The Economy of Icons: How Business Manufactures Meaning. - Review - book review

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, April, 2000

Ernest Sternberg. 1999. The Economy of Icons: How Business Manufactures Meaning. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger. ISBN 0 275 96641 0.

The thesis of this controversial book is that "enterprises make their way in the capitalist economy by transforming commodities into icons" (p. 3). An icon is generally regarded as a sacred painting or perhaps "an exceptionally meaningful work of secular art" (p. 4). 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.

Perhaps Sternberg can explain this better in his own words: "economic activity generates the meaningful contents that animate desire, the boundary between economy and culture has long been breached. The old economic strictures are routinely violated by none other than a day-to-day business practice that uses cultural sources to heighten product meanings" (p. 4).

One implication of this thesis is that 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" (p. 5). As in the Hollywood film "The Graduate," the young graduate of the 1960s was advised to go into "plastics," but the graduate of the 2000s might best be advised to go into "iconography." Indeed, Sternberg insists that his numerous examples of wristwatches, cars, vacations, restaurants, hotels, and so on, are not isolated examples or exceptional curiosities that are grist for the scholar's mill. Not at all. The examples are not exceptions but instead manifestations of a fundamental change in the market system. To use Sternberg's unmistakable terminology it is "capitalism [that] is burgeoning from the calculated produ ction of meanings" (p. 3).

It is not just commodities and services that communicate images and invite us to join in and hook up with an entire matrix of shared and surprising meanings. A typical shopping mall or even large furniture store might build its shop into a world of paintings, decor, and music from, say, New Orleans. Boston's Faneuil Hall--a densely shopped mall on the ruins of the historic Boston waterfront--successfully pioneered the "festival marketplace" idea. The new world of shopping sanctuaries "extends far beyond decoration and advertising--the search for iconicity drives product choice and design" (p. 55).

Sternberg's chapter on tourism--one of the world's biggest industries--is itself one of the most stimulating chapters in the book. As anyone can readily understand, North America's premier tourist attraction, Niagara Falls, is also a commercial event. The tourist experience is simulated and constrained by the tour companies who cleverly balance commercial values, time constraints, and feasibility. Currently, the tour buses do not stop by the Love Canal dump sight for a brief eyewitness stop and mini-lecture on the dangers of industrial waste disposal and the role local government can play in exaggerating the problem, However, such a stopover is conceivable and possibly feasible as well. Tourists actually might enjoy the drama of it all even if they do not attach much interest in its educational value. Tour operators have the power and even the opportunity to "make ethical choices to make their designs conducive to learning and insight" (p. 129) by choosing at what places the tour bus should stop. Here we hav e a note of positive thinking and the holding out of some promise for a capitalist system.

Sternberg expresses his debt to Daniel Boorstin's The Image who defined an illusion as an "image that we have mistaken for reality" (p. 133). Boorstin and Jean Baudrillard are two authors that "share the observation that technology-driven capitalism has estheticized ordinary life, engrossing us in hyperreality" (p. 135). 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.

Indeed, the consumers of the products know that they are not really James Bond and that the new shopping mall does not look like or function exactly like Boston's eighteenth-century waterfront. What they are consuming are features of the original experience or history which can be more or less replicated. For example, the designer of the Rain Forest Restaurant dining area will not include an image of a rotting animal carcass with replicated odors so that the diners can experience this particular attribute of the real rain forest experience. The omission of rotting carcass is intentional and heartily welcomed by the patrons who come into the restaurants to eat an enjoyable meal.