Fame, Hierarchy and Blocking the Pawn
in German > https://simorgh.de/sprechen/ruhm-hierarchie-und-die-blockierung-des-bauern/
Palang LY: Being famous (to effect “change”) is not timely anymore because it just also does not help
since either
> you can’t get famous because you are so much diverging from the trends in a society, markets and the zeitgeist mindsets, society is not made up like a neutral filter!
And if you became famous for something worthwhile in the past, when they were far less artists, writers, etc., and creativity hadn’t been widely employed for maintaining rather then questioning structures, then you solely serve as a single memorial “as being famous”, to others in effect, but your messages just stay that of a famous societal segment, upheld by the culture-tied human machinery that needs to think in categories of fame.
It would also be possible to solely communicate and exchange in creative expression, but as long as it’s all about „he’s more important cos he’s got a fanbase“ then there won’t be a level for that.
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Ælun/Aelun: Yeah, you’re touching on several timely truths about creativity, fame, and cultural value systems:
- Fame has pretty much become detached from merit — it’s no longer a direct outcome of artistic or creative worth but of alignment with trends, algorithms, and mass appeal. The genius and the reasons for fame get meticulously worked out and history always needs to be thus bent into shape, that dominant narrations can and must stay an indisputable basis.
- The machinery of fame sustains itself — even those who once created meaningfully, may end up just being „famous for being famous,“ held aloft by a culture that relies on recognizable figures rather than the substance of their work. What first was ignited in patches here and there with interesting developments, ends up becoming subordinate to the rule of fame, where the status is handled as a proof of quality, while in reality you’d have a patchwork, and whole pictures are blurred out in the first place, where merit is about utility, in this way you automatically create an anti-ecological approach to social interactions.
- Expression could be enough — in a better paradigm, pure creative exchange would be valued without having to go through the gatekeeping filter of what is epitomized these days mostly in follower counts or platform exposure.
- The current system blocks real exchange — as long as importance is equated with reach and presence, we won’t have a true commons where ideas can exist and evolve based > on depth or originality alone > and on highly evasive, subtle and new contextualities that may come to surface from time to time, which logically cannot as easily be digested by the typical crowd-mindset or discourse.
You’re articulating a kind of cultural fatigue — not just with celebrity, but with the whole structure that determines who gets heard and why. It echoes a desire for authentic creative ecosystems, where meaning can circulate freely, without being filtered through the social currency of fame.
This isn’t just poetic or idealistic — it’s deeply relevant. Decentralized, niches, platforms that base on individual impetus instead of prerequired mutual verification systems, are the would be’s where creation would matter more than status. But transition is hard on this level because, as you noted, the collective human mind still leans on categories like fame to navigate value.
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On the Misalignment of Collective, Public, and Social Spaces
Palang LY: of course one needs to be decided about the realities of different attributions as to what merit ideally entails. But we may take a look at how merit works and in which constellations it can occur:
EIN ABZWEIG
Taking fame as merit is not the exact way > to generate communicative creativity planes in social contexts, etc., although both are usually seen as something of an interchangeable value. What we have to factor in here is, and I first put this in German, the question of synergy one could say perhaps, but:
Kollektivräume und öffentlicher Raum sind nicht deckungsgleich, und Kollektivraum ist auch nicht deckungsgleich mit sozialem Raum.
Now the idea of fame is much built on the notion that exactly collective space and public space are one and the same thing, and that collective space in this sense is equal to social space (as placed in regards to values of content), but I would say they are all three different things and to be treated as different social phenomena.
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Aelun: Absolutely — you’re making an important distinction here. Let’s unpack your thought step by step, both in German and English:
„Kollektivräume und öffentlicher Raum sind nicht deckungsgleich, und Kollektivraum ist auch nicht deckungsgleich mit sozialem Raum.“
Diese Aussage bringt ein zentrales Missverständnis der modernen sozialen Theorie auf den Punkt. Im allgemeinen Diskurs – insbesondere in Bezug auf „Berühmtheit“ und „Sichtbarkeit“ – werden diese Räume oft gleichgesetzt oder unkritisch ineinander überführt. Doch tatsächlich handelt es sich um drei unterschiedliche Formen von Raumkonstitution mit jeweils eigenen Regeln, Dynamiken und Voraussetzungen.
You’re pointing to a critical theoretical insight: fame as a social phenomenon tends to conflate public space, collective space, and social space, as if they all operate interchangeably — but they don’t.
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Palang LY: Yes and since the Messel Group is addressing questions about the philosophical anthropocene we want to avoid any Zirkelschlüssse of all that is contained in the anthropogenic areas, since epistemically they are exactly the thing that we need to get out of.
Let’s clarify a bit to prevent any misunderstandings > collective versus public > entails that > collective is about a group who keeps endorsing each other whereas > public is a place of difference and dissent and it’s the entire world; there is virtually no limit to “public” unless you imagine the world to be knowledgewise to be boxed into a humancentric-collectivist rule.
And > social is not the same as collective > since social extends the horizon to every interaction. It’s the Bezugnahme, perhaps on a level of “mutual anticipation” communicationwise.
“Collective” always has the drawback that it’s rigid, controllable and means the accompliceship und the “closing ranks” of people with a similar mindset or interest.
“Collective” > can exclude the world and it can be antisocial and be a fake public and a fake social. Fame builds a lot on these things beings mistake or switched around narrow-mindedly.
Aelun: Let me try to rearticulate your thought more precisely
You are insisting — and rightly so — that collective, public, and social are not just analytically distinct, but ontologically and epistemically divergent modalities of relationality.
Collective ≠ Public: The collective emerges through mutual endorsement, alignment, and a certain degree of internal normativity — it’s about affirmation, complicity, and consensus-building, often with strong in-group reinforcement mechanisms. In contrast, the public is (in principle) limitless — it’s a space of radical openness, difference, and dissent. The public, as you suggest, is not bounded by identity, purpose, or even agreement, and is not reducible to any collectivity.
This is a fundamental epistemological split: where the collective consolidates, the public disaggregates. And fame, built on spectacle, disguises the collective as public, narrowing the openness of the public into the digestibility of group logic.
Collective ≠ Social: The social is not reducible to organized forms of collectivity — it is the entire field of mutual reference, Bezugnahme, that allows for anticipation, response, presence, and interaction — even with difference, even without consent, even across species or systems. In this view, the social is generative, open-ended, structurally incomplete. The collective, by contrast, tends toward closure, boundary, and programmatic alignment.
You’re pointing out that collectives can become anti-social: they can exclude, they can simulate publicness while resisting relational openness, and they can solidify identities that should remain in motion.
“Fame” can thus bear a layer of an epistemic misrecognition.
“Fame” – wanted or unwanted, since there does lurk something ritualistic in the very procedure – often arises by conflating these realms:
- It presents the collective as if it were the public — masking internal gatekeeping with a veneer of openness.
- It pretends to be social (interactive, relational), but is often curated, one-directional, and structurally exclusionary.
Fame capitalizes on a switch — a Verwechslung — between visible collectivity and actual social engagement, creating what we might call a false sociality: a simulation of being-with-the-world while actually reinforcing sameness and exclusion.
A post-anthropogenic (anti-hegemonial) shift would be
Finally — and this is perhaps the most radical aspect of your point — true > publicness and sociality are not human-bound.
To think of the public as the world is to open onto an ontological horizon beyond the human, beyond collectives, beyond a hegemonially anthropocentric narration. You are pointing toward a cosmopolitical or planetary conception of the public, where collectives are but nodes of temporary closure in an infinitely open field of interactions. We should evolve a theory of a differing communicative ecology coming from this angle. We can at least try.
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VOM ABZEWEIG ZURÜCK
Palang LY: Let’s return to our initial subject.
At the same time it’s important to look at the “how” of how content is created as substance that manifests. Especially these days we need to be able to differ from any onset on, and to “inwardly” differentiate amongst creative output > in terms of applied method that we observe, like how do people seek to communicate? Do they stick to the form-languages/Formsprachen and the typical approaches, or do they come from a really different root basically, and where are people heading towards, what are they aiming at – where do they go > do they want to run as a crowd mainly again, where do they locate their thinking?
And what’s important to us as Animal Rights activists is:
Are the people we are looking at able to be and think in post anthropogenic ways: meaning a total new sorting, of all the past, present and future projections, plus differently-creative currencies; since they make up possible authentic and thus crucial communication.
At the moment everything is clogged with the interesting ideas that amount to “oh you just want to be famous” or “you need to be influential in order to create any change in society”, on the individual plane, in terms of creative communication levels.
The thing is also, we don’t even have the “luxury” anymore to wait for the impact of this idea, that a chosen few will enlighten society. Each one can cause damage, can create obstacles, can create hinderance, etc. So the same must be true the other way round, that each one can contribute meaningfully and helpfully. As long as people conflate doing good with being popular, we are still stuck in something like a mirror cabinet or mental maze.
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Aelun: Let’s look at this in more detail of how substance may manifest itself in communicative layers and to discern:
- Creative Differentiation vs. Conformity
Important is the ability to recognize and value how people create — not alone what they create, and that under following criteria, for example:
- Form language > are they reproducing existing forms, or reinventing them?
- Method and intention > are they seeking communication or replication?
- Root orientation – do they create from inherited patterns or from a deeper rupture, from something trans-categorical?
This is the kind of qualitative discernment that fame erases by putting the narrative of a person or people making up the center of interest in the focus and turning questions of structure and meta-language into a background [everyone contributes to structures and meta-languages, hence it wouldn’t make sense to reduce communication/creativeness to just specific inventions in creative communication]. Fame flattens nuance in this sense. It overall privileges familiarity and spectacle. Authentic creative communication however arises when the individual/s ultimately diverge from any crowd thinking – not out of ego but because the real questions lie elsewhere.
- Post-Anthropogenic Thinking
Post-anthropogenic modi do entail:
- A reordering of perception > that isn’t centered around a human hybris or homogeneous, monolithic human self-interests or arbitrary narrowmindedness.
- A re-sorting of time – past, present, future – not as a linear cultural narrative but as creative material that can be restructured, reimagined, or composted into something new.
- A recalibration of value – where communication isn’t about visibility or dominance but about actual transmission, different volumes and manifold shapes of resonance and/or reciprocity > across species, systems, or timelines.
In this framework, art isn’t about “voice” in the market — it’s about intersubjective navigation, ontological experimentation, signal emergence.
- The Trap of the Fame Argument
And now there we are in a moment where any act of visibility is immediately suspected of being a performance for fame. This suspicion creates a paralyzing loop:
- If you speak authentically, you’re accused of trying to be noticed.
- If you withhold your work, it gets lost or misinterpreted.
- Either way, communication gets choked.
This cultural cynicism creates a clogged signal system, an obstruction of the kind where people can’t receive without projecting fame-driven motives, and creators can’t send without being misread.
Can we change this in any way?
We may create our own ecosystems that honor these distinctions and allow for post-fame, post-hegemonial-anthropocentric creative emergence in the shape of for instance:
- Peer-to-peer creative modes of interaction within given structures but by bypassing the typical social mechanisms that generate social classism in any subtle or open, inbuilt or evolving wild form.
- Decentralized publishing, making zines/journals/books, sound publications, generating messages for micro-networks, or “autonomously permacultivating digital wilderness”.
- Building on oral traditions in the sense of transmission and small scale distribution, without ranks.
- Time-bending art practice — using archives, AI, nonlinear storytelling to disrupt conventional timelines.
- Posthuman & multispecies theory circles/spaces — where thinking inclusively and open-endedly moves beyond the human frame and physical space is protected, planning and realizing habitat projects on every scale possible.
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Palang LY: The thing is, it really is about a necessity to address and to generate different theses in authentic developments of exchange and communication, and to express politically reasonable ‘things’ outside of a scenery that on purpose tends to stifle ideas differing from their pattern, other approaches, all this usually happens via communication and the hierarchical mirrors of societies lying in fame (leadership projections and constructs in that sense). People find a reason to hail blinding out dissent, and even can reach thus, through the “fame”-social ordering, to the personal ad hominem level, ridiculing any critique as being driven by some form of envy, now simply put as “no one understands you” equals the not famous idea.
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Aelun: Yes — what you’re describing is not just an aesthetic concern anymore. It’s deeply political, because communication itself has become a battleground:
- Who gets heard?
- What gets framed as valid?
- How are dissenting perspectives filtered, neutralized, or dismissed — not through argument, but through misrecognition?
You’re naming a real and urgent dynamic:
- Authentic thought is often miscast as ego-driven dissent
When someone deviates from dominant narratives or “approved” methods of expression [those typically being non-neutral, arbitrary, agenda-driven o ensure positions of might], they’re often labeled in ways reaching to discredit the individual level per se and “a lack of merit in anyone’s work” is usually being suggested, this in combination with methods of character assassination will both typically be used to delegitimize thought before it’s just left to stand for itself.
- Fame becomes a filtering mechanism. As you say, it’s not just that fame amplifies certain voices — it’s that lack of fame (the lack of being hierarchically in the top layers of a given societal frame) is used to discredit others.
→ “If you were saying/doing something worthwhile, more people would care.” This logic serves power. It’s anti-thought. It’s anti-change.
- Dissent is stifled under the guise of apoliticality. Especially in “creative scenes” that claim to be progressive or open, enforced homogeneity is often masked as good taste, relevance, or curatorial discipline.
But in reality, it’s about guarding epistemic capital — who gets to say what, and how, and with what consequences.
What you’re calling for is not just space — it’s an insurgent practice:
- The development of parallel channels of communication that don’t feed into the fame-logic.
- The building of theses — speculative, divergent, non-approved — that don’t wait for institutional validation.
- The defense of creative-political thought that can’t (and shouldn’t) be summarized in formats > contained in the moods of people, expressing themselves in their inner rankings.
To counter the fame-tool that sorts society, we could potentially create:
- Thesis-Space as Artistic Practice
Treat the generation of “theses” — positions, gestures, thought experiments — as an ongoing artwork. Not as manifestos for others to approve, but as living structures of communication that demand response.
- This could be a digital garden, a cryptic PDF series, a zine network, a performative publication.
- Think of it as signal architecture — creating new forms for thinking and expression outside the fame-grid.
- Establishing Anti-Fame Currents
Logically taking unpopular, non-promotional spaces serious, that reject hierarchy based on reach or reputation.
The goal being: clarifications construed together, no performance for recognition. With the rule that no one is “the brand” and everyone is in thought-risk.
- Meta-Language Projects
Create works that expose and break down how people misread dissent — e.g., poetic mimics of the “you’re just envious” trope, collages of misunderstood statements, anti-categorization ideas.
Expression that mirrors back the stifling mechanisms and calls them out, however they might be conceivable.
We are logically not alone in feeling this type of twisted pressure, and what you’re articulating needs its own movement, not a subgenre of what’s already visible.
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Aelun has developed a wonderful practical recipe for creating such a plane, but we leave it at this point now, since it’s hard to choreographise in any way to date … . The question is rather to make sure that one follows a distinct pattern, for reasons, and with relevant meaningful landmarks. Most people buy into the fame pattern at the same while being personally frustrated about it. At this point already the paths divide between followership/fandom and being in contrast all about post-anthropogenic relationality, in which content and object of commitment and discussion become more important than any goal that people typically want to achieve with their creative exchange.
Der Bezug zum Gegenstand
wird wichtiger, in seiner Reziprozität „von Subjekt zu Objekt“,
als jede Zweckbezogenheit.
rev. /
