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capital, and who have become, in their millions, a permanent migratory underclass:completely interchangeable and replaceable parts in the neo-feudalist machineryof world capital. It is precisely here that we are obliged to play out our lives today,where even the conscious ideologies of rebellion and negative critique are wovenin advance (like planned obsolescence) into the fabric of the play. What all thishas to do with photography should be perfectly clear. As anticipatory illusion,photography and its media progeny are in fact the enabling devices of globaliza-tion, manufacturing our needs, desires, and consent in the service of capital, withourselves as ‘the technical operators’ of the device’s infinite virtuality.I began this chapter commenting on Baudrillard’s claim that images are almostexclusively the technical fulfilment of photography’s intrinsic possibilities, itbeing the medium itself that ‘does all the work’. I also began with what I called‘Plato’s dilemma’, which referred to the essential ambivalence of the powers ofart to fabricate and simultaneously problematize the hegemonic power mate-rialized in the city’s forms and practices: the ambiguity of artifice as such in notsimply reflecting but also fabricating the world in which we live. Artifice – art– problematizes any opposition between the poles of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’, historyand poetry, between ‘fairy worlds’ of labour and the ‘actual world’ in which welive. If we forget that radical and terrifying power of art (which hegemonicpower works tirelessly to ensure we do forget, using the tools of artistry againstus), we ensure our own demise. We must be very clear indeed about what is atstake in reckoning with photography.

Notes

1 Such a claim is not, of course, unique to modernity.2 This remarkable 150-page poem, initially published anonymously by the unidentifiedauthoress of Belgravia,A Poem , 2nd edn, 1852, is divided into six parts, devoted, respectively,to an overview of the year of the Exhibition from its opening on 1 May to its Autumnclose, morning in the Crystal Palace (with the joyous arrival of the Queen), a discussionof the building’s resemblance to great edifices of ice seen by Arctic mariners, the lamenta-tion of a mother for her daughter lost in the crowds, a description of the progress of twoanonymous persons through the Exhibition one day, closing with a discussion of ‘the tiesthat exist between a great Author and those of his Readers who appreciate his works’(137). The building opened 1 May 1851 and closed 12 October, 165 days later.3 A useful introduction to the building and to a good sample of the recent literature isMcKean (1994). The present discussion expands on several earlier versions: a lectureentitled ‘The Crystalline Veil and the Phallomorphic Imaginary’, part 6 of the SladeLectures, Oxford, 2001, and the publication of those lectures (Preziosi 2003). An earlierdraft appeared under the title ‘The Crystalline Veil and the Phallomorphic Imaginary:Walter Benjamin’s Pantographic Riegl’ (Preziosi 1999).4 My perspectives here are indebted to the work of, and to work in the wake of, Luce Irigaray.See the special issue of Diacritics , 28, 1 (1998), devoted to her work, especially Berger (1998);see also Irigaray, ‘The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry’ (1985: 41–68).5 I follow here the reading of Samuel Weber (1996: 76–8) in his essay ‘Mass Mediauras, or:Art, Aura and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin’.