The Scenes of the Street and Other Essays by Anthony Vidler

“Following the warnings of de Toqueville and the severe critique of Adorno, and with the experience of two world wars and several industrial revolutions later, we have become only too aware of this side of the apparently brilliant vision of Enlightenment: the ‘dark side’ of Enlightenment, as it has been called, referring in intellectual history to the disturbing works of de Sade or the black visions of Goya. In spatial terms we might characterize this darkness as relating to similar Sadean and nightmarish evocations—the fundamentally intrusive nature of Enlightenment vision, its relationship to an all-determining technological and antihumanist version of progress, as well as the deeper psychological implications of Rousseauesque inquiries into the self and its hidden forces. In these terms, the dream of Enlightenment transparency is revealed as a false promise of redemption, dialectically situated between absolute truth and absolute terror, and dedicated to the installation of a machine conformity to production and its social laws.”

-Anthony Vidler, 2005