Title:
Space After Spectacle: Infrastructure, Indifference and the Phantasmagoria of Transit
Space After Spectacle: Infrastructure, Indifference and the Phantasmagoria of Transit
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Author(s)
Spencer, Douglas
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Abstract
Andreotti and Lahiji’s The Architecture of
Phantasmagoria presents an incisive critique
of the discourse of spectacle in architecture.
‘Spectacle’, they note, has become the ‘tired
mantra’ of a supposedly critical posture lazily
reiterating its complaints against architecture
as image and missing the critical thrust of
Debord’s writing. Without wanting to
abandon what remains for them still
pertinent in Debord’s thought they suggest,
in response, phantasmagoria as a model more
adequate to grasping the machinations of
contemporary architecture as an apparatus of
power and subjectivation than that of
spectacle. This paper builds upon and extends Andreotti
and Lahiji’s critique. The discourse of
spectacle, I will argue, rests upon the
assumption of a cinematic mode of reception
in which subjects are distracted from everyday
realities under the spell-like influence of star
architects and their iconic productions. This
mode of reception is, though, exceptional
rather than typical. As such, it is itself a
distraction from the more everyday experience
of the built environment and the analysis of
its subjectifying powers. This subjectifying
power, I will argue, operates through forms of
attention that are very much divided rather
than undivided; the fleeting glance rather
than the focused gaze, the habitual as opposed
to the extraordinary. In order to explore these
more habitual and habituating forms of
attention - exemplified here in the spaces of
contemporary transit and their sobrely
dressed interiors - I draw methodologically
upon Benjamin and Kracauer’s concern with
the everyday experience of the city as a
ubiquitous environmental condition and,
reaching further back still, to Simmel’s
account of the metropolis as, in its economic
and experiential essence, a ‘sphere of
indifference’.
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Date Issued
2017-03-31
Extent
34:19 minutes
Resource Type
Moving Image
Resource Subtype
Lecture