Narrative that reveals itself as mere image shifts discourse from language to media

Evidence

Luhmann’s second set of processes, which turn on the external environment itself — or what in literature is generally called the context or even the referent — is exemplified above all in those moments (also characteristic of Robbe-Grillet) in which a narrative in which we have been led to believe (for in literature, what is called the fictive is the equivalent of the referential in other forms of language) suddenly proves to have been a mere image all along, whether that image is simply a painting (which the preceding pseudonarrative has, as it were, animated) or turns out to have been a film, as in the case of the tropical expedition in Les corps conducteurs. Here, then, the materialization of the signified by quotation, described above, is replicated diegetically or narratively on the level of the sign as a whole, with new and unexpected results: these passages now lift us from the realm of linguistic problematics and linguistic philosophy into that of image society and the media. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 342

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the mechanism by which the nouveau roman’s self-revealing images move analysis from linguistic philosophy to image society.
• XREF: Jameson’s ‘image society and the media’ connects to Debord’s society of the spectacle and the reader’s own work on media-driven superficiality. — connects to: Deep stories furnish ready-made narrative lenses for interpreting the world. — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 228