Space After Spectacle: Infrastructure, Indifference and the Phantasmagoria of Transit

Spencer, Douglas

Title:

Space After Spectacle: Infrastructure, Indifference and the Phantasmagoria of Transit

dc.contributor.author	Spencer, Douglas
dc.contributor.corporatename	Georgia Institute of Technology. College of Design	en_US
dc.contributor.corporatename	Georgia Institute of Technology. School of Architecture	en_US
dc.contributor.corporatename	Architectural Association (Great Britain). Graduate School of Design	en_US
dc.contributor.corporatename	University of Westminster	en_US
dc.date.accessioned	2017-05-12T17:21:02Z
dc.date.available	2017-05-12T17:21:02Z
dc.date.issued	2017-03-31
dc.description	Presented on March 31, 2017 at the 2017 Spring Symposium on Architecture, Phantasmagoria, and the Culture of Contemporary Capitalism in the Architecture Library, Architecture West Building, College of Design at Georgia Tech.	en_US
dc.description	Session One	en_US
dc.description	Douglas Spencer is the author of The Architecture of Neoliberalism (Bloomsbury, 2016). He teaches and writes on critical theories of architecture, landscape and urbanism at the AA’s Graduate School of Design at the Architectural Association and at the University of Westminster, London. A regular contributor to Radical Philosophy, he has also written chapters for collections such as Architecture Against the Post-Political (Nadir Lahiji, ed. Routledge, 2014), and This Thing Called Theory (eds Teresa Stoppani, Giorgio Ponzo, and George Themistokleous, Routledge, November 2016), and published numerous essays in journals such as The Journal of Architecture, AD, AA Files, New Geographies, Volume and Praznine.	en_US
dc.description	Runtime: 34:19 minutes
dc.description.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’.	en_US
dc.format.extent	34:19 minutes
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/1853/58087
dc.language.iso	en_US	en_US
dc.publisher	Georgia Institute of Technology	en_US
dc.relation.ispartofseries	Architecture, Phantasmagoria, and the Culture of Contemporary Capitalism Symposium	en_US
dc.subject	Architecture	en_US
dc.subject	Phantasmagoria	en_US
dc.subject	Theory	en_US
dc.title	Space After Spectacle: Infrastructure, Indifference and the Phantasmagoria of Transit	en_US
dc.type	Moving Image
dc.type.genre	Lecture
dspace.entity.type	Publication
local.contributor.corporatename	College of Design
local.relation.ispartofseries	Architecture, Phantasmagoria, and the Culture of Contemporary Capitalism Symposium
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