Page 50 - Cultural Theory

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••• Georg Simmel •••

Mentality

What is the mentality of Modernity? For Simmel, Modernism is distinct from tradi-
tionalism by the replacement of essence with form as the central category of popu-
lar consciousness. Traditional society regarded identity, place and culture to be held
in place by essential, immemorial hereditary principles and Deistic necessity. The law
of the monarch and his Court elicited in human form, the God-given universe. On
this reading, culture is an allotment of fixed and pure essences, expressed most
implacably, in the concept of immemorial hereditary hierarchy and the greater glory
of God. It is a closed system in which the room for manoeuvre between position, sta-
tus and community is tightly constrained. In contrast, Modernity is a much more
open system in which the experience of upward and downward mobility is more
widely distributed and the allocation of status and reward by hereditary principles is
openly challenged by contest systems. The meritocratic ideal flourishes under
Modernism. It may not be evenly reproduced in the culture of everyday life, but its
presence sets the tone of the relations of everyday life, especially when these rela-
tions meet the obstructions of hereditary might and custom. In Simmel’s view cul-
ture is form, in the sense that it refers to the synthesizing categories that transform
raw experience into determinate unities. He differentiates this from ‘content’, which
he understands to refer to the nuclei of social life which, as Levine (1971: xv) put it
cannot ‘be apprehended by us in their immediacy’. The study of form may reveal
content, but the situation is complicated under Modernity by the tumultuous char-
acter of form.
Simmel encapsulates these arguments in the proposition that the transition
between Traditional and Modern society involves the domination of objective cul-
ture over subjective culture. Under Modernity objective culture is not imposed upon
individuals by a dominant social formation as is the case, for example in traditional
monarchical, court and class rule. Of course, Simmel recognizes the existence of hier-
archies in Modernity and acknowledges that some of these carry the vestiges of the
hereditary principle. On the other hand, the accent in his analysis is upon the crys-
tallization of objective culture deriving from interaction between constellations of
actors. By the term, objective culture, Simmel means above all, the spirit (Geist) of
rational calculability, technological innovation and scientific authority which per-
meates everyday life. The corresponding term, subjective culture, refers to the realm of
the emotions, localized practices, conventions and attachments, personal daydreams
and imaginary relations. The division between these two levels of culture was a very
prominent theme in nineteenth century fin de siecle German sociology. It reached its
zenith in Max Weber’s rationalization thesis with its forlorn, eerie metaphor of the
encroaching, implacable disenchantment of the world.
Simmel’s sociology places the lion’s share of causality behind this process in the
division of labour and the money economy. These two institutions contribute to the
distancing effect in human relations which, on the level of common experience, is
expressed in feelings of anonymity, isolation, division and conflict. In many places

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