Page 49 - Cultural Theory

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••• Chris Rojek •••

the shopping arcade. In these years Berlin established itself as the centre for both the
power elites of old Prussia and the new financial centres, mass media, organized inter-
ests and political parties (Sturmer 2000: 81–2). The revolutionary pace of change in
Berlin presented Simmel with the experience of an unusually white-hot concentration
of urban and cultural transformation. From its midst money and the metropolis were
irresistibly suggested as central metaphors of Modernity. The money economy both con-
tributed to and represented the sense of increasingly indirect relations between people
while the rapid rate of expansion in the city produced a melting pot of new stimuli in
the form of amalgamated German national cultures, immigrant communities, interna-
tional finance and modernist retail commerce.
Simmel’s sociology was also a product of the crisis in intellectual life associated
with these deep changes. As befits Modernity, he lived at a time when traditional ver-
ities were overturned overnight and revolutionary new ideas on identity, association
and practice cascaded into society at a pell-mell pace. Nowhere was this more acutely
expressed than in science. Simmel was certainly influenced by the methodenstreit
debate in German sociology in the late nineteenth century. This was a dispute
between neo-Kantians who held that the natural and cultural sciences are different in
kind and hence require distinctive methodologies, and the Naturalists who held the
view that a single scientific methodology is appropriate to the study of culture and
3
nature. The methods of hermeneutics and verstehen emerged from this conflict. A
parallel debate between the historical and neo-classical schools in Economics focused
on the question of the role of value judgements in scientific research and introduced
the concepts of value freedom and value neutrality. 4
Simmel did not take a direct stance on either of these debates, although his work
clearly reflects their ramifications. In particular, the questions of the distinction
between subjective and objective culture and the dilemma of how to intellectually
encapsulate flux in worthwhile ways is stressed. There is no doubt that he believed
in the possibility of a scientific comprehension of the culture of Modernity and that
this was in fact, the object of his work. As he (1900: 102) proposed:

The goal of our thoughts is to find what is steadfast and reliable behind
ephemeral appearances and the flux of events; and to advance from mutual
dependence to self-sufficiency and independence. In this way we attain the
fixed points that can guide us through the maze of phenomena, and that rep-
resent the counterpart of what we conceive ourselves as valuable and definitive.

His analysis of modern experience constantly returns to the notion of the ‘level-
ling’ effect of ceaseless change and the ‘colourlessness’ of reciprocal relations with
others. Yet it also recognizes substantive distinctions, nowhere more so than in the
distinction between the superficial attachment to everyday life and a scientific
attachment that is capable of producing durable insights and forms of knowledge.
Positivism and empiricism are foreign to his sociology. However, Simmel is enough
of a counter-Modernist to acknowledge science as offering a route out of the vicious
circle of cultural relativism and psychological disturbance unleashed by Modernity.

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