## ICONOMY, ICONOCLASH ≠ ICONOMICS

## Terry Smith

It is one thing…to apprehend directly an image as image, and another thing to shape ideas regarding the nature of images in general.

Jean-Paul Sartre's remark, made in his The Imagination (1936), is used as a prefatory quotation by W.J.T. Mitchell in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986),  his  classic  study  of  the  nature  of images and the differences  between  images  and  words. 1 Like everything else that Mitchell (and Sartre) says about these topics, this gesture is immediately relevant to the issues raised by the questionnaire. Indeed, the first two sentences of the questionnaire set up a relationship between images and imagery, or single images and the overall image flow, that is indeed 'traditional,' in fact, ancient, as a presumption, one that is so instinctive to thinking about images that it is almost everywhere taken as fundamental. It is also, as Sartre suggests, problematical.

Traditionally we think of images as relatively individualized or delimited phenomena that in one way or the other appear to the human mind and apparatus of perception. Currently, however, we are witnessing an intensification of what we might call the networkedness of the image along with a proliferation of machine imagery that operates independently of human perception and cognition.

A  contemporary,  information  theory,  'digital  age'  name  for this relation between each image and every image is proposed: 'networkedness.' This is reinforced by triangulating the relation with the suggestion that machines communicating with each other, via a kind of imagery imperceptible to humans -and unthinkable by us -is  widespread today. I will return to this suggestion in some concluding comments.

The  paragraph  ends  by  channelling  Guy  Debord  in  1967  on spectacle societies:

Indeed, the global circulation  of  images  and  the  workings of new media realities increasingly seem to mediate social relations  and  the  social  imaginary  (accelerated  during  the pandemic where much social interaction has been referred to  the  interfaces  of  different  real-time  communication technologies), to the point that the social field is now largely constituted by the production and distribution of images.

This, too, is a conventional gesture, unavoidable given Debord's prescience about current reality. A return to Debord is, to me, as welcome as it is necessary, despite the fact that, within critical theory, his diagnosis has become an occluded orthodoxy, in much need of refreshment by a critical return -yes, a détournement . 2 Yet returning to Debord does not mean that we are obliged to stay  within  his  analysis  as  if  it  were  entirely  adequate  in  the present situation. It  is  not,  precisely  because  of  its  generality. (Accepting it in this manner is about as illuminating as saying that a mice plague consists of the simultaneous presence in a place of uncountable numbers of the same kind of mouse.) The last sentence of the questionnaire has the same problem: its generality drowns all of the important, more specific questions then asked in the next paragraph. They are saturated by spectacle's ubiquity and therefore risk remaining as questions to which it has already provided adequate (if egregious) answers. I will, however, suggest some (counter-spectacle) answers in the course of these reflections.

My response will be concerned less with the ontological character of specific or particular images -although I will consider some -more with the strengths and weaknesses of several theories that have  been  advanced  (including  some  that  I  have  proposed)  to characterize the nature, structure, development, and histories of imagery, image flows, scopic regimes, vision, visuality, the visual field, and world picturing. (The questionnaire prefers 'the contemporary image-space' for this general register.) We will come up constantly against the problem implicit in the opening lines of the questionnaire: what can analysis of particular images (the ontology of an image) tell us about imagery in general (the ontology of the image), and vice-versa? How can the connections between  these  registers  be  made  apparent?  Whether  we  have in mind visual images or encompass (as we should) mental and verbal imagery as well, I believe that these questions have as much political urgency today as they ever did. 3

## HISTORICAL PROSPECT

Indigenous  cultures  are  grounded  in  stories  of  world  making that are replete with instances of the vividly visualized interplay between Originary Beings, animals, natural forces, humans, and things. These are not simple matchings, crudely imagined: they are complex exchanges between mimesis and alterity, between what can be shown and the othernesses that cannot. 4 In Western thought, the most famous account of the relationship between seeing  and  knowing  is  Plato's  allegory  of  the  cave,  with  its dramatic scenario of an enchained people convinced that reality is represented by figments that are, actually, firelit shadows cast on the walls of the cave by icons ( eidolon ) paraded behind them by unseen actors. A philosopher releases one person and leads him through a tunnel to the world outside, where sunlight reveals the Truth as abstract Ideas ( eidos ). Yet when he returns, bearing excited  witness  to  his  insights,  he  is  punished  by  the  people, who prefer to remain in their deceived condition. Socrates tells this story, which foretells his own fate. A similar circuitry, but in  reverse,  arose  during  the  iconoclastic  controversies  of  the Byzantine era, when a duplicitous doubling was introduced that cleverly  overcame  explicit  prohibitions  in  the  Old  Testament against the worship of 'craven idols.' Nikephoros, the Patriarch of Constantinople from 806 to 815, argued that the images of the Holy Spirit, of God, of Christ, Mary, and other sacred beings were divine phenomena, invisible to mortals, while the icon of each sacred being that was visible to them in churches and elsewhere was of course an artifice, but it was licensed, as it were, by the holy images. Worship of the icon was in fact worship of the image and was, therefore, not idolatrous. Such worship structured ritual behavior in sacred spaces but was also central to practices of everyday life based on belief in Christ's teachings about living -it became an economy ,  in the basic Greek sense of a conscious, sustained  way  of  organizing  one's  home  life.  Imprinting  the image of Christ on the obverse side of coins circulating through an empire suggested that Christ's modelling of the most desired economy of self and others, that is, Christian morality, was the model to be adopted within the domain ruled by the emperor whose image appeared on the reverse. 5

Each of these archetypal allegories about seeing and knowing turns on a dialectical double-troubling, specific to its situation, between  particularity  and  generalization,  transparency  and opacity,  vision  and  visuality,  and  revelation  and  duplicity.  A general image economy evolved, continued during modern times, and remains with us today, constantly renovating existent forms of insight and obscurity even as it generates new ones.

## MAKING THE MODERN WORLD

In Making  the  Modern:  Industry,  Art,  and  Design  in  America (1993), I set out to answer several questions about the forms that modernity took in the early twentieth century, especially in the United States, one of its major engine rooms. Among them, these: 'Why does a certain variety of modes of visualization seem to play such an important role?' and 'What place do specialist discourses, such as modernism within the visual arts, have in the broader imagery of modernity?' 6 You will have already spotted that this pairing,  and  the  pairings  within  each  question,  are  instances of  the  doubling  that  concerns  us  in  this  essay.  And  that  the autonomy of art in relation to a 'broader' (everyday, commercial, governmental) domain of imagery is presumed -in, however, a relative way. Any 'simple, deterministic equation between the Machine Age and Modernism' is denied. Instead, 'an iconology of modernity' is charted, within which, I argued, all producers of imagery worked:

By the later 1920s the iconography of Modern America seems to  coalesce  into  a  limited,  loose,  but  nonetheless  flexible and effective ensemble of images. Its elements, so constantly repeated, varied, approximated, so rarely violated, are readily listed: (1) the industrial plant and manufacturing worker (for example,  the  River  Rouge  and  the  assembly-line  worker); the agricultural site and the farm worker (the wheat silo and the sharecropper); (2) the vertical city and the crowd (almost always New York city and the Wall Street/Broadway crowd on the pavement); (3) the stylized product and the consumer (a  burgeoning  number  of  examples  of  great  structural similarity). 7

My gloss on these strands signalled my debt to Michel Foucault's brilliant dynamiting of historicism and ideological determinism by his focus during the 1970s on the dispersive structures of the micropolitics of power. 8

This  ensemble  figures -in  its  internal  relationships,  its productivity, its dominance over other structures -a 'regime of sense' of considerable power. It indicates the presence of a  visual  order  which  organizes  seeing  in  a  particular  way, despite  the  limited  scope  of  its  imagery  and  its  structural fragility. It not only reproduces in visual terms what I argue is  a  new  'regime of truth' in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s -that is, a new corporations/New deal consensus -but it was an active, constructive constituent of this regime and of the social formation on which it, in turn, was based. It grew from being an iconography -a repetition of images -to become an iconology… That is, these images and couplets, in their accelerating repetitions and predictable diversifications, secured increasingly ordered patterns of reading from those consuming them,  while  at  the  same  time  modifying  other modes, even displacing them, until the new regime of seeing became itself the norm. 9

While I now think I overplayed the political coherence of the 'new corporations/New Deal consensus,' I believe that the mapping of a visual imagery of modernity in the U.S. during those decades remains accurate. I traced the three major strands within this regime, beginning with the revisualization of manufacture as flow and assembly in the early Ford plants and culminating in the crowd-oriented spectacle of the New York World's Fair of 1939/40. This society-wide movement from base to superstructure (until the latter infused the base) was, I argued, the dynamic within which image makers of all kinds worked. The vertical/horizontal coupling in each of the three iconotypes, itself embodying a topdown distribution of power, was lateralized, recruiting image producers of all kinds while also affording them new forms of relative  autonomy.  For  example,  professional  artists  became trend-setting actors within each strand: Charles Sheeler, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Rockwell Kent were employed to create up-market advertisements for major manufacturers -respectively, the Ford Motor Company, Dole Fruit Company, and Vanity Fair -and to do so in the style that they employed in their art. On the government side, nationwide New Deal projects such as the Farm Security Administration employed several leading photographers -among them  Walker  Evans,  Margaret  Bourke-White,  and  Dorothea Lange -to  record  the  impacts  of  the  Depression  and  official efforts  to  alleviate  it,  and  to  do  so  by  bringing  to  bear  their sensibilities as independent artists, including their commitments to  a  critical  realism.  In  some  places,  revolutionary  political perspectives pitched themselves against these powerful regimes: notably, the visitors to Detroit, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. The third strand offered less resistance: the streamline aesthetics evolved by self-styled 'modernistic' industrial designers such as  Raymond Loewy, Walter Dorwin Teague, and Norman Bel Geddes  responded  to  a  situation  in  which  consumption  was becoming itself a prevailing mode of production. John Vassos was one of the few who deployed streamlining critically. Each of the strands, along with their increasing interaction over time, helped to weave the shared sensibility that underscored the 'regime of truth' then prevalent in US society. Each strand also contained those who struggled to establish a different 'politics of truth.' 10 The third strand prefigured the next wave of consumerism, which grew from post-war recovery.

## THE OCCLUSIONS OF SPECTACLE

By the late 1960s, Guy Debord was able to confidently pronounce that

The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles . All that once was directly lived has become mere representation. 11

This axiom, the opening words of his tract The Society of the Spectacle ,  rewrites  the  famous  opening  lines  of  Karl  Marx's Capital : 'The wealth of societies in which the capitalist system of production prevails presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities.' 12 Debord's first axiom launches a section of his text entitled 'Separation Perfected,' the sentiment expressed in the second sentence: dwelling in the incessant, awe-inspiring exhibition  of  imagery  that  consumes  all  of  us,  we  have  been separated  from  our  natural  modes  of  being;  we  live,  instead, in  a  world  of  misrepresentations,  enormously  attractive  but essentially  deceptive  images  whose  array  we  do  not  control, which is managed against our interests. The section ends with his second axiom: 'The Spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.' 13 The questionnaire does not mention capital(ism) but reaffirms the claim that the circulation of visual imagery has now become so pervasive that 'the social field' needs to be understood as primarily shaped by the workings of images.

Jean  Baudrillard  took  Debord's  analysis  one  step  further, arguing that in postmodern societies 'direct living' and 'natural experience' -to which Debord still appealed as the basis for true community -had become impossible in a world consisting entirely of hyperreal representations, that is, simulacra (primarily visual signs) of that which was once real. 14 These insights, while acute readings of the appearances and of the immediate experiences of contemporary life, mistake surface immediacy as the entirety of that life (having, of course, denied the distinction). The Gulf War did not take place: it was a media event. So, too, was 9/11. Insight into underlying causes is, by definition, blocked. Critique will always be absorbed, so it is pointless. Action for revolutionary change just feeds the monster. Capital is infinitely adaptable; humans are mired in mystification. Welcome to the desert of the irreal.

## ARCHITECTURE IN THE ICONOMY

There were other ways of reading the role of imagery in events such as 9/11 and of parsing their political implications. In The Architecture  of  Aftermath (2006),  I  set  out  to  chart  some  of them. 15 The targets on that day did not simply happen to be wellknown buildings. The World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington symbolized US economic and military power, while the likely targets of the third plane, the Capitol or the White House, symbolized the nation's governance. Images of these buildings had circulated in countless iterations throughout the world on multiple mediums, from official insignia through televised location shots, films, and tourist promotions to dollar bills.  For  much  of  the  time,  and  in  most  circumstances,  such symbolic connotations remain conventional and relatively benign, or, for those galled by the concentrated power which the symbols represent, untouchable. I recall, for example, while recovering from an illness in Athens during 2000, that the television reports on the Olympic Games began each afternoon and evening with an upbeat sequence that skipped, via schematic logos, from the original home of the Games, symbolized by the Parthenon, across Europe to the Eiffel Tower, followed by the London Bridge, over the Atlantic Ocean to the New York skyline and finally a long hop across the country and the Pacific Ocean to Sydney, where the Games were being held, evoked by an image of the Opera House. Universally  recognized  signs  for  cities,  linked  by  a  travelling torch,  immediately  suggested  an  international  community  of sports-loving nations. The imagery cemented itself in a full screen shot of the Olympic Games rings before becoming live to events in Sydney. An efficient and effective -in a word, economical -introduction to each broadcast.

A year or so earlier, I had discussed with Jacques Derrida his 1981 essay 'Economimesis.' 16 Derrida was not concerned with outlining a controlled, circulatory system of representation, as the  title  of  his  essay  might  imply  if  read  literally.  The  title  is typical of his penchant for contracting or aggregating existing terms in order to name the operations of a hitherto unnoticed conjunction  of  forces.  This  practice  prompted  my  simpler neologism for  the  image  economy:  'iconomy.'  His  essay  is  a penetrating study of how, in the Third Critique , Kant resolves the apparent contradiction between the pure creativity required by art that is freely made and freely appreciated and the demand that such creativity accord with the operations of nature itself. The economies of the various kinds of mercenary arts or the manual crafts -which  would,  projected  forward  in  time,  include  the televised sequence I just described -were of little interest to him. These arts existed mainly to point a contrast to 'free,' or fine arts. Derrida cites this key passage from the Critique [Section 45]:

In a product of the Fine-Arts, we must become conscious that it is art and not nature; but yet the purposiveness in its form must seem to be as free from all constraint of arbitrary rules as if it were a product of pure nature. On this freedom in the play of our cognitive faculties, which must at the same time be purposive, rests the pleasure which alone is universally communicable without the use of concepts. 17

Highlighting the 'as if' here, Derrida shows how Kant resolves the apparent contradiction:

Mimesis here is not the representation of one thing by another, the  relation  of  resemblance  or  identification  between  two beings, the reproduction of a product of nature by a product of  art.  It  is  not  the  relation  of  two  products  but  of  two productions. And of two freedoms. …The communicability of pure judgements of taste, the (universal, infinite, limitless) exchange  between  subjects  who  have  free  hands  in  the exercise or the appreciation of fine art, all that presupposes a commerce between the divine artist and the human one. And indeed this commerce is a mimesis , in the strict sense, a play, a mask, an identification with the other on stage, and not the imitation of an object by its copy. 'True' mimesis is between two producing subjects and not between two produced things. Implied by the whole third Critique , even though the explicit theme, even less the word itself, never appears, this kind of mimesis inevitably  entails  the  condemnation  of  imitation, which is always characterized as being servile. 18

Both  the  televised  announcement  and  these  reflections  might seem worlds away from the act of using icon-bearing airplanes (United,  American)  as  weapons  against  the  actually  existing structures upon which those city-signifiers ('icons') are based. Yet,  however  much  Osama  bin  Laden  may  have  had  in  mind the  rhetorical  and  propaganda  value  of  pursuing  an  updated version of the ancient practice of throwing one's troops against the walls of the enemy's citadels, the 9/11 attacks wreaked more than  symbolic  damage  upon  the  U.S.  economy,  military,  and government.  Financial  losses  were  huge,  a  chaotic  response by the Bush Administration deflated the myth of the U.S. as a 'hyperpower,' while inappropriate military overreach ('War on Terror') led to failures on all fronts, not least twenty years of futile war in Afghanistan. In the years around 2000, Al Qaeda was producing not simply 'media events' of the kind that had been generated for decades (by 1960, Daniel Boorstin was already labelling  them  'pseudo-events' 19 ),  it  was  conducting  warfare, with  icons  as  weapons.  This  was  occurring  within  an  image economy for which I proposed the name 'iconomy.' 20 Insisting that  we  were  dealing  with  much  more  than  'the  dense  image manipulation that prevails in cultures predicated on conspicuous and  incessant  consumption,'  I  remarked  that  'If  anyone required a demonstration of the immediate but also far-reaching significance of the realm of visual culture -in its distinctiveness but also entanglement with the politics, economics, and ecologies of  everyday  life -surely  9.11.01  was  it.' 21 As  the  world  media played out the scenario of a global clash of civilizations, it often became reduced to a battle between two stereotypical contestants, a mimesis enjoined by two masked but highly productive subjects: Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush. This shadow play was but one of its many resonances.

## VISUAL CULTURE

These resonances were subsequently explored by several others, including the pioneers of visual cultural studies, W.J.T. Mitchell and  Nicholas  Mirzoeff.  Mitchell's  2011  book Cloning  Terror: The War of Images from 9/11 to the Present deploys a method of image analysis he names, expanding Panofsky's more strictly art historical approach, 'iconology.'

Images, from an iconological standpoint, are both verbal and visual entities, both metaphors and graphic symbols. They are,  at  one  and  the  same  time,  concepts,  objects,  pictures, and symbolic forms. Some of them become operative forces in sociopolitical reality, attaining what is commonly known as  'iconic'  status -widely  recognizable,  and  provocative of powerful emotions. The figure of speech entailed in the phrase 'The War on Terror' was widely regarded as 'the most potent weapon in the battle for public opinion' waged by the Bush administration. The image of the Hooded Man of Abu Ghraib became a globally recognized icon 'more dangerous to American interests than any weapon of mass destruction.' 22

The  War  on  Terror  campaign  modelled  terrorism  as  the sociopolitical equivalent of a painful,  deadly  pandemic threatening to invade the body of the nation and all citizens within it. The Hooded Man image made explicit the fact that the US state was  miming  this  terrorist  figure  in  its  torturing  of  supposed terrorists. These mirrorings, and several parallels in then new forms of communication, above all social media, led Mitchell to see cloning as the current 'master metaphor or 'metapicture' of image-making itself.' 23 In his Watching Babylon, The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (2005), Mirzoeff develops a further set of similar readings, as does art historian Stephen F. Eisenman in his The Abu Ghraib Effect (2007). 24

While  image  regimes  were  generating  new  metapictures  (or 'hypericons' as Mitchell elsewhere names them) -as they must, to  stay  alive  as  compelling  responses  to  their  situations -the affective power of images has been measurably increasing. The thinking about images by each of these scholars find parallels in the methods being developed by the Bildwissenschaft project in Germany, led by Horst Bredekamp, in arguing that this change is  occurring and that its logics require definition. 25 Historical perspectives are common to all of these scholars, but they have been most extensively canvassed by Mirzoeff in his 2011 book The Right to Look: A Counter-History of Visuality . 26

He takes a post-national perspective drawn from post-colonial critique, showing that modern ways of world picturing ('visuality'), like modernity itself, were grounded in exploitation and exercised through violence. He charts a succession of dominant imaging regimes, each of which was, in turn, contested by a different way of seeing the world. During the 'Plantation Complex,' prevalent from  around  1660  to  1860,  overseers  controlled  sequential processes of production and large numbers of workers primarily by means of onsite oversight -always, of course, backed up by exemplary punishment. Slavery in the Americas was enforced in the same way. In the second phase, the 'Imperial Complex,' 1860 to 1945, European nations pursued their imperial ambitions, developing complex structures of visuality that ruled at home and abroad during times of constant warring between nations and between classes within them. Mirzoeff dubs the third phase the 'Military-Industrial Complex,' following President Dwight D. Eisenhower's warnings in his 1954 farewell address to the nation. If  we add advertising, entertainment and newscasting to these forces, we recognize this regime as having prevailed from 1945 to its peak around 1989. Since then, its power has been augmented by what Mirzoeff calls 'post-panoptic visuality,' that is, globalized systems of surveillance aimed at the gathering and management of information flows in order to secure the reign of neoliberalism, techno-capitalists, and, in several states, autocratic rulers.

Mirzoeff's  subtitle  is  'A  Counterhistory  of  Visuality.'  He posits a set of matching counter-visualities, that is, resistances to the dominant regimes that also took strong but distinct visual forms. He argues that the overseer's visuality that prevailed during the  plantation  years  was  opposed  by  'revolutionary  realism' in Europe, and, in Haiti especially, by what he calls 'abolition realism.'  Similarly,  he  suggests,  various  forms  of  indigenous countervisuality were developed to evade imperial visuality, and, when imperialism took on fascist dimensions during much of the mid- and later twentieth century, it was opposed by 'antifascist neorealism.' If the military-industrial complex favored 'aerial visualization,' it was countered by what Mirzoeff calls 'decolonial neorealism.'

While Mirzoeff's descriptions require more careful elaboration, and do not amount to an iconomics, they are a bold attempt at outlining  the  broad-scale  dialectic  of  the  visual  regimes  that structured modern iconomies and modern visuality more generally. These dominant regimes were not only colonialist, imperialist in orientation, they were also totalizing (or, at least hegemonic) in their ambitions, and predominantly masculinist, heteronormative, and racist in character.

In Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, Blackness (2011), Nicole F. Fleetwood demonstrates that, in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West, the presence of black subjects has always troubled prevailing regimes of visuality through the mere fact of their presence as distinct from the white preference that they be 'seen through,'  remain  in  their  place,  and  thus  'invisible.' 27 This relation  also  troubles -to  paraphrase  her  argument  mildly -black subjects as they come to occupy social positions that attract attention,  in,  for  example,  politics,  business,  entertainment, sports, or the arts. Many who do so become living icons, exemplary exceptions from white perspectives, pioneers of potential change for  the  better  from  black  perspectives.  Some  conform  to  the negative  paradigm  of  hypervisibility  (Michael  Jackson's  selfwhitening), many flout it by flaunting their blackness to deliberate excess (Malcolm X, Béyonce, Black Panther ), while others seek a middle path that emphasizes shared human experience (Oprah Winfrey, Barak Obama) or 'non-iconic' ordinariness (Bill Cosby, Charles 'Teenie' Harris). Still  others,  especially  artists  (Glen Ligon, Kerry James Marshall, Deana Johnson, Arthur Jafa), leave markers of the racism that they have overcome, or are overcoming, as 'visible seams' in their productions. In every case, the 'burden of  representation'  weighed,  or  continues  to  weigh,  heavily. Fleetwood  notes  (in  her  italics)  that  ' seeing  black  is  always  a problem in a visual field that structures the troubling presence of blackness .' 28 A powerful recent demonstration is the exhibition originally  conceived by Okwui Enwezor, Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, presented at the New Museum, New York, in 2021. 29

## INSIDE THE IMAGE WARS

I share Mirzoeff's belief that, today, the current dominant regime, that of globalized, extractive, 'post-panoptic visuality,' is being countered  by  what  he  calls  'planetary  visualization' -that  is, ways of seeing that bring together awareness of the vast scope and deep time of planetary processes (aka world picturing) with urgent  action  in  the  present  in  order  to  build  small  scale  but worldwide  coeval  communality  among  humans,  animals  and things. This spirit inspires the intersectional protest movements, which announced themselves in the anti-globalization rallies in Seattle in 2000 and have surged, intermittently but insistently, since then. The interaction of this 'activist imaginary' with larger image flows has been named 'the image complex,' a 'political field' constituted by images. 30 These densely networked images surged again in 2020, especially since the posting of the video of the murder of George Floyd on May 25. Led by the imagery of Black Lives Matter, they have erupted frequently since then, their variety proliferating -from yellow umbrellas in Hong Kong, inflated rubber ducks in Thailand, to three fingered salutes from the Game of Thrones in Myanmar -their constancy increasing as people push back against oppressive regimes, both sides knowing that these are the end games.

Amidst  the  plethora  of  imagery  that  swarmed,  during  the summer  of  2020,  on  all  the  mediums  that  carry  the  constant construction  of  the  world's  self-picturing,  three  constellations stood  out  from  the  usual  business  of  depicting  everyday  life, selling  commodities,  enacting  governmentality,  and  showing natural forces undergoing global warming. These were: graphic imagery of the coronavirus and its national and global spread, plus filming of its effects in hospitals, at testing sites, and on crowds, masked and not; the events staged by Donald J. Trump across a variety of mediums; and the cut-through impact of the cell phone video of a police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd as the latter died. The first announced information about the current and future state of the global pandemic. The second acted as the volatile epicentre of vast tracts of political and cultural agendasetting, both in the United States and across its world-wide reach. The third brought to the boil a social struggle that is profoundly shifting  relationships  between  the  races,  and  those  between citizens and police, in the US and elsewhere. The ways in which these three constellations of images interacted -and cut through the other memes jostling for attention in the image economy -continue to resonate and will have far-reaching implications for some time to come. 31 These constellations constituted warring image  regimes,  a  system-wide  iconoclash,  that  are  subtended by  Mirzoeff's  historical  narrative  of  visualities  and  countervisualities.

## ICONOMY

In  today's  globalized  world,  the  most  glaringly  obvious  fact about visual imagery is its quantitative increase. It is generated and  reproduced  in  ever  more  varied  ways  on  more  and  more platforms and is more widely disseminated than ever before. It is orthodoxy to claim that imagery, particularly visual imagery, was and continues to be a major driving force in the modernization of most societies, and that in most it has reached saturation point. As of October 28, 2020, Instagram users had uploaded 50 billion photographs, at a current rate of 995 each second. 500 hours of video  are  uploaded  to  YouTube  each  minute.  Facebook  users post 350 million photographs each day, at the rate of 4,000 per second, and there are 4 billion video viewings each day on the platform. 4.5 billion photos and 1 billion videos are shared on WhatsApp. WeChat users send 205 million video messages each day. Across these sites, billions of people spend some hours each day  on  making,  posting,  and  consuming  images. 32 What  was in the 1920s a first wave of image production and consumption, which became tidal by the 1960s, is now a constant tsunami. In his The Supermarket of the Visible: Towards a General Economy of Images (2019), Peter Szendy makes this his starting point for an analysis parallel to mine, one which also uses the concept of iconomy. Although his major focus is on film, he, too -in his case,  following  Marx  of  the 1844 Manuscripts ,  Mondzian  on image economies, and Deleuze on cinema -seeks to profile the largest economy, that is, the world. He asks a version of the same question we have been pursuing:

Is there a market of the visible that would precede, that would exceed, the commerce of images in the supposedly strict sense of the word? Is there a bigger market, an arche-economy, of images, in other words, a super- or hyper-market of visibility that would be the counterpart (the 'reverse') of the metacinema that for Deleuze is the world? 33

That the internet, initially a communication system internal to the U.S. military, then offered as a free public good, as genuinely social media, has been thoroughly monetized is simply the most evident  fact  about  its  evolution.  Yet  while  the  numbers  about social media usage are overwhelming, and the ever-expanding, apparently chaotic, tsunami of imagery being exchanged seems unstoppable, we should not be blinded to the new normalcy that is establishing itself inside the flow, against it, and alongside it -even as the flow rushes to fill every space, including those we can't see and those we might try to visualize. Its horror vacuii voids  every  spatial  metaphor  we  attempt  to  strike.  Perhaps this, as much as the sheer impossibility of imagining the vast quantities of pictures now in circulation, accounts for the curious emptiness of those artworks that literally display its quantitative presence: Erik Kessel's 24 Hours in Photos (2014), and even aspects of Thomas Hirschhorn's installation Crystal of Resistance in the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011.

But the Flood (Biblical metaphor) itself cannot resist analysis, least  of  all  that  which  serves  its  inner  normalcy  by  describing its rules of operation. The mistake is to take every instance as equally significant and potentially lasting, as if the world was a constantly self-replenishing supermarket of things and images. The exclusionary violence driving the  iconomy means that all but a few of its instant attractors prove themselves to be of any importance  at  all.  In The Rules of Contagion (London:  Profile Books, 2020), Adam Kucharski surveys studies of internet usage which  consistently  show  that  'content  rarely  goes  far  without broadcast events to amplify it.' 34 He shows that almost all postings are not read by anyone or anything but the network that moves them; most are read by only one other user, once or twice; those that  become  viral  do  so  mostly  because  media  outlets  or  wellknown personalities  have  boosted  them. 35 Such  extraordinary wastage means that effectiveness, for politicians, advertisers, and 'influencers,' depends less on the inherent interest and relevance of the story than on the constancy of their posting of stories that might precipitate 'cascades.' It may be that Donald J. Trump's unprecedented online presence owed as much to his indefatigable energy as a poster as to his long-term status as a celebrity and to the importance of his position as President of the United States. Similarly, online platforms must devote much of their design efforts to attracting users as often as possible (in the U.S., cell phones are opened on average 80 times each day) and keeping them online for as long as possible. Constant, small-scale, low level connections are the basis of their cash flow. Perhaps the true degradation of imagery these days is to be found here, especially when we recall Sartre's premise that images are always a form of consciousness, initially unreflective but potentially richly reflective, to the point of being essential to individual and social freedom. 36

Yet the video of the killing of George Floyd cut through the dazzling din of everyday emergency, standing out even among the regular stream of images of young black men brutalized by white police. It showed the deadly logic which underscored such imagery, which is usually glimpsed in short segments, if shown at all, or quickly scrolled past. It showed, too, the necropolitics of all policing in divided societies. It precipitated a world-wide outburst of protest, amplified by the organized display of Black Lives Matter and similar imagery. Its ramifications continue to resonate.  One  is  that  it  brushed  aside  the  sense -widespread, paradoxically,  in  artworlds -that  visual  imagery  in  general  is becoming inevitably more enervated. The same recognition of the power of imagery is true for the spread of the COVID-19 iconotype and its associated visual messaging. These images may be about 'bare life,' but they are not weak. 37 They remind us just how fragile a matter it is to live a full life, even to aspire to one. The imagery of racial injustice and of the pandemic is not simulated. It is rooted in truth-telling about life and death. It leads us, or should lead us, despite being told that we live in a 'post-truth' era, straight to acting in truth's interest. 38

The  questionnaire  is  also  concerned  about  the  increasing integration of 'operational images and machine vision' within the 'contemporary image-space' (yet another phrase for the iconomy). Already  in  2016,  in  their  introduction  to The  Contemporary Condition book series, Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund emphasized the importance of investigating 'the significant role of media and information technology in the production and reproduction of  contemporaneity.' 39 They  commended  Benjamin  Bratton's argument  that  the  many,  seemingly  various,  contemporary computational technologies are less 'so many different genres of  machines,  spinning  out  on  their  own,'  but  instead  form  a planetary-scale 'accidental megastructure' consisting of several layers -user, interface, address, city, cloud, earth -with multiple connections between them, which he names The Stack. 40 This is an insightful image, a strong candidate for the most recent world picture. The last term, 'earth,' is also the first, reminding us that this structure is located in the physical world with which its virtual workings always 'blur.' Imagining the conditions for the Stack-to-come (the 'Black Stack'), he poses these questions:

Our  experiment -indeed  everyone's  experiment  for  the coming  decades -is  tied  to  an  ecologically  ubiquitous computing,  a  gamble  that  in  many  ways  underpins  all others.  The  Stack-to-come  should  tilt  the  outcome  of  that impact towards a renewed modernity, but will it -in  some configuration of Clouds , objects, tags, Addresses , Interfaces , sensors, algorithmic phyla -provide the lightness necessary to organize a restorative, subtractive, resilient modernity, or will its voracious energy appetite, toxic production footprint, and  alienating  visualization  finally  overwhelm  all?  …Will planetary-scale  pervasive  computing  prove  to  be,  in  some guise, the integral media of real reindustrialization, allowing for light but powerful interfaces of governance and exchange, or instead, the final, most unsustainable machine consuming the remaining resources into its subterranean pits? 41

Towards the end of The Stack , Bratton raises but downplays the implication that these machines, whichever direction they may lean,  might  eventually  become  indifferent  to  the  priorities  of their human masters. Gaia theorist James Lovelock has recently argued that, with innovation as the driving force of planetary evolution, and with computational machines now generating most innovation and most likely continuing to do so exponentially, the  biosphere will promote cyborg interrelationships between machine and humans as a means of maintaining the balances that it requires to sustain itself (that is, to sustain the life of all of its elements in productive equilibrium). 42

Visual images, imagery, imagining: what forms do each of these take in these circumstances? How will they change as the world changes?

## ICONOMICS

If  we  can  envisage  the  flow  of  images  as  having  become,  in contemporary conditions, a self-managing, externally negotiating system -an  economy  of  iconicity,  an iconomy -and  if  we recognize that this iconomy operates in a real world as disposed to contestation as it is to construction -thus generating the creation and  sustaining  of  powerful image regimes as  well  as  repeated iconoclashes (not  iconoclasm, the waging of campaigns to obliterate imagery as such, rather the conducting of campaigns between competing image regimes) -then how might we name all these relations as an area of research, analysis, and critique? 43 Several well-established disciplines actually undertake such work without naming it, except perhaps as topic, at most a subfield. Among the humanities: art history, cultural studies, museum studies, history. Among the sciences:  studies  of  visual  perception,  psychology, sociology, media studies, communications, behavioural science, economics of culture. Assuming it be to a humanistic, social  science -or,  better,  supplementing  these,  a  post-human, deconstructive inquiry -some names have already been proposed. As we have seen already, names of the mode of inquiry mix with those for the object of study: 'A science of seeing,' 'Word and image studies,' 'Visual culture,' 'Visual Studies,' 'Image science ( Bildwissenschaft ).' If the iconomy is, or has become, a pervasive economy, an internally dynamic but also embedded system that is fundamental to human (and perhaps animal) societies, to machinic communication, and to natural reproduction, then why not name its study according to its object: Iconomics .

'Iconomy' is obviously a play upon 'economy,' itself drawn from the Greek word οἰκονόμος (literally, 'household management'), a composite word derived from οἶκος ('house; household; home')

and νέμω ('manage; distribute; to deal out; dispense'). Substituting εἰκών or eik ṓ n ('image', 'resemblance') for οἶκος , while retaining νέ μ ω ,  gives  us  a  word  for  the  image  economy,  an  economy  in which images have become capital, thus iconomy .  'Iconomics,' obviously,  echoes  the  well-established  if  always  controversial (rarely dreary) discipline of economics. 44

Of course, like every name, 'iconomics' is already taken. Google searches of in print material most often turn up typed texts in which the 'E' in the word 'Economics' has been degraded, such that the machine misreads it as 'I'. (An interesting indicator that machines talking to each other are, like humans doing the same thing, quite capable of generating and multiplying misunderstandings.) A 1996 publication, World Wide Web Yellow Pages , a directory of terms to be found on the Internet at that time -as a print publication now  wildly  anachronistic -lists  a  now  redundant  URL  for  a company named Iconomics that describes itself as 'Your global illustration resource for graphics design via modem, mail, ftp, or floppy disc. Provides links to custom art, images, ordering, prices, and policy information.' 45 This is likely an early iteration of Iconomics Inc., a Toronto-based software development and design  company  that  has,  its  website  claims,  been  'dedicated to  implementing  Enterprise  Performance  Management  (EPM), Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Warehousing (DW) solutions since 1995.' 46 In 2019, the name was adopted by The Iconomics, a Jakarta-based company offering a variety of business information and brand-management services, with this mission:

The  Iconomics  is  established  by  professionals  that  have experience in integrated media. Our mission is to share business analysis and information to our readers. W e want to take part in advancing the economy of Indonesia by delivering news and macro economy analytsys. W e  are  the  media  platform  that people need. W e do share good news to our readers but we also share reliable business forecast. We are the alternative media that give information that readers actually need to know. 47

As its descriptor 'Leading Disruption Economy' suggests, and its web presence shows, this enterprise is a pure product of imported, adaptive  globalization.  It  also  exemplifies  every  danger  that adopting, despite instant qualifications and caveats, the word 'iconomics' for the kind of thinking we need to undertake might afford -not least, providing yet another professional service to rampant neoliberal globalization. Obviously, I do not propose its adoption in this form, or in any form susceptible to such usage. Rather,  I  see  it  as  a  placeholder  for  a  critical  project  around iconicity that may name itself differently -if and when it does.

Being caught within the image world of globalized neoliberalism and surveillance capitalism does not, however, mean submitting to  its  commodification  and  monetarization  of  all  relations, including the exchanges of imagery we have been exploring. Of the three image regimes that warred during 2020 and 2021, the one driven by Donald J. Trump was thoroughly commodified, but the COVID-19 campaigns and reporting was only partly so (sales of vaccines), and the imagery of BLM and intersectional resistance coalesced around the recognition of difference and the coalition of differentiations that prefigure another social and economic order.

Due in large part to its proclivity toward overreach, but also as a result of such resistances, capitalism as we have known it has arrived at its zombie incarnations, ready to haunt a future that could be even worse than the world it has afforded to date. 48 As I have been insisting throughout, historical trajectories need to be traced, causes identified and operative structures exposed, as always when we wish to see our contemporaneity more clearly. This is what the projects discussed in this essay have been doing all along, and continue to do so, as the warring between those who embrace their planetary responsibility and those who reject it moves into its decisive phase.

## PRINCIPLES OF ICONOMY

All of which leads to some tentative suggestions, in much need of development, urgently. We have seen, throughout this review of  broad  scale  conceptions  of  images  and  imagery,  icons  and iconicity, some basic principles at work. A sketch…

The most obvious is the movement by which single images become singular, attracting the descriptor 'iconic,' that is, invested with significance  in  ways  analogous  to  the  worship  of  a  religious icon. Iconic images are those widely recognized as representing particular generalities: certain ideas, practices, places, peoples, events, processes, products, companies, historical periods, ways of life, nations, even entire categories of human experience.

In doing so, at the same time, they push aside other, similar imagery that strives to represent the same or closely similar ideas, practices, places, peoples, events, etc.

The iconicity of particular images is established through initial incarnation but mostly through insistent repetition followed by variation  within  a  relatively  narrow  range.  Differentiation  is abhorred, but it does not disappear. It is the constant ground of resistance to iconicity's tendency towards exclusion.

Iconic images, when they gather sufficient force to become central to an image regime, displace imagery of other places, peoples, events etc. that seek prominence in the visual field, the iconomy, the domain in which interests and forces of all kinds compete to be seen, to be heard within public discourse, to occupy the subjective imaginations of individuals and the imaginaries of societies.

This domain is mostly structured in ways that echo the dispositions of economic, social, political, and cultural power in any given society,  in  its  region,  and  in  the  world  geopolitical  (dis)order. Disposition here includes top-down, bottom-up, lateral movements, floods, viruses, and ubiquitous micropowers.

Images flow through structures that have been developed, over centuries,  to  make  them  visible,  to  exhibit  them,  to  attract attention to them. Festivals, carnivals, parades, theatres, public squares, meeting halls, shops, markets, trade fairs, expositions, museums,  galleries,  billboards,  department  stores,  malls, cinemas, broadcast then cable television, screens of all kinds. The  multiple  exchanges  across  this  ever-expanding  but  also always localized network operate as an exhibitionary iconomy. 49

Specialist representational practices, such as the visual arts, have developed distinctive sets of platforms for the showing, assessment, interpretation and circulation of their products. These are the nodal points of artworlds, or visual arts exhibitionary complexes. 50

Most imagery within capitalist societies is, like all other forms of exchange, commodified. Most imagery within authoritarian societies serves as propaganda for the ruling order. Most imagery within theocracies articulates the ruling narratives of faith and belief. Repetition and variation, again and again, over and over… haunted by a fear of differentiation, which also keeps reasserting itself.

Image regimes emerge, compete, some may achieve prominence, even predominance for a time, then they recede, not disappear but become residual, as others emerge to play through the same cycle. There is, however, nothing natural or regular or predictable about this: it is a matter of accumulated weight, of momentum, disrupted by contingency, always.

Against the grain, some modes of representation seek to reshape these  hierarchies  and  counter-hierarchies  into  a  plane  of appearance that would approximate closer to a level playing field, using dispersive imagery to build diversity, concurrence and, at best, community. 51

Within each of these tendencies, so many nuances, degrees and kinds of conformity, neutrality, dissensus.

World  pictures,  meta-geographies,  mapping  strategies…these have  been  surprisingly  few:  Indigenous  Creation  stories  that register the actions of Originary Beings as an eternal recurrence in the environment as it is lived now; Babylonian cities surrounded by the rest of the world; ancient and early modern China as the Middle Kingdom; the Great Chain of Being in Medieval Europe; continents and oceans during the Age of Exploration; the centers and colonies of empires; Blue Earth; Google Earth; The Stack…

Meta-pictures,  hypericons,  are  also  few.  The tabula  rasa , Plato's cave, Aristotle's wax tablet, Locke's dark room, Marx's camera obscura, Freud's mystic writing pad, Sartre's keyhole, Wittgenstein's hieroglyphic, Derrida's pharmakon…

And then there are the several kinds of imagery mobilized by art…which stand to each and all of these principles in relations of surplus, exception, excess, occlusion, and obliquity.

TERRY SMITH is Andrew W. Mellon  Professor  of  Contemporary  Art  History  and  Theory  in  the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh, and Professor in the Division of Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought at the European Graduate School. He is Faculty at Large in the Curatorial Program of the School of Visual Arts, New York. Smith is the author of a number of books, most recently Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2019) and Curating the Complex, The Open Strike (Sternberg and MIT Press, 2021).

1. W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 5. Mitchell is citing the edition of Sartre's Imagination: A Psychological Critique (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), 3.
2. McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street: the Everyday Life and the Glorious Times of the Situationist International (London: Verso, 2011).
3. On the necessity of keeping in focus the entire 'family of images' while undertaking such analyses, see Mitchell, Iconology , 9-14. And on mental images see also JeanPaul Sartre, The Imaginary [1940] (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). In this context, we are reminded that looking is an act of exchange with that which is looked at, or remembered, or thought about, during which images appear, less as entities that are seen, more as those that are sensed.
4. The classic study of this relation is Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (London: Routledge, 1992). For an example of its operations in a particular setting, that of the Yolŋu people of the Northern Territory of Australia, see Howard Morphy, Ancestral Connections: Art and An Aboriginal System of Knowledg e (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
5. These arguments are advanced by Marie-José Mondzian, Image, Icon, Economy; The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary [1996], trans. R. Franses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).
6. Terry Smith, Making the Modern: Industry, Art, and Design in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 6.
7. Smith, Making the Modern , 7.
8. Announced in Discipline and Punish, The Birth of the Prison [1975], trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), the clearest statement can be found in 'The political function of the intellectual' [1976] trans. C. Gordon, Radical Philosophy , no. 17 (Summer, 1977): 12-14. Art historians will recognize my debt to Erwin Panofsky, whose iconography to iconology method for interpreting Western art in the Renaissance tradition, charted in the introduction to his Meaning in the Visual Arts [1955] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), I have socialized.
9. Smith, Making the Modern , 7-8.
10.  Foucault, 'The political function of the intellectual,' 14. Jacques Rancière's 'partition of the sensible' and 'aesthetic regimes' are glosses on Foucault's insights.
11.  Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle [1967], trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 12.
12.  Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy , vol. 1 [1867], trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications: 2019), 41.
13.  Debord, The Society of the Spectacle , 24.
14.  Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects [1968], trans. J. Benedict (London: Verso, 1996); Simulacra and Simulation , trans. S. Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994); and The Gulf War Did Not Take Place , trans. P. Patton (Sydney: Power Publications, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).
15. The Architecture of Aftermath (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
16.  Jacques Derrida, 'Economimesis,' trans. R. Klein, Diacritics , vol. 11, no. 2 (Summer, 1981): 2-25.
17.   Section 45, cited Derrida, 'Economimesis,' 9.
18.  Derrida, 'Economimesis,' 9. The 'divine artist' in this passage is, of course, Nature itself.
19.  Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America [1962] (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2012).
20.  Smith, 'After Effects - Architecture, Iconomy, Contemporaneity,' the introduction to The Architecture of Aftermath , 1-16.
21.  Smith, The Architecture of Aftermath , 2.
22.  W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images from 9/11 to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), xvii.
23.  Mitchell, Cloning Terror , xiv.
24.  Nicholas Mirzoeff, Watching Babylon, The war in Iraq and global visual culture (New York and London: Routledge, 2005); Stephen F. Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion Books, 2007).
25.  On hypericons, see Mitchell, Iconology , 6, and his Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 49. On image affect, see W.J.T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). On the bildwissenschaft project, see Horst Bredekamp, Image Acts: A Systematic Approach to Image Agency , trans. E. Clegg (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2018).
26.  Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
27.   Nicole F. Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
28.  Fleetwood, Troubling Vision , 4.
29.  Okwui Enwezor, Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America (London: Phaidon for The New Museum, New York, 2020).
30.  Meg McLagan and Yates McKee, 'Introduction,' Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Politics (New York: Zone Books, 2012), 8.
31.  I develop this analysis in The Image Wars 2020-2021: Contestation, Contagion, Concurrence , forthcoming.
32.  Data drawn from statistics sites, such as that of Omnicore for Facebook at https://www.omnicoreagency. com/facebook-statistics/, accessed May 26, 2021.
33.  Peter Szendy, The Supermarket of the Visible: Towards a General Economy of Images , trans. J. Plug (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), 8-9. See also his lecture at the European Graduate School, August 9, 2019, at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=d4vpruhRTIA, accessed May 26, 2021, and The Supermarket of Images , eds. Emmanuel Alloa, Marta Ponza and Peter Szendy (Paris: Gallimard/Jeu de Paume, 2020).
34.  Adam Kucharski, The Rules of Contagion (London: Profile Books, 2020), 208.
35.  Kucharski, The Rules of Contagion , 181-2.
36.  This is the main thrust of his The Imaginary [1940], see note 3.

37.   These paradoxes are illuminatingly explored by Hito Steyerl, 'In defence of the poor image,' e-flux journal , #19 (November 2009), at https://www.e-flux.com/ journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/, accessed May 26, 2021.
38.  Terry Smith, 'Truth in Transition: As the Decade Breaks,' in Fabricating Publics: The dissemination of culture in the post-truth era , eds. Bill Balaskas and Carolina Rito (Liverpool: DATA browser series, Open Humanities Press, in partnership with Exhibition Research Lab, Liverpool John Moores University, 2021).
39.  Geoff Cox & Jacob Lund, The Contemporary Condition: Introductory Thoughts on Contemporaneity and Contemporary Art (Berlin: Sternberg, 2016), 25. See also Yasmin Ibrahim, Politics of Gaze: The Image Economy Online (Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge, 2020).
40.  Benjamin H. Bratton, 'The Black Stack,' e-flux journal , no. 53 (March 2014), at https://www.e-flux.com/ journal/53/59883/the-black-stack/, accessed May 26, 2021.
41.  Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 356.
42.  James Lovelock (with Brian Appleyard), Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence (London: Allen Lane, 2019).
43.  On iconoclash more specifically, see Bruno Latour, 'What is Iconoclash? Or Is There a World Beyond the Image Wars?', in Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art , eds. Bruno Latour, Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, for ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2002).

̱

44.  Another common Greek word, omoío ma , evokes less the sense of an icon, more that of a likeness that is an effigy, a simulation, a mockup of some kind.  When it comes to the contemporary spectacle as defined for us by Debord, Baudrillard and many others, we might need, then, a word closer to omoniomy . If we wanted to evoke the constant foregrounding of the imagery of humanity within many image economies, we could use the spelling homoniomy . This association requires more thought re the predominance of logos during the later C20th, but it resonates in the imagery of celebrities, which is clearly centered around particular individuals, even though they must behave like gods to maintain their presence.
45. New Rider's Official World Wide Web Yellow Pages (Indianapolis: New Riders Pub., 1996), 478.
46.  See http://www.iconomics-inc.com/company.html, accessed May 26, 2021.
47.   See https://www.theiconomics.com/about-us/, accessed May 26, 2021.
48.  McKenzie Wark, Capital is Dead. Is This Something Worse? (London: Verso, 2019).
49.  I discuss this in more detail, and in relation to Tony Bennett's concept of the modern 'exhibitionary complex,' in my EGS lecture of August 19, 2019, 'Exhibitionary Times: Art against Spectacle,' at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8mvqnMat3M, accessed May 26, 2021. Benjamin's emphasis on 'exhibitionary value' is an important step in the accumulation of theory about the image economy. See Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
7. Reproducibility' (1936), trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings , vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
50.  See Terry Smith, Curating the Complex, The Open Strike (Berlin: Sternberg Press; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021).
51.  In 'Defining Contemporaneity: Imagining Planetarity,' Nordic Journal of Aesthetics , vols. 49-50 (2015): 156174, I set out a planomenal framework within which these principles should be understood as located.