The Dissociation of Personality

Abstract

As early as 1908, Georg Simmel articulated the potential value of impersonal spatial relations. The particular sociological impersonality of Simmel’s stranger is not unlike the specific literary articulations of impersonality that arose just a few years later. Though he does not mention the term explicitly in this passage, Simmel theorizes something akin to what modernists would call “personality” as it develops from spatial and social interaction. As I will argue here, the aesthetic impersonality modernists would employ later was a response to this idea of personality as a socio-spatial concept. According to this logic, having or possessing a personality entails the ability to socially demarcate oneself, to occupy a distinct unit of social space. For a sociologist such as Simmel, “personality” is linked to singularity and individuation. Furthermore, social space is not meaningful outside of the value it acquires from this sort of human organization. Within this spatial organization, the stranger inhabits the best of both worlds; his “personality” is made possible through a condition of spatial fixity that offers freedom of interaction without complete “liberation from every given point in space” (Sociology 402). That is, his fixed position within social space grants him a personality, but his “distance” ensures that that space is dynamic, neither overly static nor completely in flux. Like “the really new” Eliot praises in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which “modifie[s]” and “alters” the “existing monuments” of tradition into a new order, Simmel’s stranger also “imports qualities” into the existing social group, “which do not and cannot stem from the group itself” (Sociology 402).2 KeywordsSocial SpaceSpatial FixitySexual AmbivalenceIndividual TalentDomestic SpaceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.