Unthinking Spectacle

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgement I would like to thank Gevork Hartoonian for his insightful comments. Notes 1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, New York: International Publishers, 1956, p. 64. 2 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967. 3 See, for example, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Consciousness Industry: On Literature, Politics and the Media, New York: Seabury Press, 1974; Jean Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production, St. Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1975; Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, St. Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1981; Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern Turn, New York: Guilford Press, 1997; Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle, London: Routledge, 2003; Sut Jhally, The Spectacle of Accumulation: Essays in Culture, Media, and Politics, New York: P. Lang, 2006. 4 See, for just a few examples, Ayse Oncu and Petra Weyland, Space, Culture and Power: New Identities in Globalizing Cities, New York: Zed Books, 1997; Kris Olds, Globalization and Urban Change, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001; Alexander R. Cuthbert, The Form of Cities: Political Economy and Urban Design, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 5 See, for example, Gerry Kearns and Chris Philo (eds.), Selling Places: The City as Cultural Capital, Past and Present, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1993; Urban Affairs (ed.), City Branding: Image Building and Building Images, Rotterdam: NAi, 2002; Celia Lury, Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy, London: Routledge, 2004; Jonathan Crary, The Suspension of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001; Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001; B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1999. 6 See, for example, Michael Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, New York: The Noonday Press, 1992; Mark Gottdiener, The Theming of America: Dreams Media Fantasies and Themed Environments, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001; Scott A. Lukas (ed.) The Themed Space: Locating Culture, Nation, and Self, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007; John Hannigan, Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropolis, London: Routledge, 1998; William Fox, In the Desert of Desire: Las Vegas and the Culture of Spectacle, Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 2005; Carol Becker, Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002; Alan Tomlinson and Christopher Young (eds.), National Identity and Global Sports Events: Culture Politics and Spectacle in the Olympics and the Football World Cup, New York: State University of New York Press, 2006. 7 See, for example, Hal Foster, ‘Image Building,’Artforum, 43, 2 (October 2004): 270-275; Joan Ockman, ‘New Politics of the Spectacle: “Bilbao” and the Global Imagination,’ in Medina Lasansky and Brian McLaren (eds.), Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance and Place, Oxford: Berg, 2004, pp. 227-240; Anthony D. King, Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity, London: Routledge, 2004; Williams S. Saunders (ed.), Commodification and Spectacle in Architecture, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnessota Press, 2005; Gevork Hartoonian, Crisis of the Object: The Architecture of Theatricality, New York: Routledge, 2006; Anthony Vidler, Architecture between Spectacle and Use, Williamstown, MA: Yale University Press, 2008. 8 Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,’ in Neil Leach (ed.), Rethinking Architecture, New York: Routeledge, 1997, pp. 350-356. The quote is from p. 356.