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Other problems with commodification critiques
Another difficulty with the commodification critique is revealed when we ask what kind of inhabitation of a place would count as not consuming it. Either every possible relation to the place counts as consumption, in which case the critique has no content, or there are particular relations that are consumptive and others that are not, in which case, the issue becomes one of deciding empirically what forces and influences are at work and which can be mobilized to influence our relations for the better. Totalizing critiques run the danger of leaving us no choice but trying to escape completely away from the tyrannical totality. Theories that see bourgeois culture as outflanking all attempts to get beyond its reach search in vain (in the primitive, in the unconscious, in the avant garde, in various Others) for outside critical positions, only to see them co-opted by the system. What is there that would be safe, that could never be converted into a commodity? The answer cannot lie in finding some magical object or infinitely distant meta-position. The answer lies in a better understanding of the distances and spacings already within the processes by which we live and share in the making of that current condition.