Introduction

aestheticization of the wor(l)d picture

pp. 1-17

in: Jan Jagodzinski, Visual art and education in an era of designer capitalism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

E. J. Dijksterhuis (1961), the great Dutch historian, once characterized modernization as the "mechanization of the world picture." Secularization—brought on by mathematics and the utilitarian pragmatic mind-set of merchant and laissez-faire capitalism—eventually began to infiltrate all aspects of life as capitalism continued its aggressive developments. We can say that postmodernity, which shapes the information society under designer capitalism, has brought about an "aestheticization of the wor(l)d picture." The signifier as word and its signified as image or picture—word and image together as a post-hieroglyphic sign—are presented 'seamlessly" together as various forms of simulacra—such as xenomoney, which made its appearance in financial capitalism in 1973. Money refers only to itself as a sign of exchange. I use the portmanteau term "wor(l)d" to refer to both "world" (globalization) and "word" to indicate the aestheticization of the image as the manipulation of the sign through de(sign), with the prefix "de" enabling the play of images through perceptual games of privation, removal, separation, negation, intensity, and reversal—the 'surrealization" and serialization of appearances. Hyperreality of image and sound, as hyste-ricized by Jean Baudrillard, has become business as usual in postindustrial designer capitalism. Spectators living in globalized world centers are caught within an information age of consumerism, resulting in a new machinic assemblage of the synopticon—the panopticon has been inverted.