The revised translation of the title of Walter Benjamin's famous 1935 essay—from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” to “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility”—signaled a shift in its use value for those interested in understanding the kinds of work that images do within capitalist modernity. A more exact translation of “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischer Reproduzierbarkeit,” the new title also oriented English-language readers closer to Benjamin's major preoccupations in the essay, away from the cherry-picking within artworlds that had reduced its relevance for aesthetic inquiry to the commonplace idea that the widespread circulation of multiple photographs of individual works of art had caused them to lose the “aura” that they possessed when seen in their original niche in time and space.

Underlying this banality, however, was a concept of consequence for understanding that capitalism was building a new kind of engine room, a society-wide apparatus. Benjamin's insight was a major update of Plato's pairing of deceptive shadows and ideal Forms, Nikephoros’ icon/image double vision, and Marx's identification of the inner dynamic of commodification as the interplay of use and exchange value. Taking “art” to be the entirety of human visual representation, he introduced a distinction that constituted the next big step in thinking about image economies:

In modern times, icons produced during what were now seen as the primitive, ancient, and medieval eras were everywhere abstracted from their millennia-long grounding in ritual practices and valued as independent works of art. In Nikephoros’ terms, they become images. Not natural, nor spiritual, but aesthetic images. Suitable above all for display among other images that have been similarly transposed. All classified according to their place within a transcendent History of Art. This transvaluation occurs in museums, as it does in the museumization of churches and other sacred places.

In this chapter I explore the epistemic aspects of strong experience. I discuss schemata, and how metarepresentation plays an important role in generating certain strong experiences. I seek explanations for the epistemic feelings, including the feeling of strong significance and the feeling of ineffability.

Representations and Metarepresentations

Our thoughts have content, and we have introspective access to that content. In other words, we know what we are thinking about. This makes our thoughts representational, and they are one type of mental representation. Other types of mental representation include perceptions, schemata and so on. The various different kinds of mental representation can be matched to one another if they share content or have the same content; for example a perception of a chair can be matched to a schema for a chair. This is a matching of representations at different levels of generality. The matching of mental representations is important for the present project, because a discrepancy in the matching of mental representations, for example the match between a perception and a schema, can be a trigger of surprise, and hence sometimes of a strong experience.

We can sometimes introspectively examine the content of mental representations, but not always. And we have no introspective access to the structure of mental representations; we cannot introspectively know if they are formed like sentences in the language of thought which Fodor (1975) hypothesises. Similarly, though our memory is partly in the form of schemata, we cannot introspectively examine what a schema is. The same is true of many kinds of mental representation, including for example representations of sound or visual material, which may involve types of representation to which we have no introspective access. And while our ability to speak depends on our having mental representations of linguistic structure, again these are inaccessible to introspection. The same applies to our musical abilities, which depend on representations of musical structure which are themselves inaccessible to introspection. Raffman (1993) uses the term ‘structural ineffability’ to describe our inability to introspectively know about the structure of mental representations.

Metacognition is the ability to have cognition about cognition. This is an ability that may be specific to humans and allows us to think about our own thoughts or other cognitive processes and about other people's thoughts and cognitive processes.

Given the reverberations of Greek thought within the German Enlightenment, it will be no surprise to find the cave allegory echoing in the work of one of its most critical thinkers when he comes to consider the relationships between seeing, knowing, and acting in the world. Yet we might be surprised at the resonances of religious reflection—many of them sharing much with those of Nikephoros—in the thought of Karl Marx, a life-long opponent of organized religion. In a searching analysis of Capital as a literary text, J. Hillis Miller avers that “Marx's language in his analysis of commodities is permeated by a displaced theological or ontological terminology and figuration.” “Displaced,” yes, but in the sense of having shifted from one (medieval) economy to another (modern) one, which it haunts. This is an action performed not by Marx himself but by the facts of the matter, as he explicitly states in a section entitled “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”:

Volume 1 of Capital is subtitled A Critique of Political Economy and is devoted to an extended analysis of the “The Process of Production of Capital.” Its first chapter, on commodities, begins from this observation: “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities,’ its unit being a single commodity.” The chapter defines the nature of commodities, and how they are produced, exchanged, and consumed in societies dominated by the bourgeoisie. Marx shows that crucial to these operations is the distinction between the value that inheres in an object produced by labor for a purpose, which he calls “use-value,” and that which comes into operation when it is exchanged, which he names, variously, “exchange-value” or simply “value.”

A central claim of natural law theory is that moral reality exists independently of human beliefs about that reality. “Moral laws are propositional realities, ‘dictates of reason’, not character traits, practices, or cultural creations.” Moral reality is reflected in the natural law; no law can lay claim to obedience if it lacks this connection.

Yet history is replete with natural law theorists who confused their beliefs about the natural law for the natural law itself. The nineteenth-century campaign against Mormon polygamy is a case study that has echoed in recent debates about LGBTQ access to marriage. The federal government prosecuted and imprisoned polygamous Mormon husbands, revoked common law privileges and constitutional rights, and legally dissolved the Mormon church while seizing most of its assets. More than a century later, polygamy continues to generate legal commentary, especially in debates about marriage equality.

Nineteenth-century anti-polygamist arguments and contemporary defenses of traditional marriage each illustrate the dangers and pretensions of natural law theory. Anti-polygamists justified their attacks on Mormon polygamy with appeals to Protestant Christian morality, a sexist theory of republican self-government, and White supremacy, rooting each of these in the natural law. Today, of course, U.S. laws cannot be justified by their mere coincidence with Christian morality. Though gender imbalances remain, women are now entitled to full participation in representative government and public life. White supremacy also persists but is illegal in government and disreputable in society. Yet, anti-polygamists were confident of the objective truth of their premises and the resultant conclusion that polygamy violated the moral order; it was the passage of time that exposed these purportedly objective truths as merely customary values held by nineteenth-century White Americans.

Natural law defenders of traditional marriage made the same mistake in a different way. They argued that the defining characteristic of marriage is reproductive sexual union, a definition now rejected by most Americans—including, one suspects, most believers. Seventy percent of Americans, including a majority of political conservatives, support same-sex marriage, and nearly two-thirds of American women of child-bearing age, including virtually all believers, use some form of contraception. Rather than mistaking widely held social conventions for the objective moral order, as did the nineteenthcentury anti-polygamists, traditional marriage defenders have mistaken their sectarian religious beliefs about marriage for that order.

Therése Denny, Kay Kinane, Catherine King and Joyce Belfrage all wanted to create a legacy. They came to the ABC determined to reshape their worlds, to challenge themselves and their audiences. They did not leave their missions behind when they left the ABC and continued to engage with broadcasting after they made their farewells. Their respect for radio and television was sustained, even though their successes were tempered by compromise and confrontation.

As the 1960s progressed Kay Kinane had reached the heights of the ABC production hierarchy and had consolidated her reputation as an exemplary, world-class broadcaster. As an ABC elder, Kay not only continued to produce content as well as advise on policy and practice, she worked to improve conditions for staff as an elected member of the Senior Officer's Association. She challenged management on staff rights and workplace relations and grappled with internal power struggles between senior production staff. Kay also consulted regularly with ABC commissioners and provided reports and recommendations to the Australian government on behalf of the organization. She had come a long way since being asked to ‘go and make the tea’.

In 1976, while Director of Young People's Programmes, Kay saw her beloved Education division being devalued and undermined and did not want to stay around for the coup de grace. Kay was increasingly disheartened by the ABC's approach to educational broadcasting and was worried by management's escalating focus on ratings and viewing figures. ‘Minority’ content that catered to specialized audiences was considered less important than higher-rating shows. Kay sadly remembered making one unsuccessful, last-ditch effort to save a radio series of dramatised book-reading segments. The project was cancelled despite the fact that it had successfully improved the literacy of young audiences. Controller of Television John Cameron rejected Kay's appeals and argued that – regardless of the fact ABC Commissioners endorsed her views – he was going to cut large proportions of children's programming. Apparently, Cameron did not believe that it had a relevant place in the modern ABC. Kay described one conversation from the time just prior to her resignation:

As its aura of normality falls away, and its actuality becomes more widely exposed, police brutality against Black and colored minorities in the United States and elsewhere is coming into view as a form of white domestic terrorism. In contrast to the militias that dot the nation—which are rag tag until, on occasions such as January 6, 2021, they are not—this concentrated violence is organized, institutionalized, and, in principle and by community consent, regulated. Until it is not.

The images of violence unleashed on African American men and women that we have been considering may well be records of moments in an ongoing race war within the United States. If so, is a time of reckoning coming up soon, or is it already here? The intense politicization of the national iconomy charted in the preceding chapters seem to signal an acceleration in other long-standing social divisions, those based on class, geography, and ideology. But not evenly in each of these domains, and not along traditional lines. This is evident in the widespread support for Republicans by displaced industrial workers and by the divisions within the Democratic party between well-heeled elites and the working poor. Reckoning seems on the near horizon through whichever lens one looks. We have seen that imagery of all kinds has played several crucial roles within these scenarios. In this chapter, I will continue to track developments in the three image regimes we have been following, preparatory to offering some concluding remarks, necessarily provisional, on political iconomy today.

Judgement in Minnesota

Earlier I asked whether, when the cases against the officers who attended the incident at Powderhorn got to the courts in Minneapolis, the sheer force of the indexical presence in Frazier's video, its unfolding for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, along with its subsequent ubiquity on all communicative media, would make it less vulnerable to the kind of degradation that was visited upon George Holliday's video of the beating of Rodney King. Even today, the Federal Rules of Evidence, a document reviewed each year by the Supreme Court of the United States, offers no explicit statement about the ways in which courts should treat the visual evidence that comes before them.