Shaming the working class in post-socialist Reality Television

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which working class participants are shamed in Czech Reality TV programmes. Previous research demonstrates that everyday Reality TV is an exercise in neoliberal governmentality and respective technology of the self, which advances the idea of the entrepreneurial self as a capital investment project and a brand. The article seeks to illuminate the process of stigmatisation of those who do not comply with these norms in the cultural setting of post-socialist neoliberalism. It builds on the arguments contending that neoliberal capitalism was implemented in the post-socialist part of Europe with higher momentum and stronger hegemonic power than in the West. The research looks at the acts of shaming working classes in three different Reality TV programmes as the dynamics through which class positions are moulded in a culture with a yet emerging class structure. The qualitative analysis of shaming interactions reveals that a working class position in the post-socialist cultural setting is articulated predominantly to excessive preservation of habits dating back to the period of socialism or, however, insufficient employment of the innovations and opportunities brought about by capitalism. Qualitative clustering of the targets of shaming resulted in four different types of self – marketised self, depaternalised self, unclassed self and (desperately) inegalitarian self – which the analysed Reality TV programmes endorse as the ideal facets of post-socialist personhood. The master homology between the genre of makeover reality show and post-socialism is detected as both systems are entrenched in the values of a complete overhaul of an individual or society.

Keywords

Neoliberalism post-socialism Reality TV shame working class

Introduction

The camera is pointed at the decrepit, wretched man whose shoulders shiver as he cries, on learning that he will probably lose his house due to the devastating debts run up by his family. The next shot features a well-groomed, young financial expert making a comment, ‘In the first instance, this family must get rid of the kind of fixed notion coming from communism that everybody ought to have the same money’.¹ This excerpt from the show Krotitelé dluhů (Debt Trainers) produced and aired by the Czech public broadcaster Czech Television (ČT) in 2009–2012 presents the object of this study in a nutshell. This project set out to examine televisual disparaging of working class participants in Reality Television (RTV) programmes as a problem weaved in the net of mediated meanings and societal settings deriving from the post-socialist condition of Czech society.²

By now there is a plenitude of scholarship in cultural and television studies looking at how socially disadvantaged classes are shamed on television, primordially in the case of inquisitive RTV programmes (Andrejevic, 2004; Hirdman, 2016; Lyle, 2008; McCarthy, 2007; Ouellette and Hay, 2008; Redden, 2018; Skeggs and Wood, 2012). However, explorations of media-imposed shame targeted at people with low social standing and corresponding lifestyles have so far focused almost exclusively on representations of class and social inequality in Western media.³ This article seeks to illuminate the specific constitution of cultural meanings of poverty in the condition of post-socialist capitalism by the means of enquiry into the class-based shaming found in post-socialist RTV programmes. It provides an insight into cultural practices through which classed perspectives are assembled and class distinctions enacted (Bourdieu, 1984) in a society with a 40-year history of a system characterised by the aim for a classless society. Whereas, in societies with long-existing social hierarchies, the cultural reading of poverty leans upon more established class codes, in post-socialist cultural settings we find the process of class othering in its state of emergence.

This study is informed by the cultural, interpretative approach to social structure. Classes are not conceived as pre-defined categories in a fixed class system into which people belong or not depending on their economic and material resources (Šafr and Häuberer, 2008). As Deery and Press (2017a: 4) recall, the cultural tradition of class analysis – which is perpetuated in this research – was initiated by Max Weber and later galvanised by Pierre Bourdieu or Michèle Lamont. From this angle, classes are rather amoebic bodies – always under construction, always being produced and reproduced on the agency level, in the myriads of cultural practices and acts of symbolic interaction. In this study, shaming of the socially deprived participants as performed in the RTV discourse is understood to be a radical, extreme mode of class recognition ‘from below’. By enabling and endorsing reciprocal judgements of the participants’ lifestyles, RTV discourse engages – under the guise of mere television entertainment – in ‘doing class’ (Scharff, 2008).

The aim of this article is to explore how class is being done by shaming the others in post-socialist RTV programmes, to reveal patterns and regularities in shaming working class participants and to dig for the potential rationality which would link certain types of shaming acts to the post-socialist social condition. This article seeks to illuminate how shaming the working class in the post-socialist condition derives from an orthodox adoption of neoliberalism in this part of the world in the transformation shortly after 1989; the orthodoxy being predicated on the overarching imagination of neoliberal capitalism as a safeguard separating, both technically and symbolically, the new social order from the spurned socialist past. Reflections on the self-positioning of post-socialist neoliberalism as a rescue from, and in contradiction with the socialist era inspired the research questions which steer the empirical part of the study in which the selected episodes of the three Czech RTV programmes will be analysed:

What are the objects of class-based shaming in the selected Czech RTV programmes?

Are there any homologies between the objects of working class shaming on RTV programmes and the principal features of the post-socialist appropriation of neoliberalism?⁴

The article opens with a discussion of the broad issue of shame in society and then successively evolves its more specific renditions. After outlining shame in terms of symbolic interactionism and affect theory, the generation of class-based shame is tackled (‘Shame and the classed subject’ section). The article then adumbrates the links between the RTV genre and technologies of neoliberal governmentality (‘Reality television as an extension of neoliberalism’ section) and looks at the peculiar appropriation of neoliberalism in the post-socialist part of Europe (‘Shaming the working class in the context of post-socialist neoliberalism’ section). Methodological considerations are presented in the ‘Methodology’ section, followed by the exposition of the results in ‘Targets of shaming in RTV programmes’ section, which presents the outcome of an open coding analysis, and ‘Personhood at the intersection of post-socialism and neoliberalism’ section, where the paradigmatic model of shaming the working class in post-socialist RTV programmes is assembled.

Shame and the classed subject

Shame is a multi-faceted and convoluted emotion. The origins of shame come from a two-step process: it is grounded in biological structure of the brain (Probyn, 2005; Tomkins, 1962) but this predisposition must be ignited socially and put into action by the presence of a real or imagined social mate (Nussbaum, 2009). Shame may be an intimate feeling we produce inwardly but it can also be harshly directed at us from the outside. The social environment which is conducive of shame can be an existing actor who actively engages in shaming us or just our own anticipation of how the others see us produced through the patterns of ‘reciprocity of perspectives’ (Mead, 2009 [1934]) and the ‘looking-glass self’ (Cooley, 1992 [1902]). Many scholars who have been examining shame observed that shame relates to rudimentary failure of the self. Lynd (1958) was among the first to emphasise that ‘shame is bound with self-recognition’ (p. 50), followed by, among others, Nathanson (1987), Chase and Walker (2013), Scheff (2014) or Ahmed (2014). Nussbaum (2009) provides a more psychoanalytical account when linking shame, the state in which ‘one feels inadequate, lacking some desired type of completeness or perfection’, to the infant’s experience of helplessness and incapability of catering for her own needs (p. 184). In the last instance, it is by the self that shaming stimuli are approved as shameful, and shame starts unfolding. Nevertheless, the other side of the shaming equation – the society’s eye – is equally important, as in the process of recognising the imperfection of ourselves, we fear that it could be seen by the others or feel ‘as if’ it was seen by the others. To Erikson, (cited in Ahmed, 2014: 103) shame comes ‘when one is visible and not ready to be visible’, while Loader (1998) relates shame ‘to our inner experience when we feel uncovered . . . unwillingly or unwittingly revealed’ (p. 44).

In terms of affect theory, we can only be shamed by those whom we are ‘interested’ in Parker and Sedgwick (2013) and Tomkins (1962). In her reading of affect theory, Probyn (2005) explains shame as ‘incompletely reduced interest’: affects, such as interest (unlike drives, such as hunger), cannot be easily eliminated by giving them the desired object. We continue being interested even after we get what we are interested in. ‘In the stead of the on/off function of the drives, the affects provide a wide range of differentiation – what Sedgwick and Frank call their analogical operations’, says Probyn (2005), and concludes that affects have no fixed predetermined object (p.19). Whereas hunger can only be satiated by food, we can feel or produce shame about absolutely anything. In other words, the content of shame is highly contingent, and this opens its meaning to social and cultural anchorage. It is the body which builds the physiological infrastructure for affects (‘neural firing’ as coined by Tomkins, 1962), and it is culture which gives shame its specific orientation. ‘Empty’ shame structures are topped up with specific content deriving from the values and interests of the particular society. By this token, in modern capitalist society, the position of the shamed object is often attributed to the working class and underclass, the social groups which defy its material and moral values.

Inspired by Skeggs (2013 [2004]) conception of working class as the residual category of middle-class self-determination, Lyle (2008) and Tyler (2013) elucidate the denigration of the working class in capitalist society through the paradigm of abjection. Tyler (2013) relates ‘abjectification’ of the working class to the broader issue of repulsion and disgust in human culture, emphasising that the anthropological function of disgust is to expel ‘what are collectively agreed to be polluting objects, practices or persons’ (p. 23). She believes that creation of ‘national abjects’ and ‘wasted humans’ is ‘employed to legitimize neoliberal forms of governmentality’ (Tyler, 2013: 47). Lyle (2008) states that the working class is (mis)recognised by the middle class as ‘being of lesser value’ and as ‘the abject other’ (p. 320). The distinctive feature of the working class, which makes it different from the middle class and turns it into an object of its abhorrence, is disinvestment in the self. The working class is seen as negligent of the imperative to cultivate one’s self and to ‘accrue and exchange the “correct” cultural, economic and moral capital or resources’ (Lyle, 2008: 322). This appeal – and its ignorance as a source of working class denigration – is being related to the neoliberal economic order but it can be in fact be traced as far back as the birth of spirit of capitalism from protestant ethics (Weber, 2013 [1904–1905]).

Reality television as an extension of neoliberalism

RTV focusing on everyday life has been widely theorised as a cultural extension of neoliberal logic and governmentality (Andrejevic, 2004; Hill, 2005; Kavka, 2012; Lyle, 2008; Ouellette and Hay, 2008; Redden, 2018; Skeggs and Wood, 2012).⁵ These accounts generally take Foucault’s (2009) notion of governmentality, as the concept addressing the liberal form of rule at a distance under which populations are not governed by oppression but freedom, to be their starting point. Provision of unrestricted freedom goes hand in hand with the claim that the individuals, by their own convictions and nature, use the freedom wisely and responsibly (Ouellette and Hay, 2008: 10). According to Rose (1999), the concept of the entrepreneurial, fully responsibilised self is a backbone of the hypercapitalist citizen’s subjectivity. Neoliberal hegemonic rationality is enacted through the idea of general economisation of society, which recasts the fields that are not inherently economic – such as healthcare, education or cultural production – as domains of economic logic (Foucault, 2009: 193). Neoliberal subjects are positioned as micro-capitalists who have a moral obligation to increase the value of the self through all sorts of growth and cultivation, as the self is perceived as their most valuable capital.

Scholars writing on the interesections of neoliberal governmentality and RTV rationality find social ascent and a middle-class lifestyle attained by means of self-management and an achievers’ mind-set to be the core values of RTV programmes, as well as in advanced capitalism. From this perspective, RTV channels the neoliberal narrative into the popular discourse by converting otherwise abstract ideals of individualism and self-discipline into everyday, tangible stories often contrasting a well-ordered petit-bourgeoisie with an unruly working class.

Lyle (2008) has contended that the voyeurism of everyday-life RTV programmes is structured by ‘the middle-class gaze’. Working class RTV participants are vilified by media and the audiences as they represent an obnoxious, feckless ‘other’ to the ideal-typical middle class, decent persona. The working class, as a classed version of ‘folk devils’ (Cohen, 2011), produce anxiety, which in turn gives rise to the middle-class gaze as a method to render the uncultivated, animal-like other less threatening (Lyle, 2008: 320).

The concept of middle-class gaze – as catchy as it is – has its limits. The middle class has become a rather fragile category in advanced capitalism. On the one hand, it is shrinking in the United States and Europe due to repercussions of the financial crisis, the polarisation of society, low wages and precarisation of work. On the other hand, vast sections of the population, dazzled by consumer opportunities and the changing types of labour in the service economy and digital capitalism, self-rank themselves as middle class.⁶ If full advantage of the concept is to be taken, the middle class must not be understood purely in terms of economic or professional criteria but framed culturally as a social imaginary of the capitalist societies in the West, whose relevance grew more significant as neoliberalism stabilised the middle-class drive to achieve as the general norm. As Róna-Tas (1996) implied, ‘The middle class is a state of mind, an identity, a set of aspirations, shared by a segment of society much larger than those in the middle’. (p. 31)

Shaming the working class in the context of post-socialist neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is not one. This study draws on a prior analysis showing that implementation of capitalism (in its neoliberal version) in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) was culturally specific and in many aspects predicated upon the post-socialist condition of the region, that is, mainly strong disidentification with the socialist past (Jelača et al., 2017; Makovicky, 2016; Sokol, 2013). The circumstances of neoliberalism’s implementation in this part of the world give an extraordinary spin to its hegemonic power. In CEE, the introduction of capitalism after 1989 was articulated as liberation from oppressive state socialism and treated as a doppelganger of democracy and freedom. A further narrative opening the door to capitalism was a myth of returning to the natural order. The representatives of the social transformation towards capitalism ‘saw the socialist past as a freak of history and a construction manufactured by political engineers, whereas the introduction of capitalism represented the return of a natural condition’ (Reifová, 2017). Capitalism’s entanglement with democracy and rectification of the historical error invested it with specific charisma, power and impact. Kideckel (2002) argues that post-socialist capitalism is even more orthodox and ‘reworks basic capitalist principles in new, even more inegalitarian ways than the Western model from which it derives’ (p.115).

Sociological surveys, however, demonstrate that the installation of neoliberal capitalism in the Czech Republic was not a one-dimensional, uncontested story. The research conducted at Central European University (Budapest, Hungary) in 1997–1998 evidenced that 74 percent of the Czech population evaluated the national economy as doing little or much worse than before the social transformation, and 69 percent thought that the transformation to a market economy was handled fairly to very badly – although 64 percent thought that move to the market economy was a good resolution in principle (Miller et al., 2001: 53–54). Illegitimate ways of accumulating property in the new private sector (asset stripping, corruption scandals and other methods) generated mistrust in economic elites and inspired the concept of the ‘undeserving rich’.

Nevertheless, a partial retreat from enthusiasm for capitalism and neoliberalism does not translate into the conception of hegemonic subjectivity as it is enacted in RTV programmes. The wider lack of enthusiasm for neoliberalism among the public is not reflected in the way that the subjects of the RTV programmes are portrayed and scrutinised.

The distinctive features of post-socialist neoliberalism, which endowed it with a different hegemonic potential in comparison to its Western version, are detailed as follows:

Neoliberalism was imported to Czechoslovakia and Czech Republic in the beginning of 1990s simply as ‘capitalism’. The political economic literacy of the general population was almost non-existent; so too was public knowledge about the variegated models of capitalism (Wood and Lane, 2011). The neoliberal model – as fostered by the new local economic elites hand in hand with representatives of global monetary institutions and ‘fly-by-night consultants’ (Makovicky, 2016: 1) – was taken for granted to be natural, self-evident and the sole alternative to state socialism.

Post-socialist societies have no history or experience of the legal, democratic welfare state. The standard of the social benefits provided by the socialist state was rather low-key and, more importantly, the totalitarian character of the party-run state continues to compromise the public perception of welfare today.

Post-socialist countries are relatively egalitarian, that is, they have smaller disparities in income between the richest and the poorest quintiles than Western EU countries. In 2017, the Czech Republic was the second most egalitarian country in the EU, after Slovenia.⁷ This allows post-socialist neoliberal discourse to claim more equity, as egalitarianism is not only seen as a relic of socialism but also ineffective in its own terms.

The concept of class is discredited just as much as the welfare state. The concept of class lost its allure by the end of the 1980s in Western Europe too, as evidenced, for example, by the works of Giddens (1990) or Beck (1992), which prioritise enquiry into the individual’s management of global choices. Classes – external, structural determining conditions – had to give way to the capacities of the flexible neoliberal individuals. Deery and Press (2017a) second that ‘By the 1990s some scholars proposed that in high-consumerist, service economies class is no longer a useful explanatory tool for understanding social behaviour’. (p. 4). It must be specified that in post-socialist culture, the dismissal of the concept of class is twofold. The repudiation of class results from the synergy of the neoliberal perspective with the post-socialist reading of the concept of class as a staple of the communist Marxist-Leninist rule.

Methodology

The issue of disparaging the working class in the post-socialist cultural setting was analysed by looking at three different RTV programmes aired on Czech TV channels: Krotitelé dluhů (Debt Trainers, ČT1, 2009–2012), Come Dine with Me (Prostřeno, FTV Prima, 2010–until present) and Wife Swap (Výměna manželek, TV Nova, 2005–until present).⁸ WS and CDWM are the longest running RTV programmes on the Czech television channels, deeply embedded in the Czech viewersʼ experience with the RTV genre. DT represents an example of a reality-based programme produced by the public broadcaster Czech Television (unlike the other two which were produced by the commercial channels FTV Prima and TV Nova).

Shaming the working class was conceived as a radical form of class awareness, that is, an agency stemming from the shamer’s capacity to determine and denominate specific attributes of participants’ class position and lifestyle. Shaming in the analysed RTV programmes originates either in the agency of the participants or the representations created by media professionals. The signs of participant-produced shaming are to be found in the dialogue and non-verbal emotional expressions. Verbally, shaming is often delivered as derogatory, humiliating language or as expression of strong dislike and scorn. Non-verbal expression of emotions must also be considered as potential features of shaming, especially, for example, the use of laughter, crying, voice intonation, uses of interjections, and so on. Shaming produced by television professionals was recorded in the following elements of televisual language: script (the comments and remarks made by the host of the show, oftentimes in the form of irony and/or sarcasm), direction (staging of mise-en-scène, i.e. selection of the specific houses or flats as the shooting locations), editing (preference of the scenes showing participants in an unflattering light), and camera (types of shots, especially close-up and panorama).

Photography in particular is deployed as an exceptionally efficient shaming tool in RTV programmes. The use of the camera in RTV visualises the otherwise invisible markers of class, manufactures images of abhorrent realities and consequently aims to evoke an affective response in the spectators appeals.⁹ In the analysed RTV programmes, close-ups were repeatedly employed to tightly observe signs of living in poverty, such as dirt, dust, cobwebs, dilapidated furniture, spoiled food, decayed teeth, and so on. Adding to that, panorama-style shots mapping the living environments and providing a general overview of the miserable living standards were also significantly present.

Qualitative content analysis was used to enhance our understanding of the research questions. The above given indicators (verbal and non-verbal expressions, script, direction, editing, photography) were used to carry out the purposive sampling and determine the episodes containing the acts of objectified shaming for the purpose of qualitative content analysis. The sample eventually included 39 episodes of the 3 programmes: 16 episodes of CDWM, Season XV, 2017; 8 episodes of WS, Season VII, 2016–2017 and 2015 episodes of DT broadcast in 2009–2012.¹⁰ The selected episodes were coded and analysed using the approach inspired by grounded theory (Strauss and Corbin, 1998).

Targets of shaming in RTV programmes

Open coding was used to pinpoint and categorise the targets of shaming in RTV programmes. Thirteen different types of conduct and thought were determined which happened to fall in the crosshairs of shaming, be it the participant-driven or production-driven shaming. In this section, the objects of shaming are grouped into categories and denoted by the nominal codes (indicated with underlining). The categories represent the spheres of everyday life in which breaches of norms and expectations placed on self-disciplined, well-managed subjects were reciprocated by shaming. If the standard is transgressed in the respective spheres, it is likely that the ‘delinquent’ will be shamed by the other participants or television professionals. The categories are exemplified by the quotes and uses of televisual language.

The first (in alphabetical order) area of everyday life to which shame was directed in the analysed programmes was action-mindedness. Working class participants whose penurious material situation coincided with a lack of an action-oriented mind-set were disparaged for their insufficiency of a vigorous, energetic and autonomous approach to solving everyday problems. The financial counsellor in DT, whose mission was to design the financial plan helping the family out of their debts, was sarcastic about the alleged inactivity of the participant: Mrs. Vrbová is waiting for someone to appear miraculously and pay all her debts so that she can happily put the strain of new debts on her family (DT, 07 September 2009, 25:07). Shortly before this scene, the camera captured the participant as a couch-potato indifferently watching the TV screen, sitting still on her sofa (DT, 07 September 2009, 24:33).

The upbringing of children was a regular object of the shaming gaze, in this case usually focusing on too direct, negligent or otherwise inappropriate ways of raising the children by their parents. A member of the group of guests in CDWM snooped around the host’s apartment and observed, This kids’ room is just a disaster. Being a social worker, I would call child protection (CDWM, S15E70, 26:29). In one of the WS episodes shaming of poor childcare was achieved with a close-up. It caught clouds of dust coming off the bedding in the children’s room as the swapped wife beat it loathingly (WS, S09E08, 38:30).

The moments when working class participants demonstrated poor general knowledge, usually regarding different cultures, countries or languages, were a popular object of shaming to be filmed and edited into the analysed programmes, in particular in CDWM. One of the episodes featured the contestant mispronouncing the dishes when reading the cosmopolitan menu, ‘cheesecake’ having been mispronounced as ‘chezeke’ (CDWM, S15E93, 10:23); another episode quoted the participant clearly mistaking a fish dish for a soup in an otherwise self-confident statement: Hmm, halibut with vegetables and herbs . . . I do not know this kind of soup (CDWM, S15E70, 19:43).

Health and body care is another area in which shortcomings and failures were reciprocated with shaming. It mainly addresses clear disinvestment in the physical and aesthetic aspects of the self (health, body shape, fitness and outlook including clothing). One of the instalments of DT included a scene showing an encounter between an MP and a father of a family in debt. The MP sat at a posh desk, wore an expensive suit and talked confidently, whereas the father looked extremely wrecked, in worn-out, baggy clothes with a heavily wrinkled face. At the top of it, the camera zoomed in and showed a close-up of the father’s coarse hands with signs of manual work and dirt under his nails (DT, 04 January 2011, 17:28).

Hygienic living standards, especially neglect of cleanliness and tidiness at home, was made an object of shaming in an absolute majority of analysed episodes. Derogatory comments condemning poor hygiene can be represented by a shout between the swapped wives: The kind of mess in your house, it almost made me throw up! Jumble, reek – just piss off and go back to your Nowheresville (WS, S09E06, 57:24).

RTV working class participants were also verbally and visually denigrated in the area of immaterial lifestyle, where lack of taste in design and decorations and bad etiquette were key targets of shaming. One of the female participants in WS for example noticed the wall calendar with nude models hanging in the swapped house and she found it morally and esthetically deplorable: Yuck. Sorry but the father in this family is a total pervert. Sorry but I am not going to look at the naked female genitals (WS, S09E05, 08:21). The visual side of all three shows heavily drew on close-ups and camera movements in the interiors of participants’ apartments capturing tasteless, tawdry design and decorations. There were many other visual tropes such as the sequence of close-ups in CDWM, showing details of kitschy decorations on the shelf: pictures and statues of kittens, dolls made from straw, fake blue onion china, and so on (CDWM, S15E22, 04:33).

Contemptuous representation of participants’ material living conditions was obviously a crucial category in the audiovisual shaming of the working class on RTV. It entailed pictures and comments pointing to shabby and neglected housing equipment or lack of financial resources. Audiovisual means were similar to those used in case of shaming immaterial lifestyle, as can be seen in one of the WS episodes, where the participant stood in front of the ruined house where she was supposed to spend the next 10 days. She smoked nervously and the camera zoomed on to a damaged façade of the house with plaster falling off the walls (WS, S09E02, 5: 51).

The category of navigation through complexity generalises the instances of shaming in which a lack of individual emancipation, autonomy and capacity to survive independently in a complex, fuzzy society was vilified. These shaming comments and visuals referred to working class participants’ incapacity to understand the complex processes of late capitalism, especially regarding operations of financial and symbolic capital. In one of the DT episodes, the indebted family almost fell prey to another fraudulent non-bank financial instutition following an advertisement leaflet. This is how the advertising expert reflected upon their choice: The world is panicking about the decreasing power of advertising. From this perspective you are a relic of history because the advertisers duped you with something really stupid. (DT, 04 January 2011, 24:46)

A specific type of class-based shaming addressed age, ethnicity, gender and place of living. Working class RTV participants were disparaged for old age, marginalised ethnicity, inappropriate enactment of gender (usually female) and a parochial place of living. Nevertheless, these identities do not trigger shaming on their own but in synergy with participants’ class. These cases evidence that the working class position is intersectional (Collins and Bilge, 2016): it works together with other identities in mutual cross-fertilisation, although one part of this interrelationship, the class itself, is suppressed here. One participant in CDWM scorned the host for the lack of skills that a proper female should have, but she combined reference to the gender markers with the class ones: Dust, dirt, cobwebs everywhere. How can a woman live like that? (CDWM, S15E74, 25:40). The shamer in WS fused class with ethnicity in the same style: This could not be worse. Gypsies and cockroaches together in one place. I am gonna throw up (WS, S09E06, 26:14).

The last object of shaming was the lack of a work-oriented mind-set that the working class participants putatively had. Ridicule, sarcasm and scorn was directed at RTV participants for having low work intensity and a dislike for high performance in the labour market. The voiceover in one of the DT episodes noted, ‘Miloš visits the employment office regularly. Perhaps he should do the employment, not the office’ (27 January 2009, 01:00).

Personhood at the intersection of post-socialism and neoliberalism

In the following stage of the analysis, the above listed categories are organised into the central story on how individual selves are governed through the synergy between neoliberal and post-socialist social imaginaries. The main effort is on examining whether the post-socialist appropriation of neoliberalism can be used as a backbone theme around which shaming working class in the analysed RTV programmes gravitates.

The categories of shaming were first converted into appreciation of the specific norms by assuming that shaming the lack of a certain quality represents endorsement of the respective quality, that is, norm of behaviour. The norms were further organised into four clusters representing the ideal post-socialist self: (1) using market solutions (marketised self), (2) living independently of state guidance (depaternalised self), (3) suppressing class determinations (unclassed self) and (4) building distinctions between oneself and others in spite of one’s real economic position ([desperately] inegalitarian self). Eventually, the post-socialist appropriation of neoliberalism, and more precisely its station as antithesis to – and liberation from – state socialism, was used as a vantage point in making sense of the four clusters. In this process, homologies between shamed features of post-socialist everyday conduct and distinctive features of the socialist thought or lifestyle were determined. Practices targeted by post-socialist shaming were matched up with the myths and stereotypes of socialism as moulded by the post-socialist memory of socialism (Kennedy, 2002).

Scheme 1 visualises the clusters, representing dimensions of the ideal post-socialist self as put forward through the instances of shaming in the analysed programmes. The perspective anchored in sensitivity towards post-socialist neoliberalism allows us to see that there is an articulation between the shamed forms of working class conduct and excessive preservation of habits dating back to the period of socialism or, insufficient employment of the innovations and opportunities brought about by capitalism. According to the shaming rationality disentangled in this article, we can say that working class RTV participants are shamed for living their life too much as in the socialist past, or for adapating too little to capitalism. Shaming the preservation of socialist-like habitus and conduct should be understood as a form of post-socialist memory through which Czech society grapples with its socialist past. It is immensely complex cultural terrain consisting of diverse and often contradictory practices such as ‘socialist nostalgia’ – sentimental longing for, or playful irony regarding the socialist past (Berdahl, 1999; Boyer, 2006; Enns, 2007; Mihelj, 2017) – on the one hand, while disparaging resemblances to the socialist lifestyle on the other hand. Whether the memory of the socialist past is imbued with nostalgia or dismissal, it is heavily influenced by the fundamental discontinuity wedged into the Czech society’s sense of identity during the sociopolitical changeover in 1989 and the following transformation period (Reifová, 2017).

Scheme 1.

The ideal facets of the post-socialist self as endorsed in RTV programmes.

Marketised self

The ‘marketised self’ cluster consists of the acts of shaming targeted at the imperfections brought about by inappropriate or insufficient use of the market. There are two definitions of ‘market’ involved in shaming acts falling under this cluster: ‘market’ in the narrow sense, as the site of monetised exchange, and the ‘market’ in a broader sense, as an accumulation of opportunities where the right choice has to be made. It is grounded in shaming participants’ material living conditions, immaterial lifestyle, health and body care, general knowledge and hygienic living standard. In all these cases, the shortcomings could be amended by taking advantage of the market in the narrow or broad sense. Run-down apartments could be refurbished, kitschy decorations replaced with designer fittings, private shrinks hired to heal psychological injuries and low-cost airline tickets purchased to mitigate the lack of general knowledge of foreign cultures and languages. Shaming for flawed methods of raising children also partly fits into this category as bad parenting was occasionally defined as a lack of material provision to children.

What imbues this category with a post-socialist rationality is the contrast between market solutions and market choice brought about through capitalism, and the absence of the free market and the resulting economy of scarcity under state socialism. The homology between participants’ disregard for market solutions, and the wretched materiality and austere material conditions in the period of socialism is usually implicit. Nevertheless, these data which explicitly shame obsolete, abandoned interiors as something correlated with the socialist lifestyle are recorded too, that is, voiceover (sarcastically) in CDWM, S15E63, 24:52: ‘This contestant tries to impress her guests with time-proven meals. But her guests see it as outdated, obsolete, unfashionable and ordinary cuisine. C’mon, why do you turn down the chicken with peach? Good old school, isn’t it?’. Another quote in a similar vein was made by another participant (ibid., 38:28): ‘Chicken served with peach does not recall anything good. It recalls the old times which should simply vanish’.

Depaternalised self

The categories ‘work-oriented mind-set’, ‘navigation through complexity’ and (partially) ‘action-oriented mind-set’ feed into the ‘depaternalised self’ cluster. Shaming in this cluster is directed at the participants who are unemployed or have low work intensity. Another target of shaming is lack of orientation in the field of finances, media and information technologies, and hence vulnerability to the associated risks such as unwise financial decisions or uncritical reception of media. Shaming aimed at those who do not prove to have the action-oriented mind-set (referring to the activity in private life in contrast to the work-oriented mind-set) fits to this cluster only partly as it is mostly presented as a timeless personality trait independent of any governmentality system. However, there are the quotes which explicitly relate lack of an action-oriented mind-set to the period of socialism, as in the quote from the financial expert: ‘In the first instance, this family must get rid of the kind of fixed notion coming from communism that everybody should have the same money’ (DT, 22 December 2009, 4: 38).

In the ‘depaternalised self’ cluster, a homology between the shamed types of conduct and socialist subjectivity is demonstrated through reliance on paternalism, the crucial element of the socialist state which effectively limited the individual’s sphere of action and responsibility. Shaming is aimed at the participants who, in the face of the shamers, act as if there was still some higher authority ready to step in and prevent complete bankruptcy. The concerned shaming acts convey ostentatious dissociation from the mentality homologous with the state socialist paternalism or explicitly address the inactive, disoriented mind-set as an inheritance of state socialism.

Unclassed self

The ‘unclassed self’ cluster brings together instances of working class shaming in which class intersects with other identities and sublimes into them, typically age, ethnicity, gender and place of living. Producers of the shaming acts frequently ascribe the abandoned state of the participants’ apartments to their age, unappetising dishes to the failed enactment of femininity, untidiness to ethnicity and uncultured environment to the rural place of living. A simple commutation test (Fiske, 2010: 103) helps us to realise that it is class, as a composite of available sources and types of capital, which feeds into shaming for the above-stated identites.

Paradoxically, awareness of class is completely absent in the acts of working class shaming in RTV programmes. The concept of class in public post-socialist discourse is endowed with Marxist-Leninist understanding of class in its ritualised meaning as a key token of the communist party ideology. As such, the concept is understood to be overthrown and the signifier itself is almost taboo in the post-socialist cultural code. Schröder (2008: 3) shares the point when claiming that ‘class is obliterated in public discourse in Eastern European societies’. Shaming class through its obliteration and sublimation into other cultural categories follows the rationality in which class is disassociated from the socialist imaginaries governing the norms proposed for the post-socialist self. Yet, the type of disassociation is new in case of the ‘unclassed self’ – compared to the ‘marketised self’ and ‘depaternalised self’. Whereas in the earlier cases, the ideal post-socialist self was constituted by an opposition to the anticipated socialist mentality, unclassed self is manufactured on the basis of a suppression of class as a relic of the communist party-generated discourse.

(Desperately) inegalitarian self

The three clusters of post-socialist personhood feed into the overarching type of post-socialist self in which all the so far distilled norms meet in synergy and unity – the ‘(desperately) inegalitarian self’. An absolute majority of individuals and families featured in the analysed episodes are from the working class or underclass and the objective social distance among the participants is not big.¹¹ Fostering various norms infused with neoliberalism, starting from use of market solutions and going as far as suppression of structural limits such as class, is not the final purpose of the shaming efforts. Rather, they should be interpreted as a discursive means by which social differences are established symbolically in the field where a fully fledged social hierarchy, as a ground for class-based othering, is not available. It is at this point where the empirical data loop back to the starting point of the research – to the interpretative sociology of social inequalities which understands class boundaries to be floating lines permanently drawn and re-drawn in symbolic interactions (Šafr and Häuberer, 2008).

Shaming in the analysed RTV programmes can be interpreted as a desperate search for inegalitarianism, the concept of morality and fairness put forward by neoliberalism. Simultaneously, its counter-hegemony – egalitarianism – was a socio-economic backbone of the socialist economic doctrine (Harvey, 2007: 203). It is at this point where we see a homology between the post-socialist background to shaming (absenting genuine hierarchies) and the attributes intrinsic to the organisation of the socialist state. It is not pristinely clean houses or financial literacy that are at stake in the case of class shaming, but adherence to the inegalitarian neoliberal norm and disassociation from socialist egalitarianism.

Discussion

This research, focused on detecting homologies between the disparaged facets of the post-socialist self and the features of the socialist personhood, cannot ignore the ultimate, master homology underpinning this study – the one between the genre of makeover reality show and the spirit of post-socialist transformation.¹² Both undertakings – so incommensurable in the absolute majority of regards – share a similar accent: they are both entrenched in the values of a complete overhaul of the concerned entity (an individual or society) and overwhelming change for the better. This homology brings new insight and relevance into the study of everyday RTV in the post-socialist context. In the post-socialist situation, ‘the losers’, ‘the social cases’, and ‘the chavs’ are always already positioned as those who did not ‘make it’ in the newly manufactured capitalist society and failed in turning the economic transformation to their advantage, bringing them personal growth and prosperity (Ekman and Linde, 2005: 356). The same characters are typical targets of shaming in everyday RTV programmes. The mere objects of shaming are not very different from the poverty-stricken people who are bashed for similar reasons in ‘poverty-porn’ style programmes in the West. Nevertheless, in the Czech, and generally post-socialist, context, there is a layer of meanings added. Being stagnant, underperforming and neglectful of increasing one’s value is always already associated with being somehow buried back in socialism, while being entrepreneurial, flexible and able to capitalise on oneself is always already somehow progressively capitalist. In Czech post-socialist RTV programmes, shame is smeared over those who did not manage to synchronise their personal life trajectories with the hegemonically triumphant trajectory of post-socialist neoliberal transformation.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was supported by the grant provided by The Czech Science Foundation GAČR 17-02521 S.

ORCID iD

Irena Reifová

Notes

Biographical note

Irena Reifová is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic. Her research and teaching interests are at cultural studies, television studies and post-socialist mediated memory. She has been serving as ECREA General Secretary since 2016.

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