The 20th Century, The Body In Late Capitalism: City, Experience And Techniques

Abstract

This paper presents a genealogical approach to the body in the 20th century, pondered from different focuses: urban experience, technology and critical theory. It argues that late modern capitalism produces politics of the body that are the basis of the politics of the experience of the subject, while also developing the materialistic techniques of reading proposed by Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, and used to criticize the modern experience of dream cities and disasters that emerges with the new myth of contemporary technology. The essay defends an archaeological argument: the historical apriori of critical theory are the cities; field of analysis and urban action that has recently been modified such that our experience is no longer that of the urban phantasmagoria of the last century but, rather, that of the apparatuses of security.