LECTURE 11

THE MODERNIST METROPOLIS

1. MODERNISM AND THE CITY

The great nineteenth-century narratives had been filled with crises of religious and moral conscience. The arts and ideas of the later nineteenth century looked elsewhere, to the very nature of perception and consciousness, and to the world that lay below consciousness and came to be called the unconscious. The language of a plain and direct realism no longer expressed a sufficient sense of the shifting, moving, speeding, complex modern world. In many modern plays and novels character is regarded not as a coherent, definable, well-structured entity, but as a psychic battlefield, or an insoluble puzzle, or a flux of perceptions and sensations. The integral conception of human personality, bound up with the notion of character as embodying the resources for rational self-development, gives way to the idea of the contingent person who does not know or understand himself.

The great European cities, with populations in the millions by the turn of the century, were the incubators of this new world. In the great city new ideas and styles could find audiences. Artists could find outlets for their work in galleries, magazines, and theaters; and places to work (studios, garrets, libraries) and to relax (cafes, cabarets). They could cultivate their eccentricities, their strategies of surprise, shock, provocation, and scandal. The urban avant-garde is entranced with the depths of the city and the self, with the extremes of sensation. Modernism is in the first place an art of the metropolis. Cultural frictions and critical debates are most intense there.

Cities are not only places where talents and innovations cluster, they are also places where strangers gather. The great European culture capitals, we have seen, were hospitable to exiles and expatriates, and a number of the greatest modern writers and artist preferred to live abroad: Ibsen, Strindberg, and Picasso typical examples. Perhaps a certain distance from local origins, class allegiances, and the specific obligations and taboos of a cohesive culture is intrinsic to modernism. The turn of the century was an era in which the railway made travel easy, there were virtually no passports, and the cost of living abroad was low. Every major city had colonies of exiles, Bohemian villages where refugees from middle class culture could gather and conduct guerilla raids on the bourgeoisie. Some of the most characteristic modernist techniques, one might say, internalize the perspectives of exile and estrangement: the emphasis on multiple points of view and radical juxtapositions, for example.

Finally, cities are among other things collections of specialists: the division of labor is most advanced there. Artist become specialists as well, producing works not so much for the broad public as for their aesthetic peers. And specialism can be liberating, it can emancipate sound, meaning, color, line, space, time. The Cubists and Expressionists liberated form and color respectively from their representational functions. This kind of radicalism could not have taken root in the more conservative provinces of European culture.

2. THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMPRESSIONISM OF GEORG SIMMEL

We have cited French Impressionism as the first really modern movement in art. Monet dissolved bodies into fields of light. What seems to the ordinary bourgeois mind solid fact is to the avant-garde mind ephemeral process. Hence the emphasis, from Baudelaire onward, on the fleeting and the fragmentary: the sketch, not the masterpiece; spontaneity rather than craftsmanship; process rather than product. The nineteenth century was fascinated with history; the early modernists were fascinated by synchronicity and simultaneity.

Georg Simmel (1858-1918), one of the founders of modern sociology, was a sort of sociological impressionist. The crucial characteristic of modernity for him is rapid change: "In reality itself things do not last for any length of time; through the restlessness with which they offer themselves at any moment... every form immediately dissolves in the very moment when it emerges; it lives, as it were, only by being destroyed; every consolidation of form into lasting objects... is an incomplete interpretation that is unable to follow the motion of reality at its own pace." For Simmel the social phenomenon par excellence is money, "the most striking symbol of the completely dynamic character of the world" (The Philosophy of Money, 1900). Money specializes and accelerates social activity and depersonalizes individual and social relationships.

Simmel emphasizes the cultural and psychological dimensions of modernity rather than the structural features of modernization. He wrote brilliant essays on certain modern types ("The Stranger," "The Adventurer") and on the sociology of emotions and intimate interaction ("Flirtation"). He was more interested in "psychological microscopy" than in analysis of the major institutions of society. Like Freud, he chose to explore the modern world through seemingly insignificant or "fortuitous fragments of reality." And like Freud, he was interested in the phenomenon of neurasthenia, modern nervousness, which he located in the city. The urban environment is characterized by an "intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli." He notes "the rapid telescoping of changing images, harsh differentiation in the perceptions of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of intrusive impressions." Hence the development of an attitude of blase indifference among city dwellers–as a defense against emotional overload. "The Metropolis and Mental Life," written at the beginning of the twentieth century (1903), is one of the most trenchant essays on the emotional life of city-dwellers.

3. BERLIN MODERNISM

His city was Berlin. He noted repeatedly that "the development of Berlin from a large city to a metropolis (von der Grosstadt zur Weltstadt) in the years around and after the turn of the century coincides with the period of my own strongest and broadest development;... perhaps in another city I would have achieved something that also would have been valuable, but the special achievements that I made during these decades are undoubtedly tied to the Berlin milieu." Every year tens of thousands of immigrants were attracted to a city that was the capital of Prussia and the German Reich, as well as the major center of German finance, commerce, and industry. To an unusual extent it was a city of "strangers" with a primarily nonnative population. Already in the late eighteenth century the city had welcomed Jews and Huguenots, craftsmen from Holland and Bohemia, and laborers from Silesia, Pomerania, and Poland. The melting down of these groups was never complete, but Germans did believe there was a certain Berlin "character type": aggressive, impolite, witty, and marked by disrespect of authority and cynical scepticism toward conventional values.

As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, the burgeoning metropolis was becoming, like Paris, a center of consumption and commercialized leisure. Unlike Marx and Weber, who were most interested in the production end of the equation, Simmel was fascinated by the plethora of commodities characteristic of urban life in the modern world, and by the phenomenon of advertising. Peter Jelavich, historian of popular entertainments in Munich and Berlin, summarizes Simmel's views: "To direct attention amid these variegated impressions, modern advertising became necessary. In situations where the supply of commodities exceeded the demand, goods needed to have not only use-value, but also an 'enticing exterior'; they needed to be fashioned, packaged, and displayed in an aesthetic manner to increase their 'external appeal,' since 'internally' there was often little differentiation among competing products. The 'shop-window quality' of commodities thus came to supersede their practical utility for the consumer. At the same time, 'ordinary advertisement has advanced to the art of the poster,' since ever more extreme means were required to catch the eye of the shopper. As commodities and their advertisements acquired aesthetic traits, shopping and 'window-shopping' became forms of entertainment. Conversely, the forms of art favored by the modern urbanite came to reflect the diversity and fragmentation of the world of commodities: he or she responded to the "charm of the fragment, the mere allusion, the aphorism, the symbol, the undeveloped artistic style.' The metropolitan consumer ultimately felt at home amid a fragmented multiplicity of objects and styles in both the aesthetic and the commercial spheres, which increasingly overlapped."

It was left to a later generation of social theorists to offer a critique of the manipulation of desire and consumption so characteristic of advanced capitalism. But Simmel was certainly an important influence on those thinkers (the Frankfurt School of "Critical Theory"), particulary on the most brilliant of them all, Walter Benjamin, who extended the analysis back to Baudelaire's Paris.

4. THE IRON CAGE OF MAX WEBER

Max Weber (1864-1920) was probably the greatest sociologist of the twentieth century. His work dealt with the value orientations of the great world religions, with the distinctiveness of the Western city, with the sociology of political authority and bureaucracy, and, above all, with the nature and origins of modernity. He had two major goals: (1) to specify the distinctiveness of Western civilization in a comparative perspective; and (2) to design conceptual tools that would enable social scientists to analyze the problems that confront modern societies, and help people to make rational choices in accordance with their personal sets of values, whatever they might be, by taking the probable consequences of these choices into consideration. He followed Nietzsche in denying that science could give us our values and in thinking that the current tendency of Western civilization is hostile to the great personalities who are the truly creative agents in history. But he rejected Nietzsche's hostility toward the majority of the population and remained all of his life a despairing liberal.

His father had been a supporter of Bismarck and had played an important role in the inner circle of the leaders of the so-called National Liberal Party in Berlin. This group cared more about the grandeur of the German Reich than about constitional government. His mother, raised in the Calvinist orthodoxy, had a stern Puritan conscience. Weber was trained as a lawyer and did his early work on legal and economic history. He took his mother's side in family quarrels, and seems to have blamed himself for his father's death by heart attack. A breakdown followed, and it incapacitated him for five years. His great work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), appeared after his recovery. Here he brilliantly connected the psychological insecurity of Calvin's followers with a compensatory drive for ascetic self-discipline and economic achievement as signs of God's everlasting grace–an ethic of unceasing commitment to a worldly calling and a methodical saving. The result of such beliefs and practices, Weber argued, was the rapid accumulation of capital through the cultivation of the bourgeois virtues: thriftiness, rationality, honesty, hard work. (An earlier version of this value cluster, Weber believed, had been present in ancient Judaism in the time of the charismatic prophets.)

But if Weber thought he had identified the origin of the capitalist spirit, he also thought he could foresee its end. He associated capitalist industrialism with the rise of ever more powerful and gigantic bureaucracies, and he believed that this process would bring about a thoroughly "goal-oriented" type of society in which purely instrumental relationships would dominate and individual creativity would be crushed. Weber believed that the value-oriented action of charismatic individuals committed to goals for "other-worldly" rather than day-to-day reasons, was the source of creativity in history. But he also assumed that the creative force of charismatic leadership would be increasingly difficult to sustain in an era of rationalization, routinization, and bureaucratization. The tension between Weber's commitment to individualistic, value-oriented conduct on the one hand and the Puritan "disenchantment of the world" on the other, gives his great lecture "Science as a Vocation" its pathos.

"The disenchantment of the world"–the sense that the modern world of industry and bureaucracy is barren, soulless, impersonal, lacking in freedom and grace–has been a source of lamentation among intellectuals from the Romantic era onward. But no one had analyzed this phenomenon as rigorously, or with as much erudition, as Weber. The twin sources of our prosperity, capitalism and science, with their ceaseless quests for profit and knowledge, were making our world more rational and productive but less meaningful. He saw no easy answers to this modern dilemma, and no end to the conflicts of values inherent in the human condition. And he had a premonition of what might happen if false prophets with phony charisma were to appear with claims that they could provide both productivity and meaning–the blessings of modern technology plus a "re-enchantment of the world." Those people were populist demagogues, fascists, and they would emerge, as we'll see, out of the wreckage and carnage of The First World War.

RECOMMENDED:

Wolfgang Mommsen, The Age of Bureaucracy (Oxford, 1974).

Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber (New York: Grosset & Dunlop, 1969).

Peter Jelavich, "Modernity, Civic Identity, and Metropolitan Entertainment," in Berlin: Culture and Metropolis, ed. Charles W. Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990)