Offence as Presence, Presence as Offence: Classed Cultures of Visibility

This paper discusses the various ways in which crossing over from the ‘ordinary world’ to the ‘media world’ (Couldry, 2000) are constitutive of offence. On one hand, media producers’ practices of recruiting ordinary people to participate in trashy talk shows and reality shows are commonly received as offensive by middle-class critics, insofar as unequal and artificial structures of representation govern these transactions. On the other hand, visibility contests, ‘presencing’ (Couldry, 2012), and position-taking in the mediated space of appearance are increasingly regarded not as means but as ends in themselves: media recognition is the constitutive symbolic flourish that legitimizes both acts of political claims-making and personal performances of victimhood. These two movements–offence as presence, and presence as offence–are discussed here using examples from an ethnography of television, their working-class and poor audiences, and their middle-class critics in class-divided Philippines.