Television and Everyday Life

THEMES AND TENSIONS
There are a number of identifiable but obviously interrelated themes running through
what I have to say on the following pages. I identify them now as a sensitising
signal in the certain knowledge that they will only intermittently be the direct focus
of the ensuing discussion, but also in the certain knowledge that they will always
be not far below the surface. They are themes that run through the literature on
consumption as it emerges from the Marxian and post-Marxian critique of twentieth-
century capitalism and in particular the emergence of a concern with culture as an
object of critical attention. And they run through more recent discussions which
have adopted a focus on, and a language of, the semiotic as a way of understanding
the particular dynamics of technology, political economy and public images as
they have emerged in modern and post-modern society.
The first theme is that of commodification. Commodification involves
exchange. Objects acquire a value not according to their usefulness but
according to their capacity, within a market, to be exchanged. Marx traced the
emergence of the commodity form as the dominant expression of economic
rationality as coexistent with capitalism, and closely tied to production, and
the relations of production. Indeed the history of capitalism can be traced
through the increasing significance of the commodity not just in relation to
produced goods or objects but in relation to culture, leisure and consumption.
The critique that was associated with this analysis of commodification was, of
course, that of alienation (Meszaros, 1970). This involved the separation of
the worker from his or her product, and workers from each other, as the
atomisation associated with exchange value (not social or use value) replaced
the moral economy (Thompson, 1971) of pre-industrial society. This doomed,
moral, economy was articulated to other forms of social and economic
rationality: more sensitive to the individual and to the support of community.
While some (e.g. Kopytoff, 1986) have suggested that commodification is
antagonistic to culture, so that culture ensures that some things remain outside
commoditisation: sacred, singular, unexchangeable; others (e.g. Haug, 1986)
suggest that culture cannot resist (does not, under capitalism, resist) the process
of commodification. Culture, by implication, disappears beneath it. The critics
of the Frankfurt School (see below) take this as their starting point. The insidious
commodification, and reification, which they saw as the work of the cultural

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Television and Everyday Life
industries, stamps an alien rationality and an alien aesthetics on the images,
objects and pleasures of contemporary culture. The result is an atomisation
and an homogenisation of everyday life—atomised because value lies in the
individual objects of exchange—homogenised because everything is
exchangeable and in some sense, therefore, equivalent.
Yet others see in commodification not an antagonism to culture, nor even a
repression of culture, but an embodiment of culture (Appadurai, 1986). No
exchange without meaning. No economy without value. No culture without
exchange. In this dialectical approach in which commodification is to be
understood as a social process, some of the arguments about commodification
and consumption became more complex and more challenging. The histories
of consumption (e.g. McKracken, 1988) which incorporate such a view depend
less on a version of commodification that demands an analysis of its iron-
fisted imposition, or on the malleability and vulnerability of the new consumer,
and more on the constructive logics embodied in commodity exchange and
their openness to creative attention in and through consumption itself.
To see commodification and consumption in this way involves the second
of the themes of this chapter: goods as symbols, and it might be said, symbols
as goods.
Once goods enter a system of exchange they enter a system of differences,
of differential values and meanings which provide the basis not only for
their position in a hierarchy of value, but increasingly in a society constructed
around and through consumption, the basis for a classification of consumers
and owners, tastes and styles. And these public meanings have to be visible
meanings if they are to have any weight and significance, and if any power
is to be exercised through their expression. Consumption has to be
conspicuous. And the needs which it expresses, and to some extent must
fulfil, are social. As Appadurai notes (1986, 31) consumption (and the demand
that makes it possible) is ‘a focus not only for