Television and Everyday Life

THE DYNAMICS OF CONSUMPTION
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In presenting the arguments in this section I refer back to my discussion of the
moral economy of the household at the end of Chapters 2 and 4. There I argued
for a view of the household as a transactional system, actively engaged both
economically and culturally, with the products of the public, formal economy,
and I suggested that in that interaction, and in the correlative dynamics of the
appropriation of goods and meanings, something of the place of the household
in relation to public space and public discourses could be understood. Now I
want to develop those arguments by specifying the elements within the process
that seem to be significant. In doing so I want to make clear that I am not
attempting a reification of the household. On the contrary. The household as a
particular expression of the domestic is the site in which much of our
consumption takes place, but as I argued, also in Chapter 3, the household is
not a fixed or necessarily simply a material entity. It has a phenomenological
reality and the domestic as such extends beyond its literal boundaries. In the
following discussion therefore I privilege the household, but do not insist on it
as the necessary or only location for consumption (on other sites of
consumption, see Shields, 1992; Fiske, 1989a). Indeed I want to suggest (though
mostly by implication) that this model has a wider range of reference, revealing
as I hope it does, something of the larger-scale processes of consumption and
the role of the media, especially television, in those processes.
The second set of introductory remarks concerns the status of television
(and other information and communication technologies) as doubly articulated
in domestic culture. I have cited Baudrillard’s discussion of the television as
object, and without necessarily endorsing the full force of his analysis, I want
to pay attention to the specific aspects of television and other media which
distinguish them from other technologies and objects in the domestic sphere
(see also my discussion in Chapter 4).
The notion of double articulation is derived from the work of André Martinet
(1969), who understood the unique capacity of natural language to convey
complex meanings to be the result of the articulation of both its phonemic and
morphological levels. Sounds (without meaning) were a precondition for words

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Television and consumption
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or signs (with meaning). The meaningfulness of natural language is made
possible by, and requires, both. The meanings of all objects and technologies
are articulated through the practices and discourses of their production,
marketing and use. The technical dimensions of the machine, its design, its
image constructed through advertising and its final appropriation into domestic
cultures (see the papers in Silverstone and Hirsch, 1992) are of a piece: what
is being communicated is the meaning of the commodity as object, and while
this meaning is significant, compared to that generated through the
communication of words and images, it is invisible and relatively meaningless.
Television, and other information and communication technologies, carry,
however, a second level of meaning, whose communication depends on its
prior status and meaning as an object. Television is a medium and its
communications—its programmes, narratives, rhetorics and genres provide
the basis for its second articulation. They only become available as a result of
the prior appropriation of the technologies themselves (see Haralovich, 1988;
Spigel, 1992).
What I am suggesting here is that the cultural value of such a machine as a
television lies both in its meaning as an object—embedded as it is in the public
discourses of modern capitalism, but that meaning is still open to negotiation
in the private discourses of the household (see Miller, 1987)—and in its content,
which is similarly embedded (Morley and Silverstone, 1990). The consumption
of both, the technology and its content, define the significance of television as
an object of consumption. And it is in this sense that I refer to television as
being doubly articulated.
It is worth pointing out that Baudrillard sees these two articulations as
separable and as the basis for different, class-related, relationships to
television. I am suggesting that they are not separable (though there is a class
inflection), and that individuals and households will relate to television
through both articulations, though with different degrees of emphasis, and
subject to change. New technologies (or technologies that are claiming
novelty) are likely to be bought, by some, for their status as objects (and by
those for whom such status displays are important). Others will buy them for
their functionality and for what they provide by virtue of their distinctive
mediation. Television is a paradigmatic example of what I mean here.
Through its double articulation into culture its significance is extended
beyond its status ‘simply’ as object or medium, for in its status as medium,
and through the provision of information and entertainment, television
provides the basis for an ‘education’, a competence, in all aspects of
contemporary culture (Haralovich, 1988).
There are six moments in the process of consumption which I now want to
distinguish. They are identified as: commodification; imagination;
appropriation; objectification; incorporation; conversion, and I shall consider
each in turn, acknowledging now that they can be considered as neither discrete,

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Television and Everyday Life
nor necessarily as evenly present, in all acts of consumption. This ‘model’ of
the consumption process is very much a sketch.