“Fantasmagorias do mercado”: um olhar Benjaminiano sobre as vivências de consumo e os espaços mercadológicos da Paris do século XIX

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the history of some consumption spaces in the 19th century of Paris, as well as the forms of experience, imagination and sensitivity that are connected to these places. In order to achieve this goal, we chose Walter Benjamin’s Passages project (Das Passagen-Werk) as the main source of our research and his concept of phantasmagoria as a central category of our analysis. The dissertation analyzes more specifically three consumption spaces of the Paris of the 19th century: the boulevards, the passages and the department stores. Therefore, we look for, on the one hand, understand the specific configuration of such spaces, all the apparatus of devices, technologies and aesthetic forms operating in it, and, on the other hand, in the reception’s view perspective, we try to investigate the way in which Parisian landscapes consumption affect the sensitive experience of consumers.Regard that reception cannot be considered a homogeneous process, we have chosen a particular social type as the object of study, the flâneur, a Parisian figure who is studied by Benjamin in his work. In a last moment of our research, we try to understand the phenomenon of the phantasmagoria of the market inside the forms of urban living, recoveringat the same time some elements of the life and works of Charles Baudelaire and some concepts of psychoanalysis. At the theoretical-methodological level, we propose an approach that combines the history of historiography with some familiar procedures to the current of New Cultural History. Our study is supported by a qualitative polyphonic research, based on the articulation and interpretation of evidence from different sources. Beyond the number of documents collected by Benjamin himself in his project, we also used, as a complementary support, other primary sources not mentioned by the author. Some contemporary studies were also used as a basis for the analysis. The present dissertation was guided, in this way, by an attempt to understand the forms of living mobilized by modern capitalist culture, at the same time we try to study cultural processes connected to the consumption spaces of Paris in the 19th century as foundational and paradigmatic phenomenon, which will allow to understand, therefore, certain experiences, practices and representations related to consumption today.