Iconomics

The reviewer of Ernest Sterberg's 1999 Economy of Icons in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology summarizes some main points from this latter-day Thorstein Veblen:

"The thesis of this controversial book is that 'enterprises make their way in the capitalist economy by transforming commodities into icons.' An icon is generally regarded as a sacred painting or perhaps "an exceptionally meaningful work of secular art." In today's culture the word applies to the consumption experience or, should I better say, obtaining an object or service because it communicates meaning both to oneself and to various onlookers. The BMW that responds to James Bond's every command, when purchased by an individual customer (who is, like Bond, a male) signals to every onlooker, and most importantly to the owner himself, that he shares other qualities with James Bond in addition to owning the BMW. What these other qualities are vary from intelligence to virility."

The iconographic aspect is not something added-on by the marketing department. Instead, "manufacturing does not come up with a gadget of some sort which is then sent over to the marketing and product design department to think about and then come up with some marketing scheme or 'campaign' for it. Rather, from the start of the production process, it is 'the making of icons [that] now has to be understood in itself as a kind of production.'"

Further: "Sternberg expresses his debt to Daniel Boorstin's The Image who defined an illusion as an 'image that we have mistaken for reality.' Boorstin and Jean Baudrillard are two authors that 'share the observation that technology-driven capitalism has estheticized ordinary life, engrossing us in hyperreality.' This observation has catapulted each author into a post-modern rage about the trickery and falseness of modern popular culture. But Sternberg parts company with Boorstin's and Baudrillard's lamentations for a lost reality of experience now polluted by the craftiness and deceptions of the icon makers. According to Sternberg, the theme park makers, marketers, restauranteurs, architects, etc., are not deceiving their audiences--not really. Even a tiny child eating a meal in the 'Rain Forest Restaurant' knows that she is not really in the rain forest."

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, November 07, 2006 at 04:30 PM

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