David Hawkes - Idols of the Marketplace

Autonomy of representation!!!! Signs are granted power over what they used to merely represent, and image and presentation are more important than content itself. In the late sixteen to late seventeenth centuries, autonomy of representation was strongly linked to idolatry, and idolatry was seen in nearly every aspect of life. Idolatry, roughly put, is the adoration of the products of men’s hands, rather than the work of God. Idolatry is thus an ‘unhealthy materialism’ which leads to compulsive addictions and sensuality. Today we have succumbed to this tendency so thoroughly as to have it be invisible to our eyes, which is why an examination of seventeenth century literature can be so instructive.

The correlating idea to the rise of idolatry is the simultaneous rise of the market economy and of capitalism (the making of money with money). This rise of capitalism subverts teleology (i.e., the end of money is not to make more money), and confuses the natural progression of means and ends – money is a means to an end, rather than an end in and of itself.

So: objectification is idolatry, and objectification is linked up to the market economy. This makes sense because the market economy leads us to desire commodities, which are idols in that they are works of men’s hands rather than a reflection of God, or telos, so that capitalism leads us away from God and toward the idolatrous desire for commodities, or money (by which means we can then purchase commodities). Commodities seem to be defined as things that people can buy and feel as though they need that aren’t needs or that seem to have no essential use value. They are in this sense fetishized. Double check this with Hawkes.

The way this book departs from typical Marxist thought is that the rise of Capitalism is not seen as part of an overriding progression – rather than being a telos or a path to that end, it is seen as the seventeenth century viewed it – a “unmitigated disaster.” The seventeenth century viewed life in totality, rather than dividing it up into spheres of economy, religion, philosophy, etc. Dropping the typical Marxist move of privileging the concept of the class struggle allows one to open up the inquiry and view capitalism as other than teleological in its bent.

Exchange value == human labor è exchange value is abstracted human life. Exchange value allows unequally-valued items to be exchanged. Societies have long struggled to deal with this- usually happens through religion – this book looks in part at the effect of what we would call religion on what we would call economics.

The discovery of the new world and the massive influx of gold and commodities that came from that led to a market economy rather than an exchange economy based on use value. It is this rise of the commodity economy that was given an ethical critique in the seventeenth century.

Idolatry and commodity fetishism are homologous. Economics can now be thought of in terms of semiotics, the relation and system of signs that it is. Shell argues that history can be viewed as a progression of increasing independence of signs from the things they ostensibly represent. Both Shell and Goux see this increasing independence in both economics and language, where a sort of perverted telos seems to be the eventual autonomy of signs. One way to trace this is in the view of money, which went from being Gold itself to being represented BY Gold to being eventually totally off the Gold Standard, which means that money itself really is an autonomous sign with no basis in any sort of material reality. What this basically means is that there is no longer really any such thing as money, and yet money still has near-supreme power over life now as we live it.

The rise in the autonomy of signification is usually regarded now as being ethically neutral, if not downright liberating in that it frees people from the teleological modes of thought that have often been experienced as oppressive. However, in the seventeenth century it was not regarded as such – during the time when the people of England were forced to understand the rise of autonomous signification in their daily lives, they experienced this and thought of it as the rise of idolatry. Money is often thought of as a “carnal invention” that “distorts the divinely ordained natural order” – money becomes the subject of human adoration, rather than God. (as an aside, one could read pretty much all of Jonson’s plays, as well as Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, in exactly this vein).

Idolatry is the reduction of spirit to matter, objectification.