Michael Lissack the revitalization of small-scale regional agriculture. They also relied on both the expansion of imports and local farmers' willingness to try new agricultural techniques. Since the 1940s, the basic cultural meanings and social relations of an industrial economy--the position of blue-collar and many white-collar workers in a firm, the web of labor union, household, and community, and the quality of such basic commodities as steel, television and even comput- ers have been transformed from the durable into disposable. This is what flexibility, at its harshest, implies. We do not find coherent values in the landscapes of consumption growing around us. Institutions like the shopping mall, the department store, and the mu- seum foster a multiplicity of uses that removes the distinctions between mercantile display and public exhibition. The surrounding environment-the city, the corporate suburb, and the fantasy center-supports a multiplicity of uses between nature and culture, market and pleasure, work and leisure, which hides the key role of centralized economic power. People like to con- sume; they seek their social identity ho shopping, comparing goods, and talking about consumption. They find drama, history, and variety in new spaces of consumption. However, as their lives grow more distant from the activities of material production, they lose interest in values that developed during the industrial age: economic equity, labor organization, social justice. At the same time, the decision to cheapen labor and cut back on in- dustrial capacity in the United States makes it harder for men and women to increase their market-based consumption. The socialization of desire toward an unattainable standard of consumption leads to a broader ques- tion, that of the depleting moral legacy of the economic system. On the one hand, the positional goods that used to confer social status (e.g., the big house on a lake) are no longer available in infinite supply. On the other hand, when such goods arc commercialized-that is, freely available for sale in a marker-they lose much of their ability to position people in the social structure. Social status is immanent not in the economic value of goods but in the cultural value of getting them or the cultural value of the social group that has already got them. This recalls Edith Wharton's description of "in"
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