Memories of capitalism: cities, phantasmagoria and arcades

Salvage memory: constellating material histories on a hardscrabble homestead

“…As Kevin Hetherington has suggested, materiality 'has indirect ways of telling us stories … about power, agency, and history that we could never grasp through more direct forms of representation'. 37 The stories I have drawn out here often touch on the intricate workings of subjectivity -sideways glimpses of the overlapping terrain between intimate experience and collective practice. The texture of 1930s Montana farm life that comes into view through this story-telling is dense with the details of a few specific lives, a series of choices, commitments, and disappointments.…”

Urban Phantasmagorias

“…According to Marc Berdet (2010), a phantasmagoria may be defined as “a representation of the imaginary relationship of the society to its real condition of existence” (p. 1). Kevin Hetherington (2005, p. 191), following Benjamin, traces the term’s etymological root to Phantasos , the name of one of the sons of Hypnos, who “was responsible for sending dreams to people of inanimate objects, or things,” suggesting that “his is the figural message concealed within material culture.” And yet, for Hetherington (2005, p. 194) a more suitable etymological definition of phantasmagoria is “ phantasma agoreuein : to speak in public (from the agora—a place of public discourse that was also a market place) under the influence of allegory,” that is, “a voice expressed through the materiality of unfinished disposal.”…”