ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the particular role of consumption in understanding the contemporary world, and the author do not pretend to be clear himself as to how far the argument the author makes here works in relation to phenomena such as finance capital or, indeed, the virtualism of virtual reality within computer technologies. Thus it appears that auditing is a sign of a shift to political virtualism. The critique of virtualism is both similar to and different from the critique of capitalism. So, while the narrative that underlies virtualism is intended to be surprisingly encompassing, the author certainly do not mean it to be all-encompassing. Rather, it is that postmodernism is based in large measure upon a misreading of the experience of consumption that the theorists abstract in a way that reinforces abstraction as virtualism.
