SAMUEL WEBERthe former gave new meaning to the ambiguous term ‘‘media coverage.’’ The televisual
and print mediacoveredthe event but revealed neither its causes nor its significance.
Indeed, by focusing its ‘‘live coverage’’ on individual figures, such as Oswald and Ruby, it
may have participated in a cover-up of the event in its complexity. At any rate, ever since,
the realm of the visible, in politics as elsewhere, has been increasingly framed by that of
the invisible, the accountable by the unrecounted. Thus, the communication of visible
and invisible has in recent political history been very different from that which allowed
Plato to compare democracy with a ‘‘multi- and brightly colored (poikilon) garment’’
(Republic, 557c). Visible and invisible have, rather, been presented as symmetrical mirror
images, as simple oppositions, as light and dark, rather than ‘‘like the fanning wheel of
the peacock, which women find so irresistible’’ (26 / 43).
In place of the many-colored, spangled quality of democratic multiplicity described
by Plato (and deeply mistrusted by him), the perceptual field of American democracy, as
propagated by the televisual media, has assumed a rigorously binary and oppositional
character, with figure framed by ground, foreground framed by background, and the
whole framed by the discourse and appearance of ‘‘anchors,’’ whose function seems above
all precisely that: to anchor—fix in place—all movement of uncertainty that might exceed
or complicate the simplicity of the individual, isolated frame. The familiar figure of the
‘‘anchor’’ is the audiovisual correlative, condition, and confirmation of the self, exhibiting
the possibility of its staying the same over time—for a while, at least.
This relation of democracy, and in particular American democracy, to a certain expe-
rience of image and sound as meaningfully unified, transparent, and self-contained can
be illuminated by recurring to a different but perhaps not unrelated discussion of another
kind of image, one that involves not democracy but the economic organization of society,
which in many circles today is proclaimed as being structurally inseparable from it. This
discussion is found in a short and unfinished text written in 1921 by Walter Benjamin
and bearing the title ‘‘Capitalism as Religion.’’ Consisting of only a few pages, it can be
divided into two sections. The first is devoted to the elaboration of four theses on the
relation of capitalism to religion. The second comprises a series of notes, written in tele-
graph style and lacking all elaboration: they seem to be notes for further study. In order
to make any sense of the very brief allusion to images that interests me in our context, it
will be helpful first briefly to summarize Benjamin’s four theses. His first and primary
thesis is that capitalism is not just the product of a religion, as argued by Max Weber,^20
but is itself a religion, in particular, what Benjamin calls a ‘‘cult.’’ What he means by
‘‘cult’’ is never entirely elaborated in this short fragment (or elsewhere, so far as I can
see^21 ), but certain of its characteristics are made clear: first, cult is distinguished from
‘‘dogma’’ and also, implicitly, from ‘‘faith.’’ It is less theoretical, mental, or internal than
practical. Second, capitalism is religious insofar as it responds to the cares and concerns
to which religions traditionally have sought to respond. As a cult-religion, capitalism
responds to these cares and concerns through a form of practice—of doing. Third, in
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