This is the slideshow for a Visual Culture lecture.

1. Simmel, Kracauer and Benjamin
Georg Simmel Sigfried Kracauer Walter Benjamin
1858-1918 1889-1966 1892-1940
Modernity, Mentality and Overstimulation

2. “The Metropolis and Mental Life” 1903
“Modernity involved an
‘intensification of the nervous
stimulation.’ Modernity
transformed both the
physiological an psychological
foundation of subjective
experience”
(Singer, 73)

3. “The Metropolis and Mental Life” 1903
Simmel looks at the social-
physiological features of modern urban
culture.
He notes that in cities, many
anonymous people come into contact
with one another, yet are removed from
the emotional ties and social bonds that
they had in smaller communities.
Urban dwellers tend to be:
•Calculative: daily life is filled with
“weighing, calculating, enumerating,”
reducing qualitative values to
quantitative terms
•Blasé: urban dwellers possess an
outlook of indifference towards the
values that distinguish things.

4. “The Metropolis and Mental Life” 1903
The “brevity and scarcity
of inter-human contacts
granted to the
metropolitan man, as
compared to the social
intercourse of the small
town” makes the
“objective spirit” dominate
over the “subjective spirit”

5. “The Mass Ornament” and “The
Cult of Distraction”
Kracauer views the city through the
notion of ornament, thinking about the
subjective experience of city life by
viewing fragments of the city
(amusement park, movie theater,
employment exchange, homeless
shelter) as urban microcosms.
For Kracauer, the city is a stifling place
filled with a milieu of distractions. His
most famous of his Weimar Essays
look at the role movie theaters and film
have for the masses.
Looks at the process of rationalization
of capital.

6. “The Mass Ornament” 1927
Kracauer offers a layout of
analyzing modern city life
by examining circuses,
photography, films,
advertising, tourism, city
layout and dance.
Offers an analysis of the
Tiller Girls

7. the aesthetic pleasure gained from the ornamental mass
movements is legitimate. . . .The masses which are
arranged in them are taken from offices and factories.
The structural principle upon which they are modeled
determines in reality as well. . . .No matter how low one
rates the value of the mass ornament, its level of reality
is still above that of artistic productions which cultivate
obsolete noble sentiments in withered forms. . . . [26]

8. “On Some Motifs of Baudelaire”
(1939)
Looks at modern life
through the works of
Baudelaire, Proust and
Poe.
Baudelaire “indicated the
price for which sensation
of the modern age may
be had: the disintegration
of the aura and the
experience of shock.
(196)

10. Shock
Medical definition: a sudden debilitating
effect produced by over-stimulation of the
nerves.
When a body is in shock it is literally over-
stimulated: it is taking in too much
information.

11. “On Some Motifs of Baudelaire”:
shock
For Benjamin, shock is inherent to a
crowded modern city.
Because of all the stuff going on
(visual images, moving images, sights
and sounds) there is a huge amount
of external stimulation.
Modern city dwellers however have
trained themselves to always be alert
but also have their shields of
mediation raised to cope with the
environment.