Title:
Architecture, Phantasmagoria, and the Culture of Contemporary Capitalism - Introduction
Architecture, Phantasmagoria, and the Culture of Contemporary Capitalism - Introduction
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Authors
Andreotti, Libero
Lahiji, Nadir
Lahiji, Nadir
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Abstract
This symposium addresses the concept of
phantasmagoria in architecture,
unearthing its various manifestations in
the contemporary culture of spectacle.
Participants from a variety of fields at the
intersection of architecture, technology,
and political philosophy will examine the
history of phantasmagoria from the late
eighteenth century to the present and the
place it occupies in the writings of Marx,
Benjamin, Adorno, and others. More
specifically, participants will discuss its
role in analyses of capitalist commodity
fetishism where, along with the notions
of the spectral and the fantastic, it is used
to question, and occasionally to subvert,
the relationship between ‘reality’ and
‘illusion’. Special attention will be paid to the present-day significance of
phantasmagoria in an age of
tele-technological and communicative
capitalism. Just as new technologies,
according to Benjamin, reorganized the
human sensorium in the 19th century,
turning Paris into the interior space of
the flaneur, so technical innovations are
reconfiguring the most basic conditions
of urban experience in our time,
generating new forms of
‘hyper-mediated’ subjectivity that
transform the city through the force of
psychic shock. By bringing a variety of
perspectives to bear on this one
concept, the symposium will attempt to
frame a general critique of the culture
of contemporary capitalism.
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Date Issued
2017-03-31
Extent
23:59 minutes
Resource Type
Moving Image
Resource Subtype
Lecture