Re: <documenta X><blast> visual commodity
Morgan Garwood (mgarwood@inch.com)
Mon, 07 Jul 1997 10:10:24 -0400
a simplification: the global culture is in an extended drift from
*qualitative* consciousness to *quantitative*. The process of
commodification, or our intellectual sense of the condition, perhaps is a
chimera of sorts, a philosophical ghost with whom we have long
conversations. The economic and social realities of the human condition are
increasingly predicated on exact measurement, description by number, and
swiftly determined mechanisms of *pricing*. Pricing, or the search for what
something ought to cost in an auction market before it comes to that market
(i.e. a highly accurate estimate of what the market will bear before being
tested against the attitudes of a paying customer) is a dominant issue in
social/economic relations (social and economic have collapsed to the point
where they might as well be called *econosocial* and forget the pieties of
there being separate domains where one or the other doesn't apply).
Did all this begin when the angel spoke to Descartes in his dream when
the angel whispered into his sleeping ear that "nature shall be known by
number and measure"?
The border zones now are between quantification, the essential process
for the econosocial life, the life withing the auction market economy, and
the problems of explicating what exactly is Quality with a big Q.
This becomes most problematic when we seek to comprehend the Quality of
a person. Can we speak of higher quality or lesser quality people ? Are
they to be judged according to which standard, and does this standard have
a quantitative element.
Dante Alghieri expressed the paradox more elegantly than contempoary
thinkers, I believe, with the attempt to collapse this paradox in the
Divine Comedy, where qualification and quantification were joined in a
single condition of "placement" within the universe.