Transparency, Opacity and Status Presentation in the Early Modern City

Abstract

Incongruence between „real“ social status and its mere display through novel patterns of consumption is one of the defining characteristics of modern consumer society. Ostentation, deceit, pretension, imposture and other forms of social masquerading could only become possible after the more transparent character of social relations in traditional society had been replaced by the opacity of modern urban society. Contrast between intimate traditional social relations and urban anonymity has featured strongly in the discussions of nineteenth and twentieth century modernity, for example in such sociological studies as Ferdinand Tönnies’ seminal work on the modern division between Gemein-schaft and Gesellschaft and Georg Simmel’s sociology of the city, or in more poetical and literary approaches as those in Charles Baudelaire’s and Kurt Tucholsky’s poetry of urban solitude and anonymity or Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s childhood memories of his native village in Switzerland during the 1920s and 1930s. However, the growth of an urban anonymous sphere and the erosion of traditional structures of society must be dated back at least to the seventeenth century, when rapidly increasing urbanization turned cities such as Amsterdam and Paris into quasi-theatrical locations which made extended role play possible.