The Stranger

Shaun Best

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429857539
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

This book explores the concept of the stranger as a 'modern' social form, identifying the differing conceptions of strangerhood presented in the literature since the publication of Georg Simmel's influential essay 'The Stranger', questioning the assumptions around what it means to be regarded as 'strange', and identifying the consequences of being labelled a stranger.

Organised both chronologically and thematically, the book begins with Simmel's major essays on the stranger and culminates with an analysis of Zygmunt Bauman's thought on the subject, with each chapter introducing an idea or key theme initially discussed by Simmel before exploring the development of the theme in the work of others, including Schütz, Derrida, and Levinas. The stranger is an enduring concept across many disciplines and is central to contemporary debates about refugees, asylum, the nature of inclusion and exclusion, and the struggle for recognition. As such, this book will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences.

1

THE CITY

Georg Simmel on the stranger

Georg Simmel’s essay The Stranger (1908) describes the position of the stranger in social life. Although this essay is only eight pages long, Simmel’s reflections on the stranger and metropolitan life continue to influence the ways in which present day commentators think about the political and cultural anxieties that people experience within the urban environment. Simmel identified how the city is still to this day seen as a lifeline for marginal and excluded people. For Simmel, the stranger is not perceived as: ‘the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the person who comes today and stays tomorrow’ (Simmel 1950/1908: 402). The stranger has what Simmel describes as the: ‘specific character of mobility’ that embodies a ‘synthesis of nearness and distance which constitutes the formal position of the stranger’ (Simmel 1950/1908: 403–404). The position of the stranger within a group is: ‘determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself’ (Simmel 1950/1908: 402). The position of the stranger stands out more sharply if the stranger settles down in a place, instead of leaving it again. The stranger is supernumerary: ‘The stranger is by nature no “owner of soil” soil not only in the physical, but also in the figurative sense of a life-substance which is fixed, if not in a point in space, at least in an ideal point of the social environment’ (Simmel 1950/1908: 403). Human beings cannot be defined by their humanity alone, they also have self-definition and an ascribed definition of self, both of which have a central role to play in the formation of identity. Simmel notes that we must not think of the individual ‘as a solid substance, but as the peculiar identity of the living with itself’ (Pyyhtinen 2012: 82). For Simmel, human beings produce social forms and strangeness is the product of a form of interaction; the individual is for Simmel an ‘assembled being’ (zusammengesetzte Wesen) (Simmel 1997a: 323) and the content of our individuality is completely dependent on difference (Simmel 1999: 515). However, the strangeness of the stranger is important in that the perceived difference of the stranger helps to reinforce what the people who describe themselves as ‘belonging’ have in common. Simmel concludes his essay by suggesting that without the presence of the stranger, social life in the metropolitan money economy would be too uniform and key aspects of self would be diminished.

Simmel is well known as one of the founders of sociology, however he always regarded himself first and foremost as a philosopher. Simmel’s philosophical ideas have been largely ignored by sociologists, while philosophers tend to ignore Simmel’s contribution to both sociology and philosophy. Simmel’s philosophical starting point was an interpretation of Kant which suggests that within our minds there are categories of thought that allow the individual to think in terms of social forms or categories of things, making it possible for individuals to make sense of their experience. However, during a period of rapid social change, such as the rapid urbanisation and industrialisation that Simmel witnessed in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, there is the possibility of a degree of incompatibility between the form (the category in our mind) and the (external) content of our experience. Individuals must use the categories of thought or forms to provide thresholds or reasonable parameters that assist the person to make sense of the content of their experiences and observations. Individuals give their experiences meaning by creating categories and boundaries; searching for links between social forms and content to make sense of their experiences in a rapidly changing environment. Without these created boundaries and categories people in the city would experience urban life with much greater meaninglessness and dread. Habits, and the underpinning assumptions upon which they are based, especially if they are shared by people within a community, provide a degree of ontological security.

Simmel accepted David Hume’s argument that people are habit-forming by nature. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume (2001) argued that the repetition of an act generates a propensity to renew or repeat the same act in similar circumstances and is the basis of custom. For Simmel social action takes place within a context of Hume’s understanding of custom and habit. In her review of the nature and role of habit, Wendy Wood (2017) argues that ‘habit mechanisms’ sustain self-regulation. It is commonly assumed that when people repeat actions in the same context, the influence of habit increases and the influence of intention decreases. Individuals may impart intentionality onto their habits, mistakenly regarding externally prompted thoughts and understandings as their own choices (Loersch and Payne 2011). Habits guide or influence later behaviour. Wood also explains that William James (1890) believed: ‘habit covers a very large part of life’ (p. 3) and assumed that habits have an abstract quality and act as a symbolic, conservative force in society. Neal, Wood and Drolet (2013) argue that in circumstances where individuals have a diminished capacity to decide about how to act, their reliance on habits increases. However, habits often become central to practice and can be seen to strengthen as well as diminish individuals’ intentions.

The Metropolis and Mental Life

Simmel’s contribution to our understanding of the stranger was developed against the backcloth of rapid urbanisation and the rise of the money economy. Based on his own experiences of life in Berlin in the 1890s, looking out from his bedroom window at the corner of Leipzigerstrasse and Friedrichstrasse, The Metropolis and Mental Life is something of a personal reflection on the ways in which the metropolitan environment redefined the relations between space, spatial practices and subjectivities. For Simmel: ‘The City is not a spatial entity with social consequences, but a sociological entity that is formed spatially’ (Simmel 1997: 131). Simmel argued that one of the psychological consequences of rapid urbanisation was a form of disaffection that encouraged estrangement rather than sociability. To protect themselves against this, many metropoles developed a blasé attitude; a new form of subjectivity better suited to the demands of the metropolitan environment.

The metropolis provided the condition for the emergence of cosmopolitanism. In contrast to the ‘slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase of small town and rural existence’ (Simmel 1972: 325), metropolitan life is capitalistic and intellectualistic in character and the ‘tempo’ and ‘multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life’ (Simmel 1972: 325) is very fast. For the modern person, maintaining a degree of independence and individuality in relation to the sovereign powers of society, including our shared sense of historical heritage, culture and accepted ways of leading a life, is described by Simmel as one of the deepest problems of modern life. In the modern world, there is a relationship between the social structure that promotes individuality and at the same time modernity promotes aspects of life that go above and beyond the interests of single individuals.

In Simmel’s day, as today the influence of the metropolitan environment reaches well beyond its physical boundaries. The current levels of urbanisation are unprecedented and over the last decade there has been a substantial increase of new migrants into large cities. The link that Simmel identified between the stranger, the city and boundaries still shapes current debates about the stranger. Cities are globally important because they are often in the front line dealing with the problems created by migration. For Bauman (2016) cities are comparable to garbage cans into which all the problems that have emerged from the processes of globalisation have been randomly poured.

Although cities do not follow a single pattern of development, the urban environment is always characterised by a large aggregation and relatively dense concentration of population. Simmel explained how the process of urbanisation and industrialisation generates urban anonymity and impersonality (gesellschaft) that is absent from the traditional community. As such, migrants to cities face new challenges that they did not face in traditional communities. In the city people will only know a small number of other residents and, unlike in the village where it was not uncommon for people know each other well, in the city proximity to our neighbours does not assure feelings of community. Rather, ways of living in the city can generate feelings of isolation, separation and insecurity. The urban resident may have contact with many other people but does not get to know many of them well. Disconnection from others and feelings of anonymity are a consequence of the concentration of large numbers of often diverse people in big cities. Life within the city for Simmel was characterised by an ever-expanding diversification of life-spheres and individuals deeply engaged in one life-sphere can find it difficult to speak with other individuals involved in another life-sphere, and as a consequence conflict can occur.

Traditionally, ‘place’ shaped the identity of its inhabitants; for Simmel the traditional relation between place, communality and identity has been dissolved by the processes of urbanisation. A sense of ‘place’ is no longer viewed as the foundation of a stable social identity. The experience of the city is subjective, but impacts on state of mind, character and identity of the urban resident. The consciousness of the self and our relation to the Other is both a medium and an outcome of life in the city. As Sabine Buchholz and Manfred Jahn explain: ‘space always include a subject who is affected by (and in turn affects) space, a subject who experiences and reacts to space in a bodily way, a subject who “feels” space through existential living conditions, mood, and atmosphere’ (Buchholz and Jahn 2005: 553). In Simmel’s analysis, the city reflects the dynamic and diverse culture of modernity and generates a new sense of proximity and distance.

In The Metropolis and Mental Life Simmel examines the influence of urban life on the psychological and cultural elements of sociality. At the time when Simmel was writing in the nineteenth century, cosmopolitan relations were infrequent and fragile. In the opening sentence Simmel identifies the impact of modernity on the mundane practices of everyday life: ‘The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence’ (Simmel 1997b: 409).

The contemporary city is characterised by flows of people, symbols and material goods as the city is interconnected to numerous other places via global-local networks or flows that impact on everyday social practice. As John Allen explains:

Simmel’s thinking on proximity, distance and movement can shed light upon how people make sense of today’s complex networks of social interaction both within and beyond cosmopolitan city life … modern times for Simmel are experienced largely through changing relations of proximity and distance and, more broadly, through cultures of movement and mobility.

(Allen 2000: 55)

Our encounters with others, our social and cultural relations are based upon sets of practices not needed in the rural environment. There is a newness to the experiences people had in the rapidly expanding nineteenth-century urban surroundings. The city provides meeting places for different groups and urban space is occupied by people in diverse ways. The emergence of the flaneur, for example was a product of the urban environment not known in the rural setting, a person who spends their days wandering around the streets of Paris and other cities as spectator-traveller, looking at the world and enjoying being exposed to the gaze of others. For the flaneur the city offers a liberating experience. In a similar fashion, Simmel looked at the position of the stranger as a social construction put together from everyday social practice, in relation to proximity and interaction.

There is something distinctive about urban sociality; the city is the central force in shaping individual lives. There is a degree of ambivalence to city life, according to Simmel, in that the city provides opportunities to act in a way that is free from rural constraints and expectations. At the same time city life can induce feelings of detachment. The city was associated with a distinctive outlook for Simmel, the ‘blasé attitude’:

The blasé´ attitude results first from the rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting stimulations of the nerves … An incapacity thus emerges to react to new sensations with the appropriate energy. This constitutes that blasé´ attitude which, in fact, every metropolitan child shows when compared with children of quieter and less changeable milieus.

(Simmel 1997b: 414)

The degree of ambivalence to city life provides opportunities to act in a way that is free from constraints and expectations. At the same time city life can induce feelings of detachment. Simmel’s argument has much in common with the themes later explored by Marc Augé’s (2002) In the Metro, an ethnographic investigation focused on the experience of travelling on the Parisian Metro. City metro systems are more than just a way to get from one place to another, they are often ambiguous spaces. Augé’s focus is on the experience of the time and space provided by travelling on the metro. The journey is often taken alone in solitude, often near ‘proximal others’, people who appear to be like ourselves, the middle classes and the excluded; the metro is a place where we encounter the homeless, beggars and street entertainers.

Influence of Simmel

Levine (1977) rightly points out that Simmel’s essay on the stranger was a stimulus to the study of stranger and social distance, including: Robert Park’s concept of Marginal Man, Paul Siu’s concept of the Sojourner, Alfred Schütz’s concept of the Homecomer and Lewis Coser’s understanding of the Alien. However, Levine also argues that much of the research that took its lead from Simmel, such as viewing the stranger as a ‘marginal man’, ‘the newly arrived outsider’ or ‘ethnic communities’ is based upon a misreading of Simmel’s central argument about the links between nearness and remoteness within a bounded group. Simmel’s stranger is not a person who attempts to be assimilated into the host community but fails. There are several aspirations that Simmel’s stranger may have in relation to the bounded community and several possible responses that the bounded community may have in relation to the stranger.

Park (1928) explains to his reader that he explicitly attempted to base his conception of the marginal man on Simmel’s conception of the stranger. The marginal man was defined solely in terms race and ethnicity, and Park regarded the Jew as the prime example of the marginal man. Insecurity and instability were central to the life experience of the marginal man whose marginal personality was a product of the marginal situation that he found himself in. For this reason, the marginal man was attracted to the ‘marginal culture’ shared by other similarly positioned people to offer some security and protection from discrimination and stigmatisation. The marginal man is defined as an individual who is:

living and sharing intimately in the cultural life and traditions of two distinct peoples, never quite willing to break, even if he were permitted to do so, with his past and his traditions, and not quite accepted, because of racial prejudice, in the new society in which he now seeks to find a place.

(Park 1928: 892)

Taking his starting point from Robert Park (1928), Stonequist (1935) is interested in the precarious lives of mixed-race people who are much more likely to develop into a marginal character. Marginality is an abstraction: ‘a core of psychological traits which are the inner correlates of the dual pattern of social conflict and identification’ (Stonequist 1935: 10). Stonequist argues that most people live their lives within one cultural tradition, with one set of loyalties to one government, and in compliance with one moral code. However, because of the processes of globalisation and the migration associated with it, many individuals are relocated, together with their cultures, to such a degree that people in the city often find themselves growing up in a: ‘more complex and less harmonious cultural situation’. People in the city are often unintentionally socialised into ‘two or more historic traditions, languages, political loyalties, moral codes, and religions … every city is something of a melting-pot of races and nationalities’ (Stonequist 1935: 2). Individuals who lead their lives within and between two cultures often develop a ‘marginal personality’, which involves some cultural conflict and the emergence of what Du Bois called a ‘do...