Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga

Structural Patterns

Reflections on Art, Technology and Society

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You can also identify this phenomenon in the contemporary pressures of corporations with publicly traded stock to maintain and increase “shareholder value.” What matters most to these corporations’ managers are the metrics of profit and objective value monitored and determined by a new enormous, international financial services industry. What matters less, especially to most metrically inclined institutional investors, is how well the company has done for society, what the subjective value of its products are to its producers and consumers, it is the objective, quantifiable dimension of value that is the proverbial bottom line. Marx would see this as the essence of capitalism – the centralization of markets and money, the elevation of the quantitative, formal side of things and therefore “estrangement,” in human experience. In contemporary capitalist society, like it or not, the medial sphere of exchange and transaction reigns supreme, utilizing the formal, objective dimension of value to triumph over the poetic, and, for Marx, “human” dimension of value.

Written by ricardo

June 16th, 2010 at 10:44 am