A key example that the German sociololgist Georg Simmel used is how it makes an enormous qualitative difference to move from a relationship
between two people interacting with each other
- a dyad – to a triad, to the introduction of - to begin with - one other person.
The idea of ‘the one other person’ is actually to lay the foundations for an infinite number of ‘third persons’.
Simmel was trying to capture what the difference is between any one-to-one interaction and any broader social interaction.
He said that if you have a dyad, with two people, there’s only a certain kind of relationship that they can have with each other.
Each can only respond to what the other person has said or done, and the way around, you end up knowing each other quite well, it’s a fairly
simple relationship with its own internally devised rules.
That doesn’t mean it’s conflict-free, as anyone in an intimate relationship knows,
but that’s not the point, which is that it has a distinctive kind of logic to it.
As soon as you introduce a third person, though, a whole range of new things start happening,
and you have to pay attention to variety of different concerns.
It’s no longer enough to pay attention to what the one other person is thinking or doing, you also - at the same time - have to pay attention to
what the third person is doing, which already makes a more complicated kind of relationship.
How much attention one person pays to one person as opposed to the third person has
enormous significance for the way that triadic relationship operates.
What it also means is that one has to pay attention to the relationship between the other two people,
it’s not enough to pay attention to those individuals separately, you also have to attend to how they're interacting with each other.
That 's often quite a complex set of interrelationships.
Simmel also has important things to say about power,
that that’s also an interaction and arelationship.
On the whole, when we think about power, we think of its being about control and coercion, about some force being exercised on someone.
You can see this in the language we use – we say someone ‘has’ power or they don’t ‘have’ power.
The implications of Simmel’s analysis is that it’s a mistake to use that kind of vocabulary.
But it’s so built into our language that it’s actually quite difficult to change your language to take account of that,
it’s hard to avoid describing someone as ‘having’ power.
His point was that power is in fact an interaction, that one has to think in terms of a relationship of power,
a balance of power, rather than saying that one person is powerful and the other is powerless
One can only say that one has more power than the other.
This also doesn’t mean that the person that you think has less power doesn’t actually play a role in that relationship.
One of his points of shifting his account to one of a relationship between people,
rather than the positions they occupy, was to say that it’s possible for everyone to be active in those kinds of relationships.
This is what he said about that:
Interaction . exists even in those cases of superordination and subordination ... where according to popular notions the ‘coercion’ by one
party deprives the other of every spontaneity, and therefore of every real ‘effect’ of contribution to the process of interaction.
He was saying that it’s a problem to use concepts like coercion, necessity and determination, and that there are different ways
of looking at how power relationships
work.To see power as a two-way relationship is very important conceptual step to take, because our tendency, when we use concepts like power,
domination, subordination and so on, is effectively to eliminate the agency, the active participation of some people in that situation.
Simmel thought that it’s important to see power relationships in much more dynamic terms,
which also relates to his conception of social institutions as being much more fragile and unstable than we think they are when we use
concepts like structure and system.
Simmel also talked about fashion, because it tells you something quite significant about the way a society works.
This was a concern that kept him on the outside of a lot of sociology until quite recently,
because fashion’s been defined as a quite superficial topic.
How could lots of tall models walking around on a catwalk actually tell anything about social institutions or about power?
Simmel thought that fashion was actually very important, a significant element of everyday life,
which says something about the structure of society, in the sense that it’s a manifestation of a
desire and a need to both part of society, but also distinctive.
It throws light on how fluid that concern is, how much it engages our consciousness,
how much of an existential problem it is, which is why fashion magazines, fashion shows, and so on,
attract so much attention, why it’s difficult to avoid being captivated by them, without really knowing why.
Simmel argued that fashion reflects a basic problem that we all have,
that we want to be accepted, we want to be part of society, we want to be treated in a positive way,
we want to be recognized and respected, but we also want to be special.
The problem is, how can you be special in a way that doesn’t attract a negative response from everyone around you,
how can you do that in a way that doesn’t end having you excluded from your social group or a whole society?
What fashion does is give you a number of ideas about how to do that in terms of how you dress, to some extent how you behave.
This is why celebrities canbe understood as the embodiment or ‘bringing to life’ of fashion.
In general, fashion images are passive and one- dimensional, but celebrities bring those images to life and translate them into a whole way of life,
a way of being in the world, adding a dynamic human element to fashion.
What’s going with fashion is an interaction between the desire to be equal to everybody else, to be seen as part of the broader social
group, and also to differentiate yourself from others around you.
Money was another concern for Simmel, as a central element of the way any society operates.
It’s not just what economists are concerned with, it’s more sociologically significant than that.
In economic sociology, Simmel is regarded as one of the earliest thinkers to consider economics in a more interesting, dynamic way,
as not simply being infrastructure of all social institutions, but as actually embedded, in the way we relate to each other.
He said that money is important because it functions as a linkage between different people that would otherwise not have any relationship
with each other at all.
For example, in the development of free trade relationships between different parts of the world, those economic relationships generate
new social connections that would otherwise not exist.
It’s also a linkage between individuals, it makes it possible to translate your interaction with people into something concrete that you both
understand, that you don’t argue about – well, not about the idea of money itself!
Money allows for a larger range of different kinds of relationships than an economy based on barter and exchange.
It makes it possible for a much more diverse group of people to coordinate their activities with each other,
in ways that they would otherwise not be able to.
The other thing that money does it make you think in terms of the future, it makes you plan in a longer-term way.
Because of its abstractness, it means you can accumulate it, in order to do something else with it in the future,
it has the capacity to go beyond being an immediate concern.
It has a disembedded value and meaning that only get realized at the point that you spend it.
Like Weber’s account of Protestantism, it enabled the creation of a certain kind of personality organised around long-term planning.
It also turns quality into quantity, it puts a numerical value on everything that we do,
everything that has a certain meaning or quality for us becomes quantifiable.
This is because in order to coordinate our activities with a large range of people around the world,
that’s only possible through quantification.
A related point in Simmel’s work was a distinction between subjective and objective culture.
There are other sociologists that refer to this opposition using different words, different concepts.
Jurgen Habermas, for example, talks about the difference between the lifeworld and the system.
The basic point is that there’s a difference between our experience on a daily interactional level
and the way that social sphere gets caught up in institutions with their own logic, direction and concerns in a way that may not have much
connection with our own experience.
An example would be education – one can learn a lot entirely on one’s own, one doesn’t even need to go to school or a university,
which are organised around other kinds of concerns,
to do with establishing a hierarchy, with distinction, with linking education to other kinds of concerns.
The American sociologist Randall Collins argues that education systems have become orientated toward credentialism,
towards the production of credentials that function a bit like money.
There’s a transformation of the quality of the educational experience into a quantifiable ‘thing’.
A student’s experience at university gets translated into an object – a degree – which becomes a token with a certain kind of value,
that can be taken into the marketplace.
This objective dimension of university education then risks overwhelming the subjective experience of studying at university.
Simmel felt that the long-term tendency was that, over time, the distinction between the two, between subjective culture and objective culture,
gradually widens.
More and more the concerns about what value the things we do have in a quantitative sense,
tend to dominate the qualitative experiences we have.