The Loss of Symbolic Authority in Postmodernity

Abstract

In the nineteenth century Marx had already exposed the fetishistic “secret” of the commodity form of capitalism (Žižek 1989, 14–15). He showed that the hidden labor-time that it took to make something could be exposed, but this had ultimately nothing necessarily to do with the value the product eventually came to possess. It was, rather, the fascination that the object held that provided it with value. Use value and exchange value were mediated by something quite immaterial—desire. A cheaply manufactured object could still fetch a handsome price if “presented” the right way. The seduction of the form itself took precedence over its meaning. As Goux (1990) put it, “to create value, all that is necessary is, by whatever means possible, to create a sufficient intensity of desire … what ultimately creates surplus value is the manipulation of surplus desire ” (200, 202). Walter Benjamin’s figure of the flâneur moving from one window display to the next, caught by the merchandise; while the flâneuse equally strolling through the new public spaces of the 19th century, the arcades, department stores, and amusement parks, capture perfectly this new fascination with form (Friedberg 1993). It was the vitrine that made desire transparent, producing a “commodity excess” that leads to today’s “society of the spectacle” (Roberts 1991; Debord 1994). The emergence of the new desiring subject was overdetermined through capitalist commodity consumption during the late nineteenth century.