ABSTRACT
In the ‘introduction’ to the 1939 exposé, Benjamin presents his investigation into the ‘reifying representation of civilization’ as the ‘new forms of behavior,’ and the ‘new economic and technologically based creations,’ that constitute the nineteenth century’s ‘universe of a phantasmagoria.’ In these creations, he identifies four phantasmagorical formations that he sets out to illuminate, not only ‘theoretically by an ideological transposition,’ as he says, but also in the ‘immediacy of their perceptible presence.’ 1 They are the phantasmagorias of the arcades, world exhibitions, the flâneur, and the interior. In this final chapter, we look at the last of these, the phantasmagoria of the interior, which, as Benjamin wrote, is ‘constituted by man’s imperious need to leave the imprint of his private individual existence on the rooms he inhabits.’ 2
The phenomenon came into existence, according to Benjamin, in Second Empire Paris and persisted at least until Jugendstil’s cult of the domestic interior. Today, we argue, the themes and concerns that defined the phantasmagoria of the interior survive not in the space of the private individual but in the space of collectivity – that is to say, in the City as Interior. By transposing Peter Sloterdijk’s notion of ‘the capitalist world interior’ to the city of contemporary techno-capitalism, we argue that the Interior, today, is the City itself. 3 This can be seen in the two different moods that drive the nineteenth-century interior and its twenty-first-century successor.
