“Cover the Earth”: like the red liquid that drips over our globe in Sherwin-Williams’ emblem advertising its brand of house paint, it can be said that a globalizing consumer culture covers the northern hemisphere and extends on to the sea and land below the Equator. The famous logo is a fitting allegory for the state of the world that theorists in the line of Lefebvre and Certeau in the post-war years, anticipating globalization, had called the effect of the bourgeois and the impact of the disciplinary society. In Chapter 2 I suggested that familial and ethnic networks lose their character when transnational economies redefine them. At a microlevel, argued Certeau, stories and myths that had been vital to everyday life and ecological spaces are now compressed into slogans and advertisements for the ends of economic development. We have seen more directly that his writings deal with ruses and resistances to what he and Lefebvre perceived to be the controls that the state imposes on its citizens through technology and consumerist ideology. Using psychoanalysis, in which the language of the unconscious plays a determining role in human activities, Certeau focuses on questions of existence in relation to place. Writing at the threshold of globalization, he is less interested in a sociology of space than in discerning how everyday practices implicitly subvert urban administration and how migrations are now transforming the shape and complexion of the nation-state.

Along this line of inquiry, Certeau's writings on space and place bear useful comparison with those of Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard is fascinated by the same fascination that drives consumer-based media. Bearing a Marxian signature from his early writings up to his death in 2006, he argues that new forms of capital, increasingly equated with transnational circulation of money and signs, eradicate popular resistance.