Television and Everyday Life

Appropriation
As Daniel Miller (1987, 215 and above; 1992) has suggested, an object—be it
a technology or a message—is appropriated at the point at which it is sold, at
the point at which it leaves the world of the commodity and the generalised
system of equivalence and exchange, and is taken possession of by an individual
or household and 
owned
. It is through their appropriation that artifacts become
authentic (commodities become objects) and achieve significance:
consumption as work may be defined as that which translates the object from
an alienable to an inalienable condition; that is, from being a symbol of
estrangement and price value to being an artefact invested with particular
inseparable connotations. Commerce obviously attempts to pre-empt this
process through practices such as advertising which most often relate to objects
in terms of general lifestyle, but this does not mean that advertising creates
the demand that goods should be subsumed in this way.
(Miller, 1987, 190)
From this perspective appropriation stands for the whole process of consumption
as well as for that moment at which an object crosses the threshold between the
formal and the moral economies. It also embodies the particular tension at the

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Television and consumption
127
heart of consumption, to which I referred at the beginning of this chapter: that in
our daily acts of consumption we express our irredeemable dependence on the
material and symbolic objects of mass production, and at the same time and in
the same actions, express our freedoms as creative participants in mass culture.
But as Miller (1988) acknowledges, and Carrier (1990) also acknowledges,
the meanings associated with the acts and objects of possession, the withdrawal
of objects from public to private space, are often anticipated in the discourses
of advertising and marketing, so that, for example in the mail-order catalogues
analysed by Carrier, we are being presented with objects (or images of objects)
which are already constructed as posessions. Mail-order catalogues can do
this by making production as well as sale a personal matter. Commodity
exchange is overlain by the symbolism of the gift, and the anonymity of
production is displaced by the personality of the imaginary producer. Even
here, therefore, the freedoms associated with, and necessary to, the acts of
appropriation, the freedoms for symbolic manipulation and reevaluation, are,
and must be, anticipated as far as possible in the system of meanings within
which we, as consumers, must engage.
There are a number of further points to be made here. The first is made by
Miller (1988, 175; see Carrier, 1990) himself when he draws attention to the
constraints differentially operating on an individual’s or a household’s capacity
to effect a transformative appropriation. For many, neither material nor symbolic
resources are sufficient for them to do anything other than accept passively the
embodied claims for meaning in technologies or mediated texts. And even for
those who appear to have significant scope for resistance or transformation,
except in the limiting case of complete rejection, it is unlikely that some aspects
of public or systemically embodied meanings will not filter through.
This is true both for the appropriation of television as object, and for the
appropriation of its transmitted meanings (see Morley (1980) for a discussion
of television viewers’ relationship to the texts of 
Nationwide,
and compare
this to Miller (1988) as well as Parkin (1972)).