Georg Simmel (1858-1918).
Was a major influence on Walther Benjamin and Georg Lukacs (they personally knew eachother).
Jewish bacground
Intellectual who initially was not so political (except for allowing women in the audience, thus there is some kind of political a wareness).
PHD on Kant (big influence on his sociology, was a neokantianist)
Develops a kind of critical diagnosis of society
Did a kind of social psychologoy (or ethnopsychology), characterises the kind of psychology that a certain group of people hold (not very relevant anymore, and he moved away from it too).
His sociology is often called ”formal sociology”; due to his foramlistic analysis of the interactions between people. The kind of analysis between what happens if we add or deduce people from a group.
His most important work is called ”the philosophy of money”, influenced by Marx, and had further influence on sociology, however he wants to develop an alternative position to Marx. Lukacs draws inspiration on Simmel’s concepts of reification.
His most important topic however is modern city life, the metropolis.
He lived in Berlin, and Berlin was a city that was changing massively at that time. Much of his work is coming to grips with what it means to live in a big city. Simmel was specifically situated to do so because he was doing the analysis from his own seat as a city that was modernising.
Germany was delayed in their modernisation; remained backwards with feudal insitutions and no press freedom for a very long time, no modern state even. However, when modernisation does reach Germany, everything modernised at mach speeds.
The change was from a rural, village-based social life, towards a social life in a large metropolis with millions of people.
One of the reasons many sociologists have pinned down to nazism in Germany is due to the incredibly fast modernisation and the alienation that brought upon them, there was basically a disintegration of society. So there was both a kind of social organisation but also a social disintegration.
Italy similarly had the kind of rapid modernisation, and we saw fascism there too. Gramsci wrote about this concern.
The text is quite difficult, Simmel is quite indirect.
Simmel’s method:
he is very different form what we have seen thus far. For Simmel, society is a kind of whole, a totality, but we don’t have access to that totality of society, rather we have access to surface phenomena of the society – the fragmentary experiences of our daily life is what we have access to. This is already a kind of expression of how it is to live in a big city, or in a big bureaucracy. You cannot grasp its totality, there are always new impressions and expriences which gives you something, but not the whole. This is Simmel’s principle.
Sometimes his sociology is called impressionistic, he focuses on how society presents itself to the mind and at certain moments. He lacks synthesis or theoretical system, but rather has an experimental style.
Simmel writes as if he paints a city, from his own subjective experience, and it is always fragmentary.
”from each point on the surface of existence – however closely attached to the surface alone – one may drop a sounding into the depth of the psyche so that all the most banal externalities of life finally are connected with the ultimate decision.” (413)
For example, Simmel was fascinated with the metro because this is an experience that rural people never even approaches. For a short period of time you are stuck with a lot of people whom you will never know, and everyone makes an effort not to look at each other, everyone follows a kind of strange behaviour in order to not look at the others. This seems to happen in no other social contest. In this sort of behaviour, a new type of individual is produced with new types of attitudes.
Simmel is interested in these fragments of everyday life, we can discover something more fundamental about our society.
In modern cities there is a particular style of life that we can reconstruct by investigating the fragments, and the surface phenomena.
In the details you can glimpse at the totality of social life.
Simmel doesn’t answer questions related to data and empirical study. He reflects on experiences and tries to build concepts on the basis of these experiences; something most people do not consider to be methodologically sound.
”the typical is to be found in what is unique […] To the adequately trained eye, the total beauty and total meaning of the world as a whole radiates from every single point.”
This requires theoretical exercising, and the introduction of concepts, which makes it very philosophical.
Anything could be the starting point for a sociological exercise, and the essay format thus becomes very important. The essay is a short form of text where we try out (essayer) a certain viewpoint. It is not bound by any technically scientific method. When we read an essay we will not be asking the types of questions that a scientist usually asks, the essay is freer.
A lot of sociologists write essays as a method.
Simmel wrote about really strange things which we would in ordinary life not think so much about like a bridge and a door.
The modern city; the metropolis is the kind of phenomena we want to understand, and we want to understand what the effect is on mental life in this kind of institution.
Was important for urban sociology, the critical study of modernity, and the study of the money economy. He was one of the first to show what is new and distinctive about the city. The modern city is kind of a new sociological phenomena never to have been seen before.
The major part of city dwellers actually live in slums however nowadays (Mike Davis ”City of Slums”. He describes life in slums and was the first to syntesise this).
The idea of the Crowd, to be amongst a mass of people in a demonstration or whatever, you are together with them, but you’re actually a lonely individual in the crowd. You are anonymous to them and they are anonymous to you. There is little physical distance, but social distance is still somehow high.
The money economy has an impact on social relations and how people think. What is the type of indiovidual and thought that emerges where there are money relations.
How can the individual preserve themselves in the mass of the city?
There are no durable and sustainable relations, you have mainly superficial encounters where you only get a very vague idea of other people. Before this, one would often have very close knowledge of the people in your village, you would meet them often.
This in turn generates what Simmel titles the blas´e attitude.
The major question for Simmel is: How does the individual relate themselves to the big whole of city life.
”The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and indiviuduality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.”
Modern city life overwhelms a person, and you understand how the people at the time must have felt their entire world become entirely broken down by the metropolis.
There is a kind of tragic dimension in modern history which Simmel talks of. On the one hand he says that in modern history the individual has been liberated through the enlightenment, liberated from oppressive bonds; such as feudal bonds.
But what happened? That liberated individual became caught again in new types of social forces that they themselves contributed to creating. Everyone becomes an individual and thus takes part in specialisation, they try to distinguish themselves from each other to sell themselves on the market, which create a kind of system of dependence, as not everyone is able to do everything. A kind of system emerges which the individual cannot control. And thus a new bond is formed.
(Simmel sometimes uses vague terms).
The social-technological mechanism
”the metropolis is the genuine area of this culture which outgrows all personal life. Here in buildings and education institutions, in the wonder and comfors of space-conquering technology [eg the tram, space becomes insignificant, in half an hour we can travel the space what would take us a day in an hour], in the formations of community life, and in the visible institutions of the state, is offered such an overwheling fullness of crystallised and impersonalised spirit that the personality, to speak, cannot maintain itself under its impact.” (422).
We must understand Simmel as speaking about culture, there is a culture that has become embedded in institutions and artworks and writing, and has become impersonalised because we don’t know who the author of everything around us is. We cannot find any clear cause of anything, everything becomes impersonal.
Overwhelming obective culture or spirit
Overstimulation
Simmel’s aim:
to understand how individuals relate to or adapt to ’external’ social forces in the context of the metropolis
What is the metropolitan type of individuality?
Preponderance of objective spirit.
Simmel was fond of the city, he would never want to leave the big city; but nevertheless what he writes about a city, is an expression of a type of crisis, a civilisational crisis.
Makes a distinction between subjective and objective spirit, similarly to Hegel but uses them differently.
Objective spirit: all the objects in which culture is embodied, objects of the collective human mind; science, culture, art, technology → these are all part of objective culture (spirit), thought has been objectified, turned into real things. Hegel used these terms in relation to history, and saw that the spirit of the times took the form of literal objects, and the task of subjective spirit is to suck up or reconile the subject with the objective culture. There has to be a kind of harmony (Hegel talked was very fond of wanting to bring back ancient Greece) in society, which is found in ancient Greece. This is a society in which the individual is reconciled with the society, there is no conflict between them and the society, all aspects of society are about being together and also having it integrated into your personality. What matters is that subject and object, are somehow integrated and reconciled with one another. The reconciliation was however somehow lost with Christianity (a religion of the individual who is no longer integrated), and Hegel furthermore thought that the French revolution could bring that reconciliation back. Marx’s notion of the classless society is a kind of elaboration of that view.
Based on Simmel’s analysis of modern life, it has become impossible for subjective spirit to make objective spirit into its own. The ideal of bourgeois education, the ideal was ”Bildung”, contstruction of a full personality, a full human being, by exposing yourself to the big achievements of humanity. One has to be in understanding and familliar with the changes of the past and contemporary ongoing. You only have to appropriate the main forms of objective culture. Our current universitites however want you to specialise in one very small field of knowledge, in stark contrast to the idea of the ”Bildung”. This radically changes our view of history about what is actually possible. We are now condemned to live in a context where objective culture will always overwhelm us, and we cannot feel at home in it. Nobody can realise in themselves a kind of synthesis of all the major insights in science, culture art or whatever. There is too much of it.
Thus, the objective spirit is given a preponderance over the subjective spirit.
The individual can never keep up with the pace of society. One can never remain informed about all the developments of science. Culture grows massively fast, and the individual remain behind, but is still somehow driven by individuals, but it is still impossible to unify the totality.
Society explodes, the individual implodes.
Now, how does personality adjust itself in regards to external forces?
One of the phenomena for this is that you see how modern people makes a retreat inwards. What becomes very important for the richer people in the Berlin metropolis, is the interior of the houses. Simmel thinks that people are spening a lot of attention and money to the interior of their houses, their house becomes a kind of artwork or exposition of ourselves. It somehow expresses something of our personality. There were new artistic currents which focused only on interiors, and for Simmel this is a new kind of sociological phenomenon, which is a reaction to the difficulty of maintaining themselves a society like this.
There is a focus on authenticity, Heidegger spoke about authenticity, and how to be an authentic individual. Adorno also writes about the interior of the houses, and sees it as an expression of the crisis of modern culture.
The subject gets lost in city life, and the counter to that is to exadurate your own individuality. All kinds of new phenomena help with that. eg. Fashion. But there is still a kind of paradox inherent in this.
But there is also, on a psychological more concrete level, overstimulation.
It’s also that the physical and emotional and psychological experience of the city exposes a person to incredible amounts of stimuli, new encounters more or less all the time. City life never stops. (This is also important for Walther Benjamin), living in society is continuous shock. You cannot avoid crowds for example. Which contrasts rural life greatly.
This means that an individual has to maintain themselves against this overstimulation; and Simmel finds that daily, there are mechanisms which indiviudals use to maintain themselves in overstimulation. In a rural community, you follow your habits and you don’t have to reflect on what you do, things go as they go. In a metropolis, an individual needs a higher awareness, about whether you will interact with a person or not, whether you go one way or another, you have to reflect on everything. You orient yourself with your intellect rather than your intutition.
Intellectuality preserves subjective life against the overwhelming power of metropolitan life. Rational thought is necessary to orient oneself. This intellectuality hangs together with the money economy. The structure of the money economy has an impact on how we think. (Important recent marxist topic: money makes abstractions from things, it doesn’t matter what you sell, only the amount you sell and the amount you gain from it. It is not a mental abstraction however, Marx says however that there are real abstractions in for example money.) Simmel makes an analysis wherein money functions in an abstract way. It abstract individuality, I don’t care who buys the goods. The logic of money is the logic of commonality, a kind of unequal equality. Money is indifferent to what you buy with it, and this notion of indifference becomes important for Simmel to describe how modern inhabitants of the metropolis thinks; they think like money. And this is necessary for people to be able to live in this kind of society. People have to take on an attitude of indifference. The money economy is entirely anonymous, you don’t have to have interest in each other, relations become calculable, everything becomes an object of quantification. The modern mind only sees relations as instrumental, we talk to people if it gives us some kind of advantage. Activities become instrumental, we don’t do things unless we think they will be beneficial monetarily.
”The relationships of the typical metropolitan usually are so varied and complex that without the strictest punctuality in promises and services the whole structure would break down into an inextricable chaos.” The clock becomes important.
Everything has to happen at the right moment and everything becomes even more measurable, through the clock. This has an effect on the kinds of individuals we become.
These are all surface phenomena, but it helps to produce what kind of life is actually in place inside that non-understandable whole.
Life is no longer determined from the inside, but rather from the outside, and is schematised by the forces of the metropolis. (From Kant; he is intrested in how thought is schematised in an innate way.) Simmel thinks that the schema is not a innate way to think, but that is an effect of the way in which modern city life is organised.
Overstimulated individuals reach a point at which ”the nerves finally cease to react”. The nerves refuses to react to all the stimuli that excites them after a while. How do we protect ourselves? By forcing our nerves no longer react to those things we do not care about, so that we are not stimulated by everything we experience. We see this come to expression in the attitudes of modern individuals; they take on the blas´e attitude.
”The essensce of the blase atttitude consists in the blunting of discrimination (distinctions between different things you experience in day to day life)”: indifference to the meaning and value of things (similar to how money is indifferent to quality).
You can only live in a modern city if we imagine the city as a kind of thing where the people who walk there are not there. Physically one is close to one another, but you adopt certain attitudes which allows you to maintain distance.
Thus there is a kind of prejudice that emerges about city life about how it is cold and unfriendly.
To the foreigner or the rural person, it appears cold, but it’s more like a protection.
”the blase person has completely lost the feeling for vlaue differences. He experiences everything as being of an eqaully dull and greu hus, as not worth getting excited about, particularly where the will is concerned.”
Once you can buy something with money, the special qualities of things become indifferent to us.
Is there not a falling apart of society, a kind of dissociation? Not quite. There is a kind of dissociation in the blase attitude, but in reality it is a kind of sociation, it certainly gives shape to social life.
Simmel however, does not want to judge this kind of society, but rather he is really only trying to understand. He is doing science after all.
The psychology Simmel speaks about is more about the general human soul, rather than the discipline of psychology that we have today.
”Transcendetal Homelessness” in Lukacs.