Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
food (Schlosser 2001) has united vast swaths of the world under the common
umbrella of materialism, homogenizing once-diverse tastes and preferences
to an unprecedented degree. Far more than politics, consumption in most
economically advanced societies (and, increasingly, in the developing world)
provides an escape, a sense of ful
fi
llment, and a source of identity for billions
of earth's inhabitants.
Like all processes, consumption and consumerism are spatialized at mul-
tiple scales, ranging from the body (Valentine 1999) to the actor-network
chains that unite consumers and producers over vast distances in the global
economy (Hartwick 1998). Central to the rise of postmodern consumption is
its geography, in which shoppers share the physical spaces of consumption
(stores, malls, resorts, etc.) without signi
cant social interaction with one
another. Spaces of consumption thus tend to reinforce the long-standing
bourgeois trend toward individualism and thwart the possibilities for collect-
ive action. Perhaps no locale more powerfully exempli
fi
es the power of post-
modern consumption than does the shopping mall (Goss 1993). In societies
with considerable free time and disposable incomes, shopping malls are a
signi
fi
cant form of participation in public life, the postmodern equivalent
to the agora. The mall is a powerful semiotic system of signi
fi
fi
cation that
e
ectively severs the commodity from its social origins. Shopping malls are
carefully engineered spaces strategically designed to seduce the consumer by
various means (e.g., the use of previously noncommodi
ff
ed environments
such as historic districts or nature). This logic reaches its apex in enormous
megamalls such as the West Edmonton mall (Hopkins 1990) or Minnesota's
famous Mall of America (Goss 1999). Like Disneyland, the landscapes of
postmodern consumption are a pastiche or simulacrum that on the surface
project an aura of innocence and authenticity but insidiously invite or sustain
a faith that consumption is a panacea that will impart status, happiness, and
sexual appeal. In collapsing the world's spaces and times, postmodern retail
places form the endpoint for vast commodity chains that extend across the
planet, suturing producers and consumers into seamless wholes, and hiding
the social relations of production within the glossy spaces of the commodity.
fi
Telecommunications and the hypermobility of
financial capital
A common perspective on postmodern geographies is that telecommunica-
tions entails “the end of geography,” a popular claim asserted by writers such
as O'Brien (1992) and Cairncross (1997). For Virilio (1995:35), telecommuni-
cations represent the latest and ultimate chapter of the long history of velo-
city: “With acceleration there is no more here and there, only the mental
confusion of near and far, present and future, real and unreal—a mix of
history, stories, and the hallucinatory utopia of communication technolo-
gies.” Such views hinge upon a simplistic, utopian technological determinism
that ignores the complex, mutually transformative relations between tele-
communications and local economic, social, and political circumstances. For
fi
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