Television and Everyday Life

particular now is to try and make sense of the interweaving of the political
economy of the media with their cultural appropriation. I have tried in this
chapter to offer a framework for beginning to meet that challenge. In the next
chapter, in a discussion of consumption, I will develop the argument by
considering the dynamics of the process.

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Chapter 5
Television and consumption
There is a paradox lying at the heart of the term, and the activity of, consumption.
To consume is to destroy. Consumption is associated with waste, with wanton
dissipation, with decay (see Williams, 1974). Consumptive bodies are those
eaten away by disease. Fires consume. Conspicuous consumption—from the
potlach to the Polo shirt—is a waste: a public, visible, dramatic waste (Veblen,
1925). We consume and are consumed.
1
Yet recent and not-so-recent theorists
searching for the key to understanding the particular character of middle and
late capitalism have found it in consumption. And some of the most recent
critics of contemporary culture have found in consumption the basis for a
defining critique of modern and post-modern culture—a cause for celebration
and a definition of culture not as destructive but, on the contrary, as the source
of much (if not all) that is creative both in the pointillism of everyday life and
in the surrealism and hyperrealism of the mass media.
There is another paradox. Consumption depends on production. We can
not consume what we do not produce. Consumption stimulates production.
Without destruction we cannot create. And furthermore it is in the stimulation
of consumption that we forget about production. In advertising’s
encouragements very little is displayed about the conditions under which our
goods are produced, as if that recognition might somehow tarnish the glow or
dampen the flames of desire.
In this chapter I want to consider television and consumption. I want to do
it as a way of approaching something of the dynamics of contemporary culture,
the mechanisms by and through which we engage in, and are engaged by, the
systems and structures of life under late capitalism. Television is only one
element in all of this. Yet arguably it is crucial. It provides most of the core
images, the concerted blandishments, the musical accompaniments, of this so
vital an activity. And I want, if I can, to hold on to these paradoxes, for they
express yet another of the essential tensions in contemporary society that this
book seems to be identifying and which any discussion of television must
inevitably reveal. This time the tension is between the claiming power of an
increasingly international cultural-industrial complex and the possibilities

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Television and consumption
105
released by those powers for self-expression, through denial, transcendence
or transformation. And it is a tension articulated through, as well as ameliorated
by, television and the other mass media. In consumption we express at the
same time and in the same actions, both our irredeemable dependence and our
creative freedoms as participants in contemporary culture. Television (and of
course the other mass media), I want to suggest, provides both the models and
the means for this participation.