Page 56 - Cultural Theory

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••• Georg Simmel •••

Conclusion

As Kurt Wolff (1950: xxxiv–xxxv) observes, Simmel’s sociology perpetually shades
into philosophical concerns having to do with the phenomenology of Modern expe-
rience. Because the philosophy of culture is not a strong influence in either the soci-
ology of culture or Cultural Studies, Simmel’s ‘philosophical sociology’ has not been
fully absorbed. In addition, his emphasis on Modern experience as fragmentary and
incomplete results in an elliptical and impressionistic style of analysis. The difficul-
ties in emulating this style are matched by the problems in formalizing its special
qualities. No-one writes like Simmel, because Simmel’s style of interpretation was a
product of his unusual receptivity to Modernity. He was active in Berlin at a conjunc-
ture when the traditional uneven habits, mores and practices of the German people
were welded into the outward appearance of national unity as a result of Bismarck’s
economic and political revolution. Small wonder that Simmel was so obsessed with
the thesis that objective culture was akin to a Minatour overwhelming subjective cul-
ture in destructive, inexorable ways.
Yet his understanding of Modernity also portrayed the wealth of new opportuni-
ties that the break with the past presented to modern men and women. Modernity
evoked a particular ratio of psychological impulses and designs. These were expressed
in the formation of new personality types which left their mark on objective culture.
By reading Simmel, the late nineteenth century fin de siecle revolution in aesthetics
becomes more intelligible, as does the rise of feminism, the crisis in masculinity and
the antinomies of nationalism. Simmel provided an entre into all of these issues
before they were widely debated, let alone understood.
The trajectory of development in sociology for most of the twentieth century fol-
lowed a route into varieties of institutional or action sociology. Between Parsons and
Marxism, Simmel fell awkwardly as an interesting, but ultimately inconsequential
curio from a decadent age of salon culture and leisurely philosophizing of metropoli-
tan experience. It was only when the defects of institutional and action sociology
became transparent in the 1980s, that the value of Simmel’s work on Modernity
became appreciated.
The second edition of The Philosophy of Money published by Routledge in 1990 and
edited by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby, became for a time, a best-seller on the aca-
demic Sociology list. Simmel’s insistence on the fragmentary, incomplete, relativistic
character of Modernity was widely interpreted as a forerunner to postmodernism. With
hindsight this claim of kinship was too rash. Simmel was committed to a scientific
understanding of culture and science. This was predicated in the elucidation of cultural
and social life through inter-generational study. In other words it presupposed a degree
of continuity which was incommensurate with the more apocalyptic views elaborated
by, for example, Baudrillard and Lyotard (Rojek and Turner 1993; Rojek and Turner
1998). Yet Simmel’s heritage remains under-explored in Cultural Studies and the soci-
ology of culture. It is time to acknowledge him, not merely as the first sociologist of
Modernity, but as a founding father in the sociology of culture.

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