ABSTRACT
In his essay, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), Georg Simmel claims that faced with the unpredictable, rapid, overwhelming effects of the modern city individuals have to fi nd modes of adaptation to maintain their psychic integrity. Against the intensifi ed nervous activity of the city they develop their intellect as a protective organ.3 In contrast to small-town and rural dwellers, people from the city cannot respond emotionally but have to react with blaséness and reserve. As a consequence, there is a blunting of sensitivity to the differences among things: everything appears in a “homogenous, fl at and gray color.”4 Walter Benjamin’s critical evaluation of modernity contains a comparable thesis about a lack of experience. In modernity individuals are confronted with constant fragmentary stimulations that he calls “chocks.” Whether at the assembly line or on the battlefi eld, whether in street traffi c or in confrontations with urban masses, in modernity the experience of “chock” has become the norm. Against this sensory bombardment the self erects “consciousness” as a constant stimulus protection. This protective shield prevents the integration of stimuli into non-superfi cial, penetrating experiences. Everything remains on the level of events instead.5 The everyday world of modernity is described as a disenchanted realm of mechanistic and habituated actions. Performing routine habits, we dwell in the world mostly instrumentally and goal-oriented and are thus deprived of deep and penetrating experiences possible fi rst and
foremost under non-instrumental, non-routinized circumstances. Around the very same time, John Dewey expressed similar thoughts about experience: “Ordinary experience is often infected with apathy, lassitude and stereotype. We get neither the impact of quality through sense nor the meaning of things through thought. The ‘world’ is too much with us as burden or distraction. We are not suffi ciently alive to feel the tang of sense nor yet to be moved by thought. We are oppressed by our surroundings or are callous to them.”6 Because of distraction and dispersion, extraneous interruptions or inner lethargy experiences are either inchoate; or they are dominantly practical and consist of overt doings that might be effi cient but are too automatic to become experiences in an emphatic sense.7
