The Phantasmagoria of the Techno-City: Walter Benjamin’s Play-Space

The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus, has served as a foundational text for his exploration of urban culture engendered by the media, creative and entertainment industry complex in the nineteenth-century Europe. Yet, Benjamin’s analysis of the city has been unduly linked with the surrealist literary motifs and experiment like flâneur, montage and profane illumination. Critically distancing himself from the European humanist tradition that is deeply ingrained in Surrealism, Benjamin approaches to the city as a modern form of play-space (Spielraum) where innovative technologies and urban spectacles are intricately intertwined, and, therein, a new mode of collective experience is articulated. In this chapter, I examine Benjamin’s unique analysis of play-space as threefold modalities—technology, image-space and body-space—outlined by Benjamin himself. In doing so, I show how Benjamin’s analysis of modernity as phantasmagoria is relevant for a comprehending of contemporary metropolitan techno-environments.