![]() ![]() This debased pepper, no longer the luxury of the early modern spice trade, had been so adulterated that it was really spice only in name. (Inevitably, the notion of a 'sign for a metastasized form of labour' finds its grotesque variant in the pepper consumed by the working class in the Romantic period. This bohemian style was the prototype for modern forms of consumption, which for the sake of clarity one might consider as an aimless 'window shopping'. Colin Campbell describes this style of consumption as a kind of bohemianism in The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism. This enabled it to be caught up in what I call 'Romantic consumerism', a self-reflexive, Kantian form of consumption in which the sense of consuming is itself consumed. My recent work in The Poetics of Spice has demonstrated that since the late Middle Ages, spice in English literature had become a strange kind of sign: the sign for a metastasized form of labour-capital. ![]()
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