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THE POST-METROPOLIS IS GOD: Notes for a Phenomenology of the Urban Spirit

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Abstract

More akin to the Roman Empire’s concept of civitas mobilis augescens, the distinction between the twentieth-century metropolis and the Roman model of a city must be sought in the eminently biopolitical character of the modern-day post-metropolis, conceived by Hardt and Negri as the new hegemonic paradigm of production. As a result, the primacy of time over space has been established as the only possible way of measuring the proximity of (re)productive relationships: everything that can be converted into information is instantaneous and the value of goods depends not on the requirements of its production process but on the cost of its transportation. As a kind of Phenomenology of the Urban Spirit, this paper develops the main milestones in the historical unfolding of this Logic of the Absolute Urban Spirit.

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Notes

  1. “άςγή. This concept marks the limit between myth and philosophy but a limit, as such, participates in the two fields it limits” (Cassirer 1998a, p. 17).

  2. With increasingly greater regularity, the MIT Technology Review publishes news articles about robots that have learned by themselves (or are self-programmed to) to identify behaviors or patterns for which they were not initially programmed as well as about some robots that are made to interact with each other and, in order to optimize their communication, develop their own language which no human being can decipher.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad de Zaragoza, Calle Pedro Cerbuna, 12, 50009, Zaragoza, Spain

    Jorge León Casero & Julia Urabayen

  2. Universidad de Navarra, Edificio de Bibliotecas, Campus Universitario, 31009, Pamplona, Navarra, Spain

    Jorge León Casero & Julia Urabayen

Authors
  1. Jorge León Casero
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  2. Julia Urabayen
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Correspondence to Jorge León Casero.

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León Casero, J., Urabayen, J. THE POST-METROPOLIS IS GOD: Notes for a Phenomenology of the Urban Spirit. Topoi 40, 493–502 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-018-9590-0

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