We consume the photograph’s value, not the photographed object’s

Evidence

Actually, it is as though that “external reality,” which we will be careful to refrain from characterizing as the referent, is the last refuge and sanctuary of black and white (as in blackand-white film): what we take for color in the outside real world is nothing but information on some inner computer program, retranslating the data and marking it with the appropriate hue, like the tinting of classical Hollywood movies. The real color comes when you look at the photographs, the glossy plates, in all their splendor. … Any return to the haptic and the tactile, like Venturi’s conversion to respectability in the Gordon Wu Hall at Princeton, with its polished metals and genuinely solid banisters, seem to hearken back to Louis Kahn and the “late modern,” when building materials were expensive and of the finest quality and people still wore suits and ties. It is like the transition from precious metals to the credit card: the “bad new things” are no less expensive, and you no less consume their very value, but (as will be suggested later on), it is the value of the photographic equipment you consume first and foremost, and not of its objects. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 261

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The credit-card analogy is a compact theory of how late-capitalist consumption shifts value from objects to representation — sits at the level of the chapter’s core theoretical machinery.
• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s key idea that aesthetic form is the economy’s way of appearing — the photographic consumption of architecture is economic form made aesthetic.