Page 48 - Cultural Theory

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••• Georg Simmel •••

Durkheim, the sociological savant of the division of labour and organic solidarity,
and Weber, the best sociologist of rationalization and the disenchantment of the
world, Simmel is the first and greatest sociologist of Modernity.

Modernity

What does it mean to be a sociologist of Modernity? Other sociological approaches focus
on the transition between traditional and modern institutions. For example, Marxism
examines the process of modernization as a transition between Ancient, Feudal and
Capitalist society. Durkheim, basing his view in a more anthropological and legalistic view
of collective life, distinguishes between mechanical and organic solidarity and seeks to
clarify the contrasting dominant institutions and agents in both formations. Weber’s work
on religion, the work ethic and the nation-state produces a formidable historical analysis
of the sequential changes that led to the rise of legal–rational bureaucratic society.
Simmel’s approach is different in as much as it eschews history and concentrates
on the experience of modernity. The principal motifs of this experience are fragmen-
tation and ephemerality. For Simmel, unlike social formations wedded to the hered-
itary principle and religious cosmology, Modernity presents a material and mental
universe of contingent relations, cultural relativism and breaking boundaries. This
universe is directly expressed in aesthetics, which is one reason why Simmel, unusu-
ally for sociologist’s of his day, took fashion, art, adornment and subjective culture
so seriously. The metropolis is a constantly changing landscape of people, vehicles,
exhibitions, advertisements and to put it concisely, gross stimuli, that accentuate the
position of visual culture in modern experience.
Simmel’s sociology presents the experience of Modernity as flux, as intense,
unremitting consciousness of diverse, forms in motion. It is an approach that logi-
cally carries with it an enhanced recognition of the transitory nature of relationships,
the arbitrary form of external cosmology and the conditional character of identity.
Arguably, this recognition was only fully developed later in the twentieth century in
the development of symbolic interactionism and poststructuralism.
To a degree that would today be regarded as unusual, and arguably insufficiently
global, Simmel’s view of Modernity reflected his status as a citizen of Berlin. For most of
his adult life he taught sociology and philosophy at the University of Berlin. As such he
experienced at first hand, Bismarck’s ferocious attempts to weld the German peoples
into a German Empire under Prussian hegemony, and the eventual collapse of the
German Empire in military defeat, economic disintegration and counter-revolution in
1918. He was 13 when Bismarck defined the new German nation-state after the Franco-
Prussian war of 1870, and 56 when the Whilheminian era propelled the nation into
World War. The intervening 43 years witnessed the utter transformation of Berlin.
Simmel directly observed the extraordinary expansion of the city, the tearing down of
old buildings and the raising-up of new ones; the incorporation of villages, hamlets as
suburbs through new rapid tansit rail and road links; the expansion in population and
subcultures; and the emergence of new retail outlets, notably the department store and
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