The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel

'The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel' brings together new interpretations of the work of this sociologist and philosopher. The companion highlights issues, themes and concepts that most concern readers in social and cultural theory today, with an emphasis on critical perspectives that show how Simmel's work is relevant, interesting and significant for contemporary discussions and debates. Also included in this volume is Austin Harrington’s translation of selections from Simmel’s book on Goethe and a comprehensive list of Simmel’s work in English.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781783085910

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The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel

Anthem Companions to Sociology

Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the past two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological traditions, and will provide students and scholars with an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

Series Editor

Bryan S. Turner – City University of New York, USA, and Australian Catholic University, Australia

Forthcoming titles in this series include:

The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt

The Anthem Companion to Auguste Comte

The Anthem Companion to Everett Hughes

The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim

The Anthem Companion to Robert Park

The Anthem Companion to Talcott Parsons

The Anthem Companion to Phillip Rieff

The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde

The Anthem Companion to Ferdinand Tönnies

The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch

The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen

The Anthem Companion to Max Weber

The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel

Edited by Thomas Kemple and Olli Pyyhtinen

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Names: Kemple, Thomas M., 1962– editor. | Pyyhtinen, Olli, 1976– editor.

Title: The Anthem companion to Georg Simmel / edited by Thomas Kemple and Olli Pyyhtinen.

Description: London; New York, NY: Anthem Press, [2016] | Series: Anthem companions to sociology | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016035457 | ISBN 9781783082780 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Simmel, Georg, 1858–1918. | Sociology. | Social sciences – Philosophy.

Classification: LCC HM479.S55 A58 2016 | DDC 301–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016035457

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-278-0 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-278-X (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Editors’ Introduction

Thomas Kemple and Olli Pyyhtinen

Chapter 1.Simmel and the Study of Modernity

David Frisby

Chapter 2.Sociology as a Sideline: Does It Matter That Georg Simmel (Thought He) Was a Philosopher?

Elizabeth S. Goodstein

Chapter 3.Modernity as Solid Liquidity: Simmel’s Life-Sociology

Gregor Fitzi

Chapter 4.On the Special Relation between Proximity and Distance in Simmel’s Forms of Association and Beyond

Natàlia Cantó-Milà

Chapter 5.The Real as Relation: Simmel as a Pioneer of Relational Sociology

Olli Pyyhtinen

Chapter 6.Vires in Numeris: Taking Simmel to Mt Gox

Nigel Dodd

Chapter 7.Simmel and the Sources of Neoliberalism

Thomas Kemple

Chapter 8.Frames, Handles and Landscapes: Georg Simmel and the Aesthetic Ecology of Things

Eduardo de la Fuente

Chapter 9.Goethe and the Creative Life

Georg SimmelIntroduced and translated by Austin Harrington

Appendix Simmel in English: A Bibliography by Thomas Kemple

Notes on Contributors

Index

EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION

Thomas Kemple and Olli Pyyhtinen

Thinking with Simmel

A ‘Companion to Simmel’ must come to terms with the many ways in which Georg Simmel (1858–1918) himself can be considered a ‘companion’ for understanding the complexities of modern life. Simmel’s voluminous writings do not so much guide or direct readers on how to examine their experiences of change and continuity as much as they complement and form a counterpart to those experiences. At most, the intellectual distance he exemplifies offers a kind of means for probing and coping with the stresses and stimuli of contemporary existence. In a similar way, this volume does not offer a set of instructions or a comprehensive overview for reading Simmel’s works, but rather, more modestly, it aims to accompany readers in their efforts to think and move through these works. Like a pet, a friend or a fellow traveller, this Companion follows some of the paths Simmel took in his journey to the very core of sociology, which he understood as the study of how the socius, generally speaking, holds together and falls apart. These contributions are therefore made in the spirit of Simmel’s own pieces on ‘The Sociology of Sociability’ ([1917a] 1971) and ‘The Sociology of the Meal’ ([1910a] 1997), where he describes how the regard each of us has for ourselves is linked with the frequency and felicity we have of being together with others. The chapters that follow are therefore meant to participate in and sustain a conversation in our time that Simmel initiated in his own with friends, listeners and readers through his books, lectures and essays.

Compared to the mounting masses of works on other sociological giants like Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx and Max Weber, until recent years the Anglophone secondary literature on Simmel has remained somewhat scarce. While there may be several reasons for this relative neglect, it cannot be explained by his work remaining unfamiliar to an English-speaking readership. On the contrary, throughout much of the twentieth century Simmel was the only European classic to exert a lasting influence on North American sociology (Levine, Carter and Gorman 1976, 813). His impact is evident among a variety of North American authors, ranging from the Chicago school sociologists Albion Small, Robert E. Park and Everett C. Hughes to Erving Goffman, Talcott Parsons, Kaspar D. Naegle, Robert K. Merton and Lewis E. Coser, and more recently to postmodernist sociologists such as Deena Weinstein and Michael Weinstein as well as a number of social network analysts like Roland Burt and Barry Wellman. Interestingly, it was from the United States that Simmel was re-imported after World War II from across the Atlantic even to Germany as a classic of urban studies, role theory, conflict theory and analyses of small groups.

Whilst the post-war North American reception of Simmel’s work focused especially on his studies of small groups and conflict (such as Becker and Useem 1948; Hare 1952; Caplow 1956; Coser 1956; Mills 1958; Bean 1970; and Thompson and Walker 1982), the more recent appreciation of Simmel’s work in the Anglophone world owes much to David Frisby (1944–2010) and Donald N. Levine (1931–2015). It was Frisby (1985) who portrayed Simmel as the ‘first theorist of modernity’, and we therefore include here one of Frisby’s last and most comprehensive statements on this theme. In his chapter, Frisby contextualizes Simmel above all in relation to the tradition of aesthetic modernism initiated by the poet Charles Baudelaire. Frisby laments that while the classical sociologists tried to delineate what is novel in modern society, they largely failed to grasp the experiential dimension of modernity. Simmel, however, makes an exception. The modernity that Simmel examines in his texts must, according to Frisby, be understood in the Baudelairean sense of ‘the transient, the fleeting, the contingent’. Simmel treats modernity as a specific mode of experience seated in the mature capitalist money economy and the modern metropolis.

Frisby’s work challenged what was until then the predominant one-sided image of Simmel by introducing to the Anglophone social scientific readership a much more versatile thinker. Both his writings and translations highlight Simmel’s ideas about culture, aesthetics, modernity and individuality, and draw attention to Simmel’s omnivorous analytical tastes for a wide range of phenomena, from money to the metropolis, the alpine journey, the ruin, the problem of style and trade exhibitions. Accordingly, contemporary scholars have emphasized Simmel’s contributions to a remarkably rich variety of themes such as money, value, taste and consumption (Dodd 1994; 2014; Zelizer 1994; Gronow 1997; Sassatelli 2000; Cantó-Milà 2005); gender (Oakes 1984; Dahme 1988; Kandal 1988; van Vucht Tjissen 1991; Witz 2001); space (Lechner 1991; Frisby 1992; 2001; Ziemann 2000; Löw 2001, 58–63; Schroer 2006, 60–81); time (Scaff 2005); secrecy and mendacity (Barbour 2012); material culture (Miller 1987; Appadurai 1988); nature (Gross 2000; 2001; Giacomoni 2006); and trust (Accarino 1984; Möllering 2001). In spite of this remarkable diversity of themes, many scholars agree with Levine (1985; 2012) in taking issue with the famous idea of Simmel as a sociological flâneur (Frisby 1985) or bricoleur (Weinstein & Weinstein 1991) whose ideas would never add up to a coherent theoretical argument, and hold that Simmel’s writings actually do make up a systematic corpus of work concerned with fundamental questions of human existence and individual freedom in a world of social turbulence.

The writers included in this volume have each made recent contributions to an emerging new wave of Simmel scholarship. To some extent they were selected in view of their geographical and institutional location as well, and they were each invited to write on any aspect of Simmel’s work that interests them. We emphasized that we are not attempting to cover the whole of Simmel’s scholarly output, but rather to highlight those issues, themes and concepts that would most concern readers today. We are less interested in the usual summaries and reverential commentaries on topics that have been of perennial concern – money, the stranger, the metropolis and so on, although these and other familiar issues come up frequently here – and more in showing how Simmel’s work is relevant, interesting and significant for advancing contemporary discussions and debates. The Companion thus approaches Simmel himself as a companion of sorts – as someone whom to think with – rather than attempting to explain what he really meant or to contextualize him in a fixed historical intellectual lineage.

Social Life in Process

The chapters that follow fall naturally into two main sections, the first (chapters 1–5) addressing general questions concerning ‘social life in process’ that characterize the whole of Simmel’s work, including the tension between subjective versus objective culture, philosophy versus sociology, solidity versus liquidity and proximity versus distance, followed by a transitional chapter on Simmel’s relational view of reality. The second section (chapters 6–9) considers ‘the limits of individual life’, and includes chapters that focus on more particular issues, such as the material and immaterial nature of money, the sources of (neo)liberalism in the culture of conflict and competition, the aesthetics of things and the creativity of selfhood. The primary concern in each chapter is not just to review Simmel’s ideas or even to provide accurate readings that have not yet received adequate attention in the literature. Rather, what most interests the contributors to this volume is to explore how Simmel offers a kind of model for addressing our various disciplinary concerns, and to examine the degree to which he continues to speak to the experience of our own present.

The salient feature of the latest Simmel scholarship has been to stress the significance of the philosophical or ‘trans-sociological’ (Harrington & Kemple 2012, 8) aspects of his work and the confluence of his sociological and philosophical concerns (Pyyhtinen 2010). In her contribution to the present volume, Elizabeth Goodstein suggests that we should indeed take Simmel seriously as a philosopher. We cannot understand Simmel’s sociological contributions properly unless we take into consideration his philosophy as well. Goodstein argues that grasping the figure of the ‘stranger’, for example, requires a perspective that pays regard to both its sociological and philosophical aspects. And she suggests that the preoccupation with Simmel’s shifting disciplinary location between sociology and philosophy allows us to come to grips with our own interdisciplinary intellectual culture today. In considering Simmel solely as a sociologist, sociologists, according to Goodstein, risk forgetting how their discipline is rooted in philosophy, and, in neglecting Simmel almost entirely, philosophy easily bypasses what was lost when it became a discipline among others. In his chapter, Gregor Fitzi also stresses the linkage between Simmel’s sociology and philosophy. It has been customary in the secondary literature to treat Simmel’s life-philosophy as separate from his sociological project. Fitzi corrects this misinterpretation by arguing that Simmel’s mature work presents an extension of his sociological concerns and ideas from 1890–1908. In his post-1908 writings Simmel sought to extend the sociological a priori from the societal domain to the domain of culture, art, politics, law and religion, for instance. Fitzi addresses this link by employing the notion of ‘life-sociology’, and he identifies the dynamics of social life and social forms as its primary preoccupation. Notwithstanding his emphasis on process and dynamic relations, not all that is solid melts into air; for Simmel, modernity also amounts to ‘solid liquidity’ – in contrast to authors like Henri Bergson or more recently Zygmunt Bauman, who lay emphasis on open-ended processes of becoming and ‘liquidity’ and thereby tend to disregard the boundary-forming processes of being and solidity.

Natàlia Cantó-Milà’s chapter focuses on the significance of the notions of proximity and distance in Simmel’s thought – an issue that, in relation to boundaries and strangers, has become especially topical in light of the current European migrant crisis. We are compelled to think our simultaneous proximity and distance to strangers, as the Mediterranean Sea becomes a mass grave for migrants from the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa fleeing the war and turmoil that has taken over their home countries, and countries like Hungary build ‘anti-migration’ fences to prevent the flow of migration. Cantó-Milà shows that notions of near and far play a crucial part well beyond Simmel’s sociology of space and even his sociology of forms. Proximity and distance are constitutive components of all our relations; they structure our relation to others, to the world and to ourselves. Cantó-Milà also makes an important analytical distinction between those forms of relations – such as competition or flirtation – in which proximity and distance constitute but one axis among others, and those social types – such as the stranger and the lovers – which are primarily organized in relation to them. While the idea that proximity and distance are among the main axes of social life already suggests that the social can be understood only in relational terms, the chapter by Olli Pyyhtinen looks into Simmel’s relational thought more closely. Pyyhtinen observes how Simmel places relations into the heart of sociology. His work counters the substantialist assumptions still prevalent today in sociological modes of thinking and speaking. Instead of beginning from static, self-enclosed entities in a state of rest, Simmel turns attention to their emergence, movement and cessation in and through relations of interaction. Pyyhtinen also suggests that we can tease out of Simmel’s work a relational, nonreductionist ontology, which not only acknowledges the fundamental entanglement of entities but also counters the micro–macro binary. Instead of assuming that processes occur on two levels only, this relational ontology proposes that there is an infinite number of layers to the real – every entity is made of an infinity of interrelated parts.

Individual Life at the Limits

Simmel’s work takes on a certain inner shape from these more general themes, namely, in his efforts to describe the characteristic style of modern life; to develop a sociologically informed philosophy (and vice versa); to account for the cultural dynamics of solidification and liquefaction; to trace the sociological tensions between proximity and distance; and to offer a compelling view of the irreducibly relational character of reality. Throughout his career he was also concerned with finding particular examples of these patterns while exploring the outer limits of existence and the boundaries of experience. In formulating the ‘Problem of Sociology’ as early as 1984 ([1908c] 1994, 2009), he focuses on how the methods and concepts of this emerging scientific view may be employed to frame objects of knowledge, and also how this new cultural sensibility has itself become a subject of broader concern. On a few occasions he radicalizes this problem by suggesting the need to advance a ‘sociological aesthetics’ ([1896d] 1968), a ‘sociological metaphysics’ ([1908c] 2009, 660; GSG 11, 842–3) and even a ‘sociological ethics’ ([1917a] 1997; [1918e] 2010). At this stratum of his writings he deepens his interrogation of the forms of association, interaction and individuation by addressing experiences of the fragmentation, fragility and fallibility of life in all its dimensions (Kemple 2007; Harrington and Kemple 2012). To paraphrase the expression he uses in The View of Life (Lebensanschauung), which many contributors reproduce in various ways, the task is to examine how life unfolds, intensifies and effervesces into ‘more life’ (Mehr-Leben), while ultimately augmenting, overcoming and transcending itself into ‘more-than-life’ (Mehr-als-Leben). The chapters that take up this theme as a central focus are therefore concerned with the borders of social life and the limits of individual life, and in particular, with how actions and actors are subjected by and shaped within, directed to and taken over by others.

Consider Nigel Dodd’s discussion of Simmel’s argument that understanding money as a ‘claim upon society’ ([1900/7] 2004, 177). may serve as a reminder of its basis within intersubjective relations of mutual trust, rather than merely its function in creating mechanical independencies. Taking the rising and falling prospects of Bitcoin and other alternative currencies that have emerged since the 2007 financial crisis as his test case, Dodd considers how the liquidation of territorialized finance regulated through states can be sustained and consolidated by the reciprocal effects and fluid relationships of value. The collapse of the Bretton-Woods system since World War II and the deregulation of currencies in recent years have created conditions that promote both the diversification and the homogenization of money forms that drive accelerated turnover, speculation and the general expansion and intensified ‘socialization’ of the financial sector. Also attempting to update Simmel, Thomas Kemple traces a strand of recent debates over neoliberalism to the ways in which Simmel’s early work explores the perforated frontiers of sociology and biology by treating society as a life-form in which conflict and competition become driving forces for the growth, development, survival and welfare of the species. Kemple shows how this ‘biosocial’ understanding of life emerged among a remarkable range of thinkers in the 1890s, Simmel included, and draws on vitalist and evolutionary discourses about the interdependence or ‘propping’ (Anlehnung) of culture onto nature in ways that prefigure recent neoliberal concerns with the vitality of individuals, the rise of an entrepreneurial ethos and the control of populations in capitalist societies.

A similar concern with locating Simmel within current transdisciplinary debates animates Eduardo de la Fuente’s discussion of the shorter occasional and anecdotal pieces on ‘The Philosophy of Landscape’ ([1913a] 2007), ‘Bridge and Door’ ([1909a] 1997), ‘The Picture Frame’ ([1902b] 1997) and ‘The Handle’ ([1911] 1959). The apparent banality of these studies betrays their radical significance as a starting point for conceptualizing the aesthetic agency of things, or in de la Fuente’s terms, for understanding the capacity of objects to form ‘a configuration of elements capable of transformation and reversal’. De la Fuente wants to draw on these shorter writings by Simmel as a resource for reanimating the concept of ‘context’ in cultural sociology and environmental geography by reframing it in terms of life (including the internal process of the perceiving subject) and form (including the external properties of the ecology of objects). In complementary ways, Austin Harrington’s introductory remarks to his translation of the opening chapter of Simmel’s 1913 monograph Goethe emphasize the inward, expressive dimension of this dynamic in the creation of new forms of selfhood, particularly as this project is threatened by capitalist social transformation (also see [1914a] 2007). As in the studies of Rembrandt ([1916c] 2005), and of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche ([1917e] 1991), Simmel is not interested in writing a standard hagiography, historical biography or literary commentary, but rather in forging a new language of subjectivity in terms of complementarity, difference and wholeness. Goethe’s life-work is therefore not only a model for the genius striving to shape the self into a work of art, but also a point of reference for anyone labouring to engage the self and others through the detours of division and despair toward synthesis and self-actualization. The example of individuality that Simmel finds in Goethe involves less the submission to a categorical imperative or the assertion of mere singularity (Einzelheit) and uniqueness (Einzigkeit) than the outward expression of characteristics that are one’s own (Eigenheit) according to the inner workings of a certain ‘individual law’ (Pyyhtinen 2010, 152–4; Simmel [1917a] 2007; [1918e] 2010; [1916d] 2010). In some ways, these aesthetic studies bring readers to the terminus a quo and the terminus ad quem of Simmel’s entire life-work insofar as they articulate his ultimate conception of the edges of association and the limits of individualization, including his own.

Thinking Beyond Simmel

By including the excerpt from Simmel’s monograph on Goethe in this volume, we want to highlight the degree to which significant portions of his work have yet to be made available to a new generation of readers, much less addressed in critical commentaries. The wide circulation of Simmel’s ideas in the English-speaking world in particular has largely been based on extracts from his larger works published as translations as early as 1893. In fact, by the 1910s no other European sociologist had more texts translated into English than Simmel, the majority published in the American Journal of Sociology. When this stream of translations dried up, it took almost four decades to be replenished, with the publication in 1950 of The Sociology of Georg Simmel edited by Kurt H. Wolff, made up mostly of selections from Simmel’s Sociology ([1908c]) and the monograph Fundamental Problems in Sociology ([1917a]). Until The Problems of the Philosophy of History [1907d] came out in 1977, followed by The Philosophy of Money [1907/1900] the next year, none of Simmel’s other books had been available in English in their entirety. Since then, five others have been published – Schopenhauer and Nietzsche ([1907e] 1991), Rembrandt ([1916c] 2005), Kant and Goethe ([1916b] 2007), Sociology ([1908e] 2009) and The View of Life ([1918e] 2010) – but the monographs on Kant (GSG 1, 9), social differentiation (GSG 2), the science of morality (GSG 3, 4) and the main questions of philosophy (GSG 14) have yet to be translated, not to mention numerous shorter pieces scattered through his career. (Austin Harrington is currently completing a volume of translations of Simmel’s writings on aesthetics.) The comprehensive list of works by ‘Simmel in English’ included as an appendix to this volume reveals not just what remains to be translated, but also the remarkable variety of translations that have already come out at various times and in a wide range of places.

The sporadic and sketchy availability of Simmel’s works in English suggests one of the reasons behind the selective reception of his work, especially when individual texts (on the metropolis, conflict, the stranger, fashion or secrecy, for example) are read as isolated, even fetishized pieces detached from the larger context of his oeuvre. This uneven quality of the early commentaries also helps explain the persistent image of Simmel’s work in the English-speaking world as unsystematic, essayistic, impressionistic and fragmentary. But as the contributors to this volume demonstrate, Simmel scholarship has now become broader in scope and more carefully attentive to the systematic and comprehensive character of his thinking. These essays would hardly have been possible without the publication of new translations of his works into English, and above all the recent completion of Simmel’s collected works in German, the 24-volume Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe (GSG) series edited by Otthein Rammstedt and published by Suhrkamp (see the introductory note to the Appendix, and Rammstedt 2012). And the chapters in this volume would not offer any new insights relevant to today’s discussions if they did not also focus on the subtleties of Simmel’s writing styles, the range of his topics of study and the resonances of his conceptual vocabulary.¹

Simmel’s career-long concern with the dynamics of social and individual life has now earned him a reputation as a classical sociologist who raised questions about the many-sided character of sociability and individuality, and about general processes and the particular events they give rise to. And yet he is only rarely referred to in a reverential way as a canonical social thinker or celebrated as a foundational social scientist, if only because he tended to withdraw from the pursuit of professional reputation and to undermine any quest for conceptual foundations (Baehr 2002). Rather than focus on ‘society’ as a state of belonging he emphasizes ‘association’ as a movement of becoming, and instead of stressing how ‘lively interactions’ stabilize and endure in structures such as work and institutions, he usually follows the drift of modern thought in its tendency toward the ‘dissolution of substance into functions, of the solid and the lasting into the flux of restless development’ (GSG 4, 330). In highlighting what is unique about the modern experience, he stresses the need to invent new ways of thinking and describing things, if not also of feeling and explaining existence. But ethical and political questions of justice and welfare are relatively marginal issues in his work, as are those that concern the metaphysical and ontological dilemmas posed by science and technology, except insofar as they are dramatized through the thematics of ‘the tragedy of culture’ ([1911] 1969, 1997). Our task today, then, must be to think with Simmel – to understand rather than condemn or condone the conditions we live under ([1903] 1971, 339) – but in ways that accept his invitation to think beyond the problems he posed for us as well.

1 The translation of Simmel’s two master terms is an important case in point, and is addressed by all the contributors in one way or another: 1) While Vergesellschaftung has been translated with the neologism ‘sociation’, and can also be rendered with the more narrow term ‘socialization’ or the awkward ‘societalization’, we tend to favour ‘ association’ to highlight Simmel’s stress on approaching social life as a dynamic process rather than as a completed substance . 2) Similarly, while Wechselwirkung usually denotes ‘interaction’, Simmel’s peculiar and frequent use of this term also often connotes ‘reciprocal efficacy’, ‘reciprocal causation’ or something like an ‘exchange-effect’, as well as the many ways in which subjects and objects affect and are affected by one another.

References

N. B.: References to works by Simmel can be found in the Appendix, using both the date of publication in Simmel’s lifetime in square brackets followed by the date of publication of the posthumous edition cited.

Accarino, Bruno. 1984. ‘Vertrauen und Versprechen. Kredit, Öffentlichkeit und individuelle Entscheidung bei Simmel’. In Georg Simmel und die Moderne. Neue Interpretationen und Materialien. Heinz-Jürgen Dahme and Otthein Rammstedt (eds.). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1988. ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’. In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Arjun Appadurai (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Baehr, Peter. 2002. Founders, Classics, and Canons: Modern Disputes over the Origins and Appraisal of Sociology’s Heritage. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Barbour, Charles. 2012. ‘The Maker of Lies: Simmel, Mendacity and the Economy of Faith’. Theory, Culture & Society (Annual Review) 19 (4), 218–36.

Bean, Susan S. 1970. ‘Two’s Company, Three’s a