ABSTRACT
The old literary idea of the organic, self-contained text has been exploded so comprehensively that there is no need for me here to contribute further to its demolition. Watching television is a process of making meanings and pleasures, and this process is determined by two parallel and interlocking sets of forces. Hodge and Tripp's school students who made sense of Prisoner by aligning themselves with the prisoners, the wardens with school teachers, and the prison with the school were articulating, in both senses of the word. Television is a cultural commodity. It works within an economically determined capitalist economy, but when we have said that about it we have said both much and remarkably little. In the financial economy television is programs and advertisements, textuality. While the metaphor of a cultural economy is a productive one, we must not let it blind us to differences between it and the financial.
