ABSTRACT
Much of the current reassessment of consumption – of both its historical and contemporary significance – can be related to a retrospective acknowledgement that things have not turned out in the manner anticipated or projected by earlier modern thought. It is only now, it might be ventured, that we find ourselves in a position capable of recognizing that modernity has been, above all, an exceptional state of affairs: not, as it represented itself, the final solution to the enigma of the world, but a temporary state under which that particular self-representation was propagated, promulgated and vaunted.1 Whilst, for many, this coming-to-an-end of modernity gives cause for nostalgia, lamentation or alarm, a more considered approach would recognize such responses as thoroughly modern ones, founded on all the false hopes that modernity offered. The task in hand,
therefore, is to uncover a different history, to document the process of disappearance to which modernity has subjected itself, and to assess the processes that become evident when history is brushed against the grain. All of this can be associated with the idea of the postmodern. This is, however, a term that must be read with care. As we have previously emphasized, the appellation ‘postmodern’ should not be read as implying an epochal conception of history, ‘a diachronic sequence of periods in which each one is clearly identifiable’ (Lyotard 1992, 90). The very term signals the end of any such teleological metanarrative as ‘history’. The ‘idea of a linear chronology is itself perfectly “modern”’, says Lyotard (ibid.). Still less does the term imply the beginnings of some kind of ‘postcapitalist’ situation – the ‘end of history’ as the triumph of market liberalism (Fukuyama 1992).2 To the contrary, the contention to be developed here is that capitalist society has, through changes intimately related to consumption, witnessed the inauguration of a ‘new mode of domination’, which ‘distinguishes itself by the substitution of seduction for repression, public relations for policy, advertising for authority, needs-creation for normimposition’ (Bauman 1987, 167-168). Precisely how this transformation has taken shape, and the place of the city in all of this, is the subject of this chapter.
