Television and Everyday Life

5
TELEVISION AND CONSUMPTION
1
The French word ‘consommer’ preserves a double meaning, that of being fulfilled and
annulled (see Baudrillard, 1988, 22), which can only be expressed in English through
different words: ‘consumption’ (Lat. 
consumere
) and ‘consummation’ (Lat. 
consumare
).
Of course it is precisely in the ambiguity of the French ‘consommer’ that much of the
discussion of this chapter takes place.
2
This is what I have called elsewhere its double articulation (Silverstone 
et al.,
1992).
3
See note 1 of this chapter. Baudrillard is using the French term ‘consommation’ in its
sense of consummation.
4
For a recent critique of Baudrillard, see Kellner, 1989; and for a defence, see Gane,
1991.
5
In 
Symbolic Exchange and Death
(Baudrillard, 1988, 135ff.) Baudrillard distinguished
between three orders of simulation: the counterfeit associated with classical culture
from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution; production, (Walter Benjamin’s
‘reproduction’) of the industrial period; and simulation proper: the eternal reproduction
and self-referentiality of signs governed by a ‘cybernetic’ code.
6
‘A class is defined as much by its being perceived as by its being, by its consumption—
which need not be conspicuous in order to be symbolic—as much as by its position in
the relations of production (even if it is true that the latter governs the former)’ (Bourdieu,
1984, 483).
7
‘The stream of consumable goods [into the home] leaves a sediment that builds up the
structure of culture like coral islands. The sediment is the learned set of names of sets,
operations to be performed upon names, a means of thinking’ (Douglas and Isherwood,
1979, 75).
8
‘This misunderstanding assumes that “assimilating” necessarily means “becoming
similar to” what one absorbs, and not “making something similar” to what one is,
making it one’s own, appropriating or reappropriating it’ (de Certeau, 1984, 166).
9
The arguments offered in this section are based on, and extend, material published in
Silverstone 
et al.,
1992.
10
‘What science has to establish is the objectivity of the object which is established in
the relationship between an object defined by the possibilities and impossibilities it
offers, which are only revealed in the world of social uses (including, in the case of a
technical object, the use or function for which it was designed) and the dispositions of
an agent or class of agents, that is, the schemes of perception, appreciation and action
which constitute its objective utility in a practical usage’ (Bourdieu, 1984, 100).