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As for the philosophical infrastructure of this diagnosis, Tafuri refers his read-

ers to the work of Massimo Cacciari,^163 whose stance concerning “negative

thought” is indeed of vital structural significance for Tafuri’s set of hypotheses.

The Metropolis and Negative Thought

Cacciari’s discourse on negative thought can best be understood by looking at his

analysis of two texts: Simmel’s “The Metropolis and Mental Life” of 1903 and Ben-

jamin’s study of Baudelaire that dates from the 1930s.^164 In Cacciari’s view, negative

thought represents a philosophical approach that stresses the irreducible nature of

contradictions and the central position that the phenomenon of crisis occupies in

capitalist development. He thus contrasts negative thought with dialectics, because

the latter continually aims to achieve an ultimate synthesis of conflicting positions:

“Negative thought registers the leaps, the ruptures, the innovations that occur in his-

tory, never the transition, the flow, the historical continuum.”^165 Negative thought

is operative within the process of capitalist development—in fact, it constitutes the

most advanced moment in capitalist ideology. According to Cacciari, negative

thought represents a crisis moment within capitalism; at the same time, he argues,

this moment of crisis does not form any real threat to the system and is in fact fa-

vorable to its continued expansion.^166 The capitalist principle of development, after

all, involves a depreciation of existing values by definition: capitalism is effectively

synonymous for a situation where crisis follows on crisis.

It was Simmel’s achievement, according to Cacciari, that he revealed rational-

ization—both in terms of human relations and of the money economy—as forming

the basic structure of the Metropolis (figure 68). Cacciari understands Metropolis in

an allegorical sense: it represents the modern condition and capitalist civilization—

hence the capital M. Following Simmel, he states that the Metropolis is the seat of

the Geist(spirit): and its hallmark is the process of Vergeistigung(spiritualization), un-

derstood as the process by which the personal and the emotional—both being forms

of subjectivity—are abstracted to the benefit of a calculating and calculable func-

tional rationality.

Cacciari extrapolates Simmel’s discourse by pointing to an explicit relationship

between this process of Vergeistigungand the increasing prevalence of the com-

modity system.^167 In small towns, he argues, one can still speak of use values and

exchange values coexisting, without these two moments necessarily being in a

dialectical relation with each other: it is perfectly conceivable that an object will sim-

ply be “used” without it being produced for the market. The Metropolis, on the con-

trary, is distinguished by an unrelenting cycle in which use values and exchange

values are converted into each other uninterruptedly in order to ensure the continu-

ity of production. In the Metropolis, people’s behavioral patterns correspond to this

continual transformation and are therefore eventually also subject to the laws of

production.

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