Page 46 - Cultural Theory

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Georg Simmel
CHAPTER TWO
•••••••• Chris Rojek

Recognition of Simmel’s (1858–1918) importance in the study of culture has been
belated and uneven. There are four reasons for this. First, the Birmingham School,
which is widely regarded as the crucible of modern Cultural Studies, never engaged
seriously with his work. To some extent, this neglect was a matter of the paucity of
translations of his publications during the hay-day of the Birmingham School in
the 1970s. But Simmel was also never an overly political author. Hence, on a priori
1
grounds, he was an irretrievably marginal figure on the Birmingham horizon. It
would be wrong to infer that the Birmingham School set the agenda for the develop-
ment of Cultural Studies. Other influences have been feminism, techno-cultural
studies, poststructuralism and postmodernism, especially identity politics.
Nonetheless, the Birmingham approach was a particularly important training ground
for graduates who went on to gain influential academic positions in the UK and US:
Phil Cohen, Hazel Corby, Paul Gilroy, Dick Hebdidge, Larry Grossberg, Angela
MacRobbie, David Morley and Paul Willis. None of these engaged seriously with
Simmel’s work. The emissaries who have done most to demonstrate Simmels’ rele-
vance to the study of culture are David Frisby in the UK and Donald Levine in the
USA, both of whom are career sociologist’s, and hence would not be regarded by
most people in Cultural Studies as mainstream figures. Similarly, while his influence
in the philosophy of culture is significant, encompassing such major figures as Ernst
Bloch, Ernst Cassirer, Arnold Gehlen, Martin Heidgegger Siegfried Kracauer, Georg
Lukacs and Heinrich Rickert, this whole Germanic tradition has tended to be eclipsed
by later developments in Sociology and Cultural Studies. The result is that Simmel’s
contribution has been further obscured.
Second, even within the discipline of sociology, Simmel is regarded as an ambiva-
lent figure. He is seldom recognized as a ‘founding father’ of the discipline. His view
of sociology was that it is a subject dealing with reciprocity, interaction and process.
These are abstract phenomena, omnipresent in their effect but approached by
Simmel in a peculiar, multi-layered way which is strangely elusive about orthodox
sociological considerations such as causal chains and discrete consequences. While
Simmel’s work regularly examines them in their concrete instantiations, its drive is
toward figuring the concrete as an expression of the abstract. This exacerbates the

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