No More Learning

The fact that a sense that is so exclusive in the exercise of living as the eye, which even somehow modifies what is seen through the difference of viewpoint at the same time for each, nevertheless has a content that is not absolutely exclusive, but offers uniformly to each the sky, the sun, the stars--that must suggest, on the one hand, that transcending of the nar- rowness and distinctiveness of the subject that every religion contains, and bears or encourages, and on the other hand, that moment of the unification of believers that every religion alike possesses.
The different relationships of eye and ear to their objects, highlighted above, sociologically establish very different relationships between the individuals, whose associations depend on one or the other. The workers in a factory hall, the students in an auditorium, and the soldiers of a unit somehow think of themselves as one. And if this unity also springs forth from supersensible elements, it is still influenced in its character by the eye being the sense that is essentially effective for it, by the individuals being indeed able to see themselves during the processes that join them together, but not being able to speak. In this case the consciousness of unity will have a much more abstract character than if the being together is at the same time also an oral interaction. The eye shows, in addition to what is individual in the human being who is involved in the appearance, what is also the same in all to a greater degree than the ear does. The ear communicates the fullness of the divergent moods of the individual, the course and the momentary climax of thought and impulse, the whole polarity of subjective as well as objective life. From people whom we only see, we form a general concept infinitely more readily than if we could speak with each one. The usual incompleteness of seeing favors this difference. Very few people can say with certainty what the eye color of their friends is, or can vividly represent in their imagination the shape of the mouth of the people next to them. Actually, they have hardly seen them; one evidently sees in a person in a much higher degree what that person has in common with another than one hears this commonality in that person. The immediate pro- duction of very abstract, unspecific social structure is thus favored the most,
space and the spatial ordering of society 577
? to the extent that the technique of the senses works by the proximity of sight, in the absence of the proximity of conversation. This situation has advanced very much, in accord with what was mentioned above, the formation of the modern idea of the 'worker. ' This strange, effective concept, the idea that unites the generality of all wage laborers, regardless of what they do, was not found in previous centuries, when associations of fellow workers were often much narrower and more intimate, since they often depended essentially on personal interaction by word of mouth, which the factory hall and the mass rally lack. Here, where one saw countless things without seeing them, that high level abstraction was first made of all that is common to them, and it is often hindered in their development by all the individual, concrete, variable things as the ear transmits them to us.
The sociological importance of the lower senses diminishes before that of sight and sound, although that of smell not so much as the particular dull- ness and lack of potential for the development of its impressions leads one to assume. There is no doubt that the surrounding layer of air scents every person in a characteristic way, and in fact it is essential to the olfactory impression existing that way so that, of the two developments of the sensory experi- ence--toward the subject, as liking or disliking it, and towards the object, as recognizing it--one allows the first to prevail by far. Smell does not form an object from within itself, as sight or sound does, but remains, so to speak, self-conscious within the subject; what is symbolized by it is that there are no independent, objective descriptive expressions for its differences. If we say: it smells sour, that means only that it smells like something smells that tastes sour. To a completely different degree from the sensations of those senses, those of smell escape description with words; they are not to be projected onto the level of abstraction. Instinctive antipathies and sympathies that are attached to the olfactory sphere surrounding people and those, for example, that often become important for the social relationship of two races living on the same territory, find all the less resistance of thought and volition. The reception of Africans into the higher levels of society in North America seems impossible from the outset because of their bodily atmosphere, and the aversion of Jews and Germans toward each other is often attributed to this same cause. The personal contact between cultivated people and workers, so often enthusiastically advocated for the social development of the present, which is also recognized by the cultivated as the ethical ideal of closing the gap between two worlds "of which one does not know how the other lives," simply fails before the insurmountable nature of the olfactory sense impres- sions. Certainly, many members of the upper strata, if it were necessary in the interest of social morality, would make considerable sacrifices of personal comfort and do without various preferences and enjoyments in favor of the disinherited, and the fact that this has not yet happened to a greater degree is clearly because the forms that are quite suitable for them have not been found yet. But one would have taken on all such sacrifices and dedication a thousand times more readily than the physical contact with the people onto whom "the venerable perspiration of work" clings. The social question is not only an ethical one, but also a nasal question. But admittedly this also works
578 chapter nine
? on the positive side: no sight of the plight of the proletarian, even less the most realistic report about it, viewed from the most striking cases of all, will overpower us so sensually and immediately as the atmosphere, when we step into a basement apartment or a bar.
It is of significance, still insufficiently noticed, for the social culture that the actual perceptive acuity of all senses clearly declines but, in contrast, the emphasis on sense pleasure or lack of sense pleasure increases with the refinement of civilization. And I really believe that the heightened sensibility in this respect in general brings with it much more suffering and repulsion than joy and attraction. Modern people are choked by countless things, unendur- ably countless things appear to them through the senses, which a more undif- ferentiated and more robust manner of sensing accepts without any reaction of this kind. The individualizing tendency of modern people and the greater personality and the freedom of choice in their commitments must be consistent with that. With their partly immediately sensory and partly aesthetic manner of response, they can no longer retreat easily into traditional associations and close bonds in which they are not asked about their personal taste and their personal sensitivity. And inevitably this brings with it a greater isolation, a sharper delimitation of the personal sphere. Perhaps this development in the sense of smell is the most remarkable: Contemporary efforts at hygiene and cleanliness are no less results as causes of it. In general, the effectiveness of the senses at a distance becomes weaker with the heightening of culture, their effectiveness stronger within close range, and we become not only near-sighted but altogether near-sensed; however, we become all the more sensitive at these shorter distances. Now the sense of smell is already from the start a sense positioned more for the proximate, in contrast to sight and sound, and if we can perceive no more as objectively with it as can some primitive peoples, we react subjectively all the more intensely toward its impressions. The direction in which this happens is also the same as that mentioned previously, but also at a higher degree than with the other senses: A person with an especially fine nose certainly experiences very much more discomfort than joy by virtue of this refinement. Reinforcing that isolating repulsion that we owe to the refine- ment of the senses, here is more: When we smell something, we draw this impression or this radiating object so deeply into ourselves, into our center, we assimilate it, so to speak, through the vital process of respiration as close to us as is possible through no other sense in relation to an object, it would be then that we eat it. That we smell the atmosphere of somebody is a most intimate perception of that person; that person penetrates, so to speak, in the form of air, into our most inner senses, and it is obvious that this must lead to a choosing and a distancing with a heightened sensitivity toward olfactory impressions altogether, which to some extent forms one of the sensory bases for the social reserve of the modern individual. It is noteworthy that someone of such a fanatically exclusive individualism as Nietzsche often said openly of the type of person most hateful to him, "they do not smell good. " If the other senses build a thousand bridges among people, if they can soothe over with attractions the repulsions that they repeatedly cause, if weaving together the positive and negative values of their feelings gives the total concrete relation-
space and the spatial ordering of society 579
? ships among people their coloration, one can note, by way of contrast, that the sense of smell is the dissociating sense. Not only because it communicates many more repulsions than attractions, not only because its judgments have something of the radical and unappealing that lets it be overcome only with difficulty by the judgments of the other senses or minds, but also precisely because the bringing together of the many never grants it any such attractions as that situation can unfold them for the other senses, at least under certain conditions: indeed, in general such interferences of the sense of smell will increase in a direct quantitative relation of the mass in whose midst they affect us. Cultural refinement, as already mentioned, points to an individualizing isolation through this arrangement, at least in the colder countries, while in southern lands chance influenced the coming together essentially in the open air, thus without having to manage that inconvenience.
Finally, artificial perfume plays a social role in that it effects a unique syn- thesis of individual egoistical and social purposes in the field of the sense of smell. Perfume accomplishes through the medium of the nose the same thing as jewelry does through the medium of the eye. Jewelry adds something com- pletely impersonal to the personality, drawn in from outside, but nevertheless suits the person so well that it seems to emanate from the person. It enhances the person's sphere as the sparkle of gold and diamond; one situated near it basks in it and is thus, to some extent, caught in the sphere of the personal- ity. Like clothing, it covers the personality with something that should still work at the same time as its own radiance. Insofar as it is a typical stylistic phenomenon, a blending of the personality into a generality that nevertheless brings the personality to a more impressive and more fashioned expression than its immediate reality could. Perfume covers the personal atmosphere; it replaces it with an objective one and yet makes it stand out at the same time. With the perfume that creates this fictive atmosphere, one presupposes that it will be agreeable to the other and that it would be a social value. As with jewelry, it must be pleasing independently of the person whose environment must please subjectively; and it must still at the same time be credited to the bearer as a person.
I should add a comment about sexual feeling in its relationship to space, although 'sensuality' here has a different meaning: not that of pure passivity, as when impressions of the sense of warmth or the sense of sight is being spo- ken of; but here desires and activities are placed on the receptive impressions with a greater immediacy than indicated in speech usage as sensibility. Now in this area of sensation spatial proximity seems to me to be of the greatest, perhaps of the decisive importance for an important social norm: The prohi- bition of marrying close relatives. I enter all the less into the controversy over the reason for this prohibition, as the problem of it seems to be incorrectly posed. Here, as opposed to all broader and significant social phenomena, one cannot generally inquire about 'the reason' but only about the reasons. Humanity is too diverse, too replete with forms and motives, for one to be able to contend with a single source or a single origin for the phenomena that occur in very different points on the earth and as results of long-term and obviously very different developments. As the debate over whether humans
580 chapter nine
? 'by nature' are monogamous or not is clearly incorrect, since even from the beginning as well as up to later times there have been monogamous and polygamous, celibate and mixtures of all these trends; thus all the motives cited for the prohibition appear to me to have actually been in effect, but none of them can claim to be the essential motive. Friendship and relationship of alliances with foreign lineages as well as hostile relationships that led to most of the robbery of women, the instinct of racial advancement as well as the husband's wish to separate his wife as much as possible from her family and its support for her--all this will have contributed to these marriage prohibi- tions in varying combinations. However, what is most essential may be this: the maintenance of discipline and order within the same house requires the complete exclusion of sexual intercourse between brothers and sisters, parents and children, and all the pairs of relatives who formed a spatially closed unit in earlier times. The spatial proximity in which the house holds its male and female members would allow the sexual impulse to degenerate into limitless debauchery if the most terrible penalties were not set on them, if an instinct were not cultivated through the most unrestricted sternness of social prohibi- tions, which from the outset excludes any mixing within the household group. It would speak against this rationale for the prohibition if it really held, as is claimed, originally only within the 'matrilocal family,' i. e. where at marriage the husband goes over to the family of the wife; moreover, if it were true, this matrilocal family would in no way coincide with the complex of people living together. But the period of youth before marriage, in which the male lives in his maternal household in any event, seems long enough to me to bring about all the dangers for household order that the prohibition seeks to counter; and if then this holds further for the divorced, this may be a further effect of the time that has become permanent in which he was not only a family associate but also an associate of his own household. The fact that in many places the clan regulations strongly prohibit marriage within the same clan, is in favor of this opinion, although real blood relatives are allowed without further consideration as soon as they are found by some happenstance in different clans. It is reported of the Pomtschas in Bogota that the men and women of one and the same settlement are considered brothers and sisters and thus do not enter into marriage with one another; but if the actual sister was born by chance in a different place from the brother, they were allowed to marry each other. In Rome, as long as the rigor of the household lineage stood at its height, all persons who stood under the same paternal authority, i. e. rela- tives up to the sixth degree, were prohibited from marrying one another. To the extent that the close cohesion and strict unity of the house was loosened, this rule was also softened, to the point where during the time Caesar even marriage between uncle and niece became legitimate. The prophylaxis was no longer needed as soon as the closeness of living together was loosened. This precautionary tendency appears everywhere, which is intended to obviate the temptation resulting from close physical contact, because giving into it would cause an especially violent disturbance of the family order--often of course with the radical lack of differentiation that can even otherwise only enforce a kind of partial norm upon the primitive stages of mind, so that it controls the
space and the spatial ordering of society 581
? total and general range of its content, way beyond its boundary. Among the Braknas on the Fiji Islands and elsewhere brother and sister, male and female cousins, and brother-in-law and sister-in-law must neither speak nor eat with one another. In Ceylon11 father and daughter, and mother and son cannot observe one another. Prohibitions corresponding to these exist among the indigenous Americans as well in the South Seas, among the Mongolians, and in Africa and India, against any interaction between mother-in-law and son- in-law, and between father-in-law and daughter-in-law. Among the Kyrgyz the young woman must not appear at all before any male member of her husband's family. Among many peoples, for example the Alfuren of Buru, the Dajaks, some Malayans, and the Serbs, among others, bride and bridegroom cannot interact with each other at all, and the Africans hold it especially honorable if a man marries a girl whom he has never seen before. And, again, under apparently contrasting circumstances, the same precaution appears, but made another step more subtle, when Islamic law prohibits a man from seeing the face of another woman whom he cannot marry.
Under these psychological conditions the norm exists that persons of the opposite sex who must not cultivate any sexual communion, shall not come spatially close together at all. However an exactly different norm corresponds to the contexts of sensuality that justify this: For persons of the opposite sex who unavoidably simply share the same space, marriage must be absolutely forbidden and made outwardly and inwardly impossible--as long as one wishes to avoid promiscuity in sexual behavior that drowns out any regula- tion. Thus many of these prohibitions affect not just blood relatives, but also foster brothers and sisters, and clan and group associates generally who live in a close local relationship. The Jameos of the Amazon River, some tribes in Australia and on Sumatra allow no marriage within the same village. The larger the households are, the stricter--e. g. among the Hindus, South Slaves, in the Nanusa Archipelago, and among the Nairs of Kerala--are the mar- riage prohibitions within one and the same group. Apparently it is much more difficult to protect propriety and order in a very large house than in a small one; thus the prohibition of marriage of close relatives was not sufficient, but extensive laws had to be introduced among those peoples that placed the whole house under the prohibition of marriage. As long as individual families lived apart, even blood relationships prevented marriage among them only to a limited degree. Among the Thanea Indians of Brazil, among whom marriages between relatives distant by two degrees are very frequent, every family lives in its own house, and this holds for the Bushmen and the Singhalese as well; also the fact that among the Jews marriage between brothers and sisters was strictly taboo, but between first cousins was allowed, is explained by the lat- ter not living together in a household. By and large, prohibitions of marriage among primitive peoples are more extensive and stricter than among the more advanced ones; in the course of development, they were limited more and more to the really narrower family circle, apparently because the closeness of living
11 Today's Sri Lanka--ed.
? 582 chapter nine
? together only increasingly included more of the latter. The more extensive and diverse the social totality is that surrounds us, the smaller the familial subdivi- sions become that feel as belonging to one homogenous whole, the fewer the people who refer to the dangers of living close to one another, against which the prohibition of marriage formed a preventative rule.
Completely contrary to this motif, people have admittedly claimed that living together, as housemates do, would directly blunt sensual attraction; one would not desire with passion what one would have in view from earliest childhood daily and hourly; being accustomed to living together dampens fantasy and desire, which would only be stimulated rather by the distant and novel. On this psychological basis, it would not be the members of one's own family but always strangers toward whom the desire for marriage would be turned. However the psychological correctness of this theory is only conditional. The intimate living together not only produces apathy, but in many cases stimu- lation; otherwise the ancient wisdom, that love often arises in the course of a marriage where it might be absent upon entering into it, would not hold; otherwise the first intimate acquaintance with a person of the other sex would not be so dangerous during certain years. It is also possible that during the very primitive stages of development, when the prohibition in question comes into existence, that finer sense for individuality is lacking, because of which not the woman as such is charming, but her personality that is different from all others. This understanding, however, is the condition under which desire turns from the beings whom one already knows well, and who do not have a new individual attraction to offer, to strangers of a yet unknown individual- ity. As long as desire in its original unrefined condition dominates the man, any woman is like any other woman for him insofar as she is not too old or is ugly in his judgment; and that higher psychological need for change could have had no strength to overcome the natural inertia that referred him at first to the nearest female. An anonymous writing from the year 1740, Bescheidene doch gru? ndliche Gegenvorstellung von der Zula? ssigkeit der Ehe mit des verstorbenen Weibes Schwester,12 also rejects marriage with a deceased husband's brother, and in fact precisely from the point of view emphasized here, which makes a strange impression in this case, whereby the husband should still not abuse his right to eventually marry the woman in her lifetime after the death of the spouse, for which the frequent familial gatherings would give special opportunity. And already the Jewish philosopher Maimonides cited as a basis for that prohibi- tion the danger of the immorality that lay all too near in living together in one house. Because of the prohibition of marriage, however, every husband would know that he should not direct his inclinations and thoughts in this direction at all.
All in all it seems to me that the spatial proximity is so effective for arous- ing the sense of sex that where cultivation and custom are upheld at all, and an inconceivable chaos in all legal and moral relationships should not
12 Translation: Humble Though Thorough Refutation of the Admissibility of Marriage to a Deceased Wife's Sister--ed.
? space and the spatial ordering of society 583
? arise, the strictest rules of separation must be established precisely between spatially proximate persons. If only the prohibitions of propriety and reserve that separated the members of a family are also valid for people who are far from each other, they would not be proven as powerless as they actually are often enough, but even more powerless in view of the special situation of those who live in a closer external unity. Thus a barrier had to be erected between them that does not exist for non-relatives. Neither are the ruinous effects of inbreeding on the race absolutely certain, nor is such knowledge among the primitive peoples likely to be sufficient to make marriage among relatives an unconditionally shocking horror for them. On the contrary, maintaining a sexual order is almost everywhere a closely observed requirement, and for that matter the incest taboo seems to me to be essentially introduced and given an instinctive obviousness as a prophylaxis against the allurements that must have resulted here from no other general circumstance as overwhelming as from local contact.
Of course in addition to these psychological (in the narrower sense) consequences of proximity or distance for social interactions stand those of a more logical or at least intellectual nature, which do not pertain to sensory-irrational immediacy. For example, the vicissitudes that a relationship undergoes through the transition of its elements from distance into spatial proximity in no way exist only in a growing intensity of the bond but also very much in attenuation, reservation, and repulsion. In addition to that direct antipathy that may issue from sensory proximity, principally at work here is an absence or denial of the idealization with which one more or less clothes the abstractly represented partners. If outer distance is lacking, it brings about the needed emphasis on inner distance, on the limit setting of the personal sphere, on the defense against inappropriate intimacy, and, in brief, against such dangers that do not come into question where there is spatial distance; it brings about certain caution and detour that inter- action must produce directly through personal immediacy because greater objectivity, a moderation of personal angularities, and a smaller likelihood of too much hastiness and fervor often tend to be peculiar to the indirect and often interrupted distant interaction. It belongs to the finest social task of the art of life to preserve in a close relationship the values and sensitivities that develop between persons in a certain distance relative to the rarity of togetherness. One will spontaneously decide that the warmth and sensitivity of the relationship must increase with the level of personal closeness. One anticipates at the beginning, in the tone and intensity of interaction, what could indeed develop
? 584 chapter nine
? in the most favorable case, admittedly in order to then feel that one expected too much of the mere form of the spatial relationship; we reach deeply into the void because the suddenness of the physical or permanent closeness has misled us about the slowness with which the mental closeness increases it again. Thus set-backs and cooling-off occur that not only undo these illusory excesses but also sweep away the previously attained values of love, friendship, common interest, or mental understanding. This situation does not belong to rare confu- sions among people, which could probably be avoided at the outset with instinctive tact; but once they occur, as a rule they no longer can be set right with tact alone, but only with the assistance of conscious assessments and deliberations. Physical closeness is still not always the adequate result of internal intimacy, but occurs where the latter remains in the status quo, often for entirely external reasons. And, therefore, corresponding to the physical occurrence the following happens: if one were to cause those changes in a body that warmth brings about in it, through another mechanical means, it cools off!
I take up a second example of relationships that are far distant from the intimacy that we mentioned, in order to dwell on the sociological distinctiveness of spatial distance in its more calculable consequences. Where a minority that is held together by the same interests is found in a larger group, it is very different for the relationship to the whole whether it lives spatially close together or scattered in small sections throughout the whole group. Which of the two forms is the more favor- able for such a minority's position of power under otherwise similar conditions is not generally ascertainable. If the subgroup in question is found in a defensive posture vis-a`-vis the majority, the level of its power decides that question. If the group is very small, so that no genuine resistance, but only an escape--making themselves invisible--and avoidance of devastating attacks remain in question, it is immediately obvious that the maximum possible dispersion is advisable. On the contrary, with considerably more strength, especially larger numbers of people for whom the chance already exists to withstand an attack, the most possible concentration will promote preservation. In the way that streams of herring are protected from danger by their tight concentration, in that they thus offer a narrower target and less space in between for enemies to penetrate, so living closer together provides the exposed minorities the greater probability of successful resistance, mutual support, and more effective consciousness of solidarity. The
space and the spatial ordering of society 585
? mode of spatial dispersion of the Jews made both ways usable for them. While their diasporas distributed them throughout the cultural world, no persecution could encounter all of their segments, and there was always for those for whom life at one place was made impossible still a link, protection, and support at another; on the other hand, since they lived mostly as close neighbors in individual places either in the ghetto or elsewhere, they also enjoyed the advantages and powers that the compact togetherness without a vacuum develops for defense. Now if the energies have reached the threshold from which they also can advance to attacks, to win advantages and power, the relationship is reversed: at this stage, a concentrated minority cannot accomplish so much as one that cooperates from many points. Thus while at that stage, by virtue of the smaller and thus essential powers needed for defense, the ghetto was decisive for the Jews as advantageous and empowering, with growing certainty and energy it appeared as injurious to Judaism and their distribution throughout the total population raised their collective power most effectively. This is one of the not too infrequent instances in which the absolute growth of a quantity directly reverses the relations within it. Now if one does not look at the minority as the variable ele- ment in the sense of its structure, but inquires into the constitution of the environing totality in a given spatial dispersal or compactness of it, the following tendency necessarily results. A smaller special structure within an encompassing group that holds the central authority together will favor, with its spatial compactness, an individualizing form of gov- ernance granting autonomy to the parts. Since where such a part does not provide for its interests by itself, its life cannot be led according to its own norms; it has no technical possibility at all of being protected from the oppression by the whole. For example, a parliamentary regime that always subjects the very life of the parts to a mere majority decision will simply outvote such a minority. But if it lives dispersed so that there cannot be any talk about an independent development of immediate power or of their institutions for them, the autonomy of local sectors of the whole will be of no value for them since they still do not gain a majority. It will be rather centralist minded since the consideration by which it can still hope for something from the splitting of its energies is still the most to be expected from a unified, indeed perhaps absolut- ist central authority; it will attain a positive influence on so diffuse a structure only through individually outstanding personalities whom it produces, and the greatest chance for this form of power will also exist
586 chapter nine
? precisely in view of a sovereignty as powerful and personal as possible. The local distance of the members makes it dependent on a central authority and its compactness leads it away from that.
The result of this spatial situation is an entirely different one when it is not a matter of a sector but a whole group. A community, all of whose elements live dispersed, if other causes are not strongly affect- ing it, will not have centralist inclinations as readily. As the Swiss rural regional communities in the Middle Ages were structured as collective state entities, they thereby essentially duplicated the basic characteristics of city constitutions. However the farmers' cooperative did not arise as did the urban one, almost completely in the agencies set up by it, but the early assembly of people remained the most important organ itself for the administration of justice and control over all public mat- ters. Here, on the one hand, a certain mistrust is effective because the permanent control of the central organs from afar is impracticable, and on the other, the lesser vitality of the social interactions in the country is compared to that of the compact urban population. Objec- tive structures are necessary for them as solid points in the storms and frictions that urban life generates as much through on-going contacts as through the strong but continuously gradated social differentiation of its members. These results of local conditions will also bring about a certain tenseness of centralization upon the democratic foundation of the urban population.
However, really direct democracy needs the spatially close limitation of its sphere, as the classic Federalist Papers proclaims: "The natural limit of a democracy is that distance from the central point which will but just permit the most remote citizens to assemble as often as their public functions demand. "13 And in Greek antiquity it had to be experienced as a banishment if one lived so far from the place of the political assembly that one could not participate in it regularly. Democracy and aristocracy meet in this interest in immediate autonomy if their spatial conditions are the same. The Spartan history shows this limitation in a very interesting combination. There one knew very well that the dis- persed settlement on the flat terrain favored aristocracy; because even democracies under this local condition assume a type of aristocratic character because of their self-sufficiency and their independence from
13 In English in Simmel's text. The quotation is from The Federalist, number 14, written by James Madison--ed.
? space and the spatial ordering of society 587
? dominant central powers, as the history of the German tribes frequently reveals. Thus as the Spartans wanted to overthrow the democracy in Mantinea, they dissolved the city into a number of boroughs. But in the conflict between the agrarian character of their state, in which the spatial separation always remains tangible--and indeed to the extent it was also suitable to its aristocracy and to the vigorous centralization that their militarism required--they found an outlet to let their agrar- ian economy of serfs thrive while they themselves remained fairly close together in Sparta. In some way superficially similar to that, during the ancient re? gime the fate of the French noble took the same course. He had been autonomous to a great extend in his largely agrarian way of life until the government, which became ever more centralized with a clear culmination in the court life of Louis XIV, on the one hand undermined the legal and administrative independence of the noble and, on the other hand, drew him continuously to Paris. The correla- tion is thus in contrast to that of the opposition minority: Centralist tendencies correspond to the spatial concentration of the group and, conversely, autonomy to spatial dispersion. And since this relationship appears in complete contrast to the social tendencies of life, both demo- cratic and aristocratic, it follows that the spatial factor of proximity or distance determines the sociological form of the group decisively or at least decisively in part.
E. All the sociological formations considered up to now described what lies next to one another spatially: boundary and distance, perma- nence and neighborhood are like continuations of the spatial configura- tion within the structure of humanity, which is distributed in space. The latter fact attaches wholly new consequences to the possibility that people move from place to place. The spatial constraints on their existence are thereby put in flux, and as humanity achieves the existence that we know only through its mobility, from wandering, countless further con- sequences for their interactions result from the change of place in the strict sense; we wish to sketch some of these consequences here. The basic division of these phenomena from the sociological point of view is: Which forms of social interaction are established in a wandering group, as opposed to a spatially fixed one? And: Which forms emerge for the group itself and for wandering persons if in fact no one group wanders as a whole but certain members of it do?
1. The principal formations of the first type are nomadism and those movements that are called migrations of people; for nomads
588 chapter nine
? the wandering pertains to the substance of life that is best noted for its endlessness, for the circularity of constantly returning to the same places; but as for the migrations of people, the wandering is experi- enced more like an in-between condition between two different ways of life--be it that of being settled, or be it the earlier of the two, which is the nomadic. Insofar as the sociological consideration only inquires into the effect of the wandering as such, it need not distinguish between the two kinds. For the effect on the form of society is typically the same in both cases: Suppression or abolition of the inner differentiation of the group, hence an absence of a genuine political organization is often thoroughly compatible with despotic governance. The latter configura- tion is above all reminiscent of the relationship of patriarchal bonds within nomadism. Where the necessity arises for hunting peoples to scatter and wander, the husband takes his wife away from the neigh- borhood of her family, thereby thus deprives her of its support, and places her more decisively under his power, so that among the North American Indians the wandering of the family is made directly respon- sible for the transition from the female to the male kin organization. Then it happens that among authentic nomads stock-farming replaced hunting and that stock-farming as well as hunting are the business of males everywhere. Male despotism develops among nomads through this male responsibility over the most important or exclusive means of acquiring food. Family and state despotism, however, stand not only in a broad relationship of mutual production, but nomadism still has to favor the latter all the more decisively as the individual then has no support from the land. The same circumstance that makes nomads everywhere into subjects as well as objects of robbery--the mobility of property--makes life in general become something so unstable and root- less that the resistance against powerful, unifying personages is certainly not so strong as where the existence of each individual is consolidated on the land--especially since there is no question here of the chance of escaping, which was such a characteristic weapon for the wandering craft workers against state centralizing tendencies, as is to be similarly emphasized later. It still happens that those despotic collectives are created mostly for military purposes, to which the venturous and wild nomads will always be more disposed than will the farmers. As has been stated, nomadic groups, as a rule, lack the strict and solid organization, which otherwise cultivates the methods of military formations. There is hardly any disposition for that because of the wide dispersal and mutual
space and the spatial ordering of society 589
? independence of the individual nomadic families, since a more sophisti- cated and more extensive organization presupposes a division of labor; the latter presupposes a spatially tight or dynamic contact among the elements. However, the despotic organization among those wandering masses of nomadic peoples, which ran through European history no less than that of China, Persia, and India, was obviously no organized synthesis, but its force rested precisely on the mechanical aggregation of wholly undifferentiated elements that poured forth with the steady and uninterrupted pressure of a mud flow. The lowlands and steppes that on the one hand encourage nomadic life, are on the other hand the headwaters of the migrations of the large tribes. Eastern Europe, Northern and Inner Asia, the American lowlands thus manifest culti- vated racial types the least, and this ethnographic situation must be no less the result than the cause of a sociological leveling down.
A deeply grounded relationship exists between the movement in space and the differentiation of social and personal contents of existence. Both only form different satisfactions of one side of opposite mental tendencies, the other side of which comes from silence, regularity, and a substantial uniformity of the feeling and picture of life: conflicts and compromises, mixtures and changing predominance of both lend themselves to be used as patterns in order to bring in all the content of human history. The extraordinary increase in the differences of needs among modern people simultaneously affects both forms--change of place and differ- entiation--but in other cases the two can substitute for each other so that societies that are spatially stable strongly differentiate internally; and wandering societies, in contrast, which have veiled their necessary feeling of differentiation from the outset, require a social leveling for the constitution of their nerves and for the simultaneous tendency of life in the opposite condition.
The stratagem of wandering is made the vehicle of this principal relationship. The members of a wandering band are especially closely dependent on one another; the common interests, in contrast to the settled groups, have more the form of the momentary and therefore obscure, with the peculiar energy of the present that so often triumphs over the objectively more essential, individual differences, in the double sense of the word: as qualitative or social variety and as strife and divi- sion among individuals. Impulses for spatial expansion and contraction stand in sharp contrast among nomadic tribes; conditions for nourish- ment lead the individuals as far apart from one another as possible (and
590 chapter nine
? the spatial separation must also work towards a qualitative mental sepa- ration), while the need for protection nevertheless drives them together again and restrains differentiation. 14 Livingstone says of the divisions of African clans, which otherwise do not feel very connected, that they hold whole tribes very much together during wanderings and mutually support one another. From the Middle Ages, it is often reported that merchants who travel together had introduced a strongly communistic order among themselves, of which it is only a continuation that the merchant guilds or Hanses often established abroad, and that indeed characteristically right from the beginning of their development, they agree to a completely common life. Along the leveling moment of the travels, of course, there was no lack of the despotic in such cases. At least it is emphasized about the traits of the traveling merchants who traveled through the Roman Empire from Palmyra in the Euphrates region, that their leaders would have been the most noble men of quite old aristocracy, for whom the caravan participants would then often set up honorary pillars. It is thus assumed that their authority during the trip was a discrete one, under a relationship very analogous to that that of a ship captain during a voyage. Precisely because wandering individualizes and isolates in and of itself, because it places people on their own, it drives them to a close unity beyond the differences that exist otherwise. While it removes the support of the homeland from individuals, and at the same time removes the fixed levels among them, it directly brings to consciousness the travelers' fates, isolation, and rootlessness--to complement and augment a more than individual entity through the greatest possible commitment.
This essential sociological characteristic of wandering reveals itself as one that is in form always the same in phenomena that are in essence completely without any connection to what has been touched on until now. The travel acquaintance, as long as one is really only that and does not assume a character independent from that kind of association, often develops an intimacy and candor for which no genuine inner basis is to be found. Three causes appear to me to work in concert here: the liberation from the accustomed milieu, the mutuality of the momentary impressions and encounters, and the consciousness of the imminent and
14 The unbalanced proximity of these two necessities, which find a harmony, organi- zation, and complementary form in no higher viewpoint, both dominating, is perhaps the basis for the low and difficult development of the tribe at the stage of nomadism.
? space and the spatial ordering of society 591
? definitive separation that will happen again. The second of these factors is immediately clear in its effects on uniting and on a kind of spiritual communism, so long as even the identity of the experience lasts and the consciousness prevails; the other two, however, are only accessible to a more difficult sociological consideration. On the occasion of the first factor one must clarify how few people know from within, and through sure instincts, where the unalterable boundary of their private mental possession lies, and which reserves their individual being requires in order to keep themselves from being injured. Only through initiatives and reversals, through disappointments and adaptations do we gradu- ally tend to discover what we must reveal about ourselves to others without allowing feelings of tactlessness against ourselves and direct damages to develop from embarrassing situations. The fact that the mental sphere of one individual is not at all as clearly set off from that of others at the outset as is the body, the fact that this boundary, after it also overcame the vicissitudes of its first formation, never absolutely overcomes its relativity--this readily appears when we leave behind us the accustomed relationships in which we marked out a fairly solid space for ourselves with gradually increasing rights and responsibilities, by understanding and being understood by others, by testing our pow- ers and our emotional reactions, so that we certainly know here what we have to say and what to withhold and by what measure of both we create and sustain the accurate picture of our personality in others. Now since this relative measure of expression, set by the relationship to our environment, hardens for many people into an absolute in its own right, in an entirely new environment, one before entirely strange people, it generally loses any standard for self-revelation. On the one hand they are revealed under suggestions that they cannot resist in their actual state of being uprooted, and on the other hand in an inner uncertainty in which they can no more hold in check an intimacy or confession once they are prompted, but allow them to roll to the end as though they fell on a slanted plane. Now the third factor comes into play: we allow our accustomed reserve to drop so easily before those with whom we have nothing to do after this unique, mutual or one-sided revelation. All social interactions are influenced in the character of their form and content most decidedly by the idea of the duration for which one believes it is determined. This pertains to the sociological cognitions, the truth of which is admittedly unmistakably obvious for the grossest cases; for the finer ones, however, they are all the more frequently overlooked. That
592 chapter nine
? the qualitative character of a bond between a man and a woman in a lifelong marriage is different from that in a fleeting relationship, that the professional soldier has a different relationship to the army than that of a one or two year service is admittedly self-evident for anyone; but the conclusion that these macroscopic effects of the quantity of time also must appear with a lesser proportionate starkness and, as it were, microscopically, seems to be applied nowhere. Whether a contract is completed in one or ten years, whether a get-together of colleagues is planned for a few hours in the evening or as something at a country outing for a whole day, or whether one gets together at the set dinner of a hotel that changes the guests every day or that of a pension that is intended for a longer stay, that is quite essential for the coloration of the process in otherwise wholly similar material, meaning, and personal character of the being together. Whichever way it works, the quantity of time is admittedly not looked at in itself but depends on the totality of the circumstances: the greater length of time will sometimes lead to something overlooked,15 as it were to a lingering trace of the gathered group, since one is certain of it and does not yet find it necessary to strengthen the still irrevocable bond with new efforts; sometimes, again the consciousness of this simple indissolubility will move us toward a mutual adaptation and a more or less resigned flexibility in order to make the pressure, once it is taken on, at least as bearable as possible. Shortness of time will occasionally lead to the same intensity of the utilization of the relationship as its length, among other characteristics that can admittedly endure only a superficial or 'half ' relationship over a short time but not over the long term. This reference to the effect that thought exerts on the duration of a relationship at any individual moment should show here only the sociological essence of the brief encounter belonging to a wider and principled context. The traveling acquaintance--from the feeling of being obligated to nothing, and of being really anonymous in relation to a person from whom one will be separated for ever in a few hours--often entices one to quite remarkable confidences, giving in unreservedly to the impulse to speak what only experience has taught, through their consequences, to control. Thus people have also attributed the erotic opportunities of the military to its not possessing the stationariness that most other sectors of society possess, to the relationship with the soldier possessing the coloration
15 einer ne? gligeance--ed.
? space and the spatial ordering of society 593
? of a fleeting dream on the part of the woman, a dream that not only involves no commitment but precisely by its brevity seduces one to the most superficial intensity in the exploitation of her and the devotion to him. Thus one has also explained the success of the mendicant friars by the fact that one often confessed with less embarrassment to those who had the right to hear confession anywhere and came today and left tomorrow, than to one's own pastor who had the penitent in sight for a long time. Here as often as the extremes appear to possess a certain uniform importance that is opposed to the middle sphere: one reveals oneself to the closest and the strangest persons while the layers that stand in between comprise the place of genuine reserve. Thus the following is also recognizable in these wide-ranging phenomena within the basic context: Peoples' peculiar lack of attachment as wanderers and toward wanderers, even by what I indicated above as an approach to spiritual communism, is a surrender beyond the other barriers of individualism; this sociological theme is alive in countless, difficult to recognize transformations, which promotes at a certain level a deper- sonalizing unity within the wandering group.
2. Totally apart from this is the consideration of how the wandering of a section affects the form of the whole, otherwise sedentary group. I mention here only two of the many relevant phenomena, of which one would continue to have an effect on the side of the unification of the group, and the other precisely on the side of its duality. In order to dynamically hold elements together that are distant from one another in a spatially spread out group, highly developed epochs develop a system of various means, above all everything that is customary to the objective culture, which is accompanied by the consciousness that it would be just the same here as it is at every point in the same group: the sameness of speech, law, general way of life, the style of buildings and tools; moreover, the functional units: the centralized administration of state and church that extends itself everywhere at the same time, the more selective associations of entrepreneurs that nevertheless reach out across all local separations, such as industrial workers, commercial associations of wholesalers and retailers, the more ideal but still very effective association of scholars, military association, school teachers, university professors, collectivities of all sorts--in short, a tangle of threads with an absolute or partial center that holds together all parts of a highly cultivated state, admittedly with very differently distributed energy, since the substantive culture according to quantity and kind is neither sufficiently uniform, nor do the functional connections turn all
594 chapter nine
? elements with the same interest and same force toward their center. At any rate, insofar as these unifications are effective, they require only the movement of peoples through large stretches of space in trifling segments and, as it were, accidentally; modern life succeeds in bring- ing about the consciousness of social unity, on the one hand through those factual regularities and the knowledge of the common points of contact, and on the other hand through the institutions that are fixed once and for all, and finally and thirdly, through written communica- tion. But as long as there is an absence of this objective organization and technology, it has another overriding significance as the secondary means of unification later: the wandering that, admittedly, because of its purely personal character, can never cover the breadth of the spatial territory as do those means and can never centralize the same circuit from the point of view of content. The merchant and the scholar, offi- cial and craftsperson, monk and artist, the highly prominent as well as the most depraved members of society were in the Middle Ages and at the beginning of the modern era much more mobile than now. What we gain in consciousness of solidarity through letters and books, checking account and warehouses, mechanical reproduction of the same model and photography had to be done at that time through travel by persons, which was as lacking in success as it was wasteful in imple- mentation; for where it is a matter of merely factual communication, traveling is the most unhelpful and unspecialized means for a person since one must drag along, as heavy baggage, all that is external and internal to one's personality that has nothing directly to do with the business at hand. And if the byproduct of many personal and infor- mal relationships were also thereby gained, that still does not exactly serve the purpose now in question, i. e. , making the unity of the group perceptible and effective. Pertinent relationships that leave the personal completely aside--and thus can lead from any element to many other ones without limitation--succeed more thoroughly to make conscious a unity that transcends individuals; precisely, the informal relationship not only excludes all others in substantial matters, but it exhausts itself in its immediate narrowness so that its benefit for the consciousness of the unity of the group, to which both belong, is minimal. It is indicative of this subjective nature of the linkages and at the same time also of their importance that in the Middle Ages the maintenance of highways and bridges was regarded as a religious duty. That so many of today's objectively mediated relationships came about in earlier times only
space and the spatial ordering of society 595
? through the wandering of personalities seems to me to be a basis for the relative weakness of the consciousness of unity in the extended groups of antiquity.
After all, the wanderings were often the only vehicle, often at least one of the comparatively strongest ones, for centralization, especially in a political sense. On the one hand the king took the individual parts of the realm into his possession personally in the form of a circuit, as is reported of the ancient Franks and as did the earlier kings of Sweden; on the other hand, the king traveled around in the realm either periodi- cally or continuously. The earliest Russian sovereigns did it periodically by visiting all the cities annually, and the German emperors of the old empire did it continuously. The Russian custom was supposed to have served the solidarity of the Empire, the German, which followed from the lack of an imperial capital, was thereby admittedly just the symbol of a dubious decentralization, but under these circumstances still the best that one could do for the unification of the separate parts of the empire in the person of the king. Precisely one of the causes of this traveling around on the part of the German princes--the fact that the taxes paid in kind to them had to be consumed on the spot for lack of a means of transportation--precisely this established a kind of entirely personal relationship between each place and the king. In England the arrangement of the itinerant justices through Henry II served an analogous purpose. With the imperfections of the centralization and communication, the administration of the counties was vulnerable from the outset to considerable abuse by county constables. The circuit judges first brought the highest state authority everywhere; with the distance that they had as strangers to each part of the realm, and with the sub- stantial similarity of their judgments, they first pulled all parts of the kingdom beyond their scattered condition into a unity centralized under the king by law and administration. As long as there is a lack of the supra-local means, working at a distance, to bring the local settlement authorities also into this unity, the riding circuit of the officials gives the most effective possibility of centralizing the outlying regions into the ideal political unity. The physical impression of persons also works just the same way; one knows about them that they come from that center of the whole and return back to it. In this immediacy and clarity lies an advantage of this organization, borne by mobile members, held together before the more abstract means, who occasionally balance its fortuitousness and isolation. A half-socialist English organization, the
596 chapter nine
? English Land-Restoration League, used a red coach ('red van') for its propaganda among the rural workers, in which its speaker lived and which, driving from place to place, formed the center stage at meet- ings and center of excitement. Such a wagon, with all its mobility, by virtue of its characteristics, a spectacle recognized everywhere, is still a psychologically stationary element; with its coming and going it brings the scattered party comrades their connectedness throughout the area to a stronger consciousness than would perhaps occur under otherwise similar circumstances of a fixed branch of the party, with the result that other parties would readily imitate this wagon-propaganda. In addition to state and party unity, travel can also serve religious unity. The English Christians only began founding parish churches late. At least well into the seventh century bishops moved around the diocese with their assistants to carry out church business; and thus certainly the religious unity of the individual community obtained an incomparable solidity and clarity through the church structure; thus the latter could more quickly work towards a particularistic isolation of the community while the unity of the whole diocese, indeed the Church in general, must have come more strongly into consciousness through the traveling of its bearer. Even now the Baptists in North America proceed with their recruitment of adherents in the more remote regions by means of special wagons, 'gospel cars,' that would be furnished as chapels. This mobility of worship services must be especially favorable for propaganda since it makes it clear to the scattered adherents that they are not in isolated lost outposts, but belong to a unified whole that is held together by continuously functioning connections. And finally it is still the moral conduct of the group toward its wandering members that it must occasionally come to the places of meeting and fellowship. Besides the indispensability that travel had for the whole economic and cultural activity in the Middle Ages, combined with its dangers and difficulties, the poor that were thus as much an object of general charities also wandered almost continuously--it would happen that the Church recommended travelers to the daily prayers of the devout in the same breath with the sick and the imprisoned. And similarly the Koran specifies: the fifth portion of the spoils belongs to God, His emissaries, the orphans, the beggars, and the wanderers. Then the immediate provision of welfare for the traveler was differentiated, in accordance with a general historical development, into the objective relief of the traveler on the road, assurances, institutions of different kinds, and into
space and the spatial ordering of society 597
? the subjective ones allowing the individuals their independence and self-reliance. That general religious obligation toward the traveler was the ethical reflection of the continuous social interaction and functional unity that the traveler produced. As the traveler, even if not poor at all, can still be especially easily caught up in situations of need, and all the more so the less developed the outer culture is, it is in turn particularly suggested to the poor that they travel, since the individual fields of the harvest of alms is exhausted. The fact that poverty and wandering are so often presented as a completely unified phenomenon--the persisting type of the beggar, the 'roaming poor,' is probably only recently begin- ning to disappear completely in Germany--is the basis of one of the greatest difficulties of the care for the poor with reference to the sinking poor: that one has absolutely no sure means of distinguishing between the worker seeking employment who is caught in the course of that in undeserved difficulty, and the professional idler who moves from one place to another in order to live at the cost of other people.
In addition to the unifying effect of travel on the fixed group that strives to overcome functionally its spatial distancing from itself through coming and going, there is another one that serves precisely the antago- nistic forces of the group. This occurs if one part of a group is princi- pally settled, another characterized by its mobility, and this difference in formal spatial behavior then becomes the vehicle, instrument, and growth-factor of an otherwise already existing latent or open opposi- tion. Here the most distinctive type is the vagabond and the adventurer, whose continuous roving about projects unrest, the rubato quality of their inner rhythm of life, onto territory. The difference between one settled by natural inclination and the wandering nature in itself already gives the structure and development of society infinitely possible varia- tions. Each of these two temperaments senses in the other a natural and irreconcilable enemy. Since where, perhaps, it does not succeed in procuring the born vagabonds an employment adequate to their talent through a fine differentiation of professions--which very rarely succeeds where already the time toward regular employment for them is all too related to the fixedness in space--there they will exist as a parasite on the settled members of the society. However, they do not persecute the vagabonds only out of hate, but they hate them also because they must persecute them for their self preservation. And just the same, what drove the vagabonds into this exposed and weakened position, their instinct for a continuous change of place, their ability and desire to
598 chapter nine
? 'make themselves invisible' is still at the same time a protection against that persecution and ostracism; it is simultaneously an offensive and their defensive weapon. As the vagabonds' relationship with space is the adequate expression of their subjective interiority and erraticism, so is it the same for the relationships to their social groups.
Here it is exclusively a matter of unique elements that are forced by their restlessness and mobility, but are also capable of actually sustain- ing a conflict with the entire society. At least very rarely, compared to the interweaving of the social whole into the nature of the vagabond, unions among them are such that it is thus a matter not of wandering communities, in a sociological difference from nomads, but of a com- munity of wanderers. The whole life principle of the adventurer resists that because an organization can hardly avoid some kind of permanence. There are, after all, beginnings of that, which one could call flowing social formations, which can however obviously always include within themselves and regulate only a small part of the inner and outer life of their members. One such homeless fellowship was the itinerant people of the Middle Ages; it needed the entire spirit of fellowship of the time so that these itinerant people would create a kind of inner order for themselves. While this fellowship rose even to the establishment of a 'Meisterschaft'16 and other dignities, at least the formal edge of their opposition against the rest of the society became moderate. Now this happened even more decidedly in a different type of special move- ment as a bearer of a social antagonism: namely, where two parts of a group are set into a more active opposition by it. Here the traveling skilled worker, especially in the Middle Ages, is the best example. The organizations on which the skilled labor depended by their claims to support the cities and masters had travel as a prerequisite. Or looked at differently: both stood in an indissoluble interaction. The wandering would not have been technically possible without an arrangement that granted the skilled worker, who has migrated, an initial base of support; and inevitably comrades in the trade, who themselves came or will come into the same situation, would need to provide one. While the skilled crafts drew the work centers precisely to themselves, the skilled worker was actually a foreigner nowhere in Germany (and similarly in other lands); a network of information centers among the skilled work- ers provided relatively quickly for the balancing of demand and offer
16 Recognized free status of a guild--ed.
? space and the spatial ordering of society 599
? of work at the individual places, and thus it was at first a very obvious benefit for them that allowed one association of skilled workers to arise from the skilled workers stretched out throughout the whole empire. Travel caused the skilled worker guilds to stand in a more active mutual interaction than the guilds of the masters with the immobility of their residence, and caused a unity of law and custom to develop among them, which afforded the individual or the smaller parts extraordinarily strong support in their struggles over wages, life style, honor, and social standing. The wanderings of skilled workers had to promote the forma- tion of their specialized associations extraordinarily. The skilled worker born in one place was linked to the master through residence, piety, and a general relationship to things and persons. For the skilled workers, however, who had gathered together from everywhere, there was no other interest but the purely factual and technical; the personal bonds leading back to the master were dissolved, and there remained only the rationalist direction of interests and connections that are generally characteristic of the foreigner and made the foreigner everywhere, for example, the bearer of money transactions. Besides being reinforced by the socializing effect of the travels of its members, the struggling situation of the stratum of skilled workers was still intensified quite directly by their mobility; for this enabled it to execute work stoppages and boycotts in a way that the masters could not immediately counteract. Obviously this was only possible for the latter if they balanced the disadvantages of their being rooted in the soil with alliances that embraced the whole area for the travels of the skilled workers who came into question. Thus we hear of associations of cities and guilds in cohesive solidarity against the skilled workers, associations that tended to belong to the same geographically insulated zone that constituted a regular travel area for the skilled workers. Thus two different forms struggled with each other to dominate the same space: mobility, through which the group easily shifted here and there its elements for offense and defense, each time to the point of least resistance and most advantage, backed the ideal domination of the same space through the appointment of the others to defend through them the widely distributed groups. Through these, the inner differences of this group, out of which the mobility of the others drew their opportunities, would be eliminated; only after the regularity of the behavior and the strength for all elements of the master group were restored did the opportunity for the mobility of the opposing group become illusory. Accordingly, the state of the seventeenth and eighteenth century could also much sooner cope with the guilds
600 chapter nine
? of masters, who, so to speak, had to hold still, than with the bands of skilled workers, because the skilled workers could withdraw from every territory and prevent immigration, thereby severely damaging business. Also, the states first aligned itself against the bands of skilled workers in the eighteenth century, at the same time as they were confronted by them in a large part of the imperial territory.
The character of social construction is formally determined to a high degree by how often their participants meet. Here this category is so peculiarly distributed between the masters and the skilled workers that frequently they are, of course, united by their settledness, and generally it is thus necessary to meet often, but actually only within the locally restricted group, in contrast to the others who admittedly meet less completely, more seldom, and occasionally, but in the broad circuits that include very many guild circles. Thus, while, for example, in the Middle Ages the skilled worker who broke a contract was generally penalized severely, it was conceded to the Berlin weaver in 1331 that at any instance the latter was allowed to demand payment and release if thinking of abandoning the city. It is an example of the contrary association that the multiple travels and wandering of the workers prevents a certain part of them from participating in a wage movement, and thereby places them in a disadvantage relative to the settled entrepreneurs; with the categories of workers who are generally mobilized according to their occupation, such as itinerant workers and sailors, the disadvantage of restlessness often increases up to the point of lawlessness because more often they cannot collect their witnesses against the entrepreneur in litigation over compensation and keep them together during the lengthy legal proceeding. Generally it seems as though the nearer to the present, the more favorable is the position of the settled against the opponent who is dependent on movement. And this is understandable given the decrease in the changing of places. Because it happens that people who are settled in principle can also still be transferred any time and anywhere, they can still enjoy more and more all the advantages of mobility along with the settled life, while for the unsettled, for the mobile in principle, the advantages of the settled life are not growing at the same rate.
space and the spatial ordering of society 601 Excursus on the Stranger
If travel as the loosening from any given point in space is the conceptual opposite of permanence somewhere, the sociological form of the 'stranger' nevertheless represents the union, so to speak, of the two conditions--admit- tedly here also representing the fact that the relationship to space is only the condition of the relationship to people on the one hand and the symbol of it on the other. Thus the stranger is not understood here as wanderer, the sense in which the term was used many times up to now, one who arrives today and leaves tomorrow, but as one who comes today and stays tomorrow--the potential wanderer, so to speak, who has not completely overcome the loosening of coming and going, though not moving on. The stranger is fixed within a certain spatial area--or one whose delimitation is analogous to being spatially limited--but the position of the stranger is thereby essentially determined by not belonging in it from the outset, and by introducing qualities that do not and cannot originate from the stranger. The union of the near and the far that every relation among people contains is achieved here in a configuration that formulates it most briefly in this way: The distance within the relationship means that the near is far away, but being a stranger means that the distant is near. Since, of course, being a stranger is an entirely positive relationship, a special form of interaction, the inhabitants of the star Sirius are not actually strangers to us--at least not in the sense of the word that comes into socio- logical consideration--but they do not exist at all for us, they stand outside of far and near. The stranger is a member of the group itself, not different from the poor and the various 'inner enemies'--an element whose immanent pres- ence and membership include at the same time an externality and opposition. Now the pattern wherein repelling and distancing moments here comprise a form of togetherness and interacting unity may be outlined with the following statements, which are in no way intended to be exhaustive.
In the whole history of business, the stranger appears everywhere as a dealer, and the dealer, respectively, as stranger. As long as one's own need essentially dominates the economy, or a spatially narrow group exchanges its products, it needs no 'middleman' within it; a dealer comes into question only for those products that are produced outside the group. Insofar as almost no persons travel to the stranger in order to purchase these necessities--in which case, then, precisely they are 'foreign' merchants in this other area--the dealer must be a foreigner; no opportunity exists for another. This position of the stranger is intensified in consciousness when the stranger becomes fixed permanently in the place instead of again leaving the place of the business activity. For in countless cases, even this becomes possible even for the strangers only if they can live off the middle man. An economic circle that is in some way closed by parceled out earth and soil and handcrafts to satisfy demand will also grant an existence to the dealer; and because trade alone makes unlimited combinations possible, intellect always nevertheless finds expansion and new openings in trade, which is difficult for the producers to attain with their limited
? 602 chapter nine
? mobility and their dependence on a circle of customers that can only expand gradually. Business can still always attract more people than can primary production, and it is the sphere indicated for the stranger who, so to speak, enters as a supernumerary into a group in which the economic positions are actually already taken. The history of the European Jews provides the classic example. The stranger is just not a landowner by nature, where 'land' is not understood in the physical sense only, but also in the figurative sense of a life substance that, if not fixed in a spatial position, is fixed in an ideal position in the social setting. Even in more intimate relationships of person to person, the stranger may also open up all manner of attraction and importance; but as long as they are found to be strangers, they are not 'land owners' among others. Now that dependence on the intermediate trade and many times, as in a sublimation of that, on purely financial business produces the specific quality of mobility in the stranger. While it happens within a circumscribed group, the synthesis of near and far resides in this, which constitutes the formal position of the stranger: The quintessentially movable comes to the stranger casually with each element in contact, but is bound up organically with no individual with familial, local, or occupational permanence.
Another expression of this configuration lies in the objectivity of the stranger. By not being radically committed to individual components or one-sided tendencies of the group, the stranger faces all of them with the special attitude of the 'objective' person, which does not mean, perhaps, a mere aloofness or disengagement but a particular form of the far and near, indifference and engagement. I refer to the analysis in Chapter 3, "Domina- tion and Subordination," of the dominant positions of outsiders, as of that type which the practice of the Italian cities appears to be: appointing their judges from outside because no native was free of the bias of family interests and factions. The phenomenon mentioned a little while ago, which admit- tedly applies principally but nevertheless not exclusively to someone who is moving on, is also connected to the objectivity of the stranger: the fact that the most surprising openness and admissions are brought up to him, almost approaching the nature of a confession, which one carefully withholds from anyone who is close. Objectivity is by no means disengagement--since that generally exists outside of subjective and objective behavior--but an especially positive kind of participation--as the objectivity of a theoretical observation absolutely does not mean that the mind would be a passive tabula rasa onto which things inscribe their qualities, but the full activity of the mind working according to its own laws, only in such a way that it arranges the accidental displacements and accentuations, whose individual-subjective differences would provide completely different pictures of the same object. Objectivity can also be called freedom: The objective person is bound by no commitments that could prejudice the grasp, the understanding, and the evaluation of data. This freedom, which allows the stranger to experience and handle even the close relationship as from a bird's eye view, admittedly entails all manner of dangerous possibilities. Concerning rebellions of any kind it has always been claimed by the affected party that an incitement had taken place from outside through foreign emissaries and agitators. To the extent that this is correct, it
space and the spatial ordering of society 603
? is an exaggeration of the specific role of the stranger: In practice and theory, the stranger has more freedom, observes circumstances with less prejudice, measures them against more general and more objective deals and is not bound in action by residence, loyalty, or precedents. 17
Finally, the proportion of proximity and distance that gives the stranger the characteristic of objectivity nevertheless achieves a practical expression in the more abstract nature of the relationship to the person, i. e. one has only certain more general qualities in common with the stranger, while a relationship with those organically bound together is based on the similarity of specific differences from the merely general. All relationships that are personal in some way generally develop according to this pattern in manifold arrangements. About these it is not only determined that certain commonalities among the members exist, along with individual differences that either influence the relationship or are maintained outside of it; rather that commonality itself is therefore essentially determined in its effect on the relationship, whether it exists only among just these elements and is therefore indeed common within, but specific and incomparable without--or whether it is only common for the perception of their elements themselves, if it is common at all, to a group, or a type or humanity. In the latter case a dilution of the effectiveness of the general occurs in proportion to the size of the group bearing the same characteristic; admittedly it functions as a unifying basis for the members, but it does point these members directly to one another; also, this similarity could even associate each member with all possible others. This is also obviously a type in which a relationship includes the near and far at the same time: To the degree to which the similar factors have the same nature, the warmth of the relationship that they establish, an element of coolness, a feeling of the coincidence added to this relationship, and the connecting forces have lost their specific, centripetal character. Now in relation to the stranger, this configuration appears to me an extraordinary principled preponderance over the individuals, only to pos- sess the commonalities of the elements proper to the relationship in question. The stranger is near us insofar as we feel similarities of a national or social, occupational or of generally human kind between the stranger and us; the stranger is far from us insofar as these similarities reach over both of us and bind us together only because they bind very many people generally. In this sense a strain of strangeness enters into even the closest relationships. At the stage of first passion, erotic relationships very decisively dismiss that generalized thought: a love like this has not yet existed at all; there would be nothing to compare either with the beloved or with our experience of the beloved. An estrangement--whether as a cause or as a result is difficult to decide--tends
17 But where this is falsely claimed on the part of those affected, it originates from the tendency of the upper strata to exculpate the lower strata who were in unified closer relationship with them beforehand. Because while they present the fiction that the rebels were actually not guilty, that they were only incited, that the rebellion would not come about from them--they exculpate themselves, deny any real reason for the rebellion in the first place.
? 604 chapter nine
? to enter at the moment in which the sense of uniqueness disappears from the relationship; a skepticism concerning its value in itself and for us connects directly with the thought that one would ultimately consummate with some- one only a general human destiny, experience what has been experienced a thousand times before, and that if one had not met by chance just this person any other one would have had the same importance for us. And something of that sort may be absent in no relationship, however close, because that which is common to the two together is perhaps never merely common to them but belongs to a general idea that still includes many others, many possibilities of the same; as little as they may be realized, as often as we may forget them, they still propel themselves here and there, like shadows between people, like a mist lifting up from words indicating to everyone what would have to coagulate into a more solid embodiment in order to mean jealousy. Perhaps what in some cases is the more general, at least the more insurmountable foreignness than what is produced by differences and incomprehensibilities--that admittedly a similarity, harmony, and closeness exist, but with the feeling that this is actu- ally no exclusive property of just this relationship but of a more general one that is sustained potentially between us and an uncertain number of others and thus no inner and exclusive necessity is allowed to be due to that real- ized relationship alone. On the other hand, there is a kind of 'foreignness' in which the commonality is directly excluded on the grounds of something more common that encompasses the parties: The relationship of the Greeks to the ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? (barbarian) is, perhaps, typical of this; all the cases in which the general qualities that one deems purely authentically and merely human are directly denied to the other. But here 'stranger' has no positive meaning; the relationship to the stranger is a non-relationship; this stranger is not what is being discussed here--a member of the group itself.
As such, rather, the stranger is near and far at the same time, as is the ground- ing of the relationship on only a general human similarity. A special tension arises between those two elements, however, when the consciousness of having only something very general in common nevertheless gives special emphasis to what is not directly common. But in the case of national, local, racial, and other strangers it is again nothing individual, but a foreign origin that is or can be common to many strangers. Thus strangers are also not really considered as individuals but as strangers of a particular type in general; the moment of distance is no less general for them than that of nearness. This form is at the basis, for example, of so special a case as the Medieval Jewish taxes, like those in Frankfurt, which were nevertheless still demanded. While the Beede paid by the Christian citizens changed with the level of ability at each time, the tax for each individual Jew was one fixed for all time. This fixedness was based on the Jew having a social position as Jew, not as a bearer of particular mate- rial contents. In tax matters, every other citizen was an owner of a particular fortune, and the tax could follow the changes in that. As a taxpayer the Jew, however, was in the first instance a Jew and therefore had a tax standing that was an invariant; this becomes most evident, of course, as soon as even these individual regulations, whose individuality was bounded by stiff irrevocability,
space and the spatial ordering of society 605
? are repealed, and the strangers (not only Jews)18 pay an altogether similar head tax. With all this being an organically unrelated add-on, the stranger is still an organic member of the group whose unified life includes the particular condi- tions of this element; only we do not know how to describe the unique unity of this position other than as its being composed of a certain measure of the near and a certain measure of the far, which, characterizing each relationship in whatever quantities, produce the specific formal relationship to the 'stranger' in a particular proportion and mutual tension.