Simmel and 'the Social'

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Simmel and ‘the Social’

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Olli Pyyhtinen University of Turku, Finland



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© Olli Pyyhtinen 2010

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–23617–2 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pyyhtinen, Olli, 1976– Simmel and ‘the social’ / Olli Pyyhtinen. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–23617–2 (hardback) 1. Simmel, Georg, 1858–1918. 2. Sociology. 3. Social sciences – Philosophy. I. Title. HM585.P99 2010 301.092—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

2010023949


All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

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Key to Abbreviations: References to Simmel’s Texts Acknowledgements

vii x

1 Introduction On Simmel scholarship Conceptual portraiture The structure of the book

1 8 14 19

2

22 23 28 33

The Social in Social Theory? Society and the social Social theory Sociological culture The social – a porous, contested or family resemblance concept?

35

3 Relationality, Life and Philosophy Theory of relations Relationism and relativism Life-philosophy Simmel’s two notions of ‘life’ Life as more-life and more-than-life Immanent transcendence The life of philosophy Thought and boundary

38 39 46 49 54 58 60 62 65

4

Event Dynamics The event Eventalization through reciprocal effects Process and form Living reciprocity vs. autonomous forms Becomings

68 69 75 79 81 85

5 Excluded Thirds, Included: On Being-with Being-with-you How is the social bond possible? Betweenness The third Relation as no-thing

89 90 94 97 101 107


Contents

v

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vi Contents

Relations and Circulating Objects Bridge and door as metaphysical objects Money Dynamics of subject and object Beyond dualisms

110 112 118 126 128

7 Individuality and the Outside of Relations Quantitative and qualitative individualism The in-dividual The self-identity of the living being From types of individuals to individuated type Individuality of owness Entanglement of life in death and death in life A death that is owned

133 135 140 144 148 152 154 158

8 Conclusion: Simmel and Contemporary Social Theory Simmel and Latour in comparison Stabilization, objects and performativity Life/plasma

163 165 170 174

Notes

177

References

186

Glossary

198

Index

205


6

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F

‘Fashion’, The American Journal of Sociology 62(6): 541–58, 1957. FrCL ‘The Fragmentary Character of Life’, trans. A. Harington. Theory, Culture & Society. [Forthcoming.] GSG 1 Das Wesen der Materie nach Kants Physischer Monadologie; Abhandlungen 1882–1884; Rezensionen 1883–1901. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 1999. GSG 2 Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1887–1890; Über sociale Differenzierung; Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 1989. GSG 3 Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft. Eine Kritik der Ethischen Grundbegriffe. Erster Band. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 3. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 1989. GSG 4 Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft. Eine Kritik der Ethischen Grundbegriffe. Zweiter Band. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 4. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 1991. GSG 5 Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1894–1900. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 1992. GSG 6 Philosophie des Geldes. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 1989. GSG 7 Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908 Band I. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 7 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 1995. GSG 8 Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901–1908 Band II. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 8 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 1993. GSG 9 Kant; Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 9 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 1997. GSG 10 Philosophie der Mode; Die Religion; Kant und Goethe; Schopenhauer und Nietzsche. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 10 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 1995.


Key to Abbreviations: References to Simmel’s Texts

vii

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Key to Abbreviations

GSG 11 GSG 12

GSG 13

GSG 14

GSG 15

GSG 16

GSG 20

GSG 22 GSG 23 ISF

KaGoe

PM PrF RB REL

Soziologie. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 11 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 1992. Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1909–1918 Band I. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 12 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 2001. Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1909–1918 Band II. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 13 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 2000. Hauptprobleme der Philosophie; Philosophische Kultur. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 14 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 1996. Goethe; Deutschlands innere Wandlung; Das Problem der historischen Zeit; Rembrandt. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 15 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 2003. Der Krieg und die geistigen Entscheidungen; Grundfragen der Soziologie; Vom Wesen des historischen Verstehens; Der Konflikt der modernen Kultur; Lebensanschauung. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 16 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 1999. Postume Veröffentlichungen; Schuldpädagogik. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 20 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 2004. Briefe 1880–1911. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 22 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 2005. Briefe 1912–1918; Jugendbriefe. Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe Band 23 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 2008. On Individuality and Social Forms. Selected Writings, ed. D. N. Levine (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press), 1971. ‘Kant and Goethe. On the History of the Modern Weltanschauung’, trans. J. Bleicher. Theory, Culture & Society, 24(6): 159–191, 2007. The Philosophy of Money. Third enlarged edition, trans. D. Frisby and T. Bottomore (London and New York: Routledge). ‘The Problem of Fate’, trans. U. Teucher & T. M. Kemple. Theory Culture & Society 24(7–8): 78–84, 2007. Rembrandt. An essay in the philosophy of art, trans. A. Scott and H. Staubmann. (New York and London: Routledge), 2005. Essays on Religion, ed. and trans. H. Jünger in collaboration with L. Nieder (New Haven and London: Yale University Press), 1997.


viii

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Key to Abbreviations

ix

Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. D. Frisby and M. Featherstone (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: Sage), 1997. SHN Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, trans. H. Loiskandl, D. Weinstein and M. Weinstein (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press), 1991.


SC

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Throughout the project, several people read either the whole manuscript or some passages of it. Of these people I would like to make mention especially of Gregor Fitzi, David Frisby, Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen, Seppo Pöntinen, and Alan Scott. The book has greatly benefited from their comments. In autumn term 2009 I had the privilege of getting sort of a test screening for the material of the book when I gave a lecture course on Simmel’s social theory at the Department of Sociology, the University of Turku. I am grateful to the students who attended the course for their feedback and questions. The manuscript was finished in Spring 2010 during my stay as a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process (CSISP) at Goldsmiths, University of London. I warmly thank Mike Michael and his staff for their hospitality. Philippa Grand and Olivia Middleton from Palgrave are to be thanked for their generous help and all the effort they’ve put into this book. I would also like to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewer at Palgrave who, clearly, rather than wishing to see it fail, took a genuine interest in the project and supported it. I found the reviewer’s constructive criticism and suggestions for adjustments simply invaluable. I dedicate the book to my daughter Kiia, our precious little Simmelian ‘third’ who, as the centre in-between-two, has come to occupy all space and saturate the universe. *

*

*

Previous versions of some of the chapters either have been published or are about to be published elsewhere. Parts of Chapter 3 have been discussed in two essays: in ‘From the Metaphysics as Dogma to the Metaphysics as Life: Georg Simmel as a Process Philosopher’ (to be published in Process Studies in issue 38.2) and in a jointly authored paper ‘On Simmel’s Conception of Philosophy’ (Continental Philosophy Review, 2008, 41(3): 301–322), written in collaboration with TuroKimmo Lehtonen. Chapter 4, in turn, is partly based on a piece published in 2007 in Distinktion. Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory


Acknowledgements

x

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xi

(no. 15: 111–132) by the title ‘Event dynamics: the eventalization of society in the sociology of Georg Simmel’, and a previous version of Chapter 5 has been published in Theory, Culture & Society (2009, 26(5):108–128), entitled ‘Being-with: Simmel on Dyadic and Triadic Relations’. Moreover, certain sections of Chapter 6 draw from ‘Back to the Things Themselves: On Simmelian Objects’ that appears in Sociological Objects: The Reconfiguration of Social Theory, edited by Geoff Cooper, Andrew King and Ruth Rettie, and published by Ashgate in 2009. Finally, some of the ideas in Chapter 7 have been discussed previously in the paper ‘Ambiguous Individuality: Georg Simmel on the “Who” and the “What” of the Individual’, published in 2008 in Human Studies. A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences (31(3): 279–298).


Acknowledgements

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1

Considering that ‘the social’ is the sociological object par excellence, it is peculiar how vague and equivocal the notion has remained within the discipline. Paradoxically, it is as if it was at the same time the most obvious and the most obscure thing, at once present and absent. The social is always presupposed in sociological discourses, but it hardly ever comes under discussion as such by itself. It appears more as a stable explanatory variable than something to be explained. For example, while sociologists are keen to reveal the ‘social construction’ of practically any thing,1 it is with only few exceptions that they have come to ask how the social itself is constructed, stabilized, and held together. To pick another example, The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology (Abercrombie, Hill and Turner, 2006) presents 19 entries that include the epithet ‘social’; ranging all the way from ‘social and system integration’, ‘social change’, and ‘social closure’ to ‘social reproduction’, ‘social structure’, and ‘social system’. Yet what is curiously missing from the book is an entry on the social itself. This book tries to bring to life the critical engagement in rethinking the social by drawing from the work of the German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel (1858–1918). As I will argue in more detail later, Simmel’s notion of ‘the social’ (das Sozial) is pathbreaking. Not only does he call into question the self-explanatory value of the social as a property by taking it up as a problem, as something that needs to be explained rather than explains, but, more substantially, he employs a notion of the social that contemporary social theory could profitably draw from in its efforts to consider it. To be sure, on the one hand Simmel seems to be anything but up to date. While he was an important figure in his time, exercising a considerable influence on early twentieth-century European intellectual


Introduction

1

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culture and producing a voluminous oeuvre of approximately 20 books and 200 smaller pieces, he did not leave any living legacy. Soon after his death in 1918, Simmel’s work was largely forgotten for decades. It may be speculated that this had much to do with the fact that Simmel had not created a ‘school’. He had been a ‘stimulator’, not a ‘great educator’ or one ‘who brought matters to a close’ by establishing a unified system, as Georg Lukács ([1918] 1993, p. 171; trans. 1991, p. 145), a former student of Simmel, characterized him.2 In many respects Simmel does stand quite distant from us: his insistence on pure forms, his ideals concerning the cultivation of individuality, and his essentializing views of women, for example, easily appear outmoded to us. Yet on the other hand, Simmel’s work has been subject to many renaissances over the years, and recently his concepts and ideas have been the source of inspiration in numerous theoretical enterprises. Contemporary scholars have emphasized Simmel’s relevance to such diverse themes as trust, the study of organizations, network analysis, gender, the sociology of space, time, material culture, and nature. 3 Especially in the Anglo-Saxon literature, Simmel is nowadays appreciated first and foremost as a theorist of modernity; a key figure behind this ‘paradigm’ has for sure been David Frisby (see 1981; 1984a; 1984b; 1985; 1992; 2001). Also, in the early 1990s, at the highpoint of the discussion on postmodernism, some authors were eager to see Simmel anticipating certain aspects of postmodernity in his work (Weinstein and Weinstein, 1993), though since then such discussion has waned almost completely. As regards the subject matter of this book, the thought of the social, I propose that one of the reasons why Simmel is still relevant today is the fact that he considers the social in terms of process and relations. On this account, his work resonates well in an era that sees mobilities, flows, and networks as defining characteristics of contemporary societies (cf. Scott, 2009, p. 269). Mechanistic metaphors (see Scott, 1997) have largely been challenged by notions that could perhaps be called, in the absence of a better term, ‘vitalistic’. The latter include concepts such as ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman, 2000), ‘mobility’ (Urry, 2000; 2007), ‘process’ (Rescher, 1996), and ‘becoming’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Deleuze and Parnet, 2006; Braidotti, 2002; Massumi, 2002; Pickering, 2003). Indeed, after its many years of oblivion, vitalism – and its key concept and main theme, ‘life’ – seems to be back on the agenda. ‘Life’ has become the general conceptual frame within which a whole variety of phenomena, from labour and capitalism (Hardt and Negri,


2


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2000; Lazzarato, 1996) to information (Lash, 2005), film (Mullarkey, 2007), and computer viruses (Parikka, 2007) are perceived, be it by modelling them on the idea of living process or by regarding them as specific ‘forms of life’. In the early decades of the twentieth century, vitalism (or ‘Bergsonism’, as it was also called because of the enormous influence of the French Henri Bergson on it) was without doubt one of the most significant – and fashionable – philosophies in Europe, especially in Weimar Germany. And it was not confined only within academic philosophy. In the essay ‘Die Krisis der Kultur’ (‘The Crisis of Culture’), published in 1916, Simmel estimates that the ‘concept of life now seems to permeate a multitude of spheres and to have begun to give, as it were, a more unified rhythm to their heartbeat’ (GSG 13, p. 197; SC, p. 99).4 Hence life appears as the primary category of vitalism. In general, vitalism is an assertion that living phenomena cannot be understood without residue in mechanistic terms.5 However, as is known, at the latest after the Second World War, vitalism turned repellent in the eyes of contemporaries and later generations. It was above all Nazism that tarnished vitalism’s reputation. Although vitalism itself was not National Socialist in essence (in fact, quite many of the vitalists were pacifists), the ideology of Nazism was nevertheless highly influenced by it, and the latter’s stress on irrationalism surely worked in the favour of the popularity of the Nationalist Socialist movement, as Lukács (1962) has assessed. In contrast to the ‘old’ vitalism of the early twentieth century, ‘new’ vitalism (see Fraser, Kember and Lury, 2005; Olma and Koukouzelis, 2007) is without an explicit political mission. To it, life is not a Kampfbegriff (‘combat concept’) as it was to the old vitalism, as Herbert Schnädelbach (1983) has argued. But vitalism has exuviated not only politically but also philosophically. Like the old one, new vitalism speaks of the world in the language of becoming, of flows and fluids. Nevertheless, it has deserted the notions of ‘intuition’ and Erlebnis (‘lived experience’) (which at the time were transported from vitalism to phemonenology, existentialism, and hermeneutics), and considers fluxes and processes in relational terms. As Mariam Fraser, Sarah Kember, and Celia Lury (2005, p. 3) write, new vitalism regards process as ‘characterized by a radical relationality: the (social and natural) world is understood in terms of constantly shifting relations between open-ended objects.’ It is devoid of mysticism and irrationalism. Forces and substances animating all living matter are missing from its views. Nor is it hostile to science, but rather takes great interest in it.


Introduction 3


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While new vitalism conciders processes on a relational basis, it also sees relationality largely in processual terms. Notions like the ‘rhizome’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), ‘actor-network’ (Law and Hassard, 1999; Latour, 2005), ‘collective’ (Serres, 2007; Latour, 1993), and ‘dispositif’ (Foucault, 1980; 1990), which have gained popularity recently, all share at least a loose processual foundation. None of them refers to any fixed structure, but to a set of relations that is dynamic and constantly in motion (although it is only the first of them, the rhizome, which can be said to be explicitly ‘vitalistic’). It is here that Simmel enters the picture with his notions of the social and ‘society’ (Gesellschaft). For the relational thinking of becoming, Simmel’s work provides as rich a source to draw from as the work of Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Albert North Whitehead, by whom new vitalism is inspired the most today. The kind of relational and processual emphases that are central to contemporary thought – and that are often thought of as much more recent developments – are already present in Simmel’s work. But why is it so important to think ‘becoming’? To put it in the broadest possible terms, it is because being itself incessantly becomes. If being just were, nothing would ever happen in the world, as Jean-Luc Nancy (2000, p. 176) aptly points out. In order to be able to make sense of the world, we should explore its going-ons and events, not only the entities that can be found in it. One could even argue that it is not selfconsistent and clear-cut things, categories, and subjects that constitute our world, but reciprocal relations, constant bifurcations, and becomings assembled in provisional and contingent formations. The world is made through ongoing interactivity. Many of the contemporary sciences attend well to the becomings and processes that make the world. Modern sciences are characterized by a shift from substantial reality to event: approaches from quantum physics to cognitivism and systems theory posit ‘desubstantialized processes’ (‘string vibrations’, ‘emerging properties’, ‘self-organization’, etc.), not ‘primordial elements’, as the ultimate reality (Žižek, 2004, p. 664). Most sociological notions, by contrast, have precisely prevented us from thinking becoming. While biology, physics, and cybernetics, for example, can all be said to be sciences of becoming (see Pickering, 2003), sociology, for long and in large, has been unsatisfactory in attending to becoming. It is only very recently that mechanistic metaphors have begun to give way to notions that pay regard to how social entities consist in flows, fluids, and networks of shifting relations. The contrast between substantial reality and process is still a very controversial issue in sociology. Accordingly, as Mustafa Emirbayer writes in his ‘Manifesto


4


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for a Relational Sociology’ (1997, p. 281): ‘Sociologists today are faced with a fundamental dilemma: whether to conceive of the social world as consisting primarily in substances or in processes, in static “things” or in dynamic, unfolding relations.’ Clearly, this book lays emphasis on the latter. By drawing on Simmel’s work, I wish to outline a sociology that is sensitive to becoming against the overly substantialist conceptions that still populate many strands of sociology today. Roughly speaking, in the substantialist view, the social world is constituted either by self-subsistent actors or by structures and systems that impose their laws upon individual actors. Either way, it is relatively stable entities, whether human agents or structures, which constitute the fundamental units of inquiry. As I will argue later, Simmel, by contrast, explores in his work the event or the becoming of the social. He rejects any substantialized entities, such as pre-existing individuals or structures, as valid starting points for sociological inquiry and dissolves them into dynamic relations and processes. As far as Simmel scholarship is concerned, this book has two general aims: 1. The first aim of the book is to provide an exposition of the processualist aspects of Simmel’s social theory. In this, I take issue with the overly static conception of Simmel’s sociology. It is a quite common AngloSaxon misunderstanding to regard Simmel primarily and exclusively as a sociologist of ‘form’. Such notable scholars as Theodor Abel, Pitirim Sorokin, Leopold von Wiese and Raymond Aron hold this misconception. It presents Simmel, as Harry Liebersohn (1984, p. 263) notes, as ‘a “formal” sociologist who classifies society into quasi botanical forms’. Of course, Simmel does maintain that sociological investigation should try to encompass the whole scale of social formations, from the temporary to the lasting and from the associations between two individuals to the larger groupings. He sees it as the task of sociology to identify social forms, order them analytically, ponder their psychological presuppositions, follow their historical development, and also outline their quantitative, temporal, and/or spatial factors (GSG 11, p. 22; GSG 5, pp. 58–9; see also Bevers, 1985, p. 19).6 There is also a vast array of social forms – from fashion to prostitution, from domination to the gift – that Simmel treats in his texts. Yet it is not in attempting some taxonomy of social forms, but in stressing the dynamics of social life, that Simmel seems to be primarily interested. In his thinking, Simmel is overwhelmed by the increasing tempo of modern life made manifest, for instance, in the circulation


Introduction 5


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6


I believe that this secret restlessness, this helpless urgency that lies before the threshold of conscience, that drives modern man from socialism to Nietzsche, from Böcklin to impressionism, from Hegel to Schopenhauer and back again, not only originates in the bustle and excitement of modern life, but that, conversely, this phenomenon is frequently the expression, symptom, and eruption of this innermost condition. The lack of something definite at the center of our souls impels us to search for momentary satisfaction in evernew stimulations, sensations and external activities. Thus it is that we become entangled in the instability and helplessness that manifests itself as the tumult of metropolis, as the mania for travelling, as the wild pursuit of competition and as the typically disloyalty with regard to taste, style, opinions and personal relationships. (GSG 6, p. 675; PM, p. 484) Not surprisingly, then, modern thought is characterized according to Simmel by a tendency towards the ‘dissolution of substance into functions, of the solid and the lasting into the flux of restless development’ (GSG 4, p. 330). Simmel’s own thought makes no exception to this tendency. It is itself an expression of the modern shift from substance to process that Simmel depicts. This has not gone unnoticed in Simmel literature. Hans-Jürgen Dahme (1988, p. 416) notes that the ‘emergence, development, and dissolution of social forms are central objects of investigation’ in Simmel’s work. Gregor Fitzi (2002, pp. 75, 263–4) emphasizes that Simmel aspires to grasp forms in their making, unfolding, and cessation. Indeed, in his social theory, Simmel tries to accommodate the emergence and movement of new associations. According to Simmel, ‘On every day, at every hour’, the relations from person to person binding us together ‘are spun, dropped, picked up again, replaced by others or woven together with them’ (GSG 8, p. 277; SC, p. 110). In fact, he suggests a whole new concept of the social, claiming that the social is not a ‘thing’, but fluid and shifting relations to be grasped in their unravelling. It is by drawing on this notion of the social as dynamic relations that I wish to emphasize the processuality and relationality of social life against the more substantialist conceptualizations of the social.


of money, the cycles of fashion, and the fleeting contacts within the metropolis in contradistinction to the lasting relationships in ancient and rural settings. Simmel portrays the modern rhythm of life as extremely restless:


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Simmel’s plead for a processualist and relational approach is revealed already by the key concept of his sociology, Wechselwirkung (translated as ‘reciprocal effect’, ‘reciprocal causation’, ‘reciprocity of effects’, and ‘interaction’) and by his main sociological theme, Vergesellschaftung, or ‘societalization’.7 In Philosophie des Geldes (The Philosophy of Money), Simmel insists that ‘[t]he starting point of all social formations can only be the reciprocity of effects [Wechselwirkung] between person to person’ (GSG 6, p. 208). He regards the independent and autonomous forms (social classes, family, politics, the economy, the church, etc.) that make up the traditional objects of sociology as merely secondary phenomena compared to the real reciprocal interaction (Wechselwirkung) between individuals (GSG 2, p. 130; see also GSG 6, pp. 208–9; Frisby, 1992, p. 10). Accordingly, society too is nothing autonomous or absolute for Simmel. He does not regard society as the defining feature of the social, as a general framework for social phenomena that the notion of the social would always already presuppose. Society is for him only a result of the relations among individuals and groups, something that has to be produced and connected rather than being always there. This is also the reason why Simmel prefers ‘societalization’ to society (Gesellschaft); to him, the verbalization better expresses the dynamic nature of society. 2. The second aim of this book is to uncover the philosophical background of Simmel’s social theory. His theorizing about the social is rarely only sociological. More often than not, it has a philosophical dimension as well. That is, even though Simmel distinguished between sociology and philosophy on a programmatic level, in his analyses of concrete phenomena and examination of the basic assumptions of sociology, the distinction is often vague if not completely absent. In Philosophie des Geldes, for example, Simmel not only presents a sociological analysis of the functioning and effects of money in modern society and of the entanglement of our social relations and valuations with money, but equally formulates a philosophical theory of value, outlines a theory of relativism, and ultimately even aims at erecting something of a comprehensive metaphysical worldview. I agree with the testimonial by Albert Salomon, a student of Simmel’s, that Simmel’s ‘sociological studies[...] were never separated from his philosophical concerns. He became a philosopher sociologist, one and indivisible’ (Salomon, 1995, p. 363). In a similar vein, David Frisby (1981, p. 23) notes that ‘the absence of a rigid separation between sociology and philosophy would indicate that [Simmel’s] ostensibly “philosophical” works might have great relevance


Introduction 7


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for [his] sociology’. Furthermore, Antonius M. Bevers (1985, p. 21) has argued that, ‘Anyone who does not pay attention to Simmel’s philosophy easily ends up in a onesided account of form-sociology: it appears as purely ahistorical and evinces no unity’. Accordingly, I contend that we cannot understand Simmel’s social theory properly unless we take into account his philosophy. The emphasis on process, as we shall see, resonates with Simmel’s Lebensphilosophie (‘life-philosophy’)8 and with his conception of philosophy itself as process. In many places the notion of life hovers about Simmel’s conception of the social; ultimately, the social is for him a continuous, fluctuating, and dynamic life-process. Not that the processualist view of the social would emerge from his life-philosophy, it is rather that the emphasis on process paves away for and thrusts Simmel onto life-philosophy. By considering the social in processual and relational terms, Simmel, as it were, brings it to life.

On Simmel scholarship What is peculiar about the relation of sociology to its classics compared to, say, how the natural sciences perceive theirs, is that sociologists do not show merely an antiquarian interest in their classical predecessors. This is to say that the same kind of genre of ‘classics’ that exists in sociology is missing from the natural sciences today (Alexander, 1989, p. 9). It would be extremely hard to find a contemporary work in physics takes pains to argue for the yet undiscovered elements or the continuing vigour of Galileo’s work, for instance. Names like Pythagoras, Galileo, Newton, or Einstein make appearances at most in the textbooks on the natural sciences, hardly in natural scientific studies themselves anymore. In sociology, by contrast, the classical authors are still widely studied and cited, and it is not uncommon for scholars to identify their approach as being Marxist, Simmelian, Durkheimian, and so on (Connell, 1997, p. 1512). It is no less common to see the actuality of these authors defended in a paper or monograph. This is because many sociologists (not all, of course) think that their classical predecessors still have something relevant to say sociologically.9 The natural sciences and sociology (or the humanities) thus present us two opposite vectors of time: the first, distancing themselves further and further from their past and predecessors, are constantly maturing; the latter, returning incessantly to its ancestors, remains forever young and immature. Sociology is still living its youth or, if you will, infancy. For many, especially those with a more or less positivistic10 conviction,


8


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being immature means being lost, given the famous idea by Alfred North Whitehead ([1917] 1974, p. 115) that ‘a science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost’. Among others, Max Weber maintained something of the kind. In ‘Science as a Vocation’ (1989, p. 12), Weber notes: ‘Scientific work is harnessed to the course of progress. [...] each of us scientists knows that what one has worked through will be out of date in ten, twenty, or fifty years. That is the fate of science [...]. Every scientific “fulfilment” [...] asks to be “surpassed” and made obsolete.’ This may have been the fate of science, but, as history has shown us, it has not been the fate of sociology. Notwithstanding Weber’s prediction, the time of sociology has not been one of constant progession. Indeed, the irony of Weber’s account is that his own work undoubtedly stands among the achievements, which definitely have not been ‘surpassed’ or made ‘obsolete’ by later generations of sociologists. Unlike in the natural sciences, sociologists have not been fully able to incorporate the findings of their classical predecessors into present knowledge (Merton, 1968, pp. 28, 35, 38). While any first year student of physics, as Charles Gillespie (1960, p. 8) has noted, knows more of physics than Galileo or Newton ever did, the sociological classics still contain important insights that have not yet been completely absorbed by subsequent sociological theory. Hence, whereas the time of science runs downstream, the time of sociology makes perpetual leaps to upstream. Sociology has not progressed to the same extent as the natural sciences have. Although the sociological research done and the teaching given at the university departments is much more exact and methodologically advanced than what classical sociology was like, according to Pertti Töttö (1998, p. 264), this is not due to any theoretical advancement of sociology itself. On the contrary, Töttö argues that it is rather because of the strides made within other disciplines, mainly statistical methods and the methods of historical research, that, if ever, one could describe the contemporary sociology as being more ‘advanced’ than its classical heritage (ibid.). Due to the lack of any advancement or growth of reason in sociology, the sociological classics perform different ‘author functions’ (cf. Foucault, 2000a, p. 211) from those of the forefathers in the natural sciences. In sociology, the classical authors are received in a different manner and given a different status than those in the natural sciences. The sociological classics are ‘contemporary’ in both senses of the term: they are read not only as being contemporary to themselves and their own time, but they are also perceived as being contemporary to us, in the sense of being part of our era.11 It is a fairly general belief that the


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classic works ‘continue to stand as inspiring models of scientific endeavour, providing sharp insights into scientific problems still under consideration’, as Peter H. Rossi (1958, p. 579) noted of Durkheim and Simmel some fifty years ago. As a result, reexamining classic texts modifies the discipline itself. The work is ‘given a privileged status vis-à-vis contemporary explorations’, as it embodies ‘the fundamental criteria’ within the discipline (Alexander, 1989, p. 9). In other words, in sociology, to draw on Foucault’s (2000a, p. 219) account of the author functions of ‘founders of discursivity’, ‘one defines a proposition’s theoretical validity in relation to the work of the founders’. The questions of demarcation as to ‘what kind of discourse counts as sociological theory, what theoretical language sociologists are to speak in, and what problems are most worth speaking about or are accepted altogether as ‘sociological’ problems, are still reflected to a large part in relation to the classics (Connell, 1997, p. 1512). Of course, not all practitioners of sociology readily accept the centrality of the classics within the discipline. On the contrary, some scholars, especially those who could be said to hold a more or less positivist view, would indeed be more than happy to see the whole issue of the classics bygone (see for example Black, 2000). To them, it is incomprehensible why a discipline oriented to empirical study and to the accumulation of knowledge should concern itself with past thinkers (Alexander, 1989, p. 8). After all, a great many of the classics’ theories either cannot be empirically verified or have been proven to be empirically untenable. To many of those with a positivist orientation, a sociology that remains contemporary with its classical founders is indeed lost. However, to the positivist rebuttal, it can be answered that there lies a danger in the bids to ‘forget’ the past. In ignoring the past one easily ends up repeating it. Belief in the progressing time of science may thus have the paradoxical result of merely going in circles: instead of producing new knowledge, one may end up just repeating the old. Further, unawareness of the historical descendances and emergences of ideas and concepts may lead one to completely ahistorical claims: something that already has a long historical lineage is presented as contemporary and new. Exploring the tradition to which one belongs by investigating the work of past thinkers is a way of avoiding this cultivation of ignorance. It not only enables us to become more aware of the historical limits that constitute and condition our knowledge, but also helps us to call into question self-evidencies concerning the way we see things and the assumptions we hold about the world. Returning to the works of classical predecessors may thus open new ways to think. As long


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as the question of how to integrate the classical authors to the overall theoretical framework of contemporary sociology remains open and unresolved, it is evermore relevant to go back to these authors and study their works. However, it is not only positivists who have opposed mixing the interpretation of the classics with the concerns of contemporary sociological research. The so-called historicists have done this as well. The historicist point of view proposes that the classics should be interpreted in historical terms – that is, within their historical context and as they appeared to their contemporaries (Alexander, 1989, pp. 8–9). The historicist reading attempts to understand the classics of sociology ‘in their own terms and their own right’ (Baehr, 2002, p. 100). This argument was launched above all against the so-called presentist manner of interpreting the classics in a debate that sparked off in the 1970s. Presentism, as already the term suggests, claims that classical authors should be interpreted from a present-day perspective. It considers the historical context of the classics as far ‘less important than the commonality they share with us’ (ibid., pp. 96–7).12 So, whereas historicism draws attention to the predecessors and contemporaries of past authors and tries to reconstruct the historical context and the discussions that their problems stem from/relate to, presentists read the classics as if they are contemporary. Presentists find the contributions of classics still relevant to us in a sociological and not only in a historical sense.13 That is also to say that presentists regard the interpretation of the classics as an integral part of social scientific research. Instead of producing what for them seem nothing but sterile exegeses and gestures of reverent reminiscence, presentists see that sociologists should rather try to benefit the development of sociological theory with their studies on the classics (Merton, 1968, p. 30). Accordingly, presentists use the conceptualizations, themes, and theories formulated by the classics for their own purposes, projecting their own problems on them and trying to understand the contemporary world we live in with their help. In short, presentists utilize the classical formulations as ‘tools’ to understand our own society and its phenomena. They try to make the classics speak to us as if as our own contemporaries, in our own discourse and its concepts, within the frames of our own problems, and serving our own research interests (Töttö, 1998, p. 270; Baehr, 2002, p. 97). In other words, for the presentists, the classics serve as a kind of toolbox. A classical author may also act as a guide cultivating our taste for problems. From our classical forerunners we may learn, for example, discernment in setting research problems: in


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discovering yet undiscovered aspects of phenomena, in choosing the relevant aspects out of the variety of details of phenomena, in questioning self-evidences, and so on. This way, reading our precursors may even teach us how to think otherwise. It is not surprising that a distinction between presentist and historicist lines of interpretation can be found also in the secondary literature on Simmel. What is perhaps more surprising is that the two main linguistic traditions in interpreting Simmel can be distinguished from one another in accordance with this distinction. In his doctoral thesis, Die soziologische Gesamtkonzeption Georg Simmels (1974), Peter-Ernst Schnabel shows how the reception of Simmel’s work has typically been divided into two separate traditions of Anglo-American and German. According to Schnabel, the Anglo-American tradition has, from the outset, centred characteristically on the operationability of Simmel’s theses and on his miniature theories on particular segments of social reality, such as the theory of small groups, conflict theory, theory of super- and sub-ordination, and so on. At the time Schnabel wrote his thesis, only the most recent Anglo-American reception had begun to pay attention to the presuppositions of Simmel’s work (Schnabel, 1974, pp. 40, 148). Of the German tradition the exact opposite truth holds. According to Schnabel, it was only very recently that the German interpretations of Simmel’s work had begun to use his ideas as theoretical tools. On the contrary, the German reception has been typically characterized by a more philological or historicist approach (Ibid., p. 148). It has focused on situating Simmel’s work within the context of the time it was written rather than on the usability of his theses. The epistemological and philosophical premises of Simmel’s thought have been given considerable emphasis as well. Karin Schrader-Klebert (1968), for instance, has worked on the transcendental foundation of Simmel’s sociology, and Andreas Ziemann (2000) has studied the epistemological and topographical implications of Simmel’s sociology. In addition, Klaus Christian Köhnke has made a considerable contribution by exploring Simmel’s fairly unknown early work and its key influences in Der Junge Simmel (1996). More often than not, the historical and systematic study of the premises of Simmel’s thought has taken form in specifying his relation to his eminent predecessors and contemporaries. This has been attempted not only by German interpretations but by certain recent Anglo-American commentaries as well, thus mixing up the linguistic division into different approaches. Heinrich Levy (1927), Petra


12


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Christian (1978), and Ole Goos (2004), for instance, have examined the ‘Hegelian’ features of Simmel’s work; Klaus Lichtblau (1984) Simmel’s Nietzsche reception; Johannes Schwerdtfeger (1995) and Gregor Fitzi (2002) Simmel’s relation to Henri Bergson; Gary Backhaus (1998; 2003a; 2003b) Simmel’s affinities with Edmund Husserl and phenomenology, whereas Michael Großheim (1991), Hans-Jürgen Gawoll (1993), and J.E. Jalbert (2003) have studied the relation of Simmel and Martin Heidegger; and Christian Papilloud (2002a; 2002b; 2004) has compared Simmel’s notion of the gift and theory of relations with that of Marcel Mauss. Whereas Simmel’s relevance for various particular themes has been widely argued for in the secondary literature,14 attempts to present an overall interpretation of his sociological or philosophical work, let alone his whole oeuvre, are oddities in the secondary literature. One reason for its absence has perhaps been the scant availability of Simmel’s works, and not only due to the relative scarcity of translations. For those who read German, not all of his works have been accessible, since many were originally published in journals and periodicals that have been fairly hard to find. Recently, however, things have improved considerably, with the publication of the 24-volume Gesamtausgabe series of Simmel’s collected works nearly complete. As for the overall interpretations of Simmel’s sociology, Schnabel’s (1974) doctoral dissertation is perhaps the most impressive among them. At least equally comprehensive in its scope is Heinz-Jürgen Dahme’s thesis, Soziologie als exakte Wissenschaft. Georg Simmels Ansatz und seine Bedeutung in der gegenwärtigen Soziologie (1981) has been published in two parts: the first dealing with Simmel’s reception, the second with the foundation of his sociology. Two other interpretations that strive for an overall hold of Simmel’s sociology that deserve to be mentioned are La Sociologie de Georg Simmel (2001) by Frédéric Vandenberghe and Heribert J. Becher’s Georg Simmel – Die Grundlagen seiner Soziologie (1971). In the latter, Becher puts forth an interpretation of Wechselwirkung as the key notion of Simmel’s work, a view that has since become common in the secondary literature.15 While Simmel’s sociology has become relatively well known over the years, to some extent Simmel’s philosophy remains to be found. Up to this day, Alfred Mamelet’s Le Relativisme Philosophique chez Georg Simmel (1914) and Rudoph H. Weingartner’s doctoral thesis, Experience and Culture (1960), stand as the only two comprehensive works on Simmel’s philosophy. Furthermore, Bevers’ doctoral thesis, Dynamik der Formen bei Georg Simmel. Eine Studie über die methodische und theoretische Einheit eines Gesamtwerkes (1985), and François Léger’s La pensée de Georg Simmel


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(1989) are the only ones that aim at an overall interpretation of Simmel’s whole oeuvre. Mamelet’s book cannot but be incomplete because of the simple fact that it was published before the completion of Simmel’s oeuvre and the publication of such books as Rembrandt, Grundfragen der Soziologie (‘Grounding Questions of Sociology’), and Lebensanschauung (‘Lifeview’). The latter-day commentators, by contrast, have, at least in principle, Simmel’s whole oeuvre at hand. Bevers seeks the methodological and theoretical unity of Simmel’s epistemology, sociology, and philosophy of life through two themes: the form/content distinction and the principle of reciprocal effect. In Simmel’s epistemology, Bevers argues, the distinction between form and content appears as a logical principle (a priori forms of knowledge), in his sociology as a methodical principle (forms of societalization), and in the philosophy of culture/life as a metaphysical principle (the contrast of life and form). The principle of reciprocal effect, in turn, manifests itself in Simmel’s epistemology in the form of epistemological relationism as the relative character of knowledge and truth. In his sociology, it manifests itself in the form of sociological relationism as the functional character of social reality. In his philosophy of culture/life, it manifests itself as the dialectical character of life and cultural process in the form of metaphysical relationism (Bevers, 1985, pp. 24–25). Even though Bevers’ book admittedly takes an important step towards a comprehensive understanding of Simmel’s work, it is far from being all embracing. Simmel’s theorizing upon individuality, his theory of value, the aesthetic aspect of his work, and his style, for instance, are almost completely absent in Bevers. Léger (1989), by contrast, takes up these issues in his study. He treats various aspects of Simmel’s work, from relativism to essayism, the philosophy of money to the philosophy of art, theory of history to sociology, and interpretation of Kant to life-philosophy. Yet an explicit organizing principle that would order these aspects into a unified whole is missing. Léger explicates Simmel’s thought well, but remains without forceful claims. In sum, the relatively minor attention paid to Simmel’s philosophy is unfortunate, since to a great extent his sociological and philosophical thinking are intertwined. In order to come to grips with his sociology, it is important to examine his philosophy as well.


14

Conceptual portraiture This book does not amount to pure history of thought. My primary concern is not to contextualize Simmel’s work historically or to engage in a hermeneutics of his texts concerned with what he ‘really meant’,


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what is essential to his work, or what is ‘truly Simmelian’. Neither do I approach Simmel in order to fix him in a developmental series in history, to reach some origin of the concept of the social, or to attempt any explicit exploration of the historical lineage or trajectory of the notion. Instead of abandoning the themes of this book to historical analysis and repetitive gestures of commentary, they are taken up primarily as questions. If not to be solved once and for all, then at least these questions are brought to life and are connected to their outside; perhaps even to be reinvented. While not scorning the significance of exegetic work (I think that any effort to understand our present thought and forms of being demands that we excavate history), in the following I nevertheless examine Simmel’s work above all with the purpose of trying out in which ways his insights might help us think today. In other words, this is to use history, to look at the past from the perspective of the present. What follows thus amounts to thinking with Simmel but also beyond him: I do not pretend to claim what he is all about; the purpose of the endeavour is rather the quest for alternative and innovative ways of thinking the social. This is, however, not to say that I would approach Simmel from a purely presentist perspective. Instead of just using Simmel’s ideas as tools or stimuli, or trying to operationalize his work, my own theorizing very explicitly tries to build on his legacy. For the most part, the book presents a close reading of Simmel’s texts: I look at the social, as it were, through Simmel. By disclosing certain undiscovered and non-assimilated elements in Simmel’s work, an effort is made to provide sociological thought with new categories and concepts to consider the social through. Simmel himself has said all he is made to say. While making Simmel, as if by mutating his ‘code’ into a new environment, speak about things that he did not concern himself with but in which I am interested, the concepts with which I have tried to give him a voice are nevertheless his own. The reason why I see it as relevant to explicate Simmel’s thinking as minutely as I do is because I share with Michael Crotty (2003, p. 215) the belief that it is only through a detailed and careful study of an author’s texts that we can tell whether what we say actually goes beyond or falls short of his or her work. Hence, in addition to taking an interest in Simmel’s work as such, the book tries to make something new out of Simmel. His ideas are put to work, his manner of posing questions is experimented on, and his concepts are activated in problems that may not have exercised his mind – all for the purpose of creating resonance in our own thought and era.


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What is at issue, then, is not an effort to create full correspondence with Simmel’s work or person, to produce an exact copy, any more than to just report what he has said. On the contrary, my way of reconstructing Simmel could perhaps be best described as sort of a conceptual portraiture. This bears resemblance to Simmel’s manner of interpreting such philosophers as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Kant. Simmel describes his approach as being comparable to an ‘artistic portrait’: ‘Instead of the real totality of the object, an ideal interpretation and a meaning derived from the method and the goal of presentation’ is produced. So, rather than pursuing absolute likeness, attempting a portraiture is to select, on the basis of one’s interests, some leitmotivs and place them in focus while excluding other contents (GSG 10, p. 171; SHN, p. liv). Thereby the resulting figure does not hold each and every detail of Simmel’s thought, but rather presents a new figure, a more or less one-sided image of his work. The outcome remains, as it were, a stylized Simmel against the lived reality of a real, singular person. The validity and credibility of the interpretation can be evaluated at the level of discourse by comparing the stylized figure to what Simmel says and doesn’t say in his so many texts. This is to say that the Simmel after whom concepts, ideas, and theory fragments are signed (‘sociology of forms’, ‘metropolis’, ‘stranger’, ‘tragedy of culture’, and so on) is not to be confused with the person who is designated by the proper name Georg Simmel. The author’s name and the proper name are not identical, nor do they perform the same functions (Foucault, 2000a, p. 210). The thinker who is judged by his words and sentences found in Philosophie des Geldes, Soziologie (‘Sociology’), and Lebensanschauung, for instance, resides only in his works and nowhere else. This Simmel is a product and complex function of discourse and is not the same Simmel as the one tyrannized by the love of his jealous mother, the one who collected Japanese art, the ‘eternal Privatdozent’ (an unpaid lecturer dependent on student fees), or the host who entertained guests at the ‘salon’ run regularly at his home. In other words, there is a gap between the Simmel who keeps returning eternally in commentaries and discourses (the ‘man of many renaissances’, to quote Elizabeth Goodstein [2002, p. 209]) and the man who has appeared only once in history. Whereas the latter is historical, the first is rather always becoming. As such, the Simmel who appears in the pages of this book is not without resemblance to what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1994) have termed ‘conceptual persona’. According to Deleuze and Guattari, conceptual personae are the personages or figures within philosophical


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Introduction 17

[...] the philosopher is only the envelope of his principal conceptual persona and of all the other personae who are the intercessors [intercesseurs], the real subjects of his philosophy. Conceptual personae are the philosopher’s ‘heteronyms’, and the philosopher’s name is the simple pseudonym of his personae. (Ibid., p. 64) For instance, the true subjects of Nietzsche’s philosophy are the various conceptual personae brought to life in his books: Zarathustra, Superman, Dionysos, and Socrates; Christ, Antichrist, Priest, and so on (see ibid., p. 65; Deleuze, 2001, pp. 92–101). The subject is never the man who was appointed a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel at the age of 24, the man who suffered from severe health problems, nor the man who, experiencing a mental collapse, threw his arms around the neck of a whipped horse at the market place of Turin in 1889. Simmel’s way of distinguishing between the ‘individuality’ of a philosopher and his or her ‘personal’ circumstances can be seen to be in line with this. For Simmel, what is individual in Schopenhauer, for instance, is precisely Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (‘The World as Will and Representation’) and not his external life: ‘Schopenhauer’s incomparable individuality does not lie in his “personal” circumstances – that he was born in Danzig [Gdansk], that he was a bachelor unworthy of love, that he fell out with his family, and that he died in Frankfurt – because each of these traits is merely typical. Rather, his individuality, that which was personal and unique about Schopenhauer, is Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung [...]’ (GSG 15, p. 375; RB, p. 50). It is not, however, that the conceptual persona would be completely separate from the author, his or her personal circumstances, and the socio-historical context. On the contrary, we can increase our understanding of the conceptual persona by comparing the author’s work with his or her predecessors and contemporaries – treating the author as a kind of socio-historical type (this is where historical interpretation comes in). In Der Junge Simmel (1996, p. 24), Köhnke reconstructs Simmel precisely as a type in this sense, as he examines Simmel as a crystallization of certain theoretical currents of his time and historical surroundings. Köhnke presents Simmel as a ‘case example’ (Fallbeispiel) (ibid., p. 22) of the writers who have built our epoch, a


texts to which philosophy gives life. Socrates, for instance, is the main conceptual persona of Platonism (ibid., pp. 61–3). A conceptual persona is not the same as the author of the text, nor is it merely a ‘representative’ of him or her. On the contrary, as Deleuze and Guattari argue:


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‘representative of the theory of the modern or postmodern, as a sociological classic or classical feuilleton writer [Feuilletonisten] and essayist’ (ibid., p. 24). Yet precisely the fact that a conceptual persona is in the state of ‘becoming’, whereas the socio-historical type is historical, is what distinguishes them from one another. In a sense, it can even be said that conceptual personae create new possibilities of existing for historical persons and socio-historical types. The characteristics of historical persons and types are dependent on the concepts and conditions of thought that, when connected to the specific historical state of affairs of a given society and the life-worlds of individuals, make possible certain ways of existing as a person (see Deleuze and Guattari, 1994, pp. 70–1, 96, 110–111). In sum, to characterize my manner of approach as conceptual portraiture implies that the study does not have any proper ‘findings’ in the strict sense of the word. Rather, the conceptual portrait it produces has to be created and invented. The point could be clarified by drawing on the distinction between discovery and invention that Bergson makes in The Creative Mind: ‘Discovery, or uncovering, has to do with what already exists, actually or virtually; it was therefore certain to happen sooner or later. Invention gives being to what did not exist; it might have never happened’ (Bergson, 2002, p. 51). The social theory of Simmel appearing in this book is an invention, a construction made by the author. One cannot find any clearly defined and highly elaborated theory of the social in Simmel’s texts that he himself would have explicitly subscribed to. In fact, to my best knowledge, Simmel mentions the term Sozialtheorie (‘social theory’) only once in his published writings, in passing in the second volume of Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft (‘Introduction to Moral Science’) (see GSG 3, p. 399). The ‘social theory’ of Simmel’s that I try to give being to is therefore a set of various theoretical reflections drawn from diverse sources, not a systematic framework or a coherent, fully-fledged theory about the social. It has to be assembled by following a messy network of concepts, theory fragments, and perspectives dispersed throughout Simmel’s oeuvre. It is based on concepts that usually do not allow for any unambiguous interpretation. As he does not always use concepts in a strictly technical manner, more often than not Simmel may employ one concept – such as that of ‘form’ – in various and fairly inconsistent ways, and he may also use various terms to designate approximately one and the same thing.16 Moreover, the theory fragments that prove fruitful range from those addressing the social explicitly to those that, in the face of it, hardly speak of the social at all. Finally, Simmel’s social theory has to be drawn from perspectives


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Introduction 19

that may overlap but that are irreducible to one another, such as those of sociology and philosophy.

The book is organized into eight main chapters. Chapter 2 aims at both clarifying the notion of ‘social theory’ in general and at delineating the characteristics and key dimensions of Simmel’s theorizing about the social. Distinguishing between three genres of sociological theory – ‘research theory’, ‘general theory’, and the ‘diagnosis of the times’ – the chapter identifies social theory as a subgenre of general theory along with the ‘theory of society’. It will be argued that whereas research theories are entangled in empirical materials, general theories are not internally connected to or immediately dependent upon any empirical evidence. Rather, they deal with problems of constitution: social theory as that of the social and the theory of society as that of society. Accordingly, Simmel’s social theory is specified as the study of the nature of the social and the fundamental presuppositions, key concepts, and basic assumptions of sociological reflection. Chapter 3 treats the basic convictions of Simmel’s process thought by discussing what I consider to comprise its three cornerstones: relationism, life-philosophy, and his view of philosophy itself as life. By exploring the philosophical foundation of Simmel’s processualism, the chapter situates his process-oriented notion of the social within the broader context of his work. In so doing, the chapter will hopefully also provide the reader with some helpful conceptual background. In Chapter 4, Simmel’s preoccupation with the surprising instant of the ‘event’ (Geschehen) of associations is discussed. Eventalizing dissolves society as a hypostatized, reified generality into dynamic reciprocal relations. The primacy given to the event by Simmel suggests that social formations are not simply existent, to be described in their actuality and seemingly fixed stability, but are best understood in terms of processes. The event’s becoming is basic, whereas its ‘thingness’, which, for instance, Durkheim insisted on, is derivative. The chapter asserts that the Simmelian event has two main aspects: that of reciprocal effect and life/form antagonism. Along with clarifying the event dynamics in accordance with these aspects, the key sociological implications of Simmel’s life-philosophy are also unfolded. By considering the social in terms of the event, Simmel locates it between elements. The idea of the social as ‘in-between’ is elaborated in Chapter 5, which explores the significance of the number of elements


The structure of the book


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involved for the form of relation. The chapter claims that the difference between the primary, dynamic intersubjectivity immanent to the individuals on the one hand, and the objectified social forms on the other, can be examined in numerical terms by focusing on the formations of two and three elements, the ‘dyad’ and the ‘triad’. In its basic, methodologically simplest form, for Simmel the social amounts to dyadic interaction between ‘I’ and ‘you’ that can be conceptualized as being-with. Nevertheless, a third element is always included also in the dyad, be it only as an excluded third. Therefore, I claim that in order to fully understand the dynamics of social relationships, one must look at the interplay of two socio-logics, bivalent and trivalent. The ‘third’ not only interrupts the supposedly immediate relation between the two elements of the dyad, but is also capable of transforming it into a completely new figure: a social whole, a ‘we’ that obtains a supraindividual life independent of the individual. Chapter 6 does not address the notion of the social as directly as the preceding two chapters, but rather discusses its crucial ‘internal externality’: objects. The chapter proposes that, instead of perceiving materiality as a passive ‘out-thereness’ that is simply exterior to the social, Simmel, notably in Philosophie des Geldes, pays attention to the ways objects intertwine with both social relationships and the experience of subjects, thus placing material heterogeneity at the heart of the social. Human beings are not only in, by, and among themselves, but their experience and very being is crucially tied to things: objects are an integral part of our social life – that is, one of its ‘internal externalities’. Material objects are not subsidiary, nor do they leave the ‘core’ of the social untouched, but our relationships and forms of being-with with one another are crucially affected by the objects that mediate them. The claims are supported in the chapter by discussing Simmel’s treatment of such specific objects as the bridge, the door, and money. His theoretical engagement with objects also importantly indicates that, despite its clear accent on process and becoming, his social theory is not concerned only with the ephemeral and the fleeting, but attends to the objectification of the social as well. It is to a large part with the help of objects that the shifting social relationships stabilize into something lasting. Chapter 7 addresses another ‘internal externality’ of the social: the individual. Whereas it is typically within the context of the modern metropolis and the mature money economy that Simmel’s ideas have been discussed in the secondary literature, the chapter renders those ideas in another light by addressing the ontological and existential


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issues crucial to his conception of the individual. In his life-philosophy, Simmel understands the individual on the basis of life shaped by immanent and imminent death: it is from the place of one’s finitude and non-repeatable life that the irreplaceability of the individual gives itself to thought. Unlike in the sociological conception, individuality in Simmelian life-philosophy is not given through the interaction of others, but by one’s singular and finite existence, by the fact that no one can die in one’s place. Despite its lack of practically any references to social relations or society, I will maintain that the life-philosophical notion of the individual nevertheless has great sociological relevance, not only for the understanding of the social but also for Simmel’s sociological relationism. It is crucial to think who the individual is besides one’s relationships, not least because Simmel sees the individual being something over and above one’s relations as a very condition of the social’s possibility. The concluding chapter summarizes the main points of the book and tries to situate Simmel’s social theory in relation to more recent critical confrontations and reassessments of the social. I will take the work of Bruno Latour as my example, since Latour, like Simmel, proposes an alternative social theory that reconceptualizes the social in terms of dynamic associations, and also holds to a relationistic metaphysics that has interesting affinities with that of Simmel. I will additionally argue that Simmel’s work has an enormous amount to contribute, and that contemporary social theory such as Latour’s would benefit from greater appreciation of it.


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2

The question of the social lies at the core of sociology. In his famous methodological maxim, Durkheim urges sociologists to explain the social only with itself. According to him, ‘The determining cause of a social fact should be sought among antecedent social facts and not among the states of individual consciousness’ (1982, p. 134). However, when one leafs through the sociological papers and books of today, it is not the social that the texts are solely or even primarily talking about, but rather themes like environmental problems, HIV, science and technology, unemployment, gender inequality, art, consumption, urban spaces, forms of mass protest, criminality, and so on. If the social does appear in these texts, it is above all as an explaining factor that it makes its way to the texts. Whatever phenomena sociologists study, they characteristically try to offer ‘social explanations’ for them. The sociology of art, for example, has typically made an effort to show the dependence of the production and valuation of art upon its ‘social context’, regarding it as being shaped by social factors like class, power, ideology, gender, social institutions, and economic relations (see Bourdieu, 1984). However, the problem with so-called social explanations is that they tend to take the social as the bedrock upon which to base their examinations, rather than as a problem that needs to be explained. Consequently, the social is treated as a stable explanatory variable that is external to the studied objects. By contrast, novel approaches in sociology, such as recent science and technology studies (see Latour, 1987) and the ‘new sociology of art’ (de la Fuente, 2007), have questioned the autonomy of the social. Some scholars working within the field of science and technology studies have even proposed that the term ‘social’ becomes completely redundant and useless when studying scientific practices. For instance, in Laboratory Life, Bruno


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Latour and Steve Woolgar claim that scientific facts are constructed not only ‘socially’ but in a much more concrete and material way: ‘What does the term “social” convey when it refers equally to a pen’s inscription on paper, to the construction of a text and to the gradual elaboration of an amino-acid chain? Not a lot’ (Latour and Woolgar, 1986, p. 281). In a later text, Latour (2003) specifies that the term social can only be employed to refer to the collective nature of the process of construction, not to any ‘stuff’ or ‘thing’, and these practices of constructing are ‘social’ only in the sense that they require the collaboration of many actors, both human and nonhuman. A few contemporary sociologists of art, such as Tia DeNora (2003), have drawn on Latour and his idea of the ‘co-production’ of nature and society. They claim that just as art is not independent of the social, there is neither any social context, social forces, or social dimension that would exist outside art and explain it. On the contrary, as asserted by DeNora, art and the social are made and redefined together in the practices of producing, valuing, and consuming art (ibid., p. 39). Accordingly, the new sociology of art has focused on the detailed study of these practices and the networks produced by their assemblages. Although the approaches of science and technology studies and the new sociology of art make considerable contributions to social theory beyond their specific fields, I still feel that an explicit and thorough reconsideration of social theory, as a genre of sociological theory visá-vis other genres, is also necessary. That is the objective of this chapter. The chapter suggests that sociological thinking should begin from a theory of the social; ultimately even the territorial societies based on nation-states are to be examined in terms of social relations and processes. In the examination, social theory will be defined anew, as a general theory of the social and distinguished from other genres of sociological theory; not only from the theories of society, but also from the theories of specific social phenomena and from the so-called diagnoses of the times.

Society and the social At least since the 1920s onwards, the main object of sociological investigation has been ‘society’. While prior sociology had been mainly ‘universalistic’, in the sense that practitioners such as Auguste Comte saw it as ‘a science of, and for, humanity, based on timeless principles and verified laws’ (Albrow, 1990, p. 6), the institutionalization of the discipline in universities gave rise to ‘national sociologies’ premised on the notion


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of ‘society’ as a separate, self-enclosed territorial unit coextensive with the nation-state (Inglis and Robertson, 2009, pp. 27–8). However, Ulrich Beck (2000, p. 24) claims that, past their differences, Durkheim, Weber, and Marx already ‘shared a territorial definition of modern society, and thus a model centred on the nation-state’. While Beck’s claims have been under criticism (Wagner, 2000; Chernilo, 2006), we can nevertheless say quite safely that sociological investigation has been largely subjected to a kind of ‘methodological nationalism’ (Martins, 1974, p. 276): most sociological notions of society are at least implicitly equated with territorial nation-states (Cooper, 2009, p. 9; Sulkunen, 2007, p. 325; Inglis and Robertson, 2009, p. 29). The social, in turn, has been subsumed under the territorially based national ‘society’. A given phenomena is considered to be ‘social’ if it is not, as it were, ‘purely’ natural, biological, economic, or linguistic, and occurs within ‘society’ by either expressing, maintaining, reproducing, reinforcing, or subverting its social order (Latour, 2005, p. 3). Accordingly, the predominant notion of society sees it as a kind of a ‘container’ (see Schroer, 2006, pp. 19, 161), within which our actions and social relations are thought to fit. Recently, however, the concept of society as the basis of sociology has been seriously challenged. William Outhwaite (2006) has identified four separate branches in its critique. One is the neo-liberal critique (crystallized in the Margaret Thatcher’s provocative slogan ‘there is no such thing as society’) and action theory that, based on an individualistic approach, reject the concept of society altogether. Another one is the critique launched by evolutionary psychology/sociology, suggesting the replacement of the anthropocentric concept of society with conceptions more continuous with the social patterns of other animal species. The third line of criticism is postmodernism. It argues for the fragmentation and dissolution of society (with Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Zygmunt Bauman, for instance, as its representatives). The fourth line of criticism, pinpointed by Outhwaite, is globalization theory (see John Urry, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Martin Albrow, for example). It asserts that the concept of society is destined to wither away along with the nation-state, which is its implicit basis. The container model of society may indeed have served well the selfunderstanding of nation-states in their strivings for political independence and cultural originality (Tenbruck, 1994, p. 82; Kangas, 2001, p. 304), as well as the political duties sociologists have assumed for themselves as social reformers or social engineers. However, as the representatives of ‘global sociology’ claim, for instance, sociology cannot primarily deal with entities such as ‘British society’ or any other nation-state


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based unit, for that matter (Inglis and Robertson, 2009, p. 27). As we have moved into the twenty-first century, the traditional boundaries, limits, and classifications of our world have been observed to be shifting (Featherstone and Venn, 2006, p. 1). An increasing number of social relationships do not obey territorial nation-state boundaries – those of ‘societies’ – anymore, but rather tend to cut across them (Gane, 2004, pp. 2–3). Therefore, it has become questionable whether these container societies can be examined in isolation, not to speak of considering them as the foundation or principal site of the social relations and processes (Schroer, 2006, pp. 161–2). Societies are not separate, self-enclosed entities but, as Mike Featherstone and Couze Venn (2006, p. 3) point out, ‘Form a reference group knitted together through a whole wide range of exchanges and flows of information, goods, and knowledge’. Whereas the ‘globalist’ viewpoints stress that the equation between society and the social narrows the scope of the social, in that it fails to accommodate significant international, trans-national, and supranational phenomena and processes (Inglis and Robertson, 2009, p. 27), I belive that it also misses a lot of stuff that is happening, as it were, before society. In other words, it is not only ‘above’ but also ‘below’ society that we must turn our attention, to examine the very emergence or event of the social order and society. The question of society’s origin is not behind us, belonging to the past, but we must still look at the ways in which society is being made and remade before our very eyes everyday (Latour, 1986, pp. 270–1). My contention is that in considering the social and the making of society, Simmel becomes a prime source. This is even despite the fact that his work does not distinguish between the notions of the social/ das Sozial and society/Gesellschaft in a consistent manner, and rather uses them interchangeably. Nevertheless, importantly, Simmel employs the term society in two senses, broad and narrow (see GSG 11, p. 23; Spykman, 2004, p. 32; Frisby and Sayer, 1986, pp. 56–60). Whereas the first designates a specific socio-historical social order, the latter can be interpreted as a principle of association: it is coextensive with relations, connections and associations. To discuss the two notions in little more detail, we can note that, understood in the broader sense, society refers in Simmel to a complex of individuals involved in relations of interaction, together with all the interests that unite them, and to their socio-historical actuality (GSG 11, p. 22). Society is a ‘third or intermediate element between the abstract-universal and the concrete-individual’ (GSG 20, p. 185; ISF, p. 243). However, as a whole it is neither something autonomous nor




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absolute for Simmel. Rather, he considers society as ‘only a name’ for the sum of the interactions among individuals and groups (GSG 2, p. 131). In fact, Simmel contends that, to a great extent, the adherence to an all-embracing notion of society accounts for ‘the internal and external confusion of problems’ in sociology (GSG 5, p. 311), thus hindering the development of the discipline. Therefore, Simmel thinks that sociology can develop into and advance as an independent academic discipline only by abandoning the substantive and all-encompassing concept of society as a frame of reference for analysis (Frisby, 1992, p. 10). Dissatisfied with the ‘peculiar fuzziness and uncertainty’ of the broad notion of society (GSG 11, p. 24), Simmel seeks to redefine the concept by giving it a more precise meaning. Hence, according to Simmel, while ‘everything which takes place in society’ (GSG 11, p. 23) may pass for a subject matter in various other social sciences, sociology, by contrast, cannot content itself with this. In order to qualify for a legitimate study of society, sociology must discover ‘what in society is really “society” ’ (GSG 11, p. 25; see also GSG 5, p. 57). That is, sociology should investigate the principles and processes on which the unity of society rests. To this end, Simmel makes a crucial distinction into the form and the content of society. By contents, he means, on the one hand, specific psychological contents – the motives, interests, and drives of individuals – and, on the other hand, factual contents, designating whatever may take place in society. With forms, by contrast, Simmel refers to the types of connections between individuals. Whereas contents are not yet social, but only make its ‘material’, so to speak, forms stand for the social as such. Consequently, in the narrow sense of the term, society equals in Simmel forms of Wechselwirkung. In Soziologie, Simmel maintains that ‘society exists whenever several individuals engage in interaction’ (GSG 11, p. 17). There is no society without specific forms of reciprocation (GSG 11, pp. 23–4). Further, in an important passage in Philosophie des Geldes, which can also be found in Soziologie in almost identical form, Simmel writes: Society is not an absolute entity which must first exist so that all the individual relations of its members [...] can develop within its framework or be represented by it: it is only the synthesis or the general term for the totality of these specific interactions. Any one of the interactions may, of course, be eliminated and ‘society’ still exist, but only if a sufficiently large number of others remain intact. If all interaction ceases there is no longer any society. (GSG 6, pp. 209–10; PM, p. 175)


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In other words, Simmel suggests here that the social cannot be adequately understood under the aspect of society. Society – in the broad sense of the term – is not the definitive form assumed by social relations, but only their effect or finished product. Thus the nation-based societies have to be considered on the basis of a theory of the social. It is not that we should entirely refrain from speaking of society as an entity (e.g., ‘British’ society). We may even talk of society as somehow ‘acting’ as a whole (investing to education, preparing for epidemia, taking more debt, and so on). However, it is important to understand that the expression ‘society’ is merely a shorthand: it is not always already there, weighing us down. On the contrary, it is something that is connected, assembled, and put together through the delicate, almost ‘invisible threads that are spun from one person to another’ (GSG 8, p. 292; SC, p. 120). If there is no interaction, there is no society. By taking the notion of the social instead of the territorially fixed, comprehensive concept of society as a point of departure, the question of the emergence of social order, for instance, presents itself in a completely different manner. It is no more a question of normative integration, but becomes a question of the stabilization of dynamic interaction into permanent and autonomous forms, and of the development of specific organs that are not yet necessary for a group smaller in size. The Simmelian theorem of Wechselwirkung offers thus a post- or, better still, pre-normative theory of social order. To give an example, in his 1896 review of the legal philosopher Rudolf Stammler’s Recht und Wirtschaft, entitled, ‘Zur Methodik der Socialwissenschaft’ (‘Towards the Methodology of Social Science’), Simmel criticizes Stammler’s view of society as the coexistence of human beings regulated by external norms. Against Stammler, Simmel claims that normative regulation is secondary to the principle of ‘societalization’ (Vergesellschaftung), merely its parallel phenomenon (Nebenerscheinung). It is hardly the core or the essence of society, only its product or, at most, co-producer (Mitproduzent) (GSG 1, pp. 368–9, 371). Normative regulation can be a condition for the continuing existence of already present society, not for the very emergence of society, which, in Simmel’s view, we can grasp only by examining the relations of reciprocal effect between individuals (GSG 1, p. 370). In other words, normative principles have to be ‘societalized’ (vergesellschaftet) first in order to be able to structure society. For Simmel, they cannot be the formative condition for the emergence or possibility of society. Only reciprocal relations can: ‘The homogeneity of many individuals[...] emerges, in general, only through their interactions’ (GSG 11, p. 632). Accordingly, in Philosophie des Geldes, Simmel insists that,




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Social theory The notion of social theory is an invention of the late nineteenth century. Yet its etymological roots is ancient. It stems from the Latin term socius, ‘companion’ or ‘ally’, and the Greek theoria, ‘a looking at’, ‘viewing’, ‘contemplation’, ‘speculation’, and also a ‘sight’, a ‘spectacle’. Literally understood, ‘social theory’ would thus mean the contemplation of companionship or the reflection of the possibility and forms of existing and acting together in the world, a specification that will be fleshed out later (in Chapter 5). On this account, there has existed social theory even before the term itself was invented. We can think of here the relation between the individual and society and the pathologies of that relation, for instance. The preoccupation with it dates back at least to the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke (see for example Horster, 2005, pp. 48–50). They were all concerned with the problem of how to constitute a state from free individuals, whether by way of social contract (Rousseau), subordination under a sovereign (Hobbes), or in terms of natural rights (Locke). As it stands today, the term social theory has become so broad that it is almost emptied of content. It is capable of including a wide diversity of both classical and contemporary appraoches within social and political thought, from critical theory to neofunctionalism, postmodernism, the sociology of knowledge, feminist approaches, marxism, hermeneutics, and so on.17 Social theory thus seems to be a very general label that covers all varieties of theoretically oriented thought within the social sciences. Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl (2004) defend the usability of the neologism Sozialtheorie (‘social theory’) in German discussion. Interestingly, they see Sozialtheorie as a convenient label precisely due to its wide range. According to Joas and Knöbl, social theories are not defined by belonging to any single discipline, such as sociology (in fact, Joas and Knöbl count such strands as structuralism and pragmatism among social theories), since they cover all kinds of general claims about the regularities of social life, which depart from the individualistic premises of economics, pshycology, and political thought, for example. Accordingly, Joas


‘The starting point of all social formations can only be the reciprocal effect between person to person’ (GSG 6, p. 208). It is only the reciprocal determination that creates ‘an inner bond’ between individuals (GSG 6, p. 209; PM, p. 175), amounting to being-with instead of sheer contiguity.


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and Knöbl hold that the term Sozialtheorie may not only help to bridge the gap between empirical and theoretical work but also facilitate discussion between different theoretical approaches (Ibid., p. 9–11). Joas and Knöbl prefer the notion of social theory above all to the label Gesellschaftstheorie (‘theory of society’). Unlike Gesellschaftstheorie, Sozialtheorie is not tied to any nation-state-based, territorial social order and is devoid of the ‘critical’ normative dimensions of the first as well (ibid., 11). I too see that it is useful to distinguish social theory from theory of society, something that is not usually done in Anglo-Saxon discourses. In fact, more often than not, in English, the notion of social theory includes also theories of society. However, unlike Joas and Knöbl, I do not suggest that we substitute the notion of social theory for theory of society. On the contrary, following Gesa Lindemann (2006; 2008), I think that the two can be seen as two independent genres of sociological theory. Social theory and theory of society are distinguished from one another first and foremost in terms of their object. What defines social theory/Sozialtheorie for Lindemann is the problem of the social. Social theory deals with the basic assumptions of sociological research, such as the nature of social phenomena and the question of what should be the key concepts in grasping the social–social facts, action, interaction, communication, and so on. Theory of society/Gesellschaftstheorie, in turn, pertains according to Lindemann to ‘society’ as a whole and its integration, structures, transformations, and so on (Lindemann, 2006, p. 83; 2008, pp. 339–40). Lindemann further separates social theory and theory of society from what she calls Theorien begrenzter Reichweiter (literally ‘limited-range theories’) by drawing loosely from Robert Merton’s notion of ‘middlerange theories’. They are theories concerned with specific social phenomena such as work, education, consumption, environmental issues, health, crime, housing, and so on. Unlike social theory, the theories of specific social phenomena do not ask the nature of the social, but are rather already conditioned by such reflections. And, unlike theory of society, they do not intend to cover the whole society, but explore a more limited segment of social reality. As such, the limited-range theories nonetheless are highly significant for the development of theories about society, in that the latter often build upon these theories and try to integrate them with an overview of a specific historical society (Lindemann, 2006, p. 83; 2008, pp. 339–40). The differences between these three types of theories – social theory, theory of society, and the theories of the specialty areas throughout sociology – could be further clarified by drawing on the analytical




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distinction between ‘general theory’ and ‘research theory’ that Arto Noro (2000) has suggested. Noro’s concepts are indebted to Ken Menzies’ notions of ‘theoretician’s theory’ and ‘researcher’s theory’. To put it bluntly, social theory and theory of society can be regarded as ‘general’ theories, in that they deal with problems of constitution, social theory with that of the social, and theory of society with that of society. Although they may make use of the results of empirical research, they are not immediately connected to or dependent on any empirical evidence. Research theories, by contrast, are either built upon the results of some empirical data or are used precisely to interpret such results (Noro, 2000; 2007, pp. 159–60). In fact, it would be perfectly possible to term what Lindemann calls limited-range theories as ‘research theories’. To the genres of general theory and research theory Noro adds a third type, Zeitdiagnose, or ‘diagnosis of the times’. It seeks to answer questions such as ‘Who are we?’ and ‘What is our own time?’ The epochal interpretations by the classics, such as Simmel’s ‘the tragedy of culture’, Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of rationality, and Durkheim’s ‘anomie’, as well as some of the most salient themes in contemporary sociology, like Ulrich Beck’s diagnosis of ‘risk society’, theory of ‘reflexive modernization’ by Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, and Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of ‘liquid modernity’, can be regarded as examples of Zeitdiagnose. According to Noro (2000), these diagnoses are not ‘scientific’ theories in the sense of being empirically refutable or verifiable. On the contrary, the diagnoses of the times have their own rationality, determined, for instance, by matters of plausibility, insight, and internal coherence (Reese-Schäfer, 1996; Noro, 2000). The genre boundary between the diagnoses of the times and the theories of society may not always appear very clear. For example, to some extent the aforementioned diagonses by Simmel, Weber, and Durkheim of their times have indeed been read and utilized as theories of society by later generations of scholars. However, on a principal level, one could pinpoint at least three crucial differences between the two genres. First, the genres have a different relation to time. While the diagnosis of the times always has an innate relationship to the present (it is a diagnosis of our time), this does not hold true for all theories of society. On the contrary, some theories of society come across as almost ahistorical in character. They propose how society in general is constituted, not only the one that we have presently. Diagnoses of the times, by contrast, precisely set out to describe the specific situation of society today. Furthermore, many diagnoses of our time not only tie themselves closely to the present but characteristically perceive time and


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the present within a framework of revolutions. It is typical for these diagnoses to envision the birth of a new era: an epoch is just about to end and we are thus facing the transition to a new one. Moreover, often the change of an epoch is pictured in ‘monothematic’ terms (Joas, 2008)–that is, by crystallizing the present society or era to a single theme. While some diagnoses claim that we live in an age of information society, others contend it to be the risk society, disciplinary societies, or societies of control; or they claim that we have entered an era of postmodernity, late modernity, reflexive modernity, liquid modernity, and so on. Besides the accusation of one-sidedness – that is, of oversimplifying the complex nature of social life by taking up one single theme and making it a ruling one–and the challenge of inflation that any assertions of the birth of a whole new era are bound to meet (after all, not every year can mark the beginning of a new epoch), what is equally problematic with many of the diagnoses is that they tend to be allencompassing, almost totalizing, in their claims. According to Beck, for example, all modern certainties and traditions become problematized and lose their hold in risk societies. The second difference between the diagnosis of the times and the theory of society has to do with how each regards the present. The diagnoses of the times typically tend to pathologize the present. Analogous to the medical meaning of the term, in Zeitdiagnose the metaphor of ‘diagnosis’ refers to the identifying of a ‘condition’ – that is, a disorder, problem, or fault in ccontemporary society – and the nature or cause of it. Furthermore, diagnoses also tend to prescribe something of a treatment or therapy that would cure the disorder or relieve the symptoms. While the same may hold true for some theories of society, the tendency to pathologize the present is nevertheless not a genre-typical feature. The third difference between the diagnoses of the times and the theories of society is to some extent related to the first one. It concerns the scale or scope of their accounts. Many theories of society not only present themselves as somewhat ahistorical and eternal but also claim universality. When Simmel proposes that society consists of relations of reciprocal effect, he is not speaking of any particular society but of society in general. Near the end of Soziologie, he suggests that the social relation is a general mode of being for humans: ‘Mankind has created societalization [Vergesellschaftung] as its form of life’ (GSG 11, p. 858). This is not to say that Simmel would think that Homo sapiens is a social species out of logical or even historical necessity. On the contrary, it is a contingent fact that could also be otherwise, Simmel maintains: ‘Human species could just as well have been unsociable [ungesellig]’




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(GSG 11, p. 858). This kind of universality hardly applies to the diagnoses of the times. Although sometimes they mistakenly tend to generalize the modernization that has taken place in Western societies as a universal and commanding process that applies to all societies (by assuming, for example, that the same changes that the Western countries have gone through will eventually take place in the non-Western countries as well), diagnoses of the times are nevertheless typically more particular in their claims. They concern themselves with particular societies, not only in a historical sense, but in a geographical sense as well. For the non-academic audience, the diagnoses of our time present probably the most popular face of sociology. However, it is not the diagnoses, but rather the theories of the specialty areas of sociology (‘limited-range theories’ in Lindemann’s terminology), which form the main corpus of ongoing sociological research and discussion. Where does social theory fit in? Basically nowhere. One needs not do any social theory when studying the correlation between tourism and social class, or how school shootings are represented in the mass media. Insofar as everything goes smoothly and without problems within the level of empirical sociological research, social theory does not even come into the picture, as the taken-for-granted nature of events is not problematized.18 Nevertheless, whenever the preconditions – whether of a substantive or methodological nature – of sociology that are taken more or less for granted become problematic, be it because of historical or theoretical developments, social theory becomes highly relevant and even indispensable. In a situation like that, it becomes necessary to take a step back and explore the epistemological and ontological basic assumptions of sociology, the nature of its objects of study, and its key concepts. Thus, social theory thinks what sociology cannot think as an empirical ‘science’. It poses questions that empirical sociological research must deny itself and problematizes preconditions that empirical study is grounded on. To do social theory is to think with sociology, yet not entirely within it and to some extent outside it. In this sense, then, social theory amounts to a philosophy of sociology. As theorizing the constitution of the social, social theory may take us to the vicinity of the metaphysical environment, but the questions it treats are never completely separate from empirical sociological research. The claims of social theory may not always be reduced to testable hypotheses, yet it is possible to establish a dialogue between these claims and empirical analyses. The task of social theory is to create concepts for the uses of sociological analysis and to outline the ontological conditions


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of sociology. And this is what Simmel does by questioning the selfexplanatory and self-evident nature of the social as a property. Instead of relying on its assumed immediate explanatory value, he addresses the issues of what and how the social is. By drawing on the distinction between social theory, theory of society, theories of the special areas throughout sociology, and the diagnosis of the times, in this book I deal above all with Simmel’s social theory as a line of thought irreducible to his views of society as a whole (e.g., the relation of society and the individual, the idea of mature money economy as the basic structure of modern society, etc.), his analyses of individual social phenomena (such as fashion, secrecy, sociability, money, the meal, etc.), and his diagnoses of modernity (e.g., the idea of the growing separation of subjective and objective culture and the view of modernization as a process of increasing differentiation). The exploration focuses on how Simmel treats the constitution of the social and the fundamental presuppositions, key concepts, and basic assumptions of sociological reflection. This narrow focus separates my approach substantially from the existing studies written in English that take Simmel’s social theory as their object. For example, Nicholas J. Spykman’s famous The Social Theory of Georg Simmel ([1925] 2004), the first monograph ever written on Simmel’s social theory in English, and David Frisby’s Sociological Impressionism: A Reassessment of Georg Simmel’s Social Theory (1981) and Simmel and Since: Essays on Georg Simmel’s Social Theory (1992), do not treat Simmel’s social theory only in the narrow sense of Sozialtheorie. Rather, these discuss themes that concern Simmel’s analyses of specific social phenomena, diagnoses of modern culture, and theorizations about the whole of society, such as his theorizing on money, his conception of modernization as the process of increasing social differentiation, and his view of the mature money economy as the prevailing organization of modern society.

Sociological culture What unifies Simmel’s varying theorization under the rubric of ‘social theory’ in spite of their remarkably diverse objects, themes, and perspectives? To put it simply: a certain mode of thought, a method of approach, or a form of questioning. What the various reflections have in common could be termed, crudely, sociological culture – as analogous to what Simmel called ‘philosophical culture’. Namely, in the introduction to the compilation of essays, Philosophische Kultur (‘Philosophical Culture’) published in 1911, Simmel maintains that what different




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philosophical schools and doctrines have in common is not, or at least not solely, their content, object of study, certain dogmas, or results. Rather, what is more decisive is the fact they share a ‘specific spiritual attitude to the world and life, a functional form and manner of picking things and treating them innerly’ (GSG 14, p. 162). Hence, Simmel is using the word ‘culture’ in a very specific sense here, as referring to attitudes and to ways of thinking and doing things. At the outset, a philosophical culture is not built upon a system of dogmas or specific theories but is to be found in the ‘thoroughly spiritual relation with everything that exists’ expressed in heterogeneous individual variants (GSG 14, p. 165).19 For Simmel, the spiritual relation is characterized above all in philosophy’s effort to ‘think without presuppositions’ (GSG 14, p. 13; GSG 6, p. 9), on the one hand, and in its bids to grasp the totality of things on the other (GSG 6, p. 9; GSG 14, pp. 35–36).20 As regards Simmel’s social theory, I think it is possible to outline something of a sociological culture in which his theorizations contribute to. This is past Simmel’s specifications of the three different sociological approaches to the problem of the relation between the individual and society in Grundfragen der Soziologie, which Gregor Fitzi (2002, pp. 294–5) has interpreted as sketching the sociological culture of Simmel’s day. The first of them is ‘general sociology’, which studies the societally formed historical life and the problem of the relation between the individual and the social level (Niveauproblem) – the ‘social’ being understood here as referring to the collective behaviour of a group or a mass (GSG 16, p. 82, see also 79–80). The second one is ‘pure sociology’ (the sociology for Simmel), which he defines as the study of the social as such as it is actualized in the forms of reciprocal effects between individuals (GSG 16, p. 82). The third type is ‘philosophical sociology’ which, reminiscent of how Simmel defines philosophy in the preface to Philosophie des Geldes, is located both below the lower boundary and beyond the upper boundary of sociology as an exact science. Whereas the first equals something like the epistemology of sociology, the latter equals the metaphysics of sociology (GSG 16, pp. 84–5). While presenting three distinct perspectives on the social world, what these different sociologies nonetheless have in common for Simmel is a similar concern with the individual versus society problem. It is that shared preoccupation that makes them elements of the same sociological culture. I commence from the view that besides the sociological culture of these three sociologies, it is also possible to delineate the sociological culture that Simmel’s own theorizations about the social contribute to. This is what the present study aims to reconstruct. It seeks to examine


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the manner in which Simmel’s texts deal with the conditions and basic assumptions of sociological reflection: the problem of the constitution of the social, the manner of approaching and conceptualizing the social, the relation of the social and the non-social, the social and the individual, as well as the sociological and philosophical. Simmel does not regard the social as a safe and self-evident property, but questions its very nature. Hence, ‘sociological culture’ is understood here in a very narrow and specific sense. It does not refer to a sociological conception or sociological reflections of culture (i.e., ‘sociology of culture’ or ‘cultural sociology’) any more than to the characteristics of sociology as a discipline (i.e., the culture of sociologists), but designates an attitude, a custom, a convention, and a practice of thinking and doing things – in this case, theorizing the social.

The social – a porous, contested or family resemblance concept? Notwithstanding the attempt to argue for the vitality of Simmel’s social theory, his work is not discussed in this book in order to reach a definite, commonly accepted definition for the social. On the contrary, by drawing on the idea of ‘porous concepts’, introduced to philosophical discussion originally in the 1940s by Friedrich Waismann (1968), I commence from the view that, in the last instance, the social can be seen as a porous concept. With porosity, Waismann refers to the ‘open texture’ of concepts (ibid.: 37), arguing that ‘most of our empirical concepts are not delimited in all possible directions’ (ibid.: 38). For me, the social is one such concept, all the more so because it is not only an empirical but also a technical one.21 It is not possible to define it with absolute precision: when we use the notion, in some sense we limit of its some directions, yet there always remains others in which the concept is not defined. In Über sociale Differenzierung (‘On Social Differentiation’), Simmel himself subscribes to such a view. He writes of the notion of society that, ‘In general, I believe that however simple and coherent definition of society one may provide, there will always remain a borderline area which the area demarcated by our conception of society does not cover’ (GSG 2, p. 132). It indeed seems to be much easier to list all the things that the social is not than to define the concept in positive terms. Typically in sociology, the social has been separated from the natural, the psychological, the economical, the political, and so on. It is important to note, however, that the ‘porosity’ of the social is not necessarily a defect in the concept any more than it results from




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a failure of sociologists to grasp it. I would argue instead that porosity is a semantic characteristic of the social; it is not a negative but a positive component of the notion. Porosity does not render the social conceptually unusable. On the contrary, it is only when we ignore or deny its existence that we run into analytical problems (Gustafsson, 2001). Nor does porosity paralyze sociological theory. One might even argue that it is at least partly because the social is a porous concept that sociological theory is ceaselessly kept in motion. If there were no gulf between interaction and structure, for instance, then, as Latour has claimed, ‘Sociological theory would find itself in the rather odd situation of having tried to provide ever more refined solutions to a non-existent problem’ (1996b, p. 232). Another way of approaching the deep-laden conceptual ambiguity of the social is to look at the prevailing disagreement as to its correct use. By drawing on the notion of ‘essentially contested concepts’, coined by the English philosopher W. B. Gallie (1956), Niels Albertsen and Bülent Diken (2003:1) have specified the social as an ‘essentially contested concept’. According to Albertsen and Diken, the social qualifies as a contested concept since ‘we have one concept but multitudinous ways of describing and specifying what it is’ (ibid.). That is, there is ‘no clearly definable general use [of the concept] [...] which can be set up as the standard use’ (Gallie, 1956, p. 168). It is rather that each tradition of sociology specifies its own functions and characteristics to the term, which, more often than not, also receives these specifications only in relation to other ways of defining the concept. Using the concept is hence always a matter of using it against other uses and the criteria applied to it (cf. ibid., pp. 171–2). There is yet a third perspective from which the notion of the social can be approached. To draw on the well-known notion by Ludwig Wittgenstein, this is to view the social as a ‘family resemblance’ concept. What distinguishes the idea of family resemblance from that of porous – and essentially contested – concepts is that it does not claim that there is a single essence to the social. Rather, it suggests that the social has many notions. We can think of here, again, the yawning gap between social interaction and social structure. Against the advocates of social structure, interactionists state that interaction does not merely take place in a ready-made social world but significantly creates and constructs the social. The social is not always already preexistent, but it is enacted through interactions. The people who plead for social structures, in contrast, criticize interactionism as hardly covering all social life. Interaction does not construct the social anew each time.


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Something must and does exist prior to it; it takes place in a setting that precedes it.22 It can be argued that it is not the same notion of the social that the interactionists and the advocates of social structure are referring to. Instead, they adhere to two different notions, to two different family members relative to two different language games. The one apprehends the social as a process, in terms of dynamic and largely contingent living forms resulting from interaction, whereas the other perceives it as a fairly stable, fixed, and durable stucture to a large extent independent of individuals. Later, I will assert that Simmel introduces a divide into two notions of the social, a divide not that different from the distinction between interaction and structure. The one refers to the primordial reciprocity between individuals, the other to objective and hyper-existing social forms. What makes Simmel’s work especially interesting is that he does not treat them entirely apart from one another, but investigates their relation by looking at how the objective social formations independent of individuals emerge from the dynamic reciprocal relations between them. These institutionalized and stabilized forms may appear independent from the minuscule and dynamic relations between individuals, but owe both their emergence and existence to them.




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3

Simmel’s work does not lend itself to any easy summary; it is just too rich, rhizomic, inconsistent, and multifaceted for that. Landmann (1968, p. 8) has felicitously stated that ‘Simmel’s thinking is kindled by the variety of phenomena’. He treats topics as diverse as sociability, the picture frame, the adventurer, money, religion, the ruin, female culture, the landscape, death, sociology of the senses, and so on. Simmel is also consistently reluctant to express his philosophical position. Perhaps this is because Simmel is constantly uncovering connections between objects. Given that he is after relations, Simmel is always on the move. After all, one cannot trace relations by being fixed in one position. Relations are ways of travelling, of weaving even the most distant objects to one another. Ultimately, it is by connecting seemingly separate objects that Simmel also tries to make his way to a synthesis and get a glimpse of the totality of things. For Simmel, the totality of the world does not mean absolute, substantial unity, but endless entities connected to one another by reciprocal relations. The motion of Simmel’s thinking has been well observed in the secondary literature, be it by emphasizing his ‘essayistic’ style, his ‘impressionism’, ‘relativism’, or ‘vitalism’.23 A statement from Siegfried Kracauer, one of the earliest scholars who tried to clarify the principles of Simmel’s thought, is emblematic of the prevailing view. Kracauer writes that, with Simmel, ‘Everything shimmers, everything flows, everything is ambiguous, everything converges in a shifting form’ (cit. and trans. Frisby, 1981, p. 98). In their being, language and thought are for Simmel something ‘living’ (Lebendig) (Christian, 1978, p. 50; see GSG 16, p. 258; GSG 13, p. 54), not systems of meanings and propositions. In this chapter, I sketch the key ideas and philosophical background of Simmel’s relationist and processualist social theory. The discussion


Relationality, Life and Philosophy

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is organized under three main themes. The first one is Simmel’s theory of relations. He conceives entities as consisting of relations. This kind of ‘relationism’ penetrates almost all of Simmel’s work. Its relative is Simmel’s ‘relativism’, which applies the idea of relationality to truth and value. The second theme is Simmel’s life-philosophy/Lebensphilosophie. He regards the process of life/Leben as not only characterizing but also engendering the things there are. In the last instance, the social too appears for him under the sign of life: in Soziologie, Simmel asserts that the social relation is always originally a ‘fluctuating, constantly developing life-process’ (GSG 11, p. 659). The third main theme is Simmel’s view of philosophy itself as process. Ultimately, Simmel conceives philosophy in terms of life. For him, philosophy is not a system of propositions, but a process; it is an activity, something that one does.

Theory of relations In his sociology, Simmel rejects individualistic and substantialist perspectives and focuses on relations. In his view, the social cannot be grasped on the basis of atom-like individuals or a society that would contain the individuals. It is not the isolated individual any more than an allencompassing society that provides the basis for Simmel’s thought of the social. For him, the social amounts to relations between individuals. In Simmel’s view, sociology should first and foremost be a study of relations and their forms. The individual itself is only an intersection, a crossroads, ‘the place in which social threads tie themselves’ (der Ort, an dem sich sociale Fäden verknüpfen) (GSG 11, p. 14). The individual is thus not an absolute, final element, but an ‘assembled being’ (zusammengesetzte Wesen) (GSG 9, p. 323), traversed and given to us by a specific set of relations. Simmel suggests that the more sociological a concept is, the less it is determined by a substance or by an individual, concerning rather a sheer ‘form of relation’ (Beziehungsform). According to Simmel, in purely sociological notions it is the form of the relation that determines or stands for its content or individual bearer. While in our daily use of language ‘domination’, for example, is conceived on the one hand as a property or action of the one who is dominating and on the other as an expression of the territory on which domination fulfils itself, Simmel insists that domination is first and foremost a relation between the dominating and the dominated. Overall, the purest sociological notion for Simmel is ‘relationship’ (Verhältnis). Of course, we may use the term ‘relationship’ to refer to a specific kind of relationship. A relationship may be something that lovers ‘have’, for example, or something that


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they ‘are’ as a sociological unit. In German, one can even say that someone is my Verhältnis, ‘affair’ (GSG 11, p. 710, note 1). However, the notion of relationship is not limited to any one single type of relation as such. It can stand for and represent any relation. No relation is for Simmel an arrow with only one direction. He insists that even the relationships that seem to go only one way involve reciprocity. In other words, Simmel considers relations as being reciprocal by nature. According to him, every sociological formation and unit is based on interaction or exchange. No individual subject can be given the first place in a relationship, since every cause is already an effect. It is thus the relation that makes the individual a subject. Individuals and substances are crossed by a network of relations; they stand at the intersection of relations and are constituted by them. Therefore, instead of starting from beings or substances, for Simmel, sociology essentially begins with a theory of relations. As an example of the primacy of reciprocity, we can take Simmel’s theorizing on the ‘gift’ (Geschenk) or ‘giving’ (Geben). Whereas Marcel Mauss, in his famous essay, The Gift (1954), pictures the reciprocity of the gift in the ‘exchange’, as the interrelatedness of the obligations to give, receive, and return, Simmel sees that already the sheer act of giving involves reciprocity. In Simmel’s view, reciprocity does not require an actual quid pro quo to fulfil itself; an individual can already have an effect by merely being affected. Thus what at first sight appears in giving as a one-way effect is in fact a reciprocal relationship. This is because the receiver already has a special effect upon the donor simply by having been given the gift: The way he receives the gift, gratefully or ungratefully, by waiting for it or having become surprised by it, being happy with the gift or unhappy with it, feeling either elevated by it or humiliated by it – all this has a crucial effect (even if, naturally, one that cannot be expressed with clear concepts and measures) on the donor. Therefore, every giving is reciprocity of effects between the donor and the receiver. (GSG 11, p. 663, note 1) Giving cannot be conceived without postulating at the same time an idea of reciprocity (Papilloud, 2004, p. 235). Not only in terms of the actual exchange of gifts, like Mauss thinks, Simmel suggests that the very act of giving already involves reciprocity, as intimated above. Every giving is a give-and-take relation, which binds the donor and the donee closely to one another.24


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Reciprocal effect/Wechselwirkung, the key notion of Simmel’s sociology, is also the basis of his relationism. By drawing from Graham Harman (2009, p. 127), relationism could be specified as a view according to which entities are defined by their relations, not by any hidden essence. So, for relationism, the more interconnected things are, the realer they become. We can take sensuous objects as an example. Simmel writes in a piece entitled, ‘Religion and the Contradictions of Life’: A physical object becomes real for us by appealing to different senses simultaneously; we would not call a ghost an object if it were only visible and not tangible. It would have to be perceivable, at least potentially, by different senses; the greater the number of senses that can locate it, the more objective, definitive, and fixed it becomes [...]. (GSG 7, p. 296; REL, p. 37) In other words, the greater the number of senses that a physical object relates to, the realer it appears to us. We normally do not doubt the existence of a table because a table appeals to all our senses. There’s a link or a relation not only between the table and our sight but also between the table and our touch, hearing, smell, and even taste. We can see the table’s shape, size, and colour. It gives a knocking sound when we rap our knuckles on it. At close distance, we are even able to smell the wood on a table that has just been crafted or the lacquer on one recently varnished. We may also taste the wood of the table (though gnawing at tables may earn one some bewildered looks at social gatherings). Even if one or two of our senses are deprived, temporally or permanently, or suspected to deceive us (for example, the room might be so dark that we cannot see the table), it is unlikely that they all would do so simultaneously (as we still might barge into the table, for instance, when stumbling in the room without light). In any case, the main point is that visibility, tangibility, audibility, and so on exist only as relations to us. They do not reside in things themselves. They would not appear without us, without connecting to our senses. But they do not rely solely on us, either. We could not perceive the hardness, the knocking sound, the grain, the oak, the smell, or the taste (or at least they would not be ‘real’) without the thing affording such sensations. By taking up a concept employed by Quentin Meillassoux (2008), the idea that we cannot grasp an object that would not always/already be related to a subject can be called ‘correlationism’. Meillassoux describes correlationism as a view according to which we can have access neither to the subject nor to the world/object as apart from one another, only




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in relation to one another. He argues that modern thought is predominantly correlationist. Modern philosophy gives primacy to the relation over the terms related. Meillassoux traces the correlationist paradigm back to Kant’s Copernican revolution: if ‘up until Kant, one of the main problems of philosophy was to think substance, [...] ever since Kant, it has consisted in trying to think the correlation’ (ibid., p. 6). Clearly, given his roots in Kant’s transcendental philosophy, Simmel is a correlationist in the sense just specified above. For Simmel, we cannot know anything of the world that would go beyond our relation to it. In Simmel’s thinking, the conscious subject has the powers to organize the world; he emphasizes the forms of cognition and the activity of the subject constituting the world. Simmel opposes naïve realism, which sees knowledge as a sheer copy or a projection of reality. For example, in Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie (GSG 9, p. 229; ‘The Problems of the Philosophy of History’), he refutes historical realism, which assumes to be able to grasp the past ‘as it really was’. In contrast to the realist approach, Simmel treats the question of the possibility of historical knowledge as a question of the possibility of a form of knowledge conditioned by certain a prioris of experience: ‘How does the raw material of immediate experience come to be the theoretical structure which we call history?’ That is, as nature is for Kant a unity produced by our intellect out of scattered sensuous perceptions, for Simmel the knowing subject organizes singular events and their contents into a historical series. History is thus conceived by Simmel as a form grounded on the a priori conditions of individual experience. However, Simmel’s relationism is not only a correlationist claim about the interrelatedness of the subject and the world, thinking and being. It entails aspects that are not redubile to correlationism but go beyond it. Ultimately, Simmelian relationism perceives the real as relations. Reality is relational: everything is relative to everything else. This holds true as much for the natural world devoid of subject as for the domain of culture and the social terrain. It is only because of the interconnectedness of all things that there can appear something like a world, Simmel suggests. As he puts it in Soziologie, ‘We could not say that the world is one, unless its every element interacted somehow with every one else’ (GSG 11, p. 18). This suggests that Simmelian relationism relies on a sense of wholeness. Ultimately, it is something of a pantheistic view concerning the whole universe, not only the whole of society. What is characteristic of Simmel’s conception of reality is that he does not view it as ‘a substantial, absolute oneness’ (GSG 22, p. 872), but as a manifold,


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as a unity of individual, separate elements woven together by relations of reciprocity. Simmelian relationism regards the real as consisting in dynamic relations: he dissolves all substantial elements into reciprocal effects and processes. Accordingly, serving him initially as a sociological concept, the concept of Wechselwirkung grows in Simmel’s work into a broad ‘metaphysical principle’ (GSG 20, p. 304) that concerns the whole of reality. To quote Simmel’s words in Über sociale Differenzierung, relationism is a ‘regulative world principle’ according to which ‘everything interacts in some way with everything else’ (GSG 2, p. 130). The orientation towards the totality of the world is a logical outcome of Simmel’s relationistic principle. If philosophy is to be genuinely relationist, it cannot be separated from a certain conception of totality for Simmel. Philosophy does not concern itself only with the fragmentary, but tries to strip things off their isolated being and connect them to a wider network of relations. It is among Simmel’s ‘fundamental aims’, as claimed by Kracauer (1995, p. 233), ‘to rid every spiritual/intellectual [geistige] phenomenon of its false being-unto-itself and show how it is embedded in the larger contexts of life’. Simmel stresses the reciprocal interdependence of phenomena, the connectedness of every element of the world to every other (e.g., GSG 6, p. 120–1; PM, pp. 118–9). In the Simmelian relationistic universe, there is no outside to relations, for, as Kracauer (1995, p. 250) notes, ‘there is nothing absolute that exists unconnected to other phenomena and that possesses validity in and for itself’.25 This suggests that entities are not complete in themselves, but enacted in and by relations; influences and effects do not distort a thing but participate in making the thing what it is. Nevertheless, to be precise, as already the idea that the world’s ‘wholeness’ is a product of relations intimated, Simmelian relationism does not concern merely the outer effects of other entities. Their internal makeup is also relational. This is to say that any whole consists in the relations of parts. In Soziologie, Simmel asserts that, ‘in empirical sense, [a] unity is nothing but interaction of elements [Wechselwirkung von Elementen]’. An organic body, for example, is, according to Simmel, made whole by the fact that its organs exchange energies more regularly and intensively with each other rather than with any outer entities (GSG 11, p. 18). In analogous manner, society, as we saw earlier, is for Simmel nothing but ‘reciprocal effects [Wechselwirkungen] of its elements’ (GSG 10, pp. 54–5; GSG 2, p. 130) – that is, a ‘practical association [Verwebung] and functional unity of the many [der Vielen]’ (GSG 11, p. 632). What must be emphasized here is that the very divide into an ‘inside’ and an




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‘outside’ is produced by the relations of reciprocal effects. The boundary between the inside and the outside is not fixed and unchangeable, but subject to alterations and reconfigurations. To go back to the example of the body, the ‘cyborg’, as an assemblage of machinic and ‘natural’ elements, radically unsettles the usually taken-for-given divide between the interior and the exterior of the human body. But one does not even need to go to science fiction here. The border that demarcates one’s body from its outside is reconfigured already by the use of such mundane things as pieces of clothing or glasses. When worn, they are no longer ‘objects’ separate from the subject, but are rather incoproprated with one’s body, and as a subject, one places oneself in them. What is more, everyday instruments like glasses are not only an extension of the body, but an integral part of it. In fact, to some extent the supposedly exterior elements such as a pair of glasses may even define – in a very Spinozan sense – what the body is overall capable of. ‘Able-bodiedness’ is not an intrinsic property, but in many cases it is achieved with the support of various prostheses, as Karen Barad (2007, p. 158) has underlined. Glasses literally ‘give’ vision for a person with poor eyesight. Without them, one is lacking sight. Glasses are, as it were, a second pair of eyes without which the birthright eyes cannot see. Simmel contends that, like the science of biological life did not gain a solid ground until it abjured the approach on life as an ‘undivided phenomenon’ (einheitliches Phänomen) and focused on the microscopic processes and interactions between organs and cells, so the study of society would remain rough and undeveloped were it to examine ‘society’ as an undivided and hypostasized entity (GSG 11, pp. 24–5). It is only when society is dissolved into complex constitutive relations that sociology may hope to gain a solid foundation. By taking up the notion of the ‘body without organs’ (BwO) by Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 150), we can extend this idea further, claiming that what would remain of a society when one took away the ‘organs’ and their interaction would equal zero, an empty ‘society without organs’ with a zero degree of difference.26 Therefore the starting point for the study of society, as we have seen Simmel to insist, has to be the relations of reciprocal effect between its elements. According to such a view, the part and the whole do not exist as separate terms but, to quote Robert Cooper (2005, p. 1698), each implies the other ‘in a relationship of betweenness’. The opposition of relationism, to put it bluntly, is substantialism. While for relationism everything is relational, substantialist thought considers the world in terms of categories and things (Emirbayer, 1997; Cooper, 2005; Whitehead, 1985). Sociology seems to be predominantly


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substantialist. It typically conceives the world as an aggregate of clearcut entities with exact boundaries. The three main units are individuals, groups, and society, each of which we are persuaded to think of as ‘self-consistent and self-organizing’ structures or ‘naturally integrated forms’ (Cooper, 2005, p. 1689). Groups are considered to consist of selfmaintained individuals, and both groups and individuals, in turn, are framed by a society that is pictured as an overarching container of all human actions. More specifically, Mustafa Emirbayer (1997) has identified three different versions of substantialism in social scientific thought. First of all, according to Emirbayer, we can think of certain theories of social action, such as rational-actor and norm-based models, as being ultimately substantialist by nature. In the last instance, they depict individuals as ‘self-propelling, self-subsistent entities’. The only difference is in the way they model the action of individuals. It is either that individuals aspire to rational goals (rational-actor approach) or act in conformity with social norms and ideals (the model of normfollowing). (Ibid., p. 284). Secondly, various forms of holism and structuralism, such as neo-functionalism, system theories, and many historical-comparative analyses offer a quite different version of substantialism. According to Emirbayer, they posit self-subsistent ‘societies’, ‘structures’, or ‘social systems’ as the primary elements of the social world (ibid., p. 285). A third version of substantialism mentioned by Emirbayer is variable-based analysis. It ‘detaches elements (substances with variable attributes) from their spatiotemporal contexts, analyzing them apart from their relations with other elements within fields of mutual determination and flux’ (ibid., p. 288). Hence, variable-based analysis tends to ignore the embeddedness of actors within dynamic relationships while treating them – with their variable attributes – as primary units of analysis and thus as ‘substances’ of certain kind. Simmel regards relationism as a defining feature of modern thought. Modern thought forms, as he writes in the second volume of Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, are characterized by a relationist (though Simmel calls it ‘relativist’; I shall discuss the issue of the relation and difference between relationism and relativism in the next excursuslike sub-section in little more detail) tendency towards the ‘dissolution of substance into functions, of the solid and the lasting into the flux of restless development’. Simmel regards relationism ultimately as a reaction to a world that has become relative. For example, in Philosophie des Geldes, Simmel suggests that the relationist worldview is




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internally connected to the development of the modern money economy. He thinks that the pervasiveness and growing importance of money increases the relativity of the (social) world: ‘The more the life of society becomes dominated by monetary relationships, the more the relativistic character of existence finds its expression in conscious life’. Hence, ‘the relati[on]istic view of the world seems to express the momentary relationship of adjustment on the part of our intellect’ (GSG 6, p. 716; PM, p. 512). In addition to the significance of money, the preponderance of means over ends also increases the relationality of (social) reality. According to Simmel, it is characteristic of modernity that individuals are surrounded by a whole multiplicity of means ‘in which the most important means are constituted by other means and these again by others’ (GSG 10, p. 176; SHN, p. 3). The individuals are ‘born into a teleological system composed of many links’ – that is, into ‘an ever-increasing infrastructure of means’ (GSG 6, pp. 297–8; PM, p. 231). Our strivings in life take the form of long and complex teleological chains in which it becomes ever more difficult to keep the ultimate goal in sight. Consequently, our consciousness is focused on the means, whereas the final ends lose in significance correspondingly (GSG 10, pp. 176–7).

Relationism and relativism What I have just called ‘relationism’ Simmel typically furnishes with the label ‘relativism’. Nevertheless, since the meaning of the term relativism in the common scientific and philosophical parlance is something quite different from Simmel’s usage of it, I prefer the term relationism. With the notion of relativism, Simmel refers not to the incommensurability of views but to the idea that things are defined by their relations. Nonetheless, when it comes to his conception of cultural forms, Simmel possesses a view akin to what is usually meant by the notions of ‘conceptual relativism’ or ‘ontological relativism’ – namely, that reality is dependent on the chosen conceptual system. Simmel regards different cultural forms such as science, art, religion, and economy as not competing with, let alone being capable of refuting, one another. Rather, each provides one perspective to reality that is not annullable or correctable from the viewpoint of any other form (GSG 16, p. 238). Take science and religion, for example. Scientific criticism can cast doubt on some specific contents of religious faith, such as faith cure, resurrection, the ability to walk on water, even the existence of God. But it is not capable of refuting religion in whole, as a form. This is because religion


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there clearly can be no conflict whatever between religiosity and science. For on the one hand, the latter is itself simply a way of comprehending the world and our existence in it; both religiosity and science are able to perceive and interpret life in its entirety, and the two are just as incapable of conflicting with each other, or even crossing paths, as are cognition and matter in Spinoza’s system, because each already expresses the whole of existence in its own particular language. (REL, p. 5) What Simmel maintains in the passage admittedly comes close to the common understanding of relativism. However, I think a much more apt term would be perspectivism or absolutism. After all, Simmel does not claim that the perspectives of religion and science would be ‘relative’ to one another. Quite the contrary, as we can see in the above passage, he denies the possibility of any relation between them. Religion and science are ‘incapable of [...] crossing paths’. As a whole, their perspectives are not relative to one another. Rather, each one ‘perceive[s] and interpret[s] life in its entirety’, expressing ‘the whole of existence in its own particular language’. Thus the convenience of the term absolutism: the standpoint of each appearing as absolute. The term perspectivism is equally convenient: the real can only be approached from perspectives incommensurable with one another. I am not suggesting that all the commentators who have called Simmel a relativist are wrong. There is without doubt a sense of relativism in Simmel, but it has to be distinguished not only from his relationism but also from his perspectivism/absolutism. It is quite common in the secondary literature for all these to be covered the same term, be it ‘relativism’, ‘relationalism’, ‘relationism’, ‘relational relativism’, and so on. My suggestion is that if Simmelian relationism amounts to the view that things become realer the more they are connected to others (instead of being realer the less connected they are), we reserve the notion of relativism in Simmel for the extension of this idea to truth and value. Simmel sees the relativity of propositions as the basis of their truth, not as a diminution. As he puts it in Philosophie des Geldes: ‘Relativity does not mean – as in common usage – a diminution of truth, [...]; on the contrary, it is the positive fulfilment and validation of the concept of truth. Truth is valid, not in spite of its relativity but precisely on account of it’ (GSG 6, p. 116; PM, p. 116). So, for Simmel, truth is based


is not organized through the same principles as science. The two have a very different perspective to reality. Therefore, Simmel concludes,


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on relations, not weakened by its relativity. He thinks that every claim is relative; either in ‘a rising or falling series’, as in logical derivation, ‘where every link depends upon another, and a third one is dependent upon it’, or in a circular fashion, so that ‘each part of the circle determines the position of other parts’ (GSG 6, pp. 120–1; PM, p. 119). So, whereas relativism in its conventional form sees the relativity of claims as a diminution of their validity, Simmel, by contrast, sets out to ground that validity upon relations. Therefore Simmelian relativism is to be contrasted sharply with the subjectivism and scepticism commonly associated with the term. By suggesting that all claims are relative, Simmel does not try to undermine their validity – that is, maintain that they are only relative. Nor does he suggest that validity is relative to some frame of reference, such as a system of concepts, culture, language, or a historical situation.27 In other words, his goal is not to loosen the objectivity of singular truths by showing their relativity, but to disclose how truth is founded on relations. This idea could be presented with a formula of the more relative the more true. As Simmel writes in a letter to Heinrich Rickert in 1916, ‘Truth means a relation between contents of which none possesses truth in and by themselves’ – they possess it only in relation to other contents (GSG 23, p. 638). Simmel underscores that his version of relativism is ‘an entirely positive metaphysical worldview’ that has as little to do with scepticism as does Einstein or Max von Laue’s theory of relativity (GSG 23, p. 638). In a short biographical text, we can find Simmel’s grounds for this claim: The recent dissolution of everything substantial, absolute, eternal into the flux of things, into historical mutability, into merely psychological reality is, as it appears to me, secured against an unstable subjectivism and skepticism only if one sets in the place of the substantial fixed values the living reciprocity of elements, which themselves are subject to the same dissolution ad infinitum. The central concepts of truth, value, objectivity, etc. expressed themselves to me as reciprocities, as contents of a relativism that now no longer signified the sceptical dissipation of all that is solid but precisely protection against it via a new concept of solidity. (GSG 20, pp. 304–5)


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His defence of relativism is thus relativistic itself. Of course, if relativist epistemology is to hold, its own truth has to hold the same claim it makes about assertions in general. And it is according to Simmel here where lies the strength of relativism compared to other epistemological principles. While other principles suffer from the difficulty of subjecting


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Only a relativistic epistemology does not claim exemption from its own principle; it is not destroyed by the fact that its validity is only relative. For even if it is valid – historically, factually, psychologically – only in relation and in harmony with other absolute, or substantial principles, its relation to its own opposite is itself only relative. (GSG 6, p. 117; PM, p. 117) Simmel regards relativism as ‘the most appropriate expression of the contemporary contents of science and emotional currents and decisively exclude the opposing world picture’ (GSG 6, p. 13; PM, p. 56). In practice, it does not make a difference whether one thinks ‘that there is an absolute but it can be grasped only by an infinite process, or that there are only relations but that they can only replace the absolute in an infinite process’ (GSG 6, pp. 117–8; PM, p. 117). Either way, we end up with relativism. Interestingly, the quotation also suggests a link between relativism and process: the relativistic dissolution is necessarily ‘an infinite process’ or ‘a never-ending process’ (GSG 6, p. 118; PM, p. 117). It is established on shifting sands: for relativism, truth, value and objectivity appear as reciprocities.

Life-philosophy During the last period of his work, Simmel’s writings express a great concern with metaphysics. Metaphysics becomes Simmel’s main interest after the publication of Soziologie in 1908, but he begins to develop certain themes about metaphysics as early as 1902. That year Simmel published an essay entitled, ‘Tendencies in German Life and Thought Since 1870’, which seeks to unify different threads of German philosophy in a new theory of life expressed in the work of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The crowning achievement of Simmel’s metaphysics is Lebensanchauung, his most beautiful and also most mature book, which he himself called his ‘philosophical testament’. The title of the book, ‘lifeview’, is a modification of Wilhelm Dilthey’s notion of Weltanschauung (‘worldview’) (Kemple, 2007, p. 15). Just as worldview refers to the way one understands the world to be, lifeview amounts to one’s conception of life. The term lifeview has to be understood in


their own content to the judgment they pronounce upon knowledge in general, this does not apply to relativism (GSG 6, p. 116; PM, p. 116). Therefore, Simmel claims, ‘The relativity of things is the only absolute’ (GSG 6, 307; PM, p. 238). To elaborate:


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the most literal sense here: instead of presenting his personal view of life (e.g., good or happy life) or examining specific contents of life, in Lebensanchauung Simmel sets out to view life itself; not only the life of the individual, but life itself as an incessant, continuous flux. Simmel extracts the notion of life/Leben in his own work from the German tradition of life-philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), as well as French vitalism. For Simmel, life is the key category in the modern worldview. Life-philosophy and vitalism are ‘imbued with a modern sense of life’ (GSG 16, pp. 198–9; SC, p. 85). In the essay ‘Platonischer und Moderne Eros’ (trans. ‘Eros, Platonic and Modern’), he states that ‘the dynamic vital character of the modern life-feeling[...] is manifest to us as a form of the movement of life, consumed in a continuous flux in spite of all persistence and faithfulness, and adhering to a rhythm that is always new’ (GSG 20, p. 179; ISF p. 238; translation altered). The actual Lebensphilosophie movement saw its brith in Germany between 1900–1910, but for Simmel the modern notion of life begins to take form as early as Goethe’s lifetime. For Goethe, both nature and human soul emerge from life. He regards both as manifestations of the unity of being–nature in the external dimension and human soul in the internal dimension (GSG 10, p. 131). Yet, in Simmel’s view, the prehistory of the modern notion of life dates back much further than this. It can be situated in a historical succession of basic categories characteristic of each cultural epoch. For Simmel, each epoch is crystallized into a single basic category that does not characterize so much the reality of life in a period as its ‘failures, its longing and its salvation’ and the scope of its thought (GSG 6, pp. 301; PM, pp. 233–4). According to Simmel, Greek philosophy was premised on the concept of substance. All changeability of phenomena was based on static essences, fixed forms reflected in eternally valid concepts (GSG 12, p. 386; GSG 13, p. 53). The Greeks were able to conceive ‘the continuity of life only if the fleetingness of time was supplemented by a solid and constant content’ (GSG 6, p. 301; PM, p. 233).28 For Simmel, the Middle Ages only gave Greek philosophy a Christiantheological colouring by replacing the notion of substance with God and the divine order of things. The thought of the late Renaissance, by contrast, dissolved the static reality into motion. The world was no longer perceived as eternal, static, and fixed, but constantly changing in terms of mechanical movement. In the Renaissance, the decisive form of existence is thus found in mechanism. Knowing the world was no more a matter of revealing logically binding concepts and the metaphysical eternity of substances, but of calculating laws of motion governed by


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causality (GSG 12, p. 386; GSG 13, pp. 53–4). Events were perceived in terms of ‘to-and-fro of matter and energy determined by natural laws’ (GSG 10, p. 122; KaGoe, p. 160). According to Simmel, Kant’s philosophy did not alter this in any significant way, notwithstanding that it conceived of the external world as a representation within the representing subject (GSG 10, pp. 129, 131). The world remained for Kant mechanical movement (GSG 12, pp. 386–7), something ‘external, consisting exclusively of spatial and mechanical relationships’ (GSG 10, p. 131; KaGoe, p. 166). Finally, the ‘philosophy of life’ (Philosophie des Lebens) represents for Simmel the third and most recent stage of Western thought. Retrospectively, the historical trajectory from the category of substance to life via God and mechanism can, in Simmel’s view, be conceptualized as a process of ‘enlivening’ (Verlebendigung) thought. Simmel suggests that, notwithstanding all its incompleteness, the philosophy of life may so far be the purest expression of the ‘enlivening’ of thought and the world it studies (GSG 12, p. 387). Both surprising and unsurprising, it is the names Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Bergson that Simmel mentions here. It is surprising because life-philosophy sprang up only in 1900–1910 and, in addition to Simmel, it is his contemporaries such as Max Scheler, Hermann Keyserling, and Theodor Lessing who are usually named as its key representatives (though Simmel was in correspondence with Scheler and Keyserling, of which the latter was also a close friend of his). So it is only Bergson who belongs to the same era as the philosophy of life movement, as a representative of French vitalism. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were not life-philosophers themselves, only precursors of life-philosophy at the very most. On the other hand, it is not the least bit surprising that Simmel foregrounds their names over his contemporaries’. For the latter are among his usual suspects: it is only the ‘greats’ of philosophy that Simmel mentions by name in his works, while references to contemporaries are almost completely missing. But why does Simmel choose to emphasize Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson? There must be more to it than the sheer fact that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were renowned in his day, and that Bergson very fashionable at the time. And there is. Although the modern notion of life finds expression already in the work of Goethe, according to Simmel it was only Schopenhauer who was the first philosopher to philosophize on life as such (GSG 12, p. 384) – Goethe’s writings lack even the basic intention of philosophy (GSG 10, p. 126; KaGoe, p. 162). Schopenhauer did not examine the value and meaning of this or that experience or aspect of life but the meaning and value of life itself,




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purely as life (GSG 12, p. 384; GSG 16, p. 188). Simmel thinks that this yearning to a final goal and meaning of life is connected to the preponderance of means over ends in modern culture, briefly discussed in the previous section. He sees that not even philosophy has remained unaffected by the general tendency of means gaining preponderance over ends. He takes as his example Kant’s philosophy, which redirected the attention of philosophers from objects – the contents of the world and their being, essence, meaning, and purpose – to our means of knowing them (GSG 12, p. 381). It is in this cultural situation of the growing significance of the means and the corresponding loss of final goals and definite values that there appears the desire for an absolute goal. And, placing life at the heart of his work, Schopenhauer’s philosophy is thus for Simmel ‘the absolute philosophical expression for this inner condition of modern man’ (GSG 10, p. 178; SHN, p. 5). Schopenhauer rejected the possibility of finding any absolute purpose or value outside of life. Life could not obtain any meaning and purpose beyond itself since it was to find everywhere nothing but itself as willing. This folding of life back on itself is for Simmel the source of Schopenhauer’s deep pessimism. As life has no absolute purpose outside itself, ‘the inner rhythm of life appears as an unremitting monotony’ for Schopenhauer (GSG 10, p. 183; GSG 10, p. 8). This monotony leads to ‘the pain of ennui’: ‘If we are occupied by nothing, [...] then we feel, solely and purely, life itself – and exactly this experience causes an unbearable situation’ (GSG 10, p. 183; SHN, p. 9). Thus, for Schopenhauer, so Simmel’s argument goes, the only redemption from this ennui and meaninglessness of life would be the negation of life, Nicht-Leben. Fascinatingly, for Simmel, Nietzsche’s unlimited optimism stems from the exact same source as Schopenhauer’s pessimism: the negation of any absolute goal or purpose outside life. Nietzsche manages to escape the pessimism of a life without meaning through finding the redemption within life itself. He sees the ultimate purpose and absolute value of life in its augmentation. This allows ‘the possibility for saying “yes” to life’. Hereby we can see that Nietzsche operates with a completely different notion of life than Schopenhauer did. Instead of running in monotony, for Nietzsche life appears as a constant drive towards ‘more life’ (mehr Leben) (GSG 10, pp. 377–8). In Nietzsche’s philosophy, Simmel claims, life is seen as ‘an immeasurable sum of powers and potentials which, in themselves, are aimed at the augmentation, intensification, and increased effectiveness of the life process’ (GSG 10, p. 180; SHN, p. 6). Nietzsche’s concept of life presents for Simmel nothing but ‘a


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poetical-philosophical absolutization of the Darwinian idea of evolution’ (GSG 10, p. 179; SHN, p. 6); ‘between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche lies Darwin’ (GSG 10, p. 179; SHN, p. 5). Whereas Goethe appears in Simmel’s work as an exponent of organicism that opposes mechanicist thought, Nietzsche influences significantly Simmel’s notion of life. Simmel subscribes to Nietzsche’s view that life constantly transcends itself. According to Simmel, ‘life is that which at all points wants to go beyond itself, reaching out beyond itself’ (GSG 15, p. 385; RB, p. 57). However, Simmel dispenses with the Nietzschean axiological interpretations. He thinks that life simply cannot exist other than by producing more life. The epithet of ‘more-life’ is essential: ‘It can only exist by virtue of its being more-life’ (GSG 16, p 229; ISF, p 369). Already sheer self-maintenance inevitably involves regeneration for Simmel. However, in addition to Nietzsche, Bergson also considerably influences Simmel’s notion of life. In fact, his preoccupation with Bergson’s philosophy beginning around 1908, Simmel’s concept of life goes through substantial modification. All in all, Bergson appears in Simmel’s work characteristically as a source of influence. Although Simmel wrote two essays on Bergson, rather than being interested in the inner composition of Bergson’s work or its method, in the pieces he interprets Bergson’s key concepts – duration, memory, and élan vital – above all from the perspective of his own life-philosophy, as he equates élan vital with life, for example (Schwerdtfeger, 1995, p. 92). What separates Bergson’s vitalism from Nietzsche’s notion of life as more-life is that whereas in Nietzsche’s work the category of life appears as ‘anthropomorphized and anthropocentric’ (Bleicher, 2007, p. 152), concerning only human existence and its values,29 in Bergson the idea of life as constantly striving for more-life becomes something cosmic: for Bergson, as Simmel interprets it, all existence, whatever its content, is a particular development of élan vital (GSG 13, pp. 132–3). Not only does this imply that evolution is devoid of any external goal, but it also suggests that life does not consist only of its maintaining. If it did, the process of evolution would have already stopped with the most elementary organisms capable of adapting themselves to external conditions. For Bergson, Thomas A. Goudge argues, life has kept on evolving because élan vital is constantly ‘driving it towards higher levels of organization. This impulse constitutes the unique nature of all that is animate’ (Goudge, 1999, p. 17). The extension of the notion of life to the cosmic level is what Simmel imbibes from Bergson. That is, the notion of life is for Simmel not




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anthropomorphic by nature, but he understands it ultimately as a ‘cosmic fact’. In the piece ‘Der Fragmentcharakter des Lebens’ (trans. ‘The Fragmentary Character of Life’, FrCL), he proposes that we have to understand the spatial and temporal existence of all nature in terms of continuity, as ‘a constant stream of energies interacting with everything, in an unending unity of elements in ever different combinations’ (GSG 13, p. 203; FrCL). So, unlike Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Simmel does not consider the process of self-transcendence as being restricted to the activity of the will. On the contrary, in his view it ‘holds for all dimensions of life’s movements’ (GSG 16, p. 229). Simmel thus establishes a continuum between physiological-vital life and spiritual or mental life. As Gertrud Kantorowitz (1923, p. vi) has noted, Simmel sees the ‘spirit’ (Geist) merely as ‘the strongest expression of the metaphysical might [Macht] which leads to the shaping of organisms, [as] only the symbol or demonstration of the entire cosmic reality’.

Simmel’s two notions of ‘life’ Notwithstanding its influence on his own life-philosophy, Simmel’s conception of life differs considerably from Bergson’s. Unlike Bergson (see. e.g., 1999, p. 30), Simmel does not think that we should renounce rigorously defined concepts in favour of ‘intuition’. This separates Simmel significantly not only from Bergson but from most other lifephilosophers as well. He is well aware of the logical difficulty present in attemping to come to grips with life through the help of concepts, since fixed and static concepts inevitably obliterate life’s characteristics of flux and processuality (GSG 16, p. 235). Nevertheless, rather than insisting on the necessity of grasping life via intuition, Simmel rejects the very possibility of viewing ‘life proper’. He thinks that we are denied access to life as such. According to him, we can experience and know life only in some form, never as an absolute flow: ‘Life is the opposite of form, but obviously an entity can be conceptually described only if it has a form of some sort’ (GSG 16, pp. 205–6; SC, p. 107). Overall, Simmel considers the process of life on a quite different basis than Bergson. Unlike Bergson, he does not model the process of life in accordance with the process of evolution. While Bergson regards the biological processes of evolution as paramount, Simmel, by contrast, grounds his notion of life on two foundations – or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Simmel employs two different notions of life.


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The first notion that Simmel introduces in his work understands life as a pre-individual flux. Simmel opposes life to static being. As he notes of life in the book Rembrandt, ‘It never is; it is always becoming’ (GSG 15, p. 321; RB, p. 11). Hence, becoming is the essence of life, its peculiar way of being. With the notion of life, Simmel gets at conceptualizing becoming in positive terms. Life is not movement from nonbeing to being but a potentiality or virtual, a course of becoming that determines the actuality of phenomena (see GSG 15, pp. 377–8; Lash, 2006, p. 325). It is a potentiality insofar as life is always not yet, always in the making, and virtual insofar as it creates its own lines of actualization. Even though it appears everywhere as the life of the individual, Simmel maintains that in itself, as a continuous, unrestricted flow, life is opposed to the self-enclosed form of the individual. Life not only exceeds but also produces all individual forms and, as such, it refers in Simmel to a more profound dimension beneath the surface of phenomena. Namely, for Simmel, as he puts it in Rembrandt, ‘Life [...] is a basic fact that cannot be constructed’ (GSG 15, p. 314; RB, p. 6). Life amounts to dynamic becoming that is ‘the architect [Bildner] of our traits’ (GSG 15, p. 319; RB, p. 10). Given Simmel’s conviction that life proper constantly eludes our grasp, it follows that if we want to access it, we have to approach it indirectly. And it is here that we come to the various forms present in Simmel’s work. He believes that it is by examining concrete objects that we gain an access to a deeper reality, ultimately that of life itself. He thinks that forms present the surface level of reality that is nonetheless connected to the deep metaphysical currents of life. Ultimately even ‘the sociological forms’ are for Simmel ‘themselves accomplishments of deeper lying, more general mental [seelischer] basic functions’ (GSG 11, p. 492). Simmel thinks that ‘[i]t is possible to relate the details and superficialities of life to its most profound and essential movements’ (GSG 6, p. 13; PM, p. 56). This belief is betrayed by the metaphor of the ‘plumb line’ (Senkblei), which recurs in Simmel’s work. In the famous metropolis essay ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’, (trans. ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’) it comes up as follows:



[F]rom each point of the surface of being, however much it may appear to have merely grown in and out of this surface, a plumb line can be dropped into the soul’s depth such that all of the most banal superficialities are in the end bound to the final determinations of


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This hermeneutic idea of demonstrating ‘the possibility [...] of finding in each of life’s details the totality of its meaning’ (GSG 6, p. 12; PM, p 55) guides almost all of Simmel’s studies (Kracauer, 1995, p. 252; Goodstein, 2002, p. 211).30 In the preface to Rembrandt, Simmel even names the plumb line dropping as the main task of philosophy: ‘What has always seemed to me to be the essential task of philosophy [...] [is] to lower a plumb line through the immediate singular, the simply given, into the depths of ultimate intellectual meanings’ (GSG 15, p. 309; RB, p. 3). As already the expressions such as ‘deeper lying, more general mental basic functions’ and ‘soul’s depth’ imply, the idea of life as a stream of becoming relates to inner subjectivity (Innerlichkeit) (Lash, 1999, p. 131). While being irreducible to the individual organism, life is nevertheless manifest only in individuals. The moments of life are not nonlocalized atoms of being, but the moments of the individual. It is the notion of Erlebnis/‘lived experience’ that appears here as the key concept. According to Dilthey, Erlebnis is an immediate, lived experience, the smallest phenomenon of life; life appears as a stream of lived experiences. By means of the notion of Erlebnis, Simmel strives to overcome Kant’s intellectualism (see GSG 9, pp. 75–6): like ‘will’ in Schopenhauer and the ‘will to power’ in Nietzsche, for Simmel, Leben and Erlebnis precede reason. That is, he does not see ‘consciousness’ (Bewußtsein) as being dependent on a prioris of reason but on a prioris of Erlebnis (Bevers, 1985, pp. 48–9). It is only through being first experienced in Erlebnis that an object becomes known. For Simmel, Erlebnis is thus the expression of our primordial relation to the world, the response of our ‘total existence’ (Gesamtexistenz) to the being of things: ‘In Erleben, life, the most intransitive of all concepts, sets itself in an immediate functional connection with objectivity and, indeed, in it, in a unique mode, the activity and passivity of the subject, regardless of their mutual logical exclusiveness, are connected to the unity of life’ (GSG 13, pp. 321–2). In his philosophy of Erlebens, Simmel is in unison with most of the tradition of lifephilosophy/Lebensphilosophie. The other concept of life that Simmel employs does not emphasize the inner sphere of the individual, but rather the relations between two or more individuals (Lash, 1999, p. 131). It rests on the notion of reciprocal effect/Wechselwirkung. Simmel draws here particularly on biology. Life, in its biological form, is for him ‘nothing but the sum of interacting


the meaning and style of life via indications of direction. (GSG 7, p. 120; trans. Scott and Staubmann, 2005, p. xiii)


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forces among the atoms of the organism’ (GSG 6, p. 210; PM, p. 175). In Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, he states that it would be a mistake ‘if one posited, beyond the individual effects and interactions of organic cells, some specific force of life [Lebenskraft]’ (GSG 3, p. 275). Further, in Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, Simmel maintains that ‘there is no law of life’ nor any ‘force of life’ (GSG 2, p. 344). It would thus amount to something of a tautology to say that the interaction between atoms brings about life or that life animates these atoms – for their interaction already is life. We can see that the difference between the two notions of life presented above is quite radical. While the first notion views life as a force of becoming over and above entities and their relations, the latter denies of life any such qualities. According to it, by contrast, life has no existence apart from the interactions between entities, but precisely amounts to such interactions. It can be argued that it is above all in the sense of the latter notion that Simmel speaks of the social in terms of life. Simmel contrasts the ‘living interaction’ (lebendige Wechselwirkung) (GSG 8, p. 280) among individuals to the structures of higher order into which interaction may crystallize (GSG 11, p. 32; GSG 16, pp. 68–9). For example, in the piece ‘Soziologie der Sinne’ (‘Sociology of the Senses’) he asserts that: aside from the connecting forms that are elevated to the level of those comprehensive organizations, this pulsating life which links human beings together displays countless other ones, which, as it were, remain in a fluid, transitory condition, but are no less agents connecting individuals to social existence. (GSG 8, p. 277; SC, p. 109) In the quotation, the social is pictured in terms of life; it is equalled with ‘this pulsating life which links human beings together’. In general, the notion of life can be interpreted in Simmel’s social theory as a way of emphasizing the dynamic processuality of the social over its substantialist conceptualizations. In any case, as we shall see, life is part of Simmel’s analysis of the social, and not only when he stresses its processuality by pleading to the living reciprocation as the starting point for the study of all social formations. Life enters the study of the social also when Simmel examines the social as a bond between living individuals. It is as living beings determined by their finitude, by an immanent and imminent death, that individuals participate in the social bond. This will be given a more detailed examination in Chapters 5 and 7, but for now, let us discuss in the next section Simmel’s conception of human




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life – namely, how the mental or ‘spiritual’ (Geistige) life of the individual differs from life ‘in general’, as a cosmic, pre-individual flux.

Despite the fact the Simmel gives precedence to process and life, it would be a misjudgement to say that he sets himself on the side of becoming and ignores being. On the contrary, in his work Simmel explicitly sets out to connect becoming and being. The failure to bridge the gap between flux and fixity is precisely what Simmel sees as the shortcoming of Bergson’s philosophy. Instead of standing beyond the grand dichotomy of becoming and being that, beginning from Parmenides and Heraclitus, runs throughout Western thought, Bergson’s work remains for Simmel confined within it, as Bergson champions the constantly flowing at the expense of the permanent and the fixed (GSG 13, p. 69). In this respect, Bergson’s philosophy could be said to stand under the sign of ‘modern Heracliteanism’ (cf. GSG 15, p. 445; RB, p. 105): the Bergsonian élan vital is ‘lacking a definite, persisting something’ (GSG 16, p 222; ISF, p. 363). 31 In it, as in Rodin’s art, the example of the modern Heraclitean worldview that Simmel himself gives, ‘all substantiality and solidity of the empirical perspective has turned into movement. In restless transformation a quantum of energy flows through the material world, or, rather, is the world’ (GSG 15, p. 445; RB, p. 105). For Simmel, a symptom of the flaw of modern Heracliteanism is that it makes time strictly atemporal. Whereas the mechanistic worldview of Kant’s philosophy eliminates time by making it something ideal and abstract (see GSG 16, pp. 219–21), the neo-Heraclitean worldview too obliterates it, but in a completely different manner. As modern Heracliteanism perceives life as an ‘absolute flow’, it abandons ‘all solidity in which a before and after – that is, time – could mark itself’. It makes the identification of singular moments or events impossible; absolute becoming is therefore just as atemporal as absolute non-becoming (GSG 15, pp. 445–6; RB, pp. 105–6). In the end of his essay on Bergson, Simmel speculates on the possibility of connecting becoming and being. He suggests that perhaps the next steps in the enlivening of philosophy will occupy a notion of life that would include both sides of the contrast of processuality and stability (GSG 13, p. 69). And it is not to the life-philosophies of contemporaries like Scheler or Keyserling that Simmel is referring to here. Between the lines, he is alluding to his own work. Bridging the gap


Life as more-life and more-than-life


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between becoming and being is precisely what Simmel aspires to with his own notion of life – not, however, by reconciling the two terms, but rather by drawing a disjunctive synthesis between them. For Simmel, as a cosmic fact, life does amount to process and continuous flux, yet a ‘completely new image emerges as soon as the process of life becomes more conscious-spiritual [bewußtgeistiger]’ (GSG 13, p. 203), and thereby ascends below the level of ‘sheer animality’ (bloß Animalische) (GSG 16, p. 183). Conscious human life is not sheer, absolute flow, but manifested in the self-enclosed, limited form of the individual. Hereby the world receives a new centre: the individual ‘I’ (Ich) who connects what is separate and separates what is connected, creates accentuations and shifts perspective (GSG 13, p. 203). Still, human life is never sheer flow, Simmel claims, not only because of our limited bodily form, but also because individuals create objects (GSG 16, pp. 183–4, 230). These objects include words and deeds, images, law, social formations, technology, works of art, philosophical doctrines, scientific findings, and so on. It is only with them that conscious human life ascends to the level of culture. This is not to say that there can also be ‘spiritual’ life (Geistige Leben, Geistesleben) without or before culture, but it and cultural life are rather always entangled for Simmel: subjects do not exist solely in and by themselves, the development of subjectivity always involves ‘something external’ to the subject (GSG 8, pp. 367–8). The creation and assimilation of objects is an obligatory point of passage in becoming a subject: ‘We develop ourselves only by developing things’ (GSG 6, p. 622; PM, p. 449). From the viewpoint of life, this means that life is a constant movement that at every moment draws something other to itself and transforms it into its own. Human life is always pitted against itself in the objects or forms that originate from life. It can realize and manifest itself only in forms: ‘Forms are inseparable from life; without them it cannot be itself’ (GSG 16, pp. 183–4; ISF, p. 375). That is, human life is expressed only in forms with an objective validity and a meaning in their own right, independent of the lives of the individuals who have created them (GSG 16, p. 106, 230; GSG 14, p. 408). Forms are the ‘transvital’ and transcendent element of life. Simmel calls this element ‘more-than-life’ (Mehr-als-Leben):



Just as transcending its current, limiting form within the plane of life itself constitutes more-life, which is nevertheless the immediate, inescapable essence of life itself, so does transcendence into the level of objective content, of meaning that is logically autonomous and no


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The notions of more-life and more-than-life mark in Simmel’s work the distinction between physiological-vital life and spiritual life, or corporeal and spiritual existence. Whereas physiological or organic life has only the quality of more-life, with more-than-life it becomes conscious and cultural: ‘Just as life at its physiological level is ceaseless creating, so that, with a concise expression, life is always more-life, so life creates at the level of spirit something that is more-than-life: the objective, the product, the in itself meaningful and valid’ (GSG 16, p. 295). When it reaches the level of culture, life ‘produces something with a meaning and law unto itself’ (GSG 16, p. 232; ISF, p. 372). Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is precisely by producing something autonomous that life reaches the level of culture. In order to unify the categories of more-life and more-than-life into one view, and to grasp the duality of human life, Simmel proposes the idea of ‘absolute life’ (see GSG 15, pp. 403, 419; GSG 16, p. 232), as a wider concept of life that ‘includes the relative contrast between life in the narrow sense and content independent of life’ (GSG 16, p. 232; ISF 373). The self-transcending life is one life that is then divided into form and life, individuality and continuity, being identical with itself and being other. In other words, ‘life contains that which is more than life’ (GSG 20, p. 185; ISF, p. 243). So, instead of having unrestricted life on the one hand, and restrictive form on the other, the notion of absolute life is an attempt to combine both being and becoming into a unified worldview. Not, however, by ‘overcoming of the dualism by unity’, but as a ‘third principle beyond dualism and unity’ (GSG 16, p. 228; ISF, p. 367). In other words, the notion of absolute life is not a synthesis or final reconciliation of the opposition of life and form, but the contrast between life and form is ‘the very way in which [the unity of life] exists’ (GSG 16, p. 233; ISF, p. 372): ‘If we wish to express the unified character of life in abstract terms, our intellect has no alternative but to divide it into two [...] parts, which appear as mutually exclusive and only subsequently merge to form that unity’ (GSG 16, p. 230; ISF, p. 369).


longer vital, constitute the more-than-life, inseparable from life, and the very essence of spiritual life. (GSG 16, p. 232; ISF, p. 371)

Immanent transcendence What is thus original in Simmel’s notion of life is that he deduces the striving towards more-life from the same formal structure that restricts life (Fitzi 2002, p. 271). Accordingly, the key to Simmel’s life-philosophy


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is the concept of ‘boundary’ (Grenze). In the process of more-life, every boundary and fixed form is transcended, but only insofar as there exists something to be transcended (GSG 16, p. 217). As a boundary, form is a necessary element of life: boundaries are indispensable in that they help us to orient ourselves in the world and discern the given order of things by finding our place and a place for our feelings, deeds, experiences, and thoughts. Yet every single boundary can be stepped over. Consequently, Simmel notes that we are boundary beings who have no boundaries (GSG 16, pp. 212–4). For Simmel, life is thus defined ultimately in terms of transgression. In the act of self-transcendence, breaking through boundaries and setting up boundaries are united: each step over of a boundary also finds and creates a new one (GSG 16, p. 213). However, it is precisely in its self-transcendence that remains immanent to life that life is absolute: at once centripetal and centrifugal, a bounded form and a flux without boundaries. This is why Simmel can state that, for life, ‘transcendence is immanent’ (GSG 16, p. 223):32 even when transcending itself life remains itself. Simmel clarifies this idea in the following manner: [A]s soon as something exists as a unity unto itself, gravitating toward its own centre, then all the occurring flow [Hinausfluten des Geschehens] from this side to that side of its boundaries is no longer animatedness without a subject, but remains somehow bound up with the centre. Even the movement outside its boundary belongs to the centre; it represents a reaching out in which the form always remains subject and yet which goes out beyond this subject’. (GSG 16, pp. 222–3; ISF, p. 363; translation altered) However, life, in the absolute sense, does not belong to a subject any more than it refers to an object. It rather makes the subject and object dependent on a form of the ‘beyond’ (GSG 16, pp. 234, 295–6), and is thus immanent only to itself. As the ‘metaphysical foundational principle’, life absorbs everything and ‘generates [also] subject and object from itself’ (GSG 12, p. 387; trans. Bleicher, 2007, p. 150). As Simmel writes in Schopenhauer und Nietzsche, with reference to Nietzsche’s notion of life:



Life, in its primary sense, beyond the opposition of corporeal and spiritual existence, is seen here as an immeasurable sum of powers and potentials which, in themselves, are aimed at the augmentation, intensification, and increased effectiveness of the life process. It is impossible to describe this process through analysis, however,


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Life here stands as the ultimate ‘beyond’ beyond which Simmel does not strive to go in his life-philosophy. Simmel does not deduce life any further to the transcendent, but treats it in its immanence, as ‘a basic fact that cannot be constructed’. There is no ‘outside’ to the process of life, no transcendent dimension that would determine it. He does not try to locate phenomena in any realm beyond experience and life. Rather, much in the vein of Charles Baudelaire’s modernism, Simmel sees it as ‘the great problem of the modern spirit [...] to find a place for everything which transcends the givenness of vital phenomena within those phenomena themselves, instead of transposing it to a spatial beyond.’ In other words, he does not aspire to any ‘synthesis of the finite and the infinite, but a grown unity of life’ (GSG 20, p. 185; SC, p. 243). The eternal (i.e., form) is considered by him as something that dwells within the transient (i.e., life). The domain of this life-philosophy is thus the transcendentally lived reality. As Simmel puts it in Rembrandt, he is ‘following the structure of the concepts with which we divide up the idea of the world [Weltbild] not beyond that point at which the polarity of form and life underpin at all the even unity of substance’ (GSG 15, p. 387; RB, pp. 58–9). Life is the disclosure of subject and the world, an ‘infinity’ that constitutes them – not an abstract one, which would amount to the transcendent or to the absolute flow, but an immanent infinity. Standing at the same time both ‘within’ and ‘outside’, life constitutes the ultimate horizon of thought: something that must be thought and yet constantly escapes thought. Simmel acknowledges that there is already in principle no philosophical solution at hand to the riddle of life – after all, such a solution would mean the end of life as a tension between more-life and more-than-life. The notion of life is bound to remain ‘somewhat vague and logically imprecise’, for, ‘to succeed in giving a conceptual definition of it would be to deny [life] its essence’ (GSG 16, pp. 205–6; SC, p. 107).

The life of philosophy


because its unity constitutes the ultimate and basic phenomenon of ourselves. (GSG 10, p. 180; SHN, p. 6; italics added)

The Simmelian notion of life as a radical becoming urges us not only to engage in thinking process but also in considering thinking – or philosophy – itself as process. Simmel asserts the processuality of philosophy above all in the monograph Hauptprobleme der Philosophie (‘Main Problems of Philosophy’) and in the preface to the collection of essays


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entitled Philosophische Kultur (‘Philosophical Culture’). As sources, both are exceptional in the sense that, in them, Simmel is not merely reflecting on particular questions of epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, or ethics but asks the very nature of philosophy itself. In Hauptprobleme der Philosophie, Simmel examines the practice of philosophy as an ‘inner process’. He sees that only rarely is the nature of philosophy as practice acknowledged, let alone examined philosophically. It is much more common to focus on the sublime results of philosophy – that is, to crystallized ideas and systems that, in their logically enclosed form, keep the widest possible distance to the living process of thought (GSG 14, p. 11). In contrast to this, Simmel sets out in Hauptprobleme der Philosophie to ‘enliven’ philosophical systems, to show their ‘inner life’ (GSG 14, p. 12). When discussing the ideas of other philosophers in the book, he does not concern himself first and foremost with truth claims and philosophical systems. On the contrary, along the lines of his relationist manner of thought discussed above, Simmel picks up different viewpoints and pits them against one another in order to set them in motion. One important pair of opposites for Simmel is found in Kant and Goethe. For Kant nature is a representation within the human soul, for Goethe the principle of life apparent in nature is also the principle of the human soul. While Kant stands as an advocate of mechanistic thought for Simmel, Goethe appears as an exponent of organicism (GSG 10, pp. 130–3, 165). When pitting Goethe and Kant against one another, Simmel is not, however, embracing one in certain questions and the other in different ones, nor is he making a final choice between them. In the closing remarks of the book Kant und Goethe (‘Kant and Goethe’), Simmel notes that while the worldview of the epoch coming to a close could be characterized by the slogan ‘Kant or Goethe!’, in the take on the issue of mechanistic and organicist perspectives, ‘[t]he coming epoch may be under the sign Kant and Goethe, rejecting any half-hearted mediation between them’ (GSG 10, pp. 165–6; KaGoe, pp. 189–190). The connecting ‘third’ for Simmel is not a reconciled synthesis of Kant and Goethe but a negation of their conceptual differences through a shifting balance between them, the development of their standpoints in infinite reciprocity (see also Bleicher, 2007, pp. 140–1). Another important pair of opposites Simmel finds in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Schopenhauer, as seen in the previous section, for Simmel represents pessimism: Nicht-Leben/nonlife was the only value he recognized. Nietzsche, by contrast, epitomizes optimism – for him, life is the ultimate value of all – and ‘personalism’ – for he ties objective moral values exclusively to the personality) (GSG 14, pp. 154–5).




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Simmel thinks that what is essential in philosophy is not its content or object of study. Far more decisive is the form of philosophy, a certain mode of thinking. And for Simmel, philosophical manner of thought is not built upon a system of dogmas or specific theories, but found in the ‘pervasive spiritual relation with all existence’ expressed in heterogeneous individual variants (GSG 14, p. 165). As regards their contents and claims, different philosophies may lack common ground and unifying features. Nevertheless, Simmel suggests that they find unity in the movement of thought, in the process of doing philosophy. The conflicts between competing philosophies have to do only with the ‘dogmatic crystallization’ of arguments – they do not yet appear ‘inside the movement of philosophical life itself’ (GSG 14, p. 164). Finding a unifying feature implies thus for Simmel a ‘turn from the metaphysics as dogma to the metaphysics as life’ (GSG 14, p. 165; SC 35). This is to say Simmel considers philosophy as living thought or thinking life: a thinking process that is characterized by ‘inner autonomy’ (GSG 14, p. 14). Although the various doctrines in philosophy differ as to their contents, they have in common the fact that their results are born in and through an autonomous process of thought. What Simmel means with his characterization of philosophy is that philosophy cannot be defined from outside, or before engaging in the actual practice of doing it. Instead, what philosophy is can be specified only within itself. In fact, Simmel emphasizes that philosophy begins by posing the question of its own nature: ‘philosophy itself is the first problem of philosophy’ (GSG 14, p. 13). What distinguishes philosophy from other disciplines is that while physics, for example, hardly takes physics as its first object, and philology does not ask primarily the nature of philology, one of the main and primary concerns of philosophy is itself: Alone in philosophy, every original thinker determines not only what he wants to answer but also what he wants to ask – not only in the sense of asking particular questions but in that of asking what he altogether has to ask in order to match the concept of philosophy. (GSG 14, p. 15) Of course, sociologists, historians, anthropologists, mathematicians, and other scholars working within their own fields may also occasionally explore the preconditions of their disciplines. In fact, one may even argue that it is precisely their affair, rather than that of a professional philosopher who is not necessarily touched by the questions within the field to the extent or as directly as they are. Nevertheless, whenever


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scholars undertake such explorations, they momentarily abandon their roles as ‘scientists’ and begin to philosophize (GSG 14, p. 14). The fact that philosophy’s own nature cannot be defined in advance and in general, in isolation from the specific practices of doing philosophy, is for Simmel a result or an expression of the fundamental goal of philosophy to ‘think without preconditions’ (GSG 14, p. 13). Philosophy, as Simmel wrote ten years before the publication of Hauptprobleme in the preface to Philosophie des Geldes, is the ‘last point of cognition’ (GSG 6, p. 9; PM, p. 53). According to Simmel, all knowledge is conditioned by something else, by something that gives an orientation to thought and defines its degree of independence. Individual disciplines can – and must – be free of some of these conditions, but only philosophy is characterized by the striving to go beyond all of them (GSG 14, pp. 13–4). However, Simmel is aware of the fact that a complete freedom from preconditions is impossible already in principle: where thinking begins there is necessarily already something presupposed. Each point of view appears by necessity limited; if it were not, it would not be a point of view and our consciousness would have immediate access to the world as such in its totality. However, the significance of the goal to think without preconditions is for Simmel not diminished by the impossibility to reach it. The main thing is the striving, the orientation to transgress them (GSG 14, p. 14).

Thought and boundary The ambivalence of the effort to go beyond preconditions while nevertheless being always confined within them can be conceptualized by drawing on Simmel’s treatment of the limitedness of our existence, as touched on earlier. Simmel maintains that boundaries in general are necessary and unconditional: only they provide life with its ‘richness’ and ‘determinacy’; their existence is ‘constitutive of our given position in the world’ (GSG 16, p. 212; ISF, p. 354). Yet life would be very different if each singular limit was definitive. The uncertain would never become more certain and what is taken as given would never become problematic. Thus, Simmel proposes that ‘although the boundary as such is necessary, every single determinate boundary can be stepped over’ (GSG 16, p. 213; ISF, pp. 354–5). Already because we can know our boundaries as such, first individual boundaries and then the fact of boundaries in general, suggests that we can step over them (GSG 16, p. 214; ISF, p. 355). However, as we have noted, each act of stepping over also necessarily finds or creates a new boundary. The




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paradox of transgression is thus that, while no boundary can restrict it, it is bounded in every direction; by stepping over the limit it affirms limitedness. For Simmel this forms our very human condition: ‘We are bounded in every direction, and we are bounded in no direction’ (GSG 16, p. 214; ISF, p. 355). In philosophy, Simmel thinks, this double aspect of our human condition is brought to its ultimate point. While preconditions are a necessary element of philosophical thinking (it is only by way of limitedness that the world is graspable to us), philosophy constantly steps over boundaries (the process of thought includes both the state of being bounded and the transcending of the boundary). Therefore, it is also unreasonable to expect final answers from philosophy. As it constantly strives to overcome the preconditions of thinking, it is bound to remain in process. In fact, by becoming aware of its limitedness, philosophy becomes in the last instance living: ‘That we ourselves know both our knowing and our not-knowing, and are likewise aware of this broader knowing, and so forth into the potentially endless – this is the real infinity of living movement on the level of intellect’ (GSG 16, p. 217). Just as life ceaselessly reaches beyond its present form, bursts the oppressive bonds of its forms and replaces them with new forms more appropriate, so philosophy constantly strives to overcome the preconditions of thinking. Philosophy is thus an emblem of living movement for Simmel: ‘It is only with this self-transcending movement [beyond its preconditions] that the spirit shows itself to be something downright living’ (GSG 16, p. 217). In this chapter, I have tried to show how Simmel’s sociological processualism bears an intimate relationship with his philosophy of process, in particular with his relationism, life-philosophy and conception of philosophy itself as process. Simmel is a philosopher of process, at least in two senses of the term. Firstly, process presents for Simmel the object of philosophy. Philosophy, in the first and last instance, is of process. As we have seen in his work, Simmel considers process above all in the guise of ‘life’. He perceives life as process-like and process as life-like. Every philosophy as an expression of the relation between subject and the world must ultimately become life-philosophy: an enquiry into the entangled processes of ‘spirit becoming life’ (Lebenwerden des Geistes) and ‘life becoming spirit’ (Geistwerden des Lebens) (see GSG 22, p. 873). These two processes refer to how, ‘on the one hand, we are exposed to and integrated into the motions of the cosmos’ (i.e., how mind or spirit is something living), and how, ‘on the other hand, we perceive and guide our individual existence from its own centre as responsible for itself and


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in some way as a self-enclosed form’ (i.e., how life progresses beyond the purely biological level to the level of consciousness) (GSG 12, p. 486; PrF, pp. 80–1). Secondly, Simmel is a thinker of process also because he perceives philosophy as life: philosophy is not only of process but also in process. Thus, with the notion of life, Simmel introduces movement into the very image of thought. This suggests an understanding of philosophy as an activity, not to be coceived as a rigid system of propositions in crystallized forms, but as something that one does. He insists that individual ideas are only points of passage in the process of thought and that, when perceived in this way, they abandon any systematic form the rigidity of which restrains the process of thought (GSG 14, p. 12). Philosophy, with its effort to think without preconditions, comes to embody the human condition that Simmel formulates in Lebensanschauung of being at the same time bound in every direction and in no direction. The real infinity of the movement of life is thus expressed on the level of the intellect in the process by which we increasingly come to know the limits of our knowledge, while at the same time being aware that it is still always conditioned by some other limits. Philosophy not only affirms our limitedness by uncovering what our thought unknowingly assumes, but also surpasses our limits and opens up new possibilities for thinking and living – for how to think and live otherwise.




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4

In its tendency towards desubstantialization, relationality implies a shift from substantial reality to event. In any dynamic network of relations, as Cooper (2005, pp. 1699) points out, entities do not appear as separate, static substances but as events: if an entity is defined by its relations, then by definition a change in any relation produces a change in the entity too. Thus, relational entities ‘happen’ rather than exist in their own right in themselves (ibid., p. 1707). They are shaped by series and flow of events. Relationism is thus closely connected to the thought of the event. We can find the link in Simmel too. It is implicit, for instance, in his preference for the process-oriented notion of societalization/Vergesellschaftung over the substantial concept of society/Gesellschaft. But Simmel expresses the linkage between relationism and desubstantializing event thinking also in much more explicit terms, when he notes in Grundfragen der Soziologie that society based on dynamic reciprocation is not a ‘substance’ (Substanz), but an ‘event’ (Geschehen) (GSG 16, p. 70). The passage makes a common appearance in the secondary literature (see Christian, 1978, pp. 132–3; Dahme, 1981, p. 382; Nedelmann, 1984, p. 93; Ziemann, 2000, pp. l00, 115). Nevertheless, the notion of Geschehen has not yet received detailed examination in Simmel commentaries. The explication of the concept is, to be sure, no easy task. As it is characteristic of his concepts, Simmel’s does not use Geschehen in a very consistent manner. Its meaning does not stay unaltered but rather varies greatly throughout his texts, as we shall see. Overall, favouring a ‘vital logic’ (see GSG 13, p. 328; Christian, 1978, pp. 62–5) over a rational one, Simmel, it seems, is much more interested in following his individual intellectual attitude towards life and the world than in refining his conceptual apparatus to accord with scientific exactitude.


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However, his personal lack of rigour should not prevent us from trying to analyze the concept of Geschehen and its consequences for Simmel’s theory of the social. This is exactly what this chapter tries to do. Broadly put, its aims are twofold. First, the chapter sets out to clarify the notion of the event. This is done by examining its different uses in Simmel’s writings and, more importantly, by analyzing the notion of society-event into two main aspects: the principle of reciprocal effect/Wechselwirkung and inner antagonism. The second aim of the chapter is to reconstruct, with the help of the notion of society as an event, the key sociological implications of Simmel’s life-philosophy as discussed in the previous chapter. Hitherto, the reconstruction of the social theoretical dimension of Simmel’s lifephilosophy has been attempted by such scholars as Antonius M. Bevers, Gregor Fitzi and Scott Lash. Whereas Lash (2005, p. 3) makes the effort to reconstruct a Simmelian ‘vitalism’ and make it sociological, Bevers (1985, p. 24) aims to show how Simmel ‘vitalizes Kantianism and kantianizes vitalism’. The work by Fitzi (2002), in its claims perhaps more faithful to Simmel than the other two, explicates the two-way relationship between Simmel’s sociological reflections and life-philosophy by asserting the interconnectedness of ‘social experience’ (soziale Erfahrung) and ‘life-experience’ (Lebenserfahrung). This chapter, by contrast, tries to restore the life-philosophical aspects of Simmel’s sociology from the viewpoint of the event. Towards the end of the chapter, the usefulness of Simmel’s notion of Geschehen in considering society and the social will be evaluated.

The event The German word Geschehen is fairly difficult to translate into English with all its resonances. Besides referring to a single event, Geschehen is also a nominal form of the verb geschehen, and thus implicates the ‘eventing’ of something: that something is happening, occurring, emerging, appearing, taking place, or betiding. Henceforth, I will translate Geschehen as ‘event’. It should be noted, though, that also the verbal aspect of Geschehen is always implicitly present in it. Of course, such a translation immediately faces an objection. For one thing, it is normally the word Ereignis that designates ‘event’ in German philosophy (as in translations of Heidegger’s work, for instance). Moreover, on one occasion, namely in the essay ‘Das Problem des Schicksals’ (‘The Problem of Fate’), Simmel too, on the face of it, seems to


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distinguish in an analytical and technical manner between that which ‘merely occurs’ (bloßes Geschehen, bloß Geschehenden) and the event/ Ereignis. In the piece, he defines Ereignis as a seemingly ‘peripheral occurrence’ (Geschehen), which is nonetheless ‘taken up into our own most intrinsic attunement to life and assimilated as fate’ (GSG 12, p. 488; PrF, p. 82). In short, within this context, Simmel understands an event/ Ereignis as a defining occurrence/Geschehen of life. Nevertheless, when one looks at the text more closely, one will find out that Simmel in fact refers to the above duality as the Doppeleinstellung, ‘double setting’, des Geschehens (GSG 12, p. 487). In addition, he also uses the term Ereignis in both of the two senses, referring both to external and coincidental occurrences (bloßen Ereignissen) and to the events that one considers as one’s fate. So, given all this, I see event as a justifiable translation of the Simmelian Geschehen. The notion of Geschehen appears in Simmel’s earliest publications. He employs it as early as in his doctoral thesis, Das Wesen der Materie nach Kants Physischer Monadologie (‘The Essence of Matter in Kant’s Physical Monadology’), which was published in 1881. However, it comes to play a more significant role only from the book Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie onwards, the first edition of which was published in 1892. In Die Probleme der Geschictsphilosophie, the concept of Geschehen appears in conjunction with the principle of ‘form’. In the book, Simmel sees history as a form into which the subject’s consciousness brings events and their contents. Events are located as if ‘below’ history. Singular events as such are not yet history. They become history only when being formed into historical sequences by the creative activity of the subject. The epistemological principle of the constitutive subject carries itself all the way over to Simmel’s sociology. In Chapter 5, we will see how Simmel pictures the possibility of society as being based on the subject’s consciousness of one’s own societalization and the specific empirical-psychological categories conditioning the encounter of the ‘you’ (Du) as a subject. Yet, if we want to trace the descendance of the notion of Geschehen to Simmel’s sociology, it is not Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie, but his doctoral thesis that appears as the key source. At that point, though, the concept emerges in a quite different context than in his sociology and comes up only in passing – almost accidentially. The way it makes its appearance nevertheless has great relevance for the understanding of Simmel’s later conception of the social. In the dissertation, Simmel employs the term Geschehen when presenting his criticism of Kant’s conception of matter (Materie). Against Kant, whom he


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accuses of hypostasizing matter, Simmel proposes in Section 13 that matter and the forces that produce it are not separated but fold into one another: ‘Process and result, event [Geschehen] and the thing occurred [Geschehenes], [are] kept apart only to flow into one another again’ (GSG 1, p. 35). Related to this, some pages earlier, in Section 11, he notes that matter is not a finished product, but something in process: If matter emerges out of forces [Kraften], then one should no longer treat it as purely passive stuff [Stoff ] upon which other forces can exercise their undisturbed interplay; for the product of these energies is no finished product, but a continuous process, no being [Sein] [...], but becoming [Werden] [...]. (GSG 1, p. 26) Simmel calls this approach on matter ‘realistic-dynamic’ (realistischdynamisch). Interestingly, his conception of society is not without resemblance to it. Just as matter is for Simmel not a finished product of forces, so society too, in his view, is not a finished product of forces of reciprocation: not a thing, but Geschehen. Furthermore, his notion of society could be called realistic-dynamic as well, in that, for Simmel, the ancient controversy between realism and nominalism is a badly stated problem. He regards society neither as an entity with properties of its own, nor as merely a name for an aggregation of individuals. There is a reality to which the term society refers, but it is not that of an independent entity. Instead, it is the relations of reciprocal effect that are the reality that the term refers to (GSG 11, p. 17–9): society comes into being through the synthetic realities of mutual influences between individuals (Levine, 1971, pp. xxxiii–iv). Indeed, Simmel’s contention in Philosophie des Geldes, that all social formations have to be considered on the basis of processual relations of reciprocal effect, can be regarded as an extension of his realistic-dynamic account of matter. In his doctoral thesis, Simmel claims that every piece of matter should be explained with the forces that have produced it (Wenn Kräfte die Materie bilden, so muss sich eben jegliche erscheinung der Materie aus diesen, den angenommene Urkräften, erklären lassen) (GSG 1, p. 26). All this challenges the standard view held in the secondary literature, originally proposed by Kracauer (1995, p. 225), that Simmel’s ideas bear ‘almost no relationship to the natural sciences’. For not only is Simmel’s conception of society analogous to his notion of matter, but the first can be interpreted as an extension of the latter.33 Of course, at no point in his career was Simmel a natural scientist or physicist, nor can Simmel be labeled as a natural philosopher. On the contrary, ‘It is always man [...]


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who stands at the center of Simmel’s field of vision’, as Kracauer argues (ibid., p. 226). However, instead of just ignoring natural scientific issues outright, Simmel genuinely felt that he was lacking a proper cognizance on them. In reference to Bergson’s knowledge of these matters, Simmel’s son Hans cites his father to have stated once: ‘The fact that Bergson knows more than me makes me happy, but the fact that I know less than him is, however, agonizing’ (H. Simmel, 1976, p. 263). What is more, one could – and should – stretch the nexus between Simmel’s sociology and his realistic-dynamic conception of matter a little further. Namely, provided that matter can only be relational, one can argue that the relations between material bodies are social. And although in this book I focus mainly on human sociality, the social should not be assigned exclusively to the privileged human. Social relations occur not only between humans but between nonhuman things as well.34 Without realizing or accepting it himself, Simmel replaces the model of autonomous and independent solid objects with a model inherently social: for Simmel matter is based on and produced by forces interacting with one another. In his doctoral thesis, Simmel maintains that ‘force[...] must only be a relation [Relation] between monads’, a relation that, he emphasizes, should not be ‘hypostasized into an extended substance’ (GSG 1, p. 19). So, if force is relational, and relation is no thing, then force cannot be a thing either. It is more like the reciprocal effect that counts for the social. Instead of hypostasizing force into a thing, Simmel claims that it ‘seems like an invisible fluid [Fluidum]’ (GSG 1, p. 20). Simmel’s whole sociology is based on an idea of force as relational, as we can see in its key concept of Wechselwirkung/reciprocal effect. Society can be explained only by the relations of reciprocal effect between people. The Geschehen of society refers to society in statu nascendi; not to the origin of its historical development, but to the underlying dynamic relations that give rise to its whole development at ‘every day and on every hour’. To consider the social in terms of the event is to say that it differs from an autonomous and independent substantial thing.35 Whereas being, crudely put, is the way that substances exist, becoming or occurring is the event’s mode of existing. If the social is Geschehen, then it by definition happens before it is. What this means for the study of social formations is that instead of studying them as already objectified, stabilized, and crystallized entities, Simmel invites us to think their event – that is, to examine the very processes of their formation and objectification. Social forms are not simply existent, to simply be described in the ways they appear to us; they have to be grasped in their


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becoming. Simmel regards the independent and autonomous forms of sociology as merely secondary phenomena compared with the real reciprocity/Wechselwirkung between individuals (GSG 2, p. 130). In these crystallized forms, ‘the forces of reciprocal effect [wechselwirkelnden Kräfte] have already withdrawn [auskristallisiert] from their immediate bearers’ (GSG 11, p. 32). For Simmel, it is only the ‘delicate, invisible threads that are spun from one person to another’, not the ‘final finished pattern’ of society’s ‘uppermost phenomenal stratum’ (GSG 8, p. 292), that constitute ‘the real life of society provided in our experience’ (GSG 8, p. 277). Notwithstanding Simmel’s insistence on the event, the idea of the social as event does not fit seamlessly within his sociology. On the contrary, to some extent, the notion of the event makes Simmel’s thinking totter and tremble, as it reveals a tension or, at the very least, a gap between his processualist social theory and his epistemology of society. As we shall see in the next chapter, the excursus ‘Wie ist Gesellschaft möglich?’ (‘How is society possible?’) in the opening chapter of Soziologie sets out to formulate the conditions of possibility of society. Considered in terms of the event, by contrast, the social cannot be explained by its supposed conditions of possibility. An analysis of what makes the social (or society) possible never succeeds in giving a sufficient account of its event. This is because the event is irreducible to its conditions of possibility. As Jacques Derrida (2005, p. 18) expresses it, ‘It is not enough that something may happen for it to happen; hence an analysis of what makes an event possible [...] will never tell us anything about the event itself’. A study on the possibility of the social can never fully account for what actually comes to pass between us and how this happens. The Geschehen of the social is always something more – and less – than its possibility. The event is thus not just ‘something that happens’ (Fraser, 2006, p. 126), but something that also surprises. It is always surprising and to some extent unexpected. Not, however, necessarily so much for some subject, what the event surprises is, above all, its conditions of possibility. Jean-luc Nancy (2000) has claimed that surprise is not an element of the event but the event itself, the peculiar way of being of events. For Nancy, ‘the surprise of the event is a “tautology”: the event either surprises or is not an event’ (ibid., p. 167). However, an objection seems to rise immediately. Isn’t the birth of a child, for instance, an event very much anticipated – after all, it is said of pregnant women that they are ‘expecting’? Birth, so it seems, is not the impossible that becomes possible only after having happened; it is not something completely unexpeceted. On the contrary, one waits for


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it to happen for nine whole months. Nonetheless, as Nancy emphasizes, what is awaited in the birth-event is the thing that happens, the result of the event, not the Geschehen, the happening itself (ibid., p. 167). Of course, the event cannot be separated from the state of affairs in which it actualizes (in the case of birth: from the body and the way of life of the expectant mother, familial diseases, etc.) any more than from the state of affairs that it produces (the newborn, parenthood, etc.). Yet as an event itself, in its taking place or coming to pass, birth is not the same as its conditions or results; the what happens and the that it happens of the event have essentially different structures. It is only the ‘what happens’ that can be waited for in the event, not the ‘that it happens’. Birth can be expected and anticipated only when it comes to the resulting state of affairs produced by its event (ibid., p. 172); the Geschehen itself is what remains unexpected and unanticipated. This is to say that, to some extent, the possibility of the event always remains impossible, uncertain. Let us think of love, for example. The potentiality of love or the simple wish to fall in love is never enough for the miracle of two people falling in love to take place. Despite all the beneficial conditions, love may never happen. Two people may be perfectly compatible, they may be attracted to and feel drawn towards each other, they may even be desperately longing for love, and still they may never become an item. And, from the other end of the spectre, impossible love may just become possible. That Romeo and Juliet fall in love with each other is not a matter of a coming into the real of a love that was always possible or a love that only had to be realized by limiting other options, as she (and he) could have fallen for other men (or women) as well. Their falling in love is not a case of just letting one possible option pass into the real while repressing others. Instead, Romeo and Juliet’s love is impossible love that has to create its own possibilities by breaking families and uniting enemies. In this sense, it is best described as a passage from the ‘virtual’ to the ‘actual’, not from the possible to the real. The notion of the ‘virtual’ does not refer here to something less real, as the everyday sense of the term suggests. Whereas the common usage of the term is exemplified above all by the notion of ‘virtual reality’, which designates an imitation of the real, a reproduction of our experiences in a technologically simulated environment, there is another meaning to the word, captured in the expression ‘the reality of the virtual’ (the expression comes from Žižek; in Wright, 2004). In Bergsonism (1991), Deleuze defines virtuality along these lines. He suggests that Marcel Proust’s formula of ‘real without being actual, ideal without


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being abstract’ best defines virtuality. That is, the virtual is not less real or a simulation of the real but rather it already ‘possesses a reality’. Deleuze further elaborates the notion of the virtual by distinguishing it from the ‘possible’. Whereas the possible is, according to him, ‘the opposite of the real’, the virtual is not opposed to the real but only to the actual. The possible is something that either will or will not be realized. The real is in the image of the possible, to which realization only adds existence. Given that events involve changes in things and their properties, an event does not merely make real something already there as a possibility, but it always contains the aspect of the new, novelty. Thus, events are to be considered not in terms of a shift from the possible to the real but from the virtual to the actual. According to Deleuze, actualization does not proceed by eliminating possibilities limited in advance, but it is always creative: the actual ‘does not resemble the virtuality that it embodies’, but the virtual ‘must create its own lines of actualization in positive acts’ (Deleuze, 1991, pp. 96–7). So, the actualization of the virtual is not a case of realization of a possibility. Whereas the rules of the latter are limitation and resemblance, the former is characterized by creation and positive difference.

Eventalization through reciprocal effects To a great extent, social life cannot be preprogrammed: it remains unexpected and uncertain, a surprise, an event. If it were preprogrammed, social phenomena could be foreseen and known in advance and, as a result, there would be no event in the sense specified above because there would be no surprises. By contrast, as our experience tells us, dayto-day life entails many surprises and unintended consequences. It suffices to think only economic trends, the effects of political decisions, or techno-scientific issues like genetic modification to realize that our ‘mastery’ of things constantly escapes mastery. While we are the masters of the earth, capable of manipulating life, death, reproduction, the environment, the normal, and the pathological, our own actions are in a large part beyond our control (Serres with Latour, 1995, pp. 171–3). Simmel notes the complexity of social life when he observes the impossibility of any sociological laws. According to Simmel, social life is much too complex to conform to any simple causality (see GSG 2, pp. 124–5). This is because social phenomena are characterized by pervasive reciprocity/Wechselwirkung. Society itself, he stresses, should be considered in terms of ‘reciprocal relations of its elements [Wechselbeziehungen ihrer Elemente]’ (GSG 10, pp. 54–5). Society is ‘present’ wherever several of


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these elements ‘enter interaction [Wechselwirkung]’ (GSG 5, p. 54). In relations of reciprocal effects, every effect tends to become a cause and every cause an effect. Therefore, it is near impossible to try to isolate just one cause or one effect in a social phenomenon, or to determine with certainty which is the cause and which is the effect. The notion of reciprocal effect expresses a crucial moment of the event, as it establishes the irreducibility of the event. There are two things at play here. Firstly, the notion of reciprocity draws our attention to the fact that events escape the status of ‘acts’. This separates Simmel’s version of societalization radically from that of Max Weber, who also preferred the use of verbalizations such as Vergeschellschaftung and Vergemeinschaftung instead of the substantives Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft (for Weber’s use of the terms, see Frisby and Sayer, 1986, p. 68; Tyrell, 1994; Outhwaite, 2006, pp. 6, 80). Whereas Weber conceives the social in terms of subjective action, Simmel’s notion of reciprocal causation underscores the social as not mere activity but also passivity (Christian, 1978, p. 123). Occasionally Simmel does conceptualize Wechselwirkung as ‘reciprocally determined [...] action [Aktion]’ (GSG 11, p. 161), or as the ‘activities’ (Handeln) of individuals ‘for, with, and against one another’ (GSG 11, p. 18). Still, for Simmel, the social consists not only in reciprocal actions, but in the dynamics of activity and passivity. That is, the social consists both of something that individuals ‘do’ (tun) and of what they receive and take upon themselves. To the latter, Simmel refers with the word leiden, which means, literally, ‘to suffer’. In this sense, the dynamics of Wechselwirkung equal the ‘dynamics of effecting [Wirken] and suffering [Leiden], dynamics with which the individuals mutually determine one another’ (GSG 16, pp. 70–1). Passivity is thereby a ‘positive’ element of Wechselwirkung, not merely a negative counterpart of an effect. That is why Wechselwirkung cannot always be translated simply as ‘interaction’. In relations of Wechselwirkung, individuals not only carry effects, they are also being influenced; Wechselwirkung is the dynamics of affecting and being afftected. (Simmel briefly touches on the issue of positive passivity in his essay on the ruin, ‘Die Ruine’, where he states that letting a work of architecture turn into a ruin is ‘positive passivity’; it refers to a situation where ‘the passive human operates as sheer nature’ [GSG 14, p. 289]). The second important moment of reciprocal effect with regard to the event has to do with causation. The event is not only something irreducible to action, but it is also not a ‘product’ of action. Eventalization deprives individuals of being the sources of social processes. While the concept of action isolates the actor, in the sense of identifying him or


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her and only him or her as the ‘source of the action’, and this is so also when it acknowledges the possibility that action may be reaction to the action of others (Tyrell, 1998, p. 119), eventalization based on reciprocal causation is a decentring procedure: it dislocates the source of processes and disperses phenomena into a web of relations. Events occur and emerge always in-between, between the poles of inter-individual relations. In the event, the relations and the related entries co-constitute each another. To conceptualize the eventality of the social in terms of reciprocal effects is, therefore, to quote Michel Foucault’s (2000b, p. 227) account of eventalization, to lighten ‘the weight of causality’: it removes the focus from the individual actors to the dynamic relations between them. ‘Reciprocal causation’/Wechselwirkung is thus a counter concept to one-way ‘causation’ (GSG 6, pp. 59–60; Christian, 1978, pp. 124–5; Nedelmann, 1984, p. 96; Ziemann, 2000, p. 113). It not only multiplies the causes of a phenomenon, but also makes every cause an effect and every effect a cause in their mutual determination. Thus, whereas causation resembles a straight line, reciprocal causation is reminiscent of a circle, ‘in which every point is a beginning and an end, and all parts condition each other’ (GSG 6, p. 115; PM, p. 115). In it, ‘the effect that one element produces upon another then becomes a cause that reflects back as an effect upon the former, which in turn repeats the process by becoming a cause of retroaction’ (GSG 6, p. 120–1; PM, p. 119; for this, see also Christian, 1978, p. 124; Nedelmann, 1984, p. 96; Gangas, 2004, p. 33). This circularity makes the play of forces in reciprocal causation in principle a never-ending process. According to Simmel, even the relations that seem to contain only one-way effects involve reciprocity: It is often overlooked how much what at first appears as a one-sided activity is actually based upon reciprocity: the orator appears as the leader and inspirer to the assembly, the teacher to his class, the journalist to his public; but, in fact, everyone in such a situation feels the decisive and determining reaction of the apparently passive mass. (GSG 6, p. 59; PM, p. 82)


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Here we come back to the question of passivity. The apparently passive mass and the subject under influence are not without influence themselves. As a proof of the fact that every relation involves reciprocity, Simmel takes up hypnotic suggestion, ‘obviously the clearest case of activity on one side and absolute dependence on the other’. By drawing


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on the claim of ‘an outstanding hypnotist’, whose name he does not mention, Simmel maintains that even in hypnotic suggestion ‘there is an influence, [though of the kind] that is difficult to describe, of the person hypnotized upon the hypnotist, without which the experiment could not have the effect that it has’ (GSG 6, p. 59; PM, p. 82; translation altered). So, the supposedly ‘passive’ hypnotized subject can influence the supposedly ‘active’ hypnotist, also without knowing so. Besides testifying to the precedence of reciprocity and exchange over one-sided effects in relationships, hypnosis is a remarkable example also in that it suggests that an influence does not always have to be conscious. It can be there without having to present itself, without being manifest. Provided that even the actions that at first sight seem completely onesided by nature are tokens of reciprocity, Simmel suggests that ‘most relationships between people can be interpreted as forms of exchange’ (GSG 6, p. 59; PM, p. 82). Exchange is irreducible to the acts of giving and receiving: ‘[It] is not a mere addition of two processes of giving and receiving, but a new third phenomenon, in which each of the two processes is simultaneously cause and effect’ (GSG 6, pp. 73–4; PM, p. 90). Simmel’s idea that each relation involves interactivity, so that every element of the world interacts somehow with every other, has been suspect to criticism. Already Weber (1972, p. 163) criticized Simmel’s concept of reciprocal effect for being so vague and universal that it would be almost impossible to imagine an effect or an influence that would not contain any reciprocity or interaction. Accordingly, much in line with Weber, Matthias Gross (2001, p. 397) has argued that the idea of reciprocal relations is ‘so broad, theoretically and methodologically, that not much is gained’. It lacks a counter concept and thereby any possibility of being negated, as Andeas Ziemann (2000, pp. 113–4) has maintained. These criticisms, however, largely miss the fact that, to a significant extent, as the world becomes increasingly reticular the notion of interactivity has become a precondition for thought and experience. As we have already seen in Philosophie des Geldes, Simmel maintains that the ubiquity and predomination of money is prone to increase the relationality of the world; the more society becomes permeated by money transaction, the more reticular the social world becomes – and the more prevailing the notion of exchange or interactivity as a figure of thought grows. Interactivity forms the ontology of the world, and the metaphor of interaction is an integral part of the ‘self-description’ of society, to put it in Luhmannian terms.36 So, to criticize the notion of reciprocal effect or interaction for being imprecise and vague means to treat these


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only as conceptual tools. It is equally important to look at the ‘historical ontology’, to borrow from Ian Hacking (2002), of interactivity. Simmel also seems to be well aware that, when perceived and used as a conceptual tool, the genuine sociological relevance of Wechselwirkung becomes evident only when it is married with the concept of form (Dahme, 1981, p. 24; Ziemann, 2000, pp. 113–4). In fact, it is by necessity that reciprocal effects always appear in some form. Simmel phrases this in Soziologie by stating that the social relation is always originally a ‘fluctuating, constantly developing life-process’, which ‘nevertheless receives a relatively stable external form’ (GSG 11, p. 659). That is, the social is at once process and form, becoming and being; the contrast of process and form presents the inner antagonism of the social. As this antagonism is crucial to Simmel’s understanding of the social, we shall examine in more detail in the next section.

Process and form The above cited two-clause passage, in which Simmel at once specifies the social as a ‘fluctuating, constantly developing life-process’ and ‘relatively stable external form’, discloses it in the tension between becoming and being, flux and stability. It binds together the opposing poles of process and form. By taking up the notions coined by Fitzi (2002, pp. 263–4), we can argue that the advantage of this dual specification is that it enables us to think the social at once as a ‘becoming form’ (werdende Form) and a ‘formed becoming’ (geformtes Werden). In other words, the Simmelian eventalization or, if you will, desubstantialization of the social elucidates the processual dynamics of apparently static forms without depriving the social of a form. The social is not absolute becoming, but it should be considered in terms of becoming forms or formed becomings. Indeed, notwithstanding the precedence he gives to process, Simmel does not go so far as to claim that the social would amount to sheer formless and empty becoming. It is not that it would be wholly ephemeral, fleeting, and contingent, or that everything solid would vaporize. Simmel acknowledges that the dynamic event/Geschehen of the social is often objectified into an institution such as language, thought forms, morality, religion, family, law, money, people, state, and so on (GSG 4, p. 127). In fact, as argued by Fitzi (2002), the objectification of the social from the fluctuating reciprocity between individuals to relatively stable formations is among the key issues of Simmel’s sociology. In his work Simmel offers quite a refined view on the degrees of the objectification of forms, from the elementary social forms to institutionalized ones, autonomous play


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forms of society, all the way to the generic form of society itself as a whole (see Levine, 1971, p. xxvii). Institutionalized forms are characterized by relative endurance and independence of the individual: many of the institutional norms and organizations that surround us both precede and outlast our limited existence. The autonomous play forms, in turn, as the purest example of which Simmel mentions ‘sociability’ (Geselligkeit), the play form of society, present the second degree of autonomization of forms in his work. In their vivacity and playfulness they are necessarily not stiff and fixed, but independent of individuals and practical concerns. While being completely oriented to persons, sociability, for instance, is autonomous in the sense that it does not serve any practical purpose external to itself, but is itself its own purpose (e.g., GSG 16, p. 120). Finally, the third level of autonomization is the generic form of society itself. For Simmel, society is no absolute entity in its own right, but merely an abstract form composed of the associations between individuals. He stresses that it is only in few cases that the fluctuating social relation does not gain any durability. One of them is for him the mutual glance (Blick) between persons. Simmel suggests that the glance equals pure event like no other social form. It is ‘perhaps the most immediate and purest reciprocal relation [Wechselbeziehung] that there exists’ (GSG 8, p. 280). Unlike other forms, it remains caught up with its event: ‘Where sociological threads are spun elsewhere, they tend to have an objective content and produce an objective form’. The glance, by contrast, is not objectified into durable forms: The extremely lively reciprocation [lebendige Wechselwirkung] [...] into which the look from one eye to another weaves people together, does not crystallize in any objective structure [Gebilde], but rather the unity that it creates between them remains directly suspended in the event [Geschehen] and in the function. (GSG 8, p. 280; SC, p. 111; translation altered) Simmel suggests that the glance is even more ephemeral than the spoken and heard word, despite the evidently momentary and fleeting character of the latter. The spoken and heard word has an objective content that can be transmitted to other forms for example by recording it or by transcribing it as text. The glance, by contrast, does not leave behind any objective trace. It vanishes right after its event:


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This is to say that except for the look, all social relations tend to outlive their event, if not by becoming durable and achieving more stable states, then at least because they leave behind objects. Those objects – letters, official documents, photographs, wreckage, ruins, litter, and so on – exist as pieces of evidence, as reminders of past relations, practices, and events. Another means for the present to extend into the future, and the past into the present, is memory (Gedächtnis). However, Simmel does not discuss the role of memory within the context of the durability of social relations, but he does touch on it in passing in the book Lebensanshauung when discussing life and duration, as we shall see later in Chapter 7.

Living reciprocity vs. autonomous forms Simmel considers the stabilization of the social above all in terms of the aforementioned objectification of forms. It refers to the idea that once social forms have emerged, they tend to become independent of individuals and obey their own laws, taking on a life of their own. The growing independence of social forms is one manifestation of what Simmel conceptualizes in his life-philosophy in terms of Achsendrehung des Lebens, or the ‘turn of the axis of life’ (see GSG 16, p. 244–5). With it, he refers to the process by which forms – all kinds of forms created by individuals, not only the social ones – detach themselves from the vital needs of individuals and gain a life of their own (Eigenleben) (GSG 16, p. 230; GSG 14, p. 408). Instead of forms serving life, life begins to serve forms. Simmel presents in Lebensanschauung science, art, religion, justice, the Kantian categorical imperative, and the economy as examples of such autonomous forms. As regards science (Wissenschaft), Simmel suggests that it may have originally emerged to serve the practical needs and desire for knowledge but, as science, this is not its defining feature. Knowledge that is motivated by practical objectives is for Simmel not yet scientific per se. Scientific knowledge may serve some practical needs but this is not what makes it scientific, as we can have practical knowledge of all sorts of matters also without science. In science, by contrast, truth is sought for truth’s own sake (in der Wissenschaft würde ‘die Wahrheit um der Wahrheit willen’ gesucht) (GSG 16, p. 262). Simmel phrases the development from practical knowledge to science by noting


or indirectly, for all types of relationship between human beings; the interaction dies in the moment in which the immediacy of the function lapses. (GSG 8, p. 280; SC, p. 112)


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that, ‘first people know in order to live, but after that there are people who live in order to know’ (GSG 16, p. 261). The same goes, mutatis mutandis, for fine arts (bildende Kunst). Simmel maintains that while ‘in general we see in order to live, the artist lives in order to see’ (GSG 16, p. 269). That is to say that in fine arts, seeing becomes an end in itself. It does not serve any practical needs, adhering only to the rules of art. The relation of poetry to language, according to Simmel, is basically the same kind as that of fine arts to seeing. In poetry, language is not a means of communication but an end in itself. As for religion, Simmel proposes that we may experience the same kind of feelings that religion makes us feel in other spheres of life as well. For example, we may have faith in a person, we may feel that we belong to a greater whole, such as home country or humanity, or we may have a sense of simultaneous compliance and exaltation, passion and devotion towards a loved one while at the same time feeling highly dependent and responsible in our actions. But religion emerges, according to Simmel, only when these affects and conditions lose their profanely determined contents and become ‘absolute’, so to speak. This is manifested, for example, in the idea of God as the absolute object of faith and embodiment of transcendence and love (GSG 16, p. 286). Moreover, religion may have some positive effects on the integration and cohesion of society, but believers presumably do not share the belief in God for the sake of social integration; cohesion is only a possible side effect of their faith, while religious faith is an end in itself. Similarly, Simmel claims that with their sanctions, norms and rules contribute to the self-preservation (Sebsterhaltung) of groups and communities, but if the relation between the group and the individual is to be accordant with justice (Recht), people must submit to the norms and rules for their own sake (GSG 16, p. 289). He suggests that there have indeed existed actions that may be characterized as ‘just’ by nature even before the notion of justice was created, not to speak of the establishment of judicial institutions. However, while in the pre-judicial communities, Simmel claims, what was just was good insofar as it served life, according to the idea of justice, life is good insofar as it serves justice (GSG 16, p. 291). In this respect, Kant’s categorical imperative may be seen as being analogous to the case of justice (GSG 16, p. 294). According to Kant, it may indeed be worthy and respectable that one fulfils an obligation with joy or because one cares for others, but one acts morally only when one fulfils the obligation for its own sake. Lastly, the economy (Wirtschaft) is for Simmel a special case. On the one hand, of the forms that have become independent of life, none has


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been originally so inseparably tied to the practical concerns of life as the economy. In the last instance, people exchange goods and services in order to assuage hunger and take care of other basic needs. However, on the other hand, perhaps no other form has truly become ‘a world for itself’ (eine Welt für sich) to the extent that the economy has. The economy seems to operate completely irrespective of what the subjects need or want: ‘The violent logic of its development does not enquire after the will of any subject, nor after the sense and necessities of his life. The economy runs its forced course, completely in the manner as if people existed for it instead of it existing for the people’s sake.’ It is perhaps the most extreme case of ‘demonic violence’ done to life in the name of ruthless objectivity and matter-of-fact logic. In the economy, Simmel claims, the tension between ‘life and what is against life’ (Gegenübervom-Leben) reaches its maximum (GSG 16, 293). So, it seems that there exist, as argued also by Lash (2005), not one but two notions of the social in Simmel: one as the interlacing of the social and life, the other as the negation of life. Lash terms these the ‘primary or even primordial intersubjectivity’ (ibid., p. 10) versus ‘form, which is constraining and life-destroying’ (ibid., p. 20). The difference between the two notions is radical. The first stresses the continuity between the vital and the social: the social is inextricably both life and form, becoming and being (even though the two can be abstracted from one another analytically). In Soziologie, for example, Simmel notes that the social amounts to ‘eternal flux and pulsation’ (ein ewiges Fließen und Pulsieren) (GSG 11, p. 33). And, elsewhere, Simmel couples the social with life even much more explicitly. For instance, in ‘Soziologie der Sinne’, as we remember, Simmel refers to the social as ‘this pulsating life which links human beings together’. The intertwinement of the vital and the social is lost in the notion of the social as autonomous form. Autonomous forms constrain life. The notion of the social as autonomous form seems to be in perfect congruence with Durkheim’s concept. After all, one of the defining features of social facts, along with their collective nature and independence vis-á-vis individuals, is for Durkheim their constraining power over individuals. As Durkheim puts it in The Rules of Sociological Method (1982, p. 59): ‘A social fact is any way of acting [...] capable of exerting over the individual an external constraint’. Interpreted along these lines, prohibition, as Frédérick Keck (2005, pp. 1136–7) suggests, becomes the primary social fact for Durkheim. Prohibition opposes life as it represses, constrains, and regulates the vital desires of individuals.


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Nonetheless, as we have already stated, it is the dynamic reciprocal relations between individuals that are primary for Simmel, and the autonomous forms are derivative. This can be seen also in the power Simmel affords to life to break away from constraining forms. He does not discuss the matter so much in his sociology of forms than in his philosophical essays on culture. According to Simmel, the contrast between life and form is ‘the innermost motive for cultural transformation’ (GSG 16, p. 226) and ‘the ultimate grounds for the fact that culture has a history’ (GSG 16, p. 183). Life constantly tries to overcome forms. While encompassing life and providing it with shape, stability, and actuality, forms ‘do not share the restless rhythm of life, its ascent and descent, its constant renewal, its incessant divisions and reunifications’ (GSG 16, p. 183; ISF, p. 375). Simmel describes form as actuality, surface, timeless, and powerless in contrast to life, which he gives the epithets of potentiality, inner current, temporality, and force (GSG 15, pp. 377–80). Life cannot be fully accommodated in form, since forms funnel and dam its otherwise unrestricted stream. This is why life ceaselessly reaches out beyond old forms and creates new ones. In the essay ‘Der Konflikt der modernen Kultur’, Simmel illustrates this process, taking the transformation of the forms of production as his example: The economic forces of every epoch generate forms of production appropriate to their nature. Slave economy, guild constitution, peasant obligation, free wage labour, and other kind of work organizations – all these expressed, when they were formed, adequately the capacities and wishes of their times. Within their own norms and limitations, however, there grew economic forces whose volume and manner could not fulfil themselves in these forms. Either through gradual or more acute revolutions the forces burst the oppressive bonds of their respective forms and replaced them with modes of production more appropriate. A new mode of production, however, as a form has no energy of its own that could supersede another form. It is life itself, here in its economic dimension – with its drive and its desire for advancement, its internal changes and differentiation – that provides the dynamics for this whole movement; yet life as such is formless, it can only become a phenomenon as formed. (GSG 16, pp. 184–5)


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At first glance, Simmel seems to be merely echoing Marx here. After all, Marx sees the conflict between forces of production and relations


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Becomings The idea of life bursting forms that have become oppressive indicates that there is another notion of becoming in Simmel’s work besides the actualization of the form of the social. While the idea of becoming as the statu nascendi of society in the event refers to becoming into form, the creative process of cultural change, based on the striving of life beyond forms, designates becoming from form. In Simmel’s writings these two heterogeneous becomings never meet. There is, on the one hand, the principal idea of something with an almost ahistorical formation of the social dealt with in Simmel’s programmatic texts on sociology, and, on the other hand, the historical de- and re-formation of cultural forms discussed in his culturalphilosophical essays. Of course, from the viewpoint of life, these two becomings can be seen as nothing but different phases or unfoldings of one and the same process of life, of one and the same unified act of life. Whereas societalization is the becoming of forms at the point of their actualization or realization, historical change is the becoming that destroys those forms, breaks free from them, and creates new ones. That is, while societalization is the point of actualization of social forms, ‘the point of crystallization (Verdichtung) before they have become objectified or reified’ (Frisby 2001, p. 149), historical becoming, by contrast, is the transformation and re-formation of already objectified and reified forms. Because Simmel pays so much attention to justifying his sociology’s focus on the forms of social relations, he does not lay emphasis on the novelty and singularity of individual associations, but what is common to several forms. He contends that the distinction into form and content is legitimate, since one and the same form (e.g., rivalry) can appear in the most diverse contents (sports, politics, work, science, art, love, religion, economics, rearmament, etc.), and one and the same content (e.g., sexual desire) can come in many different forms (in heterosexual or homosexual relationship, in promiscuity, courtship, cohabitation, or marriage, in monogamous or polygamous relationship, in prostitution, sadomasochism, fetishism, etc.) (GSG 11, p. 21). In the cross-section of complex historical phenomena, forms are highlighted in Simmel’s


of production as the root of history. However, for Simmel, the conflict between the forces of production and the forms of production is only one manifestation of the more pervasive conflict between life and form. It is subordinate to the opposition of life and form.


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sociology of forms as their common element. Consequently, what is singular is cut out of the analysis. For Simmel, sociology is the science of the typical. In his sociology, typification is the manner in which he grasps, and operates with, reality when describing and interpreting social phenomena (Giacomoni, 1997, p. 21); it is from the side of their repetition that Simmel’s sociology considers social forms. Forms are differentiated first and foremost as types, according to their typical features.37 Accordingly, he maintains that the main objective of sociological investigation is to find the constellations, where the interaction [Wechselwirkung] between things is robust enough for their isolated observation of interactions with other beings to make an optimal explanation. The main thing in this respect is whether the combination under consideration is a frequent one or not, so that the understanding of it may be typical. (GSG 2, p. 130; trans. Gross, 2001, p. 397) So, in the midst of the changing diversity of singular associations, sociology, Simmel suggests, should pay attention to what is typical in them. Therefore his sociology of forms is incapable of accommodating the surprising event of associations in their singularity. The emerging associations almost seem only to realize eternal and universal forms, which are valid independent of the fact whether they are realized a thousand times or not even once (see e.g., GSG 11, p. 26). It is as if societalization only had to give them a reality. Simmel’s notion of life, by contrast, succeeds in paying regard to the aspect of the new much better than that of societalization. The notion of life underlines that historical becoming is always generative and continually creating novelty. Life is an inexhaustible source of freedom; it expresses new possibilities for being in the motion of constant transformation, destruction, and creation of forms. Viewed from the perspective of life, then, social forms are not eternal, but historically changeable. Generative becoming is their dynamics. Also, the relation between the vital and the social is different in the two becomings. Whereas societalization is the point of the vital becoming social, historical becoming is the negation of the social that has negated the vital (at the point when the social has become objectified). After their creation, forms are not in the immediate service of life anymore. They rather tend to cut their serving relation to life as they gain autonomy and come to restrain becoming, as Simmel suggests with the notion of Achsendrehung des Lebens.


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I suggest considering both of these becomings in terms of the event. The event, like both notions of becoming, emphasizes the primacy of process over substance. For Simmel, the social is no stuff, no item, no thing, but movement, process, and fluid associations (this is what such contemporary scholars as Latour clearly share with Simmel, as we will see in Chapter 8). His theorizing reminds us that even though the institutionalized social formations may be as far from the living reciprocity between individuals as possible, without such reciprocity there would not appear any institutionalized forms in the first place. Yet, the notion of societalization as becoming into form is helpful for us only when it is supplemented with the other central notion of becoming in Simmel’s philosophy of culture, namely the becoming from forms designated by the historical change of forms. The de-substantialization of the reified notion of the social easily runs the risk of overemphasizing its emergence at the expense of the continuing processes of its maintenance (for a fairly similar argument see DeLanda 2006, pp. 38–9). Just as social formations would never come into existence were it not for the vital reciprocity between individuals, neither would these formations be able to maintain their relatively stable form without the ongoing reciprocity, the constant murmur and ceaseless work of actualization. Whereas the notion of societalization suggests that it is the process of becoming that determines the actuality of society and establishes the positivity of its being, the idea of the creative, generative becoming of life discloses the movement of structures and already objectified formations. It underscores that actuality does not exhaust society and the social. Life overflows forms: forms have change-potential that is not lapsed in their actuality. Not only society but also other familiar heuristic categories used by sociologists – such as structure, culture, institution, identity, race, and gender – are not stable, clear-cut entities with exact boundaries. Rather, they are themselves boundaries that leak and are radically open to change. This is what the notion of the event fascinatingly emphasizes with the element of surprise being always inscribed in it. In sum, both of the mentioned perspectives on becoming emphasize that studying social forms should always be a matter of studying formation, not only hypostatized forms or fully-fledged and isolated actors. While societalization emphasizes the emergence of the social, process of formation before the forms have become objectified, the idea of historical, generative becoming underscores that social formations change and maintain their identity only through reciprocal relations. Not even the seemingly most stable groups, formations, and collectives are capable of persisting without the ongoing give-and-take between individuals.


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Absolutely nothing would happen. Therefore, instead of considering the social as a thing, a finished product, we should grasp it in the event of its becoming. Events of social formations cannot be specified by way of their causes or consequences, origins or outcomes. We cannot explain the forms of social life by going behind them to social action, structure, or the totality of society. What matters is not what precedes or follows, but the moment of the event itself, the becoming. The social is not fixed substantiality, but a living process to be examined in its continuous alteration and draining, in the event of the actualization of its form. An important insight that Simmel offers is to disentangle this process of formation from simple causality. The work of actualization belongs always to the dynamics of the event in its irreducibility and unexpectedness, not to that of individual actors. As Nietzsche (2003, p. 26) put it with the term action, ‘There is no “being” behind doing, working, becoming; “the doer” is a mere appen[d]age to the action. The action is everything’.


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Excluded Thirds, Included: On Being-with

As we have seen, instead of being reducible to an overarching society, the social, in its most basic form, is for Simmel processual association of individuals. However, he does not go as far as to claim that the social is not at all objectifiable. Notwithstanding the precedence Simmel gives to the dynamic reciprocity between individuals, he does not deny the existence of supra-individual social wholes. In this chapter, I will discuss how the contrast between dynamic sociality and objectified social formations can be elaborated by looking at the number of persons involved in the interaction. In the second chapter of Soziologie, ‘Die quantitative Bestimmtheit der Gruppe’, Simmel treats the quantitative determination of social formations. According to him, there exists an explicit correlation between social forms of interaction and the number of elements involved in the interaction. While a clear distinction can be detected also between the forms of small groups and those of large groups, he contends that it is only in the interaction between two elements – which he terms the ‘dyad’ (Zweizahl), and that of three, the ‘triad’ (Dreizahl) – that the quantitative determination can be specified in numerical terms. Simmel’s treatment of the dyad and the triad has been highly influential, especially in the American sociology and social psychology within the study of small groups and group dynamics (see e.g., Levine, Carter and Gorman, 1976: 1115–1117; Becker and Useem, 1942; Hare, 1952; Caplow, 1956; Mills, 1958; Bean, 1970, Thompson and Walker, 1982), as well as in organization studies (see e.g., Burt, 1992; 2005; Burt and Knez, 1995; Krackhardt, 1999). But it is only with few exceptions that it has been considered in connection with his conception of the social. That is the objective of this chapter. By playing on the dynamics between the dyad and the triad, I will try to analyze Simmel’s notion


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of the social into its most basic components. Thus, the following will amount to a sort of sociological arithmetic that explores the arithmetically definable quantitative determination of social formations. Simmel himself does not employ the expression ‘sociological arithmetic’, but I think it succeeds in identifying the style and logic of his analysis of the dyad and the triad. In the examination, the dyad and the triad are taken as generalizable models of all kinds of social constellations or, to play with words, as forms of a ‘socio-logic’,38 the dyad presenting its bivalent and the triad its trivalent variant. Simmel argues that, sociologically, the typical differences between all social constellations can be presented by looking at the differences between the formations of two elements and the ‘third’ (der Dritte).

Being-with-you The simplest social unit for Simmel is the dyadic relation between ‘I’ (Ich) and ‘you’ (Du). He considers the beginning of sociality as a ‘society of two’ (Gesellschaft zu zweien) (GSG 8, p. 348), a ‘unity of one human being with another’ (GSG 11, p. 44). Rather than referring to a societal whole, the term ‘society’ is closer here to the social: it designates sociality, social bond, and social relation. In Soziologie, he asserts that ‘[t]he numerically simplest formations which in general can still be called social interactions seem to express themselves between two elements’ (GSG 11, p. 96). A few pages later, he further elaborates on this by stating that the relation ‘between two elements’ is ‘the methodically simplest sociological formation’: ‘It offers the schema, the germ and the material for innumerable formations of more members’ (GSG 11, p. 100). As a sociological unit, the dyad is for Simmel even simpler than a unit of just one person (Einzahl) (GSG 11, p. 124). The relation between two persons precedes the ostensible nonrelation of ‘being-alone’. Therefore, even being-alone is essentially ‘being-with-others’. Being-alone is not the sheer absence of social relations but their presence, which is then removed: in being-alone, the influence of others is merely cut off and their presence is turned from actual into ‘ideal’.39 Being-alone is thus not being the only person on the face of the earth but a relation, a form of interaction in which the other party is excluded after carrying out real effects on the person (GSG 11, p. 96). The fact that Simmel conceives even being alone as a form of being-with implies that our existence is essentially co-existence for him. The being of an individual is always being with a ‘you’, a point addressed recently also by Nancy (see 2000; 2008) more thoroughly and


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illuminatingly than perhaps any other thinker before him. According to Nancy, it was Heidegger who first elucidated the essentiality of the ‘with’ for being (Nancy, 2008, p. 3). In Being and Time (1962, Section 26, p. 155), Heidegger contends that ‘being-with’ (Mitdasein) is essential to Dasein. However, preceding Heidegger, already Simmel noted that being-with is constituent to our being. With few exceptions (see e.g., Heidegger, 1962, pp. 494–5 note vi), Heidegger almost never mentions Simmel by name in his texts. However, to some extent, Heidegger was familiar with his work. Hans Georg Gadamer (1975, p. 521 note 129), for instance, reports that as early as 1923, Heidegger spoke highly of Simmel and his last pieces of writing in a private conversation. Heidegger also took up some aspects of Simmel’s thought. David Farrell Krell (1992, p. 95) has suggested that Simmel has influenced Heidegger’s analysis of being-in-the-world, and also his notions of death and destiny (we will discuss Heidegger’s relation to Simmel in more detail later in Chapter 7). Furthermore, interestingly, like Simmel, Heidegger even stresses being alone as a deficient mode of being-with. Heidegger sees being alone as imprinted by the existential-ontological fact that being-in-the-world is, by necessity, ‘being-with along with others’ (Heidegger, 1962, Section 26, p. 155; translation altered). For Simmel, the basic ontological condition of human existence is that ‘the single human being is not alone on earth but becomes determined through being-with-others [Mitdasein anderer]’ (GSG 8, p. 348). Being-with is not added to being, nor does it come second to it. Being is already given as being-with; being-with constitutes the being of individuals. Simmel holds that ‘the human being is in one’s whole essence determined by the fact that one lives in reciprocal interaction with other people’ (GSG 16, p. 72; GSG 11, p. 15). The purest form of ‘togetherness’ is represented for Simmel in sociability/Geselligkeit. It is characterized by an impulse to be with others – that is, ‘by a feeling for, by a satisfaction in, the very fact that one is associated with others, and that the solitariness of the individual is resolved into togetherness, a union with others’ (GSG 12, p. 178; SC, p. 121). Nevertheless, being-with is for Simmel not only a specific social form, but essential to being in general, its ontological condition. The being of an individual is always supported, even constituted by something other than him- or herself. This makes ‘the other’ a crucial component in the structure of being for Simmel; being-with others is essential to the constitution of being. The individual is not complete and self-consistent in itself, but is traversed by relations. The individual exists only in relation with others, in a relational milieu. It is also precisely the relations with




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others that the social designates. By drawing from Simmel, Michael Theunissen (1984, p. 6), for instance, has defined the social as ‘every type of relation to the Other, including the presocial’. Given this, the study of the social (i.e., sociology) could be seen as the enquiry into the conditions and forms of being along with others. This is, of course, not a new perspective, but it can already be found in the etymological root of the term ‘sociology’: the Latin term socius implies that the social relates to our associations with companions or allies. Theunissen (1984, p. 1) suggests that ‘the Other’ is a generic label that encompasses all the notions by way of which continental philosophy has tried to ‘set out the structure of being-with, or its transcendental form’. He divides the philosophies of the Other roughly into two approaches: transcendental philosophy, which conceives of the Other as the ‘alien I’, and the philosophy of dialogue, or ‘dialogicalism’, which understands by the Other the ‘you’ or ‘the Thou’ (Theunissen, 1984). Simmel’s thought of the other represents a variant of dialogicalism. He considers being-with-other in terms of being-with-you. And the ‘you’ figures not only in his sociology. Simmel also defines morality (Sittlichkeit) as ‘the devotion of the I to a you’ (GSG 11, p. 239), suggesting thus, like Emmanuel Levinas is to remind us later, that ethics should not be understood only in terms of a general ethical order – ethical codes and moral rules – but also as a responsibility and respect to the singular other. Furthermore, for Simmel, the question of ‘understanding’ (Verstehen) too comes down to our relation to the ‘you’. Understanding has always to do with understanding a you: ‘The you and the understanding are the same, expressed in the one as substance and in the other as function – a primordial phenomenon [Urphänomen] of the human spirit’ (GSG 16, p. 162). By invoking the notion of the you, Simmel conceives the other as both specific and typified. It is specific in the sense that it does not refer to otherness in general, to a more or less indeterminate group of others in the plural, but to the other, the you, in the singular, as the second person of the personal pronoun. It is typified in the sense that this you does not refer to any singular you, a capitalized Other with a proper name (such as Mother, God, etc.) but rather signifies a type, a category, a position that a subject comes to occupy when facing me. The Simmelian you is a thus a lowercase ‘other’, not to be confused with any of the notions of capitalized Other, such as the Lacanian one, separation from which, in Lacan’s view, constitutes the social (i.e., separation from the ‘mOther’ with whom the I cannot be re-united; Albertsen and Diken, 2003, p. 15). It is crucial to distinguish it from Mead’s ‘generalized other’, and


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from any conception that identifies the other with the ‘alien I’ (such as the transcendental subject or the unconsciousness) with some external force (i.e., God),40 that is other to the I, as well as from the concept of ‘otherness’ employed by, say, feminist or postcolonial theory. In his thinking of the you, Simmel commences from the idea that, besides having an ontological certainty of ourselves, we also hold to ‘the fact of you’: ‘We feel the you as something independent from our representation [of him/her], as something that is for oneself exactly the same way as our own existence’ (GSG 11, p. 45). The you who I face is not an object but a subject inasmuch as myself: ‘The other soul has for me the same reality as I myself’ (GSG 11, p. 44). This makes the you and I ontologically equal: ‘The you is [...] a primordial phenomenon in the same extent as the I’ (GSG 16, p. 160). Not only does the you have an independent existence, but Simmel notes that it is also immediately perceived as such by me. As much as the I, the you is a ‘primary immediately experienced category that can be traced back no further’ (GSG 15, p. 338; RB, p. 23). The independent being-for-oneself of the you implies that being-withyou is fundamentally marked by distance. Donald Levine (1959, p. 23) has correctly pointed out that for Simmel, ‘distance is the main dimension in social life’. In topics like secrecy, the stranger, value, the pauper, super- and subordination, as well as in the sociology of space, distance plays a significant role as a theme. Simmel stresses that in principle all social relations can be analyzed in terms of spatial and psychological distance/proximity (see GSG 11, p. 717). However, what hasn’t been properly noted in the secondary literature is that distance is of crucial importance for Simmel’s very notion of the social, too, in the manner that it manifests itself in the bilateral bond between the I and the you. Sociality between the I and the you appears as being-with precisely because the you always remains distanced and separate from the I, and therefore I cannot be united with you, in the sense of forming a common substance. While the you is subjectively closer to the I than anything else, the I and the you cannot, nevertheless, become completely fused together: On the one hand, the animated you is our only pair in cosmos, the only being with which we understand ourselves mutually and which can be felt as “one” like nothing else, so that we place the other nature, whenever we mean to feel united with it, in the category of the you [...] On the other hand, the you has an individuality and sovereignty alongside us like no other [...]. (GSG 16, p. 162)




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Indeed, in his or her singularity, the other remains to some extent a secret to us; secrecy, secretum, as Derrida (1995, p. 20) notes, alludes to separation, se-cernere. Simmel states in the piece ‘Der Platonischer und der Moderne Eros’, that ‘there is something unattainable in the other: [...] the absoluteness of the individual self erects a wall between two human beings’ (GSG 20, p. 188). He elaborates on the inaccessibility of the you in the essay ‘Psychologie der Koketterie’: The fact that the human being is, in one’s most passionate needs, dependent on the being from whom one is separated by perhaps the deepest metaphysical gap is the purest, possibly even the archetypical form [Urform] of the loneliness which makes the human being ultimately a stranger not only amongst all the beings in the world, but also amongst those who are the closest to him or her. (GSG 12, p. 48) The human being is thus lonely even in spite of being always already along with others. This is to say that while we are always already related, we also remain separate; we are connected and disconnected at the same time. So, while being alone is merely a deficient mode of being-with, to some extent we are solitary even when being with others.

How is the social bond possible? It is precisely the yawning metaphysical chasm between us that makes the relation between I and you an essential problem: how is it that we can appear with one another? How can we be together? The tension between proximity and distance that shapes the I/you relation sets for Simmel the ‘deepest psychological-epistemological schema and problem of societalization [Vergesellschaftung]’ (GSG 11, p. 45). This has been a key question from the excurse ‘Wie ist Gesellschaft möglich?’ (‘How is society possible?’) to the opening chapter of Soziologie. Even though being analogous to Kant’s question of how nature is possible, the problem of the possibility of society has a completely other methodological sense: unlike nature, the social is not constituted by a transcendental subject, but is built upon the interplay between I and you. Whereas a meadow, a stream, a tree, and a mountain make up a ‘landscape’ only in the mind of an observer, societalized elements do not need a third party, an observing person to appear together with one another, but they themselves are ‘synthetic-active’ (synthetisch-aktiv) (GSG 11, pp. 43–4). Societalized elements are not simply put together to stand


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alongside one another in a relation of pure exteriority. Their being is constituted by an essential, originary ‘with’ based on reciprocal determination. According to Simmel, the consciousness of one’s societalization emerges from the feeling and realization that one determines and is determined by others (GSG 11, 44). As Petra Christian (1978, p. 129) points out, the I and the you mutually ground themselves in a dialectical or dialogical fashion. As a primary category, you are a constituent component of my own existence, and I myself am a you to the you. So, Simmel asks, how is this mutual determination possible? After all, the you is not an object but a subject inasmuch as myself, since the you has ‘for me the same reality as I myself’. Simmel sees that answering the question requires that we find the conditions of possibility for encountering the you. Even though Simmel himself calls these, in a Kantian manner, ‘aprioric’ (apriorische) (GSG 11, p. 43), they are not transcendental-logical but rather empirical-psychological by nature (Bevers, 1985, p. 49).41 The first condition is that I perceive you as typified to some extent (GSG 11, pp. 47–8). The you is given to me through several general traits: female, aged, French, professor of philosophy, married, smoker, music lover, and so on. It is their fusion and combination that forms for me the individuality of the you (cf. GSG 6, p. 393). None of these traits are limited to this or that singular you, but are ‘something turned to the outside’: they transcend the individual toward a type (GSG 15, p. 422; RB, p. 87). So, from the viewpoint of the I, you are not defined by yourself alone but by belonging to a social type that you share with others. Thereby the type helps to identify or recognize the other person by way of some general characteristics. Simmel proposes that the type provides the you with ‘a new form’ as the ‘individual-real residue’ of the person becomes united with it. Due to this form, it is possible for me to perceive the other as my like, as a ‘co-dweller of the same specific world’ (Mitbewohner derselben besonderen Welt) (GSG 11, pp. 49–50). The world in being-in-the-world is always shared; you are never wholly ‘other’, someone absolutely inacessible and strange, but in some respects like me and someone with whom I share a world. The general social attributes, however, do not encompass the person entirely. The type is ‘always at once more and less than the individual’ (GSG 11, p. 50): more insofar as it holds for several individuals, less insofar as the individual is not exhausted by the type. That is, for Simmel, the you is not thoroughly social, a sheer social product. Instead of being merely a carrier of social roles and general attributes, the you also possesses qualitative uniqueness that is not socially determined: ‘It seems




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as if every human being had a deepest point of individuality in oneself which cannot be reproduced [nachgeformt] inwardly by anyone else with whom this point is qualitatively divergent’ (GSG 11, p. 48). Accordingly, Simmel coins the second condition of the social as ‘every element of a group is not only a part of society, but is still something besides it’ (GSG 11, p. 51), ‘the a priori of the empirical social life is that life is not completely social’ (GSG 11, p. 53). For Simmel, the fact that that the you is not fully absorbed by and integrated into a social formation is not a sheer negative condition of society, but its positive moment. The social being of an individual is crucially determined and co-determined by the way in which the individual is not social in other respects (GSG 11, p. 51). It is only because one is not completely socially determined that the individual is able to self-determine oneself and to identify one’s action with one’s person (Schrader-Klebert, 1968, p. 114). The third condition, finally, concerns bringing the antagonism of the social and the individual to a ‘principal harmony’ (GSG 11, p. 59). Here, Simmel is dealing not so much with the bond between I and you but with the relation of the individual to society as a self-sustaining social whole. He holds that, were one to perceive society from a purely objective perspective, it would appear as a system in which the individual has no weight whatsoever, an order consisting of functions linked together systematically in terms of space, time, concepts, and values, completely devoid of the ‘self’ (Ichform) that, in the last resort, nonetheless carries its dynamics. On the other hand, were one to consider each function and quality as purely individual, society would become ‘a cosmos whose diversity is [...] unfathomable in terms of being and movement’. In it, each element could be and act as it pleased without changing the overall structure in any way (GSG 11, p. 57). Thus, Simmel concludes, in order for society to be possible as a constellation of mutually related individuals, there has to be a pervasive correlation between the life of the individual and the surrounding social whole. According to Simmel, when considered from the viewpoint of the individual, the causal nexus that produces the external network of society is transformed into a commitment, conviction, and a feeling of purpose (for example, as expressed in ‘vocation’). By way of this, ‘every individual receives a specific position in the social milieu by oneself and in accordance with one’s own nature’, becoming thus societalized (GSG 11, p. 59). This produces the ‘general value’ of individuality, which means ‘that the individuality of the individual finds a place in the structure of generality’ (GSG 11, p. 61). Then one exists as an individual also in a social sense, by appearing as individual to others and not only in and by oneself.


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To sum up the discussion so far, for Simmel, our being is essentially being-with. Instead of theorizing this being-with primarily in the form of being-among-many, he conceptualizes it in its basic form as beingwith of I and you. For Simmel, our recognition of the you is opposed to the knowledge of an object: the you is a subject who is like me in some respects (when appearing as a representative of a type) and yet different from me, precisely because of having an individuality and sovereignty as a subject; the being-with of the I and the you is not a relation of the same to a same. However, as signalled by the notion of being-with, the you is not only someone resembling me and appearing to me as an other self, but also essentially someone with whom I am. Thus, the you who is bound to remain distanced from and alien to me despite our similarities also fundamentally supports my being. This dialectics of distance and proximity, of dissociative association, sets out the question of the ‘between’ in-between I and you. It will be treated in the next section.

Betweenness What exactly does it mean to ‘be with’? First of all, it should not be confused with mere contiguity. Being-with does not amount to pure exteriority or sheer being alongside each element. In ‘Exkurs über Sozialpsychologie’ in Soziologie, Simmel stresses that the sheer multiplication of individuals does not yet make their aggregate a social phenomenon – this a ‘statistical’ error concerning the social that confuses the ‘contiguity’ (Nebeneinander) of individuals with their ‘togetherness’ or being ‘with one another’ (Miteinander). He illustrates this idea with an example that stands in exact opposition to Durkheim’s claims in Suicide, though it does not explicitly reference the latter (it is uncertain whether the book was even known to Simmel). Simmel proposes that just because a certain amount of people commit suicide each year does not make the phenomenon sociological (GSG 11, pp. 630–1). It is not because a phenomenon is general that it is social, Simmel argues, but because individuals are connected to one another in and through practice. The ‘with’, Miteinander, is the defining feature of the social. Therefore, to repeat what has already been noted, to study the social is to explore the conditions and forms of togetherness. Secondly, if not as sheer contiguity, then Simmel does not consider being-with in terms of the ‘hyper-existence’ of either the community or society.42 Instead of forming an independent existence beyond the individuals, the social being-with is located for Simmel between individuals.




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The social is not a static object but fluctuating, dynamic reciprocity between individuals: ‘The reciprocal effects between the elements [...] carry the whole persistence and elasticity, the whole diversity and unity of the so palpable and so puzzling life of society’ (GSG 16, p. 69). Indeed, in Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, Simmel warns against hypostasizing this ‘between’ (Zwischen) as if into ‘an object located between them [i.e., individuals] in a spatial sense’. The hypostasization, Simmel argues, is based on an ‘old metaphysical mistake’, which reifies the flux between elements into a fixed object standing outside them (GSG 4, p. 122). In Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, Simmel proposes that the social must therefore subsist within individuals: ‘Every society and social formation is based on the fact that an individual affects another, but these effects remain within the individual as the same qualities or movements which form the personality without differing from those modifications in any way’ (GSG 4, p. 122). For Simmel, the unity of society is realized directly in and by the consciousness of individuals: ‘The consciousness of constituting with others a unity is all there is to this unity’ (GSG 11, p. 43). This idea reappears in Philosophie des Geldes, although in a slightly altered form. When discussing ‘exchange’ (Tausch), which he considers as the ‘purest and most developed kind of interaction’ (GSG 6, p. 59; PM, p. 82), Simmel remarks: The concept of exchange is [...] often misconceived, as though it were a relationship existing outside the elements to which it refers. But it signifies only a condition or a change within the related subjects, not something that exists between them in the sense in which an object might be spatially located between two other objects. (GSG 6, p. 61; PM, p. 83) The two changes that the event of exchange brings with it – the mutual gain and loss in possessions between the individuals – evince for Simmel only one ‘causally connected double event in which one subject now possesses something he did not have before and has given away something he did possess before’ (GSG 6, p. 62; PM, p. 83). So, this view confines exchange solely within the individual. The idea has long roots in Simmel’s work, appearing in his doctoral thesis as it discusses relations between monads. In the thesis, he asserts that a ‘relation [Beziehung] between two things is not something that would hover between them, not an actus purus’, but it ‘means only a transformation in their states of being [Zustände] that does not extrude [heraustretende] from the things themselves’ (GSG 1, p. 15). In other words, ‘Forces are




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no threads [Stricke] which would stretch from monad to monad and exist in space as real’. On the contrary, ‘there are only monads and their movements’ (GSG 1, p. 30). Hence, in his conception of exhange in Philosophie des Geldes, Simmel only seems to extend his claim about monads and their interplay to the exchange between individuals. Just as the relations between monads should not be hypostasized into a thing existing outside them, so exchange, in the last instance, designates only a change within the individual. However, Simmel does not adhere to this thought throughout his work. By the time we get to the publication of Soziologie in 1908, he liberates the social from the confines of the individual consciousness. Now he stresses that the social is not manifested only within individuals but also spatially in the betweenness in-between them: ‘The between as sheer functional reciprocity, the contents of which remain within each of its personal bearers, realizes itself [...] also as the insistence of the space existing between them’ (GSG 11, p. 689; italics added). The reason why the publication of Soziologie marks a significant turning point here is that the passage cannot yet be found in the essay, ‘Soziologie des Raumes’ (‘Sociology of Space’), published in 1903 (for the absence of the passage in the essay, see 1995c, p. 134), which otherwise is reproduced almost to the word in the chapter ‘Der Raum und die räumlichen Ordnungen der Gesellschaft’ in Soziologie. Simmel only added the remark to Soziologie. The notion of the between as ‘sheer functional reciprocity’ that realizes itself not only within individuals but also in the space between them is extremely important for three reasons. Firstly, it suggests that the interaction between two elements, which in the last instance concerns an event or a condition within each, also manifests itself in space. The ‘between’, as Nicholas J. Spykman ([1925] 2004, p. 145) has noted, has thus ‘a double meaning’: it is both a functional and a spatial concept; the ‘functional reciprocity is felt to be located between the two points of space occupied by the elements themselves’. Betweenness thus emphasizes the significance of spatiality in the social relation. Yet in its spatiality the between, to be exact, is more like a non-site than a particular place with specific coordinates, a midway or an ‘across’ through which the reciprocal influences cross. The social is nothing but what, in a spatial sense, takes place between the interacting elements, in the non-place of the in-between. The social is not something that would be in either one or both of the two subjects of the dyad, but it takes place, happens between them. Their betweenness marks the disclosure




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of being-with; it is the ‘insistence’ of the ‘space between’ that accounts for the social. Secondly, the notion of the betweenness as ‘functional reciprocity’ is linked to the desubstantialization of the social we discussed in Chapter 4. The desubstantialization is evident in Simmel’s manner of considering the social in terms of the event, as we discussed. Instead of perceiving the social as an already objectified entity or finished product, Simmel tries to reveal the very event of its emergence. It amounts to process, not to thing. Thirdly, the passage suggests that the between is, in itself, literally nothing: ‘sheer functional reciprocity’. I think that one should understand Simmel’s use of the term ‘functional’ (funktionelle) here not in the sense that structural functionalism has given to it, but how it is used in mathematics, that relate to function as a relation between a given set of elements. In Simmel, functions relate to actions and processes – in a word, ‘effects’. Thus, to some extent, insofar as the between has merely a functional nature, I and you amounts to nothing; we are with one another, yet I am me and you are you. So, the ‘with’ of being-with, as Nancy has pointed out in relation to the notion of being-with he finds in Heidegger, ‘implies proximity and distance, precisely the distance of the impossibility to come together in a common being’; I remain myself and you yourself. In other words, the with is the proximity of I and you, which gives itself as distance; the with is in between I and you, always implies an in-between. Being-with thus comes down to ‘sharing nothing, sharing the space between’. (Nancy, Ronell and Schirmacher, 2001) The dyad is, ultimately, dissociative association: the relation between the two subjects is at once a connection and a disconnection. It is made as much from presence as from absence, proximity and distance are mutually constitutive of it. Betweenness in itself is nothing also in the sense that it appears only through various kinds of relations and associations. The space between and relations are not separate categories, but mutually suppose one another. As little as there is space in general, Simmel stresses that there is no such thing as social interaction ‘in general’, but only specific and concrete forms of interaction (GSG 11, p. 24). As he claims in Soziologie, it is only reciprocal determination that renders the sheer contiguity (Nebeneinander) or being alongside one another of isolated individuals into forms of their being and acting with one another (Miteinander), for one another (Füreinander), and even against one another (Gegeneinander) (GSG 11, p. 18–19). This immediately suggests that social cohesiveness can take not only the form of harmonious ‘sharing’, as happens ideally


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in friendship and love, but also that of being-against. For Simmel, those forms of interaction that oppose individuals or groups to one another, such as struggle, conflict, and rivalry, also fundamentally bind them together (see GSG 11, pp. 284–8, 310, 327). It is precisely being-with that is played out also in the forms of being-against. However, to address the cohesive force of conflict and struggle in detail would go beyond the scope of this chapter. What is more relevant here is the fact that being-with gains specificity precisely through and in the forms of reciprocation. The existential-ontological fact that being-in-theworld is necessarily being-with-others is devoid of a precise sociological meaning. Simmel argues that even though the idea of being as always being-with must lead to a new manner of examination in the human sciences, it nevertheless does not yet provide a distinct object of study. To study man as a social animal would make sociology a sheer method and a tool of other sciences, comparable to induction that, as a principle of study, extends to the field of practically every discipline without possessing the status of an independent discipline (GSG 11, pp. 15–6). To find out what is in between individuals thus requires that we look at the concrete forms of reciprocal effects/Wechselwirkungen between individuals and their specific ways of coming together: super- and subordination, conflict, cooperation, rivalry, secrecy, sociability, and so on. Simmel sees it as the task of sociology to study these forms of relations.

The third The thought of the between can also be explored in arithmetical terms. In its basic form, betweenness, as Cooper (2005, p. 1700) terms it, means ‘interaction by or via two (i.e., the “be two” of “between”) in space and time’. Our relations are always a matter of first and second persons, singular or plural. The basic form of dialogue is that I discuss with you; communication takes place between two poles: the sender and the receiver (the basic unit of economy is the exchange of sacrifices between two subjects; the logic of war demands that you are either with us or against us, and so forth). Yet the third always haunts these relations, as excluded or included. To every dialogue there is an exluded third, a ‘he’ or ‘she’, a ‘that’ or ‘they’ that marks the outside or the exterior of the relation by not belonging to it, by being left out or exclude. To every communication there is ‘noise’ that is always already part of the message; every exchange needs the object of exchange, merchandise, as a third; and the violence of war is preceded by a tacit agreement on a common code: weapons. (Serres, 1995a, p. 88; 1995b, p. 8; 1997, p. 46; 2007, pp. 66–70).




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Simmel’s work is full of thirds that hover around our relationships. One of them is the ‘stranger’ (Fremde). The stranger highlights the borderline between the inside and the outside of the group; the stranger is included only insofar as he is excluded. Simmel stresses that the stranger does not just stand outside a group but is rather ‘an element of the group itself [...] to be a stranger is naturally a very positive relation, a specific form of interaction’. Yet the stranger’s position in the group is ‘determined, essentially, by the fact that he does not belong to it from the beginning’. Rather, the stranger has arrived only recently. He is a ‘potential wanderer’, a ‘person who comes today and stays tomorrow’. This endows him with a greater freedom of movement when compared to the insiders of the collective: although the stranger has not moved on, he has not abandoned ‘the freedom of coming and going’. By being a newcomer, the stranger imports qualities into the group ‘which do not and cannot stem from the group itself’ (GSG 11, p. 765). Thereby he is able to transform the whole social milieu. Before his emergence, the stranger had occupied no space at all; he was literally nothing. By his arrival, however, the stranger takes up space and becomes something. He is there, among us, and does not go away. Thus, in order to fully understand the dynamics of social relationships, we have to add a third element to the dyad. For Simmel, the third in fact saturates the sociological universe. According to him, any further expansion to the formations of four, ten, one hundred, one hundred thousand and so on does not modify our relations to the same extent (GSG 11, pp. 117–8). Therefore, the contrast between the dyad and the triad is fundamental. Here, the spectrum of social relations is played out in its full complexity. The difference between the dyad and the triad has to do not only with the fact that the latter involves more participants. It is also qualitative. The triad differs from the dyad significantly by its degree of objectivity and also in terms of dynamics and stability. As regards the difference in the degree of objectivity, the addition of the third produces ‘a completely new formation’ (GSG 11, p. 121): a supra-individual social whole (GSG 8, p. 349), an ‘independent, supraindividual unity’ (GSG 11, p. 101). The individuals in the twosome are confronted only by one another (I encounter a you to whom I am a you), but with the arrival of the third, they may have a relation with the relation itself. The third is thus a source of objectivity that indicates the threshold of a social fact in a Durkheimian sense – that is, of a formation transcendent to and independent from the individual. The greater independence makes the triad, in principle, much more objective and


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durable than the dyad. It provides the twosome a wider, solidifying ‘social frame’ (GSG 11, p. 115): the societal milieu. By way of the dyadic and triadic socio-logic, then, Simmel is able to account for how the social as a ‘thing’, both collective and objective, emerges. This is clearly what Durkheim fails to explain in his notion of the social. For him, the social, endowed with coercive power as it is, appears already made. The third also marks the threshold of group dynamics. The arrival of the third produces at least five types of constellations that are not possible in the relations between two individuals. In the first place, unlike in the triad, in the dyad no majority can be built up to ‘outvote’ an individual (Krackhardt, 1999, p. 185). In the second place, vis-à-vis the triad, in the dyad the demands of the individual have much more weight, given that he or she can threaten to depart the relationship if certain demands are not met. In the triad (and other formations involving more participants), the threat of withdrawal does not have the same weight anymore, as the relation is not necessarily dissolved because of the desertion, the remaining members still have one another (ibid.). As an independent, supra-individual formation, the triad thus means reduced individuality vis-à-vis the dyad. The dyad is able to preserve the individuality of the partners to a much greater extent, as it does not build up ‘any higher unity above its individual elements’ (GSG 11, p. 106), but ‘relies immediately on the one and the other’ (GSG 11, p. 101). Thirdly, the third can play the part of the ‘impartial’ (Unparteiische) and ‘mediator’ (Vermittler) (GSG 11, p. 125).43 Conflicts are thus more readily managed and resolved in triads than in a dyad (Krackhardt, 1999, p. 185). While the dyad presents the first embodiment, not only of synthesis and unification, but also of separation and antithesis, Simmel contends that the third brings a ‘crossing, reconciliation, rejection of absolute contrast’ (GSG 11, p. 124). When in an impartial position, the third appears equally distant from the two parties: it may either be completely beyond and untouched by their interests and opinions or participate in both sides to the exact same extent. As for the impartiality that is required in arbitration, the third may reconcile the conflict between the two parties either by leaving the decision in their hands to reach an independent solution or by becoming a ‘referee’ (Schiedsrichter) who makes the judgement. As for the position of the ‘mediator’, Simmel holds that there is no social formation of more than two participants in which mediation does not play a part. It is, according to Simmel, precisely the third that presents the ‘type’ and the ‘schema’ of the mediator; all the other cases of mediation are in the final analysis reducible to it. When playing the part of a mediator, the third may either reinforce




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the bond between the two parties, as in the case of a common enemy against who the two are sided (in the dyad, of course, no majority can take form that could subjugate the individual) or in that of a newborn child who consolidates the parents’ relationship. Or, it may change the relation between the two parties into an indirect one, so that it is mediated by the third (again a child may serve as an example here) (GSG 11, pp. 125–9). Fourthly, while the impartial and the mediator appear as benevolent, in the sense that they wish to contribute to the cohesion of the parties, the third may also seek egoistic interests and try to benefit from the conflict among the two. For Simmel, the third appears in this constellation as a tertius gaudens, ‘rejoicing third’ (GSG, p. 134). In German, the rejoicing third is called der lachende Dritte, or ‘the laughing third’: taking pleasure in the conflict of the two. The fifth type of constellation could, according to Simmel, finally be described as a situation of divida et impera, ‘divide-and-conquer’ (GSG 11, p. 143). Like in the tertius gaudens, the third appears here as malevolent and benefits from the disunion of the other two. The difference between the rejoicing third and the divide-and-conquer, however, is that whereas the former pertains to situations where the two parties already stand in conflict, in the latter they are disunited precisely by the effect of the third. Accordingly, and unsurprisingly, many commentators have argued that it is only just the triad and not yet the dyad that marks the threshold of the social in Simmel’s work. Julien Freund (1976, p. 91), for instance, has maintained that while the dyad/Zweizahl has more of a social-psychological imprint, sociologically, the triad/Dreizahl is ‘a primordial sociological form [soziologische Urform]’ and ‘the most important’. In a similar vein, Theodor Litt (1926, p. 114) claimed some fifty years earlier that it is only by subsuming the I and the you under a comprehensive whole that the conscious apprehension of the beingfor-one-another of the two becomes possible. Indeed, as we have seen, the a prioris of societalization Simmel sketches in the excursus ‘Wie ist Gesellschaft möglich?’ suggest that, when we encounter the you, there is always a broader social frame implied in the typical features the person shares with others. Yet, perhaps things are not that simple. While the third marks the threshold of the societal milieu, within which the bilateral relation between the I and the you is always embedded, the third may carry its effects only in relation to the relationship between the two. Hence, it is neither simply the dyad nor the triad that can be regarded as the basic unit of the social, since each appears mutually dependent from one


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another. The possibility of the dyad is conditioned by the third, and the actions of the third, in turn, already presuppose the dyad. Or, the dyad may be the simplest social formation, as Simmel suggests, but only insofar as it is made possible and produced by the exclusion of the third. This can also be claimed to follow immediately from Simmel’s relationism, according to which everything is related to with everything else.44 The necessity of excluding the third expresses the negative aspect of the quantitative determination of social forms. It can be illustrated by taking ‘intimacy’ (Intimität) as an example. Simmel sees the sociality between two persons as the basis of intimacy. According to him, the amount of two presents the numerical limit above which intimacy as a social form cannot occur: it is something shared by two and only two. That is to say, intimacy is exclusive by nature. In an intimate relationship, something that the two partners share only with one another and with no one else is placed at its heart, made into its main carrier or primary source of fulfilment (GSG 11, pp. 104–5). So, here the third is that which interrupts: it disturbs, disrupts, or shatters the intimacy; the intimate relation collapses or is damaged as soon as a third party comes along. According to Simmel, the dyad is characterized precisely by the fact that it lacks ‘the interruption and the diversion of the pure and immediate reciprocity’ (GSG 11, p. 115). Thus, intimacy can be achieved only by constantly excluding a third; it is the only way that two can be together. In this light, we arrive at a crucial factor distinguishing the sociality of two from self-sustaining, hyper-existing social wholes: death as another third that ‘interrupts’. Simmel’s thoughts on death are important for understanding his notion of the social bond in its basic dyadic form. Death is a third that ultimately abolishes the bond, a mediator that destroys the very possibility of mediating. Simmel holds that the dyad is fundamentally limited and shaped by death. In self-sustaining social wholes, the treshold of which the triad indicates, the communal ‘we’ secures the individual a certain kind of immortality: I do not die, at least not completely, insofar as the social whole (family, fatherland, Humanity, etc.) of which I am a part, lives on (cf. Blanchot, 1988). The communion revealed in the dyad, by contrast, does not outlive the existence of the partners, but rather manifests itself first and foremost as the being-with of two finite beings.45 In ‘Die Gesellschaft zu zweien’, Simmel writes:



The dependence of the group of two upon the pure individuality of its singular members makes its existence in a nearer and more


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Of course, love, as Derrida (2005, pp. 11–13) points out, can survive its object, for one can love the deceased. Perhaps survival even presents the ultimate sign of true love; it just might be that it is in the death of its object that love is really tested. We who survive can indeed be with the deceased, perhaps we even cannot but be insofar as ‘one does not survive without mourning’ (ibid., p. 13). Nevertheless, this love cannot be shared anymore as the one being loved knows nothing of it. Love cannot survive the death of either partner as a shared reciprocal relation that would exist for both; our deceased loved ones cannot be with us anymore, even though we, left behind, are with them. While they are still present to us, we are absent to them; it is not the deceased who disappear from the world but the world disappears from them. Therefore, in love that survives, the other is placed in the position of the inanimate, and in this respect our relation to the deceased has something in common with our relations to objects. (In fact, perhaps being loved means always to be placed in the position of an object, of the inanimate.) The deceased other is an object of our concern, as the deceased’s body is transported, prepared for the funeral ceremony (clothed, tidied up, placed in a coffin, etc.), seen off in the funeral service and the memorial, weeped after at the graveside, visited at the graveyard (where lies an object, the stone, for us as a reminder of our loved one), and so on. However, this is not to say that the deceased would amount exactly to an object, even though we perceive him or her in a position quite similar to one. Rather, the deceased person remains within the framework of life, appearing, Heidegger (1962, Section 47, p. 238; translation altered) reminds us, as ‘something unliving that has lost its life’. Laying aside the case of our relations to the deceased, unlike selfsustaining formations, the reciprocal, dyadic bond between two living individuals is not independent of those involved. And it is ultimately through death, the finitude of the individuals, that the dyadic bond reveals its dependence upon each individual partner. In Simmel’s words, ‘to its life’, the dyad ‘needs two but to its death only one’ (GSG, pp. 349–50). Hence, just as the life of the individual, so the ‘life’ of the bilateral bond is determined by death from the outset: ‘We are, since our birth, such beings that will die. And so it is with groups as well’ (GSG 8, p. 349).46 Death is the ‘other’ of life – both that of individuals and


palpable manner consistent with the end of the individual than what is the case with other bonds; about the latter each individual at the time knows that they can outlast one’s own departure or death. (GSG 8, p. 349)


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that of the dyad – through which it gains its specific form and significance. Death is thus not external but immanent to the ‘life’ of the relation: ‘Death is initially and inwardly tied to life’ (GSG 12, p. 82). This is captured well by Simmel’s expression Todesverflochtenheit des Lebens, ‘the entanglement of life in death and death in life’ (GSG 16, p. 305). Death is not something that determines our lives only at the moment we die, as pictured in the image of the Grim Reaper suddenly cutting the thread of life. Rather, the certainty of death is an ever-present feature of our lives: ‘In each and every moment of life we are of the kind that shall die’ (GSG 16, p. 299). Therefore, the being-with of two is sociality marked with death, the finitude of the individuals, I and you. Notwithstanding the fact that death ultimately erases the relation, it is important to understand that death is not a mere negation of the bond between I and you, but also its positive condition. As a negativity or nothingness, death belongs innerly to the relation’s very existence and constitution.47 As a third separating I from you, death prevents I and you from coming together in a common being or substance – that is, becoming truly one. Nonetheless, at the same time, death has to be excluded as a third: the relation cannot survive death, it cannot live through it (and this is precisely what separates the dyad from the hyper-existence of self-sustaining wholes, as we saw). The very negativity of death makes it that the relation between I and you can last only as long as death remains an excluded third. When death appears, that is, as soon as it is included as a third, the two ceases to be: it breaks down to solitude or even to zero.

Relation as no-thing Simmel’s reflections on being-with interestingly resonate with more recent thinkers, such as Heidegger and Nancy. Compared to them, Simmel’s distinctive contribution lies in that he ties the preconditions of the ‘with’s intermediary region to an arithmetical understanding of the social, which he discusses in terms of dyadic and triadic sociological constellations. What makes the dyad and the triad particularly interesting is the fact that in them, the difference between the two notions of the social –as being-with immanent to the individuals, on the one hand, and as a self-sustaining form, on the other – can be expressed as quantitatively determined in numerical terms. An inquiry into the Simmelian bivalent and trivalent socio-logics might even provide a new perspective on the history of quantitative reasoning in sociology. Drawing out the specific implications of the bivalent and trivalent socio-logics for a




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mathematical understanding of social life remains, however, a task for a future study. Of course, Simmel is not alone in addressing dyadic and triadic relationships. Besides the recent orgizational analysis and the vast tradition of social psychological studies of small groups that draw explicitly on him, there are also many contemporary thinkers who have discussed the issues with hardly any direct connection to Simmel. Levinas (1985), for instance, considers intersubjective relationships in terms of ‘facing’ the Other, and it is on the responsibility for this Other that the Levinasian ethis is based. Further, René Girard (1976) models his idea of ‘mimetic desire’ in accordance with a triadic relationship of subject, model, and object, and Serres’s (2007) figure of the ‘parasite’ is essentially in the position of the ‘third’ (see also Serres, 1997 for his treatment of the ‘third instructed’). It is easy to find resonance between Simmel and authors like Levinas, Girard, and Serres. However, one must not forget the many significant differences between them. In a preliminary manner, it can be maintained that Simmel not only plays with the dynamics between the dyad and the triad, but overall underlines the significance of the number of relationary elements far more explicitly than the other authors. He claims that the number of elements involved affects the form of relationship. In addition, he shows that there is both a negative and a positive aspect to the quantitative determination. The negative aspect manifested itself in the dyad: the constellation of two elements presents itself as the numerical limit above which the primary and methodologically simplest social relation cannot take place. Hence the being together of two, modelled according to the idea of intimacy, always presupposes the exclusion of the third. The positive aspect of the quantitative determination, in turn, became evident in the way the arrival of the third transforms the dyadic, immanent relation into a transcendent social fact: the triad is not a sum of I’s (and you’s), but a completely new figure that can be characterized by part-to-whole relations. Thus, the third excites the dyadic constellation, making it change its state by forcing a metamorphosis. The case of divide-and-conquer is perhaps most evident in a situation where the third operates as an exciter, but it is hardly the only one. Thirds such as the stranger, the pauper, and the enemy all import qualities into social formations that do not stem from those formations themselves, and they operate as mediators or relay points, as well as highlight the borderline along the inside and the outside of the group. To the dyad, the third brings with it the dimension of societalization. It not only interrupts the immediate relation between the two elements


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but also refers to a wider social frame, hence linking the dyad to a wider network of relations, and ultimately to society. This is the crucial difference between the bivalent and the trivalent socio-logic. The paradox of the dyad, however – a paradox that Simmel does not pay attention to – is that as soon as there are two, there are already three. The only way two can be together is via a third or by excluding the third. Thus, the bivalent socio-logic is always already trivalent. The third does not have to be a person. It can be a third place, a middle point; already the dissociative-associative ‘between’ in between I and you presents such a third. Namely, in order for there to be two, there has to be a relation connecting them, yet as soon as it connects it becomes a middle term between the partners through which their reciprocal give-and-take must pass. So, in order for the dyad to be possible, the between must at the same time be included (for there to be I and/with you) and excluded as a third (for there to be two and only two). The dyad thus expresses perfectly that a relation is, and must ultimately be, a nonrelation: it must disappear as a relation into immediacy in order for there to be only two; as soon as it exists, there is not two but three. We can draw here on Serres’s examination of the ambiguity of relation and nonrelation in communication. Using a channel, two stations exchange messages. As soon as the channel works properly, it disappears into immediacy: if it is there it does not work but has turned into noise. In Serres’s words: ‘If the relation succeeds, if it is perfect, optimum, and immediate; it disappears as a relation. If it is there, if it exists, that means that it failed. It is only mediation. Relation is nonrelation’ (Serres, 2007, p. 79). In sum, in the last instance, the relation cannot be anything else but ‘nothing’, literally ‘no-thing’; relation is nothing but proximity that gives itself as distance, or the negativity of death that shapes and limits the being-with of the two partners from the outset. But how is the situation altered when we move from no-thingness to things – that is, when we accommodate the share of things in our relations? This is something I will examine in the next chapter.




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We live among things, desire them, feel attached to them, use and attend to them, carry them with us, pass them among us, and throw them away. In this respect, as Heidegger (1962, Section 15, p. 96) notes, the Greeks had a convenient name for ‘thing’: πράγματα, pragmata, ‘that which one has to do with one’s concernful dealings’. Things are objects of our concern, and they concern us. It is thus easy to see that things are closely entangled with social relations. Let us think of gifts, for example. The gift is tied so intimately to social relations that it cannot be grasped as something completely in itself without paying attention to the ties that accompany it. To do this would mean to deny the ‘phenomenon of the gift’, as Jacques Godbout and Alain Caillé (1998, p. 24) maintain. By imposing obligations, the gift establishes a relation between the donor and the donee. When we receive a gift, we immediately feel obliged: we are supposed to return the gift; not perhaps the exact same object (at least this is usually not the case in our contemporary society), but in any case the gift must somehow come back to the donor, if not as a ‘countergift’ then at least as a symbolic equivalent in the form of a ‘thank you’, for example. The gift is also a good example of how our social relations significantly affect the things that circulate among us and participate in our lives. A gift is not refused only for its supposed lack of quality; it is also because of the awareness of the unwanted relationship it might produce (e.g., with a person one does not want to feel obliged to). Indeed, the meaning of a gift is greatly dependent on the nature of the relationship between the one who gives it and the one who receives it: a gift between strangers, for example, has a very different feeling to it than a gift between lovers, even if the gift object in both cases were exactly the same. However, it is not only that relations lend meaning to objects,


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but the way we are with objects also affects our relations to our fellow humans. It makes considerable difference what we do with an object once received as a gift; if we give it to somebody else right away, sell it, do not take proper care of it, or do not even accept it may harm or even completely destroy our relationship with the person from whom we have received the gift. Our being with one another and our being with objects thus cross each other. That we are surrounded by objects in everday life is quite self-evident. Yet, for a long time, our entanglements with things have remained without widespread consideration in sociology. To borrow Serres’s (1995, p. 91) words, for sociology, objects have lied ‘outside the relational circuits that determine society’. Perhaps this is largely resultant of sociology’s quest to find a distinct subject matter of its own, as the classics of the discipline thought that this was to be found by specifying what is purely social, the social as such. The need for a genuine sociological phenomenon that would legitimize the field as an independent science thus called for serious work of purification: the social had to be demarcated from what was ‘not-social’. A by-product of this has been, without a doubt, that sociologists have forgotten the material side of social phenomena far too easily. As Latour (2005, p. 82) claims, sociologists seem to ‘consider, for the most part, an object-less social world’: their images of social reality lack our companionship with things. The ‘masses’ are missing from sociological investigation (Latour, 1992). This is all the more paradoxical considering that, while things remain absent from our images of social relations, the social itself has been made into a ‘thing’, as if ‘stuff‘; Durkheim’s (1982, p. 14) famous aphorism, ‘consider social facts as things’, provides the paradigmatic case of such a view. Nevertheless, more recently, social theory has begun to accommodate materiality more fully. Scholars have paid attention to the materiality of power, to material culture, and to materialized nonhuman ‘actants’, for instance. This has managed to unsettle the seemingly safe distinction between the social and the non-social that sociology has largely rested on since its foundation. However, ‘things’ were not completely overlooked even in classical sociology. Classical scholars such as Comte, Marx, and even Durkheim stressed that society consists not only of human beings but also of things. Simmel, too, can be counted among the predecessors who took objects seriously. He pays objects much more attention than Comte, Marx, and Durkheim do, too. Besides writing several pieces dedicated to the investigation of objects such as money, the bridge, the door, the handle, the ruin, the picture frame, exhibition architecture, and the




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letter, Simmel also integrated the world of objects into the theoretical reflections on the social. Of course, in his programmatic texts seeking to lay the foundations of the sociology of forms, Simmel clearly reduces the social to relations between humans. The essays that do pay attention to objects typically treat them in themselves, for their own sake, instead of looking at how they are accompanied by social relations. However, Simmel’s work does include texts in which he addresses our being with objects, especially Philosophie des Geldes. The book sets out how money is intertwined both with social relationships and with the experience of subjects. Likewise, Simmel’s various essays on culture address the dynamism between objects and subjects. Rather than treating objects as essentialized, external, and simply imposing their causal laws upon us, the texts show subjects and objects as intermingling with each other. This chapter is organized into four sections. The first picks Simmel’s essay on the bridge and the door as an example of how objects often interest him insofar as they make visible a metaphysical behind-thescenes realm. Simmel tries to get at classical metaphysical problems by thinking concrete objects. The second section exits the depths of life and examines Simmel’s view of the relationality of objects, which will be treated by focusing on his investigation on money. For Simmel, money is the relational object per se. It is perhaps even not so much an object as a relation. The third section discusses Simmel’s view of objects as our contemporary milieu. In modernity, so Simmel asserts in his diagnosis of the times, our lives are increasingly determined and surrounded by objects: our relationships with one another, the development of subjectivity, and the subjective modes of experience are interrelated with things. In the final section, I will raise the issue of some of the shortcomings of Simmel’s object-oriented thought and propose a way of possibly moving beyond them.

Bridge and door as metaphysical objects Philosophically, Simmel’s exposition of things appeared quite revolutionary in its time. Until then, philosophy had concerned itself with what is universal, eternal, and deeply significant. By theorizing objects, Simmel, by contrast, turns its attention to what is mundane, ephemeral and seemingly insignificant. Even Theodor Adorno, who lashed Simmel in many other aspects, acknowledged him for having accomplished this shift in philosophy’s focus to concrete objects. According to Adorno, the shift ‘remained canonical for anyone dissatisfied with




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the chattering of epistemology or intellectual history’ (Adorno, 1984, p. 558; trans. Frisby, 1997, p. 24). By objects, Simmel means not only material, tangible things but also categories, norms, representations, works of art, scientific findings, social formations, and so on. In any event, the move is radical: while philosophy had traditionally contemplated at most the ‘Ideas’ of things, now it set out to grasp the things themselves. Simmel does not consider the preoccupation with even the most superficial things as a task too worthless for a self-respecting theorist. He does not fear getting his hands dirty with what seems ‘banal’ and ‘repulsive’ (see GSG 5, p. 198), but rather very consciously concerns himself with the most common and ‘profane’ phenomena in his work. In thinking things, Simmel contrasts his own approach especially to those of Plato and Hegel. Unlike Plato, Simmel does not regard the surface level of things as being only apparent, more or less imperfect reflections of the world of Ideas. Plato’s doctrine exemplifies for Simmel the ‘typical tragedy of the spirit: the being has to be loved, because as such it nevertheless is the reality of the Idea, and it has to be hated, because it is precisely reality and not as such the Idea’ (GSG 14, p. 101). Nor does Simmel try to elevate superficialities ‘to the level of philosophical nobility’, as he regards Hegel to have done (GSG 15, p. 309; RB, p. 3). Simmel criticizes Hegel for losing sight of the objects themselves when seeking their general rule and metaphysical base (GSG 2, pp. 367–368). Contrary to Plato and Hegel, Simmel’s philosophy is concrete, in the sense that it takes things in their plainness and superficiality seriously. As he writes in the preface to Rembrandt: ‘Philosophical concepts [...] ought to give to the surface of existence what they are able to give’ (GSG 15, p. 309; RB, p. 3), instead of trying to make it ‘fit into a philosophical system’ (GSG 15, p. 310; RB, p. 3). Abstract philosophical systems keep too wide a distance from concrete phenomena, as they only try to save the latter from ‘isolation and lack of spirituality’ (GSG 6, p. 12; PM, p. 55). By contrast, Simmel thinks it would be better to leave the surface ‘simply as it is and subject to its own immediate laws’ (GSG 15, p. 309; RB, p. 3). Yet, it is not in their plain immediacy that Simmel examines objects. He is interested in them, above all, to get a glimpse of a totality – either that of modern society, which in all its entirety and detail has become too complex to be grasped in a single vision (see GSG 6; Hetzel, 2001, p. 72), or, ultimately, the totality of existence, which is ‘accessible to no one and can act upon no one’ already in principle (GSG 14, p. 17). This is the miracle of banality in Simmel’s essays: an object is always revealed to be more than it appears to be. Bearing striking affinity with the modernism of Baudelaire (1972) as it sets out to grasp what is eternal




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in the fleeting and transient phenomena, Simmel, as Lukács (1993, p. 172; trans. 1991, p. 145) put it, views ‘the smallest and the most inessential phenomenon of daily life so sharply sub specie philosophiae that it becomes transparent and behind its transparence an eternal formal coherence of philosophical meaning becomes perceptible.’ Simmel’s manner of treating objects is connected to his commitment of trying to get hold of the ‘large’ by the ‘small’. He often treats objects as backdoor entrances to more general problems. From a philosophical perspective, things present themselves as theoretical means of exploring life’s depths. He is convinced that the superficialities of life can be connected to its metaphysical depths. This conviction is betrayed in his writings above all by the recurring image of the ‘plumb line’, which was dicussed previously in Chapter 3. In the preface to Rembrandt, Simmel defines the effort to drop a plumb line into the profound metaphysical realities beneath the immediacy of things as the ‘essential task of philosophy’ (GSG 15, p. 309; RB, p. 3). He thinks that each fragment, in its own perspective, already contains the totality of existence: ‘From every point, the whole beauty, the whole sense of the unity of the world radiates for the gaze that is sharp enough’ (GSG 5, p. 199). In Hauptprobleme der Philosophie, Simmel phrases this as a paradox: ‘The world has been given to us as a sum of fragments, and philosophy strives to set a totality in the place of the fragment; it succeeds in this insofar as it is able to set a fragment in the place of the totality’ (GSG 14, p. 32). The essay ‘Brücke und Tür’48 provides a good example of how Simmel thinks physical shapes and material realities can be connected to deep metaphysical meanings. Bridge and door are of interest for Simmel especially because, in his view, they materialize something metaphysical. They render ultimate meanings that are not perceptible as such into something material, concrete, and visible. The bridge epitomizes for him our ‘will-to-connect’ (GSG 12, p. 56): it overcomes spatial divide; it connects and relates what is separate. It is also a token of the fact that, for us, separation and connection are always a precondition for the other: By selecting two things from their undisturbed natural situation in order to call them “separate”, we have already related them to one another in our consciousness, we already have contrasted those two against all that lies between them. This is true vice versa: to our mind only that is connected which we have somehow isolated from one another first. Things must first be separate in order to be together. Practically and logically, it would be senseless to relate that




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Relating is thus, for Simmel, a mental act that presupposes the separation of the related things. Association always implies dissociation, a gap: ‘Things must first be separate in order to be together’. There would be no point in relating things that were not first separate, nor in trying to connect things that would not remain separate in some sense even after the act of relating – in this case, they would not be related at all, but one and the same, with zero difference. As we remember from the previous chapter, a relation between objects of nature is for Simmel a human accomplishment, an act of mind; a meadow, a stream, a tree and a mountain make up a ‘landscape’ only in the mind of an observer. Yet, it is only to us humans that ‘the banks of the river are not merely apart but “separated”; the concept “separation” would not have any meaning if we did not relate them first in our purposeful thinking, in our desires, in our imagination’ (GSG 12, p. 56; trans. Kaern, 1994, p. 408). As for the being-with of humans, they can be with one another only provided that they are separate beings. Were that not the case, they would amount to hardly anything else but one big lump of body mass, not to beings existing side by side, not to speak of influencing one another. What for Simmel fundamentally distinguishes humans from animals in their relation to separation is that while animals also overcome distance, only with humans are the beginning and the end of the distance related (GSG 12, p. 56). And, they are related not only subjectively by way of a mere operation of the mind, but the separated ends are connected also objectively. According to Simmel, this is achieved by the ‘miracle of the path’. The path, a prior form of the bridge, connects sites independently of the actual comings and goings between them: ‘Animals do not create the miracle of the path: the miracle to freeze movement into a permanent form which originates from movement and into which movement is channeled’ (GSG 12, p. 56; trans. Kaern, 1994, 408).49 According to Simmel, ‘This achievement reaches its high point in the construction of the bridge’ (GSG 12, p. 56; trans. Kaern, 1994, p. 408): the different ends it connects are not only separate in space but, without the bridge, crossing over from one side to the other would be difficult, if not utterly impossible. We can think of a canyon, a cleft, a gulf, or a river to convince ourselves of this fact. Humans are not birds, that’s for sure. We have not grown wings. But even in the water, the vortex and the sheer distance offer us active resistance, making it


which was not separate, or to relate that which in some sense does not remain separate. (GSG 12, p. 55; trans. Kaern 1994, pp. 407–8)


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difficult swim across. Departing one shore in order to reach the other is risky. There’s always the danger of not making it to the other side. To return to the difference between humans and animals, for Simmel it is only humans who are able to stabilize the fluctuating movement from here to there into something lasting (GSG 12, p. 56). Animals lack objects – paths and bridges. In paths and bridges, the ‘will-to-connect’ has put things in a shape that lends itself to an unlimited repetition of the act of connecting, independent of how often the connecting is actually repeated (GSG 12, p. 56). Oddly enough, Simmel does not take it further from this. He does not go into the issue of how the bridge relates both sites – the banks of a river, two shores, or the sides of a cleft – and humans with one another. Somewhat surprisingly, from a sociological point of view, Heidegger has observed the way the bridge creates connections and relates in a much more interesting and adequate manner than Simmel does. In ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, Heidegger writes (and in so doing becomes, very briefly, an actor-network-theory sociologist): The city bridge leads from the precincts of the castle to the cathedral square; the river bridge near the country town brings wagons and horse teams to the surrounding villages. The old stone bridge’s humble brook crossing gives to the harvest wagon its passage from the fields into the village and carries the lumber cart from the field path to the road. The highway bridge is tied into the network of longdistance traffic, paced as calculated for maximum yield. Always and ever differently the bridge escorts the lingering and hastening ways of men to and from, so that they may get to other banks and in the end, as mortals, to the other side. (Heidegger, 2001, p. 150) The bridge can thus be seen as a material mediator of the social. It gives the relation between humans a permanent form, independent of how often they actually cross the bridge. As it traverses distance, the bridge channels and makes possible relations between humans. It enables us to go across not only the spatial gap but also reach across the metaphysical gap between human subjects to get to the other, the you. Ultimately, as Heidegger also suggests in the passage, bridges may enable us to get to the other side of life, too. To take a somewhat macabre example, it is no secret that bridges are popular sites for people to end their lives. The Bridge (2006), a documentary film by Eric Steel, tells the stories of the ‘jumpers’, persons committing suicide in 2004 by jumping off from the Golden Gate Bridge, where more people kill




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themselves than anywhere else in the world. The poster of the movie features a gloomy image of the Golden Gate Bridge, with half of the bridge vanishing into mist. Thus, the image associates the vertical with the horizontal, the jumping with the crossing over: it is as if the bridge itself would carry us not only to the other shore, but also to the other side, over the boundary of life. Bridges have politics, too. For example, the Oresund Bridge between Denmark and Sweden has great political significance. This is not least because it connects the Mainland Europe to Sweden and the rest of Scandinavia. By forging a spatial passage between the Mainland Europe and Scandinavia, it also connects the latter to the former symbolically. The sense of connectedness is amplified by the fact that, thanks to the Schengen Agreement, there is no passport control when one passes from one country to the other. The politics of the bridge is also betrayed by its name: while in Swedish the bridge is called Öresundsbron and in Danish Øresundsbroen, the bridge company, owned in half by the Danish and Swedish governments, prefers the hybrid form Øresundsbron, which connects the two languages just as the bridge connects the two countries. However, bridges can have politics not only by making connections. They also may create disconnections. A well-known example frequently reiterated in science and technology studies literature is Langdon Winner’s (1980) analysis of Robert Moses’ bridges in New York. Allegedly, in his redesign of Long Island parkways, Moses built the bridges so low that they prevented the buses from passing under them. And since it was mainly poor African-Americans who were using public transportation, the low bridges are claimed to have had a segregating effect of assumably keeping them away from the parks and other recreational areas used by whites. So, while the Oresund Bridge exemplifies the fact that bridges – and objects, more generally – may enable and authorize us to do things, Moses’ bridges suggest an example of discrimination, showing that bridges may also oppress people and prevent them from doing things.50 Whereas the bridge, with regard to the separated–connected axis, puts the accent on connecting, on the spanning of a gap, the door demonstrates for Simmel ‘in a more explicit manner [...] that the acts of separating and connecting are but two sides of the same act’ (GSG 12, p. 57). Because of the possibility of its being closed, the door marks off a limited and finite space. It brings order out of and into the openness of chaos, and thus protects us from the chaos gaping wide. It demarcates the space of the ‘human’ out of the endless continuity and infinity of all space (GSG 12, p. 57). Yet, in the very same act of demarcation, the




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door also cancels the partition into the inside and the outside (GSG 12, p. 58). There is always the possibility – even when the door is locked – of ‘overstepping’ the boundary, of opening the door and just stepping out. Therefore, the door is never simply a boundary. If it was, it would be no different from a wall. But it is not a mere hole-in-the-wall, either, as it offers means to restrict coming and going, to control the flow of chaos. Nevertheless, as it also is a hole, it does not succeed in keeping the chaos out entirely, but it only manages or controls the flow to some extent. All this is a way of saying that the door is ultimately a double: at once closed and open (Droit, 2006). It is both a barrier and a passage, it shuts off and opens, it limits and offers a possibility to go across – an open wall and a closed passageway. Even though Simmel’s metaphysical explorations of objects such as the bridge and the door may indeed prove quite imaginative and stimulating – it is as if his writings at the same time opened a ‘door’ to a whole new view and led us towards it, with feet firmly in the air – it is his theorizations on the share of things in our social lives, not on their connections to the metaphysical behind-the-scenes realm, which prove theoretically the most rewarding. Whereas in the latter case, objects are connected to the metaphysical depths of life, in the former they reveal the network of social relations they are part of. In fact, as a critical note, it can be asserted that, to some extent, the essays in which Simmel treats objects in themselves, devoid of our concrete interrelations with them, repeat or reproduce the divide into a pure human culture (i.e., subjective culture) and a culture of objects (i.e., objective culture) that Simmel describes with the notion of the ‘tragedy of culture’. Nevertheless, his metaphysics of objects such as the bridge and the door make an important point, as it seeks to think objects as being essentially connected to the human condition, suggesting that things, relatively enduring and permanent forms, are placed at the heart of humanity. We may discover something fundamental about what it is to be human by looking at something that is not human – that is, an object.

Money Simmel’s treatment of money in Philosophie des Geldes is highly relevant concerning the share of things in our social relations. Unlike the texts in which Simmel sets out to lay the foundations of the sociology of forms, here he does not reduce the social to interhuman relationships, but examines how social relations in modernity are supported, carried, mediated, and affected by money. Indeed, except for the gift, there is




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perhaps no other object that would embody relations to the extent that money does. For Simmel, money is the relational object par excellence. He asserts that the great philosophical significance of money lies in that it is the ultimate symbol of the relativity of all being. It ‘represents within the practical world the most certain image and the clearest embodiment of the formula of all being, according to which things receive their meaning through each other, and have their being determined by their mutual relations’ (GSG 6, p. 136; PM, pp. 128–9). Why is this so? Because economic value means ‘to be exchangeable for something else’ (GSG 6, p. 124; PM, p. 121) and, as a means of exchange and a measure of value, money ‘is nothing but the relation between economic values themselves, embodied in a tangible substance’ (GSG 6, p. 130; PM, p. 125). Money is relationality or relativity reified, ‘the substance that embodies abstract economic value’ (GSG 6, p. 122; PM, p. 120). It is ‘nothing other than a special form of the embodied relativity of economic goods that signifies their value’ (GSG 6, p. 716; PM, p. 512). This is to say that money is lent its meaning by relations. Simmel suggests that money has meaning and value only withing exchange relations: ‘Outside exchange, money has [...] little meaning’ (GSG 6, p. 212; PM, p. 176). Its sole purpose is to be passed around, to be exchanged for other objects and measure their value. It has no significance and value in itself, only in relation to other objects. As money is relationality reified, nothing in it is immediate. It is all about mediation. First of all, it mediates our valuations to one another. Money enables us to communicate, compare and exchange our valuations. Furthermore, while bringing an incredible amount of objects into our reach, it at the same time distances them from us, as they become available to us only via money. Thirdly, money is not connected in any specific way to the objects it measures the value of, only with the relations they may have with one another. This is to say that the position of money is to be in-between: it stands between subjects, between subject and object, and between objects. By drawing on the sociological arithmetic discussed in the previous chapter, it can be maintained that money is essentially in the position of a ‘third’. To the basic unit of economy, the exchange of sacrifices between two subjects, money presents a third. And, as such, it is a source of objectivity: it provides the exchangeable valuations an objective yardstick. It makes values objectively comparable. Unlike in gift exchange, which always has to do with things more or less incommensurable, money not only enables the evaluation of things on a common scale, but also makes possible the perfect equivalence of prestation and counter-prestation.




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While in the exchange of gifts one can never be sure of getting possessions on a fair price, because of its nearly unlimited divisibility, money makes possible the exact equivalency of the exchanged values. By mediating subjective valuations and providing the exchanging parties an objective measure of value, money forces subjective value through a metamorphosis: via money, value becomes an objective ‘social fact’. Exchangeability becomes reified in money. Nevertheless, while money may indeed be the purest example of relational objects, Simmel regards relationality as a more general characteristic of practically all things. Even though particular objects in themselves are ‘substantial entities’, their significance for us lies only in being ‘visible representatives of a relationship that is more or less closely associated with them’ (GSG 6, p. 137; PM, p. 129). This is to say that, according to Simmel, objects are embodiments of social relationships: Thus, a wedding ring, but also every letter, every pledge, every official uniform, is a symbol or a representative of a moral or intellectual, a legal or political, relationship between men. Every sacramental object embodies in a substantial form the relation between man and his God. The telegraph wires that connect different countries, no less than the military weapons that express their dissension, are such substances; they have almost no significance for the single individual, but only in reference to the relations between men and human groups that are crystallized in them. (GSG 6, p. 136; PM, p. 129) This is a very important passage. It suggests that objects are not only of the physical world but essentially also of us. They are a matter of the ‘collective’, as Serres (1995; 2007) or Latour (1999a) would put it. This is to say that, sociologically, objects are interesting not so much in their brute tangible materiality than as part of our social relations and collective life. In themselves, objects are mute and meaningless; they become significant only in relation to our own and when being used or passed between us. All this is captured very aptly, I think, by Serres’s (2007) notion of the ‘quasi-object’. Of course, while the above passage importantly accommodates the entanglement of objects with our relations, it nonetheless remains within the representational framework. Simmel seems to concern himself solely with what objects represent and express rather than paying attention to what they do: the focus is on the meaning of objects, not their actions. In his work, objects characteristically appear as symbolic entities, not as entities capable of doing things. However, this is only




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half the truth. In Philosophie des Geldes, Simmel escapes this representational framework when he concretely examines how money affects our relationships and experience. For Simmel, money is defined by its potentialities; it is what it is capable of. In amongst objects, money presents a special case in that it is not so much a thing as a relation and abstract idea. Simmel holds that money appears ante rem, in re, and post rem (GSG 6, p. 123; PM, p. 120) – that is, ‘before the thing’, ‘in the matter of a thing’, and ‘after the thing’, without being a thing itself. The object used as money is merely ‘a symbol of money’ (GSG 6, p. 246; PM, p. 198). As a general equivalent, money expresses all the values and meanings and has none itself. Lacking any inherent individuality or qualities, it is neutral, a blank figure.51 Money is any object and no object. No other value is more detached from concrete valuable objects than economic value, and no other object ‘is more completely the abstract bearer of value’ than money (GSG 6, p. 181; PM, p. 157). Of course, as a piece of paper, plastic, or metal, money can be cut, torn, even burnt or eaten, but what makes it money is ultimately not its physical properties. On the contrary, Simmel contends that it is precisely because ‘its qualities are invested in the social organizations and the supra-subjective norms’ that money is capable of doing the things it does (GSG 6, p. 264; PM, p. 210). He insists that money is a form of social interaction (GSG 6, pp. 205, 286; PM, pp. 172, 224), a reified social function (GSG 6, p. 209; PM, p. 175). The essential thing in money is trust. Without trust in the fact that money once accepted can be spent again at the same value, monetary transactions would ‘collapse’ (GSG 6, pp. 214–215; PM, pp. 178–179). The exchanging parties have to have confidence in the fact that money passes for a general means of exchange and preserves its value. For Simmel, that money appears as a pre-thing, in-the-thing, or postthing rather than as a thing itself is a result of a historical development. Money has not always been as ‘immaterial’ as the modern money is. According to Simmel, the development of money is characterized by the dissolution of its substance into functions. In the Middle Ages, the substance of money dominated its effects, which were reduced close to nothing. In the modern money economy, by contrast, there is ‘a tendency to eliminate substance entirely’ (GSG 6, p. 201; PM, p. 169). Today, the function of money no longer necessitates that it be a valuable object: ‘The more it is really money in its essential significance, the less need there is for it to be money in a material sense’ (GSG 6, pp. 203–4; PM, p. 171). Hence, Simmel distinguishes between the material sense of money and its function or ‘essential significance’. One justification for




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this is that money has no inner relation to its material value: ‘Money has value not on account what it is, but on account of the ends that it serves’ (GSG 6, p. 251; PM, p. 201). As we know, the material value of paper money is close to nothing in itself, and Simmel notes that it is also secondary whether it is based upon metal (GSG 6, p. 214; PM, p. 178). In the light of the phenomenon of trust, the development of money from substance and use-values to credit and, more recently, electronic money, appears not that radical at all. The latter stages in the development are merely more strongly and independently based upon the dimension of trust already present in material money, when it was utility values that were exchanged as money. Nonetheless, money cannot cast off its materiality completely. Although it is becoming less and less tied to a physical substance, it can never attain the ideal of becoming a pure symbol (GSG 6, pp. 181–2; PM, p. 157). According to Simmel, this has to do not so much with the nature of money as with ‘certain shortcomings of economic technique’ (GSG 6, p. 182; PM, p. 158). One of these shortcomings concerns the use of money as a means of exchange. As long as the equation between the measured value and the standard remains imprecise, the measuring process requires support by and a reference point in substance, such as in precious metal. The second reason that money cannot entirely free itself from matter has to do with its possible misuse. A necessary limit has to be set on the amount of money in circulation (and/or money has to be linked to a substance of a limited supply) in order to prevent inflation (GSG 6, pp. 184–6; PM, pp. 159–60). To some extent, money has to remain scarce. That money acts both as a means of exchange and as a measure of value makes it ultimately a double, not only in the sense of having a dual role, but also in having two contradictory characteristics. On the one hand, as a means of exchange, it does not remain unaltered through individual uses but presents and preserves its identity only in and via ‘the greatest and most changing variety of equivalents’ (GSG 6, p. 301; PM, p. 234). To take up a notion by John Law and Annemarie Mol (2001), money could thus be conceptualized as a ‘mutable mobile’: it is constantly in motion and tends to change its configurational characteristics in different uses. Simmel observes the convenience of the expression ‘liquid’ (flüssig) money: like a liquid, money ‘lacks internal limits and accepts without resistance external limits that are offered by any solid surroundings’ (GSG 6, p. 691; PM, p. 495). It is like a fluid, keeping its shape for only a relatively short period of time. What is decisive for money is its flow. It has to circulate and remain in motion in


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order to function as money: ‘The meaning of money lies in the fact that it will be given away. When money stands still, it is no longer money according to its specific value and significance’ (GSG 6, p. 714; PM, p. 510). Money also dissolves and bursts solids: ‘Money is nothing but the vehicle of movement in which everything else that is not in motion is completely extinguished’ (GSG 6, p. 714; PM, p. 511). Accordingly, Simmel maintains that the constant circulation of money accelerates the modern pace of life (GSG 6, pp. 696–7; PM, pp. 498–9): ‘The modern view of life rests upon money whose nature is fluctuating’ (GSG 6, p. 301; PM, p. 234). Yet on the other hand, money is not only that which is constantly mutable, but also that which remains stable and immutable. Simmel conceptualizes the latter characteristic by calling money in Aristotelian terms an ‘unmoved mover’ (unbewegte Beweger) (GSG 6, p. 204; PM, p. 171): it presents a stabilized, trustworthy and objective measure of things. Money provides exchange with continuity and evenness that are missing in barter. In measuring values, money’s value persists even if the value of an object alters: ‘money, as the stable pole, contrasts with the eternal movements, fluctuations and equations of the objects’ (GSG 6, pp. 124–5; PM, p. 121). So here again, money appears as something other than an object; whilst objects are constantly in motion money stands still. Consequently, what is at issue in the contradiction described above is perhaps the difference between money as an object, on the one hand, and as an abstract idea, on the other hand. The dual role of money as an unmoved mover (measure of things) and as a mutable mobile (means of exchange) is captured in the following passage, in which Simmel describes the process of how money weaves together the network of modern society: On the one hand, money functions as a system of articulations in this organism, enabling its elements to be shifted, establishing a relationship of mutual dependence of the elements, and transmitting all impulses through the system. On the other hand, money can be compared to the bloodstream whose continuous circulation permeates all the intricacies of the body’s organs and unifies their functions by feeding them all to an equal extent. (GSG 6, p. 652; PM, p. 469)



Importantly, the passage implies that modern society and economy are not ready-made, but they are literally ‘made’ in concrete money transactions. Neither society nor the economy precede or exist outside


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exchange relations but, as Simmel’s realistic-dynamic approach maintains, both are produced by relations; society and the economy are only the outcome of the synthesis of relations or a general notion designating their totality. In this sense, the circulation of money presents a theory of the event of the social bond in modernity. This is to say that, as an object generated by relations, money also generates relations. Its functioning is not only dependent on social institutions; with its circulation money is also able to produce relations. Money establishes relationships of mutual dependence between different elements. Via money, we are dependent on the whole of society. According to Simmel, money spreads over our relationships and life in general: ‘At present [...] the whole aspect of life, the relationships of human beings with one another and with objective culture are coloured by monetary interests’ (GSG 6, p. 305; PM, p. 236). It links individuals with divergent interests, needs, and desires, but also different spaces, cultural contexts, and actions. For instance, due to the mediating role played by money, Simmel asserts ‘it is possible for a German capitalist but also for a German worker to take part in the swap of a minister in Spain, in the profits of African goldmines and the outcome of a South American revolution’ (GSG 6, pp. 663–4; PM, p. 476). Money is able to overcome distance and forge ties between complete strangers (perhaps it can even be said to socialize us into strangers). In fact, Simmel even seems to be implying in the passage something that we today would place under the heading of ‘globalization’. While the motion and circulation of money weaves the social (i.e., the network of relations effected by money transactions), when it stops by ending in the hands of someone, it designates that subject or individual. That is, having become the absolute measure of things and the object valued to the highest, to a great extent money also defines us. Without money, we would not be the subjects that we are. In a wonderful passage from The Parasite, Serres touches on this. For Serres, money is an integral part to our being: Cartesian meditations are soon written; I am rich; therefore I am. Money is integrally my being. The real doubt is poverty. Radical doubt to the extreme is misery. Decartes cheated; he should have gone out, a new Francis of Assisi, and gotten rid of his goods. Descartes cheated; he didn’t throw his ducats into the stream. He never lost the world since he kept his money. The true, radical Cartesian is the cynic. Descartes never risked losing his ‘I’, since he never risked his money. He never played his malin génie for high stakes – for the shirt




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So, we can doubt everything else but not the fact that we are rich (if that is indeed the case; the six or more figures in one’s bank account attest to that like nothing else). Today, mammonism has replaced rationalism: in itself, thinking has become worthless; it is only money that counts. (Thinking may become valuable only if it can be sold or at least given a monetary value, as is indeed beginning to happen even in the academia.) Serres seems to claim that it is only when deprived of money that we really come to doubt our existence, not only in the sense of whether our existence is worthless but whether we exist at all. Within capitalist society, the person without any money remains outside society, unrecognized, undistinguished, a fool: ‘A rich fool is rich; a poor fool is a fool’. To conclude, we can say that, as an object, money is more of a relation than of a thing; that with it, nothing is immediate, but it is all about mediation: money stands in-between, in the position of a ‘third’; that it is a double, at the same time a mutable mobile and an unmoved mover; that it is both engendered by relations and able to engender relations; and lastly, that it weaves the social and is able to designate the subject. To come back to the idea raised at the beginning of this chapter, Simmel’s account of money has considerable methodological relevance as regards the study of the share of objects in social relations. First, Simmel’s notion of the relationality of money invites us to study objects in their relations rather than as separate and static substances. His analysis advises us to look at things in their relations to us instead of just looking at the things in themselves and for their own sake. This goes back to the objective of Simmel’s relationism to dissolve all substantial elements into processes and dynamic relations. Objects are intermeshed in relations: in many cases they are not only enactments of relations but also able to weave them. Second, if objects appear as produced by relations, they become more like events rather than stable entities. This means that while some objects may present themselves, perhaps, as unmoved movers, many others do not stay unaltered when they are being passed around between us. Yet other objects may even combine these qualities, like money does. Third, Simmel’s theorizing on money suggests that it is by following the motion and circulation of objects that we can grasp the making of relationary network they are embedded in. Objects are great tracers of


off his back. [...] I have always doubted this doubt that does not go to the zero level of possession. A rich fool is rich; a poor fool is a fool. A rich ‘I’ is rich; a poor ‘I’ is an ‘I’. (Serres, 2007, p. 229)


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social relationships. Money presents itself as an excellent means to study society’s ‘movements’ and ‘transformations’ (Papilloud, 2002b, p. 97). One’s image of society would remain hopelessly vague were one to start from an abstract notion of it. One would not ‘see’ anything were one to just stare at ‘society’ in itself. By following the movement and circulation of money, in contrast, ‘the unity of things [...] becomes practical and vital for us’ (GSG 6, p. 13; PM, p. 56). By drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s (1988, p. 5) formulation, one could thus say that Simmel’s approach is imbued by a sort of ‘methodological fetishism’, a conviction based on the idea that things-in-motion not only illuminate but also participate in generating the relations they are entangled among. It is perhaps by following the circulation and stabilization of objects that we are best able to observe what kind of relations exist between us, what happens in our collectives, and how our social aggregates are made stable.

Dynamics of subject and object For Simmel, subjective modes of experience are deeply interrelated with objects. In modernity, our dependence on objects is all the greater, not least because of the vast expansion of their number. It can even be claimed that things have become our contemporary milieu. Objects such as ‘tools, means of transport, the products of science, technology and art’, increasingly ‘determine and surround our lives’ (GSG 6, p. 620; PM, p. 448). One result and expression of this increase in the amount of objects is, for Simmel, the preponderance of means over ends in modern culture. He takes the enthusiasm for technology as an example: It is true that we now have acetylene and electrical light instead of oil lamps; but the enthusiasm for the progress achieved in lighting makes us sometimes forget that the essential thing is not the lighting itself but what becomes fully visible. People’s ecstasy concerning the triumphs of the telegraphs and telephone often makes them overlook the fact that what really matters is the value of what one has to say, and that, compared to this, the speed or slowness of the means of communication is often a concern that could attain its present status only by usurpation. (GSG 6, pp. 671–2; PM, p. 482)



However, Simmel does not discuss the intertwinement of objects with our being only within the framework of means and ends. In the previous section, we saw how Simmel examines in Philosophie des Geldes


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modern social relationships and experience as being intertwined with and affected by money. In addition, his essays on culture set out to explore the development of subjectivity in connection with objects. For Simmel, a subject is not something that exists solely by and in itself. On the contrary, it is a product of relations to multiple others, both subjects and objects. Whereas the relation between the I and the you, as we have seen, is Simmel’s basic scheme of conceptualizing the relations between two subjects and ultimately society itself, he explores the relations between subject and object as components of culture. He approaches culture as ‘the process pending between the soul and its forms’ (Habermas, 1998, p. 11). What is interesting in Simmel’s theorizing is that instead of serving as his point of departure, subject and object are rather his destination: he does not commence from full-fledged subjects and objects, but looks at how they come into existence by mutual determination. The development of selfhood always involves ‘something external’ to the subject itself (GSG 8, pp. 367–8). The cornerstone of Simmel’s conception of culture is the idea that subjects could not exist as they do were it not for the creation and assimilation of objects. Objects are obligatory points of passage and essential materials for the making of ourselves. The creation of objects is the reverse side of becoming a subject: the subject forms its selfhood by producing and giving form to objects. That is, in order to become who one is, the subject has to take a detour through the historicocultural world. Simmel maintains that it is by cultivating things that we cultivate ourselves (GSG 6, p. 618) or, to put it the other way, ‘we develop ourselves only by developing things’ (GSG 6, p 622; PM, p. 449). Thus, according to Simmel, ‘culture, in a unique way, sets the contents of life at a point of intersection of subject and object’ (GSG 8, p. 371; SC, p. 45); they exist neither in the subject nor in the object but between them, as their relation. Thereby, the cultural processes of subjectification and objectification go hand in hand: ‘Whatever difficulties metaphysics may find in the relationship between the objective determination of things and the subjective freedom of the individual, as aspects of culture their development runs parallel’ (GSG 6, p. 403; PM, pp. 302–3). For Simmel, objects play a crucial part in our subjective and social lives. Accordingly, in an interview Latour (in Gane, 2004, p. 81) gives Simmel recognition for being perhaps the only social scientist he knows who has treated objects as ‘neither all powerful nor powerless’. Latour explains the idea in negative terms by contrasting Simmel to Marx. Marx, too, pays attention to material objects, but in Marx, objects are either capable of too much – the notion of material infrastructure




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suggesting that material elements are able to cause social relations to happen – or too little – as when they are regarded as merely reified social relations (ibid.). Latour, however, does not say what the expression ‘neither all powerful nor powerless’ means in a positive sense. I think it is best interpreted in terms of the ‘double’ nature of Simmelian objects. That is, the objects Simmel treats are at once constructed and objective: while being human made, they appear as independent from subjective observations and have effect on us. They have a considerable impact ‘upon our psychological and emotional states as well as our social being’ (Frisby, 1997, p. 24). Besides connecting various individuals, spaces, objects, and actions to one another – and thus considerably extending the circle of our lives – money has, according to Simmel, significant psychological effects (such as cynicism and blasé attitude) resulting from the reduction of concrete and incomparable values to the mediating value of money (see GSG 6, pp. 332–7; PM, pp. 255–7). However, while maintaining that the subject attains a selfhood only through and in relation to objects, Simmel also assumes that subjects are genuinely threatened by the autonomy of objects. This prevents him from seeing how closely social formations and the lives of subjects are already tied and inscribed to things; he holds that the culture of subjects and that of objects are increasingly growing apart from one another. Simmel describes this process with his renowned notion, ‘the tragedy of culture’. Basically, the concept entails the idea that the objects of our own making ‘follow an immanent developmental logic in the intermediate form of objectivity [...] and thereby become alienated from both their origin and their purpose’ (GSG 14, p. 408; SC, p. 70). According to Simmel, ‘historical development tends increasingly to widen the gap between concrete creative cultural achievements and the level of individual culture’. Objective culture has ‘become substantially [...] independent of subjective culture’, because objects ‘become more perfect, more intellectual, they follow more and more obediently their own inner logic of material expediency’ (GSG 8, p. 372; SC, p. 45). As a result, we become dominated by the objects of our own creation. As William Outhwaite (2006, p. 63) puts this, ‘We set up an organization and make ourselves its puppets; we adopt an innovative artistic convention and find ourselves unacceptably constrained by it’.


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Beyond dualisms Against Simmel’s cultural criticism, which presents an image of atrophied subjects under the sway of the hypertrophy of the culture of


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objects, it would be possible to argue for the increased mixing and folding into each other of subjects and objects, as for instance Latour has done in his work (e.g., 1993; 1999a; 2005). One might argue, for example, that the real problem for those who design and build technology, is not that technological objects may become autonomous, but rather how to make them autonomous, so as to function independently and without support. As for users, things go smoothly as long as objects continue to act independently. After one has learned from the manual how the device actually works, problems start only when objects stop working (e.g., in the instance of breakdown). So, even though Simmel’s cultural criticism may be right in claiming that objects have become more and more independent and begun to dominate our lives, in that we cannot assimilate them all and make them work for the benefit of our own improvement, it nevertheless misses the many ways in which subjects and objects are both profoundly and subtly scrumpled and folded into one another. The subject, of which objects are a constituent part, just as it is a part of them, cannot possibly be threatened by those objects since they already belong to its mode of existence. Without things, the subject could not be the way it is and do the things it does (Latour, 1993, pp. 136–8). It is only insofar as objects act autonomously that they are able to enable, permit and authorize us to do things. Hence, that Simmel apprehends objects primarily from the viewpoint of mastery – our mastery over them and, as in the notion of the tragedy of culture, their mastery over us – does not permit him to fully appreciate our complex entanglements with them. Of course, as stated above, in Philosophie des Geldes, Simmel does make the observation that in modernity, the whole aspect of life and the relationships of individuals, both with one another and with the culture of things, are affected by money. Nevertheless, we need more detailed explorations, first, on what people do with material things (i.e., their uses) and, secondly, what things make us, people, do, beyond our mastery of them. As for the first point, Simmel takes the use of objects as far too selfevident and given. For example, in the piece ‘Das Problem des Stiles’ (‘The Problem of Style’), he treats the uses only to the extent of making a contrast between applied arts (and other utility artifacts) and works of art. Instead of paying attention to the specific ways we use objects, Simmel contents himself to merely stating their instrumentality: ‘A chair exists so that one can sit on it, a glass in order that one can fill it with wine and take it in one’s hand’ (GSG 8, p. 379; SC, p. 214). Likewise, Simmel’s essay on the handle, ‘Der Henkel’, in Philosophische Kultur serves as another hint of his relative lack of interest in our concrete and detailed




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uses of objects. In the text, he remarks that the purpose of the handle of a jug is to be ‘taken in one’s hand’, so that the jug, an island-like aesthetic object in a Kantian sense, is thus ‘drawn into the bustle of practical life’ (GSG 14, pp. 278–9); a jug can be ‘grasped, raised, tipped up’ by its handle (GSG 14, p. 279). These passages ignore the specific ways that things inscribe on our everyday lives and the energy, time, skill, and attention that their care and their handling require. Objects need constant care and upkeep. A large part of our daily activities in our environs concern various dealings with things. As Orvar Lofgren (1997, p. 103) puts it: ‘We shuffle things back and forth, rearrange them, recycle them. Every day, new objects enter our homes and old ones go out the back door.’ Our homes are stations and terminals for a whole variety of commodities, from technology to food, books, and furniture, as well as too often also being points of transit on the way to the waste tip. Regarding the second point, for Simmel, objects and things cannot have similar agentic effects as humans within interactive networks. In Philosophie des Geldes, he does state that money creates a whole new relationship between freedom and bond: it liberates us from personal bondages by replacing payment in kind by money payment. Yet, much more careful consideration is needed on the specific ways of how things create potentials for our actions and increase our capabilities, affect us and move us both in place and to place, articulate our rationalities, politics, passions, and wills, participate in our world-making, and so on. With Simmel, there is always an a priori asymmetry between the capabilities of humans and non humans: only the human subject is endowed with the powers to generate and organize the world. This stems from Simmel’s roots in Kantian transcendental philosophy, in which the knowable world is produced and organized by the mental activity of the knowing subject. Thereby Simmel decides in advance, once and for all, that nonhumans cannot have the same powers of effecting as human subjects have, without studying how action is actually distributed in practice in various situations. From the assumed asymmetry, it results that, while emphasizing the interdependence of the material and the social, Simmel nonetheless pictures their mixes as some sort of zero-sum game: the more natural or material a phenomenon is the less cultural or social it is, and the more cultural or social a phenomenon is the less natural or material it is. His essay on the sociology of the meal is a good example of this. Although Simmel acknowledges the interdependence of social processes and the material world, in the text the social is depicted as being placed higher in the hierarchical order than materiality. Even though




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in the meal, the physiology of eating is connected with the sphere of social interaction – that is, ‘with a frequency of being together, with a habit of being gathered together’ (GSG 12, p. 140; SC, p. 130), compared to the its materiality, its social dimension is a domain of higher order: ‘The shared meal elevates an event of physiological primitiveness [...] into the sphere of social interaction, and hence of supra-personal significance’. That is, the meal ‘permits the merely physical externality of feeding [...] to rest upon the principle of an infinitely higher ranking order’ (GSG 12, p. 142; SC, p. 131). Without thereby being completely detached from its material basis, the sociality of the meal nonetheless designates a triumph over the naturalism of eating (GSG 12, pp. 142, 147): while being bound to materiality, the shared meal elevates us beyond that of its own. Materiality is considered solely as the content of the social form, the meal. His dualistic conviction renders Simmel’s reflections on the socialmaterial question insufficient if read solely by themselves. Indeed, the value of more recent work on the articulation of the social and the material – for example, in studies making use of actor-network-theory – lies precisely in its break from this kind of dualistic thinking. For instance, Steve Woolgar (2002, p. 268) suggests that, instead of picturing the relation between the social and the material as ‘a zero sum game [...] we might instead consider that the entanglement between the two is mutually stimulating. The more material the more social?’ The point has been made by others as well (see Serres, 1995, pp. 87–8; Latour, 1996b, p. 229; 1999a, pp. 114, 146; Gieryn, 2002, p. 35), but the idea is basically the same: the more mediated and more attached to material objects the social is, the more existent and durable it becomes. The social is not ‘pure’ and self-referential but substantially supported by extra-social elements such as material objects. In this sense, objects are an internal externality to the social. Thus, in order to be able to account for the multiple ways objects enter our social relations, we ultimately would have to abandon Simmel’s dualistic mode of thought. Whereas for Simmel dualism is his basic scheme, the form in which any unity (not only social or cultural ones) is ever capable of existing, perhaps we should rather, like Latour suggests, bypass the whole material-social issue. Latour rejects the idea of there being only two kinds of entities. Entities are not either ‘natural’ or ‘social’, but come in various kinds and shapes and mix both human and nonhuman properties. Thus, the great divide into society and nature has to be replaced, according to Latour (1993; 1999a), by an innumerable amount of smaller gaps to be bridged by the work of translation. Of




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course, not being able to escape the confines of language, perhaps we have to keep on producing and re-producing dualisms when it comes to linguistic expressions. In this respect, dualisms are, to take up the expression by Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 21), an ‘entirely necessary enemy’. In contesting dualistic thinking in order to remain sensitive to the mixed nature of beings and the world, using and even multiplying dualisms may prove to be the only viable strategy. Challenging and undoing one dualism via invoking another, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, may just be the way to finally pass the futile ontological dichotomy of the social and the material that has made sociology so indifferent to things and objects over the years.




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Individuality and the Outside of Relations

Simmel’s relational ontology, as we have seen, dissolves entities into relations. Relations appear not only as the basic unit of analysis for Simmelian sociology but they also have ontological primacy over relata. They are the reality that his realistic-dynamic approach refers to. For Simmel, no entity is separate from its associations: to be is to be with, to be related. The related entities do not preexist their relations as such, but they rather constitute each other in their mutual relations, as we saw in the case of I and you. Instead of pure entities completely independent of others, one only encounters entities in their relations to one another. Therefore, what anyone is ever capable of experiencing is mixings and interminglings. However, are relations all there is to entities? In other words, are entities exhausted by their relationships? Is there no ‘outside’ to the relational grid of networks? Simmel’s answer to all of the three questions would most certainly be, ‘No’. Notwithstanding his pervasive relationism, for Simmel relations do not exhaust the beings that relate, nor cover all of the real. In this chapter, I will look into the limits of relationality and try to think the outside of relations – in other words, the in itself nonrelational and disconnected; that which is not part of the social terrain. I will do so by focusing on Simmel’s life-philosophical conception of the individual. In his life-philosophy, Simmel develops a notion of individuality very different from his sociological understanding of the individual, which considers individuality within a relational framework, as well as from his renowned qualitative and quantitative interpretation of individuality. In Lebensanschauung, Simmel terms this notion the individuality of ‘owness’ (Eigenheit), and interprets it ultimately on the basis of a life shaped by immanent and imminent death. It is from the place of one’s finitude and nonrepeatable life that


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a person’s individuality may appear as owned. Dying is the ownmost, nonrelational possibility of one’s existence and, as such, it is therefore also the foundation of a subject’s ownmost, nonrelational individuality, which is not dependent on others nor exhausted by one’s supposedly individual qualities. Even though Simmel’s life-philosophical discussion of the individual lacks almost any references to social relations and society, the notion of the individuality of owness is nevertheless of crucial importance for understanding his conception of the social. First of all, it is relevant not least because of Simmel’s assertion in ‘Wie ist Gesellschaft möglich?’, according to which the very fact that the individual is something in addition to social relations presents a condition of possibility for the social. ‘The a priori of the empirical social life is that life is not completely social’, we have heard Simmel maintain. It is thus crucial to try to think the individual not only in one’s connectedness but disconnectedness as well. Secondly, the question of the nonrelational being of the individual is linked to the dyad. As we noted earlier, for the dyad, the basic Simmelian unit of the social, the individual is irreplaceable: if he or she departs, the relationship ends. This lends serious gravity to the demands of the individual: if my claims are not met, I will leave you. Such ultimatums, as we recall, no longer have the same weight in constellations of three or more individuals. In these, if you present claims that we are not happy with, we will leave you. Or, if you decide to depart instead, the rest us of will still have each other. Yet, the individual is irreplaceable for the dyad also in a much deeper sense, beyond all ultimatums. This is because the relationship cannot survive the death of the individual; in the death of the individual, the dyad meets its end too. Thus death appears ultimately as the place of the irreplaceability of the individual; the singular individual can be understood only on the basis of life fundamentally limited by death. It is thus above all upon the living individual, the individual’s life leading towards death, that the dyad is dependent. However, before tackling the question of a life individualized by an immanent and imminent death, we will first discuss Simmel’s sociological account of the individual, as well as his famous notions of ‘quantitative’ and ‘qualitative’ individualism. This is intended to serve as a backdrop to our main concern, Simmel’s metaphysical conception of the individual, which is counterposed to the sociological one in a substantial way. While for Simmel the sociologist, the individual is defined by one’s qualities and relations, Simmel the life-philosopher attends precisely to the individual beyond




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one’s qualities and relations. Simmel’s life-philosophical notion of individuality unfolds around the idea of the individual as a whole, as indivisible. For Simmel, the being-a-whole (Ganz-Sein) of the ‘in’-dividual is thinkable only as a peculiar identity of the living with itself. From there we will proceed to the entanglement of death in life and life in death, and to his idea of death as that which ultimately individuates life.

Quantitative and qualitative individualism It does not require great insight to note that individualism is among the most powerful slogans of our era. It has played a significant role in the history of ideas, in political debates, in ideologies, and so on. Along with ‘individualization’, it is also among the key themes of contemporary sociology. One is unavoidably confronted with the question of individualism in theories of the social and society, in modernity and post-modernity, and in so-called specialty areas throughout sociology such as sociology of consumption, urban sociology, sociology of family, sociology of work and labour, sociology of youth, and so on. However, the concept of individualism, as Steven Lukes (1971, p. 45) has pointed out, is used not only in many contexts but also in a great many divergent ways and, unfortunately, ‘with an exceptional lack of precision’. As already Weber (1930, p. 222) observed, ‘[t]he term individualism embraces the utmost heterogeneity of meanings’. For example, it is used both in negative and positive terms, and equated as much with widespread egoism and hedonism as with the dissolution of traditional social structures and institutions (Schroer, 2001, p. 9). In the latter sense, individualism is thought to mark the end of community/ Gemeinschaft and lead to social atomization. The more positive uses of the notion, on the contrary, identify individualism with uniqueness, self-realization, creativity, freedom, and originality. In Simmel’s work, individualism and individuality are among its key themes. Simmel concerned with the problem of the individual practically throughout his whole career, as many distinguished Simmel scholars have convincingly shown (see e.g., Landmann, 1976; Dahme, 1981).52 The problem of the individual makes its way to Simmel’s texts at the latest in 1890, with Über sociale Differenzierung. In the book, Simmel proposes an interpretation of the individual that draws on his theory of differentiation. It perceives the individual as an intersection of social circles. Although never dispensing with this view completely, by the time of the publication of Philopsophie des Geldes in 1900 (see GSG 6) and the essay ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’ in


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1903 (see GSG 7, pp. 116–31), he nevertheless has changed his focus to some extent. Now he sets out to study the possibilities and threats for the development of individuality in the modern metropolis and the mature money economy. Around the same time, as he develops an increasing interest in aesthetics, Simmel also modifies some of his earlier views, especially the strict ‘sociologism’ of Über sociale Differenzierung. He introduces the notion of ‘qualitative individuality’ in order to be able to be attentive to the qualitative uniqueness of individuals, something that eludes any sociological attempts to grasp it. Finally, in his mature work, Simmel arrives at the theorem of ‘individual law’ and at a life-philosophical interpretation of the individual within the framework of life/Leben. One of Simmel’s merits is undoubtedly the most refined sense of conceptual distinctions that he develops about individualism. He traces the historical descendance of the aforementioned two individualisms – the atomized, isolated individual and individual uniqueness – and also tries to bridge the gap between them. In the essay ‘Die beiden Formen des Individualismus’ (‘The Two Forms of Individualism’) (GSG 7, pp. 49–56), and in many other places in his work (see e.g., GSG 6, p. 493; GSG 7, 131; GSG 11, pp. 811–2; GSG 12, pp. 389–90; GSG 16, pp. 128–37, 146), Simmel observes the rise of a ‘new individualism’ peculiar to the nineteenth century. In contrast to the individualism of the eighteenth century, which Simmel terms ‘quantitative individualism’ (quantitativen Individualismus), the nineteenth-century individualism is according to him ‘qualitative’ (qualitativen) in nature: it concentrates on the specificity and qualitative uniqueness of the individual. Simmel observes that quantitative individualism had developed as a reaction to the prevailing societal conditions of the eighteenth century, namely the suppressive ties of religion, political power, and the economy. As these ties were felt to create sharp inequalities between persons, a call for freedom in the name of universal equality was made. It was thought that people should gain independence vis-à-vis the oppressive social relations. According to Simmel, eighteenth-century individualism could be labeled individualism of ‘singleness’ (Einzelheit), as it conceived individuals at once as atomized and undifferentiated. The idea found expression within a variety of fields, ranging from rationalism to economical liberalism and all the way to Kant’s philosophy. Rationalism, with its notion of ‘man’ as a ‘rational being’ (Vernunftwesen), laid emphasis on the ‘general human being’ (der allgemeine Mensch) instead of the specific, incomparable individuality of each. Simmel cites here Fichte, according to whom ‘a rational being must without doubt be an




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individual, but not this or that specific one’. According to the ideal of economical liberalism, in turn, individuals were to follow their interests in absolute freedom, without any restrictions. And, lastly, in Kant’s philosophy, the transcendental subject designates the authentic rational and moral ego (Ich) while appearing as the bearer of objectivity and generality. Individualism of singleness is, for Simmel, essentially ‘abstract’ in character because, as the examples of rationalism, liberalism and Kant’s work show, it was not concerned with any concrete individuals in their particularity, but only with the human in general. For it, the entire value of every human being lay in their being human, and this value was the same with each and every one (GSG 7, pp. 50–2). The qualitative individualism characteristic of the nineteenth century, Simmel maintains, dissolved the unity of freedom and equality peculiar to eighteenth-century individualism. According to him, it was dissolved into two separate paths: on the one hand, socialism, which for Simmel is characterized by the tendency toward equality without freedom, and, on the other, specifically modern individualism, which perceives the individual as a unique and specific being (GSG 7, pp. 52–3). According to Simmel, it was perhaps above all Romanticism that channeled qualitative individualism to the cultural milieu of the nineteenth century, Goethe having created its artistic and Schleiermacher its metaphysical basis. Instead of Einzelheit, singleness, the main principle of qualitative individualism is, according to Simmel, Einzigkeit, ‘uniqueness’, which emphasizes the individuals’ differences instead of their sameness: the individual becomes a specific, incomparable being who is ‘called [berufen] to realize his own irreplaceable image [Urbild]’ (GSG 16, p. 146). The relation to the self gains importance. Cultivating one’s individuality has become a downright ethical task (sittliche Aufgabe) (GSG 16, p. 146). Consequently, it is not only the notion of the individual that has been altered but also that of freedom. Unlike by the individualism of singleness, in modern individualism freedom is no longer understood in the sense of sheer negative freedom, as freedom from something (suppressive social ties, for example), but in a positive sense, as freedom to something. And it is precisely to expressing their unique and incomparable individuality that individuals are supposed to use their freedom (GSG 7, pp. 52–3). Nevertheless, the individualism of uniqueness did not simply efface the eighteenth-century individualism of singleness. Rather, Simmel stresses that the two individualisms reside side by side, and, it is in the modern metropolis where their co-existence can be observed. In the essay, ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’, Simmel maintains that the




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modern metropolis offers a site for the co-presence of these individualisms in the two social forms of metropolitan individuality: both their contrast and the attempts to overcome it take place in the space of the metropolis (GSG 7, p. 131). Simmel regards the individuality of ‘similarity’/Gleichheit as the counterpart of eighteenth-century individualism. It fulfils the promise of the ideal of liberalism: in the metropolis, the individual has considerable freedom of movement in the physical, social, and mental sense. Compared to the smaller social circles of the countryside and towns, those of the metropolis are notably large and loose in terms of their integration and normative coherence. This provides the individual with an unparalleled amount of freedom and selfresponsibility (GSG 7, p. 126). However, according to Simmel, besides being relatively free, city dwellers also wish to appear individually unique, an ambition with roots in nineteenth-century individualism. Due to the wealth of people and stimuli in the metropolis, the individual has to emphasize his or her specific characteristics in order to stand out. The impersonal life of the metropolis demands developing the individual’s personal uniqueness. The reverse side of the metropolitan individuality of ‘difference’ (Ungleichheit) is empty exaggeration: one is easily led to adopt extreme extravagancies and caprices empty of any content, the meaning of which lies purely in the form of being different (GSG 7, pp. 128, 131). So, the ‘ism’ behind the individuality of similarity or equality is the individualism of singleness, while the individuality of difference is parallel to the individualism of uniqueness. Either pair can be said to express a distinguished meaning of individuality. The individualism of singleness and the individuality of equality centre on a meaning of individuality that Simmel calls ‘quantitative’. They both perceive individuality as freedom: while the first seeks individuality in the form of ‘the lack of every kind of restraint on personal powers’ (GSG 11, p. 811; ISF, p. 271), the latter is an actualization of that ideal in the being and conduct of individuals within the modern metropolis due to widening social circles. The individualism of uniqueness and the individuality of difference, on the contrary, give accentuation to a ‘qualitative’ meaning of individuality. It pertains to the way a person differs from others in terms of the form and/or content of his or her being and conduct (GSG 11, p. 811; ISF, p. 271). So, while the quantitative sense refers to the measuring of individuality through social comparison for the sake of equality and sameness, qualitative individuality results from contrasting one’s uniqueness to others for the sake of personal distinction.




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Notwithstanding their connectedness, there is a crucial difference between the forms of individualism and the meanings of individuality. Namely, while the individualism of singleness assumes the individual’s complete independence from social bonds, both of the forms of individuality essentially refer back to the social milieu. Both the individuality of equality and that of difference grow out of societal ground; associations create new kinds of possibilities and intensities for their emergence. To be more exact, Simmel suggests that ultimately, the possibility for the development of the forms of individuality stems from the widening of social circles (GSG 11, p. 814; ISF, p. 274), resulting from such phenomena as the extensification of the network of money transactions, growth of population, high economic division of labour, and the consequent social differentiation (see GSG 7, pp. 127–8; GSG 11, pp. 813, 831–2). What is more, as regards the individuality of difference, in Soziologie Simmel maintains that the division of labour has not only made it possible, but individual differentiation can be regarded as a type of division of labour itself: The difference of individuals, also when it means neither economic production nor immediate cooperation of all, can be understood as a kind of division of labour [eine Art Arbeitsteilung]. This takes us, however, into the speculations of sociological metaphysics. The more incomparable the individual is, and the more one stands, according to one’s being, activity and fate, in a place reserved only for him in the order of the whole, the more is this whole to be grasped as a unity, as a metaphysical organism of which every soul is a member, exchangeable for no one else, while all the others and their interaction condition one’s own life. (GSG 11, pp. 842–3) Simmel seems to make an equation between individual difference and the third a priori of society that we discussed in Chapter 5. Simmel proposes, as we remember, that for society to be possible there has to exist a pervasive correlation between the life of the individual and the surrounding societal whole. If this happens, then ‘every individual receives a specific position in the social milieu by oneself and in accordance with one’s own nature’ (GSG 11, 59). What Simmel is suggesting, then, is that individual difference is subject to social relations. One becomes unexchangable precisely by finding a role in the network of social relations, and the more unexchangeable and unique one is, the better one fits the differentiated overall structure of society.




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All in all, in his sociology, Simmel seems to consider the individual primarily as a product of social relations – that is, as an intersection of social circles (see e.g., GSG 1, p. 237) or including occasionally the historical dimension, also as a ‘point where the social threads woven throughout history interlace’ (GSG 9, p. 230; trans. Jalbert, 2003: 264). This is much due to the fact that Simmel’s sociology is pervasively relationistic. Ultimately, Simmelian relationism dissolves anything into relations. In accordance with this line of thinking, in Über sociale Differenzierung, for example, Simmel insists that individuality has no inner essence but is ‘maintained through the combination of circles, which in any case could also be different’ (GSG 2, p. 244). In other words, individuality results from a set of relations that is specific to each individual; the bundle of assembled relations that make up or ‘give’ an individual differs from person to person. It is very much along these lines that Simmel proposes in Soziologie that the expression ‘qualitative singularity of the individual’ (qualitativer Singularität der Einzelnen) is nothing but a ‘sophisticated misuse of words’ (sophistischer Wortmißbrauch) (GSG 11, p. 842). That is, a person does not owe one’s individuality to some autonomous hidden essence but to one’s relations. In the last instance, for Simmel the sociologist, the individual is one’s relations.

The in-dividual The idea of individuality as resulting from a combination of social relations suggests that the individual is not an absolute, final element, but an ‘assembled being’ (zusammengesetzte Wesen) (GSG 9, p. 323): the individual is traversed and given to us by a specific set of relations. While insisting on this, Simmel nonetheless rejects the reduction of the individual to relations. He does not consider it solely as a product or enactment of relations or as a part of a larger social whole, be that society or whatever social aggregate. Quite the contrary, rather than just embracing the framework of ‘homo sociologicus’ (cf. Dahrendorf, 1969), one of Simmel’s main points is that the individual is ultimately a double: not only one who belongs to the world but also one who is a world. In other words, whilst being defined by relations, we are also something, someone singular over and above them.53 Whereas it may be true that being is always given as being-with insofar as ‘the human being is in one’s whole essence determined by the fact that one lives in reciprocal interaction with other people’, as Simmel holds in Grundfragen der Soziologie (GG 16, p. 72), the relations do not exhaust the beings that relate. The individual’s irreducibility to relations is something that the idea of individualism of


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singleness already more or less suggests with its emphasis on the isolated yet undifferentiated individual who stands loose from all ties. But one could easily also think of much more concrete and mundane examples. For instance, lovers may form a unit, an item, so tight that they may be nowhere to be seen without one another. They may even be so interdependent that they truly feel they could not live without each other. Nevertheless, each partner’s being is not exhausted by their relationship; both have qualities and an existence independent of it. To take another example, even though it is completely dependent on its parents in that it might not survive an hour without their care, an infant is not reducible to the relation, which for some time may even be its only one, but is an irreplaceable, singular being in itself. Simmel expresses the idea of the duality of man in the essay ‘Fashion’. In the piece, he writes that humans have ‘ever had a dualistic nature’ (F, p. 541). He commences from the ontological idea that there are two antagonistic forces at play in every human being. Philosophically, they manifest in the part-whole tension; biologically, between heredity and variation; psychologically, between imitation and individual differentiation, and ideologically, between socialism and individualism. Lastly, from a sociological point of view, we can perceive the contrast as the antagonism between the tendency towards uniformity and conformity to the demands of society, on the one hand, and a tendency towards individual differentiation and departure from the claims of society, on the other (GSG 10, pp. 9–10; F, pp. 542–3). According to Simmel, we have here the provincial forms, as it were, of those great antagonistic forces that represent the foundations of our individual destiny, and in which our outer as well as our inner life, our intellectual as well as our spiritual being, find the poles of their oscillations (F, p. 541). Far from being alone in insisting on the human as being essentially a double, homo duplex, Simmel is in fact expressing a quite common perspective in classical sociology.54 Because of his methodological maxim urging sociologists to explain the social only with the social, even Durkheim, who is most often considered as the sociological determinist par excellence, subscribed to the idea of ‘double-man’ (Turner, 1984, p. 20). For instance, in The Division of Labour in Society (1933, pp. 129–30), he writes:



There are in each of us, [...] two consciences: one which is common to our group in its entirety, which, consequently, is not ourself, but society living and acting within us; the other, on the contrary, represents that in us which is personal and distinct, that which makes us an individual.


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From this Durkheim draws a conclusion that bears interesting comparison to Simmel’s thoughts. When Simmel holds in Über social Differenzierung that ‘in every human being there is, ceteris paribus, as it were, an invariable proportion of the individual and the social which changes only in form’ (GSG 2, p. 173), Durkheim states quite similarly that there are ‘two contrary forces’ acting in us: the one societal – which he calls ‘centrifugal’ – and the other individual – which he terms as ‘centripetal’ (Durkheim, 1933, p. 130). In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1973, p. 162), Durkheim repeats basically the same thesis: It is not without reason[...] that man feels himself to be double: he actually is double [...]. In brief, this duality corresponds to the double existence that we lead concurrently; the one purely individual and rooted in our organisms, the other social and nothing but an extension of society [...]. He conceives the individual and the social as being diametrically opposed to one another. He writes in The Division of Labour (1933, p. 130) that we cannot simultaneously adhere to both tendencies: if we desire to be individual, we cannot think and act as others do; if we express solidarity with others, our individuality decreases accordingly. This is an important point, since it immediately reveals the crucial difference between Simmel and Durkheim. We get a firmer idea of that difference by turning back to Simmel’s thoughts on fashion. Interestingly, in the essay, Simmel argues that even though individual and society are irreconcilable already in principle, fashion is nonetheless able to reconcile their antagonism in a provisory manner: ‘It is peculiarly characteristic of fashion that it renders possible a social obedience, which at the same time is a form of individual differentiation’ (GSG 10, p. 19; F, pp. 548–9). However, not only is fashion for Simmel a form in which the antagonistic forces of generalization and individuation compete and seek harmony, but so is the individual as well. For Simmel, the individual is ultimately a synthesis concept (see Tennen in Böhringer and Gründer, 1976, p. 17; Schroer, 2001, pp. 314–6). Whereas Durkheim regarded the individual and the social in humans as separate, Simmel was critical of this kind of segmentation. As he writes in his ‘fragments’, Simmel holds that ‘a totality of inner life [seelische Totalität] always has the form of the individual’ (GSG 20, p. 286). The individual is a totality that includes all contrasts. Let us stop here for a moment. The idea of the individual as a totality seems to contradict one of the basic strategies of Simmel’s work, namely


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thinking via dualisms and dichotomies. He notes in various writings that the basic motifs and determinations of our being and thinking order themselves typically into dualities, such as being and becoming, masculine and feminine, absoluteness and relativity, emotion and reason, body and mind, passivity and activity, repose and motion, and so on (see e.g., GSG 5, p. 197; GSG 10, p. 9; GSG 15, p. 402). Each attribute receives its meaning only in relation to the other; Simmel perceives phenomena as the struggle, compromise, and combination of antagonistic forces, tendencies, or characteristics. Yet Simmel holds – and this is a crucial moment – that the whole quarrel between the poles of these dichotomies loses ground as soon as we look at how the dichotomous determinations ‘realize themselves in an individual’. Drawing on the ‘pure meaning’ of the concept of the in-dividual as ‘indivisible’, Simmel notes in Rembrandt that the individual ‘must evidently be the common substance or base of those separated or diverging parties’. (GSG 15, p. 350; RB, pp. 31–2.) For instance, ‘even though the corporeal as such and the spiritual as such may be foreign to each other’, as the corporality and the spirituality of this or that specific individual they nonetheless are indivisible in their individual determination – ‘the concrete individual is [...] a unity’ (GSG 15, pp. 350–1; RB, p. 32). The individual is not only someone who consists of a mind and a body but someone who has a mind and a body (see GSG 20, p. 261), and thus stands beyond the opposition: the indivisible unity of the individual is, as it were, a ‘third’ reconciling the contrast between the mind and the body. The individual is thus at the same time divided and undivided: undivided insofar as the individual is a totality, a ‘third’ that includes all contrasts and in which the separate parties achieve a unity; and divided insofar as the indivisible unity of the individual consists of nothing other than separate elements that only the form of the individual conjoins. Simmel considers these elements, above all, in dualistic terms. For him, the divisible presents itself as the dividual. It is as if the unity of the in-dividual would be capable of existing only in the form of dualities. So, it is in the form of the individual where the opposition, between modes of being related (i.e., the social) and being beyond relation (i.e., purely individual existence), manifests itself and seeks reconciliation. Thus, in Simmel’s work, the model of homo duplex gets translated into individuum duplex. He explicates the idea of the individual as a double in a clear-cut manner in the essay ‘Individualismus’ (‘Individualism’), published in 1917. Here, he asserts that individuality is the form par excellence, in which the double nature of human existence is able to manifest itself and make itself felt as a unity. Both our relation to the




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world, to which we belong as a particular part, and our relation to our self, which is a whole in itself, open up precisely in the form of individual existence. The individual is someone who both belongs to the world and is a world: on the one hand, every individual is part of a greater whole, be it the divine, natural, or societal order; on the other, each and every one is also a self-enclosed whole, a self-sufficient being and a unique world unto oneself. According to Simmel, the existence of every ‘spiritual being’ (geistige Wesen) that can be regarded as ‘one’ (eines) – that is, as a singular and independent entity – is structured according to this duality. The individual is at once connected and separated, something which is at the same time related and devoid of relation, part of a larger whole and against such wholes according to its very form. The individual ‘is always member and body, part and whole, complete and in need of completion’ (GSG 13, p. 300).

The self-identity of the living being Given that the individual is not reducible to relations and therefore also not merely a part of some more primordial whole or unity, but is also a whole in itself, which is different from relations, there is also a second fissure in the individual. The inividual is not only to some extent different from one’s relations, but also different from one’s qualities; as a whole the individual is an emergent reality irreducible to one’s parts or components. Of course, the problem that now rises is the following. How should we conceive the being-a-whole, Ganz-Sein, of the individual? In what sense is the individual a ‘wholeness’, unity, or totality? Surely, the beinga-whole cannot mean that in each moment of one’s life one would be actual or present-at-hand as a whole. We are not ‘complete’ the moment we are born, but change and develop to a considerable extent throughout our life course. In that sense, we are rather living ‘becomings’ than living ‘beings’. According to Simmel, something new is ‘born’ of us all the time: ‘We are not already there [da] at the instant of our birth; rather, something of us is born constantly’ (GSG 16, p. 299; trans. Krell, 1992: 93). Thereby, the life of each individual forms a unity with the ‘not yet’ (Noch-Nicht) of the future (GSG 16, p. 221); ‘the present of life exists in life transcending the present’ (die Gegenwart des Lebens besteht darin, dass es die Gegenwart transzendiert)’ (GSG 16, p. 220). Life constantly stretches to the future as a process of maturation and actualization of virtuality. This throws us right in the middle of Simmel’s life-philosophy. For it is ultimately in the framework of life that the being-a-whole


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of the individual has to be interpreted, as we can see in the books Lebensanschauung and Rembrandt. In Rembrandt (GSG 15, p. 447; RB, p. 106), Simmel notes that we must not think the individual as a ‘solid substance, but as the peculiar identity of the living being with itself’ (der eigentümlichen Identität des Lebendigen mit sich selbst). But if it is a peculiar identity of the living being with itself, how does the living remain identical with itself while being constantly subject to change and alterations? And in what sense is the identity of the living ‘peculiar’? To begin unfolding the cluster of questions from the last of them, the identity here is peculiar because it has to be understood in temporal terms. For Simmel, the individual is a sequential unity; ‘individuality [...] is only thinkable through the historical successive ordering [...] of the moments of life’ (RB, p. 106). At its most extreme, this means that the living could have different qualities than it possesses, without still losing its identity (GSG 16, p. 344). The living being is identical with itself primarily because its past extends to its present or, in other words, because ‘the past arrives at a synthesis with the present’ (RB, p. 105). We are saddled with our past; it continues to determine and shape us in our present. This is to say that anyone who ‘is torn from his own past[...] is not an individual’ (RB, p. 106). The most evident case here is amnesia. At the Identity: 8 Rooms 9 Lives exhibition at Wellcome Collection, London, on show from November 2009 to April 2010, there was a small section on Clive Wearing, a professional musician and composer who, after having been contaminated by a virus in 1985 that infected his brain, has been unable to remember any past events from his life or to form any new memories ever since. Living ‘his life in perpetual present’, he is lacking ‘an inner biography’ and thus ‘a meaningful personal identity’, as one of the wall texts in the exhibition phrased it. Hence, as Simmel too stresses, insofar as it is for a significant part through memory that our past is able to continue to exist in the present,55 personal identity can be thought in temporal terms (GSG 16, 219). Thinking the individual as the peculiar identity of the living with itself is to consider it within the framework of life. Individuality is essentially bound up with life. In Lebensanschauung, Simmel expresses this very explicitly by noting that ‘individuality is living through and through, and life is individual through and through’ (Individualität ist überall lebendig, und das Leben ist überall individuell) (GSG 16, p. 227). For Simmel, the individual and life suppose one another: individuality has to be understood as a peculiar identity of the living with itself, and everywhere life appears as individuated. However, while saying this,




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human life [...] stands under the double aspect: on the one hand, we are thrown into and adapted to cosmic movement, yet on the other hand we feel and conduct our individual existence from our own centre, as self-responsible and, as it were, in self-enclosed form. (GSG 16, p. 319) Out of this duality develops the ‘ultimate metaphysical problematic of life’ (GSG 16, p. 222). It culminates in the question of how we can understand life as both unrestricted flow and the life of an individual. Life is no substance that would exist independent of individual organisms, but it manifests itself precisely as their life. However, while existing only in individuals, the process of life overflows and traverses the individual. It ‘never is; it is always becoming’, Simmel writes. The self-enclosed, limited form of the individual and the continuous flux of life that flows through it are thus irreconcilable precisely on a principal level. While life is present only in the living individual, life itself is different from the individual that is born, lives, and dies. The individual is merely an actualized form of a life that is ‘virtual’, in the sense that Deleuze (2001) has specified the term. Life does not disappear even when a singular individual dies, but it both precedes and continues to exist after it (GSG 16, p. 227). Death means, therefore, ‘only the end of an individual form of life, not the end of the life which manifests itself in it’ (GSG 16, p. 336). The process of life, bare life, which the Greeks termed zoē (Agamben, 1998: 1), is not confined to the individual. On the contrary, in the parlance of Simmel, we could say that while manifest only in the individual, life is also something ‘more-than-individual’. Life by definition never ceases: it is continuous, without limits. For Simmel, it ceaselessly reaches out beyond its old forms and creates new ones. Constant striving beyond itself (Hinausgreifen über sich selbst) belongs to the character of life’s mode of being (Wesensgestaltung des Lebens) (GSG 16, p. 221). As Simmel puts it in Rembrandt, ‘Life is that which at all points wants to go beyond itself, reaching out beyond itself’ (GSG 15, p. 385; RB, p. 57). However, when we turn from life – or, to follow the terminology of Deleuze (2001), from a life – as an impersonal, pre-individual flux to


Simmel does not think that the entanglement of life and the individual would take place smoothly, without fracture. Quite the contrary, our life, as life, is constantly torn between two irreconcilable poles. According to Simmel:


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the life of the individual that is always personal(ized), it does not take the form of a continuous Heraclitean current’s absolute flow, but is manifest only in the self-enclosed, limited form of the individual. We have already referred to the idea that, when a life becomes the life of the individual, its process becomes ‘more conscious and spiritual’ (bewußtgeistiger) and receives a new centre: the individual I/Ich. We can quote here the same passage referred to when discussing Simmel’s insights on how transcendence is immanent in life: [A]s soon as something exists as a unity unto itself, gravitating toward its own centre, then all the occurring flow [Hinausfluten des Geschehens] from this side to that side of its boundaries is no longer animatedness without a subject, but remains somehow bound up with the centre. Even the movement outside its boundary belongs to the centre; it represents a reaching out in which the form always remains subject and yet which goes out beyond this subject.’ (GSG 16, pp. 222–3; ISF, p. 363; translation altered) So, while life constantly reaches out beyond its present form, the individual nonetheless remains its centre. The same is true the other way around. As a form, the individual is peculiar in the sense that while life is counterposed to it, it nevertheless remains inseparable from life: without life, the individual cannot be. The inextricability of the individual from life distinguishes it essentially from other forms that originate in life, such as language, technology, works of art, social formations, and so on. As they have a meaning and objectivity in their own right that is no longer vital, the mode of being of these transvital forms is thus more-than-life/Mehr-als-Leben. The individual, by contrast, is only as living – that is, as long as it is alive. This is, of course, not a way of saying that the individual would be completely self-sufficient, in the sense of being nothing-but-life. Quite the contrary: as a living organism, the individual necessarily requires something external for nutrition and nourishment. However, Simmel does not take up this lead. The problem he sets is not so much that of life’s preservation as its enhancement. He concerns himself less with the body than with the ‘spirit’ (Geist), less with some body that is alive than with the processes of ‘life becoming spirit’ (Geistwerden des Lebens) and ‘spirit becoming life’ (Lebenwerden des Geistes). So, rather than developing the theme that, in order to survive, we must find something to eat outside ourself, Simmel probes problems more cultured in nature, such as the cultivation of subjectivity.




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The difference between the sociologically framed individuality reducible to social relations or to the unique qualities of the individual and the lifephilosophical interpretation of the individual beyond one’s relations and qualities can perhaps be clarified to some extent by exploring Simmel’s two concepts of ‘type’. His social or socio-psychological types – the cynic, the blasé person, the stranger, the faddist (Modenarr), the pauper, the urbanite, the adventurer, and so on – are well known. These individuals are crystallizations of interactions in certain times and places, and as such they supplement Simmel’s analysis of social forms. What is common to these types is that they are all defined by the features of social relations. The emergence of the cynic and the blasé person, for example, is conditioned by the reduction of qualitative values to the abstract monetary value. The stranger, in turn, as we have seen, does not just stand outside a group but is in a specific kind of relation to others. For Simmel, the type stands as a mediating middle term between the general and the specific, the distributed and the unique. It does not have any ‘transcendent essence’ (Morris-Reich, 2003, p. 136), but, as HeinzJürgen Dahme (1981, p. 389) has pointed out, results from comparison between empirical exemplars. The typical cannot therefore be equated with the objective-universal any more than with the subjective-individual. Paola Giacomoni (1997, p. 21) has claimed that the type presents for Simmel a dimension between the general – which is applicable to each particular case – and the irreducibility of the individual – which eschews all generalities. From the perspective of the individual, the type is thus never identical to the individual in its singularity. Therefore the individual exemplifies the type rather than instantiating it. We can recall here Simmel’s claim that the type is ‘always at once more and less than the individual’. In the second part of the Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, he notes that the idea of an individual being nothing but the instance of a type is nonsense (GSG 4, pp. 99–100). Such an individual would be equivalent to a sheer concept, lacking all life and blood. The statement regarding the irreducibility of the individual to the type can be interpreted in at least two ways: sociologically and life philosophically. From a sociological perspective, we can understand it to mean that no one is reducible to a single type; each individual is rather a combination of many types. Indeed, in Philosophie des Geldes, Simmel writes in a manner that is in concordance with this line of interpretation:


From types of individuals to individuated type

Only the combination and fusion of several traits in one focal point forms a personality which then in its turn imparts to each individual


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However, as regards the life-philosophical interpretation of the unique self, the different traits that a person has – or is – cannot mark the individual’s absolute singularity, since these traits, as Simmel notes in Rembrandt, ‘are shared with countless others’. In fact, Simmel stresses that, ‘What we like to call the “personal” aspect of people – the external circumstances of their lives (their social position, whether married or unmarried, rich or poor) – is precisely that which is not personal about them’ (GSG 15, p. 374; RB, p. 50). Indeed, ‘The more we go into details, the more we find traits that we also encounter in others’, Simmel claims. All the aforementioned aspects are merely typical: ‘All individual characteristics are generalities’ (GSG 15, p. 396; RB, p. 67). It would be easy to read this passage as a deliberately paradoxical statement that all that is individual is typical (or ‘general’). However, to me it seems that this is not at all what Simmel is saying here. The sentence should be read with emphasis on the word ‘characteristics’ – all individual characteristics are typical. The individual cannot be merely assembled from the sum of its describable qualities, because it is not only a collection of various features but also a form that renders those features a whole, a unity or totality – as we emphasized above – that is superior to all particular attributes, an emergent reality which is not exhausted by one’s qualities or components. In fact, nothwithstanding how individual a person may seem judged by one’s characteristics, in the last instance these characteristics are that which is the least individual in him or her. All individual qualities are only typicalities; it is ‘only the totality of the human being’ as a unique, non-repeatable lifeprocess that is ‘unique’ (GSG 15, pp. 395–6; RB, p. 67). This takes us to Simmel’s life-philosophical notion of type. In Lebensanschauung, he introduces a new concept of type besides the sociological one. Unlike the social type shared with others, the lifephilosophical notion pertains to the absoluteness of one’s subjectivity. Simmel phrases the relation between us and our type in terms of part and whole: ‘We are all fragments, not only fragments of a social type or of a type of a soul [seelischen] depictable with generic concepts but, as it were, fragments of the type that only we ourselves are’ (GSG 16, p. 280). This latter type, ‘the type that only we ourselves are’, is something singular, something that remains inexpressable to generic terms. It is our ownmost type, although we are it only ideally: we actualize it in what we do, say, and are only to a lesser extent. We are only parts, fragments


trait a personal-subjective character. It is not that it is this or that trait that makes a unique personality of man, but that he is this and that trait. (GSG 6, p. 393; PM, p. 296)


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of our type. We are also constantly measured against our type. As we know, this is consistent with much of our everyday experience. We not only compare our fellow human beings with others, but also with themselves, so to speak. It is not unusual that we say something is so ‘typical’ of someone. Equally, when people have done something that does not fit our image of them we tend to note that they were not ‘themselves’. It is as if there were an ideal version of us, an idea of the potentialities of our being, or an image of someone who is truly us but who we are only ideally–someone with whom our actual being, doings, and sayings either correspond or break faith. Simmel does not explicate the conceptual difference between the social and the individual type in any more detail. Nevertheless, in a preliminary manner, we could put it as follows: whereas the social type is made typical by the fact that it is distributed, what makes our own type typical is its ideal nature. While the social type expresses what is special about an individual through something that is common to many individuals (Giacomoni, 1997, pp. 21–2), an individual’s ideal type expresses that which is typical of an individual in his or her singular existence. The individual’s ownmost type is singular. But what does it mean to say that our ownmost type is ‘ideal’? The notion of the ideal affords here at least three possible interpretations. First, it could be interpreted in accordance with Simmel’s doctrine of the ‘three worlds’, not far from Bernard Bolzano’s metaphysics of different realms or from the ideas proposed by the neo-Kantians Heinrich Rickert and Wilhelm Windelband. One could interpret the individual type to be a pre-existent model with an ideal validity independent of its actual realization. In this sense, type would be analogous to Simmel’s concept of ‘form’, which according to him is independent of whether it is realized a thousand times or not even once (for the notion of form in this sense, see GSG 11, p. 26; GSG 6, p. 31; GSG, 14, p. 113). However, on a closer look, this interpretation proves to be flawed. What separates the individual type from form is that, whereas one and the same form ‘can occur in two, or in an unlimited number, of existences’ (GSG 15, p. 397; RB, p. 68), one’s ownmost type is unique; it is bound to the absolute singularity of the individual. Therefore, against the first interpretation, it is possible to argue that the individual type is not something already valid, but rather has to be created. This is the second line of interpretation. Simmel’s notion of the philosopher’s type suffices as an example of this. In Hauptprobleme der Philosophie, Simmel holds that momentous philosophical achievements are characterized by a conception of the world that expresses its creator’s ideal




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determination and irreplaceable nature, ‘an inner objectivity of a personality, which follows only its own law’ (GSG 14, p. 29). This ‘inner objectivity of a personality’ is not reducible to the subjectivity of the philosopher’s person any more than to a transcendental archetype or to an objectivity extraneous to the particular individual and his or her life. On the contrary, beyond the individual subjectivity, as well as the objectivity which is supposed to be ‘universally convincing’, there must be a ‘third in the human being [Menschen]’. And, according to Simmel, this third has to be the soil in which philosophy has its roots – indeed, the existence of philosophy even necessitates as its presupposition that there be such a third. This third might be termed – to use an approximate characterization – the layer of typical spirituality [Geistigkeit] in us. (GSG 14, p. 28) Another counter-example against the interpretation of the type as already ‘ready’ is offered by the artistic personality and its ‘individual law’ (GSG 8, p. 377) – a notion which Simmel probably appropriated from Schleiermacher. The individual law of an artist can be regarded as being analogous to the type of the philosopher. Simmel writes in ‘Das Problem des Stiles’ (‘The Problem of Style’) that, facing a statue by Michelangelo, a religious painting by Rembrandt, or a portrait by Velasquez, the question of what these works share with others of their style and period becomes irrelevant to us (GSG 8, p. 374). This is because ‘these great figures have created a mode of expression flowing from their very individual genius, which we now sense as the general character in all their individual works’ (GSG 8, pp. 375–6; SC, p. 212; italics added). Despite its heroistic imprint, this statement reveals something essential: the great figures have created their style. It is not something that exists before and outside the actual works but has to be extracted from them. The personality of the artist is not that of the real author, but an ideal edifice (GSG 7, pp. 31–3): it resides only in the works and nowhere else. For instance, Simmel states of Michelangelo that his individual law, the style of his works which he is himself ‘is expressed in and colours all artistic utterances of Michelangelo, but only because it is the root-force of the[se] works and these works only’ (GSG 8, p. 376; SC, p. 212). The third possible interpretation of the ideal nature of our type is that it is ideal in that it presents an obligation. In Simmel’s life-philosophy, the notion of individual law appears as the basis of an individualized ethics. He develops it in the final and fourth chapter of Lebensanschauung, ‘Das individuelle Gesetz’ (‘The Individual Law’). By introducing the




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notion of individual law, Simmel tries to dissolve the opposition of law and individuality posited by Kant’s moral philosophy. According to Simmel’s reading of Kant, the cornerstone of Kantian ethics and the notion of categorical imperative is the assumption that an ideal cannot be anything individual but only general. Kant regards generality as the essence of any ethical law: for him, a law cannot be determined by the concrete living individual but has to determine it (GSG 16, pp. 365–6). By introducing the notion of individual law, Simmel questions this presumed unity of law and generality in Kantian ethics and proposes the purely individual existence is itself law-like. For him, Kant’s categorical imperative signifies ‘violence done to the one through the many, a levelling of the specific through the typical’ (GSG 12, p. 426). The individual law, on the contrary, is a moral ‘ought’ which is valid not because it holds for each and everyone, but because it holds precisely for me: ‘First and foremost it is I who has to do it, it belongs to the circle of my obligations, and the image of my existence gains or loses in worth through its fulfilment or omission’ (GSG 12, p. 442). That is, the obligation does not fall upon the individual as if coming from outside, but stems from within the vital process and unity of the individual’s life itself, from the same source as the fulfillment demanded (GSG 16, p. 382). The notion of individual law thus represents a doctrine of a ‘vitalized’ and ‘individualized’ ethics (see e.g., GSG 12, pp. 444–8; Levine, 1991, pp. 110–11). It commences from the idea that individual life is responsible to no instances other than itself; the individual’s life course runs in absolute self-responsibility and incomparability.56 Along these lines, fulfilling one’s type, one’s individual law, becomes a moral ‘must’ or ‘ought’ (Sollen): ‘The whole existence [of an individual] must be such and such, regardless of the way it is in reality’ (GSG 16, p. 383).

Individuality of owness We shall abandon now the theme of the individual law itself and instead focus on another theme which Simmel takes up in ‘Das individuelle Gesetz’, a theme which is even more pressing as regards the understanding of his metaphysics of the individual. It concerns the question of how we should understand the idea of the individuated type as owned. What does it mean to have a type that is purely individual? In what sense can individuality be ‘owned’? In a short but remarkable passage of ‘Das individuelle Gesetz’, Simmel discusses what he calls the individuality of Eigenheit. The usual meaning of Eigenheit is ‘idiosyncrasy’, ‘peculiarity’, ‘characteristic’,


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‘distinguishing quality’, or even ‘individuality’. However, none of these translations quite succeed in capturing Simmel’s use of the concept. What is of crucial importance in the Simmelian notion of Eigenheit as regards the understanding of his conception of individuality is the root eigen, which means ‘own’ in terms of property. Given this, Individualität der Eigenheit could be interpreted as an individuality that is ‘own’ or ‘proper’ to the individual and, consequently, translated as ‘individuality of owness’. What is especially fascinating about the passage is the fact that in it, Simmel contrasts Eigenheit precisely to Einzigkeit, that is, to his sociological notion of individual uniqueness based on the set of relations peculiar to each individual. Now, Simmel notes that all ‘the fallaciousness and inadequacy regarding the concept of the individual’ is precisely because the content of the individual is considered solely in terms of ‘difference’ (Differenz): the individual is perceived as that which differs from what is ‘general’ (Allgemein) and shared with others (mit Anderen Individuen Geteilt) (GSG 16, p. 415). Individuality grounded in difference is not something that is, nor even could be, truly ‘owned’ by the individual. Difference does not give individuality any positive quality that would belong to the individual alone. Rather, it is ultimately based on what the individual is not, as it results from comparison with and contrast to what others are. In other words, the individuality of uniqueness or difference, as Simmel writes in Soziologie, is based on the fact that ‘what has been found in others is not found in one’ (in dem einen das nicht findet, was in andern gefunden hat) (GSG 11, p. 842). That is, an individual can assume its difference only in comparison to others. As comparison relies on a supraindividual generality, on a norm, the individuality of uniqueness or difference cannot count as truly one’s own individuality, because it subjects the singular individual to the formal similarity of individuals. Thus, it cannot cover one’s whole existence. It ‘does not at all touch the individual in one’s essential reality’ (geht das Individuum nach seiner Wesenswirklichkeit nicths an), for, as Simmel reminds us, in a manner which links to the discussion of the being of the individual as a wholeness above, ‘The individual is the whole human being, not the rest which remains were one to take from him all that which pertains to others as well’ (GSG 16, p. 415). So, there are not only two meanings to individuality, but actually three! In contrast to singleness/Einzelheit, which is abstract in the sense that it is not concerned with any concrete individuals in their particularity but the idea of a general human being, and to uniqueness/




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Einzigkeit, which does pertain to concrete, particular individuals, but does not make their individuality their own, Eigenheit/owness marks one’s ownmost individuality. It refers to the irreducible singularity of the individual’s life. It is the notion of owness, then, which in Simmelian metaphysics is supposed to express the individuality that is owned by the individual.

Entanglement of life in death and death in life A highly relevant question has not even been posed yet: the question of the source or root of singularity. On what is one’s singularity based? What makes one’s individuality singular, one’s own? Simply, Simmel’s answer is: death. This should make clear why we have deferred the question: not in order to try to avoid it but to suspend it, to postpone it, just as one would wish to postpone death, as inevitable as it is horrifying. So, before we have been fully prepared to discuss the problem of the individual who will die, we have had to think first the living individual, as a peculiar identity of the living with itself. For even though we are old enough to die as soon as we are born, we cannot die without living first, no matter how little. Simmel thinks that in death, the unique possibility for the realization of an individual’s existence is lost for good (GSG 16, p. 329–30). This implies that the life of an individual is essentially non-repeatable: ‘That the same existence could occur twice is quite nonsensical’, Simmel maintains in Rembrandt (GSG 15, p. 397; RB, p. 68). Each individual is bound to being-only-once: ‘The particular life cannot be deprived of its being-only-once [Nur-einmal-Sein]’ (GSG 15, p. 424; RB, p. 89). Therefore, when an individual dies, we experience a loss of the person’s very type: ‘The essence of individuality is that the form cannot be abstracted from its content and still retain its meaning. [...] the human individual, really grasped as pure individuality, is the unrepeatable form’ (GSG 15, p. 373; RB, p. 48–9). In the above quotation, Simmel’s choice of words appears somewhat contradictory. After all, earlier we heard that form is not dependent upon its realizations in content. Given this, the expression ‘unrepeatable form’ would thus amount to an oxymoron. In fact, the first quotation in the above paragraph, that states ‘That the same existence could occur twice is quite nonsensical’ opposes existence and form, as it continues ‘[...] but the same form can occur in two, or in an unlimited number, of existences’ (GSG 15, p. 397; RB, p. 68). Is Simmel just being inconsistent or is the choice of words intended? Of course, there is no


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way for us to know for sure. Nevertheless, we can try to resolve the contradiction by considering the existence of an individual as a form. In these lines, Simmel invites us to think existence – or the life of the individual – not only as the opposite of form but as a form in which life gives itself. The existence of the individual is a nonrepeatable form; its uniqueness is the form in which the endless process of life manifests as finite. Death is that which individuates life, just as it is the individual that, in its actual form, ‘mortalizes’ it. Interestingly, Heidegger’s treatment of death in Being and Time (1962) has many remarkable similarities with Simmel’s own life-philosophical notion. The issue deserves a detailed discussion in its own right, but here I will only take up a couple of examples. First of all, like Simmel, Heidegger (1962, Section 49, p. 290) perceives death as a ‘phenomenon of life’, as a boundary of life still part of it. Neither of the two philosophers regard death as a violent interruption of life that befalls it as if from outside. Simmel abjures this idea by introducing a conceptual distinction between ‘dying’ (Sterben) and ‘being killed’ (Getötetwerden), and Heidegger, one between ‘dying’ (Sterben) and ‘perishing’ (Verenden). In Lebensanschauung, Simmel maintains that in being killed, death remains something exterior and alien to life; something accidental that falls upon it from outside. Thereby, in being-killed, death does not yet receive its full meaning for life. In dying, by contrast, death as that which ultimately abolishes life belongs originally and innerly to life’s very nature and being. He frames this in a dialectical fashion, stating that, ‘life demands, from itself, death as its opposite, as its “other” ’ (GSG 16, p. 308). Hence, for Simmel, death is immanent in life. This immanence means not only that death stems from nowhere else than life itself but also that ‘we do not first come to die in our last instant’ (GSG 16, p. 299). Death affects and sets the tone for every moment and all content of life (this is something which Simmel notes in many of his texts; see e.g., GSG 16, 298; GSG 12, p. 82; GSG 15, p. 401; GSG 8, p. 349; GSG 11, p. 102). It accompanies our life from the very start: ‘In each and every moment of life we are of the kind that we will die’ (GSG 16, p. 299). For Simmel, the individual is, as a living being, as some-body that is alive, from the beginning essentially someone who will die. ‘Death is a quality of organic existence’ (GSG 15, p. 401; RB, p. 71). Unlike an inorganic body (Körper), which finds its limits determined from the outside, the limits of an organic body are not only spatial but also temporal. In other words, the form of the organic body is limited from within by its finiteness (GSG 16, p. 297). There is absolute certainty that we




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shall die; what we do not know, however, is when this is going to happen (GSG 16, p. 301). Leo Tolstoy perspicaciously depicts the horror and unsettling affect of this conjoining of the existential certainty and temporal indeterminacy in the short novel The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The main character, Ivan Ilyich, a member of the Court of Justice, is living a decent, secured life immersed in everydayness. One day he bumps his side on a window-frame knob when falling from a stepladder on the occasion of hanging the draperies. He has forgotten the whole incident ever happening, but after a while he develops a strange taste in his mouth and a funny feeling in his side, a constant dragging sensation that doesn’t go away but only seems to get worse day by day. Ilyich is visited by many specialists. Various reasons are given to his worsening state, from floating kidneys to chronic colitis and blind gut, but no cure is found. Realizing that his condition has nothing to do with any of these diagnoses, but is a matter of life and death, Ilyich finds himself terrified. He has to live with the awareness that he will die, along with the terror of not knowing when exactly it will happen: It’s a matter of living or ... dying. Yes, I have been alive, and now my life is steadily going away, and I can’t stop it. No. There is no point in fooling myself. Can’t they all see – everybody but me – that I’m dying? It’s only a matter of weeks, or days – maybe any minute now. (Tolstoy, 2006, pp. 56–7) In a manner not very dissimilar to Simmel, Heidegger rejects the idea of Dasein’s death as something advening from the outside. As already hinted, it is to this end that he makes the distinction into dying and perishing. According to Heidegger, dying is not external to the life of Dasein but immanent in it. On page 289 in Section 48 of Being and Time he writes that, [...] just as Dasein is already its “not-yet”, and is its “not-yet” constantly as long as it is, it is already its end too. The “ending” which we have in view when we speak of death, does not signify Dasein’s Being-at-an-end [Zu-Ende-Sein], but a Being-towards-the-end [Sein zum Ende] of this entity. Death is a way to be, which Dasein takes over as soon as it is. “As soon as man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die.”


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Thus, Heidegger concludes that death belongs to the existence of Dasein as its ownmost possibility: ‘Death is a possibility-of-Being which


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Dasein itself has to take over in every case. With death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being’ (Heidegger, 1962, Section 50, p. 294). For Heidegger, dying is Dasein’s absolutely ownmost, independent, and nonrelational possibility that does not depend on others. This is the second remarkable similarity between Simmel and Heidegger besides the immanence of death in life. For much of what Heidegger says about the dying of Dasein Simmel has claimed about the death of the individual. Simmel sees dying as an internal possibility of the individual’s life. Only individuals are capable of dying. For Simmel, non-individual beings may be killed, have their thread of life suddenly and accidentally cut off; but in their case, death is not yet an internal possibility of life (GSG 16, pp. 300, 328, 330). It is only the life of the individual that is accompanied by immanent and imminent death in each and every moment. The capability to die is thus the mark of a higher, individual existence (GSG 16, 326). In fact, Simmel goes as far as claiming that the capability to die captures ‘the proper definition of individuality’ (die eigentliche Definition der Individualität); the more individual a being is the more constitutive death is for it (GSG 16, p. 330). Accordingly, in Simmel’s view, the whole ‘question of mortality becomes altogether acute only with respect to the genuine [eigentlichen] individual’: ‘Where the individuals are not distinguished, there the immortality of the species swallows up the mortality of the individual’ (GSG 16, p. 325). The life of an individual, by contrast, receives its specific form and meaning through the fact that one is mortal. 57 However, one should not fool oneself into believing that the distinction Heidegger makes between dying and perishing would be exactly the same as the one that Simmel makes between dying and being killed. Throughout Being and Time, Heidegger makes it very clear that the existential-ontological analytic of Dasein is to be distinguished from life-philosophy, including Simmel’s. And, not only from life philosophy, but as much from biology, physiology, psychology, anthropology, ethnology, and thanatology, too. According to Heidegger (1962, Section 47, p. 284), the dying of Dasein must be distinguished from the perishing of the ‘merely living’ (Nur-lebenden).58 He insists that the ‘merely’ living cannot die, but its life ends in perishing (Verenden), which he equates with physiological death. Dasein, by contrast, does not die only at the actual moment of the event of its decease. On the contrary, as death is immanent in the being of Dasein, Dasein is constantly towards its death as long as it is at all. Heidegger does admit that it is possible to examine Dasein as living, but for him (1962, Section 49, p. 290) this is to assume the ‘viewpoint of biology and physiology’ and treat Dasein at




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the level of study for animals and plants. But the being mode of Dasein is essentially different from that of plants and animals, Heidegger insists, because while plants and animals perish (or are being killed, as Simmel would put it regarding animals), Dasein does not perish but is capable of dying. Therefore the existential interpretation of death has to precede any science and ontology of life (1962, Section 49, p. 291). All in all, Heidegger’s relation to life-philosophy is highly ambiguous. While being openly and harshly critical towards life-philosophy and taking great pains to distinguish the existential analytic of Dasein from it, Heidegger nonetheless gives life-philosophy credit, among other things, for the fact that in life-philosophy, at least in the ‘serious and scientifically-minded’ versions of it (Heidegger has in mind here especially the life-philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey), ‘there lies an unexpressed tendency towards an understanding of Dasein’s Being’. Life-philosophy, Heidegger thinks, is at its best only on the way towards existential analytic; the existential analytical intention is not articulate in it. The principal flaw of life-philosophy is consequently that it never comes to treat life as a mode of being in ontological terms (Heidegger, Section 10, p. 72). Whether Heidegger’s accusation is actually true is highly questionable. As we have already seen, at least Simmel philosophizes about life in a manner which is to great extent immanent in Heidegger’s existential analytic. Ideas, like the immanence of death in life and death as an inner possibility of life, are core themes in Heidegger’s own existential interpretation of not only death but Dasein as well. Indeed, as David Farrel Krell convincingly argues in his book, Daimon Life (1992), Heidegger, despite all his efforts, fails to shoe away life philosophy from existential analytic. Even though life does not belong to the existential structure of Dasein for Heidegger, one cannot think Dasein without life, be it only for the fact that Dasein dies, and only the living can die. In fact, Krell asks whether it would be ‘possible that the existential-ontological interpretation derives its most powerful idea, the idea of being toward and unto death, Sein zum Tode, precisely from the biology and the life-philosophy that it claims to abjure’ (Krell, 1992, p. 85).


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A death that is owned Let us still go back to Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. While realizing that he is inevitably heading towards his end and there is nothing he or anyone else can do about it, Ivan Ilyich still has insurmountable


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All his life the syllogism he had learned from Kiesewetter’s logic – Julius Ceasar is a man, men are mortal, therefore Ceasar is mortal – had always seemed to him to be true only when it applied to Ceasar, certainly not to him. There was Ceasar the man, and man in general, and it was fair enough for them, but he wasn’t Ceasar the man and he wasn’t man in general, he had always been a special being, totally different from others [...]. (Tolstoy, 2006: 61) In the mind of Ivan Ilyich, death cannot apply to him. It concerns people in general, the others, but not him, for he is a singular being, not ‘man in general’. However, just as Ivan Ilyich must take his dying upon himself as his end comes closer and closer, Simmel insists that it is not only life that appears individuated in the nonrepeatable form of the individual, but death too. As it individuates life, death loses its generality and equality. In Rembrandt (2003: 410), Simmel quotes a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke: O Herr, gib jedem seinen eignen Tod, Das Sterben, das aus jedem Leben geht, Darin er Liebe hatte, Sinne und Not. Oh Lord, give each a death of his own The dying that emerges out of that life In which he had love, meaning, and need.59 In the verse, Rilke too seems to subscribe to the idea of immanent death (‘The dying that emerges out of that life’) that we have seen Simmel and Heidegger to evoke. However, when it comes to the question of singular, individuated death, the key line is the first one, appearing in the form of a plea: ‘Oh Lord, give each a death of his own’ (O Herr, gib jedem seinem eignem Tod). In the plea, Simmel suggests, ‘the generality of death negates itself’ (GSG 15, p. 410; RB, p. 78). The plea insists that death should not be one and the same for all, but each and every individual must die – and does die – a death of its own, its ownmost death. But what does it mean to die a death of one’s own? In what sense can death be ‘mine’? Unfortunately, Simmel does not venture further in this direction. Nevertheless, as the idea of death as owned, as my death, is crucial to the understanding of the individuality of owness, we must


troubles in coping with all this. Even though he can see that he is dying, he cannot accept the idea nor understand it:


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try to sketch at least a preliminary answer to the above questions. It is Heidegger who will lead the way to it. In Being and Time (1962, Section 47, p. 284), he proposes: ‘No one can take the Other’s dying away from him’ (Keiner kann dem Anderen sein Sterben abnehmen). One can always give one’s life for the other, but this can never mean that one is able to take the other’s dying away from her, in the sense of dying in the place of other, instead of her. One can only give one’s life for the other in a certain matter, such as donating an organ, for instance. But by giving my life for the other, I can only give the other a little more time to live; what I cannot give her is immortality. I cannot rescue her from certain death, as my death can never take hers away. On the contrary, Heidegger notes (and here we arrive at the core of the issue of what is meant by the claim that death is owned): ‘Dying is something that every Dasein itself must take upon itself at the time’ (1962, Section 47, p. 284). Dying that is taken upon myself inevitably ‘remains mine’, as Jacques Derrida puts it in his reading of Heidegger in The Gift of Death (1995, p. 42). Death cannot be general, but everywhere, it appears as individually owned: ‘By its very essence, death is in every case mine, insofar as it “is” at all’, Heidegger (1962, Section 47, p. 284) maintains. The individual has to take it upon oneself. We can now see the difference between the life-philosophical notion of the individual and the sociological one in all its breadth. For the sociological conception, individual uniqueness, for example, is based on the comparison of qualities with others. The singularity of the individual, by contrast, is completely beyond the question of similarity and dissimilarity of individuals. It is not exhausted by the qualities or parts of the individual, but it has to do with the nonrepeatable, irreplaceable existence of a person. As Simmel writes in Rembrandt: Even if an existence, in one or all of its stages, would look exactly the same as some other one, it would nevertheless be, with all of its preconditions, derivations, and borrowings – as a life process; as a reality of becoming – just this unique current. (GSG 15, p. 398; RB, p. 68) So, from a sociological perspective, as we have seen, the individual becomes irreplaceable by finding its place in the overall structure of society. In the light of absolute singularity, on the contrary, the irreplaceability of the individual can only be understood from the place of its finitude and nonrepeatable life. As no one can die in the place of another, the individual’s irreplaceability is given by death, not by the


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interaction of others. In Derrida’s words: ‘Death is the place of one’s irreplaceability’ (1995, p. 41). It is because I am mortal that my ‘existence excludes every possible substitution’. Therefore, Derrida concludes, ‘To have the experience of one’s absolute singularity and apprehend one’s own death amounts to the same thing. Death is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place’ (Derrida, 1995, p. 41). My death is thus the ownmost, independent, and nonrelational possibility of my existence, as Heidegger thinks. But, as such, it is also the foundation of my ownmost, independent, and nonrelational individuality: the Simmelian individuality of ‘owness’. Given the radical contrast between the sociological and the lifephilosophical perspective, the individual comes out in Simmel’s work as a very paradoxical being. It is both social and not-social, connected and separated, part of a whole and a whole gravitating towards its own centre, composed of qualities shared by many and yet a unique form superior to all particular attributes. The individual is thus neither irreducible nor reducible to anything else. It is never absolute nor completely isolated and self-sufficient, but given through a set of relations peculiar to each. And yet, no individual is without residue reducible to its relations. Nevertheless, Simmel does not settle for merely stating this duality. On the contrary, the individuality of owness can itself be interpreted as an attempt to bridge the rift in the individual; it is an effort to think the being-a-whole of the individual, the whole individual instead of only certain aspects and parts of it.60 From a life-philosophical perspective, as we remember Simmel to suggest, the being-a-whole of the individual can be thought as a peculiar identity of the living with itself. Simmelian life-philosophy sees the individual as ‘living through and through’, and life as ‘individual through and through’. The entanglement of individuality and life culminate in the idea of dying as the ultimate source of individuality – an idea which reverberated in Heidegger’s existential ontology of Dasein. Nevertheless, despite their intriguing similarities, as we have seen, the views of Heidegger and Simmel stand almost opposite to one another: while in Heidegger the existential analysis of death precedes any philosophy of life and comes after the fundamental ontology of Dasein, in Simmel the metaphysics of death, inasmuch as death is a phenomenon of life, is posterior to a philosophy of life, which would therefore be also anterior to any analysis of Dasein. Of course, the life-philosophical view of individuality is an easy target for criticism: ideas like that of the individual as an actualization of the stream of becoming of virtual life, or that of death as the nonrelational,




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ownmost possibility of the individual’s existence, are not completely devoid of a certain amount of mysticism. However, instead of making the life-philosophical perspective obsolete, this mysticism could also be seen to affirm an idea that, in the last instance, the individual itself is a mystery. In the essay ‘Der Platonischer und der Moderne Eros’, Simmel proposes that individuality is the ‘deepest mystery of our world view’. According to him, the individual is an ‘unanalyzable unity, which is not to be derived from anything else, not subsumable under any higher concept, set within a world otherwise infinitely analyzable, calculable, and governed by general laws’ (GSG 20, p. 187; ISF, p. 244). Provided that we can know entities only in their relations (in their relations to us, a ‘correlationist’ – to use the notion employed by Meillassoux [2008] that we discussed earlier – would say), the ‘whole’ of the individual beyond relations, as it were, is simply unknown to us. In its separatedness, the individual literally remains a mystery, a secret, insofar as secrecy implies separation, as we noted Derrida to suggest. In a world otherwise infinitely analyzable, the individual appears, in its singularity and nonrelational finitude, as something unanalyzable, even unknowable. There remains something unattainable and impenetrable for us in the individual.




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Conclusion: Simmel and Contemporary Social Theory

The general aim of this book has been to use the work of Simmel to revitalize the critical engagement in thinking the social. The fact that Simmel tackles fundamental sociological questions about the nature and conditions of possibility of the social readily makes him a social theorist still worth reading. Yet his contribution is not confined to the gesture of posing these questions. It also has to do a lot with his original answers to them, as well as his overall way of examining the social. In sociology, the social has been typically grasped by commencing from a subject, be it an individual actor or the community and society. The focus on these figures of the individual and the communal subject has tended to exclude the social’s relational mode, signalled by the previously discussed notions of ‘between’ and the ‘with’ of being-with. In fact, this may even be said to betray a shortfall in thinking that is common to the entire Western tradition. According to Nancy, it is ‘a fundamental disposition of our whole tradition’ that ‘between two subjects, the first being “the person” and the second “the community,” there is no place left for the “with” ’ (Nancy, 2008, p. 5). With regard to the thought of the social, the thinking which takes the isolated actor as its point of departure sees the relations between individuals as merely relations of exteriority which do not touch the constitution of the individuals themselves. And, the theories premised on the notion of society or community, in turn, tend to neglect the ‘with’ in favour of a pure interiority, achieved in the hyper-existence of society or in a harmonious community which unites individuals who are assumed to share a common substance. To me, Simmel’s merit consists precisely in grasping the social neither in terms of exteriority nor interiority. His social theory discloses the intermediary, relational mode of the social. Accordingly, Simmel can


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justifiably be acknowledged as a founder of a ‘sociology of associations’ or ‘sociology of relations’. With him, the theory of relations precedes the sociological theory of beings (individuals, society). Instead of starting from isolated actors or from the hyper-existence of society, methodologically Simmel begins with a theory of relations. For him, relations largely define the relating individuals, as their being is always given as being-with. As for social aggregates, by beginning from the relations in between, Simmel also avoids hypostasizing social formations. He rejects pre-existing unities, and insists instead that any whole is only unified through reciprocal relations. For sociology, this means that society cannot form a general framework for social phenomena which the notion of the social would presuppose, for Simmel tells us it too is a product of association, constantly produced and connected rather than being already there. Thus, if in Hauptprobleme der Philosophie, Simmel proposes that whereas unity and being belong together, ‘the multiple’ (Vielheit) is always coupled with becoming and movement (GSG 14, p. 61), in his social theory, he privileges the becoming of the many over the being of the One, concrete relations over Society. Society itself is for Simmel a multiple – a manifold of associating individual elements, not an absolute, indivisible term. It is only by tracing relations that the sociologist is able get ‘society’ in sight without losing the multiplicity of associated elements and the concrete forms of their associations that make it up. This is the general guideline of Simmel’s realistic-dynamic approach. As one of my key points has been, Simmel’s relational view of the social goes hand in hand with the processualist aspects of his thinking. Relations are not durable and static but dynamic and shifting, and becoming itself is relational. In its elementary form, the social amounts for Simmel to relations and is primarily by way of becoming. Accordingly, in his work, Simmel may be said to execute, as it were, a shift from the sociology of the social as substance or thing to the social as life: its social world does not consist in substances and their properties, but in processual relations, flows, and exchanges. The social does not assume a lasting and substantial existence by itself. Processual in nature, it comes into existence in the surprising instant of the event; it can be detected in the emergence of new associations, in the change of existing ones, or in the shifts from one to another. Thus, with his inclination to grasp the social in processual terms, Simmel, as it were, brings it alive; already his preference for the process-oriented notions discussed in previous chapters, Wechselwirkung and Vergesellschaftung, betrays this. According to Simmel, as we recall, the examination of all social formations must take the living reciprocity between individuals as its starting point.


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However, we should not forget that the idea of the social as process-like is only one of the two ways that the notion of life figures in Simmel’s social theory. The other articulation is manifest in the dyadic relation between two living – and thus finite – individuals, I and you. I argued in Chapter 5 that, unlike supraindividual social formations, the dyad is immediately dependent upon the individual: its relation cannot outlast the individual’s death, but ceases to be (as a shared relation) at the very moment when either one of the partners departs. These ways in which the notion of life is linked to that of the social reflect the distinction between the two different foundations in the Simmelian concept of life, as was discussed in Chapter 3. On the one hand, Simmel bases his concept of life upon the notion of reciprocal effect, while on the other, he understands life in terms of inner subjectivity, as the individual’s nonrepeatable existence. Accordingly, the first employment of the concept pertains to Simmel’s effort to enquire into social forms of interaction in statu nascendi. The second one, by contrast, reveals how the basic unit of the social, the dyad, is fundamentally both shaped and limited by something, which escapes exchange and is therefore independent of and alien to interaction. This is the finitude of the individual’s life; the dyad amounts to the being-with of two finite, singular, and nonrepeatable individuals. Nevertheless, ultimately each use has the same implication: the precariousness of forms, both social and individual. Instead of giving forms their foundation, life designates their constant passing. The notion of the social as life suggests that stability and durability are rare things to have in the world of social formations; sooner or later, living reciprocity will burst open fixed forms and create new ones. The idea of life as singular, in turn, is suggestive of our own impermanence and, by way of this, relates the precarious nature of dyadic social relations to death.

Simmel and Latour in comparison Of the more recent social theorists, it is perhaps most famously Bruno Latour who has questioned the self-evident durability and stability of social formations. In a manner not dissimilar to Simmel, Latour (2005, p. 8) insists that the starting point for the study of any social aggregate should be the movement of association: instead of ‘begin[ning] with society or other social aggregates, [...] one should end with them’. Given the continuing relevance of Simmel’s work to contemporary thought that I have sought to claim throughout this book, we are perhaps finally in place to open our horizons of examining Simmel to approaches within




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recent social theory. Rather than trying to situate his work within an extensive account of social theory, I will focus on the work of Latour, bringing out common and overlapping themes between the two thinkers, as well as indicating divergences. The point of the exercise is not only to situate Simmel in relation to contemporary social theory, but also to show the enormous amount that his work still has to contribute. Simmel and Latour are not tied by any direct descendance. Their link is analytical rather than historical. Nevertheless, this being said, there are many interesting affinities between them worth studying. Another motivation for this juxtaposition is that Latour is a highly prominent contemporary social theorist. In fact, it seems that today Latour has almost become something of an obligatory passage point, not only within the field of science and technology studies, but within social theory as well. Like Simmel, Latour is suspicious of the social’s explanatory value. He contends that it does not explain but needs to be explained. As Latour puts it in Reassembling the Social (2005, p. 5), the social ‘is not some glue that could fix everything including what the other glues cannot fix; it is what is glued together by many other types of connectors’. For him, the adjective ‘social’ ‘does not designate a thing among other things, like black sheep among white sheep, but a type of connection between things that are not themselves social’ (ibid.). The social is not some stuff or an ingredient that would differ from other types of materials, but a specific movement of association and reassembling things. Accordingly, Latour proposes a shift from what he terms the ‘sociology of the social’ to the ‘sociology of associations’ (ibid., p. 9). The focus on associations betrays the relationism of Latour’s work, an approach characteristic of Simmel’s as well, as I have suggested throughout this book. Latour conceives reality as relational and holds that entities, as argued by Graham Harman (2009, p. 75), are not defined by some autonomous hidden essence but by their alliances and outer effects. His relationism is apparent, for instance, in his conception of action, which is among the most radical aspects of his work. For Latour, action is not an intrinsic trait of entities. For example, we cannot assign only human subjects the ability to act. What entities are capable of is defined, according to Latour, by sets of ‘trials’ in the entities’ mutual relationships. He considers an actor as an enactment of relations: ‘An actor [...] is not the source of an action’, but simply ‘what is made to act by many others’. Action is thus always ‘other-taken’, Latour claims: ‘By definition, action is dislocated. Action is borrowed, distributed, suggested, influenced, dominated, betrayed, translated’ (Latour, 2005, p. 46).


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Provided that action is distributed in the network of relations, it becomes an event: ‘Action should remain a surprise, a mediation, an event’ (ibid., p. 45). Accordingly, Latour’s project clearly shares with Simmel the fascination for the surprising event of associations. In fact, Latour proposes that actor-network theory is nothing but a ‘way to go back to the surprise at seeing the social unravel’ (ibid., p. 258). The social does not amount to ‘a place, a thing, a domain or a kind of stuff’, but to ‘a provisional movement of new associations’ (ibid., p. 238). It is extremely fluid. It is characteristic of both Simmel and Latour to see events as mundane and commonplace. As Simmel considers the social in terms of the Geschehen, the unfolding of basically any association must become an event for him. Events happen all the time in the Simmelian sociological universe. Events occur wherever people gather – around a table in order to share a meal, in bars, shaking hands, using money, sending an E-mail, taking a train to work, looking at one another in a passing encounter on the streets, and so forth. Such associations arise ‘[o]n every day, at every hour’, and on every day and at every hour they are also ‘dropped, picked up again, replaced by others or woven together with them’ (GSG 8, p. 277; SC, p. 110). For Latour, too, the surprises of the events are mundane, but for him the surprise concerns not only the relation but also the related elements. When a link is established between elements, they are all transformed: ‘They all leave their meeting in a different state from the one in which they entered’ (Latour, 1999a, p. 127). The assemblage of man and car, to draw on the gender-stereotypice, makes two new actors: a new man and a new car. Both add something to the other. A car that stands still is without doubt different from the moving car. In fact, it could even be claimed that a car is what it is only when being driven. When it is immobile, parked on the street, it is only an object, a mute and cold piece of metal. By contrast, it is almost as if the car would come alive when one starts the engine – just think the growling, the heat, and the metallic rhythm of the motor. (One manifestation of the modern machine culture may indeed be the pleasure and the thrill that people take from just being in the midst of powerful machines.)61 It stops being an object and becomes an extension of our body, without, however, being in our total control. And it is only moving cars that can commute between places and be taken on joyrides – or crash into other cars, run over hedgehogs, and so on. A car just sitting in a garage gathering dust is unlikely an accident waiting to happen. Likewise, just as the man adds something to the car, the car does the same for the man: the man




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in the car is not the same man as the one strolling down the streets. The man in the car is ‘empowered’, if you like. In All that is Solid Melts into Air (1982, p. 167), Marshall Berman notes: ‘The man in the street will incorporate himself into the new power by becoming the man in the car’. In and with a car, the man becomes a new kind of actor with new capabilities and freedom (as well as constraints). He may even get new goals and aspirations. In their ‘Translators’ Introduction’ to The Three Ecologies (2005, p. 10), Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton recount the dramatic effects that getting a driving license at the relatively late age of 35 had on Félix Guattari’s life: Guattari felt he had become more independent, and this resulted, among other things, in a divorce from his wife. So, humans not only drive cars but are also ‘driven’ by cars. In any case, the assemblage or – to speak in the language of Latour (1993) – ‘hybrid’ of car and man, car-man/man-car, is an event because the association is irreducible to the elements that entered it: neither the man nor the car are the same after their conjoining. Not even the streets remain the same, since the man-car hybrid needs a new type of street, setting thus new requirements and standards for urban planning. It is precisely this which is the surprise of the event for Latour: ‘No event can be accounted for by a list of the elements that entered the situation before its conclusion [...]. If such a list were made, the actors on it would not be endowed with the competence that they will acquire in the event’ (Latour, 1999a, p. 126). We can now also finally see why the social’s conditions of possibility cannot be ‘a priori’ by nature, as Simmel terms them in ‘Wie ist Gesellschaft möglich?’. Provided that the I and the you ground each other reciprocally, the conditions of possibility are formed on the occasion of their encounter, not before it. The I and the you gain in their traits – at once representing a type and being a distinct individual – only at the moment that they are connected. The contradiction, raised in Chapter 4, between Simmel’s epistemology of society, that centres on the question of society/the social’s possibility, and his processualist social theory, that emphasizes the surprising event of it, would thus seem to be resolved: the conditions of possibility do not precede the social but coinicide with its event. Simmel’s sociology would have avoided many problems and mistreatments had he developed this. The elements coming into contact may not be changed into something or someone completely different in the event – perhaps in most cases the changes are rather so small that they are hardly even detectable. In fact, while they probably would not deny the possibility of the emergence of world-shattering events, it is common for both Simmel and


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Latour to conceive events as fairly minuscule in their effects (though in Simmel this is something only implicit and underdeveloped, while Latour makes the point quite explicitly [see e.g., Latour, 1999a, 124–7]). In this respect, Simmelian and Latourian events are to be sharply distinguished from what count as events for authors like Baudrillard and Foucault. For Baudrillard and Foucault, events are essentially rare. Consequently, both are also inclined to think that events have major – even revolutionary – consequences. In other words, they take the event’s surprise criterion to the extreme. Baurdillard (2002) qualifies only devastating, historically revolutionary occurrences, such as the 9/11, as true ‘Events’. And in The Order of Things (2002), Foucault examines how certain discursive events have brought a rupture in the organization of the conditions of possibility for knowledge and truth in the epistemic structure of a whole era. A somewhat similar rarity of events is on display in Madness and Civilization (2004, p. xiii). In the book, Foucault focuses on ‘two unique and symmetrical events’: the first being the ‘great confinement’ (and the creation of the Hôpital Général) in 1657, the second, the liberation of the chained inmates of Bicêtre Hospital around the time of the French Revolution (and the birth of psychiatric discourse) in 1794. Nevertheless, it is important to note that the discontinuities that Foucault traces do not necessarily coincide with major historical events, even though in his analyses he tends to lay special significance on the time period around the French Revolution. In his work, Foucault is interested above all in how our practices of ‘truth speaking’ and governing are formed and change. Eventalization is, for Foucault, a way of disclosing the contingent makeup and singularity of things in the place of their assumed necessity and historical continuity, as well as a way of paying attention to the places of confrontation and plays of power which have produced the seemingly self-evident, necessary, and universal nature of certain practices and truths (see, 2000b, pp. 226–7). Therefore, while Foucault’s notion of the event is a good tool to have in one’s kit of methods when tracing ruptures and discontinuities in history, Simmel and Latour sensitize us to the minuscule events in our everyday associations – to the emergence of new relations, to the movement from one association to another, to the various small breaks and concatenations, slips and stabilizations, and differences and repetitions. So, paradoxically, for all the emphasis they put on the event and the unstable nature of associations, Simmel and Latour seem almost to trivialize events: in their treatment, events become the most common thing there is.62 While this could also pass as a criticism of their conception of




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the event, it is crucial to understand that the notion of the event seems to have an entirely different function in the social theory of Simmel and Latour than in Foucault’s work, for instance. With the event, Foucault turns our attention to ruptures, but Simmel and Latour can be said to use it to study how durable and stable structures are made; how something permanent is born from the instant of the event. Thereby, Simmel and Latour turn the usual point of departure for social sciences upside down: it is not change that is the cause of wonder and in need of explanation, but what needs to be explained is how things endure, and how fleeting and fragile links are made into something lasting. Both thinkers reject the idea of society and other social aggregates as preexistenting wholes and seek to clarify the processes of their formation.

Stabilization, objects and performativity Now that we have brought out some striking similarities in theme and approach between Simmel and Latour, I will next concentrate on some of the relative strengths of Latour’s work and then conclude by indicating a key area where his approach could benefit from greater appreciation of Simmel. When it comes to his relative strengths over Simmel, I feel Latour does a much better job in accounting for how things are actually made stable. To be sure, Simmel too theorizes the stabilization process, namely in terms of the objectification of social forms, as has been suggested in previous chapters. The solidification of the social, from fluctuating reciprocity to relatively stable supraindividual formations, is one of the key themes in his sociology. Simmel even pays regard to the various degrees of the crystallization and respective autonomization of forms, ranging from institutionalized forms to the autonomous play forms and all the way to the generic form of society. Nevertheless, he tends to take their stabilization as too self-evident: it happens as if by itself. Moreover, the consolidation of the social is also a matter of concern for Simmel. For him, that which brings stability and makes our history slow ultimately ends up being oppressive. Latour, by contrast, succeeds in bringing to light just how much work it takes to ‘make’ social aggregates and hold them together. While for Simmel beings are always already connected insofar as being is essentially being-with and everything interacts with everything else, for Latour entities are fundamentally separated. They can be connected only through the work of translation, which is always uncertain and laborious – the work may also fail (see e.g., Latour, 1996a). This is a




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point which cannot be emphasized too much if we want to understand Latour’s work. To a great extent, Latour thinks, the stability and durability of society is achieved by enrolling multiple nonhumans. Sharing the view of Serres (1995, pp. 87–92), Latour holds that social formations need to be backed up and stabilized by artefacts such as commodities, architecture, tools, texts, infrastructure, and money. A society made of humans and their social skills alone could not have a stable structure. Thus, Latour concludes: ‘Many features of the former society, durability, expansion, scale, mobility, [a]re actually due to the capacity of artefacts to construct, literally and not metaphorically, social order’. Artefacts do not only ‘reflect’ the social order, ‘as if the “reflected” society existed somewhere else and was made of some other stuff’. Rather, Latour holds that they ‘are in large part the stuff out of which socialness is made’ (Latour, 2000, pp. 113–4). Accordingly, raising nonhumans – artefacts, things, technology, microscopic life-forms, and so on – to the centre of attention in social sciences is an essential objective of Latour’s project. Of course, as I have tried to show, objects populate Simmel’s work as well, and Latour too has acknowledged this. Nevertheless, against Simmel (and authors like Elias and Marx) Latour (2005, p. 82 note 103) argues that the sheer ‘presence of objects is not enough to load the social. It’s their way of entry that makes the difference’. One could reply to Latour’s criticism that Simmel does pay attention to the force of things in the emergence of social relations. We have seen that when discussing Simmel’s treatment of money. In Philosophie des Geldes, money literally does things. Nevertheless, it has to be admitted that very soon Simmel goes back to his usual routine in letting human subjects carry all the action and objects carry none. By contrast, Latour assumes no a priori asymmetry between the capabilities of humans and nonhumans. He pays attention to the multiple and detailed actions of things; things are productive and agentive for him. In the list of elements that make up society, the social ones like class, values, roles, norms, and culture are for Latour only ‘items among many others’, implying also that ‘they cannot be used to replace all other elements; or even used as their headings’ (Latour 1986, pp. 275–6). To be sure, Latour’s overall take on what it is to do sociology is quite different from Simmel’s. To begin with, unlike for Simmel, the problem of the constitution of society is for Latour not so much a theoretical problem than a practical one. He suggests a shift from the ‘ostensive’ definition of society to a ‘performative’ one. According to his view, society cannot be defined once and for all by pointing out things that belong to its extension, but it is produced and performed, not least by




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the attempts to define it. What society is and what it is made of cannot be defined in principle, but only in practice: ‘Actors, whatever their size, define in practice what society is, what it is made of, what is the whole and what are the parts – both for themselves and for others’ (ibid., p. 273). This implies that sociological ‘debates about what holds society together’, too, are among the ways of ‘holding society together’ (ibid., p. 270). And it follows from this that sociologists themselves cannot be excluded from the list of actors who participate in ‘making’ society and holding it together. In the Latourian perspective, their theoretical views of society become practical ways of consolidating its existence. So in Latour’s mind, Simmel too would amount to merely one actor in the network in which society circulates. Accordingly, if society can be defined only in practice, as Latour thinks, sheer theorizing does not get us very far, at least not without becoming practical – that is, empirical. Theorizing that is not empirical is vampirical for Latour. Indeed, in his own work, Latour places a high premium on empirical case studies and ethnographic fieldwork. Accordingly, he (1999a, p. 78) calls his work ‘empirical philosophy’. The label does not imply that Latour would situate his work outside the social sciences, but empirical philosophy is for Latour nevevertheless a way of doing social science – he does not distinguish between philosophy and sociology in a sharp categorical manner. It is the term ‘empirical’ which is crucial here. In his studies, Latour tries to tackle classical philosophical questions through empirical work. In any case, what we need to do, according to one of Latour’s favorite slogans (2005, p. 68), is to ‘follow the actors’. Instead of falsely believing to be the one who has all the knowledge and all the explanations, the researcher should try to learn from the actors whom he or she is studying by paying attention to how they explain the world and their actions to themselves and to others (Latour, 1999b, pp. 19–20). Otherwise it is hard to explain why one should bother to do actual research in the first place. Latour even goes as far as claiming that we have to let those who we study do our sociology for us: ‘They’re doing our sociology for us, and doing it better than we can; it’s not worth the trouble to do more’ (Latour, 1996a, p. 10). In Latour’s view, actors make everything; they have their own theories, frames, and interpretations. The task of the researcher is not to say which one of the actors’ sociologies or metaphysics is right, nor to pass his or her own laws on the real, but only to provide a description of what the actors do and say. In the final analysis, Simmel’s and Latour’s work carry almost opposite intentions: while Simmel always seeks to reduce the complexity of the world to pure forms and basic principles


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(which typically present themselves to him in the the form of dichotomies), by increasing mediators Latour wishes to lay open the world in all its messiness and chaoticness, and trace mixtures, translations and interminglings. Thus in the Latourian universe, actors attest to various controversies and enormous heterogeneity, and their every relation to one another is mediated. The Latourian manner and guideline of always starting in the middle and tracing chains of associations admittedly succeeds in steering philosophy and social theory away from the thinking which either begins from pure forms and/or simple entities or aspires to end up with them. However, the problem with the Latourian idea of mediation, as argued also by Harman (2009, pp. 145–6), is that indirect, mediate links just cannot be the only ones there are. At some point, immediacy must come into the picture, otherwise actors could never actually influence one another. It results from his insistence on infinite mediation over immediacy that in Latour actors are something reminiscent of Achilles in his footrace against the tortoise. Just like Achilles who in Zeno’s paradox can never overtake the tortoise, since he must first reach an infinite number of intermediate points, it seems that Latour’s actor or actant can never come into contact with others, since it always needs a mediator for that, but it would first have to reach an additional mediator to reach the mediator, yet another mediator to link up with the additional mediator, and so forth to infinity (ibid., p. 145). Simmel’s trivalent socio-logic and the figure of the ‘third’ offers a solution to the problem of the infinite chain of mediators. The dynamics of immediacy and mediation is always a matter of twosomes and thirds. There are two possibilities for immediacy to take place. One is that two beings come into contact in or via a third. While their relationship to one another remains mediated, the third is immediately related to each of the parties. The Simmelian third is not any passive, loyal transmitter, but an active mediator in a very Latourian sense in that it always excites a transformation to the relation. The other possible case of immediacy is the exclusion of the third. Two can attain immediacy (or intimacy) only by actively excluding any intervening thirds. Everywhere there are thirds haunting and hovering around the dyad, and therefore the only way there can be two and only two is by repetitively othering them. In fact, pure immediacy may indeed be the most difficult thing to achieve, as it means establishing a relation which at the same time must be a nonrelation; every relation not only connects and brings into contact but also disconnects and affirms distance. In order to be successful, the relation must disappear as a relation. In the last instance, of course,




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Life/plasma As he just lets the actors deploy their own sociologies and metaphysics, Latour tries in every way to refrain from defining the building blocks or the nature of the world himself. So, as much as he stresses the shifting and movement of associations, it would be both imprecise and unfair to describe Latour as a process thinker à la Simmel, or even Bergson or Deleuze, for that matter. Latour does not think in terms of becoming or the actualization of the virtual (though at times he flirts with the notion of virtuality [see e.g., 2005, p. 59, note 64]). He assumes no general, pre-individual flux of becoming, like that of ‘life’ in Simmel, that would engender individual entities (for Simmel: ‘forms’) as its products and crystallized manifestations. Instead, Latour focuses on concrete actors such as scientists, microbes, laboratories, technological devices, and texts and their associations. He studies how their capabilities are defined in the sets of trials they are put to by other actors. This implies that, as Harman (2009, p. 80) interprets Latour, actors ‘come to birth only on the occasion of their associations’ and are transformed when one or several of their relations change. For me, the way he takes entities only by their relations is the second problem in Latour’s work. Like the problem of infinite mediation, this too has been pointed out by Harman (2009). According to Harman, ‘Latour defines actors in terms of their relations. An object is no more than what it modifies, transforms, perturbs, or creates’ (ibid., p. 127). However, unlike Harman, I don’t see Latour going as far as to claim that entities would be nothing over and above their relations. Rather, he seems to be merely suggesting that we should only study them as such. So to me Harman to some extent fails to acknowledge the – without doubt unwarranted – gap between the metaphysical and the empirical in Latour’s work, between Latour the metaphysicist and Latour the empirical researcher, and tends to reduce the latter to the former. It is part of Latour’s empirical research strategy to examine entities in terms of their relations. Latour the metaphysician, by contrast, acknowledges the existence of a vast hinterland of stuff that is simply unconnected. He calls it the ‘plasma’ (see Latour, 2002; 2005, pp. 241–6). With the term, he refers to ‘that which is not yet formatted, not yet measured, not yet


the two possibilities of immediacy come together, since the first always presupposes the latter: the third can have an immediate connection to the parties of the dyad only insofar as other thirds are excluded from its dyadic relation to each partner.


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socialized, not yet engaged in metrological chains, not yet covered, surveyed, mobilized or subjectified’ (Latour, 2005, p. 244). So, Latour does not think that there would be no ‘outside’ to associations. Rather, he admits that associations do not cover all of the real. After all, networks are made as much of empty spaces as from nodes. In fact, if we are to believe Latour, they cover only a tiny bit of the real. According to him, if the social terrain would occupy as much room as the London tube network, the plasma would amount to the rest of London (ibid.). Given that entities can be known only in their relations (in their relations us, correlationism claims),63 there is a lot to the world that is simply unknown. ‘The world is not a solid continent of facts sprinkled by a few lakes of uncertainties, but a vast ocean of uncertainties speckled by a few islands of calibrated and stabilized forms’, Latour maintains (ibid., p. 245). Here we can see a fascinating parallelism between Simmel and Latour. After all, as the reader may already have anticipated, and hopefully will now finally begin to see the reason for the winding detour via Latour, the notion of plasma resembles Simmel’s concepts of content and life a lot. For Simmel, the ingredients of any association come from contents, and contents are ultimately contents of life. And Latour notes, in turn, that the plasma ‘provid[es] the resources for every single course of action to be fulfilled’ (ibid., p. 244). For Simmel/Latour, life/plasma is thus the ground of the social; it engulfs our actions and associations. Nevertheless, in itself, life/plasma is chaotic and unknown; it cannot become a phenomenon. In order to be perceived, conceived, and known, any phenomenon must depart from life/plasma, as it has to have a form of some sort. Therefore, as soon as a phenomenon appears, it leaves life/plasma. On this point Simmel and Latour cound not lie any further distanced from phenomenology. While acknowledging the existence of plasma, the problem with Latour’s thinking is that he does not give it its due. Nowhere does he develop a detailed, comprehensive theory of the plasma. In fact, notwithstanding his claim that the whole reason behind his insistence ‘on not confusing the social as society with the social as association’ is ‘to be able in the end to mobilize this [plasma] reserve’ (ibid., p. 246), ultimately the plasma occupies no place in Latour’s studies.64 It never ‘does’ anything. On the contrary, the plasma appears more as the sheer non-differentiated background of things which is there, inevitably, without ever being thought in itself. This is truly a problem, provided that ‘no understanding of the social can be provided if you don’t turn your attention to another range of unformatted phenomena’ (ibid.,




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pp. 243–4), as Latour himself acknowledges. So to put it simply, the problem with Latour is ultimately that at some points the metaphysical and the empirical remain too far apart in his work. To me it is precisely the towering contribution of Simmel’s work that he does bring this background to the foreground and makes it the subject matter of his thought, especially in his life-philosophy with the metaphoric expression life/Leben. Simmel attends to the birth and event of forms from formless life, order from disorder. What is more, unlike Latour, Simmel does not think the outside of relations in terms of a single non- differentiated mass, but also gives us an account of how singular entities elude relations. Ultimately, this is what I tried to suggest in Chapter 7 with the treatment of Simmel’s notion of the individual as a double, though admittedly in a fairly complicated manner. That is, while being always hooked to social relations, in its finite and nonrepeatable existence the individual is also someone who withdraws from the social and is alien to it. And it is precisely upon this plasma side of the individual, inexhaustable by all relations, that the social in its dyadic form is dependent. Simmel’s work succeeds in accommodating how things are essentially double: the social makes up society, but society does not encompass the whole terrain of the social; we are always related, yet we are not exhausted by our relations; the social amounts to life but is also someting in addition to life and life is not completely social. Thus, the constant back and forth movement between the two notions of the social in Simmel: the interlacing of the social and life, and the negation of life in the autonomous form; the being-with immanent to individuals, and the social as self-sustaining form.


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1. Ian Hacking has recited a long list of these things in The Social Construction of What? (2000). 2. Nevertheless, it would be an exaggeration to say that Simmel’s legacy went completely unnoticed. His ideas continued to exert a posthumous influence on scholars widely not only in Europe but in North America as well. It is possible to trace Simmel’s influence on at least some members of the Frankfurt school, Karl Jaspers, and Martin Heidegger. Of the representatives of critical theory, Walter Benjamin was the one most influenced by Simmel, taking up some aspects of Simmel’s work in his Passagen-Werk, to the work on tragic drama and to his notion of the ‘origin’ (Ursprung) (Frisby in Pyyhtinen 2006, p. 56). Even Adorno, despite his severe criticism towards Simmel, gave him credit not only as the master of the essay form but, more substantially, also for turning the attention of philosophical inquiry into concrete objects (Adorno, 1984, pp. 9, 558). As for Jaspers, his concepts of ‘self-being’ (Selbstsein) and ‘authenticity’ (Echtheit) have been traced back to Simmel (Susman and Landmann, 1957, p. vi). Simmel’s thought has also some interesting affinities with phenomenology (see for example Backhaus, 1998; 2003a; 2003b; Owsley and Backhaus, 2003). In fact, Simmel’s work had a special impact on existential phenomenology, namely Martin Heidegger. In the United States, Simmel’s sociology had a major – and partly anonymous – influence, especially on the so called Chicago school. After World War II, Simmel was re-imported from across the Atlantic even to Germany as a classic of urban studies, role theory, conflict theory, and analyses of social groups (see Coser, 1965, pp. 24–5; Levine et al., 1976; Köhnke, 1996, p. 14). 3. On Simmel and trust, see e.g., Accarino (1984); Möllering (2001). On Simmel and organizations, see e.g., Burt (1992; 2005); Krackhardt (1999); Scott (2009). On Simmel and network analysis, see e.g., Diani (2000). On Simmel and gender, see e.g., Oakes (1984); Dahme (1988); Kandal (1988); van Vucht Tjissen (1991); Witz (2001). On Simmel and the sociology of space, see e.g., Lechner (1991); Frisby (1992; 2001); Ziemann (2000); Allen (2000); Löw (2001); Schroer (2006). On Simmel and time, see e.g., Scaff (2005). On Simmel and material culture, see e.g., Millers (1987); Appadurai (1988). And on Simmel and nature, see e.g., Gross (2000; 2001); Giacomoni (2006). 4. When referring to Simmel’s texts, I use the volumes of Georg Simmel Gesamtausgabe (GSG) series as sources. Whenever availabe, a reference to an English translation is also given, separated by a semi-colon from the German original. 5. Vitalism is most readily identified as a metaphysical doctrine. However, as Monica Greco (2005) states, the term contains ‘semantic polyvalence’: while some forms of vitalism are based on metaphysical principles, this is not the case in all vitalisms. The so called ‘naturalist’ varieties of vitalism, for instance, merely ‘posit organic natural laws that transgress the range of physical explanations’ without any recourse to metaphysical principles. (Greco, 2005, pp. 16–7.)


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10.1057/9780230289840 - Simmel and 'the Social', Olli Pyyhtinen 9780230_236172_10_not.indd 177

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Notes

6. All quotations from German sources have been translated by the author. Where a German source is followed by an English equivalent source, the translation is from the latter. 7. A glance at the commentaries and translations of Simmel’s texts shows a huge variety in English translations of the German term Vergesellschaftung, ranging from ‘sociation’ (e.g., Frisby, 1992, p. 6, pp. xv–xvii; Frisby and Sayer, 1986, p. 54; Outhwaite, 2006, pp. 74, 75, 78), ‘association’ (e.g., Coser, 1965, p. 5), and ‘socialization’ (see e.g., Albion Small’s translations of Simmel in AJS, 1904; 1909; 1910) to ‘societalization’ (e.g., Gross, 2001, p. 397; Lash, 2005, p. 15). The problem with ‘socialization’ is that it usually refers to the process whereby an individual becomes a member of society and internalizes its norms and values, an aspect which is completely missing in Simmel’s Vergesellschaftung. ‘Association’ on the other hand has over ‘sociation’ the advantage of elucidating more evidently the movement of establishing connection crucial in Vergesellschaftung, namely, that the social is a relation. Yet it does not restore the reference of Vergesellschaftung to the whole of society as clearly as the term ‘societalization’. 8. A word on the translation may be in place. On a first glance, ‘philosophy of life’ would seem like a fitting English equivalent to the German term Lebensphilosophie. However, this would contradict one of the basic ideas of Simmel’s Lebensphilosophie, according to which life is not an ‘object’ of philosophy (as the expression ‘philosophy of life’ would suggest), but requires a whole different approach. To objectify life would be to make it something alien to itself, since, so Simmel thinks, life is by its nature nothing but constant and formless flux. Therefore, life is at most the impossible object of Lebensphilosophie; we are denied immediate access to it. Life cannot be known as such, as pure flux (Weingartner, 1960, p. 183); it can become known and objectified only in nonlife – in forms that are alien to life and oppose its constant becoming, as we shall see later. 9. Bevers (1985, pp. 13–4) discusses the matter in terms of ‘cultural studies’ (Kulturwissenschaften) and ‘natural sciences’ Naturwissenschaften and their different historical distance to the classics. 10. Positivism, of course, has been given various meanings throughout its history, the main lines being nonetheless the Comtean positivism and the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. Here I refer with the term positivism, to put it simply, to the view that, instead of being the outcome of theoretical reasoning, authentic knowledge can only be achieved through direct experience of what is ‘posited’. In science, this means the acquisition of knowledge via scientific observation making use of scientific methods (see Crotty, 2003, pp. 18–29). 11. I draw here on Michel Serres’s clarification of the double sense of the term ‘contemporary’ (see Serres with Latour, 1995, p. 47). 12. On the basis of what was noted above, we could thus say that whereas the natural sciences, for the most part, show merely a historicist interest in their classical founders, in sociology there appears both historicist and presentist attempts to reconstruct the classics. 13. Alan Dawe (1978, p. 366), for example, states that what makes the classics still momentous for us ‘is the continuing relevance of their concepts to our experience. When Weber speaks to us of his bureaucratic nightmare of a


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14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

world, he is also speaking to us of our world. So, too, is Marx speaking to us of our world when he speaks of his world of alienation and dehumanization; and Durkheim, speaking of his and our worlds of anomie. Through the creative power of their thought and work, they reveal the historical and human continuity which makes their experience representative of ours.’ In recent years, it is especially Simmel’s Philosophie des Geldes (The Philosophy of Money) which has been at the centre of focus in many monographs and articles on Simmel. Giancarlo Poggi, for instance, explicates the main arguments of Philosophie des Geldes in his Money and the Modern Mind (1993). Natàlia Cantó Milà, in turn, has focused on Simmel’s relationist theory of value in her A Sociological Theory of Value: Georg Simmel’s Sociological Relationism (2005), Roberta Sassatelli (2000) has interpreted Simmel’s theorizing upon money as a contribution to the sociology of consumption, and Mathieu Deflem (2003) has compared Simmel’s work on money to Weber and Marx. In The Social Meaning of Money (1994), Viviana Zelizer starts from Simmel’s analysis on the cultural significance of money, yet emphasizes that it needs to be supplemented by stressing the differentiation of multiple monies. Many commentators have since asserted the essential role of the notion of Wechselwirkung not only in Simmel’s sociology but in his thought in general (see e.g., Christian, 1978, pp. 125–33; Dahme, 1981, pp. 253, 368–75; Nedelmann, 1984, pp. 93–6; Ziemann, 2000, pp. 113–6; Gross, 2001, pp. 397–8). Moreover, Petra Christian (1978, pp. 115–20) and later Andreas Ziemann (2000, pp. 117–31) have traced the pre-Simmelian history of the concept; Christian as a path leading from Kant to Hegel, Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey and finally to Simmel; and Ziemann, following otherwise the same route, except for the fact that he substitutes Helmholtz for Hegel. For example, when discussing the effort to accomplish a comprehensive worldview as a defining aspect of philosophy, Simmel uses various expressions such as the ‘totality of being’ (Ganzheit des Seins, Ganzheit des Daseins) (GSG 14, pp. 16, 17), the ‘whole of being’ (Gesamtheit des Daseins) (GSG 6, p. 12), the ‘totality of life’ (Ganzheit des Lebens) (GSG 6, p. 9; PM, p. 53), the ‘whole of the world’ (Ganze der Welt) (GSG 10, p. 188), the ‘totality of the world’ (Ganzheit der Welt) (GSG 14, p. 18), the ‘totality of reality’ (Ganzheit einer Realität) (GSG 6, p. 11; PM, p. 55), the ‘totality of things’ (Ganzheit der Dinge) (GSG 14, p. 19), the ‘whole of life’ (Ganze des Lebens) (GSG 14, p. 14) and the ‘totality of all multiplicity’ (Totalität aller Mannigfaltigkeiten) (GSG, p. 193) to refer to what philosophy is after in his view. The examples are a selection of the list that the European Journal of Social Theory gives on its web page (http://www.sagepub.com/journalsProdDesc. nav?prodId=Journal200815) as examples of what its conception of social theory includes. I leave here aside the question whether sociology as a whole does in fact ever reach the stage of ‘normal science’ (Kuhn, 1962), where doing reseach is routinized to the extent that dominant theories nor the preconditions to what one is doing are not questioned. On the contrary, the fact that sociology seems to live repetitious youth, as I have argued above, may well be one reason for the appeal and somewhat high prestige of social theory in sociology.


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Notes

19. Besides in the collection of essays, Simmel employed the notion of ‘philosophical culture’ in another place as well. Namely, in 1914, Simmel wrote to Heinrich Rickert suggesting a student exchange between Strasbourg, Freiburg and Heidelberg. According to Simmel, this would contribute to the creation of ‘a south-west German corner of philosophical culture’ that would ultimately enable one to ‘enlarge the concept of “philosophical culture” ’. (GSG 23, p. 284; trans. Frisby, 1997, p. 4.) 20. I have discussed these two characteristics of philosophy in more detail elsewhere (see Lehtonen and Pyyhtinen, 2008). 21. Of course not even empirical concepts ‘correspond’ to reality. On the contrary, concepts have an entirely other structure than the world. Simmel too touches on the matter in Soziologie (‘Sociology’). ‘No scientific discipline can describe or formulate the richness of real existing events [Vorgänge] or the qualitative determinations of some thing exhaustively. When we therefore employ concepts which crystallize that immensity in themselves and, in a sense, make it tractable, the whole is not represented in the concepts as if in parts made of essentially identical matter. On the contrary, concepts have a different inner structure, different epistemological, psychological and metaphysical sense than a whole consisted of the things underlying it. Concepts project this whole on a new level; they do not express the extensive nature of the world with the same albeit minor extensity, but in a form which is already in principle different. The syntheses of those forms do not form a miniature image of the totality of immediate phenomena, but are autonomous formations made of the materials of the forms.’ (GSG 11, pp. 606–7.) 22. The example of the tension between the interactionists and the advocates of structures is from Latour (1996b, pp. 231–2.) 23. For Simmel’s essaysim, see Adorno (1984), Habermas (1998, p. 9), Christian (1978, pp. 70–4), and Goodstein (2002, pp. 210–1); impressionism, Lukács (1993) and Frisby (1981); relativism, Mamelet (1914; 1965), and vitalism, Bevers (1985) and Lash (2005). 24. To be precise, Mauss and Simmel do not operate with the same notion of gift. Simmel thinks that no gift can ever be returned or compensated. He bases his claim on the idea of a deep asymmetry between giving and compensation, the gift and the return present: he thinks that while giving is a voluntary act, this voluntariness is no more at hand in the act of countergift. Therefore we simply cannot pay back the gift we have once received: ‘Where we have received from someone something to be grateful for, where that person has preceded us with his gift [vorgeleistet], we cannot pay it back with any gift or service in return, albeit de jure and objectively they might exceed it.’ There is thus something in the gift, Simmel thinks, which puts the donee in a certain permanent position in relation to the doner and gives him a ‘feeling of an innerly infinite relation which cannot be bailed or realized’. (GSG 11, p. 667.) The impossibility of returning the gift that Simmel assumes implies that, rather than with the gift object, Simmel’s sociology of gift concerns itself with the dialectic between giving and gratitude. In fact, Simmel explicitly states that if the gift and gratitude had to do solely with an object, the gift could be returned and paid back with a quid pro quo. For Mauss, by contrast, gift exchange is all about circulating objects which


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25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

give rise to a network of mental bonds. So, unlike for Simmel, it is not the permanent gratitude that binds the donor and the donee to one another in Mauss’s theory, but the endless competition with gifts and return gifts between the parties. I deviate here from the formulation given in the English translation of Kracauer’s essay published in The Mass Ornament and follow an alternative translation provided by Frisby (1981, p. 7). This idea is indebted to Niels Albertsen and Bülent Diken (2006), who have coined the notion of the ‘society with/out organs’ precisely by drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of BwO. Cultural relativism, for instance, is based on the idea that there exist different cultures, and the views and practices of one of them cannot be seen as being more ‘true’ or ‘better’ than any of the others, since there exists no common yardstick to measure this that would not be dependent upon some cultural frame of reference itself. Simmel traces substantialism back to Parmenides. Parmenides’ philosophy is for Simmel substantialist par excellence. In it, ‘being’ is not yet an abstract concept, a form, but appears as if as ‘matter’ (Materie), ‘stuff ‘ (Stoffe): it is an emblem of the emptiest abstraction – being is something common to all beings – become perceptible and tangible. (GSG 14, pp. 46–7.) This is also the reason why, for Simmel, Schopenhauer ‘is without doubt a greater philosopher than Nietzsche’: while the latter concerns himself only with moral questions, not metaphysical ones, the first ‘has a mysterious relation to the absolute of all things’ and to the abyss of existence. Unlike Nietzsche, Schopenhauer is concerned not only with the basis of human beings and their values, but also with that of existence itself. (GSG 10, pp. 188–9; SHN, p. 13.) Other examples are cited below (in Chapter 6), so let it suffice here to refer to the piece ‘Soziologie der Geselligkeit’ (trans. ‘Sociology of Sociability’): ‘In art, in all the symbolism of religious life, in great measure even in the complex formulations of science, we are thrown back upon this belief, upon this feeling, that autonomies of mere parts of observed reality, that the combination of certain superficial elements possess a relation to the depth and the wholeness of life, which, although often not easy to formulate, makes such a part the bearer and the representative of the fundamental reality’ (GSG 12, p. 192; SC, p. 129). Nevertheless, perhaps Simmel would have it that despite its flaws, Bergson has still the benefit over Heraclitus that, with his notion of élan vital, he manages to consider becoming in positive terms. Simmel criticizes Heraclitus for not knowing any other way to describe becoming than as a relation of being and nonbeing. Therefore Heraclitus, Simmel argues, is unable to rid himself off the primordial status of the notion of being, and can only ‘paralyze’ it by identifying it with its opposite, nonbeing. (GSG 14, p. 66.) Simmel hails critical enlightenment for having refuted the idea of the ‘transcendent’. The tradition of the transcendent places certain realities, values, objects of belief, and validities – such as ‘God’ – for which there is no room in the subjectively circumscribed life into the realm of the ‘beyond’ while, however, letting them act back onto life. However, for Simmel critical enlightenment is flawed by the fact that it jumps to the other extreme: it


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33.

34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46.

Notes reduces everything located beyond the subject back within the confines of subjective life. As a line of thinking, it remains completely within the subject, thus failing to recognize anything beyond it. (GSG 16, p. 234.) While in Simmel the link between matter and society is one that has to be reconstructed, in recent philosophy and social theory, there is an explicit aspiration to draw on physics. Currently popular Karen Barad (2007), for instance, bases her ‘agential realist’ approach on quantum physics, especially on Niels Bohr’s ideas. Michael Halewood’s fascinating ideas on Whitehead’s notion of the social made me realize the possibility, even necessity, of extending the notion of the social to things also in Simmel. This, of course, is a crude opposition. From a relationist pespective, things too have a historicity and should be eventalized. For the historicity of things, see for example Latour (1999a). Kai Eriksson (2005) has asserted the exact same thing on the ‘network’. Simmel’s preoccupation with the typical is betrayed also in the famous passage from the essay ‘Soziologische Aesthetik’: ‘For us, the essence of aesthetic observation and interpretation lies in the fact that the typical is to be found in what is unique, the law-like in what is fortuitous, the essence and significance of things in the superficial and transitory’ (GSG 5, p. 198). The term ‘socio-logic’ was coined by Sverre Wide (2006), though he uses the concept in a somewhat different sense than I do here; see also Wide, Abrahamsson and Palm (forthcoming). To me, what Simmel seems to intend here with the term ‘ideal’ approximates to the concept of the ‘virtual’ in the sense specified earlier (in Chapter 4). Simmel’s student Martin Buber, for instance, conceives of God as the ultimate ‘you’ or ‘Thou’ in his treatise Ich und Du (1923). Quite obviously, Buber’s theorizing of the profane I-you relation echoes some of Simmel’s ideas – even though the student mentions his teacher not even once in the book. For an interesting and original interpretation of the Simmelian a prioris of societalization as outlining a ‘set of axes of sociability’ see Kemple (2007, pp. 4–7). I have imbibed the term ‘hyper-existence’ from Nancy (2008, pp. 11, 13). The German ‘Vermittler’ translates also as ‘arbitrator’, ‘conciliator’, ‘intermediary’, and ‘middleman’, for instance. I have chosen the translation ‘mediator’ for its generality; it covers all of the mentioned terms. See also Serres who notes in The Parasite (2007, p. 57): ‘As soon as we are two, we are already three or four. [...] In order to succeed, the dialogue needs an excluded third’. Nancy’s work on community as the exposure of finitude in The Inoperative Community (1991) has perhaps explored this linkage of communion to death the furthest. According to Nancy, community cannot be produced or objectified but only experienced as the experience of finitude, as the community of singular finite beings. In the last instance, it is made up of nothing – the community is a ‘groundless “ground” ’ –, of nothing but the sharing of finitude, the exposure of singularities before and in the face of nothing. (Nancy, 1991, pp. 26–31.) Simmel is not very consistent with his terminology here. It is reasonable to surmise that by ‘groups’ Simmel does not refer here to formations of several individuals, but to dyads.


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47. Howard Becker and Ruth Hill Useem (1942, p. 16) too note that ‘all dyads eventually become broken dyads. Every type of pair is subject to the possibility of being broken by death of one of its members.’ 48. In English ‘Bridge and Door’, translated by Mark Ritter, and published in Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 11, No. 1, February 1994, pp. 5–10 (reprinted in Simmel on Culture, 1997, pp. 170–174), and ‘The Bridge and the Door’, translated by Michael Kaern for Qualitative Sociology, Vol. 17, No. 4, pp. 407–412 the very same year. 49. This resonates well with a statement by Serres (in Serres with Latour, 1995, p. 166), claiming that ‘Humanity begins with things; animals don’t have things.’ 50. Latour (2004) criticizes Winner precisely for not acknowledging the former point. However, Steve Woolgar and Geoff Cooper (1999) provide an even stronger criticism: according to them, Moses’s bridges have never actually prevented buses from passing under them. Therefore the politics of Moses’s bridges, so Woolgar and Cooper, is just an urban legend circulated in science and technology studies literature. 51. Viviana Zelizer has questioned Simmel’s assumption of the generality and neutrality of money in The Social Meaning of Money (1994). Zelizer maintains that there are multiple moneys instead of just one general and impersonal money: money has various different meanings for different people. Not denying the originality of Zelizer’s account, I nevertheless feel that her criticism is not quite on the spot when it comes to Simmel. For one thing, Simmel does emphasize that the same amount of money may have completely different meaning and value in the hands of a rich person and a poor one (GSG 6, p. 277–81). Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Simmel suggests that the specific meanings of money fade away when money is being used as money: when the aesthetic or personal meanings of money stand out, it is shoved outside the circulation of the economy and it stops being money (GSG 6, p. 173–4). Money whose meaning is not the acquisition of other values is money only potentially. 52. Nevertheless, I still feel that Michael Landmann’s (1976: 7) portrayal of Simmel as ‘the philosopher of individuality’ is an exaggeration, since the problem of the individual does not exhaust all the various facets and topics of Simmel’s work. In fact, in a letter to his friend Friedrich Gundolf Simmel himself notes in response to the former’s description of him as ‘the philosopher of the individual, the unique’ that the problem of individuality is only ‘a partial expression of a much deeper undertaking’ in his work (GSG 20, p. 872). 53. I have discussed this difference between the ‘something’ and the ‘someone’ that the individual is in more detail elsewhere in terms of the split between the ‘what’ and the ‘who’ of the individual (see Pyyhtinen, 2008). In the essay ‘Der Platonischer und der Moderne Eros’ (trans. ‘Eros, Platonic and Modern’) Simmel considers the split in relation to love. According to Simmel, modern love is characterized by the fact that we do not love a person only ‘because he possesses these and those attributes, but simply because he just is. However valuable the qualities of a person may be, feelings are attached to the unity and totality which lies behind them. Its superiority over all particular attributes which stimulate love (which only serve to form bridges


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54.

55.

56.

57.

58.

59. 60.

Notes to that totality) is evident from the fact that love survives the disappearance of these several attributes.’ (GSG 20, p. 187; ISF, p. 244.) Regina Mahlmann has scrutinized the Simmelian version of the model in her book Homo Duplex. Die Zweiheit des Menschen bei Georg Simmel (1983). Her discussion is organized in accordance with the divide into quantitative and qualitative individualism, which we dealt with in the previous section. As the other form of ‘the past living on in the present’ (Hineinleben der Vergangenheit in die Gegenwart) Simmel mentions ‘the objectification into concepts and formations’ (die Objektivierung in Begriffen und Gebilden), which outlive the moment of their emergence and may even be passed on to next generations (GSG 16, p. 219). For a critical assessment of Simmel’s notion of individual law see Rolf Engert’s Über die Zulänglichkeit des individuellen Gesetzes als Prinzip der Ethik (2002, esp. pp. 48–57), published as early as 1917. Interestingly, with its insistence on the individualizing nature of death, Simmel’s metaphysics of death is in direct contrast with Jean-Paul Sartre’s subsequent existential philosophical interpretation of death in Being and Nothingness (1992). For Sartre, death means precisely the loss of individuality: death strips the individual of one’s singularity and uniqueness. Sartre thinks that ‘death is never that which gives life its meaning; it is, on the contrary, that which on principle removes all meaning from life’ (Sartre, 1992, p. 690). Unlike Simmel – and Heidegger, whose identification of death and finitude Sartre is explicitly opposing here – Sartre regards death as always advening from the outside. Instead of being a possibility of my life, ‘[d]eath [ ... ] comes to us from the outside and it transforms us into the outside’, Sartre (1992, p. 698) insists. For Sartre, death is always sudden, always an event which cannot be awaited for and which not only is outside my possibilities but also nihilates them. By drawing on Simmel, however, one could criticize Sartre by asserting that the unexpectedness of death doesn’t make it supervene from the outside. Simmel, as we have seen, regards temporal indeterminacy precisely as a characteristic of immanent death, a characteristic, which is accompanied by death’s existential certainty. Death is at once imminent and unexpected, certain and indeterminate, an immanent phenomenon of life and an event. This is what Sartre fails to acknowledge. Translation altered. In their translation of Sein und Zeit, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson translate Nur-lebenden as ‘that which has life’. The translation is not the best possible one, since if life is a flow of becoming which generates subjects as well as objects, life cannot ‘belong’ to anyone as such, in the sense of property. No one can ‘have’ life, but life rather ‘gives’ itself in the sense of the German expression es gibt: there is life. Translation by Scott and Staubmann (in RB, p. 169 note 6). It has been observed in the secondary literature that, in his work, Simmel explicitly sets out to connect also the quantitative and qualitative dimension of individuality. He does not give clear precedence to either one (see Giacomoni, 1997, p. 20), but rather ties them together and exposes their rivalry by retaining their contrast in force (Schroer, 2001, pp. 314–6, 335). In fact, finding a ‘positive synthesis’ between the two ideas of individuality is for Simmel the key task of the 20th century (GSG 7, p. 56). This connects to Simmel’s prediction in the end of the posthumously published piece ‘Das


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61. 62.

63. 64.

Individuum und die Freiheit’ (‘Freedom and the Individual’): I would prefer to believe that the idea of free personality as such and the idea of unique personality as such are not the last word of individualism – that, rather, the unforeseeable work of mankind will produce ever more numerous and varied forms with which the human personality will affirm itself and prove the worth of its existence (ISF, p. 226). For more on the attraction of the machine culture see Meikle (2001). The claim about triviality is not mine, but owes greatly to Turo-Kimmo Lehtonen, who has asserted it with respect to Latour’s notion of creativity (see Lehtonen, 2008, p. 145–6). Though being sympathetic to correlationism, Meillassoux (2008) nevertheless has formulated perhaps the most forceful criticism of it. This may be largely due to the fact that Latour considers the real in terms of action and actors. An unconnected entity does nothing in that it cannot possibly have any effect on others, and therefore it also cannot be an actor. Latour defines action in terms of influence on others. In Pandora’s Hope (1999a, p. 122) he insists that ‘there is no other way to define an action but by asking what other actors are modified, transformed, perturbed, or created by the character that is the focus of attention’.


Notes 185


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actual A mode of existing in act or fact and having full presence in the present; actual beings cannot but be. In Simmel’s life-philosophy, the notion of actuality is connected to the concept of form: he regards forms as actual in contrast to the potential(ity) or virtual(ity) of life. association A term designating the movement or the process of making connections. Simmel considers the social as association. conceptual persona A concept borrowed from Deleuze and Guattari, referring to a figure within a text that the text gives life to. Conceptual persona should not be confused with the person of the author, as the two have not only different conditions and modes of existence but different discursive functions. conceptual portraiture A manner of reconstructing past thinkers as conceptual personae. Conceptual portraiture does not seek absolute correspondence with the thinker examined. Rather than producing an exact copy, it tries to create and invent the thinker anew, giving an event to what did not exist before. content [Inhalt] The material of the social form for Simmel. Contents refer, on the one hand, to processes in the psyche of the individual (e.g., individual motives, interests, and ambitions) that give rise to social forms, and on the other hand to the concrete ingredients (e.g., scientific, political, economical, religious, etc.) that social relationships are tied with. Whilst always appearing in some form, contents in themselves are not yet social.


Glossary

dyad [Zweizahl] A relation between two entities. 198

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Glossary 199

An occurrence which cannot be defined by its causes or consequences, conditions of possibility, or outcomes. An event thus always surprises; otherwise it is not an event. The elements that enter the event do not remain the same before and after it. Rather, they all change in the event. form [Form] Designates in Simmel’s sociology of forms the type of a connection or association between individuals. Related to the concept of content: while contents are not yet social, forms equal the social as such. In Simmel’s life-philosophy, the notion of form has a somewhat more general meaning, as it refers to objects both material and immaterial which are generated by life and yet irreducible to it. Forms are thus always more-than-life for Simmel. This use of the notion does not contradict the sociological one, but social forms can be considered as one instance or domain of a more general category of forms. historicism A manner of interpreting past authors (the ‘classics’) which tries to understand them in their own theoretical language and within the historical context they appeared to their contemporaries. Opposes presentism. immanence [Immanenz] Refers to that which ‘remains within’ (cf. Latin, in manere). Immanence is in itself and immanent only in itself; not in or to something else. The concept of immanence can be understood in relation to the concept of transcendence, to which it is opposed. The conceptual pair of immanence and transcendence is highly important for Simmel’s conception of life. Simmel thinks that transcendence is immanent for life: even when transcending itself, life remains within itself. Life thus supposes immanence in Simmel’s life-philosophy. individuality [Individualität] Simmel distinguishes between three separate meanings of individuality. The first one is quantitative, emphasizing freedom and responsibility. Simmel calls it the individuality of ‘singleness’ (Einzelheit). It conceives the individual as atomized and undifferentiated. The second meaning is qualitative: it underlines the uniqueness of each individual in terms of distinguishing from all others. Thus, Simmel calls it the individuality of ‘uniqueness’ (Einzigkeit). The third meaning of


event [Geschehen]


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individuality has to do with the unexchangeable, nonrepeatable and finite existence of the individual. Simmel terms it the individuality of ‘owness’ (Eigenheit), and interprets it ultimately on the basis of a life shaped by immanent and imminent death: it is from the place of one’s finitude and non-repeatable life that one’s individuality may appear as owned. Unlike the first two meanings, which conceive the individual as a crossroads of relations, the third meaning of individuality cannot be understood on the basis of social relations: it does not arise from the social soil, but rather has to do with the ownmost, independent, and nonrelational possibility of the individual’s existence. The individuality of owness thus has to do with sinfularity, with which it is almost equivalent. life [Leben] With the notion of life, Simmel succeeds in thinking becoming in positive terms as a movement from the potential or the virtual to the actual, instead of as a movement from nonbeing to being. Simmel asserts that life cannot be known or conceived in itself but only in some form, even despite the fact that in its excessive and incessant flux, life is the opposite of form. Simmel coceptualizes this essential tension which takes place within the plane of life itself by employing the notions more life and more-than-life. They also allude to the difference between bare life and human or cultural life. more-life [Mehr-Leben] An essential characteristic of life in Simmel’s life-philosophy: life is in excess of the forms which manifest it. Life is for Simmel that which constantly tries to reach out beyond itself: everywhere it strives for morelife. more-than-life [Mehr-Als-Leben] The transcendent element of life for Simmel. In Simmel’s life philosophy, more-than-life refers to forms which have been created by life but transcend it, taking on a meaning and significance of their own. mutable mobile


200 Glossary

A notion taken up from John Law and Annemarie Mol, with which they refer to a form of spatiality. Above, I have used it to designate certain objects (such as money), which do not remain constant and unaltered but change their configurational characteristics in accordance with each individual use.


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Glossary 201

A concept taken up from Friedrich Waismann, with which he refers to the open boundaries of concepts. Porous concepts are not equipped with exact boundaries and therefore cannot be defined in an absolutely precise way. More than being a flaw in a concept, porosity is rather a semantic characteristic of certain concepts. potential Something not yet actual. In this sense, potentiality is similar to the virtual. The two terms, nonetheless, have significant difference of emphasis. While virtuality suggests that actualization is always creative in that it involves an aspect of novelty, potentiality emphasizes the possibility of not-being and not-doing: something is potential insofar as it is possible for it to be actualized, and only as long as it has not been actualized. presentism A manner of interpreting past authors from a present-day perspective, as if as our contemporaries. Unlike historicism, presentism sees the historical context of classical authors as less significant than the manner of how they still manage speak to us. A scholar reading the classics from a presentist perspective uses the ideas formulated by them for one’s own purposes and research questions. processualism An intellectual position which insists on the fundamentally processual nature of the natural and the social world. Processualism is guided by the idea that processes have primacy over things and that things are engendered, sustained, and characterized by processes. reciprocal effect [Wechselwirkung] English equivalent to Simmel’s German term Wechselwirkung, referring to the reciprocity of influences that is characteristic of every social relation. Simmelian Wechselwirkung cannot in all the cases be translated simply as interaction since it is not only inter-activity, but also the dynamics of activity and passivity, of affecting and being affected.


porosity

relationism A view according to which entities are defined by their relations, be it by internal relations or by outward relations to others. Should not be confused with relativism.


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202

Glossary

In Simmel a view according to which truth and value are based on relations. The Simmelian understanding of relativism is to be distinguished from the common meaning of the term, which refers to an intellectual standpoint which denies the existence of absolute or universal standards. In epistemological relativism, for example, there are no absolute criteria of truth and falsity. Their criteria are dependent upon, and thus relative to, cultures, historical periods, groups, the interests of people, and so on. The common use of the term relativism assumes, therefore, an idea of the incommensurability of views. What distinguishes Simmelian relativism from the common use of the term is that while the latter sees truth as only relative, for Simmel, a statement is more true the more relative it is. singularity [Singularität] The condition of being singular, not in terms of difference from others as grasped by the sociological notions of individuality, but in terms of the finite and nonrepeatable existence of the individual: an individual is singular insofar as one exists only once and has to take one’s death upon oneself. societalization [Vergesellschaftung] Unlike the substantial notion of society, societalization stresses the processual and dynamic nature of human association. Linked to the notion of reciprocal effect. society [Gesellschaft] In a commonsense use, refers to a unified and distinct entity, the boundaries of which are congruent with that of a nation state. Simmel employs the term society also in the sense referring to human association more generally. For him, association is society ‘as such’, that which in society is really society. sociology of forms [Formensoziologie] Simmel’s version of sociology, which focuses on the form(s) of reciprocal relations between individuals, separated from the content(s) of those relations. For Simmel, the task of sociology of forms is to discover what in society is society as such, without any addition.


relativism [Relativismus]

substance That which exists in itself independent of and before relations.


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Glossary 203

The notion of transcendence can be understood in relation to that of immanence. While immanence refers to that which remains within, to transcend to is to climb beyond. The notion of transcendence is rooted in theology, where it was used in reference to a God that transcends the world, that is completely outside it. In Simmel’s life-philosophy, the notion of transcendence is employed for a somewhat different usage. It does not refer to a realm ‘beyond’ the world, but to a characteristic of life. For Simmel, life is characterized by self-transcendence. Life transcends its current form by becoming more-life within the plane of life itself, but life also transcends itself into the level of form(s) (i.e. morethan-life) which assume an objective and autonomous significance irrespective of life. triad [Dreizahl] A formation involving three entities. virtual Like the notion of potential, that of the virtual refers to something not yet actual. Rather than being an imitation of the real, the virtual already has a reality. What is important is that the actualization of the virtual always involves novelty. As Deleuze suggests, the actualization of the virtual does not only make real something that was already there all along, but it creates positive difference. vitalism A philosophical standpoint which opposes mechanistic thought. According to vitalism, living phenomena cannot be understood in mechanistic terms. The so-called new vitalism in social and cultural studies, that puts emphasis on processes and fluxes, is marked by relationism. Although vitalism is most readily identified as a metaphysical doctrine, all forms of vitalism are not explicitly based on metaphysical notions.


transcendence [Transzendenz]


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Abel, Theodor, 5 absolutism, 47 action as an event, 167 carried by objects, 120–1, 128, 130, 171 distributed, 130, 166, 167, 185n Nietzsche’s conception of, 88 plasma/life as the resource of every single course of action, 175 substantialist conception of, 45 the isolated actor as the source of, 76–7 uncontrolled, 75 actor-network-theory, 131, 167 actual, 19, 74–5, 84, 198 actualization, 55, 75, 85, 87–8, 138, 144, 174, 201, 203 critical perception of, 161 Adorno, Theodor, 112–13, 177 Albertsen, Niels, 36, 181n Albrow, Martin, 24 animals and distance, 115–16 lacking objects, 116, 183n social patterns of, 24 the difference of Dasein from animals, 158 anomie, 30 Appadurai, Arjun, 126 Aron, Raymond, 5 Aristotle, 123 association, 5, 6, 19, 21, 25, 43, 80, 85–7, 89, 92, 133, 139, 164, 165–8, 173–5, 178n, 198 implying dissociation, 97, 100, 115 author, 16, 17 Backhaus, Gary, 13 Barad, Karen, 44, 182n Baudelaire, Chalers, 62, 113 Baudrillard, Jean, 24, 169 Bauman, Zygmunt, 24, 30

Becher, Heribert J., 13 Beck, Ulrich, 24, 30, 31 Becker, Howard, 183n becoming and being, 4, 58–60, 79, 83, 88, 143, 164 two notions of, 85–8 being-alone, 90–1, 94 being-with, 20, 28, 90–4, 97, 100–1, 105, 107, 109, 115, 140, 163–4, 165, 170, 176 Benjamin, Walter, 177n Bergson, Henri, 3, 4, 13, 18, 51, 53–4, 58, 72, 174, 181n Bergsonism, 3 Berman, Marshall, 168 betweenness, 19, 77, 97–101, 119, 125, 163 Bevers, Antonius M., 8, 13, 14, 69, 178n Bohr, Niels, 182n Bolzano, Bernard, 150 boundary, 44, 61, 65–6 door and, 118 bridge, 112, 114–18, 183n Golden Gate Bridge, 116–17 Moses’ bridges, 117, 183n Oresund Bridge, 117 Buber, Martin, 182n Caillé, Alain, 110 causality, 50–1, 75, 77, 88 Chicago school, 177n Christian, Petra, 12–13, 95, 179n collective, 4, 23, 102, 103, 120, 126 Comte, Auguste, 23, 111, 178n conceptual persona, 16–18, 198 conceptual portraiture, 16, 18, 198 content, see form/content distinction correlationism, 41–2, 162, 175, 185n dualism, 60, 128–32, 143 Cooper, Geoff, 183n Cooper, Robert, 44, 68, 101 205

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Index

Index

Crotty, Michael, 15 culture, 33, 34–5, 42, 59–60, 84, 118, 127–9 Dahme, Hans-Jürgen, 6, 13, 148 Darwin, Charles, 53 Dasein, 91, 156–8, 160, 161 Dawe, Alan, 178 death, 21, 57, 105–7, 109, 133–5, 146, 154–61, 165, 182n, 184n, 200, 202 as boundary, 155 Deflem, Mathieu, 179n DeLanda, Manuel, 87 Deleuze, Gilles, 4, 16–17, 44, 74–5, 132, 146, 174, 181n, 198, 203 DeNora, Tia, 23 Derrida, Jacques, 73, 94, 160, 161, 162 diagnosis of the times, 19, 30–2, 33, 112 dialogicalism, 92 Diken, Bülent, 36, 181n Dilthey, Wilhelm, 49, 56, 158, 179n discovery, 18 distance, 93, 94, 97, 100, 109, 115–16, 124, 173 door, 112, 114, 117–18 Durkheim, Emile, 10, 19, 22, 24, 30, 83, 97, 102, 103, 111, 141–2 dyad, 20, 89–90, 99–100, 102–9, 134, 165, 173–4, 176, 183n, 198 dying, as the source of ownmost individuality, 134, 157, 161–2 vs being killed, 155, 157–8 vs perishing, 155–8 Einstein, Albert, 8, 9, 48 élan vital, 53, 58, 181n Emirbayer, Mustafa, 4, 45 Engert, Rolf, 184n Eriksson, Kai, 182n Erlebnis, 3, 56 event, 4, 5, 19, 25, 42, 58, 68–88, 98, 99, 100, 124, 125, 157, 164, 167–70, 182n, 184n, 198, 199 eventalization, 19, 76–7, 79, 169, 182n Geschehen and Ereignis, 69–70

evolution, 53–4 fashion, 6, 142 Featherstone, Mike, 25 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 136 finitude, 21, 57, 106–7, 133, 160, 162, 165, 182–3n, 184n, 200 Fitzi, Gregor, 6, 13, 34, 69, 79 form, see form/content distinction form/content distinction in Simmel’s epistemology, 14, 42, 70 in Simmel’s sociology, 14, 26, 85, 198 as form/life distinction in Simmel’s life-philosophy, see life and form Foucault, Michel, 10, 77, 169, 170 Frankfurt school, 177n Fraser, Mariam, 3 Freund, Julien, 104 Frisby, David, 2, 7, 33, 181n Gadamer, Hans Georg, 91 Galileo, 8, 9 Gallie, Walter Bryce, 36 Gawoll, Hans-Jürgen, 13 gender studies, 2, 177n general theory, 19, 23, 30 Giacomoni, Paola, 148 Giddens, Anthony, 30 gift, 13, 40, 110–1, 118, 119, 120, 180–1n Gillespie, Charles, 9 Girard, René, 108 glance, 80–1 God, 46, 50, 51, 82, 92, 93, 182n, 203 Godbout, Jacques T, 110 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 50, 51, 53, 63, 137 Goodstein, Elizabeth, 16 Goos, Ole, 13 Goudge, Thomas A., 53 Greco, Monica, 177n Gross, Matthias, 78 Großheim, Michael, 13 Guattari, Félix, 16–17, 44, 132, 168, 181n, 198 Gundolf, Friedrich, 183n


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206

Index

I–you relation, 20, 90–7, 100–2, 104–5, 107, 109, 127, 134, 168, 182n immanence, 199 life as pure immanence, 61–2, 147 of death in life, 107, 155–8, 159, 184n individual, as a double, 140–4, 176 as a wholeness or totality 135, 142–5, 149, 153, 161, 162, 184n constituted by relations, 39, 91, 133, 135, 139–140 not exhausted by relations individual law, 136, 151–2, 184 individualism, 135–9, 141, 185 of singleness, 136–9, 140–1, 153 of uniqueness, 136–9, 153–4, 160 qualitative, 134, 136–8, 184n quantitative, 134, 136, 138, 184n individuality, of difference, 138–9 of similarity, 138–9 of owness, 133–4, 152–4, 159–61, 200 interaction, see reciprocal effect intimacy, 105, 108 intuition, 3, 54 invention, 18 iron cage of rationality, 30 irreplaceability, 21, 134, 141, 151, 160 Jalbert, J.E., 13 Jaspers, Karl, 177n

Joas, Hans, 28–9 Kant, Immanuel, 14, 16, 42, 51, 52, 56, 58, 63, 70, 81, 82, 94, 95, 130, 136, 137, 152, 179n Kantianism, 69 neo-Kantianism, 150 Kantorowitz, Gertrud, 54 Keck, Frédérick, 83 Kember, Sarah, 3 Kemple, Thomas, 182n Keyserling Hermann, 51, 58 Knöbl, Wolfgang, 28–9 Kracauer, Siegfried, 38, 43, 71, 72, 181n Krell, David Farrell, 91, 158 Köhnke, Klaus Christian, 12, 17 Landmann, Michael, 38, 183n Lash, Scott, 30, 69, 83 Latour, Bruno, 21, 23, 36, 87, 111, 120, 127–9, 131, 165–76, 180n, 183n, 185n von Laue, Max, 48 Law, John, 122, 200 Lebensphilosophie, see life-philosophy Léger, François, 13, 14 Lehtonen, Turo-Kimmo, 185n Lessing, Theodor, 51 Levinas, Emmanuel, 92, 108 Levine, Donald, 93 Levy, Heinrich, 12 liberalism, economic, 136, 137 Lichtblau, Klaus, 13 Liebersohn, Harry, 5 life, 2–3 as Kampfbegriff, 3 and form, 14, 19, 54–5, 59–62, 66, 79, 81–8, 146–7, 155, 174–5, 178n, 198, 199, 200 rhythm of, 6 life-philosophy, 8, 14, 19, 21, 39, 49–62, 66, 69, 81, 133–5, 136, 144–7, 151–2, 157–8, 161, 176, 178n, 198, 199, 200, 203 limited-range theories, 29–30, 32 Lindemann, Gesa, 29, 30, 32 liquid modernity, 2, 30, 31 Litt, Theodor, 104


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Hacking, Ian, 79, 177n Halewood, Michael, 182n Harman, Graham, 41, 166, 173, 174 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 13, 113, 179n Heidegger, Martin, 13, 9, 69, 100, 106, 107, 110, 116, 155–8, 159, 160, 161, 177n, 184n Helmholtz, Hermann von, 179n Heraclitus of Ephesus, 58, 147, 181n modern Heracliteanism, 58 historicism, 11–12, 178n, 199 Hobbes, Thomas, 28 Husserl, Edmund, 13 hypnosis, 77–8

207

Index

Locke, John, 28 Lofgren, Orvar, 130 love, 74, 106, 184n Luhmann, Niklas, 78 Lukács, Georg, 2, 3, 114 Lukes, Steven, 135 Lury, Celia, 3 Lyotard, Jean-François, 24 Macquarrie, John, 184n Mahlmann, Regina, 184n Mamelet, Alfred, 13, 14 Marx, Karl, 24, 84, 111, 127, 179n material culture, 2, 111, 177n matter realistic-dynamic conception of, 71–2 relations between material bodies as inherently social, 72 Mauss, Marcel, 13, 40, 180–1n means and ends, 46, 52, 126 mechanistic thought, 2, 3, 4, 50–1, 53, 58, 63, 203 Meikle, Jeffrey L., 185n Meillassoux, Quentin, 41–2, 185n Menzies, Ken, 30 Merton, Robert, 29 metropolis, 6, 20, 136, 137–8 Michelangelo, 151 middle-range theories, 29 Milà, Natàlia Cantó, 179n mobilities, 2 modernity, 5–6, 46, 112, 118, 126, 129 late, liquid, post, reflexive, 31 Mol, Annemarie, 122, 200 money, 46, 112, 118–26, 128, 130, 171, 179n, 183n more-life, 53, 58, 60–2, 200 more-than-life, 58–60, 62, 147, 199, 200 Moses, Robert, 117, 183n mutable mobile, 122, 200 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 4, 73–4, 90–1, 100, 107, 163, 182–3n nature according to processualism, 201 and society, 131

as a stream of interacting energies, 54 for Goethe, 50 for Kant, 42, 63, 94 the passive human operating as, 76 the study of, 2, 177 Nazism, 3 Newton, Isaac, 8, 9 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 13, 16, 17, 49, 51–4, 56, 61, 63, 88, 181n optimism of, 52, 63 personalism of, 63 nominalism, 71 nonhumans, 23, 111, 131, 171 norms, 27, 45, 80, 82, 113, 121, 138, 153, 171, 178n Noro, Arto, 30 objects, 20, 44, 52, 55, 59, 72, 81, 106, 110–32, 171, 177n, 181n, 184n, 199, 200 organization studies, 2, 89, 177n other, 91–3 Outhwaite, William, 24, 128 Papilloud, Christian, 13 Parmenides of Elea, 58, 181n perishing, 155–8, perspectivism, 47 phenomenology, 13, 175, 177n philosophy as process, 19, 39, 62–7 Pindar, Ian, 168 plasma, 174–6 Plato, 113 plumb line, metaphor of, 55–6, 114 Poggi, Giancarlo, 179n porosity, 35–6, 201 positivism, 8, 10–1, 178n postmodernity, 2, 18, 31 postmodernism, 2, 24 potential, 55, 84, 87, 150, 200, 201 presentism, 11–12, 15, 178n, 201 processualism, 4–8, 19, 38–67, 73, 85–8, 164, 201 Proust, Marcel, 74 Pythagoras, 8 quasi-object, 120


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208

rationalism, 125, 136–7 realism, 71 naïve realism, 42 reciprocal effect, 7, 13, 14 19, 26–8, 40–1, 43–4, 69, 70–3, 75–9, 98, 165, 201 and life, 56–7, 164 immanent to individuals, 20, 108, 176 relation theory of relations, 39–46 as non-relation, 109, 173 relationality, 3–7, 8, 38–49, 68, 72, 91, 112, 119, 120, 125, 133, 163–4, 166 relationism, 7, 14, 19, 21, 39, 41–7, 66, 68, 105, 125, 133, 140, 166, 201 vs. subsantialism, 5, 6, 39, 44–5, 68, 87–8 relativism, 7, 38, 39, 45–9, 180n, 181n, 202 religion, 46–7, 82 Rembrandt, 151 research theory, 30 Rickert, Heinrich, 48, 150, 180n Rilke, Rainer Maria, 159 Robinson, Edward, 184n Romeo and Juliet, 74 Rossi, Peter H., 10 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 28 ruin, 76 Salomon, Albert, 7 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 184n Sassatelli, Roberta, 179n Scheler, Max, 51, 58 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 137, 151, 179n Schnabel, Peter-Ernst, 12, 13 Schnädelbach, Herbert, 3 Schrader-Klebert, Karin, 12 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 16, 17, 49, 51–2, 54, 56, 63, 181n Schwerdtfeger, Johannes, 13 science and technology studies, 22–3, 117, 166, 183n Scott, Alan, 184n Serres, Michel, 108, 109, 111, 120, 124–5, 171, 178, 182n, 183n

209

Simmel, Hans, 72 singularity, 94, 140, 148–9, 150, 154, 160–2, 169, 183n, 184n, 202 of associations, 85–6 social actuality of, 87 as contested concept, 36 as family resemblance concept, 36–7 as porous concept, 35–6 as primary, dynamic intersubjectivity, 20, 176 as relations, 2, 5, 6, 19, 37, 39, 71, 87, 100, 163–4, 167, 198 as self-sustaining form, 20, 37, 176 claimed redundancy of, 22–3 conditions of possibility of, 94–7 demarcation from not-social, 24, 35, 111 explanatory value of, 1, 22–3, 33, 166 internal externality of, 20, 131 relational mode of, 163 self-explanatory meaning of, 1, 22 social explanations, 1, 22–3 social forms, 5, 6, 14, 26, 39, 80, 85–6, 101, 105, 131, 198, 199 quantitative determination of, 89–90, 105, 108 social life and life that is not completely social, 96 compexity of, 31, 75 distance as the main dimension of, 93 dynamics of, 5 interaction not covering the whole of, 36 objects as an integral part of, 20 processuality and relationality of, 6 social theory and the regularities of, 28 social theory, 5–8, 18–19, 20–1, 23, 28–33, 34, 38, 57, 73, 111, 163–176, 179n, 180n societalization, 7, 14, 27, 31, 68, 70, 76, 85–7, 94–6, 104, 108–9, 178n, 182n, 202


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Index

Index

society assumed autonomy of, 7, 25–6, 80 broad and narrow sense of, 25–6 container model of, 24–5 critique of, 24–5 emergence of, 25, 27 ostensive vs performative definition of, 171–2 nation-state as the basis of, 23–5, 29 territorial basis of, 23–4, 27 sociology and natural sciences, 8–9 general sociology, 34 global sociology, 24–5 methodological nationalism of, 24 national sociologies, 23–4 of art, 22–3 of forms, 5, 6, 34, 84–6, 101, 112, 118, 202 philosophical sociology, 34 pure sociolgy, 34 sociological classics as a genre, 8 author functions of, 9 historicist interpretation of, see historicism presentist interpretation of, see presentism privileged status of, 8–12 sociological culture, 33–5 sociological theory genres of, 19, 28–33 socio-logic, 20, 90, 103, 107, 173, 182n bivalent variation of, see dyad trivalent variation of, see triad and third socius, 28, 92 Sorokin, Pitirim, 5 space and the bridge, 115 finite space, 117 of the social, 99–100 sociology of, 2, 93, 177n Spykman, Nicholas J., 33, 99 Stammler, Rudolf, 27 Staubmann, Helmut, 184 Steel, Eric, 116

stranger, 102, 108, 148 study of small groups and group dynamics, 89 substance, 6 as the basis of Greek philosophy, 50 consisting in relations, 45, 164 detachment of money from substance, 121–2 vs event, 68 substantialism, 4, 5, 6, 39, 44–5, 181n Sutton, Paul, 168 Thatcher, Margaret, 24 theories of society, 29–32 Theunissen, Michael, 92 third, 101–9, 119, 173 and group dynamics, 102–4 society as, 25 time, as atemporal in Heracliteanism and in Kant, 58 in Greek philosophy, 50 relation of theories of society and diagnoses of the times to time, 30–1 sociology of, 2, 177n sociology and natural sciences presenting opposite vectors of time, 9 time of science as progress, 10 Tolstoy, Leo, 156, 158–9 totality, 38, 43, 56, 65, 113–14, 124, 179n, 180n tragedy of culture, 30, 118, 128 transcendence, 54, 59–62, 82, 147, 199, 203 as character of social facts, 20, 108, 176n transcendent, 181–2n, 200 transcendental philosophy, 42, 92, 130 transvital, 59, 147, triad, 20, 89–90, 101–9, 203 trust, 121–2 type, 17–18, 86, 95, 104, 148–52, 154, 182n the third as the type of the mediator, 103 typical, see type


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210

211

Töttö, Pertti, 9

von Wiese, Leopold, 5

Urry, John, 24 Useem, Ruth Hill, 183n

Wallerstein, Immanuel, 24 Wearing, Clive, 145 Weber, Max, 9, 30, 76, 78, 135, 179n Wechselwirkung; see reciprocal effect Weingartner, Rudoph H., 13 Weismann, Friedrich, 35, 201 Wellcome Collection, London, 145 Whitehead, Albert North, 4, 9, 182n Wide, Sverre, 182n Windelband, Wilhelm, 150 Winner, Langdon, 117, 183n Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 36 Woolgar, Steve, 23, 131, 183n

values, 7, 14, 39, 47, 51–2, 49, 53, 63, 96, 119, 121–4, 128, 137, 148, 171, 178n, 179n, 181n, 182n, 183n, 202 Vandenberghe, Frédéric, 13 Velasquez, 151 Venn, Couze, 25 Vergesellschaftung, see societalization Vienna Circle, 178n virtual, 18, 55, 74–5, 144, 146, 161, 174, 182n, 201, 203, vitalism, 2–4, 38, 50, 51, 53, 69, 177n, 180n, 203 New Vitalism, 3–4, 203 see also Bergsonism

Zelizer, Viviana, 179n, 183n Zeno of Elea, 173 Ziemann, Andreas, 12, 78, 179n Žižek, Slavoj, 74


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Index


9780230_236172_13_ind.indd 212

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Simmel and 'the Social'

Simmel and Since

The sociology of Georg Simmel

Georg Simmel: sociologia

Studies in Intellectual Breakthrough: Freud, Simmel, and Buber

Problematics of Sociology: The Georg Simmel Lectures, 1995

Problematics of Sociology: The Georg Simmel Lectures, 1995

Epistemology and the Social

Power and the Social

Social Indicators: The EU and Social Inclusion

The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Kurt H. Wolff, Ed., Trans.)

Social Work and Social Care

Vocation and Social Context (Religion and the Social Order)

Socialism and the Social Movement

The Social Contract and Discourses

Social Justice and the City

Social Solidarity and the Gift

Liberalism and the Social Problem

Blushing and the Social Emotions

History and the Social Web

Social networking and the web

Problematics of Sociology: The Georg Simmel Lectures, 1995

Social Justice and the City

Social Solidarity and the Gift

The Social Sciences and Democracy

Social Insurance and Social Justice: Social Security, Medicare and the Campaign Against Entitlements

Evolution and the Social Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and Social Cognition (Sydney Symposium in Social Psychology)

Strangers at the Bedside (Social Institutions and Social Change)

Social Work And Social Exclusion: The Idea of Practice

Social Dynamics (Economic Learning and Social Evolution)

Social Work and Social Care Practice

Simmel and 'the Social'

Simmel and Since

The sociology of Georg Simmel

Georg Simmel: sociologia

Studies in Intellectual Breakthrough: Freud, Simmel, and Buber

Problematics of Sociology: The Georg Simmel Lectures, 1995

Problematics of Sociology: The Georg Simmel Lectures, 1995

Epistemology and the Social

Power and the Social

Social Indicators: The EU and Social Inclusion

The Sociology of Georg Simmel (Kurt H. Wolff, Ed., Trans.)

Social Work and Social Care

Vocation and Social Context (Religion and the Social Order)

Socialism and the Social Movement

The Social Contract and Discourses

Social Justice and the City

Social Solidarity and the Gift

Liberalism and the Social Problem

Blushing and the Social Emotions

History and the Social Web

Social networking and the web

Problematics of Sociology: The Georg Simmel Lectures, 1995

Social Justice and the City

Social Solidarity and the Gift

The Social Sciences and Democracy

Social Insurance and Social Justice: Social Security, Medicare and the Campaign Against Entitlements

Evolution and the Social Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and Social Cognition (Sydney Symposium in Social Psychology)

Strangers at the Bedside (Social Institutions and Social Change)

Social Work And Social Exclusion: The Idea of Practice

Social Dynamics (Economic Learning and Social Evolution)

Social Work and Social Care Practice

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