Commodity Relations: Images and Visuality

The main characteristic of postmodern capitalism is a thorough commoditization and resourcification of culture and culture production. Images also are produced and consumed. They entrench visual commodity relations. These relations ground registers of exploration and interpretation. Rapid development of information and telecommunication technologies turns everybody into a producer and consumer of various images. This transformation provides the means for storing that production and thus enforcing the attitude of seeing the human world as the storage of inexhaustible visual resources. The flood of images in media industries is stimulated by the capacity of images to induce human susceptibility directly, evading the rational intellect. This capasity is used in public policy by public relation firms which produce political images. Thus inevitably public policy is conducted according principles of marketization and advertising. The article deals with three main questions, namely, a) how postmodern production of images impact on individual identity construction, b) what basic attitude grounds the sphere of media industries and advertisement, c) how produced images determine relations in the sphere of political communication and public policy.