Supermodernity

Generally, cities, urban culture and the urban public sphere have often been taken to represent the source or centre of modern social and cultural life, which then is said to differ radically from social and cultural life in pre-modern, feudal or medieval times and from life in the countryside. The sociological opposition between the face-to-face culture of pre-modern villages and the abstract, mediated and complex culture of modern cities as an opposition between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, introduced by Ferdinand Tönnies, has become the commonplace of more than hundred years of urban sociology and theory. His sociological contemporary, Georg Simmel, described social life in cities as mediated by a money economy that stimulated what he called a blasé attitude in urban encounters, while cultural philosopher Walter Benjamin described modern urban culture as the product of a rupture with a continuity-based, traditional communal experience in which experience as such is replaced by what he called Erlebnisse, instantaneous, homogenous and isolated sensations, on the one hand, and shocks on the other. Although a certain nostalgia for a world-gone-by always rang through these sociological descriptions of urban culture, the overall feeling was that of an urban culture as the engine of renewal, experiment and social, political and economic freedom. For Benjamin, for instance, modern urban culture and its crucial public spaces like boulevards, squares and crowded shopping arcades represented the phantasmagorical dreamworld of the new capitalist commodity culture as well as the promise of a more egalitarian, transparent society, and also the birthplace of a new, individualist culture with the flâneur (the stroller) as emblematic subject of a new, modern and experimental culture. Without using the term, Benjamin was the first to identify modern city life with its public dimensions, i.e. with public culture, the public sphere or public domain. He even spent more than ten years of his life (1927-1940) documenting almost all aspects of the public life of the most important European city of the nineteenth century, Paris, in his so-called Arcades Project (Das Passagenwerk), the unfinished attempt to write a critical history of “the capital of the nineteenth century”, as Benjamin called Paris.

Although unfinished and only published long after his death, Benjamin's Arcades Project can now be seen as one of the most important testimonies of the modern awareness of the complex, contradictory but crucial role of cities and urban culture in present-day societies.