The omnipresence of commercialized fiction is unfolding right before our very eyes. An ubiquitous generalized fiction in the world of commercialized images and ideas has created its own system of rules and values that decide upon each thing’s visibility or invisibility in the media. Without exception.

Commercially fictionalized iconography is essentially different to other types of imagery: the image’s message and the meaning are determined by its function as a commercial device. At the beginning of every fictionalized image is the business relationship, a contract that lays down which commercial interests are being pursued. In order to fulfill its defined function, the commercially fictionalized image has to unify a series of contradictions within itself which make up its particular character and provide indications of what led to the universalization of its principles.

As are other systems, commercially fictionalized iconography is self-referential; it superimposes itself on all systems of meaning production, not merely those genuinely working with images, and subsumes them. Thus, this form of image production provides a system of reference for all forms of imagination. Commercially fictionalized iconography has prevailed over all other existing types of images, not only quantitatively, but qualitatively, as well; its victory is complete: this system of commercially produced and utilized images becomes the image of all images, and this meta-image installs itself and is materialized everywhere.

All other types of images either receive their meaning within this system or become relegated to this system. Even the private memento of mass amateur photography or the journalistic photograph are evaluated purely within this system. While these documentary image types have become entirely expended, they nonetheless remain indispensable: they are the machinery forming the foundation that supports commercial fiction’s dictate, an unreflected repertoire of representation equivalent to an everyday, eternally recurring ritual of affirmation.

Nearly every aspect of social life reenacts the dramaturgy of this image production, which tends towards a radical expansion consisting in the subordination of each expression of social life to its semantics, its grammar, and its rhetoric, appropriating it within contexts of commercial utilization.

The traditional category of manipulation as the explicative frame of reference for commercial iconography is the lie: the relationship of dependence is a mechanism in reverse order. The producer with his interests is dependent on ideologies that bind the consumer. Thus, fictionalization is necessarily led by existing trends and ways of looking at the world. It is not in the interests of the subjects of commercial industry, the producers, to assert new ideological content; they would lose the people they are addressing, their customers, in the process. Both the manufacturer and the image producer working for him are existentially dependent on a knowledge of recent developments in the way the world is perceived. This dependence goes as far as to temporarily alienate the product to the point of self-renunciation, that is, when a similarity between the product and its portrayal no longer exists. In their attempts to appropriate current views with an eye towards exploiting them, the advertising subjects go so far in their opportunism that they begin to negate the basis of their own commercial interests.

Conservative institutions such as banks and insurance companies, for instance, evince a tendency for portraying stylistic worlds that have the appearance of being compatible with youth culture; their plausibility, however, abolishes the very legitimacy of these institutions. This is the point where self-portrayal departs from self-similarity.

Hence, commercial iconography can react exclusively to existing views and, together with their contradictions, formulate them in images that provide an element of identification to the consumer. In order to temporarily create an appearance of authenticity, these views have to originate as far outside their self-referential system as possible.

Thus, through commercial intervention, certain groups become stripped of their authentically produced images, codes, and ways of perceiving the world, and hence of that which primarily belongs to them; they become destroyed, forced to turn to new contents, to devise new codes and to encipher them even more hermetically. These cryptic codes become the true objects of desire among producers of consumer goods. Under the sign of paradigmatic growth in the sense of economic growth and innovation, the cyclical frequency of intervention and disenfranchisement increases continuously. Thus, commercial iconography has a primary interest in tracking down the various components of a constitutive, self-organized image production, in appropriating and reproducing them on a mass scale. The commercially fictionalized image system operates through an occupation of these territories, through the mass multiplication and dissemination of entire sign inventories. Analogous to the image production itself, this step is achieved through a process of exclusion.

The image, once established, becomes universal; whatever no longer fits into the picture is discarded, removed. These laws are manifest in all areas of social life, such as in the city, where the commercial production of images and meaning prevails. Whatever becomes excluded in the process immediately begins occurring on territory situated beyond the referential system’s sphere of influence; it is neither characterized nor evinced by images of any kind, and is therefore invisible and as good as non-existent.

What laws lie at the heart of commercial iconography, justifying its generalization of fictionalization and its economic territoriality? All in all, commercialized/fictionalized iconography is determined by an extra-aesthetic codex and a necessarily contradictory and tautological apparatus of management directives originating in various fields of capital organized according to areas of activity. An agreement among essentially incompatible demands comprises the special character of the fictionalized commercial image and can be read in each result of this production.

  1. Initially, the industry commissions the manufacture of the visualization of a so-called Unique Selling Proposition ­ thus the jargon. Due to its paradoxical nature, this proposition is of the greatest importance, because an ordinary product can always necessarily be substituted by that of the competition; it is, therefore, unique in no way whatsoever. Hence, the reason for this Unique Selling Proposition is its absence. Fictionalized iconography has to dissolve this contradiction and fake a ”USP.”

  2. In order to have practical value as a tool for modifying competition, commercial/fictionalized iconography has to fake an image of the product that refers implicitly to the competing product it is seeking to exclude. At the same time, however, because it identifies the product, the product’s image necessarily negates the existence of a corresponding, other product on the market ­ because this would render its image uniform, that is, unidentifiable.

  3. Commercial/fictionalized iconography has to refer to the construct of the need, which also, however, has to be insinuated as a solvent market demand. Yet in its reference to money, the need negates the need. Hence, the iconography has to fake an unconditionality which is anything but unconditional. This contradiction needs to take on an immediate iconic form. The unconditional need is generated in recurring images of remote islands, for instance, that eliminate the economic distance between the consumer and the product: like coconuts, packs of Langnese ice-cream or bottles of Beck’s beer hang from trees, just within arm’s reach.

  4. In his actions, the producer of this iconography must necessarily reflect upon aesthetic parameters. In any case, everything that has been previously determined becomes an extra-aesthetic parameter which the producer has to render aesthetic. But even here, apparently aesthetic parameters remain ontological parameters: an immediate contradiction, comparable to how it had to be implemented in gothic painting, for example: the pictures of scenes portraying the saints are ontologically coded throughout, for example, in the color of the clothing, etc. An analogous codification can be found in the field of tourism, where the color of the sky, the water, for instance, are technically standardized elements of communication. In essence, the ontological character annuls the aesthetic category.

  5. Commercial/fictionalized iconography precludes any self-referential admission of its own unreality. It rests on a tautology: the asserted social consensus that takes fiction to be a realistic portrayal of its own predetermined ideologies - which are themselves fictions. Just as the church in the Gothic period retained contractual power over the generation of meaning and semantic directives, the commercially initiated production of imagery is capable of rendering iconological standards and their exegesis socially binding. It functions as a parasite does, making its appearance as a symbiotic partner and setting up a personal relationship to each individual that is at the same time a mass phenomenon, and thus reproducing itself infinitely. This power of definition over the world of images, however, only exists as long as the corpus and, thus, ideologies whose images it can expropriate.