The Supermarket of the Visible: Toward a General Economy of Images (Thinking Out Loud)

Already in 1929, Walter Benjamin described “a one hundred per cent image-space.” Such an image space saturates our world now more than ever, constituting the visibility in which we live. The Supermarket of the Visible analyzes this space and the icons that populate it as the culmination of a history of the circulation and general commodification of images and gazes. From the first elevators and escalators (tracking shots avant la lettre) to cinema (the great conductor of gazes), all the way down to contemporary eye-tracking techniques that monitor the slightest saccades of our eyes, Peter Szendy offers an entirely novel theory of the intersection of the image and economics. The Supermarket of the Visible elaborates an economy proper to images, icons, in other words, an iconomy. Deleuze caught a glimpse of this when he wrote that “money is the back side of all the images that cinema shows and edits on the front.” Since “cinema,” for Deleuze, is synonymous with “universe,” Szendy argues that this sentence must be understood in its broadest dimension and that a reading of key works in the history of cinema allows us a unique vantage point upon the reverse of images, their monetary implications. Paying close attention to sequences in Hitchcock, Bresson, Antonioni, De Palma, and The Sopranos, Szendy shows how cinema is not a uniquely commercial art form among other, purer arts, but, more fundamentally, helps to elaborate what might be called, with Bataille, a general iconomy. Moving deftly and lightly between political economy, aesthetic theory, and popular movies and television, The Supermarket of the Visible will be a necessary book for anyone concerned with media, philosophy, politics, or visual culture. Cover 1 The Supermarket of the Visible 2 Title 6 Copyright 7 CONTENTS 8 Sydney Lectures 14 1. Money, or The Other Side of Images 16 2. The Point of (No) Exchange, or The Debt-Image 40 3. Innervation, or The Gaze of Capital 56 Additional Features 90 Merchandise: Godzilla’s Eye 92 Deleted Scenes: Doors and Slide Changers in Pickpocket and Obsession 97 Deleted Scenes: Three Variations on Time and Money (Antonioni, De Palma, Bresson) 101 Photo Gallery: Blow-Up, or Why There Are No Images 105 Locations: 23, rue Bénard, Paris, 75014 112 Deleted Scene: The Fluctuations of the Unchained Camera (L’Herbier) 114 Deleted Scenes: The General Fetishism of the Marxes 116 Deleted Scenes: The Amortization of the Gaze (King Kong) 119 Formats: Surplus Definition (Redacted) 125 Credits 134 Notes 136 Index 168 AUTHOR BIOS 174 This book began as three lectures given at the State Library of New South Wales, in Sydney, May 5, 7, and 9, 2014, They were part of the series Thinking Out Loud: The Sydney Lectures in Philosophy and Society, organized by Dimitris Vardoulakis for the University of Western Sydney and broadcast on ABC Radio National. The Supermarket of the Visible elaborates a political economy of the images that saturate our world. From the first elevators and escalators (tracking shots avant la lettre) to cinema (the great conductor of gazes), all the way down to contemporary eye-tracking techniques that monitor the slightest saccades of our eyes, Peter Szendy offers an entirely novel theory of the intersection of visual culture and economics