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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