La fin d'une éducation française

"We are surrounded not by reality but by the reality effect" - Rosalind Krauss paraphrases Nietzsche on the illusory exit from Plato's cave.

The creation of a new visual code via photography creates a new power akin to knowledge, that can be acquired, packaged and preserved, whose value is given meaning in the trappings of its presentation both through the lens and in the exhibition space. Thus a “narrowly selective transparency of reality” (Sontag) both embodies values outside of the real world by its subjectivity (to taste, to conscience of photographer) and allows us to “see” what’s “really out there” without explicitly revealing the frame of ideology involved and imposed. This also happens in film, when the production or work involved with refining and rehashing the language and images, let alone the time differences between shots, are concealed to form a seamless illusion of reality that in fact has been orchestrated perfectly into a set ideology, the site of class struggles and the unification of the dominant ideals, while keeping the subject from such technical realizations is intrinsic to the ideology itself. Like in film, this ideological mapping of class positions and world outlooks is not material in itself but rather it is an imaginary representation of reality, which, while never assumed to actually be reality by the viewer, is followed and reacted to as if it were (one “goes along with it” if the mechanics of reproduction and concealment of work are successful), leading to material consequences upon the subject’s following actions, which in turn impact the ideology through practice, ritual and eventually iconography. The universality of the mechanically (now digitally) reproduced and infinitely distributed image, and the approachability of its seamless aspect speaks to our always-already condition and self-identification as subjects, constantly ‘interpelled’ by the non-material trappings of the trapping-less material. Only when ideological assumptions are unsettled, are we shaken from our distracted absorption, and can the code be broken. Enter PoMo. And French sociological metatheories go down the rabbit-hole.