Small Tears in Logic

According to Robert Hass, images “are not quite ideas … they are not myth, they do not have that explanatory power; they are closer to pure story.” In that images are “pure story,” free of traditional structure, they give way to alternative ways of knowing outside of scientific and analytical thinking championed by capitalism. This aesthetic knowing born by image further disregards analysis by disregarding a fidelity to fact and objective truth, favoring subjective truth instead, and favoring an inductive structure over a deductive one. Image is capable, then, of existing outside of narrative and even outside of language. In our media-driven world, narratives defined by powerful interests constitute us as subjects from an early age. As culture and capitalism have collapsed into one another, our individual identities conform to the logic of markets, transforming us from characters into performing selves and monetizing our every move. Under this aestheticized capitalism, attention is the new currency of power. Heidegger draws a distinction between meditative versus calculative thinking, defining the latter as a means of mobilizing material accumulation that also leads to a “growing thoughtlessness.” Meditative thinking, per Heidegger, is hardly useful or profitable in a capitalist sense but is useful in ways that reorient our attention to the more mindful, aestheticized qualities of our present surroundings. Images align with meditative thinking in that the two are not useful in quantitative terms but can allow people a temporary reprieve from “capitalism with a cultural face.”