Fetishism or ideology? A contribution to the political economy of television

A dominant approach to the political economy of television argues that television produces “audience commodity”, which is sold to advertisers. It situates the economic effects of television within the sphere of subjects and subjectivity. This article presents a different approach, according to which television produces objects. Television advertising produces brands as economic objects possessing qualities that material goods cannot provide. For that purpose, the article explores a theoretical reconfiguration of the critical study of television: instead of basing it on ideology, which is primarily an epistemological category, it proposes to ground it on fetishism, understood as an ontological category. This change entails a shift in the topology of critique of the visual image. While the ideological paradigm regards images as inverted representations of reality, in fetishism, according to Marx, things “appear as what they are”. This article argues that broadcast television is the distinctive fetishistic visual medium, in both the Marxian and the psychoanalytic senses of the term. Its fetish character qualifies it to production through visual presentation.