Phantasmagoria and the Architecture of the Contemporary City

Author: Nadir Lahiji
Year: 2015 (Architecture_media_politics_society, vol. 7, no. 4)
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/lahiji-2015-phantasmagoria-hyper-mediated-city.md

Summary

Lahiji argues that Walter Benjamin's 1930s concept of "phantasmagoria" — the deceptive, dazzling image in which commodity culture and its architecture appear — remains the ideal analytic framework for today's "hyper-mediated" city and its digital, spectacular architecture. Building on Hal Foster's reversal of Debord ("spectacle is an image accumulated to the point where it becomes capital") and on Susan Buck-Morss's reading of Benjaminian "anaesthetics," Lahiji contends that the contemporary media city has gone beyond the industrial city's "shock" into a generalized anesthetization of the sensorium, making the phantasmagoric spectacle an instrument of control and, very often, of intoxication.

Key Claims

• Foster's reversal: where Debord wrote that "the spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image," Hal Foster inverts it: spectacle is "an image accumulated to the point where it becomes capital." Foster used this to attack the architecture of spectacle, especially Gehry — "a computer-driven version of a Potemkin architecture of conjured surfaces."
• Duck, decorated shed, "decorated duck": tracing to Venturi et al.'s Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Foster reads Gehry's architecture as at once a "duck" and a "decorated shed" — a "decorated duck" — a "whole flock" of buildings that "combine the willful monumentality of modern architecture with faux-populist iconicity of postmodern design," used by "companies, cities and even states" to be "perceived, through instant icons, as global players."
• Phantasmagoria and the industrial city: Benjamin's 1939 Exposé introduced the term for the "deceptive image" (Blendwerk) of commodity culture; per Tiedemann, "Phantasmagoria ... is already the commodity itself," in which exchange-value hides use-value. The term itself, invented c. 1802, names the magic-lantern "ghost-shows" that tricked the senses through technical manipulation.
• Etymology / allegory's doppelgänger: following Margaret Cohen, the etymology of phantasmagoria (phantasma + agoreuein) contrasts with allegory (allos + agoreuein): phantasmagoria is "allegory's demonic doppelgänger," substituting ghosts for transcendence — a space where "the transcendence of the authentically supernatural has turned to a demonic rooted in the process of market exchange."
• Benjamin's two stages of media: "technical reproducibility" (the old new media of the nineteenth-century city: stereoscope, magic lantern, panorama, diorama, photograph, film) and "digital reproducibility" (the new new media of the last thirty years) — both within the perceptual regime of capitalism's mode of exchange.
• Anaesthetics, not shock: Buck-Morss: the nineteenth-century city produced "shock"; the contemporary hyper-mediated city produces a "generalized anaesthetics," a total breakdown of experience. "Perception becomes experience only when it connects with sense-memories of the past," and its goal today is to "numb the organism, to deaden the senses, to repress memory." Lahiji calls the result a "narcotic city," comparable to absinthe or hashish — "technological addicts ... victims of a system of political power and social control that maintains itself through the force of intoxication."
• Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk: the "total environment" of the hyper-mediated city parallels Wagnerian music drama — Adorno read Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk as phantasmagoria ("the point at which aesthetic appearance becomes a function of the character of the commodity ... purveys illusion"), a "permanent invitation to intoxication" and "oceanic regression."
• A "New Phantasmagoria": following Douglas Spencer, contemporary architecture of financial capitalism and digital technology proposes "a New Phantasmagoria," invested in the "occultation of production": much contemporary architecture "is aimed at the production of 'intoxicating brews' appealing to a sensuous realm of affectivity through environments and atmospheres" that immersive the subject in "full immersion" and eliminate interruption.
• Digital "skin and bones": the new digitally warped architecture boils down to the old modernist "skin and bones," producing "digitally warped object-building[s] ... elevated to the status of an evocative-rapturous 'illuminated sculpture'"; cities (Beijing, Bilbao, Los Angeles, Zaragoza) define themselves through such buildings (CCTV, Bird's Nest, Guggenheim Bilbao, Walt Disney Concert Hall).
• Flexible accumulation and "junk-space": all grounded in "flexible accumulation"; the "reverse side of this architecture of exuberance is ... the 'junk-space' that lies at the margins." Despite the revived "cult of the aura," these spectacle buildings "are seen as images and experienced as such," entering "the circuits of capital accumulation as star buildings."
• Destined to fail: Lahiji strikes a defiant note — the aesthetic totalization of the phantasmagoric city is "destined to fail," both because of the discomfort of a reconfigured mode of perception and because the economic drive to supersede each spectacle consigns it "to the past before it has time to take root" (evoked via Benjamin's Angel of History, "the debris of progress").

Connections

Concepts: Spectacle · Junkspace · Noopolitics · Ideology · Phantasmagoria
Authors: Walter Benjamin · Susan Buck-Morss · Hal Foster · Douglas Spencer · Guy Debord · Frank Gehry · Rem Koolhaas · Theodor Adorno
Related source notes: Recodings (Foster) · The Architecture of Neoliberalism (Spencer) · The Spectacle 2.0 (Briziarelli & Armano) · Seduced by Form (Nowicka-Wright)
Synthesis: Debord's Concept of the Spectacle

Direct Quotes

"The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image." (Debord, cited) — reversed by Foster: spectacle is "an image accumulated to the point where it becomes capital."

"Phantasmagoria ... is already the commodity itself, in which the exchange value or value-form hides the use-value." (Tiedemann, cited)

"[I]ts goal today is to: 'Numb the organism, to deaden the senses, to repress memory: the cognitive system of anaesthetics has become, rather, one of anesthetics.'" (Buck-Morss, cited)

"It is thus a narcotic city, with a function similar to that of absinthe or hashish in the middle of nineteenth century."

"Much contemporary architecture ... is aimed at the production of 'intoxicating brews' appealing to a sensuous realm of affectivity." (Spencer, cited)

"[T]hese spectacle buildings are seen as images and experienced as such. They enter into the circuits of capital accumulation as star buildings."

Open Questions

• Can the concept of phantasmagoria — developed for the nineteenth-century industrial city — carry the analytic weight Lahiji assigns it for the digital hyper-mediated city, or does the shift from "shock" to "anaesthetics" mark a different regime requiring its own concepts?
• Is Lahiji's defiant claim that the phantasmagoric architecture is "destined to fail," on the internal contradictions of capital, persuasive, or does it risk reproducing the very utopianism-by-default he criticizes?
• How does anaesthesia (the numbed sensorium) relate to the "affective turn" that Spencer reads as a mode of governance — is immersion a form of control or of escape?