Originally published in 1907, Simmel’s essay on the ‘Sociology of the Senses’ was later incorporated as the first chapter and opening statement of his mammoth agenda-setting work Soziologie (Frisby & Featherstone, 1997: 9). Simmel took an anti-positivism stance and addressed topics such as social conflict, the function of money, individual identity in city life, and the European fear of outsiders (Stapley 2010).For Georg Simmel, social life is a sensory experience. Georg Simmel (18581918) Georg Simmel was a German art critic who wrote widely on social and political issues as well.
He gives the illustrative examples of trade unions, factories, class formation and the division of labour as being focal points. At the time of writing, he contends, ‘social science generally is still situated in this stage of being able to consider only the very large and clearly visible social structures and of trying to be able to produce insights from these into social life in its totality’ (Simmel, 1997a: 109). The two central thinkers discussed are Georg Simmel and Michel Maffesoli.Simmel opens his piece with some suggestions about the focus of the social sciences. The central argument is that aesthetic phenomena are neither incidental nor epiphenomenal to social structure rather the social bond itself possesses an aesthetic dimension. He had a formative impact on sociology through his writings and students.This article outlines the contribution of a sociological aesthetics to explaining social life.
And aside from the connecting forms that are elevated to the level of those comprehensive organizations, this pulsating life which links human beings together displays countless other ones, which, as it were, remain in a fluid, transitory condition, but are no less agents connecting individuals to social existence.’ (Simmel, 1997a: 109)As a position statement this offers two clear points of clarification. One of his central concerns was the form of social interaction, and not the content of the interaction as many would have expected.‘these are already structures of a higher order, in which or to which, as it were, from one instance to another, the real concrete life of sociated individuals is crystallized. Many individuals in the sociology field remember Simmel for his contribution towards the understanding of forms and patterns of social interaction. The claim is that these small-scale experiences are a product of broader social forces and structures:Contributions.
As Simmel later concludes in the essay:‘One will no longer be able to consider as unworthy of attention the delicate, invisible threads that are spun from one person to another if one wishes to understand the web of society according to its productive, form-giving forces – this web of which sociology hitherto was largely concerned with describing only the final finished pattern of its uppermost phenomenal stratum.’ (Simmel, 1997a: 120)The spinning of the social world, the picking of threads, their dropping and continuation. The second is that, for Simmel, this is a ‘pulsating’ set of experiences and therefore sociological analysis needs to work down to the level upon which this social world is comprehended, the level of the senses. This might be to consider how modernity implicates people’s lives in different ways, both structurally and in terms of how experience their social environment.
The eye and ear are at the centre of this, but the nose also attracts some limited attention. The senses, for Simmel, orientate and mediate social relations.Simmel then attempts, with varying success, to think through the different senses or sensory organs and how they might fit into sociological analyses. As such the claim made is that ‘our sense impressions of cause their emotional value, on the one hand, and, on the other, their use for an instinctive or desired knowledge of them to become co-operatively, and in practical terms inseparably, the foundation of our relationship to that person’ (Simmel, 1997a: 111). Our senses, Simmel claims, lead us to have an emotive and sensory response, a mood, we get a feel for the person – he uses the example of the tone of voice and what is being said.
Perception is as important here as the actuality of sensory experience. The face, in Simmel’s (1997a: 113) essay, is the ‘essential object of inter-individual seeing’.As with the eye, the ear is also understood by Simmel (1997a: 115) to play a part in this dual role, as it shapes ‘what one person can perceive or wants to perceive of another’. The focus then shifts to the expressiveness of the face as the object of the gaze. Even the act of looking itself is communicative, with the look also being expressive of ourselves. Eye contact, according to Simmel, ‘weaves people together’ creating ‘unity’ rather than any ‘objective structure’. This ‘looking into’ (Weinstein & Weinstein, 1984: 358) is, for Simmel, the most ‘direct’ and ‘purest’ of interactions.
The point of these comparisons, for Simmel, is that such differences might allow us to understand how social interactions are shaped by the senses. Similarly Simmel notes that the ear receives sound intended for any number of people, rather than being a shared look only between two. There is a two-way flow of communication in eye contact, whereas the ear just passively receives sound. In another passage, Simmel writes that ‘the ear is distinguished from the eye by the absence of that reciprocity which the look produces between one eye and another’. The comparisons between hearing and seeing, the ear and eye, continue. Another distinguishing feature, he proposes, is that we have a greater ability to recall what we hear than what we see.
Our closeness to other people is defined by our sensory experience of them. The senses can produce, in this vision, occasionally quite ‘abstract’ or ‘unspecific social structures’ that then play a part in ‘proximity’. In this case, the consciousness of unity will have a much more abstract character than if the association also includes spoken communication.’ (Simmel, 1997a: 117)The senses, as proposed here, enable unity amongst groups. The workers in a factory workshop, the students in an auditorium, the soldiers in a battalion somehow feel themselves to be a unity…its character is still partially determined by the fact that its essential sense is the eye, that the individual’s see each other during the communalizing processes but cannot speak.
Smell, for instance, is a central part of what Simmel refers to as ‘distancing’.Simmel’s essay develops a parallel argument about what happens to the senses under the conditions of modernity. Again, this seems to reinforce the point that the social world is the site of sensory responses between people like and dislike, acceptance and revulsion, and thus inequality, divisions and prejudice (at least this would appear to be Simmel’s point in some of the more difficult passages in this essay). As Simmel (1997a: 119) puts it, ‘melling a person’s body odour is the most intimate perception of them they penetrate, in a gaseous form into our most sensory inner being’.
This, of course, echoes Simmel’s earlier and more influential essay The metropolis and mental life. Our senses are confined, shortened, whilst also being heightened. As Simmel puts it, we become ‘short-sensed’.
0 kommentar(er)
