Flights of Fancy: Academics and Consumer Culture

Abstract

It is worth remarking how many theories of consumer capitalism (of which postmodernism may be one exotic variant) have come to take capitalism at its face value: as a system of circulation, exchange and consumption. In doing so, they manage to reproduce the problem of commodity fetishism: the obscuring of the conditions and relations of production. It is as if the Burger King I consumed while reading Lyotard did not rest on a whole system of capitalized agriculture, transportation systems, food processing plants as well as the service economy of cooking and exchange that takes place in the house of the Burger King itself. (Clarke, 1991: 29)