In the June 3, 2020, edition of the Sydney newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, Warren Brown's cartoon entitled “Recession” was published on the main editorial page (Fig. 7.1). The trope is Welcome in the New Year, but this midyear message is bleak. The central figure is an unkempt man in pajamas, slippers, and dressing gown, representing readers confined to their homes by lockdown orders required to combat the pandemic, or, like many others, recently thrown into unemployment by its effects. He opens his door, not to a new-born baby in a ribboned bassinette, but to a Scrooge-like figure, dressed as an undertaker, who carries a wreath with the insignia “Recession.” Resigned to his fate, the man admits the deathly messenger to his bleak house, which symbolizes not only the actual home of the average Australian but also the national economy. Both are already ravaged by several forces, each of them out of control. They come from a distance, but are intensely present, obliterating all signs of domesticity. In the background, the fires that raged across millions of acres of bush land throughout the early months of the year, despite the best efforts of the (mostly volunteer) Rural Fire Services. The spiky blobs of the coronavirus float everywhere. Meanwhile, a masked housewife spills her hoarded reams of toilet paper, the US President Donald J. Trump holds up a Bible, and a police officer beats a looter. “Come on in,” the man says despairingly, “It wouldn't be 2020 without you […]”

Some of these elements reflect the ideological orientation of the newspaper: The central figure is white, male, working-class, oppressed, and resentful; a looter rather than a black man or a protestor is shown battling the police officer. Others are specific to Australia: the raging bushfires, although much of California was in flames by June, so global warming in general is also evoked. Everything depicted is instantly recognizable as a visual signifier of the forces that were most powerfully shaping 2020 in many places throughout the world and in the imaginaries of many of its peoples.

The gathering of thousands of Trump supporters in the Capitol grounds at midday on January 6, 2021, transposed the image world of one of his rallies on to the main site of national governance. In the event, this was literally so, as the insurrectionary crowd was first formed and then fed by people who had assembled shortly before at the Ellipse, a stage on the Mall side of the White House, for a “Save America” rally. Trump's speech there was the final incitement to march on the Capitol to stop the certification of the Biden– Harris victory and, instead, secure his re-election. Just in case the message was not clear, to the right of the podium from which Trump spoke, a gateway was erected with these words emboldened across its canopy: MARCH ON THE CAPITOL. Thousands did what they were told. Breeching the outer perimeters of the Capitol grounds by 1 p.m., the crowd found itself occupying the structures erected for the impending inauguration of Joe Biden. The Trumpian image world merged with the postcard site of US patriotism. The reinauguration of Donald J. Trump was prefigured. Supporters then swarmed the Capitol building (Fig. 12.1).

Inside, unaware of the tumult, the legislators began their certification process. Around 2:15 p.m., members of the Proud Boys militia led the break in through windows and the front door (Fig. 12.2). A few minutes later, the mob found itself in the Great Rotunda of the Capitol (Fig. 12.3). They had followed the unfamiliar passageways, brushing aside outnumbered and under-prepared officers. At times, they filed through crowd-control chords, as if they were on a guided tour. Then, they filled the huge hall with excited shouts, milled around in waves, taking selfies, posting to their friends and followers, waving their TRUMP flags and red MAGA gear, showing that they had arrived at the heartland. Some carried the metal bars they had used to beat back the police trying to keep them out of the building. Others covered their faces, half-aware that it might be smart to disguise their identity. Cellphone videos show that soon the hubbub died down, voices were stilled, and the majority of those present stood in silent awe.

The video of George Floyd's murder entered an image-driven economy, one that is much larger and more complex than the image blizzard carried on Facebook, Instagram, WeChat, and similar platforms. While it was posted to YouTube, it quickly went viral on the other platforms and then was amplified by heritage media such as television and newspapers, in the United States and then quickly around the world. It soon proved to be the most impactful recent posting in a growing stream of such visual records, the grim inheritance of centuries of law enforcement exercised through excessive brutality. In the United States, the precedent that comes most readily to mind is the video of the beating of Rodney King by several officers from the Los Angeles police department in 1991 (Fig. 10.1). There are extraordinary parallels but also several significant differences between the two videos, the events they register, and the conditions of their reception. What might a comparison tell us about how the iconomy works, nearly 30 years later, in a society—indeed, a world—engaged in all-out image wars and mired in seas of misinformation and disinformation?

In the immediate and near aftermath of its making, the video of the beating of Rodney King had different valences in three related but, at the time, quite distinct contexts: on local and national media, above all on broadcast television, both free-to-air and cable; in the legal system, specifically a court in Simi Valley, in Ventura County, outside Los Angeles; and in an art museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, during its Biennial of 1993. Today, by contrast, the George Floyd murder video counts in a media environment in which television is divided between several formats from free-to-air through cable to mobile phones and is just one among several other platforms, with multiple crossovers between them. Personal social media platforms predominate. Any image, any video clip, and every kind of information can be conveyed through them, with few constraints, although calls to impose some limits are growing louder as cultural and political divides widen in most societies.

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.

We have been tracing a contest of images within the United States that falls along racial, class, geographic, ideological, and party-political lines. Most of the time, these social divisions remain multiplicitous, not quite coalescing into the kind of generalized partisan divides and armed conflict that characterize full-scale civil war. Yet, the media campaigns orchestrated around Donald Trump, and the protests following the circulation of the video of George Floyd's murder, highlighted contrasting aspects of what might be called the cultural phase of such a war. So did January 6, 2021, when considered as a peak action within a concerted campaign by supporters of Trumpism determined to “Stop the Steal.” In both cases, mass media events were staged with the intent of effecting direct political change. In the United States and everywhere else during recent decades, the game has changed. The iconomy has become intensely politicized. And politics has become intensely iconomic.

Control of the circulation of images has always been important in any struggle for political advantage. Today, their saturation of most aspects everyday life means that they also occupy its extraordinary moments, those that connect us or threaten to abruptly disconnect us. We have been tracing the kinds of control over image circulation exercised by the social media companies, by governments of all kinds, by certain religions, by legal systems, and by dominant economic agendas, notably that of neoliberal capitalism and its recent centralized, statist variants. In the previous chapters, we also tracked the widespread emergence of strategies of contracirculation, and of engendering diversification, especially among activists who are building campaigns that resist these systems and envisage alternatives. This chapter will focus on the contribution to these strategies of artists, particularly Black artists, working with these widely circulating images to show why and how Black lives matter.

The “Political” Biennial

In New York in 1993, George Holliday's video of the beating of Rodney King was exhibited in the Whitney Biennial of that year as a work of art. Curator John G. Hanhardt saw it as such, as formally aligned with the examples of contemporary avant-garde and experimental video that he was showing in his section of the exhibition.

In the weeks after the George Floyd video became ubiquitous, it seemed in the United States that the multiplicity of forces contending for “the soul of the nation” were in all-out warfare. Within this confusion, two inchoate coalitions became most prominent. One was inspired to protest what the video revealed about the state of the nation and to urge for its healing based on full recognition of several intersecting rights. The other coalition, the Trump constituency, was, at first, stunned by the video. On May 29, President Trump made a video statement from the White House expressing the nation's “deepest condolences and heartfelt sympathies” to the family of George Floyd. He promised that all relevant Federal resources would join with local ones to make sure that “justice be served.” Commenting on the video itself, he said, “A terrible, terrible thing that happened […] we all saw what we saw, and it's very hard to conceive of anything other than what we did see. It should never happen, never be allowed to happen.” From someone (in)famous for saying about a Nazi-style rally in August 2017 by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia—which led to the death of a protester—that “There were very fine people on both sides,” this was a rare statement of conciliation. As the protests grew, however, the President's mood quickly changed. The constituency he headed sensed that the video's exposure of its dark and deadly underpinnings meant that the recognition it had won in recent years was in mortal danger.

The June 1 Pseudo-Event

On June 1, 2020, the Trump Administration came out fighting. Words and images were wielded, backed by as many sticks and stones as it could muster. The words were the President's avalanche of Tweets during the preceding days, including inflammatory evocations of the violent repression of Civil Rights protests during the 1960s (“when the looting starts, the shooting starts”), calls for governors to “dominate the streets,” and threats to “bring in the Military,” that is, the standing army of national forces, to do so. Late on that day, as curfew approached, he delivered a “I am your President of Law and Order” speech in the Rose Garden, which ended with the odd statement “I am now going to pay my respects to a very, very special place.”

Image economies are vital to religious observance, which is unimaginable without them. The major religions have constantly negotiated practices of worship that assign important roles to imagery of all kinds, from artifactual icons to mental images. No surprise, then, that the concept of iconomy arose in theological contexts, notably in interpretations of the iconoclastic controversies that embroiled the Christian church during the eighth and ninth centuries. In her essay, “The Face of Christ. The Form of the Church,” Marie-José Mondzian (née Baudinet) examines “the iconic representation of Christ's face—the face of God's Son, also known as the Father's Economy.” Not for the first or last time, the Christian church split over the implications of representing the holy figures, dividing itself into iconoclasts versus iconophiles, with deadly consequences for those who lost the upper hand.

She notes that the iconoclasts of that era were rarely opposed to images as such, only those claiming to represent the Father, the Son, and Mary. Their argument from faith was that these beings were ineffable, that representations falsely circumscribed them, pictured them as if they were mortal while inducing worshippers to take this reduced image for the spiritual reality, that is, to treat images as idols, thus abusing clear injunctions against idolatry. Meanwhile, on the secular level, iconoclastic churchmen and the emperors who supported them readily substituted imagery of useful saints and of themselves while maintaining the same overall relationships (i.e., the same general economy) between power and vision.

Inscription versus Circumscription

Nikephoros, the Patriarch of Constantinople from 806 to 815, was a key figure in these debates. Supported as a young scholar by pro-image empress Irene, and appointed as patriarch by emperor Nikephoros I, he was banished by the iconoclastic emperor Leo V for refusing to change his views.

I began writing these chapters while in quarantine in Sydney, having flown there from the United States on May 25, 2020, anticipating my usual three months stay. The strict lockdown conditions due to the pandemic meant that for the first 2 weeks I was confined to a hotel room, no argument, no exceptions, no problem. I had resolved to devote the coming days to revisiting an idea I have, for decades, taken as a given but never had time to think through: that the visual imagery so pervasive in contemporary life might exhibit definable structures, elusive and changeable but consistently so, just enough for its histories to be written and its emerging shapes perceived. I already had a name for this economy of images: iconomy, a simple combination of the Greek words for “icon” and “economy.” Like several others who have used this term before and since, I foolishly thought that I had coined it. I was thinking about how certain buildings, then dubbed “iconic architecture,” stood as symbols of cities within a worldwide chain of such images, how they operated within tourist economies and broader public imaginaries. The other side of this seemingly benign coinage became apparent at a moment when widespread trauma was occasioned by a war of images, when many of these buildings became targets. My response to 9/11 was The Architecture of Aftermath, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2006.

But the broader logic within which the contest of images is fought kept on eluding an analysis fitting its growing importance. I carried with me to Sydney a small cache of books, among them Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, the locus classicus for any thinking about the nature of image economies under capitalism. It would, I figured, be a familiar place from which to start over. Decades of thinking about these issues in the company of many others doing the same was my greatest resource. There was also Google Books, my University Library access to e-books and articles, and the many files I had on my laptop. As the plane took off, the prospect before me was a few weeks, with minimal distractions, to think more about iconomy, this plausible but fugitive idea.

The Strategic Value Framework developed in this book explicates the dominant sectoral patterns of market governance in Russia today. Historical process tracing from sectoral origins of labor-intensive textiles and capital-intensive telecommunication in this chapter shows how Russian state leaders intersubjectively respond to objective economic and political pressures. The political basis and evolution of the perceived strategic value of national security and resource management took root in the Soviet era through Soviet collapse and transition to and away from democratic rule. In the context of macro-liberalization and mass privatization at the founding of the Russian Federation, interacting perceived strategic value and sectoral structures and organization of institutions have shaped the centralized role of the state in market coordination and variegated property rights arrangements of centralized governance in defense-origin dual use telecommunications reenforced by the rise of Vladimir Putin aided by economic and political crises. The less strategic value of non-defense sectors, such as textiles, is governed by the decentralized coordination and dominant private property of private governance and decentralized governance since Gorbachev’s perestroika. The rise of bifurcated oligarchy in Russian-style capitalism are shaped by the joined imperatives of resource security nationalism and path-dependent sectoral organization of institutions.

In parallel to the centralized governance of strategic industries in Chapter 4, the lower degree and narrower scope of the perceived strategic value of labor intensive and less value-added sectors, represented by textiles, for national security and the national technology base, has shaped decentralized governance and private governance in nonstrategic sectors. In the context of sectoral structural and organization of institutions, less concerned about controlling products or services that have few applications for national security and low contribution to the national technology base, the central state introduced competition in textiles in the 1980s and devolved market coordination of quasi-state and private ownership to local governments and commerce bureaus by the early 1990s before China’s World Trade Organization accession. The cross-time sector and company case studies reveal the interacting strategic value and sectoral logics apply at the subsector. Capital-intensive and more value-added technical textiles experience more deliberate market coordination by local governments and the central state and are characterized by mixed property rights sponsored by and connected with state-run research and development institutions. Taken together the textile industry today experiences periodic overexpansion, environmental degradation, and reactive local state interventions in response to economic reverberations and central-level environmental and developmental mandates.

This chapter shows how in parallel to the regulated governance in telecommunications uncovered in Chapter 7, the perceived strategic value of labor-intensive industries dominated by rural small-scale producers, showcased by textiles, for national self-reliance and neoliberal development, shape the centralized governance by the Indian government. The cross-time sector and company case studies reveal that at a time when centralized market coordination in labor-intensive, less value-added textiles is eliminated around the world, India created a central ministry and other sector-specific bureaucracies in textiles associated with nationalist narratives of Gandhian Swadeshi self-reliance in the 1980s following internal political and economic crises. Endowed with limited resources and regulatory capacity, the centralized governance of the textile ministry has introduced extensive competition in the neoliberal era and deliberately intervened in market developments. In addition to subsidizing industrial upgrading and deregulating market entry, business scope, and trade, the textile ministry has nationalized large-scale textile mills of the organized sector during economic slowdowns. Moreover, fiscal and protectionist trade policies have also cushioned the survival of small-scale, labor-intensive handlooms in apparel and clothing and the highly polluting power looms dominant in more capital-intensive technical textiles even as the state promotes export-oriented industrialization.