Consumption

In the nineteenth century the trendy letters were TB: tubercle bacillus or tuberculosis. If you had any pretensions to being artistic, you had it.  Today the letters are TV; television.  If you have any pretensions to be politically correct, you watch it.  Both fashions arose from false syllogisms based on snobbery or its inversion.  In the nineteenth century the reasoning was that great artists had died of TB, so having TB - or appearing to have it - made you a great artist.  Today the logic is that TV is the medium of the masses, so watching TV, or appearing to watch it, makes you one of the people.

Society's name for TB was consumption, because the disease seemed to eat away at sufferers, visibly sapping their strength.  The wan images of dying artists that resulted from this helped feed the idea that they were not of this world, that they were only visitors, that the act of creation used up their vital force, consumed them through the agent of disease. 

TV might also be called consumption.  It is clearly consumed; night after night, hour after hour, it is eaten by its viewers.  But it is so insubstantial, so unsatisfying, that they must soon come back for more.  As for the abuser of alcohol or drugs, the users of TV soon habituate, soon need ever greater doses to satisfy the raging monsters of desire within them. 

One of those monsters relates to a different kind of consumption.  For TV's principal content lies in its endless parade of consumer products that the viewer consumes.  Today it is not just in the impossible worlds of soap operas that objects are more important than plots or people.  Films aired on TV are frequently partially funded through the new technique of product placement - the guaranteed conspicuous use of some consumer item - a watch, a car, a soft drink - with no relevance to the story, but there simply to sell, to 'shift product'.  Most recently in the UK we have seen entire programmes sponsored by companies; in the US this is rife, with every conceivable slot now tagged and tinged with a company or its goods.  TV as the ultimate in conspicuous consumption - what could be more conspicuous than on the screens of a million homes? 

But this is not the worst type of consumption involved.  Most viewers doubtless think that they are consuming the programmes - TV's overt product; the wiser among them might realise that they are also consuming the products placed within this product.  What even they do not appreciate is that the TV is in fact consuming them. It is eating up their lives through the wasted hours they spend staring at it; it is gnawing away at their minds with images and ideas it tosses there, and with the messages and desires it buries there.

In this respect TV is truly the heir of TB.  But with the difference that TB was seen - however fancifully - as a price paid for something worth having in return: creativity.  TV, by contrast, is an illness without recompense; it takes and gives nothing of value.  Except, perhaps, a condign punishment for an insatiable consumer society which finds in it a very different kind of maw.

(28.12.91)

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