Television and Everyday Life

Imagination
The work of imagination is contradictory work. Commodities are constructed
as objects of desire within an advertising and market system which depends for
its effectiveness on the elaboration of a rhetoric of metaphor and myth: a seduction
of and through the image (Ewan and Ewan, 1982; Ewan, 1984; Leiss 
et al.,
1990).
But the work of advertising and of consumers’ participation in the imaginary
which is its result, is necessarily and inevitably, as I have already observed, a
frustrating experience (Gell, 1988a). It is frustrating because of the limits imposed
by consumption itself: for every act of successful consumption, suggests Alfred
Gell, there are many failures, failures defined by economic limits, inadequate
resources and limited objects and products. But failure is endemic to the system
of consumption itself. Baudrillard identifies consumption as a kind of general
hysteria, based upon an insatiable desire for objects, a desire which can never
be satisfied. Needs can not therefore be defined since consumption is based not
on a desire for objects to fulfil specific functions, but on a desire for difference,
a desire ‘for social meaning’ (1988a, 45).
Grant McKracken (1988) writes of ‘displaced meaning’ and consumption’s
role in creating it. The displacement is that between the real and the ideal. In
our culture such displacement is mediated through the objects and commodities
of mass consumption: ‘Consumer goods are bridges to…hopes and ideals. We
use them to recover this displaced cultural meaning, to cultivate what is otherwise
beyond our grasp’ (ibid., 104). Displaced meaning is a culture’s resolution of
the problem of the imperviousness of reality to cultural ideals. The ideals are
removed from daily life into another cultural universe, in our own case the cultural
system created by advertising and expressed in goods.
It is this desire for social meaning that advertising creates and sustains. The
goods that are offered through it, that are represented through its images, tropes
and metaphors, create a Utopian discourse into which potential and actual
purchasers buy. Goods are imagined, dreamed about, in their coveting. The focus
of those dreams is both the ideal world that they come to signify, and the real
world that they will enhance with new meaning. Whereas the first can be, and
is, protected within the world of goods (the infinity of goods as well as the infinity
of dreams), the second is entirely vulnerable to the erosion of everyday life.
McKracken suggests too that goods offer a means of fixing our identities in
fantasy (this is how we would like to be) rather than in reality (this is how we
are). He notes the contradiction between these two kinds of meanings, without
clearly suggesting that it is precisely in the contradiction that the motor for
consumption is fuelled.

---

126
Television and Everyday Life
Yet it is in the mobilisation of fantasy in the pursuit of identity, and in our
goods’ capacity to fix identity within a more or less systemic discourse of
commodity meanings that many analysts have seen advertising functioning. Stuart
Ewan sees its apotheosis in style, and style is, of its essence, constantly changing.
He cites the classic work of Sheldon and Arens (1932), who discovered in
psychoanalysis the key to the creation of the endlessly mutating surfaces of
fashion. The appeal to, and the enhancement of, desire is the stock-in-trade of
advertising and marketing.
But the construction of desire is not only advertising’s prerogative. As Leiss
et al.
(1990, 290) note, some 80 per cent of new products fail to reach their
profit objectives. Consumers selectively create symbolic associations in
recognising new wants and in constructing new life-styles. In other words the
process of imagination, is, once again, a dialectical one: driven by stimulation
and desire, stalled by frustration and indifference, transformed by the active
engagement of consumers in the very process of commodification.
As commentators (e.g. Schwach, 1992) have noted, therefore, in the actual
practice of consumption, goods are imagined before they are purchased, prior
to any loss of illusion that comes with ownership. Purchase is in this sense,
potentially, a transformative activity, marking a boundary between fantasy and
reality, opening up a space (or not) for imaginative and practical work (de
Certeau’s tactics) on the meaning of the object, either as a compensation for
disappointed desire or as a celebration of its fulfilment.