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by injustice and sheer frustration that fill other media spaces such as
news reportage and Jerry Springer-like day-time talk-shows! Even in
suffering, distinctions are forged between those who can talk them-
selves into transformation and those whose behaviours suggest a lack
of self-knowledge and self-reflection and so casts suspicion on their
true intentions and thus upon their deserving status (Aslama and
Pantti, 2006; Lawler, 2005b, p. 118). Feel-good TV warns its citizens
Being Worth It 135
not to be complacent misfortunes can hit and when they do, they
hit hard it s best to be ever vigilant. But should bad luck occur, then
shows like Extreme and DIY SOS leave no doubt as to the best way to
cope and of the rewards that might follow.
Addiction
If the bad luck story erases any suspicion of culpability by pre-
senting already ideal neoliberal citizens for the Extreme makeover,
other lifestyle makeover shows manage the relationship between cul-
pability and deservingness in different ways. Individuals are often
herded into the before stage under the guise of addiction. A grow-
ing number of addictions crowd lifestyle media: from the perhaps
more familiar workaholic to the newly spun clutteroholics dis-
cussed in Chapter 2, to chocoholics spendaholics and fast-food
junkies . These labels mingle with descriptions of caffeine fixes ,
sugar buzzes , retail highs and consumer cravings across lifestyle
TV shows and self-help books. As Robin Room (2003) argues, it mat-
ters little whether there is any truth in whether people are addicted
to clutter or not, or indeed whether there is any truth to addiction
itself (there is some contention around its designation as a disease ).
What is important is the way addiction operates as a cultural frame,
shaping contemporary storytelling and thus enabling specific stories
of the self to be told. What is pertinent then is the currency of addic-
tion discourse, what it allows to be said and what space it affords
the self.
As a frame, addiction reveals its own cultural contingency. Just
as Berridge and Edwards (1981) argued that opium use turned from
a habit into an addiction in the nineteenth century as a conse-
quence of wider class frictions and the demands of an emergent
pharmaceutical profession, Robin Room starts by arguing that addic-
tion is a historic and cultural concept deployed at specific cultural
junctures. He uses the example of drink to argue that the problem
of alcoholism emerged through wider concerns about social control
and self-discipline in times of rapid social change. He states, as an
accepted way of understanding human behaviour, addiction con-
cepts are a phenomenon specifically of the late modern period (2003,
p. 222). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1993) concurs, using the term epi-
demics of will to describe the range and spread of addictions and
136 Lifestyle Media and the Formation of the Self
addiction discourses that spin, she argues, from general anxieties and
fears associated with the heightened free will and choice-making in
neoliberal societies.
As Sender and Sullivan (2008) argue, the ideal neoliberal citi-
zen as imagined through rational, tasteful and discrete consumer
lifestyle choices is haunted by the relational construction of the
addict who is unable to cope with the endless freedom on offer
(p. 580). The inability to make tasteful choices, to consume correctly
and to responsibly cope with choice, as we ve seen in previous chap-
ters, is repeatedly associated with certain segments of the working
class (Hayward and Yar, 2006). Addiction discourses when targeted
at the less educated, lower-income individuals who overpopulate
lifestyle TV (Ouellette and Hay, 2008, p. 7) parade as a seemingly
neutral (non-classed) address but serve to effectively re-circulate class
divisions and distinctions. As the choosing self needs its neme-
sis, addiction is largely an invented term that manufactures the
addict and which aids the medicalisation of non-appropriate and
strongly classed behaviours of excessive consumption, loss of control
and inner conflict (Benford and Gough, 2006, p. 429).
For Room, the cultural anxieties around self-control figure more
highly than those around choice. If ideas about normative self-
hood are as deeply embedded in notions of self-control and personal
responsibility as this book has argued thus far, then addiction looms
large in the cultural imagination not just because one has lost con-
trol over a certain substance or experience but rather because this
indicates that one has lost control over one s life (Room, 2003). It is
telling, he argues, that addiction is referred to as dependency in
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric
Association. Dependency, as we have seen, is recast as troubling,
threatening and rather distasteful in the neoliberal rhetoric spiralling
from Thatcher/Reagan administrations of the 1980s, setting depen-
dency and vulnerability as markers of an illegitimate subject (Haylett,
2001). However, while the addict is a figure of disgust and denigration
(Murray, 2008), the addict does not simply slip into the living-dead
status of the zombie (see the previous chapter). Instead a belief in
self-control works alongside the belief that one can be taken-over
by desire and craving, to offer redemption. As Kosofsky Sedgwick puts
it, the addict is propelled into a narrative of inexorable decline and
fatality, from which she cannot disimplicate herself except by leaping
Being Worth It 137
into that other, more pathos-ridden narrative called kicking the habit
(Sedgewick, 1993, p. 131).
Kicking the habit makes up much of lifestyle makeover shows and
self-help books. Participants in weight-loss shows are encouraged to
kick their addiction to fatty, sugary snacks (You are What You Eat)
while most self-help books start by asking readers to confront and
then kick the self-destructive habits of poor time management or
the habitual faulty thinking that has been holding them back (Covey,
1989; Field, 2004). While addiction may position one as in need of
a makeover, it doesn t necessarily convince or interest a viewer that a
makeover is deserved. How then does the addict manage the appraisal
filters? I want to explore this through a brief example from Supersize
vs. SuperSkinny (C4, March 2010) below.
It s not longer what you eat, but what s eating you
Dr Jessen
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