ABSTRACT
The city we have been theorizing in this study – the successor to the one that Benjamin, in his characteristically antinomic way, described as ruled by the specters of Hell and Heaven – must also be submitted, especially in its contemporary configurations, to a materialist ‘critique of ideology.’ Only in this way can the theory of the city we are advancing – ‘the city structured like a phantasmagoria’ – also become a theory of critique . It is imperative, in other words, that the critique of the city be grounded in the critique of capitalism. This means firmly rejecting the prevailing academic tendency to equate any and all principled critiques of capitalism with assorted ‘totalitarian’ doctrines of the left or the right. Even as we resist the dominant Neoliberal consensus, however, we think it is legitimate to raise the question, again, of ideology – of what defines it, of how it operates, and of what constitutes it. In what follows, we propose that one plausible, if preliminary, reply to this question might be a socialized notion of the specter, or spectralization as a distinctive mode of socialization.
