Faithful duplication makes reality itself ideological by collapsing image into thing

Evidence

Reality becomes its own ideology through the spell cast by its faithful duplication. This is how the technological veil and the myth of the positive is woven. If the real becomes an image insofar as in its particularity it becomes as equivalent to the whole as one Ford car is to all the others of the same range, then the image on the other hand turns into immediate reality. We no longer even approach the much vaunted aesthetic image-consciousness. Any achievement of imagination, any expectation that imagination might of its own accord gather together the discrete elements of the real into its truth, is repudiated as an improper presumption. Imagination is replaced by a mechanically relentless control mechanism which determines whether the latest imago to be distributed really represents an exact, accurate and reliable reflection of the relevant item of reality. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 114

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that reality ‘becomes its own ideology’ through exact duplication, and that interchangeability (one Ford like another) collapses the distinction between the real and its image, is a genuinely paradigm-shifting formulation of how representation under capitalism functions.
• XREF: Connects to Baudrillard’s simulacra, and to Debord’s Society of the Spectacle; also echoes Plato’s simulacrum in a modern economic register. — connects to: Ideology now operates by repetitious photographic reality rather than argued meaning; Perfect resemblance destroys the imaginary because exact doubling erases the image itself — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 352; Debunking old illusions becomes a new ideology that destroys their truth. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 685 (+1 more)

Related

• Faithful duplication makes reality itself ideological. (similarity 0.92)
• Ideology now operates by repetitious photographic reality rather than argued meaning (similarity 0.87)
• Attempts to capture reality unmediated transform it into hyperreality instead (similarity 0.79)
• The reality principle itself is ideological (similarity 0.78)
• The culture industry converts bare existence into a substitute for meaning and right (similarity 0.78)
• Illusion is impossible today because the real itself is no longer possible (similarity 0.78)