According to Georg Simmel, “modern nervousness” is the definitive characteristic of a new type of individual that emerges from the metropolis. The intensity of consciousness required of this urban individual is far greater than that of his rural counterpart, for the concentration of people and images, and their integration into a demanding and fervently racing timetable barrages him with such a superabundance of stimulus that he is forced to adopt a compensatory reaction.
Modern nervousness thus results in the compensatory response of the metropolitan blasé attitude whereby the “intellect” mediates the individual’s interactions with the people and objects that surround him in order to lessen the force of their impact upon his subjective life. This blasé attitude is an almost direct correlate with the condition of modern nervousness. It consists, in part, of the internalization of the money economy (Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”) and involves the displacement of authenticity by the ambiguity of capitalist exchange (Benjamin, “Reflections” 75).
Perhaps the ultimate significance of the urban condition of modern nervousness lies in the notion that the mediating intellect to which it gives rise is one of the elements that, by privileging exchange value or currency over intrinsic value, make up the regressive false consciousness of Berlin between the wars and of modern Western civilization more generally.