ICONOMY, ICONOCLASH ≠ ICONOMICS

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.

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. 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 somemore 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 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 livingit 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

HISTORICAL PROSPECT
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 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 well- 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. 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.

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. 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 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? 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.

ICONOMICS
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 eikṓn ("image", "resemblance") for οἶκος, while retaining νέμω, 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". The Iconomics is established by professionals that have experience in integrated media. Our mission is to share business analysis and information to our readers. We want to take part in advancing the economy of Indonesia by delivering news and macro economy analytsys. We are the media platform that people need. We 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.
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 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.