Plato's Allegory of the Cave is the most famous evocation within Western thought of what it is to know something, indeed, anything—from that which is immediately evident to everything that might be knowable. What kind of visual image does the allegory itself bring to our minds? W. J. T. Mitchell gives us the most useful answer: It is what he calls a “hypericon,” that is, “a summary image […] that encapsulates an entire episteme, a theory of knowledge.” No surprise that the allegory is right up there among his exemplars:

He goes on to note Wittgenstein's concerns about the danger that a visual image—or picturing in general, indeed, any kind of representation—might short-change a complete understanding of complex phenomena and subtle ideas. Such disquiet is ancient. Indeed, as I shall show, it is the starting point of the cave allegory itself.

The allegory has attracted several interpretations, from the banal to the brilliant. Most interpretations of its main meaning, however, have sedimented into contrasting pairs: between appearance and reality; seeing and knowing; superstition and objective knowledge; lies and truth; mystification and revelation; and the real and the ideal. It is an obvious starting point for our quest to trace some of the paradigmatic moments when images and economies have been thought together. The allegory vividly evokes two ways of world knowing, two kinds of spectatorial agency, two ways of managing (oikonomía), and two distinct regimes of truth (as Foucault came to name them)—both established first and foremost through the showing and seeing of images.