Check out I cite: Consumerism as politics

I teach all of this week's classes today and should be preparing for them right now instead of lingering over my brainfood brunch, but you know how it is. I can't even begin to do justice to Jodi Dean's post at I cite:

Consumerism as politics. Among other things, it is a thought-provoking analysis of our current condition in which challenges to capitalism take the form of alternative shopping choices.

Among the reasons why the politics of consumerism is reassuring, she says, are that it:

5 iterates a politics of the few and privileged who have consumer choices, providing them with a sense of meaning and purpose even as it continues to depoliticize those with no choices (we might call this the Wal Mart dilemma insofar as Wal Mart produces the conditions that require and demand it, that make it the only choice and no choice at all in the rural, post urban abandoned strip malled reaches of the rust belt; eco-tourism is another version of the same phenomenon);

6. fails to establish a political space or locus outside the logic of capitalism.

As one commenter points out, you could write a whole blog commenting on this one post. Go read it.