I'MYtroimwnt atul Planning /) Sncich and Space IW.X. volume \(\ pages M\ >\V1

Geographies of consumption: a commodity-chain approach

Klainc Hart wick Kccnc State College, Keene, Nil 03435, USA Received 21 February 1996; in revised form X August 1997

Abstract. Recent media and political events illustrate some links between consumption and production. The author explores these links through the concept of commodity chains. This concept has been partially developed in the literature, and an attempt is made to specify this further by means of the illustration of gold. The message is that the 'geographies of consumption' literature is insufficient by itself but becomes stronger when joined with a materialist commodity-chain analysis. The author moves from a deconstruction of the images of men and women in gold advertisements, at the consumption end, to the various places of production, beginning with Italian gold jewelry factories, then South African gold mines and apartheid, and third Lesotho, where Basotho men migrate to South African gold mines leaving behind 'gold widows'. The material reality of these gold widows stands in contrast to the 'gold windows' of Tiffany's and the images of women and men in advertisements for gold. The author opines that this sort of analysis necessitates a politics of consumption in which the two ends are reconnected; and that this could lead to a new 'commercial geography'. Television celebrity Kathie Lee Gilford has a line of clothes made by child labor in Honduran sweatshops for 31 cents an hour; the label on the clothing proclaims that some proceeds go to children's charities (Press, 1996). Michael Jordan, basketball player extraordinaire, receives US$20 million a year to endorse Nike; Philip Knight, cofounder and chief executive officer of Nike, is worth US$5.4 billion; Indonesian workers are paid US$2.40 a clay and Vietnamese workers are paid US$10.00 a week to make the sneakers (Falk, 1996; Sanders and Kaptur, 1997). The Walt Disney Company is publicly criticized for its treatment of Haitian workers making Pocahontas shirts for 28 cents an hour; Disney's chief executive officer makes US$78 000 a day (Bcarak, 1996; Falk, 1996). Campaigns aimed at the image of companies such as these culminated in the "No Sweat" agreement of April 1997, under which several companies, such as Nike and Liz Claiborne, agreed to comply with a 'workplace code of conduct' which set standards for decent working conditions for employees, including: the abolition of forced or child labour; nondiscrimination; healthy and safe conditions; freedom of association and collective bargaining; minimum wages; legally mandated benefits; and a restriction on working hours. In return, companies can place "No Sweat" labels on their clothing. What happens to make celebrities cringe, stockholders scared, corporations compromise, unions unite, White House personnel become suddenly pro-labor, and consumers newly conscious? A new kind of politics is in the making, joining consumers and consumer institutions, cultural critics and media activists, unions, women's groups, church and civil-rights organizations. In this paper I propose that the geographies of consumption, an area of recent research interest, be joined more directly with such a politics of consumption. This would make the discipline a vital source of information for a critical politics appropriate for the age of globalized economies, multisourced commodities, and sign-dominated cultures.

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Geographies of consumption In their survey of the growing literature on geographies of consumption, Jackson and Thrift deal with "how social relations of consumption are constructed through a tissue of sites" (1995, page 207). Studies of the immediate sites of consumption in the landscape of postmodern capitalism conjoin consumption with earlier interests in urban geography and retailing, but project in new directions, as with the formation of consumer identities (Crewe and Forster, 1993; Crewe and Lowe, 1995; Glennie and Thrift, 1992; Goss, 1993; Gregson and Crewe, 1994; Knox, 1991; Wrigley and Lowe, 1995; Zukin, 1991). Studies of chains of connection are structured in Fine and Leopold's (1993) sense of 'system of provision'—the integral unity of a commodity's differentiated chain of activities (Fine, 1995, page 142)—with empirical geographic work elucidating, for example, the production, supply, and transfer of food in international systems (Arce and Marsden, 1993; Cook, 1994; Whatmore, 1994). Studies of places of consumption emphasize representation, identity, and cultural resistance (Gottdiener, 1986; 1995; Jackson, 1993). The idea is not to see consumption as a tissue of lies, consumers as greedy willing dupes of advertising conspiracies. Rather consumption is to be seen as a set of potential sites of resistance in which consumers are knowing agents actively constructing consumption, as well as being constructed by it. This is part of what Clarke and Purvis (1994, page 1091) call "a more sensitized approach to consumption, consumerism, and the consumer society". Even so, the literature overemphasizes the cultural mechanisms of buying, rather than the social production of consumption, especially the workers who produce, distribute, advertise, and retail products. Thus Fine criticizes Glennie and Thrift (1992) for overstressing 'horizontal' factors such as commodification and aestheticization, while neglecting the 'vertical' dimension (system of provision)—"the commodity-specific chain connecting production, distribution, marketing, and consumption, and the material culture surrounding these elements" (1993, page 600). Useful ideas for the "geographical constitution of consumption practices" come from Crang (1996), who uses the "figure of displacement" to link consumption as a local contextual process, with networks, representations ("geographical lores"), and positionings of consumers. As a social critic of consumption, Crang finds potential for increasing consumer and theoretical knowledge of the "biographies of commodities". A greater realization of connections between consumers, places, and networks allows an ethical politics of consumption (see Sack, 1992, pages 22-23). Yet for Crang, such ethical concerns can be reintegrated into consumption circuits, and he too focuses on geographical knowledges stemming from "an aesthetic reflexivity that critically deploys the displaced fragments of consumer worlds" (1996, page 58). This promises a synthesis of realist knowledges of systems of provision with poststructural studies of commodity aesthetics. Yet for the vertical and horizontal aspects of consumption to be brought into relation, a material analysis of commodity networks must encounter a popular, rather than an elite, aesthetics of cultural taste (Bourdieu, 1984; Ewen, 1988). More importantly, the representational has to be conjoined with the geomaterial, exactly to counter reintegration of opposition back into consumption circuits. This entails specifying 'systems of provision' more closely in terms of commodity chains. Commodity-chain analysis The notion of commodity chains is already partly developed. Sack (1992) advocates a relational framework in which the creation of place and meaning is linked with consumption; specifically, how a consumer's world hides connections to place realms of meaning, nature, and social relations. But Sack, overcautiously, finds that "it is not always easy to reconstruct the spatial chain of events connecting actions to other actions

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so that wc can best describe the consequences of consuming this or that product" (1992, page 201). Harvey (1989, page 101) too implies the notion of a commodity chain linking the effects of consumption with material production, Dicken (1994) uses ^production chains* and Storper (1992) "consumption chains' to elaborate relationships within networks of (Inns. World systems studies also explore interorganizational networks of global companies. For Hopkins and Wallerstcin the term "commodity chain" refers very generally to "a network of labor and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity" (1986, page 159). Gercffi et at (1994) likewise see interorganizational networks of commodities linking "households, enterprises and states to one another within the world-economy" (page 2). In these studies firms comprise the main unit of analysis; unequal distributions of wealth along chains are outcomes of intcrfirm competition and of innovation. Although this work is useful, the authors fail to incorporate the sign of the commodity at the consumption end (representation, aesthetics) and the material conditions at the production end (social relations, reproduction of workers). These instances of neglect occur specifically at the most politically sensitive sites along commodity chains, preventing that concept from uniting, in a comprehensive politics, consumption, culture, labor, and the use of nature. Expanding the commodity-chain concept Geographically conceived, commodity chains consist of significant production, distribution, and consumption nodes, and the connecting links between them, together with social, cultural, and natural conditions involved in commodity movements. In this concept the generation of cultural (signifying, representational) effects at the consumption node is integrated with the social and natural conditions at the production end of the chain; the purpose being to show the effects of one on the other,'bringing home* to consumers the results of consumption. In contrast with earlier thcorizations, this formulation sees commodity movements (the vertical dimension) connecting nodes which are places (various horizontal dimensions at different nodes along commodity chains). 'Place' has a radical subversive history (Relph, 1976), with the potential for bringing together several aspects of the production and consumption of commodities. Beginning at the production end of a gold commodity chain, 'place' means local relations between capital and labor, such as between gold-producing companies and southern African workers. 'Place' integrates spatial connections between localities within a region, so that male migrant workers on South African goldficlds are connected with 'gold widows' in the labor reserves of Lesotho. 'Place' means local interconnections between institutions involved in production (corporations, the state in South Africa), or aspects of consumption (retailing, advertising, media, state, etc in the United States), or local relations between intersecting commodity chains, where one forms the conditions of existence for another (labor reproduction and the textile industry in Lesotho). 'Place' means local nature bound into the material and semiotic conditions of production and consumption. 'Place' also concentrates the effects of interregional connections, the results of activity at one site (consumption in the United States) on the conditions prevailing in another (social and natural relations in the gold-producing regions of southern Africa). Moving to a geographical focus on place broadens commodity analysis giving it greater political potential as a critical tool. Commodity chains In a complex model of commodity chains, the radiating effects of the commodity at the consumption node, the social and natural conditions at the production node, and the complex intersections of commodity chains at various intermediating and terminal points are added to a simple model of commodity movement to complete integration of the vertical and horizontal dimensions. First, at the terminal nodal point of

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Horizontal dimension of local interrelationships Consumption dimensions: consumption, retailing organization, representation

Intermediate dimensions: processing

Production/reproduction dimensions: primary production, reproduction of labor, conditions for secondary chains, effects on nature

Figure 1. Complex model of commodity chain. consumption, the radiating image of a commodity produces a 'halo effect5 of socially constructed meanings (figure 1). Such meaning systems can be analyzed in a number of ways, including the aesthetics of representation and consumer taste. The theoretical tradition preferred here is the semiotics of Peirce (1982), Hookway (1985), Eco (1976), and Prieto (1975). In materialist social semiotics (Gottdiener, 1995), a commodity has two meanings: a first-order meaning at the level of function, and a second-order imputation of meaning at the level of symbolic effect. The idea is to trace, through semiotic analysis, the social prescription of the meaning of a commodity, and hence its sign. In a postmodern sign economy first-order meanings, based in physical needs, have long been transformed into second-order representational meanings emanating from social status and cultural allusion (Gottdiener, 1995, page 174). Although this analysis expands the horizontal analysis of commodities, remaining solely with consumption still results in only partial explanation—as illusory as the illusions it illuminates. For a complete explanation the conditions of production must be included within social semiotic analysis. Second, therefore, the conditions of production at the other terminus of the commodity chain include the social, spatial, and natural relations of production, in the sense of Marxist geography, but also relations between the worker and his or her family, hence the reproduction of the household: this, in turn, consists of social relations of reproduction (gender, class, ethnicity) and social relations with nature, including the worker family's reproductive use of subsistence land and resources ["mode of reproduction" (Peet, 1991, pages 178-182)]. The full range of the conditions of existence of the producers and the range of natural conditions of production which enter into the materiality of the commodity and pass thereby into the distant bodies of consumers can be explored. Third, commodity chains articulate one with another at various nodal points of intersection. At the production end, commodities of prime significance form the conditions of existence for secondary commodity chains. At other significant nodes— processing points in particular—chains converge into 'commodity bundles' which make

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up imaged complexes entering the consumption node; the entire complex combines to signify status, wealth, and power through a halo effect of radiating interconnected significations. As Glennic and Thrift (1993, page 605) note, systems of provision are characterized by "lealciness", both in materia! and in symbolic ways, which influences other systems of provision •Glennic and Thrift usefully catalogue intertwinings between commodities, advertising of linked products, consumer rcflcxivity, and consumption across several systems of provision. Nodes of consumption are thus points of convergence for series of imaged complexes of commodity chains. In this last sense each purchase culminates an entire complex of commodity production and representation, linking together several lines of waged workers, unwaged reproducers of waged workers, and natural resources. This notion of geographical connectedness raises the fascinating question not merely of the second-order (symbolic) meaning of a commodity, but also of the reversals of a third semiotic realm that of geographical disguise. My hypothesis is that, in addition to function and symbol, signification at the consumption end necessarily involves hiding, through image-making and myth, the conditions prevailing along the interlinked spatial lines of connection of commodity chains, especially conditions of production. Toys signify the happy playfulness of carefree Western child consumers to prevent the realization that they are made under slave-like conditions by careworn child workers in China. Reversals of meaning occur most frequently when commodities link producers and consumers located in highly unequal regions. Stark contrasts in material and cultural conditions so intensify second-order meanings that they mutate into a third, specifically geographical, meaning form, [mages are usually added to commodities at, or near, organizational centers of global trading systems where the producers of sign value share the cultural norms of consumers. Underdevelopment, unequal exchange, profit flows, and power differences must be hidden behind the image of the commodity to indulge the easy fantasy that consumption is effortless, lacking in responsibility, with no negative side effects—as Appadurai (1986, page 41) says: "the production knowledge that is read into a commodity is quite different from the consumption knowledge that is read from the community... these two readings will diverge proportionately as the social, spatial, and temporal distance between producers and consumers increases." Yet even this does not entirely suffice. Is there something more, an unrecognized dimension to alienation from productive life, a guilty compulsion to hide conditions of work in images so exaggeratedly different that they deflect the attention not only of consumers, but of everyone involved in moving, distributing, retailing, advertising, and representing the commodity? Must the image maker fool herself or himself? Deconstructing consumption When commodity-chain analysis is aimed at underpinning a politics of consumption, a materialist-deconstructive geography must emphasize decoding the sign of the commodity. The vast horizontal apparatus of cultural institutions, much of the entertainment industry, for example, and the broad sweep of social reproductive institutions are involved in the production of signs and the sociocultural preparation of sign receivers. Indeed socialization might be called 'ensignification', with its hegemonic domain termed 'image space'. Here I focus on one moment of ensignification—advertising. Generally, images of commodities portrayed through advertisements do not provide information about production and distribution. Situated comfortably in the image space of consumption nodes, bombarded by signs, indulged by every device imaginable to fulfill one's civic duty by consuming, it would be easy to agree with Baudrillard's (1975)

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emphasis on sign value rather than the use-value or exchange-value, of the commodity, and that advertising serves as exemplar of codes replacing modes of production. Deconstructing the commodity sign Yet where do meanings, codes, and images come from? Jhally (1990) argues that the fundamental relationship in advertising lies between person and object. This relation has a material component—people need to consume objects to survive—and a sign content—as all objects must also have symbolic value. Thus Orlove and Rutz (1989) claim that consumption is both economic (the final phase of the cycle of productive activity) and sociocultural (ideological relations are embedded in the economic), whereas Gell (1986, page 110) argues that consumption goods are objects made desirable by the role they play in symbolic systems. In a similar way to Marx's (1979) commodity fetishism, Jhally argues that it is entry to the marketplace that erases information about the commodity's production: "The fetishism of commodities consists in the first place of emptying them of meaning, of hiding the real social relations objectified in them through human labor, to make it possible for the imaginary/symbolic social relations to be injected into the construction of meaning at a secondary level. Production empties. Advertising fills. The real is hidden by the imaginary" (1990, page 51). Instead, advertising links the material body of the commodity with an array of signs pointing to desirable attributes of object, purchase, and purchaser. Hence the unlimited possibilities of intersignification when services with little material content are advertised (for example, psychic 'readings') and the spiralling momentum achieved by the culture or sign industry in service-based economies ('intertextuality' in practice). Even so, my argument is that advertising cannot conjure commodity signs from the thin air of imagination alone. The sign has to have some relation to the object body of the commodity. So advertisers must also draw on cultural norms historically associated with the world of objects; otherwise the commodity would neither be recognized nor sold. Advertising thus becomes a complex language linking object commodities with symbolic representations and contexts. "Advertising provides a publicly shared understanding of the power of a commodity to create context and place and an idealized picture of what the context or place could or ought to be like" (Sack, 1992, page 107). Most importantly, from a geomaterialist perspective, the sign is tied always to the production conditions it must disguise. In the last instance, as Althusser (1969) was reviled for saying, mode of production reigns over code of production. Thus Williams calls advertising "the official art of capitalist society" (1980, page 184). In the postmodern sign economy, 'image', portrayed through symbol, logo, advertisement, or, increasingly, commodified celebrity 'personality', becomes the most important possession of the corporation. Especially in postneed regions of First World privilege, the corporation must adopt an image which accords with (or slightly leads) existing mass or niche consciousness. Even contradictions, such as environmental degradation resulting from overconsumption, are manufactured by corporations into images suited to furthering consumption, as with 'green' products, or 'animal-friendly' labels. Corporations even appear to be leaders of the environmental movement (for example, advertisements from the Mobil Corporation). Yet precisely this dependence on image makes corporations vulnerable to boycott and to consumer pressures which include semiotic contestations of sign meanings. As the Kathy Lee Gilford and Michael Jordan and Nike cases show, image space is battle ground, and not just advertisement makers can be cultural warriors!

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The golden chain Links between consumption and production are hidden by the mystiques of market and sign. But markets are made up of thousands of concrete practices, with goods handled, organized, and represented by working people, Each commodity movement also links consumers, making conscious choices, with these groups of workers, linked by social relations organized spatially along commodity chains. As an example, I follow one commodity, gold jewelry made from South African gold, back along the commodity chain. A "girl's best friend"? "Now you have something besides me to make other women jealous ... Nothing else feels like real gold ... Nothing else makes any moment so precious1' (Gourmet Magazine 1982a). With words (and associated pictures) like this, jewelry advertisements fabricate a context, an idealized picture of romance, passion, love, sex, jealousy, envy. Barthcl (1988, page 161) more rcvcalingly comments, "Jewelry is presented as the measure of what a man is willing to pay for a woman". Wedding rings signify commitment to responsibilities, mother and wife, socially proscribed for women. Jewelry advertisements emphasize the act of giving because precious metals and stones are used to signify acts, practices, and relations, especially love commitments, rather than having direct functional utility. Wedding rings even have their own 'blessing', sanctifying interpersonal commitment by linking gold with God. When marketed to men, the second-order meaning of jewelry stresses economic power: an advertisement for mens'gold Krugcrrand cufflinks has 'the wife' saying "This Christmas darling, I'm just giving money", with 'the son' adding "And Dad, they're the only cuff links listed in the Wall Street Journal" (Gourmet Magazine 1982a; 1982b). Yet there is another dimension to decoding: what the advertisement does not say. The missing information generally includes: planning and design, relations of production, conditions of work, wages and benefits of workers, unionization, market research on consumers, and effects on the environment (Jhaily, 1990, page 50). Such information would contradict the relationship which gold, in particular, symbolizes; in the sense of third-order semiotics, these conditions must be hidden by the advertisement yet revealed by the critic. Advertisements are thus complex representations linking culture with economy. Their interpretation includes criticizing the power aesthetics of the image, but must also go beyond into the production geography of the commodity. The Italian connection Most gold eventually heads for the United States—global center of affluence, largest consumer in the world for gold jewelry. The main immediate source is Italy: 40% of Italy's jewelry production is exported to the United States (Koistinen and Lind, 1988). At this point in the analysis, still in space where image predominates, we remain with the flexible speculation of representations. In advertisements for Italian-produced gold jewelry, workers are sometimes represented—but in a particular way. Italy is made out to be a quaint artisanal workshop, where gold is made in timeless fashion. Listen to the 'geographical lore' carried by this image: "In Italy, a remote village near Vicenza wakes to the slanting beams of the morning sun. On a street with no name, a cat sits in a doorway. Inside, a family sets to work. Sorcerers of gold. Alchemists of a sort. Artisans of the high order" (The Boston Globe Magazine 1993). Another advertisement tells of the specialized handicraft work performed on gold jewelry. Stating that the Weingrill factory owns but one machine, a coffee maker, handmade jewelry is connected to woman's pleasure:

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"As for the artisans, like every one of their predecessors, they need only operate one device, their hands .... A Master artisan carefully twists a long, gold wire into coillike strands of jewelry. It is not a quick process, nor a simple one. The gold is shaped into jewelry that, although strong and long lasting, is both supple to the touch and soft to the eye. And we assure you, it is timeless gold that a woman will want to wear for a lifetime" (The Boston Globe Magazine 1996). This image is in contrast with the material reality of Italian factories where gold chains are made by the mile on modern equipment, workers are unionized, and labor unrest occurs (Green, 1984). Furthermore, the focus on 'artisanal Italy' draws attention from mining conditions elsewhere—the Third Italy disguises the Third World! Italy buys 45% of its gold from South Africa and another 45% from European financial markets such as Zurich—these in turn buy mostly from South Africa; the rest is sourced elsewhere (Koistinen and Lind, 1988). Geographical exploration continues along the commodity chain, passing through the outer fringes of image space into the real space of the production of gold. Gold: standard of South African development South Africa's six major gold fields and forty mines are the world's largest source of gold (Tegan, 1985). Since the gold reef of the Witwatersrand was found, in 1886, production has involved corporations associated in chambers of commerce, with quasi-public and state agencies regulating labor supplies and ensuring control over workers' movements and living conditions. The international gold standard, established in 1816 to regulate global exchange relations, made gold a money commodity with a fixed price. This had contradictory effects in South Africa: on the one hand, an unlimited market with a fixed price; on the other hand, increased mining costs, of which labor accounted for 60%o, yet more than usual limitations from forces external to mining companies (Jeeves, 1982). Hence, maintaining the necessary low-cost production structure always involved forceful state intervention: the South African Native Affairs Commission (1904-05), established to review the 'native problem'; the 1913 Administration of Persons and the Union Regulation Act classifying 47% of South Africa's mine workers as 'foreign', exercising thereby virtually complete control over their movements and lives; and the Native Lands Act of 1913 placing Africans on 8.8% of South Africa's land area (Innes, 1984, page 68). These acts established the institutional, power, and spatial framework for the gold industry (Magubane, 1979). The importance of gold in South Africa's development can, therefore, hardly be overestimated (First, 1981-82; James, 1992; Jeeves, 1982; 1985). At the production end of the gold commodity chain, the mystical commodity 'casts its hue' by structuring the most intimate conditions of existence for workers, indeed determining whether existence is possible—the love symbol of image space became an apartheid system in real space. Mining gold High prices for tiny amounts of a material, with a value which is largely symbolic at the consumption end, generate extraordinary efforts to transform huge amounts of natural materials at the production end. James (1992, page 26) describes mining gold as plucking the commas from the single page of a thick twisted book. To extract the commas that form the symbols, the gold miner descends a mile and a half underground, works under conditions which, though improved, are hot, noisy, and cramped, with tunnels no more than five feet high, where they drill holes, blast ore, and return to remove it, often wading in water up to the knees while breathing dirty air (James, 1992, pages 26 - 27). Workers live in mining camps enclosed by barbed wire, with their needs met internally—in terms of beer, food, prostitution, etc—and the miner's every action is under constant surveillance: Crush (1992; 1994) uses Bentham's panopticon to refer

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to the surveillance techniques—by the hue 1980s the South African Chamber of Mines had eight million sets of finger prints from black mine workers, Tensions for workers, involving struggles with owners and between ethnic groups, are manifested in strikes and violence in mines and compounds, The spread of AIDS is a real problem in South African mines (Moodic, 1992). In response the voices of the gold miners, the unemployed, and their families, rise from the depths of material experience to contest the signification of gold jewelry in the world of images, Coplan (1994, page 133) collects 'travellers1 songs of Basotho miners, such as this: **... These mine compounds, I've long worked them ... What do 1 say to you, gamblers? I am a dog's stomach; I don't get cooked, I am skin with lice; I am not worn. I am a nest of mites; I am not entered. I'm like a charge that remained in the ore-face [unexplodcd] Look, that stopped the drill boy from working. Drill boy, I slashed his head. Drill guide, I slashed his hand. It's then the drill guide started to scold: 'You, charge-setter; you, timber boy, Shut off the water, so you stop the steam. These cables have burned us; Men's blood is mixed with these stones."* As Coplan says, poems are forms of power, poetic expressions symbolizing agency in lives otherwise locked by material constraint. Yet mining is a prized job, given the high unemployment rate and general lack of employment opportunities throughout southern Africa. From a century of migration, industrial proletarianized workers have become alienated from the rural activities of their homes (Crush et al, 1991, page 30). Hence the notion of southern African communities being self-sufficient, or even agriculturally sustainable, is a misnomer. The gold commodity chain has transformed the region for ever. Lesotho is a case in point. Gold labor reserve in Lesotho Even before its colonization by the British, Lesotho was forcefully incorporated into the global process of capital accumulation through the gold and diamond commodity chains passing through southern Africa. Lesotho's men work outside the country, and both government and households are now completely dependent on money from mining (Whiteside, 1986). Basotho miners are 'jammed' ('ho jema9): they find themselves trapped between their place of work in South Africa and their homes in Lesotho (Thabane and Guy, 1984). The agricultural base, which once supported the Basotho people well, is now filled with unemployed injured blacklisted workers, women, children, and the elderly (Ferguson, 1990). There is no longer even a pretence that farming can meet subsistence needs (Knight and Lenta, 1980), owing immediately to drought, but also to loss of arable land, erosion and overgrazing, and loss of soil fertility because of overcropping (Sechaba Consultants, 1993, page 12). Indeed, a once-fertile land is now a mere 'subsubsistence base' (Gay et al, 1990). Examining this livelihood crisis, Murray (1981, page 22) says: "the failure of peasant self-sufficiency in Lesotho ... must be examined against the background of a larger system of production which demanded, not that the Africans grow sufficient food to preserve their economic independence, but that they contribute their labor to the 'white' economy".

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Lesotho is dependent on South Africa for the most basic food supplies. A person relying on grains for subsistence should eat approximately 180 kg of cereals a year, yet household intake in Lesotho is 40 - 60 kg (Sechaba Consultants, 1993, page 12). In a society which was once self-sufficient, discarded miners tell of their utter dependency: "But now I am not working it is just like these hands of mine have been cut off and I am useless. Now life for my children will be difficult, they will scarcely eat . . . . They live in a difficult manner ntate ... except that I have my brother and he is the one who when I am not working throws something at them so they can get the means to the food. He is at a mine now" (Thabane and Guy, 1984, page 20). In juxtaposition to the images of 'wealth' and 'love' portrayed by gold at the consumption end are the stark realities of hunger, agricultural poverty, and social and familial tensions at the reproduction end—the image of gold consumption is the exact opposite of the material productive realities. Gold widows at the end of the chain Various effects of male labor migration on Basotho women have been described (Gay, 1986; Gordon, 1981; Murray, 1981; Wilkinson, 1987). Women are migrants, or former migrants; women are wives of migrants; women may have irregular migrant incomes; women are burdened with unemployed migrants who are ill, injured, or otherwise dependent; and there are women with no access to migrant income. While 40% to 60% of able-bodied men migrate to South Africa most Basotho women remain in the rural areas, caring for household affairs: 60% to 10% of Lesotho's households are (temporarily) female headed (Malahleha, no date, page 6). Lesotho may therefore aptly be described as a land inhabited by 'gold widows' (Wilkinson, 1987, page 226). During fieldwork conducted in the Quthing valley, I found primarily women and children working the fields. In a typical situation a Masotho woman tends a 12-acre garden together with a sister-in-law. She works with a Canadian nongovernmental organization, in an attempt to increase agricultural output by experimenting with terracing, intercropping, and multicropping. Her husband works in the gold mines of South Africa along with her brother-in-law. Women in such situations make decisions about day-to-day affairs, whereas larger financial decisions are left to their husbands or to their husband's family. In this way, conditions formed by the gold connection intersect with local patriarchal power relations (Gordon, 1981; Hartwick, 1995). What the gold commodity chain leaves behind (abundant cheap female labor) another global commodity chain uses (textiles and clothing production). The 'leakiness' of commodity chains, alluded to by Glennie and Thrift (1993), is illustrated by the emergence of another global commodity chain—the textile commodity chain. Textile commodity chain Since the early 1980s Lesotho has tried to attract foreign investment, urging industry to locate in the country. The Lesotho National Development Corporation tries to create a "hospitable investment environment" which "welcomes any potential investor with a red carpet and no red tape to assist them in starting their industrial operations in Lesotho" (LNDC, 1981)—for example it offered a 6-year (now 15-year) tax holiday. Most firms are foreign owned and many goods made in Lesotho are exported to the United States. A total of 92% of the employees in textiles and clothing and 87% in the footwear industries are women (Baylies and Wright, 1993). Women are said to be more "nimble and dexterous" than men and also more "docile and easy to control" (page 582). Yet this image of working women is just as flexibly speculative as is that of consuming women. Behind the benign label "Made in Lesotho" lies a scenario of worker struggle. Women increasingly joined unions as they entered the factories. By the mid-1980s 80%> of the internal working classes were union members, with

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The Lesotho Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union being particularly important, In 1988 there were eight strikes, in 1989 nine strikes, and in 1991 fifteen strikes, all centered on improved wages, In 1985 the average yearly earnings of workers in the textile industry was R927; this was the lowest of nil workers in manufacturing, where the average annual wage was RI965. In 1991, women workers for Sharp clothing disputed the classification of their jobs: they maintained that they were weavers, not ungraded artisans; this classification had placed them in a lower salary bracket. Disputes have occurred over working conditions; clothing factories have forced workers to work hours in excess of the legal limit, under surveillance cameras, with body searches, and so on. Male migrants are surveillcd at the gold mines and women are surveilled in their 'home country' of Lesotho. The Lesotho government turned a deaf ear to the plight of these women. There were rumors about bribes and deals made with government officials, and these led to a riot in 1991 in which several people were killed. By the end of 1991, thirteen foreign firms out of sixty had withdrawn their investments from Lesotho (Tangri, 1993). The dismantling of apartheid exposes this historical and contradictory relation of dependency between Lesotho and South Africa. With a decline in mine-labor demand because of closures and mechanization, young Basotho men find jobs scarce in Lesotho. Furthermore, many Basotho men presently in the mines are eligible to qualify for South African residency which would have a negative impact on Lesotho. The history and future of the Basotho people remain bound into the gold commodity chain. Hence the image of love, prosperity, and wealth portrayed in gold advertisements is rooted in real poverty and destitution. For Western women the image of gold exploits by symbolizing ownership by men; for Basotho women gold exploits through the reality of an absence of men. Signification of gold at the consumption end of the commodity chain is underwritten by a sequence of social and natural realities with consistently opposite meanings: "love and commitment" at the consumption end of the gold commodity chain is opposed by apartheid, slave-like working conditions in mines, environmental degradation, abandoned women, a Third World country desperate for any kind of 'development', underpaid female employment in fly-by-night factories, and similar conditions along the chain. The gold windows of Tiffany's in New York are linked to gold widows in Lesotho. Geographical knowledge deconstructs the sign to show its opposites. The politics of reconnection A politics of reconnection might use this kind of geographical information to bring into contact the web of peoples involved in consuming and producing commodities. Crucially, this politics asks whether the power of consumers can be used as an agency of social transformation. As Mort rightly says, "Arguing for the politics of consumption inside the Left means enlarging and complexifying our map of economic structures and processes (1989, page 165). Yet as Kaplan's (1995) work on The Body Shop suggests, an entrepreneurial consumption politics of 'profits with principles' enables endless diversion and self-glorification. Emberley's (1994) critique of the Lynx media campaign against women wearing fur likewise suggests the potential for a simulated politics of representation that merely pretends to popular struggle—this is particularly the case when self-righteous organizations assert the right to speak for silent others. However, the various groups along commodity chains such as that of gold have shown themselves to be anything but silent; indeed the quietest, until recently, have been the consumers. Thus the problem is more one of connecting and joining ongoing struggles, rather than a politics of speaking for others. In geomaterialist deconstruction of the sign attempts are made to go beyond representational politics into social and natural relations

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precisely to avoid scapegoating consumers and abstracting consumption from real global processes (see Emberley, 1994, page 70). Thus Massey says: "we need to conceptualize space as constructed out of interrelations, as the simultaneous coexistence of social interrelations and interactions at all spatial scales, from the most local level to the most global" (1993, page 155). This geographical vision opens a politics of space phrased not in grand terms, but in terms of specific interactions through mundane acts—such as buying food, clothes, ornaments. In this vein, commodity chains are posited as a way of weaving together material and signified realities, consumption and production, activities separated by space and markets; thus providing a fuller interpretation of the material and representational worlds from which to theorize a practical politics of change. In terms of commodity consumption, daily life in image space entails a series of purchases, each the end point of a chain of activities which involves waged workers directly and reproductive workers indirectly, and which stretches through a series of different spaces which are increasingly real as one nears production. A liberative political geography of consumption thus has two urgencies. First, consumption should involve a 'geoknowledge' of the webs of interconnections which might be specified as commodity chains. Second, consumption should entail a 'geoethics', in which geoknowledge is transformed into caring and responsibility for this world of interconnected people, practices, and environments. For political action is not about voting occasionally: it is about ethical daily praxis. And geopolitics does not just concern states: it is about reconnecting people in their everyday lives. Conclusion In this paper I have tried to merge recent political events, in which the possibility of a politics of consumption is indicated, with an upsurge in academic interest in geographies of consumption. For the politics of consumption to be transformative rather than media driven, diversionary, or fragmentary, the peoples involved in consuming, representing, distributing, producing, and reproducing commodities must be joined in political networks and alliances. This is not an argument against studying aesthetic reflexivity. It is an argument for a materialist deconstruction of representations in the social, and especially geographical, semiotic sense of uncovering what is being represented, misrepresented, or hidden by the aesthetic dimension of consumption. Specifically, my hypothesis is that commodity signs and representations, such as advertisements, must disguise the labor processes, chains of connection, and material conditions involved in producing and distributing commodities significantly by reversing their meanings. Hence gold mining has been uncovered as a bulwark of the apartheid system in South Africa, of migrant workers working and living under horrendous conditions, of gold widows barely surviving in the labor reserve of Lesotho, of women and men under surveillance in a Third World panoptical system reminiscent of Foucault's critique of early European modernity. Furthermore, uncovering these connected facts enables, or makes possible, a politics of reconnection within a renewed ethics of everyday life. Specifically, each moment of consumption projects horizontally into a place world of retailing and representations, but also vertically into connecting chains of production and distribution. Representation at consumption nodes (advertisements for gold) can be linked via commodity chains with counterrepresentation at production nodes (miners' songs). By making such connections, power, praxis, and agency can shift to aware consumers linked with active producers. This is an agenda for a new 'commercial geography'.

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Acknowledgements. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for so vend rounds of comments, and Jeremy Taseh for drawing the commodity chain diagram, I would especially like to thank Richard Peet for his supportive guidance and advice on the many drafts of this paper, I would also like to acknowledge the support of my former students at the University of Southern Maine, References Althusser L, 1969 For Marx (Pantheon Books, New York) Appadurai A, 1.986 The Social Life of Things (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge) Arcc A, MarsdenT K, 1993, "The social construction of international food; a new research agenda" Economic Geography 69 293 - 311 Barthel D, 1988 Putting on Appearances (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA) Baudriilard J, 1975 The Mirror of Production (Tclos, St Louis, MO) Baylies C, Wright C, 1993, "Female labour in the textile and clothing industry of Lesotho" African Affairs n 577-591 Bearak B, 1996, "Stitching together a crusade" Los Angeles Times 25 July Bourdieu P, 1984 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA) Clarke D B, Purvis M, 1994, "Dialectics, difference, and the geographies of consumption" Environment and Planning A 26 1091 - 1109 Cook I, 1994, "New fruits and vanity: the role of the symbolic production in the global food economy", in From Columbus to Conagra: The Global Station of Agriculture and Food Order Ed. L Busch (University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, KS) Coplan D, 1994 In the Time of Cannibals (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL) Crang P, 1996, "Displacement, consumption, and identity" Environment and Planning A 28 47-67 Crewe L, Forstcr Z, 1993, "Markets, design and local agglomeration: the role of the small independent retailer in the workings of the fashion system" Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11 213-229 Crewe L, Lowe M S, 1995, "Gap on the map? Towards a geography of consumption and identity" Environment and Planning A 27 1877- 1898 Crush J, 1992, "Power and surveillance in the South African Gold Mines" Journal of Southern African Studies 18 825 - 844 Crush J, 1994, "Scripting the compound: power and space in the South African mining industry" Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12 301 - 324 Crush J, Jeeves A, Yudelman D, 1991 South Africa's Labor Empire (Wcstvicw Press, Boulder, CO) Dicken P, 1994, "Global-local tensions: firms and states in the global space-economy" Economic Geography 70 101 - 128 Eco U, 1976 A Theory of Semiotics (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN) Emberley J, 1994, "Simulated politics: animal bodies, fur-bearing women, indigenous survival" New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 24 66-91 Ewen S, 1988 Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary Culture (Basic Books, New York) Falk W B, 1996, "Dirty little secrets" Newsday 16 June, pages A31 - A43 Ferguson J, 1990 The Anti-politics Machine: "Development" Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge) Fine B, 1993, "Modernity, urbanism, and modern consumption: a comment" Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 11 599 - 601 Fine B, 1995, "From political economy to consumption", in Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies Ed. D Miller (Routledge, London) pp 127-163 Fine B, Leopold E, 1993 The World of Consumption (Routledge, London) First R, 1981 - 82, "The gold of migrant labor" Review of African Political Economy 25 3 - 21 Gay J, 1986, "What women and how do we look at them", in Migration and Development Ed. C Keyter, Transformation Resource Center, PO Box 1388 Maseru 100, Lesotho, pp 147-149 Gay J, Hall D, Dedorath G, 1990 Poverty in Lesotho: A Mapping Exercise (Food Management Unit, Government of Lesotho, Maseru, Lesotho) Gell A, 1986, "Newcomers to the world of goods: consumption among the Muria Gonds", in The Social Life of Things Ed. A Appadurai (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge) pp 110-140

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