In "Philosophy, culture, image: Rancière’s ‘constructivism’ " in Philosophy of Photography (Issue 1 no1) John Roberts observes highlights the tradition of the critique of the state-sponsored and market-organized technologically produced image; its certain logic of conformity, instrumentality and systematic coercion; and on the ‘dead’ life of technologically produced and distributed images that make one culturally stupid or morally culpable. He comments:

Most philosophical writing on art is either after-the-fact in its judgements, or, through the speculative elision of concept and work, engaged in producing judgements that are wildly capricious or irrelevant. This is largely a result of the fact that the movement of philosophical thought from concept to artwork, and from artwork to concept, is rarely internal to the conflicted labour immanent to the work of art and its relations to the conflicted labour of other artworks. Artworks are invariably fitted up for scrutiny on the basis of their susceptibility to philosophical abstraction, and not on the basis of the historicity of their technicity and form. (Ironically this is precisely Derrida’s point in his critique of Heidegger’s reading of Van Gogh’s ‘peasant shoes’ (Derrida 1987).) Philosophy arrives at the doorstep of the artwork offering sustenance to what it sees as art’s conceptually bedraggled and parched identity, whereas, on the contrary, it should be attending to the thing that provides modern art with its identity – the internal violence of the art- work’s historicity. This is why modernist criticism has always been sniffy and derogatory about philosophers on art: philosophers lose sight of the contingency of the object’s making and therefore lose sight of the significance of the artwork’s claims on the particular as against its exemplary status. But, more pertinently, in the drive of philosophy to defend the extension or expansion of the art-work through philosophical reflection, the artwork’s self-disablement or self-violation is rendered amenable, and even opaque, to conceptualization.

Fair enough. But there is still our increasing seduction and narcotization by the images that support a market economy the same process of reenchantment that the Situationists referred to in their society of the spectacle.