Television and Everyday Life

sending
messages…but for
receiving
them as well’.
Goods and commodities become symbolic objects within a system of
meanings. But that system can be understood in a number of overlapping ways.
It can be seen as oppressive, the motor and motivation of a society of the
spectacle, the spectator, the spectacular. It can be seen as a system of
classification, a code. Or it can be seen as the basis for a complex web of
creative possibilities. In the first, consumption, fashion and style are all seen
to be expressions of a false reality, in which objects are no longer meaningful
because they are useful but are only deemed useful because they are meaningful;
and in which the image replaces reality as the basis for their, and all, value (see
Debord, 1977, 1990). The result is an imposed and reifying system: a tyranny
of appearance.
In the second, consumption is a dynamic but still containing a code
in which:

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the virtual totality of all objects and messages [is] presently constituted in a
more or less coherent discourse. Consumption, insofar as it is meaningful,
is a systematic act of the manipulation of signs.
(Baudrillard, 1988, 22)
In this too we are deceived by the sign, seduced into believing that the image is
the reality. But in that seduction we are also willing participants. We collude
with it.
And the third, still within the linguistic metaphor, finds in the
consumption and exchange of goods a language in a stricter sense, creating
the possibilities for speech and communication in the manipulation of their
meanings (see Bourdieu, 1984; Douglas and Isherwood, 1979). Here
personal and social identities are formed on the web of consumer
possibilities and in the choice and display of objects to hang on it. We speak
through our commodities, about ourselves and to each other, making claims
for status and for difference, and actively and creatively marking out a map
for the negotiation of everyday life.
In consumption the sign is indeed the arena of struggle—though not
exclusively class struggle (Voloshinov, 1973). But how much struggle and
how consequential? How we come to adjudicate between competing definitions
of power within the discourses of consumption, between the possibilities for
freedom and the degrees of freedom, as well as the meaningfulness of those
freedoms, is very much the issue. The analysis of television’s role in this is
once again arguably quite crucial, for as Robert Dunn (1986) suggests: ‘it is
primarily the visual form of television which exemplifies the commodification
of culture…As a sign system within a sign system, television mirrors
consumerism’s master code only to reinforce it at a deeper logical and
psychological level’ (Dunn, 1986, 53 and 55).
This observation (and challenge) leads to a consideration of the third
underlying theme of this chapter, that of articulation. This concerns the various
levels at which it is possible to consider television as being locked into the
consumptive discourses of contemporary society. Leo Lowenthal (cited in
Adorno, 1957, 480) talked of television in terms of ‘psychoanalysis in reverse’,
implying that the psychoanalytic notion of the personality has been taken up
within the cultural industry as a discursive mechanism to entrap and seduce
the viewers of television. Programmes would be layered in a kind of
homologous way to the layers of the personality and, through this coincidence
of structure, the trap—the latent and ideological messages—would be set.
More recent and more focused psychoanalytic work makes parallel claims
(e.g. the journal 
Screen,
Mellencamp, 1990). One can certainly argue that
television does indeed provide in its programmes, through its narratives, its
genres, and its rhetorics, one way in which the logics of commodity culture
are articulated with the concerns, values and meanings of everyday life.

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Television and Everyday Life
Programmes and advertisements can hardly fail to provide an expression and
a reinforcement of the dominant and dominating ideologies of consumer
society—Jerry Mander (1978, 132) calls it ‘a delivery system for commodity
life’. And equally it is clear how in the forms of television, in the structures of
its schedules, in the patterns of the media calendar and in the array of channel
choice, the medium provides yet another route into consumer culture, offering
itself as an object of choice to a more or less active/passive spectator. And
finally, it can also be argued that television as technology is articulated into
contemporary culture—domestic culture and the culture of consumption—
through producing and reproducing the very forms of the relationship between
consumer and object that define the system as a whole. We consume television,
and we consume through television.
2
And as Lynn Spigel (1992) has argued,
we have had to learn how to do both.
Even in this brief discussion of articulation it is important to recognise its
limits. Such arguments raise the spectre of total passivity, of views of the
audiences as rats in a maze, making artificial and meaningless choices under
the illusion (if rats have illusions) that they are meaningful. To talk of articulation
as if that was the end of the story, as if there was no room for difference, no
room for transformation, negotiation or denial, obviously mistakes things. Here
too there is an essential tension: a tension between structure and the possibilities
for action; between representation and reading; between public commodities
and private objects. I shall return to this theme throughout this chapter.
The last of the themes can also be posed as a tension. Arguments within
contemporary cultural theory, and particularly those that have emerged
under the banner of post-modernism have focused on the two quite opposite
tendencies within consumption towards, on the one hand, the
homogenisation, and on the other, the fragmentation and disintegration, of
cultures and tastes (Featherstone, 1991). I have already referred to them. The
critique of the increasing internationalisation of industrial cultural
production, which has its origins in the work of the Frankfurt School, sees
the results as being a global culture, the product of American cultural and
media imperialism and generating, both in form and content, a universal
cultural framework from which there is very little escape (see Schiller,
1989). The post-modern critique, in identifying the same tendencies,
nevertheless makes a different case. Globalisation both recognises and
releases the national, the ethnic and the individual. Incorporation into global
culture (which may or may not be bad thing) also creates a space for, and to
some extent also legitimises, the assertion of difference.
This tension plays out at the national and regional levels, and also at the
local and the individual level. The breakdown of the Communist bloc (arguably
itself in part the result of the attractions of consumption) has both opened up a
new market for capitalism’s commodities (a force for integration and
homogenisation) and at the same time released huge pressures for cultural

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autonomy and the assertion of national and regional identity. Similiarly it can,
and will, be argued that the commodities produced within an increasingly
consolidated cultural industry, are no longer mass produced but emerge within
a regime of flexible accumulation (Harvey, 1989), produced both for intensely
fragmented and highly differentiated markets (both in time and space), and
subject to further fragmentation and differentiation in use.
These four themes: of commodification, symbolisation, articulation and
globalisation/fragmentation make up a ground base for many of the arguments
in and around the study of consumption in contemporary society, and they will
continue to do so in what follows. And in what follows I will attempt to sketch
a model for the dynamics of consumption, particularly insofar as it affects the
consumer—in the domestic or the private sphere.
The model-building begins with the identification of the key elements,
and through the key elements some of the key theoretical ideas that inform
any discussion of consumption. My intention is to suggest that consumption
be seen, both literally and metaphorically, as one of the main processes by
and through which individuals are incorporated into the structures of
contemporary society—but that this incorporation is neither a simple nor an
unambiguous process. It involves both activity and passivity, competence
and incompetence, expertise and ignorance. But it also throws into some
relief, and gives some expression to, the particular dynamics of structure and
agency (Archer, 1988)—and especially the role of the media in articulating
those dynamics—which provide one of the central problematics of social
and cultural theory.
In providing an account of consumption in this way I draw on, but also
extend, some of the discussions that have taken place in earlier chapters. I
want to identify consumption through the interweaving of the following:
industry, ‘technologies’, taste, identities, recontextualisations, and power, and
in doing so I hope to introduce a number of different but complementary
theoretical perspectives which will inform the model as it emerges in the last
section of the chapter.