Mirzoeff, Nicholas. Chapter 3: “Visuality: Authority and War” in The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011)
- Phantasmagoria = First incarnated as an entertainment projecting ghosts and other specters by Philidor
- A name for a specific type of magic-lantern performance in the 1790s and early 1800s, one that used back projection to keep an audience unaware of the lanterns.
- The phantasmagoria quickly turned into **a metaphor for the haunted qualities of modern life
- ⇒ there is some agreement among critics of the modern that its form is the phantasmagoria, an illusion of light and sound that displaces the real
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- EG: Blake had peopled his London with the Spectre, Marx saw commodity fetishism as a phantasmagoria, while Benjamin made it a feature of his Arcades Project, and even today Slavoj Zizek warns us against the “fantasy of the real.”
Chaudhary, Zahid. Chapter 2: “Anaesthesis and Violence: A Colonial History of Shock” in Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India (2012), pp. 73-104
- “a narcotic was made out of reality itself” through phantasmagoric spectacles
- The phantasmagoric floods the senses and strives to construct patterns of wholeness, unity, and surface harmony in order to numb the body to reality
- EG: all manner of mass distractions, from the consumer’s experience of the shopping arcades in Paris, dazzling with their display of commodities from around the globe, to the panoramas and dioramas that would engulf the observer and encapsulate a world
- Unlike the use of individual drugs, phantasmagorias are experienced collectively, and therefore they “assume the position of objective fact”
- Recall that phantasmagorias produce reality as a series of surface patterns; statistics are symptomatic of a widespread rationalization of the material world, a kind of mirror that returns the image of the rational body politic stripped of its capacity for pain.
tiktok!
tiktok <> culture of visuality, seeing each other seeing self phantasmagoria
automatons: robot duck + marie antoinnette