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.

Strong Experiences

This book is about two kinds of experience, which I suggest have a common basis in surprise. One is an experience that we feel as a bodily thrill. This might be chills or tears or some other sudden arousal, usually pleasurable and fairly common for some people. The other is an experience of suddenly coming to know something very significant. It may be impossible to put into words what is known; that is, it is ineffable. This second kind of experience may be rarer and indeed can often be so rare as to be highly memorable. Experiences of the first kind can be called ‘thrill’, and I divide experiences of the second kind into two sub-kinds, namely ‘sublime’ and ‘epiphany’. These kinds of experience can be combined: when a thrill accompanies a sense of suddenly coming to know something significant.

I group both kinds of experiences under a common heading of ‘strong experiences’ because I suggest that they have many characteristics in common, and I suggest that this is because they both begin as surprises. This explains many of their characteristics and incidentally means that strong experiences are variants of a very ordinary kind of experience and need no special psychology. The term ‘strong experience’ is borrowed from music psychologist Alf Gabrielsson's (2011) analysis of a large number of elicited reports of strong, intense and profound experiences of music. Strong experiences can be triggered when we are reading literary texts, and Chapter 6 explores why literature surprises us in these ways; I will show that all the ordinary characteristics of literature provide the materials that in the right combination and context can trigger a strong experience.

The strong experience of ‘thrill’ is a sudden arousal, such as chills or tears or some other bodily response, in response to some perception or thought. I take this generic term ‘thrill’ from the psychologist John Sloboda (1991), who uses the term to describe various arousals in response to music. Thrills were described by one of the pioneers of modern psychology, William James:

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.”

It is telling that Kay Kinane, Catherine King, Joyce Belfrage and Therése Denny all had careers in both radio and television. Determined to assert their opinions and promote their social theories, they manifested their messages across a range of mediums; each format serving a different purpose and offering a different function. The cohort's transmedial mobility also helped them sustain a degree of professional autonomy when their options were limited. As a creative industry, broadcasting has an inherent capacity to cross over and interconnect with other mediums and formats, as media historians Michele Hilmes and Sian Nicholas remind us. Cronqvist and Hilgert indicate in their studies of media that there are numerous ‘convergence[s] of style and content’ to consider. The women's careers demonstrate how content producers were platform agnostic. Their work traversed a range of mediums, from press, radio, television, to performance, exhibition and literature. Between them, they worked as journalists, wrote creative fiction and children's stories, initiated a unique Australian sound-effects library, produced community theatre, and formulated educational and academic curricula about the theories and practices of broadcasting. They also used print media to serve their public personas and shaped a range of public fora to speak to the issues they cared about, strategically manipulating those mediums to their advantage.

Moving between Radio and TV

Kay, Catherine, Joyce and Therése all sustained careers in radio before embracing television. It was a predictable progression considering how the media landscape developed in the post-war years, with radio's expansion and television's rapidly emerging appeal. They did not all stay with television, however, they moved between the mediums when it suited their needs. Kay, Catherine and Therése became known for their innovative approaches to radio early on: Kay in ABC educational broadcasting; Catherine, first with the ABC's Kindergarten of the Air and then the Women's Session; and Therése, with her audacious London-based interviews. Although Joyce worked in a variety of radio roles before coming to Australia, she did not excel until she moved into television.

Catherine King believed radio was the perfect medium from which she could communicate her ideas for social and cultural reform.

In 1933 German artist Max Ernst created his third collage novel, Une semaine de bonté (A Week of Kindness), which consists of 183 collages divided into 5 booklets whose differently colored covers identify the days, elements, and examples to which each chapter is dedicated. The structure can be best rep-resented in the form of Table 7.1:

If the popular serialized novels whose illustrations Ernst used as the basis for his collages were already forgotten in 1933, as German art historian Werner Spies claims, then this only applies to the individual novels. His contemporaries would have still remembered the serialized novel as a genre “that belonged to the world of the parents of Max Ernst's generation,” as German philosopher Theodor Adorno said. The narrative model and illustrations of nineteenth-century serialized novels still shaped the collective unconscious of the younger generation that grew up during World War I. In his introduction to Ernst's previous collage novel, La femme 100 têtes (The Hundred Headless Woman, 1929), French Surrealist André Breton even said that they “might reveal better than all else the special nature of our dreams.”

The form and content of the serialized novel were closely interwoven with the technical means and economic conditions of its printing. In the nineteenth century the newspaper became the primary medium for the mass distribution of popular literature, and the serialized novel marked the beginning of the modern press. The conditions of production of the serialized novel, to which Ernst's collage novel refers, cannot be separated from the conditions of production of the myths and phantasms to which the illustrations testify, as they depict a world in which people are both threatened by mythical powers and subjected to industrially rationalized exploitation—a subjection that culminated in the first industrialized world war.

Ernst's unusual artistic appropriation of the serialized novel foregrounds images of crime and violence. Instead of glorifying violence, instinct, and the unconscious, however, it seems to reflect on the prehistory of fascism by critiquing the need to display one's own sophistication (which was particularly prevalent during the interwar period), attacking the fascist logic of distinguishing between friends and enemies, and demonstrating the absurdity of distinguishing between good and bad violence.

The Weight of the World

In 1975, Austrian writer Peter Handke began an experiment in writing that continues to the present: a practice of daily note-taking. A space for “spontaneous recording of aimless perceptions,” Handke's notebooks are heterogeneous in both their semantic content and material form: montages of thoughts, impressions, landscape descriptions, and reading notes are inscribed in pencil and colored ink into pocket-sized notebooks of different bindings and paper qualities with a range of inserted ephemera. In describing his process, Handke writes: “I now practiced reacting to everything that befell me imme-diately with language. […] It is not the narration of a consciousness, rather an immediate, simultaneously captured reportage of it.” The majority of Handke's notebooks from 1975 to 2018 have been acquired by the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, which currently houses 229 notebooks containing more than 33,000 pages. Handke's notebooks are neither diaries nor journals in the traditional sense nor merely “pre-text” for to-be-published works. Rather, they are part of a distinct artistic-writerly project that undergirds much of Handke's published work.

In 1977, Handke published Das Gewicht der Welt: Ein Journal (November 1975–März 1977) (The Weight of the World: A Journal [November 1975–March 1977]). The book was the first in what would become a series of so-called journal volumes containing selections of notes edited and transformed into typographic text. The journal volumes are essentially abridged versions of Handke's notebooks, indications of the manuscript wholes from which they were drawn. The cover of Das Gewicht der Welt, however, offers the reader a literal glimpse of the notebooks from which it was produced: a color facsimile of a torn-out page with both written script and a drawing of tramcar handholds (see Figure 2.1 ). The title, author's name, and publisher's name are also handwritten, rather than in typeface, and printed in orange and white, the visuality and materiality of the notebook page thus expanded through the cover design to envelop the book's printed contents. Semantically, the facsimiled notes capture a feeling of exclusion or isolation (“Gradually no one is free for me”). Seeing and reading (“ONE large eye; wanting to retreat to ‘Elective Affinities’”), which would become two central topics for Handke, are evoked, tinged here with feelings of anxiety and withdrawal.

Robert Musil once called Egon Erwin Kisch, also known as der rasende Reporter (the hurrying reporter), a Tagesschriftsteller: “[He was] not a poet who failed the test of eternity but rather one who ran away from it.” The term Tagesschriftsteller, which essentially means “journalist,” stresses that journalistic texts are different compared to highbrow literature in that they are supposed to have an expiry date. It thus refers to the journalistic profession, which is concerned with issues of the day, rather than the “eternal” affairs that some think art deals with.

In this chapter, I want to address the opposition between these two models of writing and publishing and the role it played around 1820 and in the following decades. Roughly speaking, this time saw a shift toward a new kind of literary interest in realism. In 1805, Johann Gottfried Seume wrote: “The time of poetry is over, reality has arrived.” This sentence could serve as a motto for the writers associated with the name Junges Deutschland (Young Germany), who voted in favor of realism and were convinced that literature should be socially useful and promote political change.

Since the 1770s, however, other writers had promoted an opposite conception of art that was related not so much to the everyday but rather to the imagination. From this point of view, the right way to approach a work of art was considered to be devotion. Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, and the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, for example, regarded art as something that expresses the most noble and prestigious human ideas, such as freedom and happiness—a telos that the artist might never reach but nevertheless had to strive for. This concept tended to isolate the work of art from its empirical context, from the time and place of its production and reception, and most certainly from all economic circumstances. From this perspective, art was considered to be untouchable and sacred.

Obviously, this model of art and literature contrasts with another one that highlights aspects of production and consumption. The latter views art as a kind of communication taking place between specific producers and an anonymous, mixed audience at a specific point in time and space. It conceives of art not as functionless and autonomous but rather as designed to cause specific effects, like empathy, which can be described in psychological terms.

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.

There is increasing awareness that “connectedness operates in more ways than simply through conjugality, sexual intimacy, and blood.” Yet, lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) friendship as a source of emotional and material support continues to be overlooked. This can be attributed to the fact that LGBTQ friendship radically subverts traditional bonds “through resistance to regimes of the normal.” It does not fit the boxes of what I refer to as traditional institutionalized relationships or, in other words, family, kinship, and the compulsory couple. Eleanor Wilkinson argues for the concept of compulsory coupledom drawing from the famous notion of compulsory heterosexuality described by Adrienne Rich. In the same line, Leo Acquistapace describes the compulsory couple as normative (two people who satisfy each other's needs), compulsory (the appropriate adult lifestyle taught since childhood), teleological (aimed at the social and economic reproduction of the nuclear family), and privileged (granting access to privileges only to those conforming to this model).

Cheshire Calhoun explains how LGBTQ people pose a threat to the heterosexual nuclear family. “[T]he construction of gays and lesbians as family outlaws,” she argues, “had the central purpose of allaying anxieties about the potential failure of the heterosexual nuclear family.” Frederik Swennen additionally notes that “the qualification of a union as a family depends on its institution as a conjugal couple, i.e. being cumulatively domestic, dyadic and sexual.” Mark Vernon further notes how friendship is viewed as a subversive practice able to challenge narrow notions of family. Friendship thus challenges the most normative aspects of the conjugal paradigm in being nomadic, polyadic, and platonic. Indeed, the combination of the two terms—LGBTQ and friendship—constitutes a dangerous mix and a threat to current systems of normativity. This is why LGBTQ friendship is invisible in our social and legal frameworks.

In this chapter, I shed light on how queer friendship is an important mode of sharing and redistributing goods between more than two people in a context of precarious conditions of work, housing, and life within a Mediterranean regime of welfare. Moreover, extended networks of LGBTQ friends can constitute a ground on which a potential convergence of interests between queer collectives and religious groups may occur, since they both advance claims grounded in solidarity and redistribution.

Since the State of Israel's founding, the nature of legal marriage and divorce has been the focus of public and political controversy. Israel is the only developed country that bestows upon religious institutions a monopoly over marriage and divorce. No civil marriage exists in Israel, and no uniform territorial law applies to either marriage or divorce. The current legal framework has been continually criticized for restricting access to marriage and divorce, due to the patriarchal character of religious marriage laws and their implications for women. The framework has furthermore been criticized for infringing upon freedom of conscience and religion.

Israeli public and academic discourses are replete with proposals to end the religious monopoly over marriage. These proposals have focused on establishing either a parallel civil institution that would coexist with legalreligious marriage or an exclusive civil framework for marriage. No proposal has considered abolishing the legal status of marriage altogether, despite growing scholarly interest in the idea. This chapter takes the first step toward filling this gap. In line with this book's theme, this chapter explores whether abolishing legal marriage in Israel could be in the mutual interest of both queer activists and certain religious groups.

This chapter proceeds as follows. The first section surveys the problem of marriage and divorce in Israel. The chapter then situates our inquiry within the broader academic scholarship around abolishing legal marriage. It then explains why abolishing legal marriage, especially in the particular context of Israel, could be understood as a “queer project” championed by those who oppose normativity in sexual kinships. Ultimately, the chapter moves to explain how such a legal shift could also be in the interest of religious groups. From the juxtaposition of these starkly different groups and the examination of their overlapping interests in the Israeli context, we advance an argument regarding their potential collaboration.

Legal Background: The Laws of Marriage and Divorce in Israel

There is no civil marriage under Israeli law. In fact, no uniform territorial law applies to either marriage or divorce; instead, the “personal law” of the marital parties governs these matters.

What was it like for women to work in public broadcasting after the war? The anecdote above, shared anonymously by a retired ABC radio producer, gives us an insight into the dilemmas facing women working in broadcasting between the 1940s and 1970s. The traditional paradigm of the dutiful married woman pervaded post-war workplaces, and the ABC was no exception. Despite pursuing a democratic, socially conscious remit, the organization was nevertheless a product of its environment and through its staff manifested conservative social conventions that prioritized male identity and authority. The ABC adopted a paradoxical approach to women in the post-war decades. On the one hand, it allowed ‘exceptional’ female production staff to defy gender conventions and was proud of their ground-breaking programming. (Kay Kinane, Catherine King, Therése Denny and Joyce Belfrage belong to this cohort). On the other, the organization systematically entrenched the sexual division of labour and fostered screen cultures that compromised women's status in public life. In the post-war years, the ABC's female staff were often seen as temporary interlopers, simply on a detour from their predetermined, ‘natural’, domestic duties. For this reason, the bulk of women were forced into pathways that constrained female staff into superficial, supportive roles.