Looking at Cities: Ways of Seeing

Question 1

why do you think the city has been seen as a “symbol of modernity”?

What is modern about the big city?

Answer 1

it’s a contrast to all predecessors

the change in experience leads to cultural and subsequent change in human behavior

Place where modernity happens (technological and artistic advances)

Industrialization, art, theater, technologies, (new means of transport)

Everything that is changing becomes visible there

Question 2

Impressionism as an Urban Art

Answer 2

Monet

  - Things look different in different lights 
  - Things change their sensual qualities, nothing is stagnant
   - Painted same landscape at different times of the day 

Step away from naturalism which says “these are the things as they are”

Move away from academic traditions of painting where you painted in a studio
–> They went outside

Visually impressions that are ephemeral and changeable

Cities/city life

• Movement
• trying to imitate/represent our perception - blurry
• Not about depicting specifics

Question 3

Baudelaire

Answer 3

Influential in creation of the concept of the flaneur

Question 4

Modernity of Perception

Answer 4

Reizbarkeit

Too much
Speed
Extreme awareness of time
Present, visual sense of time
Timetables for trains, clocks in train stations
Time becomes more measured and public than in a rural setting

Movement
New, innovative forms of transport
You get places faster

Novelty
There is always news
Newspapers 3 or 4 times a day - updates and whatnot
New theater, new technology

Question 5

blasé attitude

Answer 5

Unsurprised by everything, indifferent because I have seen it all

Not easily impressed - cool

Attitude serves as a shelter, otherwise you would be too overwhelmed

Gives the individual a lot of freedom - nobody cares what you’re doing

Question 6

Phantasmagoria

Answer 6

It’s an experience you share, it’s collective
Collective ideas of something that is a desirable form of experience
- These are material
-They are consumable, things I want to have or experience sensually

Has a lot to do with capitalism
- Industry and consumption

Shock experience has become the norm
- Increased sense of novelty

We cannot profoundly process the things we see, we are just registering them
- No deeper processing

It’s a type of reaction seen in the context of overstimulation

Technology, consumption, architecture

Sentimentally connoted images

- Emotionally charged 
 - Not far away from kitsch 
 - Dangerous - is it my genuine feeling or something created by the masses of people?
   - Relationship between the individual and the crowd

Question 7

How does - according to the quote from Arnold Hauser’s “A Social History of Art “ or according to Karl Lamprecht - the big city affect human perception?

Answer 7

impressionism as urban art

it sees the world through the eyes of the townsman and reacts to external impressions

with the overstrained nerves of the modern technical man

describes the changeability, the nervous rhythm, the sudden, sharp but always ephemeral impressions of life

enormous expansion of sensual perception

a new sharpening of sensibility

a new irritability

Reizbarkeit

Question 8

What effects does urban life, according to Georg Simmel, have on the individual’s psyche?

Answer 8

also environmental determinist perspective - psyche

 * an excess of shocking and hyper stimulating impressions: "The psychological foundation is The intensification of emotional life due to The swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli"
 * urban stress: Life is less regular, less predictable, Pace of impressions is speeded up, human consciousness feels compelled to summon a higher degree of alertness
 * Reizschutz mechanism

Question 9

How do you understand the analysis of Walter Benjamin’s notion of phantasmagoria as presented in this text?

Answer 9

consumptive shock experiences
• concept tailored to grasping broad cultural changes as a transformation of the structure of perception triggered off by external stimuli from technology, consumption, and architecture

  • defines as affectively loaded images - Wunschbilder - that live in the collective consciousness of society - above all those images are of a material kind

              - sentimentally connoted images - fairs parades shopping centers arcades
              - citizens fascinated by the countless economic and technological novelties springing up in the cultural environment

 • phantasmagoric objects: very diverse, but all have a kick of the new
       - The shock of innovation for the 19th century citizen is connected to a euphoric emotion
          --> the dream of progress, unlimited expansion, increasing prosperity Mental Constructs - how you react to it

Question 10

What is meant by “euphoria” and “dysphoria” with regard to artistic reactions to the city?

Answer 10

• dys: symbolistically inspired literature, pessimistic environmental determinist lines, hard-boiled detective novel, disillusionment with modernity
• euphoric: artistic flanerie

Question 11

Reizschutz mechanism-

Answer 11

A defense mechanism against stimulation - The jadedness of urbanites
- The individual acquires certain sociological schemata - “reserve” or “blasé attitude” - emotional response to stimuli is constantly being avoided

Question 12

urban stress:

Answer 12

Life is less regular, less predictable,

Pace of impressions is speeded up, human consciousness feels compelled to summon a higher degree of alertness

Question 13

Wunschbilder

Answer 13

defines as affectively loaded images that live in the collective consciousness of society -

above all those images are of a material kind

              - sentimentally connoted images - fairs parades, shopping centers, arcades