Massimo Cacciari’s interpretation of two texts written in the first half of the twentieth century by the sociologist Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, respectively, brings an important aspect of the dynamics driving modern society, cities and perceived progress to the fore. Cacciari reads Simmel’s essay “Die Großstadt und das Geistesleben” [The Metropolis and Mental Life] (1903) in parallel with Benjamin’s “Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire” [The Paris of the Second Empire in
Baudelaire] (1938), and he finds that Simmel and Benjamin align in a shared understanding. This concerns the individual being’s participation in a process of rationalisation that permeates all levels of society and operates under the authority of capitalism. Cacciari thereby maps a dynamic of the metropolis that gives weight to Dal Co’s statement that the city constantly renews itself “in an ever- increasing foreignness to the place” (1990: 40). Once this place becomes the market place, a constant flux of transactions prevents any kind of settlement from a lasting character. Furthermore, Cacciari argues, the individual is instrumentalised in this process of constant renewal of what is essentially the same. Simmel’s essay begins, “The psychological foundation, upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected, is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli” (1971: 325). The dialectical process observed by Simmel and seen to drive the dynamics of the modern metropolis is termed Vergeistigung [spiritualisation], or “the process of the realisation of the Geist” [spirit], as Cacciari phrases it (1993: 4). Simmel’s concept is based on an opposition between what he in German terms Nervenleben [the life of the nerves] and Verstand
[intellect]. Continuously challenged by internal as well as external impulses, the metropolitan individual counters the Steigerung des Nervenlebens [intensification of the life of the nerves] with intellectual
reasoning. Such continuous affirmation and overcoming operates beyond the immediate psychological rebalancing of the unsettled individual that it might also provide – ultimately, according to Simmel,
Nervenleben and Verstand are mutually dependent drivers of development in the modern metropolis.
Through constant processing of nervous stimuli via Vergeistigung, the intellect gives reason to the metropolis, which is to say turns it into reason. Through subordination and integration, Nervenleben serves as a “propellant force, the fuel of the intellect,” Cacciari writes (5). He summarises, “the first precise definition of the function of the Metropolis” as follows:
It dissolves individuality into the current of impressions and reintegrates these, precisely by virtue of their constitution, into the overall process of Vergeistigung. In its first stage of evolution, the Metropolis uproots individuality from its conservative fixity; the process begun by the uprooting will of necessity lead to the dialectical reasoning that governs, measures, and directs social relations, the interest (inter-esse) of the Metropolis. (5/6)
The social aspects of the modern metropolis’ emotional/intellectual drive are closely linked to
capitalism and the market economy controlling financial relations in tandem with the intellect’s control of psychological relations. While the money economy thereby transcends concepts of value, the intellect transcends the impressions imposed on its Nervenleben through life in the metropolis. Cacciari elaborates on this interdependence, “Nervenleben corresponds to the continuous and relentlessly innovated transubstantiation of exchange value into use value,” while the intellect “abstracts from the appearance of use value the substance of exchange value” (6). In summary, “The metropolis must set a
Nervenleben in motion in order to realise, through the use value, the exchange value produced by the Verstand – and hence in order to reproduce the very conditions of the Verstand’s existence” (6/7). This
process drives the modern metropolis with production determining consumption in a self-generative cycle of renewal and actuality. Cacciari’s own concept of negative thought pursues the dynamic further, and it therefore plays a key role in the understanding and mapping of the modern metropolis in the work of the Venice School. Gail Day summarises Cacciari’s negative thinking as follows:
According to Cacciari, negative thought is the ideology most appropriate to the Metropolis; it represents “the discovery of the negativity of the Metropolis itself,” that is, it “presupposes contradiction” and devaluation [Entwertung]; it recognizes that everything and everybody is engulfed in the Metropolis; it understands that “no aura can survive” and refuses the “prayer for consolation.” Indeed, Cacciari argues, the negative is negative “precisely because it is Entwertung.” (2011: 101)21
To express negative thought in the negative, the term refers to what Cacciari finds ultimately eludes both Simmel and Benjamin in their respective and otherwise very negative assessments of the modern metropolis of the early twentieth century. While both writers, according to Cacciari, distil the experience of the modern metropolis through negativity, they refrain from drawing the inevitable conclusion that not only does the metropolis materialise through perpetual crisis, but this is “the fundamental system of the social integration of the growth of capitalism” (1993: 10). In other words, the process of negative affirmation, Vergeistigung, constitutes a dynamic that brings about the
metropolis as a manifestation of the negativity integral to capitalist economy. As Cacciari summarises, “Simmel explains only the metropolitan form of negative thought, not the function of negative thought within the Metropolis; he explains the relation in the Metropolis between Nervenleben and
Verstand, not the use of this relation” (10).
Benjamin, Cacciari finds, ventures further than Simmel when utilising the categories Schock [shock] and
Erlebnis [lived experience] as dialectical operators through the example of Baudelaire’s prose poems. Schock becomes Erlebnis when acknowledged by consciousness as an event that can be stored and
thereby internalised in the form of a memory. Benjamin considers this internalisation of the negative event, the shock, to be crucial for survival in the metropolis. When Baudelaire through his writing gives expressive form to the intensification of the Nervenleben caused by shocks, a rationalisation process in line with Simmel’s thinking is made possible by the artist’s emphatic capability. Baudelaire’s writing is in this sense Verstand, when internalising the anger produced by the shock while at the same time preparing the mind for new shocks. As Michael W. Jennings writes:
This notion of a shock-driven poetic capability was a significant departure from the understanding of artistic creation prevalent in Benjamin’s day and in fact still powerfully present today. The poet is, in this view, not a genius who rises above his age and distils its essence for posterity. For Benjamin, the greatness of Baudelaire consists instead in his absolute susceptibility to the worst excrescences of modern life: Baudelaire was in possession not of genius, but of an extraordinarily sensitive disposition that enabled him to perceive, through a painful empathy, the character of an age. And for Benjamin, the
character of the age consisted in its thoroughgoing commodification. (2006b: 15)
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