Princes as Paupers: Pleasure and the Imagination of Powerlessness

For six well-documented days in January 1987, a popular television anchorwoman named Pat Harper pretended to be a homeless person on the streets of New York. Her goal, according to the WNBC news director quoted in a press release, was to "meet the homeless, experience and see what life on the street [was] like" (quoted in Pisetzner 1987). Her teeth painted yellow, a "bruise" artfully applied to her dirtied face, her nom de guerre and hard luck story concocted well in advance of any encounters with actual homeless people or domiciled passersby, Harper did her best to blend in. The results of her experience were broadcast during sweeps week on the nightly news and in a half-hour special titled "There but for the Grace of God." ¹

Harper stayed under cover even after she came down with the flu, gamely remaining in character, asking for change, sleeping in doorways. Yet while she had hoped to achieve the feeling of authentic homelessness, she quickly came to understand that her unseen but ubiquitous coterie of camera and sound technicians rendered this intimate knowledge of the unfamiliar impossible. Indeed, her mission had been doomed to failure from the start. "I could never know what these people feel," she conceded, "because I have a key that opens a door" (Stone 1987). Yet the inaccessibility of this privileged knowledge did not keep Harper from knowing other valuable things. She learned that the world was a more benevolent place than she had imagined: "I'm cold and I ache. . . . That's not why I'm crying, though. A woman with a dog, who passed me, just came back and handed me $15. I feel guilty taking it, but I'm so moved people can be this good" (Stone 1987). She also learned, paradoxically, that push come to shove, she could lead the life she was simulating: "I learned I will never be scared of not having money and work. I know if everything bad came down on me, I could do it." Nor were these lessons Harper "learned" about middle-class (dog-walking) "people" and her imaginary, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God, can-do self the only satisfactions produced by her experience: she ultimately earned an Emmy award for the report. Clearly, if Harper had not achieved the "feeling" of authentic homelessness, she had at least produced the "feel" —of something.

People in positions of power often enjoy pretending that they are powerless. This is not to say they want to be powerless. It tends to be only in situations in which there is an agreement stipulating the limits of play that powerlessness is pleasurable. Sometimes this agreement is explicit, as in role-playing games and domination fantasies that are articulated and meticulously acted out by consenting subjects. Sometimes this contract is implied, as in television shows, novels, and films that offer us vicarious experiences of powerlessness on an understanding so obvious (that they are only television shows, novels, films) it need not be stated. The pleasures of powerlessness rely on a guarantee of safety, on the existence (and vigilant policing) of barriers so high and impermeable between the imaginary and the real that the barriers may survive their own breaching and toppling. The enjoyment of powerlessness is, in some sense, the enjoyment of power. ²

One enduring experience of make-believe powerlessness among the dominant classes in Western cultures is the practice of impersonating the poor in their own milieu. ³ This essay seeks to identify the kinds of cultural work carried out under cover of simulated poverty or relative powerlessness by reading repeated visits to this site of pleasure in Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier and in Barbara Ehren-reich's recent Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Through an analysis of the uncomfortable pleasures lurking in these narratives, I will suggest that such simulations allow at once for the consolidation of entrenched modes of bourgeois subjectivity...