Blasé Attitude

Definition

The blasé attitude is Georg Simmel's term for the metropolitan type's characteristic indifference — "an indifference toward the distinctions between things," not because they are unperceived but because "the meaning and the value of the distinctions between things, and therewith of the things themselves, are experienced as meaningless." It has a physiological source (the nerves exhausted by the rapid, contradictory stimulation of the metropolis, losing "the capacity to react to new stimulations") and an economic one: it is "the correct subjective reflection of a complete money economy," in which money as "the frightful leveller" reduces all qualitative distinctions to the question of "how much." Self-preservation in the city is thus "obtained at the cost of devaluing the entire objective world, ending inevitably in dragging the personality downward into a feeling of its own valuelessness."

Key Thinkers

• Georg Simmel — originator of the concept in "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903), where it is bound to the money economy, the predominance of the intellect, and the hypertrophy of objective culture.

Related Concepts

• Aesthetic Boredom — the negative everyday aesthetic toward a space lacking inhabitability; a sibling register of metropolitan indifference.
• Spectacle — the levelling of distinctions by the money economy anticipates the spectacle's reduction of quality to exchangeable image-value.
• Consumerism — the blasé attitude as the subjective counterpart of a purchasable, quantitative world.
• Everyday Life — the metropolitan everyday as the site of this indifference and its reserve.
• World Alienation — Simmel's "atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture" is closely parallel to Arendt's loss of the stable common world.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Metropolis and Mental Life (Simmel 1903) — the sole, foundational source.
• Simmel's Hypertrophy of Objective Culture vs. Arendt's World Alienation — debate page comparing Simmel's diagnosis to Arendt's world alienation.

Open Questions

• Is the blasé attitude best read as a precursor of the spectacle's indifference (Debord) or as a distinct, pre-spectacular diagnosis of money and metropolitan life?
• Does Simmel's indifference describe a permanent metropolitan condition or a historically specific phase of the money economy?