Iconic Power and Performance: The Role of the Critic

Abstract

Materialism is a mundane mode of understanding, one that indulges the self-evident common sense of a rationalized, de-magicalized modernity. No doubt the most sophisticated manner in which the self-consciousness of modern mundanity has been applied to materiality is the commodity theory of Karl Marx ([1867] 2001). Energized morally by iconoclasm, this radical critic of iconi cism produced a brilliant but deeply misleading empirical theory of modern social life. Marx believed that market processes strip material objects of their value—both use value (their practical or true value, as dictated by design, shape, and form) and moral value (their status as product of social labor). Insofar as material objects are so commodified, in Marx’s perspective, they can be viewed only abstractly rather than in concrete terms; they are seen merely as exchange value and measured by money. Emptied of meaning, material objects become simply things. Any commodity is the same as any other commodity that can be traded at the same price, no matter how different they seem in their appearance.