The Image, and Capitalism

Skyline #1. Barcelona, 2014

This may go too far for some, but it is certainly a contemplative hors d’oeuvre:

“A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats.

The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivize reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs and strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers).

The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires unlimited production and consumption of images.”

—Susan Sontag, On Photography

I have always thought that the philosophers, historians, scientists, artists and other so-called reality experts all capture some percentage of the truth in their observations. They are neither 100% right nor 100% wrong. A really good thinker or analyst, though, will capture more truth than error.

Precisely how much of the truth do they capture? Who knows? Much depends on where you, personally, are standing. For example, how much truth do you think Susan Sontag captured in the above excerpt? Five percent? Ninety percent? Somewhere in-between?

A possible, but very challenging, solution is to seek out and contemplate various points of view and come up with your own synthesis, whilst trying to avoid the big, steel, bear trap of simply searching out the theories that confirm your own prejudices.