Postmodernized Simmel

Deena Weinstein, Michael Weinstein

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317831587
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1993, this book opens a new and major line of interpretation, showing that Georg Simmel is the essential sociologist of the postmodern age. The authors trace the important contributions that Simmel's writings can make to current studies of intellectual ethics, textual methodology, sociological theory, philosophy of history and cultural theory

Chapter 1

Introduction(s)

Postmodernizing Simmel means everything from connecting his writings to discourses and texts that are generally designated as ‘postmodern(ist)’ to describing a characteristically Simmelian postmodern. Both ends of that spectrum will be covered here along with many intermediate moves. But before post-modernizing Simmel it would be proper to provide some understanding of what we mean by ‘postmodern(ism).’

Our postmodern is already (what we believe is) a characteristically Simmelian postmodern. That is, we selfconsciously define ‘postmodern(ism)’ so that it will be as congenial as possible to Simmel, in the sense of his writings being able to make the most (fruitful) connections between discourses and texts that are generally designated as ‘postmodern(ist).’ Our procedure is not circular, but an attempt at rapprochement between Simmel’s writings and postmodern(ist) texts, and between those writings and – dare we say it? – contemporary Life.

We are helped in defining ‘postmodern(ism)’ by Bryan Turner (1991: 1, 5) who provides such encouraging words as that the term is ‘irredeemably contested’ and that ‘the very playfulness of postmodernism(s) precludes any premature foreclosure of its own meaning.’ These words are encouraging because they give us a lot of latitude. Postmodern(ism) is a generous domain, not an exclusive coterie. Can it include anything? We won’t let it because we want to demarcate this writing within the terms in which the term(s) ‘postmodern(ism)(s)’ are already irredeemably contested. We are not here to reform the contest, to declare a victor, or to reconcile the opponents, but to make a contribution to one side of the (struggle) (play), the side where we have decided that Simmel belongs.

As a convenience we will now orient the reader to what we consider to be conventionally postmodern – a partial canon of convenience. First and, of course, most important, the French ‘post-structuralists,’ namely, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-François Lyotard; then a couple of French structuralists or semi-structuralists, Michel Foucault and Claude Lévi-Strauss, taken in primarily because of the ways they de-center the ‘subject’; then the Canadian ‘viral critic’ Arthur Kroker, whose The Possessed Individual is our favorite elucidation-of and contribution-to French theory; finally, American ‘anti-foundationalists’ such as Justus Buchler and Richard Rorty who have articulated a criticism of metaphysics and totalization that is parallel to that of the pluralist wing of French theory.

The above list does not come near to exhausting everything we would include under the rubric ‘postmodern(ist).’ It is meant to mark off some of the (what we consider to be) unproblematic elements of a ‘postmodern(ist)’ ‘discursive formation’ (the latter term used in a very generous sense). We will not, however, confine ourselves to ostensive definition. We follow Turner in believing that ‘postmodern(ism)(s) are irredeemably contested,’ but we will go a step farther and try to define, in sketch, what is at stake in the contest(s). That will allow us to arrive at the discursive site(s) for postmodernizing Simmel.

Barry Smart (1991: 26) has written of ‘the “postmodern flip” inflicted upon the modern paradigm.’ We find that image to be perfect for evoking how the postmodern(ism)(s) comes to be. The ‘postmodern flip’ is simply an inversion of the old ‘ “man”–culture’ relation. The modern paradigm makes ‘Man,’ ‘Society,’ the ‘Individual,’ etc. into creators of culture: subjects. The postmodern paradigm(s) reverse the privilege by interpreting ‘Man,’ ‘Society,’ the ‘Individual,’ etc. as ‘mere’ signifiers, elements in discourses and texts, discursive operators, subject positions. Postmodernity is the triumph of Culture over Life as the ‘Central Idea,’ to express it in a Simmelian way. Postmodernity is the age of Cultural Hegemony, and the ‘Culture’ that we are talking about here has become (almost) – or fully – objectivized, a ‘web’ of objects (‘contents’) and operations (‘forms’) with no central unit of internal control, no central nervous system. It isn’t Culture as pretender to the throne of Absolute Subject, but Culture as what Arthur Kroker (1986: 88) calls ‘dead power,’ a very dynamic death, though, an ever new (ever same?) mediascape, dynamized by Culture’s minions, ourselves. The flip: we (very inclusively meant) once thought that culture served us, but now we know better. We are Culture’s servants, even though we know that culture exists only through our ‘praxis.’

Michel Maffesoli (1986: 109) presents a parallel reading of the postmodern in his study of Simmel and the ‘aesthetic paradigm.’ For Maffesoli we live in times in which ‘the Word, and its counterpart the Image, prevail over Action.’ He notes how the electronic media have ‘capillarized themselves through the entire social body.’ We add a reminder of how phrases like ‘language speaks us’ and ‘there is nothing outside the text,’ and terms like ‘the simulacrum’ and ‘virtual reality’ populate postmodernist texts. Some aspects of Simmel would feel at home in this postmodern, the ones that were responsive to ‘the hypertrophy of objective culture.’

How far does Cultural Hegemony’s writ run? Here we come upon Turner’s irredeemable contest within the precincts of postmodern(ism)(s). One gets one’s certification as a postmodern(ist) by making the flip, declaring C(c)ulture to be (King?) (privileged?). Therein lies the issue: is C(c)ulture Culture or privileged culture?

What does it mean for Word to prevail over Action? Exclusiv(ist) postmodernism, toward which Baudrillard and Kroker, and sometimes Derrida and Foucault tend, holds that the triumph of Culture means the effacement of all spontaneous initiative on the part(s) of anything other to Culture. That means that for exclusiv(ist) postmodernism Culture is formative and not expressive or even, primarily, instrumental: formative certainly of the ‘subject(s)’ and sometimes it seems of EVERYTHING. Exclusiv(ist) postmodernism is postmodernist: it rejects the spontaneity and dynamism of the noncultural including the privileged Subject. In opposition, inclusiv(ist) postmodernism rejects only the privileged Subject and not the (possibility of) (some measure of) spontaneity in that which is other to culture. That other is severely problematic. It is not some nameable Subject like an Individual, Nation, Class, or Race. It is not God or any God-wish or God-substitute. It is not the Other. It is whatever is left after Culture has been allowed to function as protagonist, something that can beckon signifiers to clarify itself rather than something that is simply coded. It is the margin(s) at which society and individual still live in lower case and ask to be expressed and described. Lyotard and Rorty, and sometimes Derrida, Foucault, and Lévi-Strauss (his project of theorizing the ‘superstructure’ autonomously) tend to inclusiv(ist) postmodernism.

Postmodernized Simmel surely belongs among the inclusivists. His theory of the dominance of objective culture is surrounded by resistances and is counterpointed by a rebellion of ‘Life’ against objective culture. But those resistances and that rebellion never fix the noncultural, not even ‘Life,’ in a logos. That is, (Simmelian) inclusiv(ist) postmodernism is postmodernist. It is continuous with modernism’s rebellion against unities, but it no longer shares modernism’s persistence in trying to privilege spontaneity over form. Carlo Mongardini (1986: 122, 123), assimilating Simmel to postmodern sociologies, notes that ‘Simmel’s sociology decomposes the idea of society’ and ‘destructures individuality.’ Julien Freund (1986: 17) observes that Simmel irritates ‘les chevaliers de la totalité.’

The simultaneous rejection of totality and resistance to a reductionism of objective culture allows for the possibility of a postmodern(ist) sociology and even psychology, as well as a postmodern(ist) culture theory. That sociology and psychology describe the detotalized society and decentered individual that co-constitute that which is culture and that which is other than/to culture. That is, the sites for postmodernizing Simmel are the culturescape and the ‘destructured society’ (‘objective culture’ and ‘the metropolis’ in his terms).

Exclusiv(ist) and inclusiv(ist) postmodernisms are irredeemably stalemated. On the one hand, what status does a description of extreme Cultural Hegemony by an exclusiv(ist) have? Is there no distance between observer and observed implied, a distance that is contradicted by extrem(ist) ideas of Cultural Hegemony? On the other hand, the acceptance of the privileges of culture by inclusiv(ists) seems to make it difficult for them to keep their margins of spontaneity clear of prior inscription. From what point can distance, genuinely, be taken? We will not attempt to break the stalemate, but will simply take the side of the inclusiv(ists) because Simmel fits best with them, though the exclusiv(ists) should welcome his theory of objective culture. The inclusiv(ists) can welcome that theory and much more in ‘his’ writings.

The essential elements of postmodernized Simmel are his theory of objective culture, his descriptions of society and individual as detotalized, and his identification of responses, both playful and rebellious, to ‘the scene.’ None of these elements find favor with adherents of ‘the modern paradigm.’ Indeed, the Simmel literature has been dominated by a debate over Simmel’s (intellectual) character, pitting moderns attacking Simmel against (post)modernists and modernists defending him. The play of attack and defense over the topics of character itself and character as evinced in Simmel’s methodology, sociology, and culture theory provides the materials for a character sketch of a postmodernized Simmel who is already lurking in the literature about his writings. In the following review of the character issue we place our project within the extant literature and acknowledge our affinities with allies and our differences with opponents, never striving for victory but only, in Simmelian fashion, for a stalemate.

The Character Issue

The character issue is a stumbling block in the way of postmodernized Simmel. As David Frisby (1981) amply shows in Sociological Impressionism, Simmel has been in trouble about his character from the beginning. He has had detractors on the right and left, and even in the center, some of them severe and some of them (once) devoted students. Indeed, Frisby’s book, the major contemporary study of Simmel, is a criticism of his (intellectual) character, synthesizing what the detractors had said up to its publication. But Simmel has also had passionate defenders, also from the beginning, including students and his philosopher-lover Gertrud Kantorowicz. The fight over who the ‘real’ Simmel is wouldn’t interest us at all if it didn’t play the most important part in the Simmel literature and if the detractors didn’t imply that the character flaw they find in Simmel infects and contaminates his work. Much of what we are calling ‘postmodernized’ Simmel is, for the detractors, evidence of neurosis. They are out to tarnish Simmel’s image! As pro-Simmelites, although not that ardent, and with the help of Simmel’s (post)modernist and mainly modernist defenders, we enter the fray briefly to parry the attack with a counter-image of Simmel, burnished for postmodernity.

We begin by cutting off all concern with determining anything about the character of the real Simmel. We are concerned only with his image in the literature, how he has been interpreted (through his ‘character’). We will then add our bit to the defender’s image, just as Frisby did to the detractor’s, perpetuating the legend of the good Simmel, now in the form of postmodernized Simmel’s character. That is, we are in the realm of mythology, at a second remove from any source events, playing within the texts. Character is dead. We are into images, bio-fictions. They are what rule the literature on the character issue anyway. Bio-fiction is also a postmodern(ized) Simmelian move. Patrick Watier (1986: 236–7) bases his theorization-of and commentary-on Simmel’s concept of ‘sociability’ on the proposition that ‘neither individuality nor sociability are simply realities, but are also types, elements constituting social reality, elements that are not only ideal in the Weberian sense, but also fictive stylizations of the given.’ So, on to stylizing Simmel’s image.

Simmel’s detractors generally find that his work is unsystematic, impressionistic, undisciplined, not sustained, indecisive, and uncommitted. These intellectual ‘vices’ are then often implicated in a deeper or more comprehensive character flaw. Frisby, who has culled from the literature unfavorable comments on Simmel, provides the most pointed presentation of the charges in an attempt to hoist Simmel by his own petard. Seizing upon A. Koppel’s description of Simmel as ‘the intellectual neurasthenic,’ Frisby (1981: 80) uses Simmel’s own description of the neurasthenic as one who cannot touch reality ‘with direct confidence but with fingertips that are immediately withdrawn’ to imply that Simmel suffered from the very disease that he diagnosed.

Simmel the neurasthenic is afraid of the world and develops a strategy of keeping a distance from it in order to keep that fear under control. He is most of all afraid of commitment. Frisby (1981: 79) quotes Siegfried Kracauer’s comment that ‘Simmel is full of interest in the world but he holds all that he has interpreted at that distance which is expressed in the concept of interest understood in its widest sense, i.e., he never engages his soul and he forgoes ultimate decisions.’ Simmel the neurasthenic, then, is someone who cannot give himself or devote himself to the other. He has, in Walter Kaufman’s terms, ‘decidophobia.’ Alfred E. Laurence (1975: 40, 42–3) surmises that Simmel ‘was possibly unable to participate in traditional personal relations because of personality problems’ and then accuses Simmel of committing Julien Benda’s ‘treason of the intellectuals’ by his rabid support for the German cause in World War I: ‘There is, in the eyes of this former inmate of Dachau, no justification in and for Simmel’s irresponsible elitism and irrationalism while flowers bloom and children laugh anywhere on this beautiful earth.’ Laurence brings up Simmel’s failure to help fellow Jews, his adultery, and his failure to acknowledge his illegitimate daughter to paint a picture of a weak, unfeeling, and deeply selfish man.

Laurence’s portrait is consistent with Frisby’s. Together they make Simmel into a pathetic and disreputable character. Under the glitter of his ‘interesting’ genius we find someone who protects himself from his weakness by backing off from engagement, becoming callous to others, and retreating into selfishness. A scared Jew, perhaps. So scared, maybe, that he identified with those who despised him. He could get just close enough to others to play over the appearances of their relations, but he could never get deeply involved. He used the idea of ‘tragedy’ to opt out of commitment. He was, as Frisby implies, Robert Musil’s ‘man without qualities.’

What were Simmel vices to his detractors become virtues for his defenders, under a new interpretation. Countering Ernest Bloch’s (Maus 1959: 195) version of the case against Simmel, that he is ‘a man born without a hard core,’ ‘a psychologist who forever winds himself into everything and out again,’ Heinz Maus (1959: 195) rejoins:

Perhaps all this is true. But if it is true, it may be because Simmel represented a social reality which is not yet a matter of the past … Today, however, that sensitivity, that capacity for listening and contemplating, that ability to tend to the singular and specific because it might illuminate the general and the broadly significant – all of that which, around the turn of the century, was condemned as decadent, un-German, and without basis – has become even more rare.

For Maus, Simmel is not a neurasthenic, but someone who appreciates, who takes things seriously, who uses his sensitivity as an opportunity to listen and contemplate.

Arthur Salz (1959: 236), a student of Simmel, reinforces Maus’s image of the strong Simmel, the super-sane, indeed, the wise Simmel: ‘Tolerant of the most diverse views and malicious toward none, he freely admitted that life is a medley of material, banal and spiritual, sublime elements; however, he was not a relativist who wavered and talked with tongue in cheek.’ For Salz Simmel had a ‘serenity of mind,’ from which ‘morbid “tragicism” ’ was absent, and believed that ‘life is a daring adventure, and that in its periods of trial, we must take up the cudgels with vigor and audacity.’ Far from being uncommitted Simmel (Maus 1959: 195) ‘distrusted the great collectivities and insisted on the individual’s right to follow his own thoughts, even if they were as playful and inconspicuous as the fleeting strokes of a pencil sketch.’ Maus and Salz do not go far to counteract Laurence’s Simmel (one can surmise that Simmel, who did not draw boundaries to his scope of sympathy, did draw them sharply in his overt relations), but they show some basis for reports that Simmel was beloved of women (including his wife and his lover) and of foreign students. Simmel the appreciator was far from afraid of the world. Indeed, he welcomed and embraced the other as other; he did not leave his writing unresolved because he was afraid of commitment but because he had a keen awareness of the intelligibility of difference. The ‘same’ characteristics, then, have a different ‘inner’ sense for Simmel’s detractors than they have for his defenders.

Postmodernized Simmel is Simmel the appreciator who (Salz 1959: 236) ‘knew how to make the polarity of phenomena both plausible and bearable,’ not by approaching them ‘with fingertips that are immediately withdrawn,’ but by participating in them with the full powers of his observation, imagination, and sympathy. M. Kenneth Brody (1982: 80), commenting on Simmers essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life,’ observes that ‘ambivalence, rather than indecision or inconsistency, is the key to understanding Simmel’s delicate intermixture of positive and negative assessments concerning metropolitan culture’: ‘His posture is clearly not one of resolute neutrality, for he is alternately praising and censorious about features of the metropolis and the ways in which its inhabitants are found to cope. Instead, Simmel seems figuratively to feel “both ways” about his topic, but nonetheless certain of his appraisals.’ Postmodernized Simmel is Brody’s Simmel who acknowledges differences out of his hold on them. He is also Mongardini’s (1986: 130) Simmel who believes that the world is to be met by an ‘ethic of contradiction’ rather than by a Weberian ‘ethic of choice.’

It is the contrast between the ethic of choice urged by Simmel’s detractors and the ethic of contradiction urged by his defenders that demarcates the character of postmodernized Simmel. The ‘good Simmel’ practices the ethic of contradiction. As Gertrud Kantorowicz (1959: 8) remarks, Simmel teaches that we should accept what is given to us and ‘exhaust it to its limits.’ In our bio-fiction of Simmel we are concerned to stress Simmel the appreciator of difference (who therefore refuses to reduce it to some form of monotony) as over against Simmel the neurasthenic (who refuses to commit himself). The former is postmodernized. The latter is what suspicious moderns understand when they encounter the postmodern(ized).

Method/Style

Simmel as appreciator has an intellectual style (a method?) that suits his character. Indeed, that style/method is an expression of his character (remember, this is, still, bio-fiction), the way it is evinced intellectually. Postmodernized Simmel is an intellectual, not an artist and certainly not an aesthete. Nor is he a moralist, though his writing is informed by the ethic of contradiction, the will to KEEP ONE’S GRIP on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• A reader’s guide to style
• Permissions
• 1. Introduction(s)
• Part I: Simmel as postmodernist
• Part II: Postmodern Simmel
• Part III: Postmodern(ized) Simmel
• Notes
• References
• Name index
• Subject index