Page 54 - Cultural Theory

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••• Georg Simmel •••

lis, are also significant. All of these factors point in the direction of greater individu-
alism. As such they support the proposition that the development of exchange soci-
ety enhances freedom. On balance, this is indeed Simmel’s position. However, at the
same time, he is concerned to elucidate the negative consequences of the rise of the
money economy. Some have already been mentioned above, notably the tendency
of calculated depersonalization, the fragmentation of the personality, isolation, reifi-
cation, the domination of subjective culture by objective culture and alienation.
Simmel’s sociology is never unidimensional. It is in the nature of his analysis of soci-
ety as a constellation of reciprocal interactions to attempt to capture not merely the
diversity of these interactions but the variety of their effects. For Simmel, society is a
complex totality. This imposes obligations on the interpreter of modern life. Society
must be grasped not merely in terms of causal sequences but in terms of the total
field of interactions and their various ramifications. This requires not only an
unusual level of learning but also an extraordinary openness to interaction in all of
its diverse manifestations. This is one reason why some of the most famous subjects
of Simmel’s essays were apprehended in his own time and arguably even today, are
regarded as sociological oddities: ‘The Adventurer’, ‘The Stranger’, ‘The Ruin’. These
essays are an attempt to capture the diversity and esoteric qualities of exchange and
interaction. They are studied not as ends in themselves, but as reflections on the
interrelated character of modern experience. A passage in his (1971: 187-8) essay,
‘The Adventurer’ is typical, and may be cited as an example of Simmel’s insistence on
study society as a complex totality:

What we call an adventure stands in contrast to that interlocking of life-links, to
that feeling that those countercurrents, turnings, and knots still, after all, spin
forth a continuous thread. An adventure is certainly a part of our existence,
directly contiguous with other parts which precede and follow it; at the same
time, however, in its deeper meaning, it occurs outside the usual continuity of this
life. Never touching life’s outer shell. While it falls outside the context of life, it falls,
with this same movement, as it were, back into that context again … it is a for-
eign body in our existence which is yet somehow connected with the centre; the
outside, if only by a long and unfamiliar detour, is formally an aspect of the inside.

The Metropolis

If Simmels’ analysis of the money economy represents his most complete attempt to
grapple with the varieties of interaction and exchange in Modern experience, his work
on the metropolis constitutes a substantial additional flank in his sociological reper-
toire. The Metropolis is a hive of interaction and exchange. It is the concentration of
diversity and variety that the money economy in conjunction with the division of
labour facilitates. It is in the metropolis that the division of labour and the weight
of objective culture upon subjective culture is most evident. The concentration of
quantitative relationships and their conditionality, imposes upon the psyche in specific
ways. Simmel distinguishes two character types as responses to metropolitan existence.

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