Ideology now operates by repetitious photographic reality rather than argued meaning

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 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

This is surely the most crucial terrain of ideological struggle today, which has migrated from concepts to representations, and where the thrill of multinational business and the peculiar opulence of the yuppie life world has (for the mind’s libidinal eye) an attraction far outweighing the nineteenth-century charm of the HayekFriedmann arguments about the market as such. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 697 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

With this reformulation, which substitutes the analogy of property rights for that of production, the royal road to the associative work of the later chapters is thrown open: now at once we can pass on to the question of romance and photography in Hawthorne. “Romance” will then offer the stability of “uncontested title and inalienable right” (GS95) and security against the market fluctuations of real estate value, while against all expectation, the practice of photography (the profession of Holgrave in The House of Seven Gables) will turn out to be “an artistic enterprise hostile to imitation” (GS96). If mimesis is associated with realism (and thereby with the threatening dynamic of the market), this strangeness and “hyperreality” of the first photographs, or Daguerrotypes, will be registered as something else, as a hermeneutic activity that “actually brings out the secret character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon” (Hawthorne, p. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 446 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Faithful duplication makes reality itself ideological by collapsing image into thing — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 114; Ideological struggle now operates through representations and imagery rather than concepts. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 697; Photography as early capitalism’s hyperreal art is hostile to imitation — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 446 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Faithful duplication makes reality itself ideological by collapsing image into thing #corroborates (0.90) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 114
• Ideological struggle now operates through representations and imagery rather than concepts. #corroborates (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 697
• Photography as early capitalism’s hyperreal art is hostile to imitation #expands (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 446