For Simmel, the metropolis of the post-industrial capitalist society produced the ‘Blasé Character’ - a person who rationalises (or intellectualises) the overwhelming stimuli of the metropolis in order to create a barrier that allows him to function in the urban environment (p.73). Simmel related this domination of the intellect to the money economy of post-industrialism in their ‘unrelenting hardness’; ‘the modern mind has become more and more a calculating one’ (p.71). This individual shows indifference to the distinctions between things which results in a loss of the value of personality (p.73). The dialectic that Simmel illustrates is between the system of the metropolis and the individual. He believes that the closeness of habitation and of existence in the modern metropolis related directly to a perceivable intellectual distance which creates a feeling of alienation and isolation (p.76). He posits that man has a natural 'resistance to being subsumed' (p.70). Simmel believed that the individual accentuated unique elements of their personality in order to be ‘brought into their own awareness’, that culture became a culture of the metropolis rather than a culture of the individual (p.78). |
Leach, Neil, 'The Aesthetic Cocoon', OASE LIV/Winter (2001), pp. 104-21.
Simmel, Georg, 'The Metropolis and Mental Life', in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, Leach Neil (ed.) (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 469-79.