phantasmagoria

is (literally a magic-lantern show of optical illusions, rapidly changing size and blending into one another) a way of understanding the spectacle of paris.

Benjamin described the spectacle of Paris as a 'phantasmagoria' -- a magic-lantern show of optical illusions, rapidly changing size and blending into one another. Marx had used the term 'phantasmagoria' to refer to the deceptive appearances of commodities as 'fetishes' in the market place.The PassagenWerk entries cite the relevant passages from Capital on the fetish character of commodities, describing how exchange value obfuscates the source of the value of commodities in productive labor.15 But for Benjamin, whose point of departure was a philosophy of historical experience rather than an economic analysis of capital, the key to the new urban phantasmagoria was not so much the commodity-in-themarket as the commodity-on-display, where exchange value no less than use value lost practical meaning, and purely representational value came to the fore' (Buck-Morss 1989:81).

is a commodity fetish in the mode not of commodity-in-the market but in the mode of commodity-on-display. It is a commodity not in terms of its exchange or its use value, but a commodity of purely representational value.

phantasmagoria, n.Definitions

phantasmagoria