The Architecture of the Visible: Technology and Urban Visual Culture (Technologies: Studies in Culture & Theory)

The Architecture of the Visible: Technology and Urban Visual Culture (Technologies: Studies in Culture & Theory)

by Graham Mac Phee (Author)

Synopsis

Visual technology saturates everyday life. Theories of the visual--now key to debates across cultural studies, social theory, art history, literary studies and philosophy--have interpreted this new condition as the beginning of a dystopian future, of cultural decline, social disempowerment and political passivity. Intellectuals--from Baudelaire to Debord, Benjamin, Virilio, Jameson, Baudrillard and Derrida--have explored how technology not only reinvents the visual, but also changes the nature of culture itself. The heartland of all such cultural analysis has been the city, from Baudelaire's flaneur to Benjamin's arcades.The Architecture of the Visible presents a wide-ranging critical reassessment of contemporary approaches to visual culture through an analysis of pivotal technological innovation from the telescope, through photography to film. Drawing on the examples of Paris and New York--two key world cities for over two centuries--Graham MacPhee analyzes how visual technology is revolutionizing the landscape of modern thought, politics and culture.

$64.50

Quantity

10 in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 242
Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd.
Published: 23 May 2002

ISBN 10: 0826459269
ISBN 13: 9780826459268

Author Bio
Graham MacPhee is Lecturer in English Literature in the School of Languages and Area Studies. University of Portsmouth. He has written on Walter Benjamin, modernist poetics and the relationship between modern philosophy and contemporary theory.