Television and Everyday Life

RECONTEXTUALISATIONS
Mass goods represent culture, not because they are merely there as the
environment within which we operate, but because they are an integral
part of that process of objectification by which we create ourselves as an
industrial society: our identities, our social affiliations, our lived
everyday practices. The authenticity of artifacts as culture derives, not
from their relationship to some historical style or manufacturing
process…but rather from their active participation in a process of social
self-creation of ourselves and others. The key criteria for judging the
utility of contemporary objects is the degree to which they may or may
not be appropriated from the forces which created them, which are
mainly, of necessity, alienating.
(Miller, 1987, 215)
Daniel Miller builds his model of consumption on an analysis of the object in
the work of Hegel, Munn and Simmel, and on a consideration of contemporary
theoretical and empirical work on consumption practices in modern society.
At the heart of his position lies a perception of consumption as negation, seeing
in it a liberationary potential quite at odds, for example, with that of the
Frankfurt School. Commodities are (or are not) transformed as they leave the
world of public meanings and are appropriated into a more private (or less
public) world: domestic, sub-cultural, gender- or age-based. Consumption,
from this point of view, is work. Alienating commodities (alienating because

---

Television and consumption
119
they are the product of mass production) become inalienable objects as a result
of a process of recontextualisation. The work of consumption is not necessarily
physical work (it can merely involve long-term ownership, for example) nor is
it only the visible work on the commodity/ object. The work of consumption
includes the ‘more general construction of cultural milieux which give such
objects their social meaning’. Miller (1987, 191) reworks a Bourdieuian (1984,
183) example to illustrate what he means. The work done on a pint of a beer in
a pub includes the whole culture of pub behaviour; just as a visit to a cafe is
not just for the drink, but a place to drink in company and to assert and display
a distinct form of sociability and cognitive order.
Advertisers know this of course, and orient their campaigns in such a way as
to make their products appear and appeal to socially defined and located groups
and individuals. And the whole consumer movement operates on a set of shared,
though not often articulated, assumptions that commodities are of necessity to
be associated with, and increasingly constitutive of, life-styles and, indeed,
distinct forms of sociability. The point however is that there is an indeterminacy
at the heart of the process of consumption. Consumption is indeterminate because
of the different kinds of potential for recontextualisation available in different
commodities. And it is also indeterminate because individuals and groups in
society have different economic and cultural resources at their disposal with
which to undertake the work of recontextualisation. In many cases people are
forced to accept the full weight of the public meanings inscribed in the commodity;
in others these commodities can be domesticated, and turned into things with
private meanings as well as, or in defiance of, their public ones.
However hard he tries to avoid it there is a romantic streak running through
Miller’s analysis; a romanticism of the popular, which arises from the failure
to acknowledge the contradictions and frustrations necessarily associated with
consumption, particularly with failed or compromised consumption. Full
realisation through consumption is almost certainly an ideal (indeed it is in
capitalism’s interests that it should remain an ideal). As Alfred Gell (1988b)
points out in a review of Miller’s book, every consumption decision is at the
same time an acceptance of its limitations. An understanding of consumption
as a satisfactory form of objectification can only be realised if the parallel
work of the imagination and fantasy—that is of the symbolic—is added to the
first. Without some sense of these frustrations and limitations, as well as a
sense of the inequalities of power which they express, analyses of consumption
do have a tendency to romanticise consumer freedoms (and, as I shall suggest
in the next chapter, the freedoms of television audiences as well).
POWER
In reality a rationalized, expansionist, centralized, spectacular and clamorous
production is confronted by an entirely different kind of production, called

---

120
Television and Everyday Life
‘consumption’ and characterized by its ruses, its fragmentation (the result
of circumstances), its poaching, its clandestine nature, its tireless but quiet
activity, in short by quasi-invisibility, since it shows itself not in its
products…, but in an art of using those imposed on it.
(deCerteau, 1984, 31)
De Certeau sees consumption as being at the heart of the politics of everyday
life. And consumption is, in a number of senses, inscrutable. He talks of the
‘consumer-sphinx’, and in doing so he is making a number of linked but
separable points. The first is that most acts of consumption are invisible. The
second is that these same acts are essentially indeterminate. And the third is
that they are, potentially and actually, transformative. Consumption and
everyday life are coterminous: the one equals the other. This is so because
consumption includes, has to be understood as, productive. Buying, using,
reading, watching—none of these activities leaves the subject, the object or
even the system untouched. To assume that it does (as he suggests Bourdieu
does) misunderstands consumption’s essentially dynamic, not to say
creative, nature.
8
His analysis is conducted through metaphor and his metaphors are
geographical and military. Culture is perceived to be a battleground, but the
battleground is unevenly occupied and treacherous. The mighty are never
invulnerable. The weak are never without hope. Minor triumphs may sometimes
lead to major victories. Daily life is a kind of guerilla war in which we find the
cracks or blow open the weak spots of, attack and retire from, or provide
occasional and ephemeral sniper fire against, the rationalities, technologies
and productive forces of contemporary society.
De Certeau offers a view of an, albeit unequal, dialectic of culture: that between
the dominating and the dominated, in which the latter is not condemned to the prison
house but is offered (or more likely steals) the opportunities for the pleasures of
Utopian thought and expression, in both the procedures and the narratives of the
everyday. In this sense the culture of everyday life is defensive, not just against the
threat of chaos and the unknown, but against the threats of domination by science,
reason and economic necessity. But at the same time that defensiveness is also (is it
not always?) aggressive. It is creative. It resists. It traces what he calls