ABSTRACT
The recent ‘cultural turn’ in human geography came at the end of a period that had been dominated theoretically by various strands of Marxist political economy (Peet and Thrift 1989). Throughout this period, consumption studies tended to be left to the relatively untheorised field of retail geography. When Marxist geographers, such as David Harvey, started to become interested in ‘the condition of postmodernity’, their work still emphasised production. There are many individual references to consumption in Harvey’s work, including discussions of advertising and the cultural-encoding of urban reinvestment (see Harvey 1985a, 1985b). In much of this work, consumption is treated as part of ‘the politics of distraction’ (Harvey 1989:61) rather than as a substantive topic on its own account. The culture of consumption is reduced to the economic imperative of sustaining sufficiently buoyant levels of demand to keep capitalist production profitable. Consumption is about ‘the cultivation of imaginary appetites’ (ibid.: 106); it is part of the ‘surface froth and evanescence, the fragmentations and disruptions, so characteristic of present political economy’ (ibid.: 179). Even Sharon Zukin’s recent work on Landscapes of Power (1991) says more about the production of these landscapes than about the way they are consumed. Her discussion of downtown reinvestment (Zukin 1991:202-215), for example, makes a number of tantalising points about the relationship between gentrification and cuisine, but her analysis of the cultural significance of gourmet food and the rise of the ‘reflexive consumer’ lacks the depth and rigour that characterise her earlier work on the transformation of New York’s art-market and the creation of a real-estate market for luxury ‘loft-living’ in SoHo (Zukin 1982).
