Mechanization and mediation of culture may have always existed, even precapitalist

Evidence

It is because we have had to learn that culture today is a matter of media that we have finally begun to get it through our heads that culture was always that, and that the older forms or genres, or indeed the older spiritual exercises and meditations, thoughts and expressions, were also in their very different ways media products. The intervention of the machine, the mechanization of culture, and the mediation of culture by the Consciousness Industry are now everywhere the case, and perhaps it might be interesting to explore the possibility that they were always the case throughout human history, and within even the radical difference of older, precapitalist modes of production. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 203

Categorization

• QUESTION: Jameson floats the provocative extension of ‘Consciousness Industry’ back to precapitalist modes — worth pressing on for the book’s falsifiability.
• XREF: The ‘Consciousness Industry’ phrase links to Adorno/Horkheimer’s culture industry thesis. — connects to: Administration always shaped cultural production, not just modern times
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Administration always shaped cultural production, not just modern times