Abstract
In Reacting to Reality Television: Performance, Audience and Value, Beverly Skeggs and Helen Wood explore the cultural politics of reality television, arguing that it is a site of value production. Utilising a unique methodology, the authors examine how class and gender are ‘made’ through intimate, affective encounters between television and viewers.
The main body of the book is organised into seven chapters. The first four chapters examine the theoretical framework and methodological approach, and the following three are empirical and analytical. Skeggs and Wood introduce the book by emphasising their interests in reality television due to the intensification of intimacy and emotional and domestic labour on-screen, and the classed and gendered dimensions of this process. Drawing on mainly Marxist and Bourdieuian as well as affect theorisations, the authors develop a ‘person value’ framework, which understands value as ‘a model of extraction from the person’, ‘a model of accruing value to the person … including defence of value’ and ‘relationality’ (p. 9; emphasis in original). Distinguishing relationality as value enables new trajectories: it holds in tension how those who are unable to accrue value via dominant modes due to inequality still attempt to circulate value ‘through time and energy with and for others’ (p. 9). Thus, these differing perspectives of value broaden theoretical concepts of what value entails and the politics of this.
The first two chapters review sociocultural discourses as well as academic scholarship of reality television, analysing the explosion of reality television through a feminist media studies and sociological lens. Chapter 1 situates discourses of quality and artifice within broader gendered and classed histories. Importantly, they argue that attempting to transform working-class differences via middle-class intervention is an historical project that is ‘re-enacted’ through reality television (p. 31). Chapter 2 positions this politics of intervention sociologically, to argue that ‘media “normalize” their own power by creating models for the distribution of value’ (p. 48; emphasis in original). The authors contend that the neo-liberal self of reality television is achievable through accumulating capitals (cultural, social, symbolic) – a process of value production emphasised through reality television. Skeggs and Wood analyse how the performances of certain dispositions, emotion and telling are ‘classed moral techniques’ shaped by historical value formations surrounding intimacy, the economy, bourgeois women and the private/public sphere, which accrue moral value (p. 53). These form normative performances, dispositions and relationships that are converted into economic capital, becoming crucial for legitimation on reality television. They argue that the structure of reality television affectively summons the audience as if they were on the shows. The authors expand Deleuze/Spinoza theorisations that affect matters through ‘idea-attachment’ by contending that this depends on discursive coding (p. 68). Reality television ‘makes social divisions sensate’ as affect is codified to emotion through value systems, informed by social positioning (p. 71).
Chapter three builds a taxonomy of 42 transformation programmes from 2004–2005, categorising these into ‘life overhauls’, ‘domestic intervention in family and relationships’, ‘appearance and health transformations’ and ‘explicit experiments in class mobility’ (p. 89). Despite reality television’s promises of sociocultural mobility, Skeggs and Wood argue that a moral economy of personhood is established, which sees classes constructed differently through immediacy, melodrama, narrative and metonymic morality (p. 97). The form of reality television makes class through ‘the televised performance of personhood, by displaying relationships in all their relational and corporeal elements, but by divorcing them from the circumstances of their production’ (p. 107). Through representation and intervention, the ‘affect-producing technology’ (p. 68) of television entices audiences to position themselves ‘as if’, judging both the participants and themselves.
The methodology chapter outlines the researchers’ locatedness and argues that methods make class and gender. Combining textual analysis, interviews, text-in-action and focus groups, the authors explore television viewing with 40 South London women of different classes and ethnicities. They argue that the social positioning of their research participants shaped responses to television where the performance of value was constant. ‘Affective textual encounters’ occurred with all viewers, and they questioned how this makes sociality (p. 122). Their methodology enabled various communications, alongside reflexive linguistic talk, to emerge, researching reactions in the moment. The affective textual encounter and text-in-action are original, ‘out-of-the-box’ methods that muddy text/audience binaries and aids in exploring ‘what affect does, rather than assuming what it can do’ (p. 184; emphasis in original).
The following two chapters explore how the participants connected to reality television depending upon value systems. Departing from governmentality and performativity theorisations, these chapters explore performances through affect, arguing that this is the missing link in ideology analysis (p. 184). Chapter 5 argues that affective encounters highlight the ‘as if’ of reality television, meaning that ‘respondents are positioned by and respond to the regimes of value and the judgments they entail about investments, value and personhood’ (p. 150). There were ambivalent reactions to regimes from the participants which, Skeggs and Wood argue, highlight differing value formations, emphasising accrual or defence of value and relational value – thus complicating notions of a straightforward uptake of governance. Chapter 6 explores the politics of affective textual encounters, arguing that reactions to reality television highlight wider social relationships and inequality. Skeggs and Wood contend that positioning oneself in the proceedings of reality television, or refusing to do so, the ‘as if’ or ‘as not’, saw their participants ‘perform the increasing mediation of experiences whereby public understandings of distinction, disgust and social in/difference are repeatedly produced’ (p. 160; emphasis in original). The authors explore reactions to reality television of schadenfruede, commentary and taste, as well as responses to tips and motherhood. They argue that these reactions to reality television highlight different value systems that depend upon access to cultural resources and moral authority, therefore justifying ‘one’s own value when one is positioned “as if” also subject to judgement’ (p. 184).
Chapter 7 argues that reality television validates neo-liberal labour ethics, exploring the participants’ reactions to this. Skeggs and Wood show that performances of labour saw participants insert themselves into the proceedings. The middle-class group aligned itself with the ‘productive self’, whereas the working-class groups were concerned with relationality: the uptake of labouring ideologies depended upon whether there was a reward (p. 192). The middle-class group invested in neo-liberal work ethics and was able to accrue value temporally, whereas the working class groups, who were constantly positioned as lacking and unable to accrue value similarly, did not have the same impetus to invest in neo-liberal labour mentalities. Rather, they attempted to attach value through ‘just getting on with it’ and imparting morality on motherhood; they judged the shows through their own value systems (p. 211). This is central to the book: for Skeggs and Wood, reality television offers morality ‘as an episteme divorced from social context, [their participants] instead decide what matters’ (p. 212).
The book concludes by concisely summarising the main arguments to emphasise the politics of reality television. Most notably, Skeggs and Wood argue that narrative holds together aspirations and ideology, with ideology working through the mode of address (p. 228). They contend that affective encounters with television highlight that ‘affect really matters when it is connected to an idea that is loaded with value’ (p. 228). This entices ‘tournaments of value’ aiding capital, ideologically fixing people socially as value is attained from available resources (p. 230). They argue that reality television offers the middle-class validation of value accrual, and the working class an opportunity to circulate relational value, assuring ideology through investment. Thus, for Skeggs and Wood, ideology does not work linearly through text/audience; rather, in defending value or distributing relational value there is a ‘reconciliation to, even celebration of, the cramped spaces by which the working class are already positioned: they put themselves in their place’ (p. 232).
The authors eloquently weave together diverse scholarship and audience reactions; however, in parts the empirical research could have been expanded. For example, although the book cannot do everything, had the section exploring cultural difference in Chapter 6 been given more space, it would have been welcome, as I was keen to read a more in-depth analysis about these reactions and refrains. Nevertheless, overall this theoretically innovative and empirically rich book injects a much-needed feminist, classed and affective perspective into how ideology works through encounters between viewers and television. The contribution towards theories of value and the original methodology are particularly insightful. This book will have a lasting legacy in sociology, cultural studies and media and communication studies.