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Peter Sloterdijk, in his 2005 book Im Weltinnenraum (In the World Interior of Capital), agreed with Benjamin that capitalism functions, in part, by creating exclusive spaces to keep out the undesirable and unmoneyed – be they gated estates, malls with security guards, or fortress Europe – but denied that such grand interiors of capital contained any hope for a better world. Indeed, Sloterdijk argued that another, grander capitalist temple of glass and steel, namely Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace built to house the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, was a better, but less hopeful, metaphor for capitalism. ‘The arcades formed a canopied intermezzo between streets or squares’, wrote Sloterdijk, ‘the crystal palace, on the other hand invoked the idea of an enclosure so spacious that one might never have to leave it.’18 Inside the Palace, the world’s most diverting flora, fauna and industrial products were displayed under climate controlled, obligingly sanitary conditions under one roof, thus precluding the necessity for travel, while whatever remained outside (war, genocide, slavery, unpleasant tropical diseases) dwindled into irrelevance. In that respect, Crystal Palace rather than the Parisian arcade was the blueprint for how capitalism has functioned since. ‘Who can deny’, Sloterdijk wrote, ‘that in its primary aspects, the western world – especially the European Union – embodies such a great interior today?’19 In The Arcades Project, Benjamin took the bourgeois drawing room to be emblematic of private space under early capitalism, one in which the private citizen could hole up from the irksome world; under late capitalism, for Sloterdijk, the exclusion zone had expanded from drawing room to the size of a continent.
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