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

If wandering is the liberation from every given point in space, and thus the conceptional opposition to fixation at such a point, the sociological form of the “stranger” presents the unity, as it were, of these two characteristics. This phenomenon too, however, reveals that spatial relations are only the condition, on the one hand, and the symbol, on the other, of human relations. The stranger is … the person who comes today and stays tomorrow. He is, so to speak, the potential wanderer: although he has not moved on, he has not quite overcome the freedom of coming and going. He is fixed within a particular spatial group, or within a group whose boundaries are similar to spatial boundaries. But his position in this 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.

The unity of nearness and remoteness involved in every human relation is organized, in the phenomenon of the stranger, in a way which must be briefly formulated by saying that in the relationship to him, distance means that he, who is close by, is far, and strangeness means that he, who also is far, is actually near. For, to be a stranger is naturally a very positive relation; it is a specific form of interaction.

—Georg Simmel¹