ABSTRACT
There has never been a philosophical theory of masses in the theory and critique of architecture. The current categories and concepts, institutional practice and pedagogy, not only leave architecture exposed to the exploitation of ruling technological-industrial capitalism, but worse, make it useful for it. The chapter begins by posing the main question: How can architecture, which, in the Age of Cinema, or at the time of its ‘death’, faces ever more devastating effects of the ‘bungled reception of technology’, perform the task of training apperception of the individual with its vast apparatus? To address this question, this chapter explores the ‘philosophy of masses’ in Walter Benjamin and Alain Badiou and attempts to construct theses grounded in their work. In this effort, I read Benjamin through Badiou and Badiou through Benjamin, while bearing in mind that Badiou, unlike Benjamin, never took up architecture for analysis when discussing cinema.
