The Mental Life of the Metropolis

Abstract

In this paper I set out to socialize hermeneutics by viewing the social life of the city and of any collective as a struggle for control of the means of interpretation and I philosophize sociology by showing its ground as an interpretive art that must confound any algorithmic phantasy. Between the inevitable origin of inquiry in a hermeneutic gesture and its irresolute conclusion that must deny hermeneutic finality, social life offers for view and analysis an unending series of intended solutions to the problem of resolving ambiguity as an effort to dispose of the ‘remains’ or the connotative surplus that that takes shape in many and varied adjustments. I begin with Louis Wirth’s question that asked “what is the urban way of life?” by echoing Max Weber’s answer that the city is essentially a marketplace. I then create a conversation on what is and what is not a marketplace by formulating a notion of market value as the grounds of such a world, organized around a disjunction between quantitative determination and the quality that remains inexpressible quantitatively (the ‘what’ and ‘who’ of those such as Arendt). I next argue that this disjunction creates inevitable anxiety that takes shape in the problem of self-worth at every level, in the form of what Lacan calls ‘sicknesses” or adjustments to such problems. I imply further that the theatricality of the city in part is an exhibition of this spectacle of subjects attempting to perform self-transcendence in relation to the constraint of market value, by varied attempts to demonstrate quality in many and diverse ways. I then suggest Simmel’s blasé attitude as a necessary shape of socialization in such a quantitative regime, in ways organized around the project of socializing the blasé attitude by bringing subjects together.