Ideology ends by being flattened into inert material signifiers in media.

Evidence

But it is just as surely a very peculiar, if not a historically original, way of handling an ideological dispute: to draw it inside the text in such a way that it also becomes part of the flat surface on which the other materials are spread out and displayed. Perhaps, indeed, this is how ideology ends, on some postmodern replay of the fifties end-of-ideology theses — not by evaporating in the general wallowing around in free elections and consumers’ goods but rather by being inscribed on the Mobius strip of the media in such a way that what used to be virulent, subversive, or at least offensive ideas have now been transformed into so many material signifiers at which you gaze for a moment and then pass on. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 360

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is the core mechanistic claim about how the economic/logic of late capitalism metabolizes oppositional ideas — the ideological dispute becomes surface, affect drained. Central to the book’s thesis and to the reader’s parody/pastiche/waning-of-affect project.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s stated project of testing whether the ‘cultural dominant’ thesis is falsifiable — this passage gives a concrete mechanism for how postmodernism absorbs critique. — connects to: Fading hope breeds reverent repetition of emptied political slogans. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 143; Irony dies because ideology and reality have collapsed into agreement — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 230; Advertising-saturated media itself demonstrates the flattening of critical thought. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 101 (+3 more)