Landscape painting retroactively reveals nature and society as ideological representations

Evidence

What that pairing off of meanings does next is to suggest that the “world” itself — as a combination of the social or cultural and the natural — can be opposed to that rather different matter which is its own representation, the aesthetic realm, in which both nature and culture (both the natural and the social) can be objects of representation. … The traditional landscape painting, then, in this move, retroactively transforms the first two seemingly ontological realities of the social and the natural into ideology and into representation. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 394

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives the reader’s core task material: the aesthetic realm stands opposed to the world, absorbing both nature and culture into representation — a key move in the parody-vs-pastiche and historical-meaning framework.
• XREF: This retroactive transformation of the real into ideology echoes the earlier chapter’s claim that postmodernism historicizes and aestheticizes everything — relevant to the cognitive-map project. — connects to: Depicted nature becomes a coded endorsement of industrial domination; The English landscape encodes submerged histories of class struggle — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 541; Landscape reading answers some histories while opening further questions — Tom Wessels, Forest Forensics: A Field Guide to…, 28 (+3 more)