The ‘lamentable sight’ of homelessness and the society of the spectacle

Introduction

Sir, There is not a more lamentable sight in the city of Sydney than to witness the numbers of squalid, miserable creatures that are marched daily in custody of the police from the different lockups in the city, to be adjudicated upon at the police courts. A portion of these are liable to punishment under the Vagrant Act, as houseless and homeless poor, who are sentenced for no crime but their poverty to such punishment as a bench of magistrates may think proper to award.

The excuse of these miserable fellow creatures is that they are obliged to walk the streets having no home or refuge. Surely this ought not to be in this rich populous city, which, to do it justice, has always taken the lead in every kind of useful charity. (HGD, 1864: 3)

Published in The Sydney Morning Herald in 1864, HGD’s short letter to the editor mobilises a common concern – past and present – of the ‘lamentable sight’ of homelessness, across national and local contexts. Connecting concern for the criminalisation of the destitute poor (or the ‘miserable creatures’ as put by HGD) with concern for the city itself, HGD’s letter illustrates the power, and significance, of the imagery of homelessness in social understandings of poverty. A century and a half later, though in very different social, cultural and economic conditions, internationally the ‘sight’ and ‘scene’ of homelessness remains central to social understandings of, and responses to, homelessness and to inequality and poverty more generally. Images and photographs of destitution and homelessness are used routinely as signifiers for ‘the poor’ in popular culture, the media, and academic research. At the same time, the ‘street practices’ of homelessness – most particularly rough sleeping and begging – are where poverty becomes visible, public, and open to judgement and action: to be tolerated, avoided, ignored, tallied, or intervened into. ‘Homeless bodies, poor bodies, visible to passersby, visible to the streets,’ Wright suggests, ‘are open to the public’s gaze, to the gaze of authority’ (1997: 1).

In the wake of the global financial crisis, and the ensuing rise in unemployment and poverty, homelessness remains a stubborn and persistent presence in modern capitalist societies. Indeed, in recent decades, despite the attempt of various cities to curb and limit homeless people’s use of, and presence in, public space (such as laws against sitting on the curb in San Francisco; the criminalisation of begging in Melbourne; Major Guiliani’s move-on practices in New York City; and the various ‘management’ techniques of homelessness in preparation for large events such as the Olympics: e.g. Kennelly and Watt, 2011; Lynch, 2002; Mitchell, 1997; see also Stuart, 2014) homelessness has not abated. In addition, whilst Lois Wacquant (2007) suggests an emergent spatial alienation, a ‘territorial stigmatisation’ in which ‘the poor’ are increasingly ghettoised in particular neighbourhoods and areas, encounters with homelessness in cities and towns still remain a feature of everyday urban life. In other words, despite the changing conditions, experiences and meanings of homelessness across history and social context, the visual, spatial and bodily presence of homelessness is a stalwart element of city life. At the same time, however, contemporary cities and public spaces are framed by the imagery of consumer capitalism: of commodities, and the endless possibilities for creating ourselves in the image of capital and the commodity through aesthetic representation.

In this paper we explore the inter-relationship between these two visual discourses and social practices: the ‘lamentable sight’ of homelessness on the one hand, and on the spectacle of capital on the other. In doing so, we reflect on the visual, bodily and spatial dimensions of contemporary homelessness, and explore how the ‘sight’ and ‘scene’ of homelessness becomes constituted as a ‘blemish’ on broader social relations in advanced capitalist nations. Responding to the continued growth of ‘homelessness’ as a research agenda, we offer a theoretical exploration on the place of homelessness within broader social relations, reflecting on the constitution of ‘homelessness’ as a social ‘problem’ to be intervened into by policies, and researched by sociologists. Our discussion rests on the premise that in order to ‘understand’ homelessness, it is imperative to consider how the notion of homelessness as a ‘social problem’ has become discursively created. We therefore bring together theories of the Other, everyday interaction, and consumer capitalism in order to examine the ways in which the ‘sight’ and ‘scene’ of homelessness is created through discourses, through bodies, and through the cultural logic of capital. Focusing on the presence of homelessness in public space, we draw in particular upon Erving Goffman and Guy Debord to explore the ways in which everyday encounters with homelessness perpetuate discourses of the Other and dysfunctionality, bolstering the notion that homelessness is ‘out of joint’ in relation to the spatial and aesthetic logic of capital and capitalism. In other words, the ‘sight’ and ‘scene’ of homelessness appear as stains and blights on the city space, whilst the infiltration of capital in public space appears customary and common sense.

We set out our discussion in three acts. First, we reflect on the creation of visual representational discourses of homelessness, and their place in the popular, academic, and media portrayals of homelessness. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s development of the social ‘encounter’ and the constitution of social stigma, we consider the public nature of homelessness, and the visual and bodily dimensions of everyday ‘encounters’ with homelessness. Second, critically engaging with Guy Debord’s society of the spectacle we contextualise the ‘sight’ of homelessness within the broader social relations of consumer capitalism. We argue that the sight of homelessness cannot be separated from the broader spectacle of capital, and the proliferation of the image – and social relations of – commodity consumption in and through public space. Here, we explore the diverse ways in which homelessness is ‘Othered’ within the normative social relations of capitalism, including as a romantic life apart and as a stigmatised symbol of failure. Third, we conclude by turning to a consideration of how the society of spectacle comes to be lived and felt by people experiencing homelessness.

Visible and spatial poverty: Encountering homelessness

As the most visible and public form of poverty and inequality, there is something particularly powerful about the imagery of homelessness. Whilst the multifarious experiences of homelessness are by no means limited to those who rough sleep or beg, popular understandings and representations of homelessness typically draw upon ‘visible’ homelessness – images of those who could ‘read’ as homeless – as a symbolic marker of destitution and poverty. Such images have provoked diverse gendered and raced responses and meanings across time and context, from romantic depictions of swag or tramp life to HGD’s concern over the moral health of the city and its citizens (see Cresswell, 2001; Garton, 1990), as we discuss later in this paper. Produced and circulated through the media, popular culture, academic research, and the campaign and advertisement material of poverty advocacy groups and charitable organisations, contemporary images of homelessness create a visual discourse (and culture) surrounding poverty and homelessness. Photographic images are powerful devices with which to represent and articulate the experience of homelessness. By unveiling ‘hidden stories’ they can have ‘catalysing properties’, inviting the viewer to judge, understand, and perhaps even to act (see Noble, 2010). Photographs of homelessness are both temporal and visual, creating a dramaturgy of everyday poverty at a particular point in time and space, which can be witnessed and surveilled outside of the specificities of its space and place.

Importantly, pictures of destitute men, women, and children ‘on the street’ have long been powerful symbols of the persistent divisions between the wealthy and the poor (see Nunn, 2004). Images proliferate across the public domain as a visual shorthand for poverty, and have often been used as campaign devices to galvanise political and moral support for various interventions and reforms. In late nineteenth-century London, Dr Thomas Barnardo used photographs of child ‘waifs and strays’ to give visual force to the moral imperative of his social reform activities (see Koven, 1997). In Melbourne, Alan Jordan’s photographs of the lives of homeless men in the 1960s were instrumental in providing ‘evidence’ for the subsequent campaigns that agitated for the reform of homeless services (see Jordan and Howe, 2012). Similarly, the efforts of Oswald Barnett to photograph the slums of Melbourne in the 1930s were central to raising the profile of his agenda of urban reform (see Birch, 2004). In the 1930s the photographic work of the US Farm Security Administration also engendered a kind of visual ‘knowing’ of poverty in the Depression era (Finnegan, 2003).

Undoubtedly, such images are produced and circulated with multifarious, and historically situated, moral and political intent. They are both constituted by, and responded to through, political and moral judgements: judgements intrinsic to the attempt to represent inequality. Smith (1996), for instance, argues that Barnardo’s depictions of children on the streets of nineteenth-century London were steeped in the racialised, classed and colonial discourses of ‘the child’ and ‘childhood’. More recently, images have often been imbued with contemporary neoliberal understandings of individualism. For instance, Hodgetts et al.’s (2005) analysis of the representations of homelessness on British Independent Television News points to how journalistic portrayals of homelessness rely upon the demand for a self-narrative of lack, victimhood, and marginalisation. They suggest that such representation ‘facilitates the maintenance of fundamentally constrained relationships between the viewing public and homeless people, and the transformation of social ills into personal problems’ (2005: 45).

The visual discourses created in and through the imagery of homelessness, therefore, contribute to the politics of aesthetic representation in the broader construction of meaning surrounding homelessness and poverty. The scenes, sets, and characters of poverty, as Mark Peel (2003) describes it, are familiar narrative tools in which to depict, represent, understand, and address social inequalities. In an attempt to describe and explain homelessness, academic research, government policy, and the media have all contributed to constructing a powerful image of ‘the homeless’. Much of this falls prey to repeating ‘trauma narratives’ of people in constant need of rescue from the ‘clutches of vice and criminality’, as Dillabough and Kennelly put it when discussing the politics of representation in their ethnography of young people (2010: 3–4). Analyses of popular media narratives from Hodgetts et al. (2005, 2006) illustrate the ways in which ‘the homeless’ are constituted as needy victims, sad cases debilitated by bad luck, bad decisions, and hardship. Narratives of ‘recovery’ are also prominent, with images of formerly homeless people returning to ‘normal’ society through the benevolent aid of charities and concerned citizens. In these analyses, Hodgetts and colleagues contend that the concern, compassion and respectability of those who wish to help the homeless are foregrounded, whilst the lives of those they aim to help are obscured by the reiteration of familiar themes: hard luck and the redemption of wayward souls.

Central to these images and representations is an inevitable discursive separation between those living homelessness, poverty, and inequality, and those who write and represent it. Reflecting, for instance, on similar practices of academic and social representation in relation to the working class, Bev Skeggs suggests that ‘the working-class did not write themselves; they told the story as proscribed and were themselves transcribed’ (2004: 124). This relationship between teller and writer is important for thinking about the ways in which homelessness is written in popular, academic and policy discourses, and the symbolic power of these. ‘Homelessness’ as a site for public judgement, policy intervention and research investigation, is underpinned by the necessity for personal testimony – of the requirement for those who are homeless to tell a narrative story of ‘self’, to which others bear witness (see Skeggs, 2004). Thus, the development of a social understanding of homelessness is as much constituted by the act of representation, as it is the ‘actual’ experience of homelessness.

There is an inter-relationship, therefore, in the ways in which research, policy, the media, and the public turn their collective gaze towards homelessness. Indeed, homelessness does not await photographic documentation, media portrayal or academic depiction in order to be viewed, represented, and judged. Images of homelessness are familiar scenes in everyday life, and the opportunity to view, represent and judge occurs in every encounter and viewing. In the opening paragraph of her ethnography of homeless men in San Francisco, Teresa Gowan (2010) paints a vivid picture of this interaction: ‘Emaciated panhandlers display their sores and amputations, genial hustlers simultaneously entertain and disturb, and haggard men and bundled-up women stare off into space, jarring the sensibilities of more comfortable passersby’ (2010: 3). This ‘jarring’ Gowan describes, the interruption between the ‘comfortable passersby’ and the images of ‘street life’ are fundamental to the social understanding of homelessness. Such encounters create the fabric for the diverse social meanings, interpretations and judgements of homelessness. These encounters are multi-directional and dynamic: unlike a photograph the ‘onlooker’ may also be subject to gaze and judgement, and, most importantly, the encounter is actively constructed, requiring some sort of action. We all ‘see’ and ‘encounter’ homelessness, and in myriad fashion we all respond: we stare, ignore, avert our eyes, give money or purchase a street-magazine, gawk, smile, speak or don’t speak.

Visible homelessness could be viewed as a ‘disturbance’ of ‘normal’ everyday life on the street: of the commute to work, the shopping trip, the outing to the movies. Robert Desjarlais suggests that the homeless have a kind of ‘ghostly’ presence, which threatens the ‘peaceful, artful air of cafes, libraries, and public squares’ (1997: 2). The street is assumed to be a place for travelling through, not a place of stasis or home. Indeed, as we discuss further below, as contemporary neoliberal capitalism places ever-greater emphasis on consumerism as a symbolic marker of productive social success, homelessness transgresses the normative function of streets and public spaces as places to facilitate consumption (see Bauman, 1998). ‘The spectral presence of homelessness,’ as Desjarlais puts it, ‘is bad for business’ (1997: 5). For Erving Goffman, such disturbances trouble normative assumptions surrounding the ‘rules’ of public engagement. He suggests that everyday verbal and non-verbal encounters are framed by unsaid socially normative understandings and patterns of social interaction (Goffman, 1967). ‘To be awkward or unkept,’ then, ‘to talk or move wrongly, is to be a dangerous giant, a destroyer of worlds’ (Goffman, 1961: 72). Thus, to use public space differently unsettles the norms of capitalist social engagement, which demand that all space and all time be utilised for commodity exchange or value accrual.

And yet the presence of street homelessness is by no means a new ‘rupture’ to city life. Nor does it result in a complete breakdown of social interaction in public space. For instance, the moral economies of exchange that underpin the social experience of begging have a long and diverse history. Visible homelessness – variously lived, felt and viewed – has long been a feature of city life, and encounters with it are not necessarily unexpected. At the same time, personal responses to homelessness are often part of established and routine responses developed over time, informed by diverse moral and political understandings and framed by the wider visual discourses surrounding poverty and homelessness. Arguably, there are a range of established positions and roles, and perhaps even ‘tacit agreements’ that are routinely taken within the everyday encounters with homelessness (see Goffman, 1959). Decisions, for example, to ignore, avert eyes, give money or purchase a street-magazine, gawk, smile, speak or don’t speak, are enmeshed with individual understandings and experiences of social inequality, and moral and political judgements surrounding its causes and effects.

The encounter with homelessness, therefore, is invariably underscored by the politics of difference. Undoubtedly, social understandings of homelessness are influenced by the marginalisation and stigmatisation of people who are homeless. In popular images, homelessness is portrayed as, in Goffman’s terms, ‘fully stigmatised’: people experiencing homelessness ‘must suffer the special indignity of knowing that they wear their situation on their sleeve, that almost anyone will be able to see into the heart of their predicament’ (1963: 127). Encounters with homelessness in public spaces are characterised by an unmistakable recognition of this stigma, and at times a perception that homeless bodies on view are distinct or separate from the real business or culture of the city. This is, of course, a stigma imbued in the politics of the Other, as homelessness becomes literally a visual and bodily marker of social failure, dysfunctionality, and unproductivity. Unsurprisingly, this is also a stigma that is acutely felt by those who are homeless, an issue to which we return below.

Kawash suggests that it is in the process of Othering that ‘the homeless body’ materialises as ‘an emergent and contingent condition that traverses and occludes identity’, which becomes marked as ‘filth’ both in the material and discursive sense (1998: 324). In other words, an encounter with homelessness can provoke judgement of homeless bodies as both physically filthy and/or as the ‘filth’ of society, or perhaps the ‘filthy’ outcome of capitalist inequality. Sara Ahmed contends that feelings of disgust are produced through both a ‘push’ and a ‘pull’, in that bodies deemed as disgusting appear ‘to be moving towards us’ (Ahmed, 2004: 84). Encounters with homelessness in public space thus move beyond the visual, having the capacity to leave a sensual and emotive trace. In this way, ‘the homeless’ capture attention and interest as well as signal that something is remiss. Of course, the ‘sight’ and ‘scene’ of homelessness can prompt a variety of social meanings and understandings, from the decline or decay of neighbourhoods, to the dysfunctionality of social welfare systems, the inequity of social relations, or the laziness of the homeless. Subsequently, the Othering of homelessness does not simply occur in judgements that can be neatly identified as stigmatising, individualising, or derisive. Even in feelings of concern and sympathy, the visual and bodily presence of homelessness serve as powerful reminders that society is ‘out of joint’.

Spectacles, consumer capitalism and homelessness

Public encounters with homelessness are framed by the commercialisation and commodification of public space. Cultures and practices of consumption are increasingly heralded as a tonic for struggling communities and city economies. Discussing the rise of entrepreneurialism in urban governance, David Harvey notes that ‘the emphasis upon tourism, the production and consumption of spectacles, the promotion of ephemeral events within a given locale, bear all the signs of being favoured remedies for ailing urban economies’ (1989: 13). For Harvey, the rise of urban entrepreneurialism affords spaces for diverse ‘presentations of self’ as punks, goths, hipsters and yuppies all participate in creating the urban space of ‘spectacle and play’ (1989: 14). More recently, Shaw et al. (2004) have examined the ways in which neighbourhoods have attempted to trade-in on their ‘ethnoscapes’, including ethnic cuisine, markets and festivals, in an attempt to capitalise on tourism and leisure markets. Analyses of this rise of ‘consumer society’ rest upon acknowledgement of the ever-expanding potential for capital to commodify time, space, bodies, and interactions.

There is, then, a kind of ‘spectral’ quality to contemporary capitalism. Public spaces are saturated by the proliferation of idealised images of commodities and the social relations promised by the consumption of these commodities. Advertisement, marketing and the ‘spectacle of consumption’ created through shopping malls and so on, create and produce the social relations and spaces of capitalism. Reiterating Marx and Engels’ analyses of the expansive capability of capital – ‘all that is solid melts into air’ (2010 [1848]: 25), in Society of the Spectacle Guy Debord describes this as capital spreading ‘out to the periphery’, so that ‘society in its length and breadth becomes capital’s faithful portrait’ (1995: 33). In other words, as capital expands its horizons into the social realm, the diverse social activities that characterise public life become increasingly infiltrated by, and imbued with, the function and form of capital: this is the core of the society of the spectacle.

Importantly, Debord’s society of the spectacle is not simply a conceptual description of the proliferation of images in public life associated with the expansion of media culture in the second half of the 20th century. The society of the spectacle is an attempt to conceptually grasp the ways in which aesthetics and images are embedded within, and created by, social activities. It is therefore more than a contemplation or conceptualisation of media culture, and an analysis of the form and function of visual discourses and aesthetics of capital in everyday life. Subsequently, social relationships are ‘mediated by images’, which have become ‘actualized, translated into the material realm’ (Debord, 1995 [1967]: 12–13). These images are proliferated in and through capital, and the commodification of the social world. They signify capital’s imagery in marketing, popular culture, public space, and ultimately in the ways in which we understand and create our relationships and ourselves. The spectacle, then, is not something separate to reality, to be viewed, understood, and catalogued. Rather, it is the very constitution of reality itself: we are all spectators and performers of the spectacle. Debord’s spectacle is one in which the social relations required for the development of capital folds back upon itself in and through social relations, so that ‘the world we see is the world of the commodity’ (1995 [1967]: 29).

There is tension here between the intersection of the ‘spectral’ quality of contemporary capitalism, with its aesthetic cultures of consumerism, and the ‘sight’ and ‘scene’ of poverty and homelessness. Particularly for those bodies, spaces and practices that cannot be transformed easily into entrepreneurial opportunities, how does the saturation of public space with idealised images of commodities relate to the everyday visual and spatial encounters with poverty and homelessness? In the first instance, as we have already noted, urban governance practices are often aesthetically motivated practices aimed at creating spaces in which encounters with homelessness do not take place. Legislation pointed at maintaining the commercialised aesthetics of public space often intends to eradicate homelessness from view through laws against loitering, begging, sleeping, urinating or drinking in public (Mitchell, 1997). At the same time, welfare services are often located outside of commercially desirable urban spaces (Wasserman and Clair, 2011), thereby further separating homelessness from the spaces of consumer capital. The emergence of large corporate pseudo-public spaces, such as indoor shopping malls, further entrenches this separation, bolstering the immaculate image of capital. The attempted erasure of homelessness from the public assists to constitute public space as an object of consumption. Juxtaposed against the clean glamorous images of consumer capitalism are the aesthetically spoiled homeless Other. Even if the attempt does not fully succeed, the act of policing, regulating, and moving homelessness succeeds in perpetuating notions of dysfunction and filth.

Beyond this, however, Debord’s society of the spectacle offers conceptual entry points for understanding the everyday encounters of homelessness: for understanding the aesthetic character of capital, and the ways that bodies, spaces, and sights are framed by proliferation and expansion of capital into the everyday spaces of the social world. Debord reminds us that the normalisation of consumer capitalism and its attendant aesthetic and spatial logics is itself constituted by spectral discourses and practices. So often the imagery of homelessness is highlighted as the ‘lamentable sight’ against an unstated and unexamined norm. Debord prompts us to examine the ways in which this apparent ‘lamentable sight’ is in fact constituted by a spectacle of capital and consumption, which presents itself as a false vision of normalised commodity harmony. Here, then, the taken-for-granted ‘roles’ and ‘positions’ of spectatorship and dysfunctionality are called into question. The society of the spectacle flips the gaze from the sight of homelessness to the cultures of consumer capitalism that create the norms, regulations, and governance practices that materially and discursively form the frameworks for the social understandings, and lived experiences, of homelessness.

At the same time, the society of the spectacle problematises the impression of unity and harmony that is created in the image of capital. It is, therefore, a double-sided analysis. The spectacle is an illusion of unity that obfuscates the inequalities and injustices that ensue from the totalising practices of capital (see also Kennelly and Watt, 2011). The spectacle, in Debord’s words, ‘is no more than an image of harmony set amidst desolation and dread, at the still centre of misfortune’ (1995 [1967]: 41). It creates in its image an idealised citizen archetype, engaged in meaningful consumption, and the work and social practices that support this. In this context, the Other are those who transgress or appear to reside outside this archetype. In other words, ‘the culture of consumption’, becomes melded to notions of ‘community’ and ‘civility’, and in turn frames anything ‘outside’ of the activities of consumption as ‘problematic to the vitality of urban public space and life’ (Ranasinghe, 2011: 1939). Distinctions between ‘us and them’ assist to construct homelessness as a glitch in an otherwise functional system, a malfunction or abnormality.

Aesthetics and capital: Reflections for understanding homelessness

Thus far, we have theorised the way in which homelessness becomes visible according to the spectacular logic of consumer capitalism. These arguments demonstrate ways in which the visibility of homelessness makes images of ‘the homeless’ into signifiers for contemporary capitalism’s Other, as well as emphasising the significance of aesthetics for the way in which homelessness is encountered. In what follows here, we return to where we started, and reflect upon the creation of social understanding and meaning of homelessness. In doing so, we highlight the lived experience of the moralised, aestheticised position of ‘the homeless’, drawing on existing sociological research. These examples illustrate the ways in which encounters with homelessness act to instantiate the society of the spectacle, and emphasise the importance of aesthetics for the way that ‘the homeless’ negotiate their presence in public space.

Writing on the consequences of consumerism, Featherstone (1982) has argued that the aesthetic body is one of the primary ways in which, following Debord, the spectacle of consumer capitalism is performed. In a society saturated with images of consumption, the ideal subject becomes the successful consumer who reflexively constructs their body as an image that others wish to consume. Slavoj Zizek recently described this as ‘cultural capitalism’, where commodities are no longer bought because of their status or utility, but because of the experience and meaning they provide (2009: 52). Subsequently, the idealised project of self-fulfilment is projected in and achieved through the act and product of consumption. Featherstone argues that consumerism means a conflation of aesthetics and subjectivity, in which the visual body is moralised as a signifier for the self. Bodies who do not consume correctly are associated with irresponsibility and moral inferiority (Bauman, 2007). ‘Looking good’ becomes a way in which to signify value and success within this cultural logic. This complex intersection of moral and aesthetic processes set against the backdrop of spectacular consumption is central to the way that homelessness is lived, performed and responded to in public.

Aesthetics and visual imagery are central to the embodied experience of homelessness in public space. People experiencing homelessness often articulate feelings of stigmatisation in aesthetic language, focusing particularly on the public significance of dirt, both actual and metaphorical. Participants in Farrugia (2011) describe the inability to remain clean as central to the stigmatisation and shame of occupying the ‘spoiled’ identity of homelessness. These participants emphasise in particular the meaning of dirt, both as present on the body, and as a metaphor for the way in which they are treated in public space. In Farrugia (2010) participants describe difficulties remaining clean alongside narratives of ‘dirty looks’ from others in public space which they attribute to their personal appearance and status as a ‘homeless person’.

It’s a feeling you get. When you sit down next to someone they kind of you know put their purse aside or briefcase and kind of just give you a dirty, well I keep saying dirty looks but that’s one big part and also they glance at you and then they cough or pretend like you’re making this kind of offensive odour or whatever. Or they stand away from you too. As soon as they see someone who’s homeless or resembles being homeless they think you know, you don’t have a job you know you’re lazy, all that other stuff. Like just your generic bum stereotypes. They don’t want to help themselves and it’s just complete waste aways and just drink all day, blow all their money on booze and drugs. (Farrugia, 2010: 4)

‘Dirty looks’, therefore, created embodied sensations of moral judgement and inferiority, affective consequences of the way that the body, as an aesthetic image, becomes a signifier for what Bauman (2007) describes as ‘failed consumers’.

Such narratives highlight the affective consequences of the position of ‘the homeless’ as outside the normatively and aesthetically defined identities that are legitimate in public space. Here, people who are homeless respond to the ‘rub’ and effect, or perceived effect, of their own bodies in relation to ‘the public’. To be homeless is to be set apart from the illusory unity of the spectacle. As Wardlaugh (1996) explores, this means that many who are homeless are aware that they are ‘not welcome’ and thus strategically negotiate the changing contours of ‘prime’ and ‘marginal’ space in order to become visible and invisible as needed. The visual discourses of the spectacle, therefore, create the terrain within which one’s visibility might feel welcome, or not. The politics of aesthetic representation underscores the ways in which people who are homeless interact with the public space created by consumer capitalism.

For instance, participants in Lankenau’s study (1999) describe the careful aesthetic performance involved in the act of begging that reflexively negotiates the moralised visual signifiers of being ‘needy’ and ‘deserving’:

When I first started panhandling, I couldn’t understand why people weren’t giving me money. I looked too clean. So I grew this ratty beard and figured so that’s the trick of the trade. As long as I was looking presentable … I wasn’t getting a dime. (1999: 307)

I’ve had a lady tellin me … ‘Why are you panhandlin’ when you dressin’ clean? Get a job.’ I see her every day, but I figure why should I take these pants off and put on the dirty pants and the dirty shirt. That will make me feel like a bum. (1999: 308)

Lankenau argues that while attempting to maintain a ‘respectable’ appearance is central to the self worth of beggars and (to avoid feeling ‘like dirt’), good quality donated clothing can undermine the image of desperation that beggars must construct. However, beggars cannot appear too dishevelled, since this means that their bodies may be read as those of the undeserving poor (such as the ‘drug addict’) who have failed to maintain an appearance that signifies respectability and self reliance. The successful construction of an appearance that is both needy and deserving carefully negotiates aesthetically signified normative boundaries in order to manage the moral requirements of contemporary capitalist societies.

The lamentable aesthetics of homelessness are thereby consumed by members of ‘the public’, whose responses dramatise the normative significance of aesthetics and spectacular consumption. Donations, averted eyes, or demands to ‘get a job’ all reflect moral and political judgements read upon bodies, which in turn become bodily and visual signifiers for different ways that poverty may be understood. Even in the act of donation, the public respond to and consume the abject image of ‘the homeless’ as figures of helplessness and despair. The violence and abuse that beggars are subjected to (Fitzpatrick and Kennedy, 2001) are also consequences of occupying this abject position in public space. The tensions involved in giving (or not) and receiving (either money or abuse) are part of a morally charged visual logic set amidst the spatial logic of capital within public space.

The mutual constitution of norm, Self and Other, the aesthetically pleasing consumer and the spoiled homeless come together in the following narrative from ‘Emma’, a participant in Farrugia (2011: 82) who describes the means by which she has differentiated herself from ‘the homeless’ after moving into a home:

I just thought okay I’m gonna look at my wardrobe, I chucked out all my clothes and then I went shopping and I thought ‘Alright, I’m gonna get top brand stuff, I’m gonna get stuff that I like, stuff that looks fashionable, stuff that looks good, and I’m gonna build a new style for myself.’

In the process of moving out of a spoiled, homeless identity and into a home, this narrative foregrounds aesthetic consumption motivated by the significance of ‘top brands’ and ‘looking good’. Moving from a homeless subjectivity defined by dirt and moral failure, Emma uses branded clothing in order to construct a ‘style’, which signifies the new life she is building. In so doing, Emma constitutes herself within the aesthetically signified normative boundaries of consumer capitalism. Similarly, in Radley et al.’s (2005) study of homelessness in London, participants Rose and Robert consciously rendered themselves ‘invisible’ in order to have ‘unrestricted’ and unsurveilled use of the city streets by ensuring that they were not ‘noticeable’ as homelessness to passersby.

In the public experiences of lived homelessness, and encounters with homelessness in public space, the aesthetic, bodily and spatial dimensions of contemporary homelessness are made visible. People experiencing homelessness often live and perform an abject position that becomes intelligible as dirt on the clean image of public space. This dirt becomes a signifier for moral inferiority, dysfunctionality, and abjection, a signifier which is publically consumed as a lesson in the normative significance of successful consumption. The aesthetic, moral and economic imperatives of contemporary capitalism intersect here to produce the terms under which homeless subjectivities are made visible. The affective and performative consequences of this for those constructed as ‘the homeless’ crystallise these processes into the ‘lamentable sight’ of homelessness against the spectacle of capital.

Conclusion

In this paper, we have brought together theories of everyday encounters with the aesthetic dimensions of consumer capitalism to examine the ways in which homelessness is positioned as a visual discourse within public space. Whilst visual discourses of homelessness are produced in and through the representation of poverty in media, popular culture, charity advertisements and academic research, we contend that visual discourses are created in and through the everyday encounter with homelessness in public space. It is here, we argue, that the visual, spatial, and bodily dimensions of homelessness come to be felt, and responded to, in myriad fashion by those frequenting public space. There is, as we have identified, a tendency to depict homelessness as a blemish on public space, and in particular, to depict homeless bodies as fundamentally amiss. And yet, the experience and visibility of homelessness in cities across national context, are by no means a complete interruption of everyday urban life. Homelessness may appear to be ‘out of place’, but it is an ‘out of place’ practice within which we often play diverse, but often unspoken and practiced, roles of avoidance, sympathy and exchange.

Yet, set amidst the society of the spectacle, within which the imagery and social relations of the commodity, its consumption, and presentation, are taken-for-granted normative social relations, homelessness remains ‘out of joint’. Within the sea of consumption, the bodies of the visible homeless can appear as island nightmares; visceral reminders of the Other. Drawing upon Debord’s development of the society of the spectacle, we have argued that these islands both expose and conceal the underbelly of capitalism. Homelessness appears as a blemish on, and exposer of, the supposed harmony of the spectacle of capital. The real spectacle, we contend, is that within which we are all performers and spectators – the spectacle of consumption, commodity fetish, and capital. It is these social relations within which the social meanings, understandings, and lived reality of homelessness are produced. As we explored in our final section, those who are homeless, and whose time in public space is spent managing feelings of surveillance, judgement, invisibility and visibility, feel these aesthetic politics acutely. There is, then, a tightly knotted inter-relationship between the aesthetic politics and representations of poverty and consumer capitalism. The ‘out of place’ representation of homelessness signals the messy relations of the consumer capitalism, which despite never completely enveloping all social relations in its image, can frame the spatial and visual discourses within which we come to ‘know’ and ‘understand’ its inevitable inequalities.