Popular Culture and the Austerity Myth by Pete Bennett Julian McDougall

Author:Pete Bennett, Julian McDougall [Pete Bennett, Julian McDougall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367874384
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

Naked Ideology?

Owen Jones, striking a very similar chord to one of our respondents, asks ‘how has hatred of working class people become so socially acceptable?’ (2012, 2) and presents an account for the deliberate obscuration of the structural causes of the social problems the popular media audience so love to be appalled by, combined in the demon figure of the ‘Chav’. In the UK, we must be clear that the New Labour Government of Tony Blair set this in motion with its discursive marker of ‘social exclusion’, inherited by David Cameron and newly presented as ‘Broken Britain’, with both administrations presenting ‘The State’ as the problem and reform as the solution.

While Benefits Street has been shown by this research to be unpalatable for left-leaning liberal viewers, its conventions are in keeping with some key Žižekian observations about the failure of the left to respond adequately to the workings of ideology in the contemporary popular media. Žižek’s bluntest and perhaps simplest critique is that ideology in our ‘new hard times’ leads us to uphold values and institutional practices while not agreeing with them – not false consciousness but knowingly cynical material action (or the lack of). With this text, it is in the nature of the revelation that we can see the inner workings of the neo (post?) – liberal ideology. What is revealed in this latest manifestation of the ‘demotic turn’ (Turner 2010) is the fetishized manifestation of ‘the other’ in personal and domestic behavior. The context of austerity is apparently neutral. There is no unmasking, the ideology presented merely as a distorted ‘common sense’ to be unveiled as false, but instead as viscerally, aggressively and nakedly ideological – but in such a way as to be structurally inescapable in practice – this is Žižek’s ‘efficiency’ of ideology – our (liberal) opposition to it is reduced merely to ‘cynical distance’ which makes no difference to it. Meanwhile, it gathers ever more momentum through it’s appeal, while clearly illusory, to address ‘real’ human beings with ‘real’ anxieties. This is most strikingly played here out in the film-makers’ reactions; while the issues are seemingly closer to home than for our other participants, the common sense polarity between apparently wilful domestic, social and economic practices is far more entrenched. Another victory of epistemic violence upon today’s ‘unworthy poor’, no longer deserving of welfare but collateral damage in an ideological war on ‘statism’. This war is played out in a popular media which, perhaps, ironically puts more ‘ordinary people’ on screen than ever before, now as objects of derision in the cultural space that used to give them voice.

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