Towards a General Iconomy

What is “iconomy” (a portmanteau of “icon” and “economy”)? And how does this concept capture (if it does) a “changing ontology of the image” that the questionnaire for this issue of The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics invites us to consider? In The Supermarket of the Visible, I developed a concept of iconomy as an explicit response to what we could call a relational ontology of the image. An image, I wrote, “is always more or less than an image”: “An image has value only in relation to other images.”1 Such a statement about the relational value of the image could easily be misunderstood. One could think that it holds only for filmic images that are meant to be unreeled in succession (“the value of an image,” Robert Bresson said, “must be, above all, an exchange value”).2 Or one could think that it holds only for the images that circulate today on social media, where they are constantly displaced and replaced, according to an exacerbated logic of “exhibition value” (Walter Benjamin’s “iconomic” translation of Marx’s “exchange value”).3 My contention, though, was not simply that images have become relational or differential entities within a worldwide system of exchanges. It was rather that, with the hypercirculation of contemporary images, what comes to the fore is the heterochronic tension that is inherent to any image as such. In other words: images have always consisted in their exchangeability with others or with other versions (formats) of themselves, but the speed of their exchanges was slow enough to make them seem completely stable and self-contained, whereas it now tends to accelerate to the point where it overshadows the image itself. In The Supermarket of the Visible, I offered Brian De Palma’s 1976 film Obsession as an example of “a masterful staging of different speeds in the exchange between images”: while a close-up of the paddle wheel of a boat evokes a slide carousel rotating with extreme velocity, the fresco that appears underneath another fresco when it flakes off because of humidity is the result of a long-term transformation. This is what led me to conclude that, “whether they change places every millisecond or have to wait several centuries,” images can never be considered as definitely individualized entities: “from the point of view of TOWARDS A GENERAL ICONOMY