Creativity Takes Time, Critique Needs Space: Re-Working the Political Investment of the Consumer through Pleasure

Abstract

The debate about consumption, and its organisation, including its spatiality and temporality, is quite rich today in and beyond academic circles. Such debate is fuelled not only by polemical or celebratory writing but also by much, often good, empirical research which addresses some relevant theoretical issues (Lewis and Potter 2011). Still, on the whole, the debate about consumption remains rather fuzzy. This is partly due to the lack of a common understanding of what we mean by consumption and to the different emphasis given to its many semantic relatives. To summarise, for the majority of the social scientists working on consumption empirically, it is understood as the use and appropriation of commodities for the creation of meaningful worlds. With the notion of consumer society, instead, critical theorists have singled out particular aspects of contemporary culture which fall under the rubric of consumerism: possessive or acquisitive individualism, a market dominated by massification, the production of waste and commodity obsolescence, the increased dominance of promotional culture even in the public sphere, the dominance of commodity sign values, the commoditisation of the consumer and so on.