Preindustrial urban sensory overload produces a vividly felt sense of chaos

Evidence

Suddenly you feel tired. The multiplicity of sights and sounds, the pushing and shoving and shouting of the crowd, the smellsparticularly the smells-all of this begins to seem “too much.” Too many people are crowded into too small a space; too many odors, most of them offensive; too many sights, most of them vile. You can’t get away from the beggars and vendors. They accost you wherever you go. You can’t escape the crippled limbs, the scarred faces, the running sores. Your person seems never safe from the constant assaults of the pickpockets. Everything seems jumbled together. Rich and poor, health and disease, young and old, house and business, public and private. All seems disorder. All seems chaos. Dizzy, frightened, confused, you step back into the time machine and are returned again to what now seems the orderliness and cleanliness of your own crowded, carcongested, smog-ridden, crime-obsessed modern city. — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 173

Categorization

• XREF: This directly instantiates Simmel’s ‘blasé attitude’ as the cognitive response to sensory overload — the reader’s stated cross-reading target. — connects to: Advert saturation makes sensory shutdown the sensible response to urban space — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2258