Examining issues such as the current dynamics of poverty in Britain, this text also considers social policy, the historical relationship between the state and the.
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It is not surprising therefore to see a similar pejorative shorthand used in Benefits Street as that used in earlier waves of 'underclass' media mythologizing - the sofa abandoned in the street, piles of windswept rubbish, the satellite dish, cigarettes, tins of cheap lager, kids loitering in the street after dark. These figures have a televisual and cinematic history stretching back to the s and the post-Thatcherite nostalgic mourning for the working class see Biressi and Nunn Benefits Street presents momentary glimpses of resourcefulness, such as the character of Smoggy 'the 50p man' who sells household items to his neighbours door-to-door.
The introductory voiceover of each episode promises to show how residents will come together in mutual support through hard times as benefit cuts become implemented. But in broader terms, and in spite of these more complex and contradictory moments, the national abjects of poverty porn serve to transform precarity into a moral failure, worklessness into laziness and social immobility and disconnection into an individual failure to strive and aspire.
The recent swathe of poverty porn does not only play on existing shameless curiosity about poverty, it also positions the lives of the poor as a moral site for scrutiny, something to be peered at, dissected and assessed. It reinvents the underclass for the purposes of welfare reform 'debate' which is set to immiserate the most marginalized and precarious of the 'post-working-class' even further. It presents the 'others' on the screen as dysfunctional in their choices and behavior, as well as presenting a dysfunctional welfare state which rewards such 'lifestyles'.
In such a framework, the poverty porn viewer is compelled to understand social insecurity her own and that of others as a problem of self-discipline, resilience and responsibility, rather than as a consequence of the extensions and excesses of neoliberalism. Fast Media, Fast Policy and Doxosophy 3. In this pre-emptive sleight of hand, McKerrew dismisses the critics of Benefits Street as prudish, unwilling to consider the obscenity of poverty. But the label of 'poverty porn' does not simply refer to the obscenity of poverty; it also refers to the practices of directors.
Such programming is 'porn' in the sense that it aims to arouse and stimulate the viewer, to provoke an emotional sensation through a repetitive and affective encounter with the television screen. Poverty porn is an all-surface, no-depth visual culture of immediacy and its semiotic cues - its red flags of moral outrage - require no interpretative work from the viewer. The burst of this genre is testament to the production processes of 'fast media', whose currency is outrage, scandal and attention, and fast media careers, which are made through ratings figures, column inches and hashtags.
The media currency produced by Benefits Street has been so plentiful that the production team have already been re-commissioned for the latest poverty porn example, Famous, Rich and Hungry. Channel 5, keen to cash in on the attention currency, set up Big Benefits Row , while Channel 4 broadcast its own Benefits Britain - the Live Debate after the final episode of Benefits Street.
Both debates featured social commentators - journalists and politicians - but neither included a single social scientist. Pierre Bourdieu referred scathingly to 'doxosophy' - the closed circuit of political discourse engaged in the vague debates of philosophy but without any technical content, a social science reduced to journalistic commentary and opinion polls - whose primary function is to comment on representations as if they were real. Doxosophers saturate public discourse with ready-made phrases and soundbites and make it hard for critical intellectuals to get purchase with critical analysis and debate see Stabile and Marooka They fail to recognise that the terms of the debate have already been constructed and are unable to counter dominant consciousness.
As a result this parasitical satellite media was largely an exercise in 'talking fast while saying nothing' see Slater ; Crossley The extensive in-depth, ethnographic, rich, sociological analysis of precarious lives, which demonstrates the insecurity that characterises those most marginalised under neoliberalism and the constant shuttling between poorly paid precarious work and benefit receipt Standing ; MacDonald, Shildrick, Garthwaite had no place in such a doxic framework.
When Conservative MP Philip Davies raised a question around Benefits Street and On Benefits and Proud in the House of Commons, he lacked the sociological imagination to consider how problematic such representations are, and assumed that the semiotic cues offered up reflected the reality of living on benefits. In his reply, Iain Duncan-Smith founder of the think-tank, Centre for Social Justice, which specializes in doxosophy does not miss a beat and references the public who - seeing the programme too - of course see it as exemplifying the urgent need for welfare reform.
When Conservative MP Simon Hart remarked at a Prime Minister's Questions session that 'sadly there is a street like this in every constituency in the land', he was not required to provide any evidence for such a claim; Cameron simply agreed in his reply that 'welfare dependency' was at the root of unemployment [4]. The ideology of the new austere welfare state is premised on a number of myths; that 'skivers' don't want to work and are encouraged to remain workless by a perverse system that rewards them; that full employment is possible in a fully marketised neoliberal economy; that paid work is always the best route out of poverty.
All three myths are rampant across the new commonsense of welfare, and are key narrative threads in poverty porn. However, as always there are interruptions to the congealing of this commonsense - the participants of poverty porn themselves have proved to be contradictory and even resistant subjects see Tyler, Allen and de Benedictus, this Issue , and some viewers of the programme have challenged the crystallization of welfare commonsense, reversing the direction of the gaze from precariat to elite.
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There was at the time of broadcast a flurry of viral mocked-up images of Benefits Street, restaged in the House of Commons and Buckingham Palace which served to highlight other costs to 'the public purse'. Other interruptions overturn the doxa of welfare reform by using the prescribed hashtag benefitsstreet to connect Twitter users who are critical of the programme and curating a vibrant mix of responses. Some of these 'doxa warriors' responded to the programme with disgust, while others shared links to statistical documents which show how paltry benefit levels are in the UK, how few households are 'intergenerationally workless' or how in-work poverty now exceeds out-of-work poverty.
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