The Stranger
Author(s): Georg Simmel and Ramona Mosse
Source: The Baffler , 2016, No. 30 (2016), pp. 176-179
Published by: {none}
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43959216
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Il Ancestors
The Stranger
cKp Georg Simmel
Th e concept of "the stranger" suggests that foreignness is a psycho-cultural
as well as a geographical matter. A stranger is not a wanderer,
who may come today and leave tomorrow. He comes today- and
stays. He is a potential wanderer: although he has not moved on from
the society, he has not quite shed the freedom to stay or go, either. He
remains within a specific place, but he has not always belonged to it,
and so he carries into it qualities that do not, could not, belong there.
The stranger is a paradox: he is here, close at hand, but his having
recently been far away is also present to us.
The stranger is a part of the community, like the poor, or various
"enemies within," but a part whose position is simultaneously that of
an outsider and a counterpart. The way this distance and apartness
form a sense of closeness and togetherness calls for some explanation.
Throughout the history of economics, the stranger has usually
been a tradesman and the tradesman a stranger. As long as the economy
is limited to the direct exchange of products within a closed system,
there is no need for intermediaries. When people travel to foreign
places to buy what they need, they become foreign tradesmen in those
regions. Historically, tradesmen have necessarily been strangers.
But an economic system with a division of property and production
on demand will offer a living to the tradesman who settles there.
Trade is always capable of reaching more people than primary production.
It is the preferred area of engagement for the stranger, since he
enters the system as a supernumerary, after all other economic niches
are filled. The history of the European Jews offers a classic example.
By definition, the stranger is not a landowner. ("Land" here can
be understood in a wider sense, as any vital resource in some social
sphere.) Though the stranger may come to be on intimate terms with
many of his neighbors, he is perceived as being of a mobile, unstable
character because of his dependence on intermediary trade, which
often becomes sublimated into pure money trade- i.e., moneylending.
This famous essay , written nearly a century ago , is a chin-stroker of the first order. But if y ou read attentively
SimmeVs observations about the modern quality of strangeness, then you may better comprehend the fear of refug
in Europe, the outbreak of xenophobia in the United States- and why your lover kind of likes you but also kin
doesn't. This translation from the German, by Ramona Mosse, is taken from Georg Simmel, Soziologie. Unt
chungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung. Berlin : Duncker ò'Humblot, 1908. S. 509-512.
176 (X* THE B AFFLER [N0.30]
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NASA
This mobility, which occurs within the confines of a given community,
contains the synthesis of closeness and distance that formally
constitutes the stranger. He comes into contact only with individuals,
and is not organically connected to familial, local, or occupational
networks.
Another way to express this constellation of social meanings lies in
the "objectivity" of the stranger. Since he is not rooted in the particularities
and biases of the community, he stands apart from it, in an
attitude of objectivity. This is not an aloofness that lacks involvement
but rather a curious combination of closeness and distance, of detachment
and engagement.
And the objectivity of the stranger leads to another phenomenon:
he is offered revelations, confessions otherwise carefully hidden from
any more organically embedded persons. Objectivity, remember,
is not non-engagement; it is rather a positive and specific kind of
engagement, much like the objectivity of a theoretical observation,
which does not turn the mind into a passive tabula rasa upon which
objects merely become imprinted. Objectivity suggests an active
mind operating at its fullest capacity according to its own laws. Such a
mind ignores random variations and accentuations that are particular
and subjective and that would deliver radically different images of the
same object.
Objectivity is also a kind of freedom. The objective person is not
constrained by predispositions that would prejudice his perception,
his understanding, or his judgment. Such freedom allows the stranger
to experience close relationships as if from a bird's-eye view, but
it also has its dangers. During rebellions of any kind, the attacked
party frequently claims that the rebels have been incited from the
outside by foreign envoys or agitators. What gives such accusations
apparent plausibility is the stranger's "objectivity": he is able to judge
conditions with less bias and evaluate them with greater detachment.
His actions are not bound by habit, piety, or precedent* The attacked
party acquits itself of responsibility and ignores the real grounds of
* Wherever those attacked make such wrongful allegations, they can be traced to a tendency of those in power to try
to exonerate their subjects, who have previously had an overall closer relationship to them.
theBaffler [N0.30] ^177
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the uprising by creating the fiction that outsiders are responsible and
they themselves are not to blame.
Finally, the combination of closeness and distance that endows
the stranger with objectivity finds another, psychological, expression:
locals merely share certain common characteristics with the
stranger; in contrast, their relationship to other organically connected
locals expresses a deeper commonality based upon the act of differentiation.
At bottom, all personal relationships follow this pattern.
Personal relationships are shaped not just by certain commonalities
and differences, abstractly considered, but by their existence in this
particular relationship. Likewise, individuals experience shared
qualities only insofar as they are considered native to a certain group
or type. Even when all humanity shares some quality, its power to
unite people weakens in proportion to the size of the local group. It
still functions as a common ground for the members of the group, but
it no longer unites them against all outsiders, since some of the latter
may share it. This is another example of a relationship that simultaneously
expresses closeness and distance: to the degree to which
these qualities are widely shared, the warmth they provide becomes
mingled with an element of coolness; a sense of randomness enters the
relationship. The forces that bind together have lost their particular,
centripetal character.
A trace of strangeness lingers in even the most intimate relationships.
Erotic relationships decidedly deny generalization in the first
stage of passion: to the lovers, a love like this has never existed before;
nothing can match the beloved or our feelings for him or her. Once
this experience of singularity wanes, an estrangement sets in- it is
hard to say whether as cause or effect. Skepticism about the relationship's
unique value becomes tied to the idea that one might merely be
enacting a generic human fate, that one's experience has been gone
through already a thousand times by others, and that if one had not
accidentally encountered this particular person, many others might
have gained a similar importance for us instead.
No relationship, however close, can eliminate an inkling of such
estrangement, since there always remain those other possible ones.
Even though these other possibilities might be unrealizable, and even
though we might forget about them, they hang like a shadow between
people. They creep from each particular act of naming like a fog that
still has to merge into a definite shape, a shape we might call jealousy.
Maybe this is a more widespread or a more insurmountable sense
of strangeness than the strangeness that manifests as being wholly
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different and unfathomable. In this case, similarity, harmony, and
closeness exist but are not exclusive to a particular relationship; they
are instead something that potentially exists between us and an indefinite
number of others. The individually realized relationship cannot
claim an intrinsic or absolute status.
There exists another kind of "strangeness," which denies that different
parties become united by a shared commonality: for example, the
relation of the Greeks to the barbarians. Here are included all cases
in which the Other is denied the common characteristics that count
as fundamentally human. In this sense only, the idea of "the stranger"
carries no positive connotation. The relationship to him turns into a
non-relation, because he is not what we have been discussing here: he
is not a part of the community.
There is closeness and distance here, as in any relationship founded
on general human commonality. But this closeness and distance
harbor a particular tension: the awareness of what is common to all
pulls into focus that which is not shared. Being of another country,
city, or race is not something wholly individual. A foreign origin is
something that many strangers share, whether actually or potentially.
Hence, strangers are not conceived of as individuals, but rather as a
particular instance of the Other. One experiences strangers as distant
in the same generalized manner as one experiences their closeness.
The medieval tax levied on Jews in Frankfurt and elsewhere
is a case in point. While the tax on Christian citizens was raised
according to their level of wealth, the tax on the Jews was fixed. This
fixedness was based on the fact that Jews held their social positions as
Jews and not as bearers of other social functions. In tax matters, every
other citizen was a property owner, whose tax could fluctuate accordingly.
However, Jews were taxpayers as Jews; their position as taxpayers
had an invariable element. This situation becomes exacerbated
once such particularized regulations- necessarily limited, given their
rigid irreversibility- are eradicated and all strangers pay the same poll
tax.
Despite his peripheral status, the stranger remains an essential
part of the community. Communal life envelops the position of the
stranger, consisting as it does of a particular mix of closeness and
distance also inherent to human relationships generally. Our relationship
to the stranger is molded by this unresolved reciprocal tension
between distance and closeness. M
I
Even when
all humanity
shares some
quality, its
power to unite
people weakens
in proportion
to the size
of the local
group.
Translated from the German by Ramona Mosse.
the Baffler {no. 30} 3®» 179
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