antagonist » Benjamin http://www.antagoni.st Tue, 22 Nov 2011 13:46:03 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 The Horror-furnishings of Incipient High Capitalism http://www.antagoni.st/2009/11/15/the-horrorfurnishing-of-incipient-high-capitalism/ http://www.antagoni.st/2009/11/15/the-horrorfurnishing-of-incipient-high-capitalism/#comments Sun, 15 Nov 2009 23:50:51 +0000 Rodney http://antgst.wordpress.com/2009/11/15/the-horrorfurnishing-of-incipient-high-capitalism/ Empty, brightly lit streets as we enter cities at night. They surround us in fan-shaped formation, travel out and away from us like rays of mandorla. And the glance into a room will always find a family at a meal or else occupied with some obscure niggling thing at a table under a hanging lamp, its white glass globe set into a metal frame. Such eidola are the germ cells of Kafka’s work. And this experience remains an inalienable possession of his generation, his only – and therefore our, because only for it do the horror-furnishings of incipient high capitalism fill the screens of its most luminous childhood experience. -Unexpectly, the street emerges here such as we never otherwise experience it, as was, a built-up thoroughfare.

Walter Benjamin in The Arcades Project

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