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politics of (mass) consumption must not be dismissed or disregarded (Miller, 1998;
Jackson, 1999). Research on commodity circuits (e.g., Le Heron and Hayward,
2002) and commodity cultures shows instead that consumption is a domain of
struggle and contestation, and that forms of cultural learning and of both solidarity
and emancipation can also emerge in and through a politics of consumption (Jackson
and Holbrook, 1995; Jackson and Taylor, 1996; Jackson, 1999; Johns and Vural,
2000; Sayer, 2003). Through this lens, consumption becomes a site of tremendous
political importance, including in forging the very links between otherwise discon-
nected people (e.g., via the transnationalisation of food and diet) that can easily be
overlooked in the rush to get behind commodities and consumption (Cook and
Crang, 1995). The commodity cultures literature draws attention to the imagined
geographies that can and do circulate with commodities as powerful and productive
sources of knowledge about the world (Domosh, 2006). Some of these may well be
highly dubious and even manipulative (e.g. think of the utopian Valley of the Jolly
Green Giant from whence your vegetables ostensibly emerge, or the smiling
campesino Juan Valdez picking
your
perfect coffee bean). And social learning and
liberation achieved via the consumption of capitalist commodities will always be
fraught (Jackson, 2002).
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But these imagined geographies are in and of themselves
important cultural facets of commodifi cation, and cannot be ignored even if and
when they tend to promote homogenous, fl atter worlds of 'McDonaldisation'.
All of this only further reinforces that commodifi cation always entails interwoven
material and semiotic processes (Robertson, 2000). In fact, debates about the cul-
tures of commodities and the implications of fetishism and commodity displace-
ments highlights an important but sometimes overlooked aspect of commodity
fetishism. Increasing displacement from points of social and ecological production
together with the sheer proliferation of the commodity-form attendant with com-
modifi cation implies that the 'meaning' ascribed to commodities becomes potentially
more malleable. That is, the very reifi cation of commodities becomes a powerful
and productive facet of commodifi cation itself. This is consistent with Marx's pro-
vocative description of the proliferation of value in the commodity-form as a process
that '. . . transforms every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic (Marx, 1977,
p. 167). This almost mystical character of commodity fetishism provides not only
an invitation to 'get behind the fetish' as it were, but also to 'get with the fetish' in
the sense of coming to terms with the production and reproduction of meaning
through commodifi cation. Thus, recognition of the tremendous cultural signifi cance
of commodifi ed meanings has led some to talk of fetishism in terms of the dreams,
desires, and wish images that come to be attached to and circulate with commodi-
ties. As Kaika and Syngedouw put it '[t]he fetish character of commodities often
turns them into objects of desire in themselves and for themselves, independent from
their use value'. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin and Susan Buck-Morss,
they continue that it is the '...very “estrangement of commodities” that makes
them capable of becoming “wish images”. Commodities do not only carry their
materiality, but also the promise and the dream of a better society and a happier
life' (Kaika and Swyngedouw, 2000, p. 123).
10
For them, a specifi c example is found
in the production of coherent notions and wish images of urban modernity which
become attached to and signifi ed by highly fetishised technological networks. Some-
what ironically, even though a major facet of these networks is the metabolic
transformation of biophysical nature constitutive of the production and reproduc-
tion of urban space (e.g., in storm and sanitary sewers, drinking water distribution
