An Overly Early Blog About the City

 Keri Blanco

            Simmel’s work not only reveals how the city causes individuals to become desensitized to the mass population and movement of the city in order to survive, but it also reflects how the emergence of technology has also caused a stimuli overload on our current culture. After reading Bridge and Watson’s work, however, I realized that I had never stopped to critique Simmel’s  overly nostalgic view of  the “real self,” a “self” that exists in individuals who live a rural lifestyle (10). This overly ideal sense of the an individual’s idea of the “self” overlooks how the “self” is socially constructed—developed from language and social activities that exist outside the “self.” As Bridge and Watson discuss, most social criticism does not lament over the loss of the ideal “self” because post-modernist thought argues that “there is  no real self to be estranged from” (10).

Even though Simmel’s argument tends to over idealize the sense of the lost “self,” it does not negate the significance of how his work illuminates the way the city had a drastic effect on the way individuals relate to one another. As he explains, social interactions are created by “obligatory associations” in which the merchant must associate with the purchaser (12). Relationships and social interactions, therefore, are created by their quantitative value. Similarly, Virginia Woolf later argues in her “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” that as result of the change of human interaction, writers have failed to effectively and honestly create characters because they do so by using materials rather than experiences. In Blake’s poetry, however, we find him pulling away from material objects when expressing human experience. In his “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence, the speaker describes a child from “a cloud” who asks the speaker to “pipe” him songs (3,5). Emerging from “a cloud” rather than the city, this child perhaps has no conditioned desire for material objects with monetary quantitative value. As Simmel explains, early in childhood individuals become conditioned by stimuli overload and develop a “blasé attitude” (14). This child from “a cloud,” however, is not numbed by the city life, and has an emotionally reaction the speaker’s songs by “we[eping] with joy to hear” (12) The speaker also writes with a “a rural pen” that he has made with a “hollow reed” (17,16). To put into Simmel’s terms, the speaker is not producing an object for mass consumption nor is he entering into the marketplace to purchase a pen to write with. In that sense, Blake’s “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence  reveals hi attempt to not create poetry as a material product, but instead to creates a response and refusal toward this culture that operates at a quantitative level.

While Blake attempts to describe human experience through a non-material means, his poetry also forces his readers to examine the harsh realities of the city. Simmel argues that in order for individuals to mentally survive within the mass population of the city, they have an “aversion” and “mutual strangeness” with others because they simply cannot handle the overload of relationships that would form if they communicated with everyone they encountered (15). In Blake’s “Holy Thursday” from Songs of Experience, the speaker points out that while others enjoy the “rich and fruitful land—“ children are “fed with cold and usurous hand” (2,4). Blake is not merely illuminating the poverty that exists within the city, but his use of “usurous hand” also indicates that individuals only give one another something for their own self interest. Not only is the one with the “usurous hand” giving someone a “cold” meal, but also is expecting a return with interest. Again, Blake’s work responds to the ways in which individuals relate to one another at a transactional level.

While I have focused on the negative effects of the city (perhaps because my focus was on Simmel and Blake), I am anticipating the discussion of how the city serves as a place for imagination and freedom as Bridge and Watson describe. Most of my study of the city and capitalism has been through the lens of oppression, and I am looking forward to seeing it through the lens of liberation.