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Objectification
If appropriation reveals itself in possession and ownership, objectification
reveals itself in display and in turn reveals the classificatory principles that
inform a household’s sense of itself and its place in the world (see
Czikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, 1981). These classificatory principles
will draw on perceptions of, and claims for status (see conversion, below) and
will in turn define differences of gender and age as these categories are
constructed within each household culture.
Objectification is expressed in usage (see incorporation, below) but also in
the physical dispositions of objects in the spatial environment of the home.
10
It
is also expressed in the construction of that environment as such. Clearly it is
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Television and Everyday Life
possible to see how physical artifacts of all kinds, in their arrangement and
display, as well as in their construction and in the creation of the environment
for their display, provide an objectification of the values, the aesthetic and the
cognitive universe of those who feel comfortable, or identify, with them. An
understanding of the dynamics of objectification of the household will also
throw into strong relief the pattern of spatial differentiation (private, shared,
contested; adult, child, male, female etc.) that provides the basis for domestic
geography.
Once again television is no exception, as Ondina Faschel Leal suggests in
her study of television in Brazilian homes:
The TV is the most important element among the set of objects in a home of
the working-class group. The TV set sits on its own small table, with the
importance of a monument, and it is typically decorated with a crocheted
doily. The TV, on or off, represents the owner’s search for the social
recognition of TV ownership which is why it has to be visible from the
street. The old radio, next to the television, has already lost its charisma but
is still there, documenting the earlier form of this status attribute. The
television as an object is a vehicle of a knowledgeable and modern speech,
it is rationality in the domestic universe where the rational order is,
paradoxically, sacralized.
(Leal, 1990, 24)
Television is one among many objects that can be displayed in this way, and
not just by working-class households (though see the observations made by
Baudrillard, cited above). And, as Charlotte Brunsdon (1991) points out in her
discussion of the enforced display of the satellite dish, the messages
communicated are not without their ambiguities nor are they always displayed
with pride. It should also be pointed out that the appropriation and display of
artifacts, in this case television, does not take place, nor can it be understood,
in isolation. In the Brazilian example, the television, a vase, a painting, a plastic
rose are all pointed out (by Leal) as significant, but significant as a collective
expression of the systematic quality of a domestic aesthetic which in turn
reveals, with varying degrees of coherence, particular dimensions of the moral
economy of the household.
Objectification is not, of course, confined to material objects. Television
programmes (and other mediated texts) are equally involved in the mechanics of
display—in a number of ways. The first is through television programmes having
(like material artifacts) the status of commodities. They can be, and are, appropriated
in the same way that material objects are, their meanings not unequivocally fixed
in production. And they can be objectified in the moral economy of the household
through their physical display in photographs of soap-opera or rock-music stars.
Finally one can see how the content of the media, and especially the content of
television programmes, is objectified in the talk of the household, for example in
Television and consumption
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the ways in which accounts of television programmes, the characters in soap operas,
or events in the news, provide a basis for identification and self-representation
(Hobson, 1982, 1989; Radway, 1984; Ang, 1986).
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