in the eighteenth century (during the rise of the "public sphere"), "minoritized subjects had few strategies open to them, but one was to carry their unrecuperated [difference] into consumption"
"commodites were being used, especially by women, as a kind of access to publicness that would nevertheless link up with the specificity of difference"
"Consumption offered a counterutopia precisely in a balance between a collectivity of mass desires and an unminoritized rhetoric of difference in the field of choices among infinite goods"
however, all the way up into "modern society," we struggle with the problem that "consumer capitalism makes available an endlessly differentiable subject, [but] the subject of the public sphere proper [still] cannot be differentiated"