Distracted, Indebted Gazes
Peter Szendy, trans. Jan Plug, The Supermarket of the Visible: Toward a General Economy of Images
Fordham University Press, 160pp, $30.00, ISBN 9780823283576
reviewed by Calum Watt
The Supermarket of the Visible is a path-breaking new book on the relation between images and money. Peter Szendy is a musicologist, philosopher and professor of comparative literature at Brown University. This short book consists of three film theory lectures originally given in Sydney in 2014, followed by further brief texts named ‘additional features’ or ‘deleted scenes’. Szendy’s book was originally published in French by Éditions de Minuit at the end of 2017 and immediately attracted interest in French film and intellectual circles. The Paris gallery Jeu de Paume has invited Szendy to curate an exhibition based on the book, opening in October. Thanks to a fine translation of Szendy’s intricate prose, Anglophone readers can now also enjoy this book.
The core proposition of Szendy’s book is that images can be seen as circulating currency forming an economy or ‘iconomy’. This connection between images and money goes back at least to the minting of coins in the Byzantine era. Within this framework, Szendy offers three intertwined theses: money is ‘lodged in [film’s] innermost texture’; our experience of the visual is increasingly cinematic; and in our image-saturated world today, seeing is itself commodified and reality has become a ‘supermarket of the visible’. The first thesis is developed through an interpretation of a line from the philosopher Gilles Deleuze: ‘Money is the reverse of all the images that cinema shows and edits on the front’.
The stakes of this quotation are unpacked and unfolded in Szendy’s opening chapter by way of an ingenious reading of a sequence thematising money from the television series The Sopranos, spliced together with analysis of shots from Robert Bresson’s classic film Pickpocket (1959). Szendy is not talking about the financing of films or sales, but rather is making a deconstructive argument that film consists in the circulation of images within a wider iconomy. He argues that images are only filmic insofar as they can be exchanged with each other, and this filmic principle of exchange-value is already pre-programmed into photographs and even medieval frescos. Szendy’s argument proceeds through readings of films by Brian de Palma, Michelangelo Antonioni, King Kong (1933 and 2005), Google Street View, and a wide variety of other images. The book’s mise-en-page is inventive, illustrated with screengrabs of film images as well as small boxes that link moments in the main text to the ‘deleted scenes’.
The way cinema has grafted itself into our gaze is the subject of the third and longest chapter, where Szendy discusses the German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘innervation’. This concept refers to the paradoxical process by which a medium aspires to immediacy or direct contact with its viewer through another medium. In the 1920s, Benjamin dreamt of a space full of images, in which images would be the very matter of the world: immediate, performative and able to directly ‘touch’ people. Szendy thinks this is now our world. By ‘innervating the filmic mechanism’, we have also transported the market into our vision, creating an image-space full of distracted, indebted gazes. Through a brief history of elevators and escalators and their place in department stores and in cinema, Szendy shows how these motors mobilise the gaze like a tracking shot, thus operating the cinematisation of seeing. This cinematic, commercial way of seeing stays with us when we leave the shopping mall, thus making our world a supermarket of the visible. At one point Szendy places a scrollbar on the page, like the one at the right of your screen, to show how we are all operating little elevators, little tracking cameras.
Perhaps the most obvious book to compare with Szendy’s is one he himself mentions, The Cinematic Mode of Production (2006) by the American film theorist Jonathan Beller, which posits cinema as the name for how, in the 20th century, global capital took the form of media images to capture and capitalise social relations and the imagination, to the point now that looking and attention are paradigms for the creation of financial value. In the West, surplus value is no longer made on the factory assembly line, but in the considerable amount of time we spend looking at screens: it is now ‘surplus view’. Szendy does not mention social media, and only briefly smartphones, but they clearly demonstrate the logic of his argument.
While both draw on Marx’s idea that our sense organs are constructed by socio-economic relations, Szendy’s account of ‘the monetization and commodification of seeing’ is much less pessimistic than Beller’s. For Beller, our situation is one of capitalist exploitation and mass alienation. Szendy, however, hesitates as to whether the marketisation and cinematisation of the visible is growing or whether we are merely witnessing an underlying structure reveal itself. He tucks into a parenthesis at the beginning of the book the most – to borrow one of his favourite words – ‘abyssal’ possibility of his argument: ‘perhaps it is the intrinsically exchangist quality of sensibility or sensationality, perhaps it is this exchange market that is always already there within the sensible that makes possible what we will have to describe as its unprecedented commodification in the era of globalized capitalism’.
If the market is ‘always already there’ inside our psyche, structuring our sensibility and imagination, then cinematic media are not the ‘corruption’ of a ‘supralapsarian’ state of seeing, as Szendy characterises Beller’s position. Nor then can aesthetics ever be done with economics. In a post-crash world where our economic model is in question and needs to be re-founded, Szendy’s book shows why artists and non-economic thinkers need to engage more with economic questions. For my money, it’s the most exciting piece of film theory in years.
The core proposition of Szendy’s book is that images can be seen as circulating currency forming an economy or ‘iconomy’. This connection between images and money goes back at least to the minting of coins in the Byzantine era. Within this framework, Szendy offers three intertwined theses: money is ‘lodged in [film’s] innermost texture’; our experience of the visual is increasingly cinematic; and in our image-saturated world today, seeing is itself commodified and reality has become a ‘supermarket of the visible’. The first thesis is developed through an interpretation of a line from the philosopher Gilles Deleuze: ‘Money is the reverse of all the images that cinema shows and edits on the front’.
The stakes of this quotation are unpacked and unfolded in Szendy’s opening chapter by way of an ingenious reading of a sequence thematising money from the television series The Sopranos, spliced together with analysis of shots from Robert Bresson’s classic film Pickpocket (1959). Szendy is not talking about the financing of films or sales, but rather is making a deconstructive argument that film consists in the circulation of images within a wider iconomy. He argues that images are only filmic insofar as they can be exchanged with each other, and this filmic principle of exchange-value is already pre-programmed into photographs and even medieval frescos. Szendy’s argument proceeds through readings of films by Brian de Palma, Michelangelo Antonioni, King Kong (1933 and 2005), Google Street View, and a wide variety of other images. The book’s mise-en-page is inventive, illustrated with screengrabs of film images as well as small boxes that link moments in the main text to the ‘deleted scenes’.
The way cinema has grafted itself into our gaze is the subject of the third and longest chapter, where Szendy discusses the German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘innervation’. This concept refers to the paradoxical process by which a medium aspires to immediacy or direct contact with its viewer through another medium. In the 1920s, Benjamin dreamt of a space full of images, in which images would be the very matter of the world: immediate, performative and able to directly ‘touch’ people. Szendy thinks this is now our world. By ‘innervating the filmic mechanism’, we have also transported the market into our vision, creating an image-space full of distracted, indebted gazes. Through a brief history of elevators and escalators and their place in department stores and in cinema, Szendy shows how these motors mobilise the gaze like a tracking shot, thus operating the cinematisation of seeing. This cinematic, commercial way of seeing stays with us when we leave the shopping mall, thus making our world a supermarket of the visible. At one point Szendy places a scrollbar on the page, like the one at the right of your screen, to show how we are all operating little elevators, little tracking cameras.
Perhaps the most obvious book to compare with Szendy’s is one he himself mentions, The Cinematic Mode of Production (2006) by the American film theorist Jonathan Beller, which posits cinema as the name for how, in the 20th century, global capital took the form of media images to capture and capitalise social relations and the imagination, to the point now that looking and attention are paradigms for the creation of financial value. In the West, surplus value is no longer made on the factory assembly line, but in the considerable amount of time we spend looking at screens: it is now ‘surplus view’. Szendy does not mention social media, and only briefly smartphones, but they clearly demonstrate the logic of his argument.
While both draw on Marx’s idea that our sense organs are constructed by socio-economic relations, Szendy’s account of ‘the monetization and commodification of seeing’ is much less pessimistic than Beller’s. For Beller, our situation is one of capitalist exploitation and mass alienation. Szendy, however, hesitates as to whether the marketisation and cinematisation of the visible is growing or whether we are merely witnessing an underlying structure reveal itself. He tucks into a parenthesis at the beginning of the book the most – to borrow one of his favourite words – ‘abyssal’ possibility of his argument: ‘perhaps it is the intrinsically exchangist quality of sensibility or sensationality, perhaps it is this exchange market that is always already there within the sensible that makes possible what we will have to describe as its unprecedented commodification in the era of globalized capitalism’.
If the market is ‘always already there’ inside our psyche, structuring our sensibility and imagination, then cinematic media are not the ‘corruption’ of a ‘supralapsarian’ state of seeing, as Szendy characterises Beller’s position. Nor then can aesthetics ever be done with economics. In a post-crash world where our economic model is in question and needs to be re-founded, Szendy’s book shows why artists and non-economic thinkers need to engage more with economic questions. For my money, it’s the most exciting piece of film theory in years.