Television and Everyday Life

DOMESTICITY
Agency and modernity (and post-modernity) meet in the domestic and that
meeting is expressed in the ideology and activity of consumption. The particular
character of everyday life as it is lived under contemporary capitalism requires
a consideration, finally, of this third term.
Domestication is a process both of taming the wild and cultivating the tame.
It is where nature becomes culture. One can think of domestication too, as
both a process by which we make things our own, subject to our control,
imprinted by, and expressive of, our identities; and as a principle of mass
consumption in which products are prepared in the public fora of the market.
In a sense the commodity is already domesticated, and it is in this ‘anticipation
of domesticity’ which the commodity embodies that we must understand the
context of our own domesticity and of the role of television in creating and
sustaining it. As Igor Kopytoff suggests:
in any society, the individual is often caught between the cultural structure
of commoditization and his own personal attempts to bring a value order to
the universe of things.
(Kopytoff, 1986, 76)
So the commodity, in a sense, is already pre-digested. Consumption presents
us not with the alienated object (Miller, 1987) but with the already pasteurised
object, pasteurised against the threat of indigestibility. Consumption is always

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a participative process and only sometimes a transcendent one, though that
does not mean that we are not able to appropriate mass-produced objects into
our own image and into our own particular expression of domesticity. What it
does mean, however, is that domesticity, like so much of everyday life, is
simultaneously both found and created, and that the identities constructed
through our active engagement in consumption are already available,
somewhere, even in their uniqueness. We talk, for example, of having just
‘found a little shop’, or ‘discovering a restaurant’ in an unfamiliar town. We
take perverse and contradictory pleasure if we later discover that the shop or
restaurant is already well known, as if that prior knowledge guarantees our
good taste (though we may feel offended by the undermining of our private
and individual competence and skill).
Television is both object and medium within this domesticity. Our choice
of technology, our incorporation of it into the private spaces, times and practices
of our homes is paralleled by the same kind of choices that we make with
respect to programmes and the work we do on them both inside and outside
our domestic space: to make them our own. But given this kind of prior
domestication (they are ‘user-friendly’) which makes both objects and texts
more or less easily appropriated, then it is clear that both the acts of appropriation
and the domestic itself are exclusively neither part of the private nor the public
spheres. Consumption too is never simply a private activity. It depends on a
whole slew of public meanings, a public language, constantly changing but
preserving, like written language, a much more resilient and material structure.
Our individual acts of consumption therefore, private as we imagine them, are
dramatic expressions, gaining their significance not just in private statements
but through the attention of public audiences. The shopping mall takes that
extension of domesticity a step further by providing protected spaces,
simultaneously public and private, within which to demonstrate (to ourselves
and others) the skills that mark full participation in the suburban world.
8
So there is an added dimension to our domesticity. The pre-digested
commodities of contemporary culture still have to be selected, bought and
owned. They enter a social space, a moral economy, that will use them to
help define its own identity and integrity. Clearly commodities are not the
only things that fulfil this role, and families and households may not find in
them anything much of symbolic value. However it is in this process of
bringing things and meanings home that the empirical diversity of our own
domesticity is produced and sustained. And it is in this struggle with or
against the commodities—both objects and texts—of the mass market, that
many of the structures of everyday life are revealed. It is in the everyday
(which is not of course coterminous with the domestic any more than the
popular is) that the functional and the cultural dimensions of media are
worked through. New technologies, old social forms: both of course are
changing, though at different speeds and unevenly. Everyday life in general

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Television and Everyday Life
and domesticity in particular can resist, but such resistance is, like so much
in everyday life, paradoxical. Through it are expressed both the marks of
difference and, in their significance, an acknowledgement that they are to be
recognised and shared by others.
The television audience is at one in all of this. The audience is, and always
was, a consumer. And the terms of trade—the material and symbolic terms of
trade—are set but not determined by a political economy of the media which
is becoming increasingly globalised, integrated and technologically diverse.
The unchallenged age of broadcasting may be over. In which case audiences
will increasingly become, more literally, consumers, buying and owning
software and hardware, and paying for telecommunicated services. There is a
politics here, of course: a politics of access and equity (Golding and Murdock,
1991), a politics that broadcasting perhaps took for granted. Yet the position of
the audience, and our capacity to make sense of that position in a changing
world, still depends on its location within the public and private structures of
everyday life. And our understanding of those structures and the practices that
both sustain and change them is still a precondition for understanding the
process of mass media and mass communication.
The politics of everyday life, then, consists in the uneven relationship of
public and private spheres: of agency, modernity and domesticity. It is a politics
mediated and translated through consumption. Nicholas Garnham is in little
doubt as to its quality:
Political communication is forced to channel itself via commercial media
… Public communication is transformed into the politics of consumerism.
Politicians appeal to potential voters not as rational beings concerned for
the public good, but in the mode of advertising, as creatures of passing and
largely irrational appetite, whose self-interest they must purchase…the
citizen is addressed as a private individual rather than as a member of a
public, within a privatized domestic space rather than within public life.
(Garnham, 1991, 111)
Stephen Heath similarly talks of the depoliticisation of political communication.
In the commodification of the public sphere, it has been argued, citizens have
been turned into consumers (see Elliott, 1982, 244). Conversely, others
(Giddens, Scannell and Cardiff, Thompson) suggest that the contemporary
politics of everyday life has been transformed by the media, and a new kind of
public sphere has emerged (see esp. Thompson, 1990, 246 and my discussion
Chapter 3). Have we come full circle? How do we resolve this final dichotomy?
Perhaps we cannot. There is a difference between a domesticated politics
and a politics of the domestic. Garnham and others bewail the emergence of
the first; Thompson celebrates the arrival of the second. Neither disagree that
it is television’s mediation of political life which is the significant factor in
what is seen by both as more or less dramatic change. I have described this

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situation in terms of the suburbanisation of the public sphere, which among
other things involves not only an extension through the media of the power of
the centralised State but also in that extension, and as a result of the same
mechanisms, possibly its intermittent weakening. Television extends rather
than deepens, and its capacity to mediate politics involves a thinning of the
fabric of control within the public sphere, such that holes can and may appear:
challenges, mobilised through the same media that have previously and
successfully been used to contain them, but which offer scope for both focused
and unfocused, and occasionally successful, participation of private consumer-
citizens in public affairs.
It is certainly the case that contemporary politics are being fought out in the
media, on the screens of television sets and the pages of newspapers. It is also
certainly the case that the political system remains for the most part protected,
inviolate (though by no means everywhere). But it is equally certain that the
politics of everyday life is not entirely contained by this media appropriation,
that consumers are intermittently also citizens, and that it is in the deepening
of our understanding of the essential tensions that mark the interrelationship
of television, technology and everyday life that we will better be able to