The Supermarket of the Visible: Toward a General Economy of Images

The Supermarket of the Visible brings together a Marxist critique of the political economy of the image with a celebration of the emancipatory power lurking in the cinematic frame. This unique project provides new possibilities for thinking non-reductively about the relationship between economy and visuality.-Todd McGowan, author of The Impossible David LynchA gifted writer with real pedagogical talent, Szendy knows just the appropriate dosage of theoretical fine points (which he makes with surgical precision) and shifts register as needed to quite accessible discussions of popular films and television. A significant contribution to our understanding of the image world we inhabit today.-Suzanne Guerlac, University of California, BerkeleyAlready in 1929, Walter Benjamin described a one hundred per cent image-space. Such an image space saturates our world now more than ever, marking the culmination of more than a century's 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 other side of all the images that the cinema shows and edits on the front. 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.Peter Szendy is David Herlihy Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at Brown University. His books include Of Stigmatology: Punctuation as Experience and All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage. Jan Plug is Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario.