Baudelaire over Berea, Simmel over Sandton?
There is perhaps no psychological phenomenon that is so unreservedly associated with the metropolis as the blasé attitude, . . . [which] results from the rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting stimulations of the nerves.
Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life
It was above all from the exploration of enormous cities and from the convergence of their innumerable connections [du croisement de leurs innombrables rapports] that this obsessive ideal [la vie moderne] was born.
Charles Baudelaire, “Preface,” Paris Spleen
Paralysis. Immobility. Fear. Don’t cover your face, Johannesburg! And yet every morning, the city carefully dresses itself in many kinds of promises. True or false. Everything is possible.
Veronique Tadjo, “Eyes Wide Open”
As a resident of San Francisco or New York or indeed of any center of what Achille Mbembe calls “metropolitan modernity,” there is an immediate shock of recognition in reading about the elusive urbanity of Johannesburg ( Nuttall and Mbembe 2004). The self-conscious styling of the self, the labyrinthine “webs of group affiliations” and “intersections of social circles” (the language is Georg Simmel’s), the neurasthenic, hypersensitive city condition, the grisly phenomenology of the urban lifeworld, motion and detachment, the city’s “psychologism” and “inner nature” (Simmel once again)—all of these things are deeply familiar to the scholar of metropolitan modernity. The shock, one might say, is in the extent to which Johannesburg has always aspired to, and now embodies, a distinctively modern aura: its zine culture, its metropolitan imaginings, its memorializations (the Freedom Charter in Kliptown and the Constitution Hill project on Hillbrow), the grotesque urban theaters of late capitalism (Melrose Arch and Montecasino), its psychic wounds and fugitive underground, its mysterious and shady crime syndicates. Central to this aura is the restless, glacial world of money and commodity exchange—the city dweller as customer, as Walter Benjamin once observed. This is Johannesburg in the eternalized present, as Simmel (1971) brilliantly described Berlin and Paris of a century ago. No surprise, then, that Johannesburg at the hands of its interlocutors should appear as a wildly heterogeneous (and divergent) set of fragments: psychotic and repressed; instant, unfinished, carceral, dangerous, and unforgiving; radically open and provisional; criminal and filthy; afflicted; a site of desire and fantasy; a space of leakage. Jozi’s flaneur is the figure of the migrant (Mbembe 2004)—or is it the diseased body of the AIDS sufferer ( Le Marcis 2004)?
Johannesburg as a modern metropolis is consistent with two broad concerns flagged by Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall (2004) in their introduction to “Johannesburg—The Elusive Metropolis,” a special issue of Public Culture. One is to interrogate Africa as a “sign in modern formations of knowledge”; the other is the task of writing about the “worldliness” of contemporary (in this case urban) life-forms. There is a discussion to be had on whether one can attribute Africa’s problematic otherness—as they do—to contemporary scholarship apparently bereft of novelty, originality, and (most provocatively) any willingness or ability to find “order . . . in the chaos of its present history.”
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