Geography Reference
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pro
t, lies at the heart of the cultural and ideological hegemony of capitalism
(Stearns 2001).
Historically, the rise of mass production, particularly during incipient
Fordism in the late nineteenth century, was accompanied by advertising and
mass consumption as well as the broader notion of the consumerist society.
Thorsten Veblen, for example, analyzed the “conspicuous consumption” of
the leisure class as a display of wealth and status within the context of the
pro
fi
igate spending by the rich during the Golden Age of robber barons.
Walter Benjamin (1969) initiated an insightful tradition concerned with
the semiotics of the commodity and its potential to narcotize consumers
(Buck-Morss 1993). Similarly, the Frankfurt School of critical theorists
focused on how consumption legitimated or smoothed over the inequalities
and contradictions of capitalism, integrating a working class into a society
fundamentally structured against its best interests. Such lines of thought
demonstrate the powerful ideological and cultural impacts of consumption,
its relations to identity and status, which are far greater than simply the
Marxist realization of use values or the simplistic neoclassical economic
maximization of utility.
Under postmodern capitalism, insatiable consumerism plays a central
important role in binding time and space together (Featherstone 1991). The
power of consumption as an economic and cultural process has been greatly
fueled by an ever-more aggressive advertising industry and credit card com-
panies which have penetrated demographic markets previously considered
uncreditworthy (Manning 2000). In a world in which the most precious
commodity is individual time (Nowotny 1994), no opportunity to grab the
attention of the consumer can be wasted. Increased levels of consumption
may not purchase happiness (De Graaf et al. 2001), but for many, shopping
carries the perpetual promise of entertainment, funneling non-material needs
into the commodity and collapsing the
fl
fi
field of social obligations into the self.
Armed with the Internet, and with e
cient chains of franchises to choose
from, consumption has become for many people the most important activity
in life. Yet as Baudrillard (1994) and others have pointed out, postmodern
consumption is not simply motivated by advertising, aesthetics, and images,
but consists of the consumption of images themselves. The result is a ubiqui-
tous postmodern identity as consumers, in which the self is de
ned primar-
ily through the commodity, which typically takes precedence over that as
producers, rendering mobilization around issues of class and labor deeply
problematic.
Globally, of course, consumer culture lies at the cutting edge of commod-
ity relations as they penetrate ever-more deeply into various social formations
around the world, appealing to the young with promises of status, fun, sex,
and power (Ritzer 2000), forming the leading edge of Western globalization.
Consumerism's triumph is contingent and spatially uneven, but almost no
society today successfully resists its allure. Often equated with American cul-
ture, consumerism in the form of television and movies, fashion, and fast
fi
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