possessed cultural relevancy before that. The notion of ‘superstar’ suggested a systematic attempt by Warhol to identify “nobodies” and place them in front of a camera (Watson 183). These underground stars found identity in the B-movie screen, searching for a level of fame that would catapult them to the silver screen. These ‘superstars’ were real individuals, tasked with remaining so when the camera turned on—they were not actors, developing a character for popular consumption. They permitted the commodification of their very selves, consumed by public audiences. Specifically, Warhol created films for his Superstars, highlighting and illuminating the personalities and the attitudes of the individuals comprising the Silver Factory. While he would always idolize Hollywood celebrities, he would not conflate his Silver comrades with those glamorous stars. His superstars found respite in front of a camera revealing the hypermodern practices of some of the most troubled individuals that Warhol found.
Nothing was sacred to the Superstar, and the embodied practices of those individuals reflected a hypermodern narrative that lacked identity, lived within the present, and permitted the
commodification of all things.
Warhol did not conflate Superstar with Celebrity, another important metaphor for Warhol. In Popism: The Warhol Sixties, Warhol discusses celebrity as a defining and magical status granted to individuals that went beyond simply the ordinary and the everyday. The
“celebrity” was “worshipped,” famous, and beautiful, privileged to a status that was unattainable to most (Warhol and Hackett 111). “Celebrity” exists in a historical trajectory, as explicated by communication scholar Joshua Gamson, who offers an in-depth analysis of celebrity in the historical moments that characterize twentieth-century America. Gamson suggests that obsession
with fame began in early Roman and Christian discourses related to public action and hierarchies within narrative traditions. The celebrity reached its pinnacle in the mid-nineteenth century when communication permitted the established of celebrity as a “‘mass’ phenomenon”—primarily through new technologies such as the newspaper and the telegraph (Gamson 3). P.T. Barnum was one of the first to utilize publicity in order to promote and commoditize the person,
according to Gamson. The practices were concerned with generated attention and managing the images of professionals. This would eventually translate into the practices of public relations and publicity, specifically addressed by individuals such as Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays that
suggested that public attitude toward people was of particular importance. Gamson contends this period marked the “birth of modern American consumer culture” which translated the concept of celebrity into one of primary consumption and entertainment (4). Gamson terms this a star system, whereby the commodification of the celebrity person simply molded that person to fit a form. He suggests that consumer capitalism privileged cults of character or turning people into mass commodities and enslaving celebrities to their audience members. Celebrities exist as images beholden to the consuming public, groomed to embody practices that point to such a public narrative.
Linked together, practices constitute narrative traditions, or publicly agreed upon stories that serve to exemplify given communication ethics questions situated within historical
moments. The three major metaphors of icon, superstar, and celebrity exemplify and illustrate Warhol’s unique creative feud in the midst of hypermodernity His relationships with his mother, Julia Warhola, one of his most infamous superstars, Edie Sedgwick, and his closest assistant in the 1960s, Billy Name, exemplify a hypermodern creative feud that uncovers practices in narratives, offering particular insights for a philosophy of communication ethics. Practices
constitute narratives, and the practices engaged in by these three important figures in Warhol’s life and works reflect Lipovetsky’s philosophical description of a historical moment
characterized by hyperconsumption and terror in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty. In hypermodernity, the practices of these three individuals reveal a deeply conflicting yet personal account of Warhol’s embodiment of hypermodernity’s malaise of the human spirit. The unique condition of the hypermodern commodification of persons further illuminates Warhol’s
contribution to understanding philosophy of communication ethics through an analysis of these individuals.