Totality as conspiracy: in the sense of this formula, Fredric Jameson understands conspiracy as a genuinely allegorical figuration, which gains epistemological relevance in the moment when traditional forms of realism falter at the unrepresentability of late capitalism. For Jameson, the following famous Brecht quote implies the demand for a new political aesthetics based on cognitive mapping: “The situation becomes complicated, because more than ever the simple ‘reproduction of reality’ says nothing at all about this reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG teaches us practically nothing about these institutions.” Brecht’s critique of photographic realism affirms the gap between the mimetic and the epistemic capabilities of photographic images – the problem that also besets Blow-Up. The concrete referential function of photography is increasingly coupled with the abstract functionality of social reality. In view of the fluid shapelessness of capital itself, which, as an “incorporeal value,” can “be represented only in its effects,” the indexical referentialization of photography comes up against its boundaries.