本文讨论马克思和本雅明关于资本主义社会的空间和现代性的理论,并试图引进一条研究中国城市现代性及上海近代史的新路径。论文首先比较马克思和本雅明对近代资本主义社会及其空间发展模式的理论观点。本雅明把现代性看做是灾难的和破碎不全的,并提出要“赎回”被历史遗弃的物质文化来作为批判动力。本雅明把马克思的历史唯物主义发展为一种“自然历史”(natural history)——一个不断回归原始的野蛮和破坏的历史。本文提出运用本雅明的以上理论来研究上海近代史(晚清时期),主要是重构一个城市空间和物质文化的主观认知图景。该图景体现了一个“混合型”的现代性,包含了传统和现代,本土和殖民等不同因素。上海的殖民型资本主义发展打破了旧式村镇型的自然有机空间布局,生产出新的破碎而又流动的空间。这便是一个上海“新自然”(new nature)的历史,其中“自然循环”的旧传统被“赎回”来批判以发展为基调的现代性意识形态。 This article discusses the theories of Marxism and Benjamin about the space and modernity of capitalist society and tries to introduce a new approach to studying the modernity of Chinese cities and the modern history of Shanghai. The dissertation first compares the theoretical views of Marx and Benjamin on the modern capitalist society and its spatial development model. Benjamin saw modernity as catastrophic and fragmented, and proposed that the “material redemption” should be discarded by the historical material culture as the critical force. Benjamin developed Marxist historical materialism into a “natural history,” a history of constant return to primitive brutality and destruction. This paper proposes that using Benjamin’s above theory to study the modern history of Shanghai (late Qing period), it is mainly to reconstruct a subjective cognitive picture of urban space and material culture. The picture shows a “mixed” modernity that embraces many different elements, traditional and modern, native and colonial. The development of colonial-style capitalism in Shanghai has broken the layout of the natural village of old-style nature and created new spaces of fragmentation and mobility. This is the history of Shanghai’s “new nature,” in which the old tradition of “natural circulation” is criticized for developing a modern ideology based on its development.