The Architecture of Phantasmagoria

Specters of the City

Libero Andreotti, Nadir Lahiji

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317478720
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

In a time of mass-mediated modernity, the city becomes, almost by definition, a constitutively 'mediated' city. Today, more than ever before, the omnipresence of media in every sphere of culture is creating a new urban ontology, saturating, fracturing, and exacerbating the manifold experience of city life. The authors describe this condition as one of 'hyper-mediation' – a qualitatively new phase in the city's historical evolution. The concept of phantasmagoria has pride of place in their study; using it as an all-embracing explanatory framework, they explore its meanings as a critical category to understand the culture, and the architecture, of the contemporary city.

Andreotti and Lahiji argue that any account of architecture that does not include understanding the role and function of media and its impact on the city in the present 'tele-technological-capitalist' society is fundamentally flawed and incomplete. Their approach moves from Walter Benjamin, through the concepts of phantasmagoria and of media – as theorized also by Theodor Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, and a new generation of contemporary critics – towards a new socio-critical and aesthetic analysis of the mediated space of the contemporary city.

Part I
Phantasmagoria, modernity, and the city

1
Urban modernity and the politics of historical memory

The historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time takes a stand [einstecht] and has come to a standstill. For this notion defines the very present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism offers the “eternal” image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called “Once upon a time” in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers – man enough to blast open the continuum of history.

Walter Benjamin, Thesis XVI, On the Concept of History

A theory of the city that abolishes its specters is an impoverished theory. The specters that have haunted historical modernity ineluctably return in the contemporary city and cannot be laid to rest. They are the historical specters of Napoleon III and the Second Empire that re-emerge in the New Empire today and that go under the term of Haussmannization. Haussmannization first manifests itself in the city of Paris, and later in the so-called ‘global cities’ – the former a product of a bourgeois capitalism in the age of Absolute Monarchy, the latter of present-day capitalism and its Neoliberal economic and political order. The contemporary global city is homogeneously scattered around the world – from New York to London, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Beijing, Lagos, Tehran, Mumbai – all of them registering, in different ways, the pressure of acceleration of high-tech capitalism. This book is less about any particular instance of the global city than it is about the generic abstract idea of what we call the madiatized city, a city haunted by modernity in which the undead ghostly apparitions of the past return to stake their claim on the living. Modernity, in this sense, is permeated by specters of the past that contemporary models such as Habermas’s thesis of an ‘incomplete project’ fail to recognize, specters that are instead central to Benjamin’s theory of enlightenment’s unfulfilled utopian promise.

Our aim in this study, therefore, is to construct a theory of the city on the premise that its reality is intertwined with a mythic structure. This mythic structure is not given to an immediate visibility but calls for a psychoanalytical and philosophical interpretation, recognizing that, contrary to naïve realism, fantasy is the ‘last support’ of reality.¹ Phantasmagoria is thus a fantastic illusion, but a necessary one, without which the texture of ‘reality’ would disintegrate. As a social symptom, phantasmagoria cannot be overcome but only traversed in a psychoanalytical sense.

With the atrophy of memory, contemporary culture fosters the delusion of pure presence through technological media. Against this notion of unmediated presence, the historical materialist, as Benjamin noted in the thesis above, is the one for whom history only exists in the ‘notion of a present.’ The theory of the mediated city we are advancing in this work is firmly grounded in Benjamin’s philosophical theory of history, which is contrary to the fashionable claim to an ‘end of history.’ In the same way, the logic of the city that we construct based on the notion of phantasmagoria is akin to Marx’s critique of Hegel’s notion of ‘rational totality’ – a critique that foregrounds the paradox inherent in the latter. As interpreted by Žižek, the Marxian critique argues that ‘as soon as we try to conceive the existing social order as a rational totality, we must include in it a paradoxical element which, without ceasing to be its internal constituent, functions as its symptom – subverts the very universal rational principle of this totality.’² Like the proletariat for Marx, phantasmagoria in the theory of the city represents the ‘unreason of reason,’ an ‘irrational’ element haunting it as its internal constituent. As its symptom, it subverts its rational totality. This study is an exploration of the encounter of reason with its own unreason.

Consistent with this approach, we propose a central thesis. In an analogy with Jacques Lacan’s theory that the ‘unconscious is structured like language,’ we propose that the city is structured like phantasmagoria. This means that, like the theory of the unconscious, it is structurally linked to a ‘fundamental fantasy’ that underlines both the desiring subject and the social totality. The ‘phantasmagoric city’ is the expression of this plural subject that must also be collectively traversed.

The phantasmagoric city must of course be demystified – the same way Benjamin unmasked nineteenth-century Paris. In this mythical city, as we will argue, the subject is subjectivized by the structure of phantasmagoria. The modern subject is, therefore, a haunted subject. Phantasmagorias originally were machines to produce illusions, fantasies, ghosts, and hallucinations in horror shows. In our time, they are exclusively a means to produce what is technically called simulacra by means of high-tech digital media. Oblivious to the specific philosophical meaning of ‘simulacrum’ from Plato to Deleuze, the term is often used in an affirmative way to invert the hierarchical order between the ‘original’ and the ‘copy,’ thus giving rise to the fantasy that images are more real than reality itself. The ensuing ‘hyper-reality’ – as presented by its chief theorist Jean Baudrillard – has been legitimized by followers in many fields. In it, two opposites strangely coincide: a ‘hypertrophy of memory,’ on the one hand, and radical amnesia on the other. Both are in some way constitutive of the contemporary city and call for the most careful critical scrutiny.

• • •

The term ‘metropolis’ (meaning the ‘mother city,’ from the Greek mḗtēr, ‘mother,’ and pólis, ‘city’) denotes the ‘big city’ as an economic, political, and geographical entity. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin’s mentor Georg Simmel – along with Georg Lukács, Ernst Bloch, and Siegfried Kracauer – explored the psychological makeup of the metropolitan subject, including what they termed the ‘mental life’ and the typically ‘blasé attitude’ of big-city dwellers. While for Simmel the metropolis was the ‘seat of a money economy,’³ for Benjamin, as Christina Britzolakis notes, it was more ‘a theater for [the] operation of dream, fantasy and memory’⁴ – in other words, in terms of the urban spectrography we are advancing in this book, it was a theater of phantasmagorias that are always already ‘mediated,’ while exceeding a strictly technological description, much like Baudelaire, according to Benjamin, saw the city of Paris through the veil of the crowd. Media here in both cases, media is first and foremost a term for a properly philosophical understanding of mediation.

Mediation, as we understand it, is a dialectical term in Hegelian philosophy, developed in particular in his Science of Logic in the context of his difficult notion of Aufhebung – which in English is rendered inadequately as ‘sublation.’ Hegel declared Aufhebung to be ‘one of the most important concepts in philosophy.’ He writes: ‘Nothing is immediate; what is sublated, on the other hand, is the result of mediation; it is a non-being but as a result which had its origin in a being. It still has, therefore, in itself, the determinateness from which it originated.’ ⁵ It is this sense of mediation that we bring to our theory of the city, a notion of sublation according to which the city is never a determinate being. To say that the city is a determinate being is to mistake its being as immediacy. The city is, rather, as Hegel would say, always on the way of becoming, located at the vanishing point between being and non-being. This means that the city is an impure being, at the core of which is a speculative theorization of the city, based on a principle of indeterminateness, according to which ‘becoming is the process of “sublating” pure being and nothing – the movement of their Aufhebung – whereas determinate being is the resulting state of their being, or having been, sublated.’⁶ For Hegel, ‘when something is aufgehoben, or sublated, it is negated, but it is not annihilated altogether. Rather, it is deprived of its independence and brought into a “unity with its opposite.” What is sublated thus continues to be but at the same time loses its immediacy and so no longer remains purely itself.’⁷ In the same way, the city is always something more, and less, than the pure technological determination that presumes to define it.

Thus the term ‘media,’ in the phrase ‘the mediated city,’ must not be taken simply in its most common and hackneyed technological sense. Rather, as we will argue, within Benjamin’s definitive theory of media, it must be subordinated to a properly dialectical determination of mediation. The same holds, in the last chapter of this book, for the particular configuration we call the hyper-mediated city, in relation to a critique of acceleration in what should be described, following Bernard Stiegler, the hyper-industrial (rather than post-industrial) age.⁸ The characteristic features of the latter, according to Stiegler, are best summed up in Gilles Deleuze’s predictions in ‘The Societies of Control,’⁹ but in our view are even more precisely described in Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.

• • •

This study is aligned with the emancipatory project of Critical Theory from Hegel and Marx, to the Frankfurt School, to contemporary radical philosophy. Two fundamental conceptual terms underpin our analysis, both deriving from this long and rich tradition: disenchantment and profanation. The notion of disenchantment is historically related to the project of the Enlightenment and the critique of capitalism. Max Weber in an essay entitled ‘Science as a Vocation’ – first delivered as a lecture in 1917 – saw it as the essence of modernity: ‘the fate of our times,’ he wrote, ‘is characterized by rationalization and, above all, by the “disenchantment of the world.” Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mythic life or into the borderlines of direct and personal human relations.’¹⁰

As we know, Benjamin adopted but also altered this notion in his own dialectical principle of ‘re-enchantment,’ which – in contrast to the way...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: specters of the city and the task of critique
• PART I Phantasmagoria, modernity, and the city
• PART II Media, technology, and modern experience
• PART III Spectacle and phantasmagoria
• PART IV The architecture of phantasmagoria and the contemporary city
• Epilogue: specters of the city and the critique of ideology
• Bibliography
• Index