one's sense, particularly when dealing with foreigners who have been enflamed by American consumerism, is that the products form a kind of hierarchy whose climax lies very precisely in the technology of reproduction itself, which now, of course, fans out well beyond the classical television set and has come in general to epitomize the new informational or computer technology of the third stage of capitalism. We must therefore also posit another type of consumption: consumption of the very process of consumption itself, above and beyond its content and the immediate commercial products. It is necessary to speak of a kind of technological bonus of pleasure afforded by the new machinery and, as it were, symbolically re-enacted and ritually devoured at each session of official media consumption itself It is indeed no accident that the conservative rhetoric that often used to accompany the market rhetoric in question here (but that in my opinion represented a somewhat different strategy of delegitimation) had to do with the end of social classes -- a conclusion always demonstrated and 'proved' by the presence of TV in the workers' housing. Much of the euphoria of postmodernism derives from this celebration of the very process of high-tech informatization (the prevalence of current theories of communication, language, or signs being an ideological spinoff of this more general 'world-view'. This is then, as Marx might have put it, a second moment in which (like 'capital in general' as opposed to the 'many capitals') the media 'in general' as a unified process are somehow foregrounded and experienced (as opposed to the content of individual media projections); and it would seem to be this 'totalization' that allows a bridge to be made to fantasy-images of 'the market in general' or 'the market as a unified process'.

The third feature of the complex set of analogies between media and market that underlies the force of the latter's current rhetoric may then be located in the form itself. This is the place at which we need to return to the theory of the image, recalling Guy Debord's remarkable theoretical derivation (the image as the final form of commodity reification). ¹⁵ At this point the process is reversed, and it is not the commercial products of the market which in advertising become images but, rather, the very entertainment and narrative processes of commercial television, which are, in their turn, reified and turned into so many commodities: from the serial narrative itself, with its well-nigh formulaic and rigid temporal segments and breaks, to what the camera shots do to space, story, characters, and fashion, and very much including a new process of the production of stars and celebrities that seems distinct from the older and more familiar historical experience of these matters and that now converges with the hitherto 'secular'

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