Television and Everyday Life

particular dynamics of consumption in contemporary society. Television can,
indeed, mean different things to different people. But what is also interesting is
his recognition of what I have elsewhere referred to as television’s double
articulation: that is to the separate dimensions of its cultural meaning, both as object
and as medium. I shall return to this towards the end of this chapter.
Second, and what appears to be quite a distinct and separate excursion, is
Baudrillard’s reformulation of McLuhan’s characterisation of the consequences
of electronic mediation on social and psychic life—a reformulation that
Baudrillard continually returns to throughout his work. The rise of the broadcast
media was, for Baudrillard, an important element in the coming of post-
modernity, for through them, and particularly through television, a fundamental
(and fundamentally new) form of reproduction, which he defines as simulation,
emerges as the predominant characteristic of culture.
5
By the late 1970’s Baudrillard was interpreting the media as key simulation
machines which reproduce images, signs and codes which in turn come to
constitute an autonomous realm of (hyper)reality and also to play a key
role in everyday life and the obliteration of the social…Baudrillard claims
that the proliferation of signs and information in the media obliterates
meaning through neutralizing and dissolving all content, a process which
leads to both a collapse of meaning and the destruction of distinctions
between media and reality.
(Kellner, 1989, 68)

---

114
Television and Everyday Life
This is a position which shares an analysis (though not an evaluation) with
McLuhan. It also shares both an analysis and an evaluation with the theorists
of the Frankfurt School. However, whereas in his discussion of television as
object he preserves a role for discrimination, for distinction, here, in media’s
banishment of meaning, all is bleached and leached: and all that remains is a
technologically driven and interiorised mass culture of homogenised
experiences and ideas. (See Horkheimer and Adorno’s (1972) ‘The might of
industrial society is lodged in men’s minds.’)
There seems to be a problem in reconciling the force of these two discussions;
the one acknowledging, as Bourdieu does, the class-based practices of
discrimination in consumption, the other denying any significance to such
activity. There is a problem, that is, until one recognises that Baudrillard’s
analysis of consumption itself depends on their integration. Consumption, for
Baudrillard, seems to be an activity that takes place within the space of
simulation; discriminations and choices are made, expressive and reinforcive
of identity but in a world of objects and meanings that are removed from any
experential reality. The choices are real choices (and ultimately unsatisfying
choices) in a phoney world of simulations and unrealities. Consumption has to
do therefore ‘merely’ with the manipulation of signs:
If consumption appears to be irrepressible, this is precisely because it is a
total idealist practice which has no longer anything to do (beyond a certain
point) with the satisfaction of needs, nor with the reality principle.
(Baudrillard, 1988, 25)
It is not just television therefore which is a technology. Consumption itself is
a transforming activity, magically effective and operating as a kind of
cultural machine, constantly providing a new range of identical symbols and
representations, refined, recycled and mass produced from the discarded and
obsolescent products of an earlier time. Television is central to this.
Baudrillard may change his evaluation of its influence, but not his view of
what that influence is. Television is both object and promoter of
consumption, and as promoter it provides the currency—the eternally
implosive, lavish sterility of simulation after simulation which defines both
the limits and the possibilities of consumption behaviour, and from which
there is no escape.
TASTES
Consumption is, in this case, a stage in a process of communication, that is,
an act of deciphering, decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit
mastery of a cipher or code… A work of art has meaning and interest only
for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code, into
which it is encoded… Taste classifies the classifier. Social subjects, classified

---

Television and consumption
115
by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make,
between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in
which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed.
(Bourdieu, 1984, 2 and 6)
Consumption, for Bourdieu, is a material activity which is real in its
consequences. It involves active discrimination through the purchase, use and
evaluation, and therefore the ‘construction’ of objects. Objects present
themselves for consumption both as material and symbolic goods. Our
capacities to consume are constrained both by our social positions and
availability of resources, as well as by the materiality of the objects themselves.
But consumption is also a symbolic activity, and Bourdieu’s perception of
contemporary culture is neither the homogeneous one of the Frankfurt School
nor the fragmented (but equally reductive) one of Baudrillard. Culture is a
patchwork, a constantly changing patchwork, of difference. These differences
are ultimately expressive of class position, but of class position precisely
constructed in consumption rather than simply by its position in the relations
of production.
6
Consumption expresses taste, and taste, life-style. All are in turn expressions
of the habitus. The habitus—‘the durably installed generative principle of
regulated improvisation’ (Bourdieu, 1977, 78)—is defined by a set of
discriminating values and practices by and through which one’s own culture
can be distinguished and defended from those above or below one socially. It
is also a set of absorbing values and practices by which the new and the
unfamiliar can be incorporated and accepted as part of the familiar and taken
for granted. We buy and display what we value; and we value according to our
social position. Our social position is the product not just of income or wealth,
but also of the relatively independent influence of education and family culture.
The habitus is the cultural residue of historical changes as they affect an
individual’s or a family’s class, status and power. But it is a residue which is
also generative of identity and difference through the application in practice
of structuring (and structured) systems of perception and taste. The habitus
itself is an expression of the various forms of capital—cultural and economic—
which define the conditions of its possibility. It intervenes between the
determinations of income and the displays of taste.
So for Bourdieu consumption is about distinction. It is about status, our
claims for it and our denial of it to others. Consumption is an expression of
competence, and of competence amongst the codes and conventions, the
knowledges, skills and differences (real and imagined) which make up the
mosaic of contemporary culture. The distinctions between classes, and within
classes, are articulated through displays of competence. Objects, works of art,
all are marked and arranged in a clearly defined though constantly interacting
and changing matrix of difference. Those differences are not essential but
socially defined. They are subject to claim and counter-claim. Their values

---

116
Television and Everyday Life
change, but they change, always, within an established and insistent hierarchy
of judgements and of class. Working-class and middle-class cultures are
distinguished by the differences of cultural power, and the absence or presence
of necessity. They are expressed in the differences between the ‘authentic’ and
the ‘imitation’—for example the insistently claimed and defended difference
between champagne and sparkling white wine. Meanwhile, in Bourdieu’s
account of the French petit-bourgeoisie, there is another relationship to be
seen, not of imitation but of reverence, not of copy but of a kind of simulation
(not his term for it) in which the petit-bourgeoisie, in their eternal and suburban
dependence, reduce, hybridise, delegitimate all that was once legitimate through
their very touch—a freezing touch applied of necessity by virtue of their social
position.
I have, of course, savagely condensed the arguments of perhaps the most
significant anthropological contribution to the study of consumption in
contemporary society. Nevertheless the burden of his position I hope is clear.
The value of objects is neither pre-given nor inherent in them. It is granted
through practice, and through the practices of informed consumption. All
consumption, even that of the repressed, is informed: informed by the demands
and statuses, the socially defined needs and desires of those who consume. In
consumption, we communicate. And as I have already suggested for Bourdieu,
as opposed to Baudrillard, that communication is real in its consequences. It
provides the fundamental matrix for the conduct of our everyday lives, and for
a politics of difference which maintains bourgeois culture as arbiter of taste
and distinction, guaranteeing its place in the hierarchy by virtue of education,
tradition and wealth.
There are a number of observations which might be made, and absences to
note. For Bourdieu class remains the single most powerful determinant of
consumption behaviour and status. And Bourdieu’s perception of class, as
something given, and in the last instance still explicable in terms of the relations
of production, imposes an altogether too rigid and restricting framework on
the analysis. For all its subtlety and sensitivity,