Social Status and Symbolic Violence

Irony: Irony Cannot Work (note: not 'does not work')

It is quite commonplace to describe irony as no longer working because everything has been ironised and so nothing can be ironic and irony does not work.  There are several good theoretical justifications for this  but the sublime Stewart Lee has made this point most clearly in his Comedy Vehicle.

The sense that irony doesn't work is unfortunately an ideological trick.  The really point is that it cannot work.  Zizek was quickly on to the problem of Irony in his The Sublime Object of Ideology; "in contemporary societies, democratic or totalitarian, that cynical distance, laughter, irony, are, so to speak, part of the game. The ruling ideology is not meant to be taken seriously or literally." (p24)

Which is to say that "the ruling culture" deals with irony through recognition "it takes into account" through cynicism (p26).

This cynicism is a means of ensuring that the ideological systems of the ruling culture continue to function in the face of criticism. Zizek again: "It is clear, therefore, that confronted with such cynical reason, the traditional critique of ideology no longer works. We can no longer subject the ideological text to 'symptomatic reading', confronting it with its blank spots, with what it must repress to organize itself, to preserve its consistency - cynical reason takes this distance into account in advance." (p26-7).

We cannot turn irony on the 'ruling culture' because it has been incorporated into that ruling culture.  Ideology is "no longer meant, even by its authors, to be taken seriously - its status is just that of a means of manipulation, purely external and instrumental; its rule is secured not by its truth-value but by simple extra­-ideological violence and promise of gain"(p27).  Irony is thus a direct support to the repressive state apparatus because it warns of its impending use.

Staus Symbols of Media Culture

Our media culture, the world of media that we engage with and consume, is replete with status symbols that we can either use or have used against us.  The most obvious are costly media texts (Vogue, The FT, DVD Box Sets, etc) but the volume and form of consumption and the types of media read or consumed are also indicative of social status and the great game of status competition.
Status competition is a deadly serious game and one that is impossible to avoid.  You may not seek to participate in the game of status but that does not prevent others situating you in their games and treating you (poorly or well) accordingly.  In fact it is impossible to escape being classified by others and even the act of active rejection of classification on your part in effect classifies (into those who classify and those who do not (you)) and is therefore the ultimate act of status completion; 'I do not participate in status competition' is the claim of those who consider their status in the field in question to be so far beyond the others around them as to be axiomatic.
Media status competition is a question (following Bourdieu) not just of the volume of media consumed but of the composition of that media.  The volume of media consumption will position an individual in the great game of distinction but may not necessarily always afford a high position in the hierarchy of that game.  Indeed massive and conspicuous consumption of media can be stigmatised and stigmatising rather than distinguishing.  On the level of display this conspicuous consumption of media (through really substantial multi-channel TV subscriptions [especially through dedicated film & sport subscriptions], high bandwidth broadband contracts, expensive mobile phones on expensive monthly contract terms, possession of expensive new media equipment [especially the very wide screen TV], etc) is concerned with display of access to resources (economic capital) and not with social/cultural capital.  It can therefore be used to denigrate those who enact this media-potlatch by those with surplus socio-cultural capital.  This is to say that a strategy of distinction can be mobilised by those of high socio-cultural capital against those of equal (or greater) economic capital who have less socio-cultural capital.  The very display that equates to successful distinction in one field of status competition can be a failing strategy in another.  This is very easy to imagine simply by considering the cultural position of Premiership Football.  Football does not hold a position in the high reaches of the cultural life of England but TV access to it requires just the media-potlatch under discussion; dedicated multi-channel TV equipment (not Freeview) and special (and expensive) subscriptions.
It is this antagonism between groups with different amounts of cultural capital (even if the total volume of capital is equal the unequal composition will come into play) that leads to denigration of the media (and thus cultural) choices of those people located in the lower parts of the cultural hierarchy (of the "they live in council houses but can afford satellite television..." type).  As the lower reaches of the cultural capital hierarchy are, typically, also the lower reaches of the economic capital hierarchy this competition leads to the enactment of symbolic violence against that lower capital volume part of society.  The least powerful feel the double effect of the actual violence of low economic capital (the choice of the necessary) and the symbolic violence of low socio-cultural capital; they have less and are made to suffer shame and disgrace for that lack.
As our society utilises a 'capitalist' mode of resource allocation (i.e. rationing by power of resources) it only notices persons with a certain capital volume and is uninterested in the rest of society and so those who lack and are made to suffer for that lack are not represented by our media and so suffer the final annihilation of not existing in our media society.  The absence of the poor from our media landscape is a brutal expression of the brutality of our social formation.

Symbolic violence and Stabile update

I have just added some resources on Nick Broomfield's Biggie and Tupac to the stabile of this blog (they can be found under Documentary or just by searching for Biggie and Tupac). The notes deal with a variety of issues but perhaps the most interesting is Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence.
Symbolic violence is (along with all of the concepts that Bourdieu introduced into sociology; field, habitus, symbolic capital, etc) not the easiest thing to get to grips with; Bourdieu seems to have been rather committed to forcing his readers to think very hard for themselves. One way of thinking about symbolic violence might be to consider it the as the effect of a specific implementation of symbolic power; which Bourdieu defines thus "symbolic power is the power to make things with words" (in his 'Social Space and Symbolic Power', Sociological Theory, Vol. 7, No. 1. (Spring, 1989)). This capacity to make things with words is rather more dramatic than this simple statement suggests; social groups and identities are after all made with words. Symbolic power is then the power to define, label, categorise, and thus control. It is the power to determine the way people are thought of and spoken of even by themselves.
Symbolic violence is the application of this symbolic power in a directed fashion against individuals and groups. The way in which Catherine Tate's 'Lauren Cooper' and Little Britain's 'Vicky Pollard' have been used to label, define and categorise poor young females in recent times and the way in which those categorisations are used against individuals and the entire social formation these characters stand for (are the synecdoche of). It is this use that is the symbolic violence in this case.
A useful wider discussion can be found in the chapter on Bourdieu in Angela McRobbie's very useful The
Uses of Cultural Studies (London: Sage, 2005).