The Contingent Foundations of Universality in Control Societies: Spiritual Fetishism and the Autoimmune Logic of Capital
Spatial Theory and the Psychopolitical Unconscious of the City
Cities have become incubators for machinic control, harnessing vast arrays of surveillance, infrastructure, and data analytics to regulate everyday life. “Smart city” initiatives, often lauded for their promise of efficiency and sustainability, embed neoliberal logics into urban policy, intensifying a form of algorithmic governance that purports to be neutral. Henri Lefebvre’s seminal premise that “(social) space is a (social) product” illuminates how these infrastructures not only organize flows of capital and labor but also mold collective fantasies and libidinal attachments.
Freud’s model of dreamwork—condensation, displacement, distortion—helps conceptualize the “dream-architectures” of contemporary urban environments. Gentrified districts displace marginalized groups to peripheral zones, while proliferating surveillance cameras function as the superego of the city, internalizing discipline into the psyche of its inhabitants. Splitting (in psychoanalytic terms) is also evident in stark class divides, with “exclusive” neighborhoods forming enclaves of securitized luxury, effectively denying any shared responsibility for urban inequality. The city thus materializes unconscious processes of repressed anxieties (about crime, disorder, the poor) and projected desires (for status, sanitized public space), thereby reproducing capital’s autoimmune dynamic on a spatial register.