Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Culture by Claire Grant

Author:Claire Grant [Grant, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9781134973842
Google: -YtIpdHvdBUC
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-05-13T05:47:23+00:00

Irony and the subject of mass culture

The Marlette cartoon shows the home restored as a safe and cosy site for the domestic consumption of distant violence. The figures, these couch potatoes, are Berlant's infantile citizens. Naive, passive and infantilized, they are also the consumers of this televised entertainment, the index market for the AT&T, Toyota, and Outback Steakhouse advertisements that punctuated the coverage of McVeigh's execution. The Marlette and Benson cartoons put on display, but also question, the Baudrillardian subject, the subject who is saturated with information and images, riveted by the latest kind of reality TV. Baudrillard argues that the media implode into the mass consciousness, obliterating distinctions between public and private, and replacing them with an increasingly pervasive media space. The subject, he claims, is reduced to a terminal within an all-consuming circulation of the hyper-real. Hence for Baudrillard, new media bring the neutralization of meaning and the emasculation of politics, with the collapse of all critical distance. Though Baudrillard's work is usefully provocative, I do not believe that the media are always already antimediatory. As you will have gathered from this chapter, I prefer to work with a notion of doubled audiences. There is, as I have hoped to demonstrate to you, much critical mileage to be gained from addressing the figure of an ironic reader, from calling upon one who can, and will, read between the lines.

Ironic spaces are one way in which the critical distance that Baudrillard claims is an impossibility can be engendered. Because irony is sited in the in-between, on that edge which is also a point of passage, the spaces of irony are media. Occupying a middle position, they effect a conveyance and a communication. The ironic is therefore a space which mediates, and it constructs an alternative media space. It is a mode of address suited to the formation of counter-public spaces, those sites in which an alternative idiom develops. These new discursive spaces engage with the mainstream and dominant public sphere, seeking to reinscribe its terms. Irony contributes to this task, as a device by which dominant discourses can be challenged in their habitual and hegemonic vocabularies, for, as Rorty (1989: 74) points out, 'the opposite of irony is common sense'. Because irony unfolds within a logic of repetition and negation it counters the iterative construction of dominant terms. As an effective counterfoil to the populist appeal of common sense, irony suspends the assumed commonality of that which is called the commonplace. It points towards other spaces, turning away towards an elsewhere. The figure of irony undercuts the claim to singularity and sameness within this prefix 'uni' to the state of unitedness. It questions the constructions of belonging, of togetherness and of ecumenical concern through which imagined traumatic collectivities are addressed as victim-citizens. The McVeigh webcast case questions the association of the internet with a democratic electronic agora. This area of inquiry is also addressed in the following chapter, which considers the impact of new media upon penality through analysis of the extensive online communications around several notorious murder cases.

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