Forensic formats: metonymic moralit

Forensic formats: metonymic morality
One of the most obvious ways in which these attempts operate to modify behaviour via responsibility on ‘reality’ television is through questions of taste. In Changing Rooms, House Invaders, What Not to Wear and Would Like to Meet participants are taught how to develop what the programme presenters define as taste, style, design and etiquette, all closely associated with long traditions of middle-class culture. In What Not to Wear the transformation of the self is complete only if the subjects conform to the right kind of (bourgeois) femininity, that is, clothing that excludes any form of excess (sexual, colour, frills, bodily exposure). For example, in one episode (first broadcast on 29 September 2004) the ‘experts’ make over Michalina. The camera focuses on her bright, brash clothing, droopy breasts, garish jewellery and heavy makeup whilst a ‘humorous’ derisory-tone voice-over makes sure the audience understand the perspective from which to judge the markers of classed bad taste. Similarly, Lisa Taylor documents how, in the gardening makeover programme, vulgar working-class tastes such as colourful bizzy-lizzy plants are uprooted to the horror of the owners, leading Taylor to suggest that ‘the depth of personal [working-class] meaning must be sacrificed to the cleansing agency of design aesthetics’ (2005: 119). These acts of transformation are examples of Bourdieu’s (1979) ‘symbolic violence’ instantiated by legitimating middle-class taste in the name of ‘lifestyle’ and improvement. It is curious, then, that ‘lifestyling’ is often mooted as one of the indicators of the demise of class, when it is in fact one of the rhetorical techniques used to devalue working-class taste and culture (Palmer, 2004).

Working-class taste, culture and values are eclipsed by the emphasis in these programmes on self-transformation – a better life is made through an individual’s correct relationship with material goods. Middle-class taste is not particularised but instead universalised and normalised as ‘good’ taste. Even in Queer Eye for the Straight Guy the queer eye is a middle-class one (Lewis 2007). This universalising of middle-class taste, behaviour, and culture via ‘experts’, and the future transformation that is projected in these programmes, echo a larger social shift in the late twentieth century whereby deindustrialisation, the eradication of apprenticeships and the decline of trade unions and the labour movement sidelined the working class as a central reference point in contemporary popular culture. According to Savage: the middle class then colonised the resulting empty social and cultural space, with the result that it has become the particular universal class. That is to say, although it was in fact a particular class with a specific history, nonetheless it has become the class around which an increasing range of practices are regarded as universally ‘normal’, ‘good’ and ‘appropriate’. (2003: 536, emphasis added)

But the universalisation of middle-class values in ‘reality’ television does not stop at taste – it is also registered in the monitoring of modes of behaviour where working-class ways of life are constructed as blockages to appropriation of the right symbols of value and progressive ways of life. For example, in Ten Years Younger smoking, sun worshipping and unhealthy eating are the errant behaviours identified as blameful and shameful (Doyle and Karl 2007).

Modes of everyday life are often turned into spectacles of shame. In the programme Honey, We’re Killing the Kids shame (not choice) operates as the catalyst. At the beginning, working-class parents stand in a white room in front of a large screen. Images of their children appear as they are now and then aged by computer graphics to the age of forty. The visual images of the children metamorphose into those of their parents, accompanied by a voice-over which increasingly and melodramatically mimes horror as the children visually become their parents, symbolizing their future through the visual image of the already failed. Looking old and unhealthy (as the parents invariably do) are symptoms of life failure, offering a dramatic visualization of a spectacle of shame. Looking back at the parents are the images of themselves: they are the problem here in the present. A family psychologist, Kris Murrin, is on hand to show them ‘corrective’ forms of behavior, which focus on apparently neutral issues such as diet and healthy living, but also frequently stray into getting motivated and getting a job to be a good role model for your children. Her list of ‘golden rules’ includes: healthy food, daily routine, structured activities, respect, one-on-one time, stop smoking, ‘you’ time, give children responsibilities, family activities, children’s learning, adult learning, challenge yourself and your kids, get kids motivated.7 Again, although class is glaringly obvious as a broader social and economic set of circumstances, the issues are dealt with in terms of personal behaviour and psychology. This provides evidence to support Valerie Walkerdine’s (2003) broader observation about how in the universalizing of middle-class lifestyles a grammar of psychology replaces the grammar of exploitation. Pseudo-psychological experts abound in ‘reality’ television programmes, where even changing one’s diet is the key to a happier life and the ‘new you’. Failure is personalized at the level of the psychological, a result of lack of self-care detached from any economic, political or cultural differences and inequalities.

Mothering in particular emerges as one of the main sites of workingclass failure, repeating the long tradition of pathologising working-class mothers (Lawler 2000). Jo, the ‘expert’ on Supernanny, enters participants’ homes to outline the failures of the parents in disciplining their children and (usually) controlling children’s sugary food intake. The focus on discipline is condensed on to the ‘naughty step’ as one of the many forms of advice, presented as ‘useful tips’. Advice is also accompanied by instructions in speaking. A how to talk to children, to explain, to elaborate, and most definitely not to shout: a more thorough demonstration of the conventional middle-class elaborated-code standard of speech would be hard to find. As Deborah Cameron notes in a broader cultural shift to ideals of individualization, communication is prized as a route improvement:
‘Good communication is said to be the key to a better and happier life; improving communication “would improve everything else”’ (Cameron 2000: 1).

‘Good communication’ as a trope appears in other ways, too. The mundane significance of the dining-room table is another motif by which behaviour is modified. Psychologists often introduce the dining table into family lives as a way of bringing the family together to talk. Talking and communicating are seen as one of the most obvious routes to parental responsibility, which stands against the images of the working class who eat ‘TV dinners’ as ‘couch potatoes’ and do not effectively interact. The television set in particular is representative of moral crime. In one episode of Honey, We’re Killing the Kids a family are forced into opening up their dining room, saved for ‘best’, to the everyday eating habits of their household. It was clear to see how distressing this act of symbolic violence was to the mother whose ‘fancy’ dining room was a matter of pride and respectability.

In Family Forensics parts of the home that are seen (by the ‘expert’ psychologist) as diversions from a more modern, communicative and healthy way of life are actually cordoned off with crime-scene tape. The overrepresentation of the working classes in these programmes make them into reified abject objects for spectacular entertainment, just as they are in Home Office White Papers, where parenting practices become ‘methods’ (or Foucauldian techniques in the care of the self) that must be taught for the public good (Gillies 2005). What parents are actually being taught is the aspiration to and value of class mobility through the psychologizing of class distinctions; as Honey, We’re Killing the Kids visualized, failure to change is a failure of mobility mimicking education policy whereby ‘the working classes are destined to transfer disadvantage to their children in a cycle of deprivation’ (Gillies 2005).

‘Reality’ television programmes are therefore finding new force through a sub-genre that fetishizes behavior modification – social work television – where moral failure can be located in many intimate spaces of personal behavior, making startling parallels with the many government behavior modification initiatives. Presented through the auspices of lifestyle and psychology, seemingly unquestionable and universal ideals are standardized for the benefit of the nation’s health. The uncomfortable presence of shame alerts us to the fallacy of discourses of ‘choice’: in You are What you Eat cameras take the opening-out of intimate behavior to a new level, focusing on faeces as the visible evidence of a bad lifestyle. That eating take-away food might have a broader social and economic explanation as a workingclass form of pleasure or a product of time necessity is not considered. Badly styled furniture in make-over programmes is a sign of lack of progress, wrinkles are the symptoms of the morally illicit pleasures of package holidays, raising your voice is a sign of lack of control and self-management. In short, each form of behaviour is given a negative value so that each part metonymically represents the ‘whole’ bad person: cultural differences visualized through the mundane and intimate details of everyday life that are presented as morally perverse, pathological and made spectacular.

Hasil (Bahasa Indonesia) 1:

Forensik format: metonymic moralitasOne of the most obvious ways in which these attempts operate to modify behaviour via responsibility on ‘reality’ television is through questions of taste. In Changing Rooms, House Invaders, What Not to Wear and Would Like to Meet participants are taught how to develop what the programme presenters define as taste, style, design and etiquette, all closely associated with long traditions of middle-class culture. In What Not to Wear the transformation of the self is complete only if the subjects conform to the right kind of (bourgeois) femininity, that is, clothing that excludes any form of excess (sexual, colour, frills, bodily exposure). For example, in one episode (first broadcast on 29 September 2004) the ‘experts’ make over Michalina. The camera focuses on her bright, brash clothing, droopy breasts, garish jewellery and heavy makeup whilst a ‘humorous’ derisory-tone voice-over makes sure the audience understand the perspective from which to judge the markers of classed bad taste. Similarly, Lisa Taylor documents how, in the gardening makeover programme, vulgar working-class tastes such as colourful bizzy-lizzy plants are uprooted to the horror of the owners, leading Taylor to suggest that ‘the depth of personal [working-class] meaning must be sacrificed to the cleansing agency of design aesthetics’ (2005: 119). These acts of transformation are examples of Bourdieu’s (1979) ‘symbolic violence’ instantiated by legitimating middle-class taste in the name of ‘lifestyle’ and improvement. It is curious, then, that ‘lifestyling’ is often mooted as one of the indicators of the demise of class, when it is in fact one of the rhetorical techniques used to devalue working-class taste and culture (Palmer, 2004).Rasa kelas buruh, budaya dan nilai-nilai terhalang oleh penekanan dalam program ini pada transformasi diri-kehidupan yang lebih baik dilakukan melalui individu hubungan yang benar dengan barang-barang materi. Kelas menengah rasa tidak particularised tetapi sebaliknya universalised dan dinormalisasi sebagai 'baik' rasa. Bahkan dalam Queer Eye untuk para Straight Guy mata aneh adalah kelas menengah satu (Lewis 2007). Ini universalising kelas menengah rasa, perilaku, dan budaya melalui 'ahli', dan masa depan transformasi yang diproyeksikan dalam program ini, echo pergeseran sosial yang lebih besar pada akhir abad kedua puluh dimana deindustrialisation, pemberantasan magang dan penurunan buruh dan gerakan buruh dikesampingkan kelas buruh sebagai pusat referensi budaya pop kontemporer. Menurut Savage: kelas menengah kemudian muncul dihasilkan kosong ruang sosial dan budaya, dengan hasil itu telah menjadi universal kelas tertentu. Yang mengatakan, meskipun sebenarnya kelas tertentu dengan sejarah tertentu, namun telah menjadi kelas di mana berbagai praktek-praktek yang meningkat dianggap sebagai Universal 'normal', 'baik' dan 'tepat'. (2003:536, penekanan ditambahkan)Tapi universalisation nilai-nilai kelas menengah dalam 'realitas' televisi tidak berhenti pada rasa-juga terdaftar dalam pemantauan mode perilaku dimana kelas pekerja cara hidup yang dibangun sebagai hambatan untuk pembentukan simbol-simbol tepat nilai dan progresif cara hidup. Sebagai contoh, dalam sepuluh tahun muda Merokok, menyembah matahari dan makan yang tidak sehat adalah perilaku bandel diidentifikasi sebagai blameful dan memalukan (Doyle dan Karl 2007).Modes of everyday life are often turned into spectacles of shame. In the programme Honey, We’re Killing the Kids shame (not choice) operates as the catalyst. At the beginning, working-class parents stand in a white room in front of a large screen. Images of their children appear as they are now and then aged by computer graphics to the age of forty. The visual images of the children metamorphose into those of their parents, accompanied by a voice-over which increasingly and melodramatically mimes horror as the children visually become their parents, symbolizing their future through the visual image of the already failed. Looking old and unhealthy (as the parents invariably do) are symptoms of life failure, offering a dramatic visualization of a spectacle of shame. Looking back at the parents are the images of themselves: they are the problem here in the present. A family psychologist, Kris Murrin, is on hand to show them ‘corrective’ forms of behavior, which focus on apparently neutral issues such as diet and healthy living, but also frequently stray into getting motivated and getting a job to be a good role model for your children. Her list of ‘golden rules’ includes: healthy food, daily routine, structured activities, respect, one-on-one time, stop smoking, ‘you’ time, give children responsibilities, family activities, children’s learning, adult learning, challenge yourself and your kids, get kids motivated.7 Again, although class is glaringly obvious as a broader social and economic set of circumstances, the issues are dealt with in terms of personal behaviour and psychology. This provides evidence to support Valerie Walkerdine’s (2003) broader observation about how in the universalizing of middle-class lifestyles a grammar of psychology replaces the grammar of exploitation. Pseudo-psychological experts abound in ‘reality’ television programmes, where even changing one’s diet is the key to a happier life and the ‘new you’. Failure is personalized at the level of the psychological, a result of lack of self-care detached from any economic, political or cultural differences and inequalities.Ibu khususnya muncul sebagai salah satu situs utama kegagalan workingclass, mengulangi tradisi lama pathologising kelas pekerja ibu (Lawler 2000). Jo, 'ahli' pada Supernanny, memasuki rumah-rumah para peserta untuk menguraikan kegagalan orang tua dalam bagaimana kita mendisiplin anak-anak mereka dan (biasanya) mengontrol asupan makanan manis anak-anak. Fokus pada disiplin kental pada 'nakal langkah' sebagai salah satu bentuk yang banyak nasihat, disajikan sebagai 'tips berguna'. Saran ini juga disertai dengan petunjuk dalam berbicara. Bagaimana berbicara dengan anak-anak, untuk menjelaskan, untuk menguraikan, dan paling jelas tidak untuk berteriak: demonstrasi lebih menyeluruh konvensional kelas menengah standar kode diuraikan pidato akan sulit untuk menemukan. Sebagai Deborah Cameron catatan dalam pergeseran budaya yang lebih luas untuk cita-cita individualisasi, komunikasi yang berharga sebagai perbaikan rute:' Komunikasi yang baik dikatakan menjadi kunci untuk kehidupan yang lebih baik dan lebih bahagia; meningkatkan komunikasi "akan memperbaiki segalanya" ' (Cameron 2000: 1).‘Good communication’ as a trope appears in other ways, too. The mundane significance of the dining-room table is another motif by which behaviour is modified. Psychologists often introduce the dining table into family lives as a way of bringing the family together to talk. Talking and communicating are seen as one of the most obvious routes to parental responsibility, which stands against the images of the working class who eat ‘TV dinners’ as ‘couch potatoes’ and do not effectively interact. The television set in particular is representative of moral crime. In one episode of Honey, We’re Killing the Kids a family are forced into opening up their dining room, saved for ‘best’, to the everyday eating habits of their household. It was clear to see how distressing this act of symbolic violence was to the mother whose ‘fancy’ dining room was a matter of pride and respectability.In Family Forensics parts of the home that are seen (by the ‘expert’ psychologist) as diversions from a more modern, communicative and healthy way of life are actually cordoned off with crime-scene tape. The overrepresentation of the working classes in these programmes make them into reified abject objects for spectacular entertainment, just as they are in Home Office White Papers, where parenting practices become ‘methods’ (or Foucauldian techniques in the care of the self) that must be taught for the public good (Gillies 2005). What parents are actually being taught is the aspiration to and value of class mobility through the psychologizing of class distinctions; as Honey, We’re Killing the Kids visualized, failure to change is a failure of mobility mimicking education policy whereby ‘the working classes are destined to transfer disadvantage to their children in a cycle of deprivation’ (Gillies 2005).Program televisi 'Realitas' karena itu menemukan kekuatan baru melalui genre sub yang fetishizes modifikasi perilaku-kerja sosial televisi-mana kegagalan moral dapat ditemukan dalam banyak ruang intim perilaku pribadi, membuat mengejutkan paralel dengan banyak inisiatif modifikasi perilaku pemerintah. Disajikan melalui naungan gaya hidup dan psikologi, tampaknya cita-cita perlu dipertanyakan dan universal standar untuk kepentingan kesehatan bangsa. Kehadiran nyaman malu peringatan kita kekeliruan wacana 'pilihan': Anda adalah apa yang Anda makan kamera ambil pembukaan-out dari perilaku intim ke tingkat yang baru, berfokus pada kotoran sebagai bukti terlihat gaya buruk. Bahwa makan makanan bungkus mungkin penjelasan sosial dan ekonomi yang lebih luas sebagai bentuk workingclass kesenangan atau produk kebutuhan waktu tidak dipertimbangkan. Buruk gaya furnitur dalam program-program make-over adalah tanda tidak adanya kemajuan, keriput adalah gejala kenikmatan moral terlarang paket liburan, menaikkan suaramu adalah tanda kurangnya kontrol dan manajemen mandiri. Singkatnya, setiap bentuk perilaku diberikan nilai negatif agar setiap bagian metonymically mewakili orang 'seluruh' buruk: perbedaan budaya divisualisasikan melalui rincian biasa dan intim kehidupan sehari-hari yang disajikan sebagai secara moral jahat, Patologi dan membuat spektakuler.