Agoraphobia

Spatial Estrangement in Georg Simmel and Siegfried Kracauer

Bibliographic Data

ID4985686
AuthorsAnthony Vidler (corresponding author)
Year1991
Issue54
Pages31
Publication date1991-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew German Critique (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0094-033X • E-ISSN: 1558-1462
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/488425
OpenAlexW2325612023
LanguageEN
Citations received10

The street in the extended sense of the word is not only the arena of fleeting impressions and chance encounters but a place where the flow of life is bound to assert itself. Again one will have to think mainly of the city street with its ever-moving anonymous crowds. The kaleidoscopic sights mingle with unidentified shapes and fragmentary visual complexes and cancel each other out, thereby preventing the onlooker from following up any of the innumerable suggestions they offer. What appears to him are not so much sharp-contoured individuals engaged in this or that definable pursuit as loose throngs of sketchy, indeterminate figures. Each has a story, yet the story is not given. Instead, an incessant flow of possibilities and near-intangible meanings appears. This flow casts its spell over the fldneur or even creates him. The fldneur is intoxicated with life in the street life eternally dissolving the patterns which it is about to form

Aesthetics · Art · Crowds · Sight · Spell · Theology · Computer Science · German Literature and Culture Studies · Philosophy · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory

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