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.
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