_Phantasmagoria

The Dialectics of Seeing - Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

p.39 "The covered shopping arcades of the 19th century were Benjamin's central image because they were the precise material replica of the internal consciousness, or rather, the unconsciousness of the dreaming collective. All of the errors of the bourgeois consciousness could be found there (commodity fetishism, reification, the world as "inwardness"), as well as (in fashion, prostitution, gambling) all of its utopian dreams. Moreover, the arcades were the first international style of modern architecture, hence part of the lived experience of a worldwide, metropolitan generation."

p.81 "Paris, a 'looking-glass city', dazzled the crowd, but at the same time deceived it. The City of Light, it erased night's darkness - first with gas lanterns, then with electricity, then neon lights - in the space of a century. The City of Mirrors - in which the crowd itself became a spectacle - it reflected the image of people as consumers rather than producers, keeping the class relations of production virtually invisible on the looking glass' other side. Benjamin described the spectacle of Paris as a 'phantasmagoria' - a magic-lantern show of optical illusions, rapidly changing size and blending into one another."

p.81 "Marx had used the term 'phantasmagoria' to refer to the deceptive appearances of commodities as 'fetishes' in the marketplace."

p.81-82 "For Benjamin, whose point of departure was a philosophy of historical experience rather than an economic analysis of capital, the key to the new urban phantasmagoria was not so much the commodity-in-the-market as the commodity-on-display, where exchange value no less than use value lost practical meaning, and purely representational value came to the fore."

Panoramas were a common attraction in the arcades, providing sweeping views that unrolled before the spectators, giving them the illusion of moving through the world at an accelerated rate. (p.82)

_if i could map out all my spaces in one big drawing like the panorama.