Photography as early capitalism’s hyperreal art is hostile to imitation

Evidence

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

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the reader’s aim to explain how aesthetic form is the economy’s way of appearing — romance as stable property title, photography as anti-mimetic hyperreality. — connects to: Ideology now operates by repetitious photographic reality rather than argued meaning