Class - Tyler Flashcards
(26 cards)
When did Tyler write classificatory ethics?
2015
How is modern inequality characterised in Britain?
Biopolitics of disposability
Painted as a moral crisis (individual behaviour) rather than structural conditions
When did Benefit Street air and when?
James Turner Street
2014
Channel 4
What was the result of Benefit Street?
Misrepresentation of people on benefits
Political justification for austerity policies
Scapegoating of working class for inequalities (financial capitalism, North Atlantic Financial Crisis of 2008)
Site of struggle against residents, producers, viewers, politicians
What is the effect for class stigma?
Pivotal for enabling exploitation
What is the effect of ‘The Benefits Cheat’?
It is a technology of social control for transition of welfare state under neoliberal economics
Stigma = political capital = reality TV exploitation through labour of unwaged participants
What was the Red Faction protest?
Against Benefits Street second season in a different town
What does Bourdieu argue about TV and when?
Social struggles fight with TV and media
What is class?
Class describes the problem of inequality
What are examples of neoliberalism decoupling class from inequality?
Politicians using sociological terms
- ‘New Labour’
Neoliberal Labour embracing financial capitalism and focusing on privatising welfare/deregulating markets
Blair: ‘The class war is over. But the struggle for true equality has only just begun.’
What is class decomposition?
Transition from industrial to financial capitalism
Less identification with historic class names
Erosion of the working class as a political category
What do Shildrich and MacDonald argue?
Social class has not disappeared under neoliberalism
Intensified struggle of classification
Inequality not understood as due to class
Why does Bourdieu critique stratification?
Stratification is too objectivist = people cannot be contained this way
Class = relational concept
Social classes form out of struggle
Classification = symbolic violence
Classification + creating categories = sustains relations
Classification represents groups and how they mobilise - define possibilities of action and agency
How does Bourdieu understand class struggle?
Post-Marxist
Class hierarchies emerge not just from struggles between labour and capital BUT in and through cultural struggles
Cultural struggles = everyday tastes, internalisation of symbols of power, acquisition of cultural competencies
How does Skeggs argue classificatory systems are naturalised?
Governmentality= judgements about class-others
New hostile form of class othering
i.e. being working class is a negative thing
Working class must resist othering
What is the new class struggle for Skeggs?
Value-reversal of class-others
Contesting class stigma
Contesting neoliberal decomposition of classes
Not feeling humiliated by class identifiers
What does Ranciere write about class?
Class = operator of conflict
Class struggle against social destiny by prescribed class names
What was the problem with the Great British Class Survey (CCSE)?
Bourdieu = class struggles through cultural domain ruined by stratification
Drew on him for economic and social capital leading to tastes and judgements
Limited understanding of culture used (items) = concludes there is no class distaste in UK
Concealed role of symbolic violence
What is an example of class resentment?
McRobbie (2005)
Public humiliation of failing to adhere to middle-class standards
i.e. ‘chav’ = welfare-dependant term of abuse for poor urban youth in 1990s
- romani word
- emerged after Tyneside riots
What is Benefits Street an example of?
Poverty porn
Cultural production of class stigma
Organs of mass communication used against working people for political gain
Elite have control over media - manipulation of how masses are percieved
What is the impact of neoliberalism on TV?
State = the core agency setting the rules of social relation
Collective representations turn to realise markets – financial capitalism requires collective representations of structural inequality to be mystified
Class inequalities presented as a consequence of individual choices
What happens to political struggles that are culturalised?
Depoliticised sources of issues
What is the impact of class decomposition on the middle classes?
Find new ways to distinguish selves through symbolic articulations of class difference
Intolerance to class-others and those who are racialised
Fear of ‘falling’ = cultural crafting of negative depictions of working class by middle-class media workers
When did the chav switch to the benefits scrounger?
2008
Blame for diminishing social resources
