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This essay analyzes the ways in which images are over- and underestimated, from idols that signify the highest values and demand human sacrifice, to empty signs that are worthless, hollow illusions. It then shows how these disparate estimations of "the surplus value of images" lead to the perception of images as living agencies that play crucial roles in social conflicts.
Up, make us idols, which shall go before us.-Exodus 32.1
Image is nothing. Thirst is everything.-Sprite commercial
Everyone knows that images are, unfortunately, too valuable, and that is why they need to be put down., Mere images dominate the world. They seem to simulate everything, and therefore they must be exposed as mere nothings. How is this paradoxical magic/non-magic of the image produced? What happens to an image when it is the focus of both over- (and under-) estimation, when it has some form of "surplus value"? How do images accrue values that seem so out of proportion to their real importance? What kind of critical practice might produce a true estimation of images?
The relation between images and value is among the central issues of contemporary criticism, in both the professional, academic study of culture, and the sphere of public, journalistic criticism. One need only invoke the names of Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord, and Jean Baudrillard to get some sense of the totalizing theoretical ambitions of "image studies," iconologies, mediology, visual culture, New Art History. A critique of the image, a "pictorial turn" has occurred across an array of disciplines-psychoanalysis, semiotics, anthropology, film studies, gender studies, and, of course, finally, cultural studies-and it has brought with it new problems and paradigms, much in the way that language did in the moment of what Richard Rorty calls a "linguistic turn" (263). On the side of public criticism, the rule of mass media makes the dominance of the image obvious. Images are to blame for everything from violence to moral decay. The popular version of the pictorial turn is so obvious that television commercials have their own metalanguage for reining in the image. Sprite soft drinks can tell us that "Image is nothing. Thirst is everything," a saying worthy of Lacan.
The relation of images and thirst is perhaps the first way we...