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Seen & Unseen Aloud
1 min read

New episode: Seen & Unseen Aloud

Listen to a curated selection of recent Seen & Unseen articles. This episode: the power of attention as evinced by Simone Weil; a look at Sir Paul McCartney's unseen portraits of the Beatles; and the grief at the death of Matthew Perry and unexpected twists in the story of real life.

Nick is the senior editor of Seen & Unseen.

a man looks to the distance beside an American flag

This week we consider the power of attention - the giving and receiving of it and its power for healing but also the complexities of fame; Justine Toh considers what Simone Weil's philosophy of attention has to say to western culture's attention battles; Jamie Mulvaney takes us to the National Portrait Gallery in London to look at Sir Paul McCartney's unseen portraits of the Beatles; James Cary speaks of the grief at the death of Matthew Perry and unexpected twists in the story of real life.

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2 min read

Do we feel guilt for Liam Payne’s death?

We want the celebrity world to exist, but it returns terrible violence.
A crowd of teenagers gather by a Peter Pan statue to mourn a dead pop star
A fan vigil beside a Peter Pan Statue, London.
Sky News.

It’s no secret that fame is a poisoned chalice. Those reading about Liam Payne, the former One Direction star who died last week, will have noticed the theme: denied privacy, loaded with unbearable expectations, in a milieu where illegal substances were too much to hand - what chance did he have? The word ‘tragedy’ is scattered across multiple headlines. 

One young Telegraph writer sees it as a generational trauma: “our first celebrity-induced reminder that life can be cruel, and fleeting”. Formerly Elvis, or John Lennon, now Payne; plus ça change. But what really haunts our society about Payne’s death is not a feeling it was unavoidable. It is, rather, our guilt: did we do this? Our rapacious appetites, consumer needs, and reckless licensing of rock-’n-roll form - did we tie this teen idol to the sacrificial altar? 

Religious language is not inappropriate: thousands in cities around the world are holding vigils to Payne’s memory, and these shrines would have interested René Girard, who had a theory about how society works. While staying “a few pages ahead of the students” in French novels at Indiana University during the late 1950s, Girard noticed that humans want things, but not because of innate desires. We want things because other humans want them. There is always this undercurrent of rivalry to our world, even amongst close friends - in fact, especially for those whose goals are most similar. 

What becomes of this collective aggression? It has to be banished through scapegoating. It’s everyone against one; a victim is butchered. For Girard, culture is what happens when a group achieves temporary peace in the wake of a sacrificial death. The bubble of built-up tension has burst, and an epoch of nonviolence means we get on with civilisation. We raise the kids, build some structures, or write a poem. 

Religious mourning for Payne reveals these sacrificial contours of our culture. We want the celebrity world to exist, for its fantasies, desirable bodies, and danger. But it returns terrible violence - exploitation, harassment, and rejection (Payne’s own solo career had not kept him at the thrilling toppermost of the chart). The death of a victim sobers us up, momentarily, from our intoxication. But how long until we repeat it again? 

Girard converted to Catholicism in 1959, after he encountered in the Gospels a religion that acknowledged these human trends, and offered a solution. It still required imitation - of Jesus Christ - but without the threat of rivalry. But in the crucifixion was a scapegoating that did not seem to leave things open to repetition. It had finished something, for good. Sunday morning yielded a new kind of peace.