Television and consumption
117
understresses the dynamics:
the shifts and turns, the squirming and the
resistances which in their significance or lack of significance, do indeed make
consumption an active, sometimes creative, process in which individual and
social statuses and identities are claimed, reclaimed and constantly being
negotiated. He also understresses, to the
point almost of invisibility, the
significance of the media in general, and television in particular, in articulating
taste, style and culture.
IDENTITIES
consumption decisions become the vital source of the culture of the
moment… Consumption is the very arena in which culture is fought over
and licked into shape.
(Douglas and Isherwood, 1979, 57)
The possibility of finding in the practices of consumption a mechanism for the
creation and expression of more finely tuned identities is one which emerges
in another seminal work on consumption, that
of Mary Douglas and Baron
Isherwood (1979). Their work shares with Bourdieu and Baudrillard a concern
with the languages of consumption, with goods and objects as markers in a
complex communicative network in which statuses are claimed and denied
and memberships of groups articulated and displayed in each and every
consuming action. Consumption, Douglas and Isherwood suggest, is like Lévi-
Strauss’ myths, good to think with.
7
Their focus is however on the individual:
Within the available time and space the individual uses consumption to say
something about himself,
his family, his locality, whether in town or country,
on vacation or at home… Consumption is an active process in which all the
social categories are being continually redefined.
(Douglas and Isherwood, 1979, 68)
Consumption goods are not, in their view, the messages; they are the system
of meanings themselves. Take them away and the system disappears. They are
both the hardware and software of the information system, which is
consumption.
Consumption is therefore, principally a symbolic activity. It is
important for what it says and does not say, for its reinforcement or its
undermining of cultural boundaries. It is also a daily activity. It provides a
mechanism (a rhetoric) for social classification. It is rational. And media
technologies are an essential element of consumption not only (
pace
Baudrillard) as objects to be classified but also as links to a wider network of
consumption activities and opportunities.
Consumption, for Douglas and Isherwood, is very much an activity taking
place at one remove from the material conditions of production and existence.
Objects and goods have no engrained utility, nor do they appear to offer
118
Television and Everyday Life
resistance
to the cognitive, affective and symbolic activities of the consumer.
Obviously, as they recognise, one’s capacity to consume, and the way in which
one consumes (access to information about consumption and through
consumption, for example) is class-based and dependent on available resources.
Obviously too, as they also recognise, consumption is about access and as
such about the structures and exercise of power and the denial of access
(Douglas and Isherwood, 1979, 89). But as Daniel Miller (1987, 146) points
out in his discussion of their work and the similarly oriented
analysis of Marshall
Sahlins (1976) they ‘tend to assert the overwhelming desire for cognitive order,
and thus offer an unrealistically cohesive model of cognition itself which ignores
the problems of ideology and framing’. Identities may be formed or reinforced
within a predominantly cognitive—information—system of consumption, and
one can acknowledge the varied rationalities that might be involved, yet Douglas
and Isherwood offer a version of that system which lacks conflict, ambiguity
and struggle. They find in the system of objects an expression of prior social
divisions. But the use of objects may have a wider
relevance and reference
than that, as Daniel Miller himself argues. It is to his discussion of consumption
that I now briefly turn.
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