Professional Documents
Culture Documents
City and Modernity in Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin: Fragments of Metropolis Vincenzo Mele full chapter instant download
City and Modernity in Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin: Fragments of Metropolis Vincenzo Mele full chapter instant download
https://ebookmass.com/product/walter-benjamin-and-the-idea-of-
natural-history-cultural-memory-in-the-present-1st-edition-
friedlander/
https://ebookmass.com/product/livy-the-fragments-and-periochae-
volume-i-fragments-citations-testimonia-d-s-levene/
https://ebookmass.com/product/tropical-forests-in-prehistory-
history-and-modernity-patrick-roberts/
https://ebookmass.com/product/psychiatric-neuroethics-studies-in-
research-and-practice-walter-glannon/
Unmarried Motherhood in the Metropolis, 1700–1850:
Pregnancy, the Poor Law and Provision Samantha Williams
https://ebookmass.com/product/unmarried-motherhood-in-the-
metropolis-1700-1850-pregnancy-the-poor-law-and-provision-
samantha-williams/
https://ebookmass.com/product/introduction-to-international-
relations-theories-and-approaches-8th-edition-georg-sorensen/
https://ebookmass.com/product/abbatial-authority-and-the-writing-
of-history-in-the-middle-ages-benjamin-pohl/
https://ebookmass.com/product/museums-modernity-and-conflict-
museums-and-collections-in-and-of-war-since-the-nineteenth-
century-kate-hill/
https://ebookmass.com/product/tropical-forests-in-human-
prehistory-history-and-modernity-patrick-roberts/
MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS
Vincenzo Mele
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
Series Editors
Marcello Musto
York University
Toronto, ON, Canada
Terrell Carver
University of Bristol
Bristol, UK
The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique
of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for
new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx,
Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with
Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as
Assistant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions,
reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published in
other languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political per-
spectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas,
producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse
and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre of
Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th
centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary
issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.
Vincenzo Mele
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2022
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in
any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic
adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or
hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the
publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to
the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.
The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and
institutional affiliations.
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG.
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgments
This book is the culmination of years of research, during which some por-
tions of its text have appeared, either verbatim or in similar form, in vari-
ous publications. Said portions are integral to the reasoning laid out in the
book and could hardly be omitted or substantially modified without
undermining its coherence. The following represent the most significant
publications:
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
–– The Blasé and the Flâneur. Simmel and Benjamin on Modern and
Postmodern Forms of Individualization, in Simmel Studies, 2019,
Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 37–70.
–– Georg Simmel and the Metropolization of Social Life, in The Cambridge
Handbook of Social Theory, ed. by P. Kivisto, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 2020, pp. 161–178.
–– Georg Simmel and Critical Theory, in Routledge International
Handbook of Simmel Studies, ed. by G. Fitzi, Routledge, 2020,
New York/London, pp. 261–275.
3 Deconstructing
History, Morality, and Society: Simmel’s
Theory of Knowledge 63
vii
viii Contents
9 The
Phantasmagoria of Modernity: On Commodity
Fetishism 285
10 Baudelaire
as the Lyric Poet in the Age of Mature
Capitalism309
11 Conclusions:
Metropolis as Tragedy, Metropolis as
Trauerspiel347
Index 383
Abbreviations and Translations
The following abbreviations are used throughout the text and notes:
ix
CHAPTER 1
Geistesleben” (Simmel 2021 [1903]), but his entire work is arguably per-
vaded by a “metropolitan spirit.” The essay on the metropolis summarizes
the main themes of The Philosophy of Money (Simmel 2004 [1900]), in
which he carries out an extensive philosophical, sociological, and aesthetic
analysis of the monetary economy, which largely coincides with metropoli-
tan culture. For Simmel, the metropolis paradigmatically represents the
problem on which he reflected for nearly his entire life, namely the rela-
tionship between the individual and society. This problem is latent not
only in his sociological and philosophical work, but also in much of his
copious essayistic production, some of the most important contributions
of which were published in his 1911 collection titled Philosophical Culture
(Simmel 1996).
The metropolis has similar theoretical and biographical importance in
Walter Benjamin’s work. He devoted fourteen years to his unfinished
work on the arcades of Paris (Benjamin 2002 [1982], The Arcades Project,
1926–1940, uncompleted materials firstly published in 1982), the city
that for him (as for Siegfried Kracauer) was the emblem of modernity. He
intended this study to be a “primal history of modernity” (Urgeschichte der
Moderne) as represented in the events and culture of the French capital
between the rise of the “bourgeois King”, Louis Philippe, and the decline
of the fragile republic with the empire of Louis Bonaparte. Understanding
how these authors theorized and described the experience of the metropo-
lis is particularly meaningful from the perspective of the history of social
thought. Indeed, Georg Simmel (1858–1918) and Walter Benjamin
(1892–1940) assume two representative standpoints on twentieth-century
thought regarding the relation between subjectivity and mass society, sym-
bolically represented by the metropolis as its characteristic social and cul-
tural manifestation. Their visions of modernity are largely the result of
perspectives that are respectively on the threshold and internal to twentieth-
century philosophical and sociological discourse on modernity. Simmel’s
standpoint precedes “the short 20th century” (as defined by the English
historian Hobsbawm 1994), and hence his perceptions are significant for
their otherness with respect to the period’s affairs and tragedies. Simmel
died in 1918, when the tragedy of the First World War (on which he ini-
tially had taken an activist stance for intervention, only then to be con-
sumed by the dilemma between Nationalism and Europeanism) (Watier
1991; Thouard 2014; Fitzi 2018) and the consequent cultural crisis
marked a definitive turning point from the previous era. Benjamin’s
1 INTRODUCTION: INVESTIGATING POSTMODERNITY THROUGH… 5
while we can utilize Weber and Habermas to orient ourselves in the tastes
and life styles of artists and intellectuals, and their interest in generalizing
aesthetic perceptions and sensibilities, Benjamin and Simmel can be utilized
to direct us toward the way that the urban landscape has become aestheticized
and enchanted by the architecture, the billboards, shop signs, advertise-
1
The reference here is to Benjamin’s concept of history and his re-reading of the idea of
revolution as an “emergency brake”: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world
history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by passengers
on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake” (Benjamin 2003
[1940], p. 402).
6 V. MELE
ments, packaging, road signs, etc., and by the people who, immersed in this
setting, consequently move about in these spaces: individuals dressed up to
various degrees, fashionable clothing, hair styles, makeup, or who move or
hold their bodies in a particularly stylized way (Featherstone 2007, p. 76).
Featherstone suggests that Simmel and Benjamin still furnish some key
elements for interpreting any analysis of the postmodern “culture of con-
sumerism” and the phenomenon of the “aestheticization of daily life.” An
analysis of the metropolis enables us to understand the aesthetic contribu-
tions to the modern process of reflexivity. This is especially true if we
consider the problem of subjectivity and its survival in the context of mass
society culture, whose true “paradigm” is to be found precisely in the
social form of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century metropolis. If we
regard the blasé and the flâneur, respectively, as emblems of Simmel’s and
Benjamin’s models of metropolitan subjectivity, we can see how analyzing,
reconstructing, and comparing these two figures can help understand
some essential aesthetic and cultural characteristics of our modern times.
Paraphrasing the renowned closing of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism, Zygmunt Bauman, a contemporary author very
attentive to the ethical and sociological dynamics of individuality, splen-
didly framed the importance of the figure of the flâneur in the contempo-
rary cultural scene:
The flaneur wanted to play his game at leisure; we are forced to do so. For
when flâneurism was carried out from of the Parisian arcades into everyday
life, and began to dominate worldly aesthetics, it did its part in building the
tremendous cosmos of the post-modern consumerist order. This order is
now bond to the technical and economic conditions of machine production,
which today determine the lives of all individuals who are born into this
mechanism, not only those directly concerned with living their life as play,
with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last bit of
information is turned out by the computer. In Baudelaire’s or Benjamin’s
view the dedication to mobile fantasy should lie on the shoulders of the
flâneur like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment. But
fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage (Bauman
1994, p. 153).
2
Honneth used this formula to include the three fundamental circles of experience that
describe the phenomenon of the “aestheticization of daily life.” Firstly, the technological
innovation that came about in the late twentieth century, together with the extensive process
of internationalization of capital, has led to a massive entry of culture into the processes of
economic evaluation, whose most prominent manifestation is the growth of mass media and
advertising. This, in turn, has led to a phenomenon that has become daily experience for
modern westerners (and not only), that is, the ever-increasing flow of electronically produced
information and images that enter our homes daily through TV screens and computers. One
result of this is the “trend to erosion of the aesthetic means of communication of the world
of social life” (Honneth 1994, p. 12). To put it in other, simpler terms, cultural activities lose
their particular nature as the means to communicate a symbolic representation of the living
world of men, and instead take on the characteristics of an electronically reproduced “techni-
cal environment” designed exclusively for amusement and entertainment. Secondly, this pro-
cess of erosion of the media goes hand in hand with a process of erosion of the normative
bonds of the world of social life itself, a phenomenon that the French philosopher Jean-
François Lyotard has described perfectly as “the end of the great narrations.” Finally, this
“erosion” of the social also involves a weakening of individuals’ communicative and rela-
tional capacities, which indicates a tendency toward the “atomization” of the individual and
erosion of the social bonds through which social groups expressively and normatively
reproduce.
1 INTRODUCTION: INVESTIGATING POSTMODERNITY THROUGH… 9
from the idea of fulfillment of human life and internalizing it to the mere
growth of its possibilities; in place of an idea of “self-realization”, the image
(Vorstellung) emerges of an experimental invention of the self
(Selbsterfindung). (Honneth 1994, pp. 15–16)
to those of theatrical masks in plays, where the same characters with the
same passions and the same destiny are always present. In his fundamental
cycle of lectures published in 1907 (now in (Simmel 2006, pp. 167–408),
Simmel underlines that the importance of Nietzsche with respect to
Schopenhauer consists in having posed the question on the meaning of
life per se:
12:ta Jako.
LIHOJEN SUOLAAMISESTA JA
SAUHUTTAMISESTA.
Toisella lailla.
Toisella lailla.
Sitte' kuin lihat edellä mainitulla tavalla ovat palotetut, pannaan ne'
veteen yöksi, ja toisena päivänä nostetaan ne' nojossa olevalle'
laudalle' valoomaan; pyhitään sitte' liina-rievulla ja suolataan astiaan,
jonka pohjalle' on varisteltu suuria suoloja. Viimmeksi pannaan kansi
päälle' ja painoa kannelle'.
13:ta Jako.
LEIPOMISISTA.
Toisella lailla.
14:ta Jako.
OLUEN PANOSTA JA KAIKELLAISIEN
MUIDEN JUOTAVIEN TEOSTA.