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DOI: 10.1177/0263276405053717

2005 22: 1Theory Culture Society Scott Lash

Lebenssoziologie: Georg Simmel in the Information Age

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LebenssoziologieGeorg Simmel in the Information Age

Scott Lash

L EBENSPHILOSOPHIE, OR vitalism, would seem, for social scientistsand intellectuals more generally, to be back on the agenda. Perhapsthe most successful of books in the social and cultural sciences in the

past seven or eight years – in terms of critical success and sales – is MichaelHardt and Antonio Negri’s (2000) Empire. Negri is a Lebensphilosoph. He isa vitalist. Negri argues for a restructured, anti-Hegelian Marxism, replac-ing labour with life as a central category. More accurately, he understandslabour as life. For Negri, both labour and life are conceived as movement

or ‘flux’. For him class struggle is not for labour to oppose capital in thefactory, but for labour to escape from the factory. The factory is prison. Andclass struggle becomes escape attempts. This movement of escape from thefactory is conceived as flux, as becoming, as movement: in short as life. Thisis the theory of Italy’s operaista left. It has been appropriated by themovement of the unemployed in Argentina. It is the ideology of new mediaartists – such as Austria’s Knowbotic Research (Reck, 2003: 369) – makingsite-specific interventions throughout Europe. Negri, and contemporaryvitalism (what one might call neo-vitalism) more generally, is highly influ-

enced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Deleuze is a Lebensphiloso-pher, whose main influences are Spinoza, Nietszche and Bergson. Thecategory of life, for Deleuze and Guattari (1972), is conceived as ‘desire’,is becoming: it is an incessant de-territorialization. Desire on this accountis pitted against dominant social structures, conceived as it were, as ‘thesymbolic’. The symbolic, taken from the work of Jacques Lacan, is to acertain extent Durkheim’s conscience collective, as it were, grafted onto theFreudian Oedipus complex. Thus against both the family and capitalismDeleuze and Guattari famously published their Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze andGuattari argued for their destruction. Here desire, as flows and fluxes of life,smashes the structures of the Oedipus, of tradition and of the commodity.

■ Theory, Culture & Society 2005 (SAGE, London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi),Vol. 22(3): 1–23DOI: 10.1177/0263276405053717

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Thus the politics of Negri, of Deleuze, that is vitalist politics, are the politicsof movement, of escape, of lines of flight, of de-territorialization. This is apolitics not of Naomi Klein’s anti-globalization, but instead of extreme glob-alization: this is de-territorialization to the point at which neo-liberalism’s

commodity form itself explodes under its force.We live today in a global information society. We live in an age less

of material and manufacturing production than an age of media, an age of communications, an age of interactive media. These new media presupposenon-linearity. They suppose non-linear, open systems. Such open systemsare the very stuff of vitalism. Vitalism is to be understood in contradistinc-tion to mechanism (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984). Mechanism is Newton-ian: it understands causation to be external to beings, to systems. Cause inthis sense is unidirectional: it is linear. The external causation of ‘metanar-

ratives’ such as Christianity, Whig history or orthodox Marxism again isinscribed in such a logic of linearity. Vitalism, in contrast to mechanism, isnon-linear, presupposing not external but self-causality, what Georg Simmellike his disciple Gyorgy Lukács, following Aristotle, called ‘teleology’.1

These are self-producing or self-organizing systems. Such self-organizationis the ordre du jour in many natural sciences today. Thus the vast growthof complexity theory: indeed, the assumptions of complexity, of self-organizing systems pervade biology, chemistry and physics. Thus the renais-sance of cybernetics – the new interest in the work of Norbert Wiener and

Claude Shannon.2

Vitalism is, I think, as rich a term in understanding this current of thought as Lebensphilosophie. Vitalism can be understood in clear contradis-tinction to mechanism, as Simmel argues in his article ‘Henri Bergson’(2000b). Vitalism has I think three central dimensions: the first is movement,or flux: this entails a metaphysics of becoming, of de-territorialization – whatthe Situationists called dérive (Debord, 1993) – of lines of flight. This firstdimension corresponds to globalization. Its second thematic is non-linearityor self-organization, corresponding to our contemporary processes of infor-

mationalization. The third constitutive dimension is monism. This monismcontrasts with the dualism of so much of contemporary theory. There is afundamental dualism in, for example, Jacques Derrida’s idea of différance.This is rooted in the idea of ‘ontological difference’ – that is the differencebetween Being and beings – that we find in Heidegger and phenomenology.Vitalism is based not on a notion of ontological difference. It is instead basedin an ontology of difference. Here there is no fundamental dualism of beingand beings. Instead all being is difference.3 Vitalism falls in sociologicalcamps neither of positivism nor phenomenology. The mechanistic assump-tions of positivism presume a subject–object dualism, in which the sociolog-ical observer is in the position of objectively viewing social structures.Phenomenology, with its much more humanistic subject, avoids questions of causality altogether. Vitalism will not presume that there is an essentialdifference between humans and non-humans. There is instead only a differ-ence in degree of powers of self-organization.

2 Theory, Culture & Society 22(3)








If vitalist flux opens up a window onto globalization and non-linearitya window onto informationalization, then this monism corresponds to our actuality of networks, of the network society (Castells, 1996), which is bothglobal and informational. In this flat world of networks, the dualism of insti-

tutions that legislate to us is replaced by the monism of the self-legislationof today’s reflexive subject, of today’s reflexive modernization. Here the olddualism of traditional institutions is displaced onto the flat, the monist actor-networks, whose connections and terminals stretch across the times andspace of the globe. Contemporary sociology is increasingly vitalist. There isperhaps less focus on the external causation of multivariate analysis thanon the self-causation, the uncertainty and unintended consequences of self-causation. Three of the most influential sociological theorists of the pastdecade or even 15 years are Bruno Latour (1993) and his flat global actor-

networks, Ulrich Beck’s (Beck et al., 1994) reflexive modernity with itsbuilt-in chronic uncertainty, and Niklas Luhmann’s (1997) self-reproducingsystems. In each case there is monism, self-reproduction and becoming –the three principles of vitalism.

Three of the most central vitalist (or proto-vitalist) philosophers areSpinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson. Spinoza was a monist, presuming a panthe-ism, an immanent religiosity, in which, as Simmel (1995: 200) noted, thehuman subject is assimilated to God. In Bergson’s Matter and Memory(1991: 133ff.), things, including inorganic things not only – at least implic-

itly – self-organize, but also are blessed with powers of perception. For Bergson all matter has memory. Indeed for him memory is co-extensive withlife. In Friedrich Nietzsche (1966: 447–8) there is a metaphysics in whichall beings, all entities, have a will to power, have powers to this extent of self-organization. Not for Nietzsche the dualism, the ontological differenceof being and beings, or even of being and becoming. For him there is nobeing other than beings, and all being is becoming. We see in Nietzsche athoroughgoing monism.

Vitalism may thus have great purchase on globalization, information-

alization and networks.

4

It is the stuff of so much contemporary social andcultural theory. It has its progenitors in Spinoza, Bergson and Nietzsche.Where does this leave Georg Simmel? Simmel was clearly a vitalist in hislater work, such as Lebensanschauung (1999c). He was influenced byvitalism in his inordinately productive middle period of 1900 to 1908 (in e.g.Schopenhauer und Nietszche, 1995). He even wrote a review article on Niet-zsche in his early period, as early as 1895 (Simmel, 2000a). In what followsI want to underscore the actuality, the relevance of a Simmelian vitalism. Iwant to reconstruct a Simmelian vitalism in dimensions first of nature andthen of value. Categories of both nature and value are pivotal in Simmel’s Lebenssoziologie. Then I want to move into the social dimension. I want tosuggest the pertinence of a sociological re-working of Simmelian vitalism ina way not dissimilar to Deleuze’s (1991, 2002) re-working of Bergson andNietzsche for the renewal of vitalism in philosophy. In doing so the task isto make vitalism sociological. Maurizio Lazzarato (2002) has already

Lash – Lebenssoziologie 3








accomplished this on an impressive scale via the work of Gabriel Tarde.Our task in this piece is, with Lazzarato, to point to some threads of a largelyforgotten vitalist heritage in classical sociological theory. It is to underscorethe meta-theoretical and hence philosophical assumptions of these. It is also

to give a few indications of the relevance of sociological vitalism to our ageof media and communication.

Forms: From Cognitive A Priori to Social A Priori

In Lebensphilosophie, noted Simmel (2000b), what Nietzsche was to morals,Bergson was to nature. This is an extraordinarily pregnant thought. Thepoint here is that Nietzsche brings a very sharp notion of interest into morals.This breaks with the disinterested character of the moral imperative inKant’s second critique for a notion of morals dependent on the will to power.

If Kant’s second critique addresses morals, his first critique addressesnature. The first critique presumes that knowledge in regard to nature ispredicated on a disinterested observer. For Bergson, the relation of ‘theobserver’ to nature is one based very much on interest. Thus Kant’s idea of a science of nature is based on objectivity, or what Francisco Varela callsthird-person truths; Bergson’s, in contrast, is based on Varela’s ‘first-persontruths’ (see Rudrauf et al., 2003).

Bergson brought vitalism to Naturphilosophie. Simmel’s idea of formwas heavily grounded in Kant’s Naturphilosophie. Simmel speaks of Kant’s

first critique in terms of cognition. But he more systematically speaks of theKantian categories of the first critique in terms of a philosophy of nature.Simmel (2000c) wrote an early paper on Kant’s monadology: on the natureof matter in Kant. Simmel understood Kant’s shift from monadology tocritique in terms of a move from Leibniz to Newton. Simmel wrote an essayon Bergson, in which nature is a concept that assumed centre-stage with theadvent of modernity. Thus for Simmel (2000b: 53) God is to Christianitywhat nature is to the Renaissance and Enlightenment. From the 19thcentury, Simmel sees ‘society’ (Gesellschaft) as playing such a role. This is

challenged by ‘life’ from the turn of the 20th century. In each case – in thistransition from God to nature to society to life – Simmel sees the hegemoniccategory as a ‘value’. In each case it is a ‘form’.

Kantian nature, we should recall, is the Enlightenment in its culmi-nation: the Enlightenment become idealist. This means that nature is not –as in materialism – understood through sense impressions. Nature is mostimportantly understood instead via the categories of cognition. Simmelunderstood ‘society’ on the model of Kantian nature. For Kant, the cate-gories of cognition and perception are forms. They are a priori forms.Without them, knowledge of nature is impossible. They are the basis of our knowledge of nature. Kant breaks with Leibnizian monadology and meta-physics for Newtonian atomism. In monadology, simple substance is differ-ence (Lazzarato, 2002). In atomism it is identity. In Kantian atomism, simplesubstance as identity is knowable through the forms, the a priori forms of cognition/perception. In Simmel’s early and Spencerian sociological









positivism the question shifts. It is not how is nature possible, but how issociety possible (Simmel, 1992a: 42–61), that is, what are the a priori socialforms? What forms make society possible?5 We note immediately that Kantin the first instance is talking about not how nature is possible, but howknowledge of nature is possible. He is not worrying about nature disinte-grating into anarchy. Simmel’s question is not immediately how is knowl-edge of society possible? But how is society possible? Kant’s initial questionis epistemological. Simmel’s is ontological. Though there will be an epistem-ology that follows from it. Forms are what make society possible. Theseforms that prevent society from disintegrating are functions. So the firstforms for Simmel and classical sociological positivism are functions. Theyare not categories of knowledge (or perception). They are institutions likethe family, economic institutions, the state, cultural institutions like the

church, education or art. These function-forms, though, like the cognitivecategories, are abstract. Like the Kantian categories they deal with material.For Kant, this material is nature conceived atomistically. In the case of soci-ological positivism it is socialized humans, people, who also are treated asif they were atoms, interchangeable atoms. The Kantian scientific observer of nature understood atomistic matter through cognitive-perceptive forms.The positivist sociological observer understood society’s atomistic matter through institutional forms.

Causation is in an important sense external to both Kant and the early

sociological positivists. Yet there is a major shift in that Darwinian causa-tion displaces Newtonian causation. Darwin and the sociological positiviststake us not to vitalism but to a sort of neo-mechanism. Newtonian causa-tion has to do with external force applied to a body. In Darwinian causationthis is displaced by the external cause of system needs. This is clearly adifferent order of cause and such functional causality has been the subjectof considerable debate (see e.g. Cohen, 1978). The point for us here is thatsuch functional causality is not vitalist self-causation.6 By 1905–6 Simmelstarts to move towards such a sort of creative evolutionist position. Simmel

on ‘society’ and on ‘form’, throughout his career, works from such a modelof Darwinian neo-mechanism.7 Simmel never changes his idea of form andsociety. The change lies in what he saw more or less as objective fact in hisearly work becoming seen increasingly as pernicious value in the later work.

For Simmel, as positivist, forms are the social a priori: for Kant, theyare the cognitive a priori. The later Simmel, as he moves towards vitalism,speaks less of an a priori. Vitalism does not think in terms of a prioris. Itdoes not speak the Kantian language of the condition of possibility. Vitalismis not interested in the condition of possibility of knowledge. It is interestedin how human and non-human beings know as they do. This is alwaysconnected to interests and to power. Thus the later Simmel speaks less interms of an a priori but rather in terms of ‘objectifying’ (Objektivierung). For Simmel forming (Formung) is always Objektivierung. Forms, whether naturalor social, are objectivized. They are constituted through a process of objectification. The raw material from which they are constituted is life:









respectively, natural life and social life. This is before they become the formsof nature and society. Objectivation (Objektivierung) constitutes the object,constitutes nature out of the flux of sense impressions or appearances. Here‘the heterogenous variety of sense impressions formed into units’ (Simmel,

1999a: 133). This is the ‘flux of continuous and contiguous appearances’that the cognizing subject makes into discrete units. Before the object wehave ‘matter (Weltstoff )’. Matter is the ‘ vorliegen wirklichen gegebene Welt’(the actually given world before us). It is ‘allein wirklich primäre Dasein’(basic effective primary being).8 In this sense, the disinterestedly objecti-fying Kantian categories transform vital nature into mechanistic nature.

Simmel argues that for Bergson life is not just matter, or matter influxed and continuous movement. It is also image. That is, matter in fluxappears as image, as ‘ Erscheinungen’. Simmel’s reading here is more organi-

cist and humanist than Bergson’s. But his critique of Kant runs parallel toBergson’s. For both thinkers, as cognizing subjects we convert continuousmatter-appearances into discrete and interchangeable units. We call these‘objects’, says Simmel, though it is the subject that constitutes them. Thesubject then recognizes himself as a very special object, one that is blessedwith powers of reason. When acting instrumentally we are merely thinking-objects: we are caused; we are mechanism; we are in the realm of neces-sity. This is the basis of modern natural law and, in particular, Hobbes, whoextended Galileo’s assumptions of isolated atoms in tension with one another

to human beings involved in a struggle of all against all (Strauss, 1953).This is the basis of the human being as an interchangeable atom. It is whatSimmel and Nietzsche saw as the levelling dimension of democracy and theidea of society. In the late work on ‘Conflict of Culture’ and ‘Tragedy of Culture’ Simmel (1997) speaks of form, in e.g. poetry, that is not objectify-ing. He argues that we need form to have meaning or value at all. Thus thereis for Simmel objectifying and non-objectifying Formung.

Simmel’s Bergson essay works through the systematic contrast of mechanism and vitalism. The implication is that society is mechanism.

Simmel’s focus here is temporality. He observes that Kantian time is part of the same transcendental apparatus that constitutes nature as form. In thissense, it has little to do with lived temporality. He endorses Bergsoniantemporality as flux. Newtonian mechanistic time is reversible and vitalisttime irreversible. Time divided up into discrete and interchangeable unitsis reversible in that one can substitute for another. Vitalist time, unlikediscontinuous Newtonian time, is kontinuerlich. Memory has no role inNewtonian time. Here time is comprised of atoms that are removable andcan be exchanged one for the other as equivalents. There is no pathdependency in Newtonian time, which is not internal to, but outside life(Urry, 2002). There is no future and no past. Lived time is always attunedto goals, indeed to internally generated value. It is dependent on pastmemory.

The past and future orientations in the Bergson essay are very closeto what Heidegger (1986: 130ff.) would write in the chapter on In-Sein in









Being and Time. Like Heidegger, Simmel returns to the temporal in thecontext of death: in the chapter on ‘Tod und Unsterblichkeit’ in Lebens-anschauung (1999c: 297ff.). Simmel’s antagonists here are Christianity and,it would seem, Schopenhauer. Both are doctrines of the will that tend to

follow from dissatisfaction with mechanism and atomism in ages of abstrac-tion. In this, Simmel argues that Christianity was to Greco-Roman fragmen-tation and abstract differentiation what Schopenhauer was to modernmechanism. Yet neither Christianity nor the work of Schopenhauer, he notes,was a doctrine of becoming. The assumption is instead of timelessness, of indeed not death but immortality. The difference is that Christianity has agoal and meaning, Schopenhauer’s will has neither. For Simmel, finitudemeans most of all that we are beings (and forms) with boundaries. Theseboundaries are spatial, but more importantly they are temporal. Death most

fundamentally sets up the temporal boundary that defines us as forms.Without this finite form there would not be the flux, the self-overcoming, therestlessness of life. Time and death are constantly rising up internal to us.This is in contrast to the external temporality of Christianity. For both Godand (Kantian) nature there is external motivation of the individual: there isalso timelessness. In God’s case there is external teleology, in Kant’s natureexternal causality. The equivalents in classical sociology would be, on theone hand orthodox Marxian external teleology and Durkheimian externalcausality. In contrast, Simmelian vitalism proffers the self as a self-

organizing form: that is, a form that deals with its own flux. Man thus avoidsboth causality and (teleological) meta-narratives. In both positivist causal-ity and teleological meta-narratives, man is an interchangeable atom and aninstrument. He is also an atom in what Simmel sees as the normativity of ‘society’. In this normativity, man is reduced to a function for the reproduc-tion of society.

Value

Simmel was from the start a moralist – a sociologist and philosopher of

morals. His first major book was, more than Über soziale Differenzierung(1989c), Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft. This is the positivism of theearly Simmel, for whom norms differentiate out and then take on function-ality for the reproduction of society.9 For Simmel as for Nietzsche, moralspresuppose values. Indeed Simmel is as much a theorist of value as he isof form. The early Simmel’s positivism was evolutionary: so was the lateSimmel’s vitalism. He reads and endorses Nietzsche as an evolutionist( Entwicklungslehre). His pivotal distinction of Schopenhauer from Nietzscheis that between Schopenhauer and Nietzsche came Darwin (1995: 179).Positivist – Darwinian and Spencerian – evolutionism thematizes differen-tiation. Vitalist, or creative, evolution is a question of what Simmel called‘ Differenz’. Simmel discusses Nietzsche’s individualism in terms of ‘Wert-differenz’ or value-difference (1995: 184). In this, difference itself (in theabove-mentioned sense not of ontological difference, but an ontology of difference) becomes a value. Classical evolutionism takes place through the









accidental generation of elements – be they social or natural – that thenbecome reproductively functional for adaptation to an emerging andchanging environment. The environment is thus an external cause of changes in structures or forms or morals. There is something mechanistic –

or at least ‘heterotelic’ – about classical evolutionism. Vitalist evolutionismis self-generated, through life’s overcoming of existent forms and creationof new ones. In mainstream evolutionism, when values differentiate thecriteria for evaluation are functionality for the whole.10 In creative evolu-tionism the criterion is which values bring man as species-being to higher levels of life. The ultimate value is the quantity of life in man as species-being (Simmel, 1995: 402–3). Difference and evolution are the heighteningof life as value. Because life is the most important value, evolution for Simmel becomes a move from life to ‘more-life’. The value and goal of life

is more-life. It is higher stages of the fullness of life and its energies. Atissue here is the value of man as a form, and evolution of forms moving from Mensch to the ever-unattainable Übermensch. Indeed the Übermensch is nota form in the classical sense, but instead the unattainable value that humanlife gives itself. The Übermensch is ‘ Mehr-Leben’. It is a process of ‘ Hinaus- zugreifen über sich selbst’.11 It is self-difference (Selbst-Differenz) (Simmel,1995: 374–8, 1999c: 223). This autopoietic difference stands opposed toheteropoietic differentiation. We cannot overestimate the influence of Darwinian evolutionism here. First, humanism needs to change after

Darwin. Previously humanism was a matter of human values and reasonreplacing Christian values. But now humanism becomes understood in termsof man as a species per se in comparison to other animal species. This istrue in Marx as well as Nietzsche. Only after Darwin does man becomespecies-being. Second, while before we may have had a notion of the polityon the basis of human atoms as in, say, Hobbes, only now after Darwin dowe have such a notion of ‘society’. The heuristic of course is the organism,with functional roles and a division of labour. Nietzsche and Simmel philos-ophized morals in terms of species-values (‘Gattungswerte’) that were indeed

human values (‘ Menschenwerte’). Values always presume, not just an ‘is’ butan ‘ought’: that is, not just a Sein, but a Sollen. It is Leben itself that is theinternalized ‘Sollen’ here: and that Sollen is ‘ Mehr-Leben’. Life carries itsfurthering in itself. Its immanent imperative is to be more life (‘ Mehr-Leben zu sein’ ). Morality here is the value of the individual. This morality is not,as in Kant, to be found external to the individual in his ‘Tun’ or his doing.It is to be found in his being, his Sein (Simmel, 1995: 388–9).12

All animals work through the ‘eternal triad’ of desire, means and ends.Simmel spoke of man, however, as the ‘indirect animal’ in that the chainsof means between desire and end become ever longer. These chains of means he understood as die Technik, as technology. For Simmel all formsstarted their life as means.13 Simmel’s point was that what start as means –knowledge, art, ethics, law, play or sport – evolve to become ends inthemselves. As forms they take on a certain Eigengesetzlichkeit or self-legislation: a certain autonomy. But some means are somehow intrinsically









communication-generator than Nike. Surely sign-value is convertible intoexchange-value, especially insofar as the exchange of equities and marketcapitalization is concerned. But it still is analytically distinct. Exchange-value works through interchangeability and indifference of units, while

sign-value works through Wertdifferenz. Though here value-difference itself becomes a means of domination. Simmel, in taking the idea of form beyondand substance beyond Marxian labour and exchange to life and to culturegives us conceptual ammunition to better grasp these contemporaryphenomena.

Life as Social Substance

Simmel addresses life in terms of social life. This is the originality of hisvitalism. For other vitalists, relations between things or between subjects

and things are primary. Relations of perception are primary. For Simmel lifeis already social. For Simmel social life is literally social life.15 This is thesociological vitalism, the Lebenssoziologie that gives this article its title. InWittgenstein the idea of ‘forms of life’ means mostly ways of life. WithSimmel we come to understand forms of life as forms of life. With Wittgen-stein there is no life without forms. For Simmel it is life that gives rise toform. Simmel does have a notion of social life ( gesellschaftliches Leben)especially in his late and vitalist Grundfrage der Soziologie (1999a), whichhe juxtaposes to form of Vergesellschaftung. This is the social life, or social

substance that is vergesellschaftet. Simmel speaks of individual life in termsof ‘ Pulsschlag’ (pulsebeat), in terms of ‘ Energie’: in terms of the ‘ wogenden Rythmus der Lebenswirklichkeit’.16 Other terms are Inhalt, Substanz, Stoff , Materie, Bewegung, Wirkung and of course Strom and Fluß. Here we mightunderstand Wirklichkeit not as reality in the objective sense, but more inthe sense that we would now call ‘the real’ – as distinct from the symbolicand imaginary – as intrinsically unrepresentable. In the chapter on Gesel-ligkeit in Grundfrage he speaks of social life ( gesellschaftliches Leben) as abearer of all forces (Trager aller Kräfte). He speaks of this pre-societal, ‘not

yet social’ Wechselwirkung (exchange-effect) (1999a: 68). At stake is anintersubjective pulsion: a primary or even primordial intersubjectivity. Atstake is ‘the content and at the same time the matter of societalization: thestuff with which life fills itself, in order to drive its motivations’ (1999a:103–4, 1999c: 216–17, 222).17

This is sociological vitalism. It is necessarily a metaphysics: Simmel’s Lebensanschauung is subtitled Four Metaphysical Chapters. Nietzsche andBergson are confessed metaphysicians. The late Simmel as metaphysicianis of course in search of the in-itself. He is not the only one. Dissatisfac-tion with the Kantian für-sich led to the an-sich of Schopenhauer’s will.Husserl was also driven by this, his an-sich being phenomenology’s intu-ition of essences. Mechanism is of course the origin of the für-sich. Ethicscan be für-sich or an-sich. So can values in regard to which Simmel speaksof ‘Werte-an-sich’ and ‘Werte-für-sich’. Clearly money was the paradigm of für-sich Werte, that is, values with external ends. Similarly, Marx in









metaphysical mode in his Grundriße distinguished between Wertsubstanzand Wertform. Wertsubstanz, like use-value, is an an-sich. The same was trueof Kant’s imperative, which defines itself as having no end outside itself.Simmel similarly addresses society. Die Gesellschaft-für-sich would be

society as in positivism. In contrast stands ‘ Die eigentlich “Gesellschaft”-an-ihr’ that is ‘ jenes Miteinander, Füreinander, Gegeneinander, womitmaterielle oder individuelle Inhalt und Interesse durch Trieb oder Zweck eineFormung oder Förderung erfahren’ (Simmel, 1999a: 106). To translate:social substance here is ‘every with-another, for-another, against-another,with which material or individual content or interest is – through purposeor drive – experienced in its form or its demands’.18 Simmel is saying herethat we experience social form. That such form is generated by socialsubstance as conflictual, associative and ethical intersubjectivity. And that

such intersubjective substance is translated into form through variouscontents or interests that can be individual or material. He is saying thatwhen such substances are translated into form, they may be experienced asforms or as demands.

Indeed what we have here is not the elementary forms of religious life,but, so to speak, the ‘elementary substance of social life’. It is drives, it isWechselwirkung, perhaps non-linear effects, it is flux, it is conflict and coali-tion: it is immediate. It is perhaps the social relation before the advent of the social bond. The dyad before any Vergesellschaftung. This social relation

– that is, flux without form – is important. Not so much because it is primor-dial, but because it can also be post-symbolic. That is, because it suits thepost-symbolic matrix of the global information culture. The social bond inthe classical sense of Durkheim and Mauss, was always mediated by thesymbolic. The symbolic has been embedded in our classic institutions,which are just at the moment undergoing rapid meltdown. The symbolicpresupposed the hegemony of the national society, which itself is beingeroded by global communications. Outside and in excess of the symbolic is,of course, the real. But this excess is now banalized and routinized in the

communication, whose real signal is also outside the national and institu-tional symbolic, and inside the global flows. We have a post-social relationnow, the communication. This is a relation after the decline of the socialbond. This sort of intersubjectivity is at stake in Simmel’s pre- and now post-social dyad. This technologically mediated communication, which takes theold social bond, and stretches, shrinks, accelerates and intensifies it to thepoint of explosion. No one more than Simmel gives us tools to come to termswith this.

Monadology

A half-generation older than Simmel and Bergson were the first modernvitalists, Friedrich Nietzsche and Gabriel Tarde. Tarde was a sociologist anda major influence on Bergson (Lazzarato, 2002). The école durkheimienneaimed its arrows equally at Tarde and Bergson. There has been a revivifi-cation of Tarde’s work in Maurizio Lazzarato’s major and masterly Puissances









de l’invention: la psychologie économique de Gabriel Tarde contre l’économie politique (2002). Lazzarato shows that Tarde, the ur-sociologist argues ineffect for a ‘psychological economy’. This is a psychological economy thatpertains to any sort of being: it applies to human beings as entities, to soci-

eties, to organic or inorganic matter. In each case the entity at issue is under-stood as a monad. One of Tarde’s (1999) seminal works is Monadologie et sociologie. Tarde’s importance now is perhaps most of all in connection withthis monadology.

Let us develop this notion further. We need to recall here that Simmel’sPhD was entitled Das Wesen der Materie nach Kants physiches Monadolo- gie. This seems to be the original published title. The title of the defendedthesis at the Königlicher Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität Berlin was Darstellungen und Beurteilungen von Kants verschiedenen Ansichten über

das Wesen der Materie. I do not want to argue that Simmel was a life-longand ardent monadologist. We need to make a number of qualifications. First,it was the second submission for his doctorate. The first was on the ‘psycho-logical’ and ethnographic origins of music. This was a more straightfor-wardly evolutionist argument drawing on ethnographic material in anattempt to contest Darwin’s opinion that man’s language-use grew out of anearlier musicality. Simmel argued that language came first and music,perhaps in part as a higher more differentiated culture, came after. Thethesis was failed by the examiners because of its apparently poor documen-

tation, the fact that it was hastily put together and contained too many‘Schreibfehler’ (typos). The examiners also disagreed with Simmel’s method,consisting of combining Darwin’s evolutionary theory and ‘theorems fromVölkerpsychologie’. The examiners, who were sympathetic to Simmel person-ally, suggested that the candidate submit for his doctorate another essay:the one on Kant’s physical monadology that had already won him a prize ina competition for essays on Kant at the university the year before. Simmelwrote the core of this argument for his PhD at the age of 21 in 1879. Thesubmitted thesis was only 34 pages in length. In the thesis Simmel (2000c)

contrasts the monadology of the early Kant and Leibniz with Newtonianatomism. He largely rejected Kant’s pre-critical monadology for a sort of positivist ‘speculative atomism’ (Köhnke, 1996; Landkammer, 2001).

Simmel’s theoretical evolution is more complex than is often realized.The received chronology is that Simmel evolved from an early positivist toa mid-career neo-Kantian and a late-career vitalist. Yet there is evidence of elements of vitalism and positivism in all of Simmel’s work. There wasclearly a shift in emphasis after his late reception of Bergson. Yet, right fromthe start, Simmel engaged with Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. He was taughtthem as a student, before he was 20 years of age, in the Fakultät für Philoso-phie und Völkerpsychologie at the University of Berlin. Darwin and evolu-tionism was a theme for both the positivist and the vitalist Simmel. Thespeculative atomism of his early positivist evolutionism indeed becomes thevitalism and creative evolutionism of his late period. Simmel always under-stood substance in terms of flux and monads. And, from start to finish, there









were the Critique of Practical Reason and the Critique of Judgement.Vitalism, for its part, must, however, be pre-critical (or post-critical): it mustbe metaphysical. ‘Difference’ in phenomenology – Husserl, Heidegger,Gadamer, Levinas, Derrida – is ontological difference: it is the difference

between beings and being. Between signifier and its ever-delayed meaning.In contrast, difference for metaphysics is the monad. Simple substance isdifference. Difference or singularities are the monadological building blocksof the world. Pre-critical Kant is a Leibnizian.

The word monad comes from the Greek, meaning ‘unit’ or ‘one’.Pythagoras wrote of it in terms of number. Here already we should see it incontrast to the proto-atomism of Euclidean geometry. The monad here wasalready an irreducible self-determining entity. Unlike the atom, wherecauses typically come from the outside, the monad is self-causing. Leibniz’s

monads too were, first, irreducible and, second, self-determining. For Leibniz, third, and perhaps most important, monads were less analogous tobody or matter than they are to mind. They are based less on res extensathan res cogitans. They are based more on mental substance than materialsubstance. In Descartes the idea of the soul or res cogitans is thinkingsubstance, possessing self-certainty in immediate unity (see Deleuze, 1993).The mentalism of Leibniz’s monad corresponds to the mentalism of Bergson’s memory, and for that matter the mentalism of Deleuze’s virtualityand ‘plane of immanence’. It corresponds to Prigogine and Stengers’s (1984)

idea of inorganic physical entities, which are capable of communication andmore or less reflexive. This mentalism is present in Tarde’s idea of monadspossessing affect. The monad is defined as its perception, from its particu-lar point of view. In vitalist metaphysics, all entities are capable to someextent of thought. A fourth (and further mentalist) characteristic of monadsis their active nature. This is unlike the classical idea of matter, which ispassive and inert: where cause must come from the outside. Monads containpowers ( puissance) of which they themselves are the source. Monads arethus: (1) irreducible, (2) self-determining, (3) partaking of mind, (4) active.

Fifth, though monads are irreducible, they consist of relations. The relationsare between still other monads. For Leibniz these relations are perceptions.Perceptions entail a psychology of the monad: they presume that monadsare agents of experience. Perception is very much at centre-stage for modernvitalists like Bergson and contemporary ones like Deleuze (1983) in hiswork on cinema (see also Massumi, 2002). For most of these writers relationis, in the first instance, relations of perception. For Simmel this relational-ity is the above-described originary intersubjectivity: that is, his sociologi-cal life-substance. For Leibniz too the monad consisted of relations of perception – the sum of its perceptions of other monads. More precisely,each monad was ‘an infinite series of perceptive acts defined by a uniquepoint of view or a unique law of series’ (Woolhouse, 1993).

A sixth characteristic of the monad for Leibniz and vitalism is memory.Each monad contains its past, present and future. For Leibniz: ‘Eachsubstance contains in its nature the law of continuation of its own









operations and all that has happened to it or will happen to it.’ Mind, alreadyfor Leibniz, is characterized by memory. Thus the cause, which is alwaysself-cause for Leibniz, is also a trace. It is unique to that monad. For Leibniza substance always bears traces of its earlier state. These traces as causes

can be discovered in the substance. This element of the thing is mind, sincematter itself cannot contain such traces (Woolhouse, 1993).

Vitalism and the monad are defined against Cartesian dualism. Themonad presumes neither a dualism of substance like Descartes, nor amonism like Spinoza. Vitalism and monadology presume that everysubstance is different from every other substance. Leibniz has of course anotion of extension. We encounter entities through their extension. Yet their difference does not consist in their extension. For Leibniz, ‘a body is amomentary mind, but without memory’ (Loemker, 1968). This is a sort of

empiricism. It is the opposite of positivist empiricism, which will think mindon the model of matter. In this sense vitalism is a sort of ‘transcendentalempiricism’ (Massumi, 1996). In atomism matter is extended and inactive.It is caused. It does not cause. In monadology matter is not inert substance.It is ‘an action that relates itself to an extension’. Each monad is anentelechy, a primitive active force. Seventh, and penultimately, monads arenot extensive. As action, as indeed reflexivity, they are somehow intensive.They are intensive and reflexive also in the sense that individual substancesare responsible for their own actions. Monads are unextended bodies – said

Leibniz – like points or instants (events).20

They still have parts. The inner movement of the parts constitutes the resistance of such bodies to outsideforces. Inert bodies have no such resistance. Finally, Leibniz’s monads cancarry their entire future and past in them because they are operationallyclosed. Leibniz’s monads ‘do not have windows’ (Alliez, 1999). A self-organ-izing system is in one sense open in that is self-organizing. Mechanisticsystems in this sense are doubly closed. Leibniz’s monads are in this senselike Luhmann’s social systems: self-organizing yet operationally closed, notpossessing ‘windows’. In other vitalists, like Tarde and Deleuze/Guattari,

monads are doubly open (Lazzarato, 1999). They have windows and do notpossess their entire histories and futures inside themselves. They formconnections, syntheses, branches. They are, in this sense, ‘rhizomatic’systems. They are ‘singularities’.

Conclusions: Towards a Global Politics of Flux

Georg Simmel never lived to see the information age. Indeed he died in1918, at the very height of industrial capitalism. He wrote in an age in whichthe emergence of the social, in the institutional sense of the full classsociety, gave birth to the discipline of sociology. I write as a sociologist inthe information age, an age in which the ubiquity of media and communi-cations threatens the social: an age of the birth and proliferation of culturalstudies and especially media and communications studies. Vitalism of course must be transformed in the information age. For example, Simmel’ssocietalization (Vergesellschaftung) seems increasingly in the information









age to be displaced by mediatization. Simmel described situations in whichthe thing, the individual and especially originary intersubjectivity were soci-etalized: these substances were given form through societalization. In theinformation age the thing, the individual and intersubjectivity are instead

mediatized. In the age of globalization and information intersubjectivity ischaracteristically ‘at a distance’. It is technology that makes possible inter-subjectivity at a distance. The mediatization of forms is also their technol-ogization.

Yet, even as media, these technologized forms do not lose their sense-making capacities. The paradigm for meaning in industrial modernity is inKant’s idea of cognition: here the subject imposed forms that made meaningpossible. Simmel as we saw above transposed such meaning-determinationonto the institutions of society. Today it is the media as technological forms

that are given meaning-making powers: but these are outside the control of the subject and social institutions. In the realm of morality, Nietzsche andSimmel took the transcendental Kantian Sollen (the ‘ought’) and brought itimmanent to the internal flux of the self-different subject. In the age of flows,in the information age, there is no Sollen. There is instead a pure facticity.There may be an ethics; but there is no Sollen. There is a flattened and bruteimmanence of the ‘is’. Simmel’s core value in an age of societalization was,as we saw, life, or to be precise ‘ Mehr-Leben’, that is life struggling ever toheighten life. Mehr-Leben, as we saw above, is difference itself. Difference

takes a different form in the information age. If the media age is character-ized by culture-at-a-distance, then difference itself becomes difference-at-a-distance. The core value of mediatization is thus captured less in anykind of struggle than in what the Situationists called ‘dérive’ and Deleuzeand Guattari called ‘lines of flight’: in Antonio Negri’s politics of escapefrom the factory. These core values are the essence, the an-sich of mediati-zation. What about the für-sich, or instrumental rationality? For Simmel,when a product is manufactured in industry it is a form. If the an-sich issubstance, the fur-sich is form. In Simmel’s age of industrial capitalism and

societalization, this form is the commodity, or exchange-value. In the infor-mation age we have sign-value. Sign-value, in Baudrillard’s sense, is, notthe an-sich, but the für-sich of mediatization. Sign-value thus has to do withthe reproduction of the global mediascape. In the information age, differ-ence as vitalist substance is here transformed into dead form. Puissance istransformed into pouvoir. But what sort of form is at stake in the new modesof media domination? Media domination yields a shift from the externallycausing power of mechanistic form, to power that is wielded through self-causing, cybernetic forms. Self-cause entails not just outward cause, but aninward flexion. The result is that power as form becomes power as in-form.This power of the in-form is at the same time immaterial power.

Marx spoke of a labour process and a process of capital accumulation.The labour process is somehow frictional and concrete. The accumulationprocess is smooth and abstract. The labour process has to do with substance,with flux. The accumulation process has to do with flow. The externalized









flows of the information society are already abstract – information, com-munication, finance flows; flows of technology, media, immigrants, evendesire or libido. Is contemporary mediatized politics about transformingflow into flux? Are tomorrow’s politics about transformation of the value-

dissolution of flow into the Wertdifferenz of flux? Information is constitutivelyand already in-form. But it is also already abstract, immaterial. The questionis what kind of forms and what kind of flux are at stake? What kind of formsand what kind of life? Labour is a process. Life is a process. ‘ Prozess’ is aword that Simmel used often in regard to life. So Wertsubstanz as labour or life is a question of process. But information is a flow, not a process. Moneyflows. Money is not a process.

Simmel speaks of flux and not flow. Flux is a tension, it is intrinsicallystruggling and conflictual. Simmel’s originary intersubjectivity comprises

such flux. In the information order there is a generalized externalization of process, of flux of flow, and indeed the nervous system onto, as McLuhanhad it, the global networks of information and communication. And it is themedia that channel this flow. The media are, at the same time, socio-technical systems. Mediatization is this collapse of form into technology.Technology in Simmel’s age had to do mainly with means of production.These are means that are not forms. Unlike the value-form or money or thecommodity, they do not function in sense-making. They function in produc-tion. Technology in our age is a matter of means of communication. Our

machines are communication-machines. Flow is Strom; Fluß, to flow is alsorinnen. But flux has to do with electricity with ‘ ständiger Wechsel, dauerndeVeränderung’. Flux is not smooth. For example, in the Lebensanschauung,Simmel speaks of ‘die ewig fortströmended Reihen der Inhalte oder Prozesse’(1999c: 225).21 Flows are a lot smoother. The idea of life as flow seems morelike the smooth idea of will in Schopenhauer (Simmel, 1995: 308ff.). Flowis a-telic. It is not packed with tension, with élan vital. Flux is autotelic;flow is a-telic or heterotelic. So many of today’s global mobilities areheterotelic, determined by the likes of Microsoft and News Corporation.

Today’s neo-vitalism must convert this into an autotelic register. Today’s neo-vitalism is an attempt to put flux back into the flows. To put flux into flowis to put reflexivity (flux is always reflexive) into globalization. Today’spolitical imperative may be in this sense to develop a global politics of fluxversus flow. Georg Simmel, in giving us a Lebenssoziologie of intersubjec-tive flux, might be one source for such a politics.

Notes

1. I do not think that self-causality (or self-organization) and teleology are the same

thing, although I think there are similarities between the notions that need to betaken seriously. I think that Simmel’s vitalist use of ‘teleology’ did not treat it asidentical to Aristotelian final cause, though Simmel must have thought that suchan idea of teleology is useful in thinking about vitalist self-overcoming. I suspectthat Lukács, who worked from a contrast of ‘teleology’ and ‘causality’, was lessconsistently vitalist than Simmel. Finally, below I give a sort of monadological









reading of Simmel’s vitalism. And Leibniz’s monad takes us away from Newtoniancausality and makes us again think seriously about Aristotelian substantial forms.What I am suggesting here is that these Aristotelian notions are useful in thinkingabout sociological vitalism and causality, and indeed reason, in sociological

vitalism. I am grateful to Joe Bleicher for calling the above to my attention. I amgrateful for Bleicher’s scholarship in his extensive comments on the third draft of this article.2. Of course Wiener and what Hayles (1999: 103) calls first-generation cybernet-ics, uses self-causation, which can be understood as steering in the form of feedbackloops, which constantly bring the system back to equilibrium. Vitalism presumesdisequilibriate systems. Vitalism presumes an ontology of becoming. Wiener’s self-causation seems to assume a normativity of stasis and hence being.3. I do not want strongly or necessarily to assert here that Heidegger is a dualist.The distinction between being and beings does not of course reproduce the Cartesian

distinction between res extensa and res cogitans. Indeed, for Heidegger being maynot be a substance at all. My point is only that there is a major cleavage betweentheories that presume ontological difference and those that presume an ontology of difference. Indeed, cultural theory today seems to be pretty much split down themiddle on this. To be a vitalist it is necessary to be in the second camp. And it isalso, I would think, necessary to work very closely via a notion of substance. Let methank an unnamed TCS referee for his/her discussion of this point.4. There is not sufficient space in this article for a detailed argument linkingvitalism and globalization. My point here was to make some suggestive connectionsin order to underscore the relevance of Simmel’s vitalist sociology to contemporarytimes.5. Josef Bleicher argues persuasively that such a priorism is incompatible withpositivism. He argues further that in the later Simmel, Leben is a quasi-ontologicala priori. This may be true of Simmel. Bleicher’s is a strongly neo-Kantian readingof the middle and late Simmel. In my Another Modernity, A Different Rationality, Itreated Simmel as having positivist, neo-Kantian and vitalist periods. In this articlemy main purpose is to provide some basic elements towards a vitalist sociologyrather than to give an interpretation of Simmel. For this reason I tend to think interms only of two Simmels – an earlier positivist and a later vitalist. Yet I think thatthere are certain convergences between positivism and neo-Kantianism. It is notuncommon for analysts to treat Durkheim, too, in terms of an a priorism, in termsof the condition of possibility of society – and see this as not inconsistent withDurkheim’s positivism. There are, it seems, two types of sociological positivism –corresponding to mechanistic and functional (evolutionary) causation discussed innote 7, below. Mechanistic causation does not work through a prioris. Functionalcausation may do so. For me, the most interesting sociological positivism – Spencer,early Simmel, early Durkheim, Parsons and maybe even the late Marx – worksthrough functional causation and a certain a priorism. In for example Paul Hirst’sreading of Marx, ideological and political structures were conditions of possibilityof capital accumulation. Yet vitalism must break fully with a priorism. WhereSimmel speaks of Leben as an ontological a priori, Simmel is not fully vitalist. Invitalism, Leben is generative: it is not a condition of possibility.6. Talcott Parsons’s later work was influenced by Wiener’s cybernetics. At this pointSpencerian natural selection is displaced by Wiener’s feedback loops. Homeostasisis at centre-stage. This is a move by Parsons to sophisticated neo-Darwinism. It is









not a move to vitalism. Indeed Hayles’s (1999) description of first-, second- andthird-generation cybernetics, and Hayles’s assumptions are all neo-Darwinian. Allthis need not detract from the singular importance of Hayles’s work.7. Josef Bleicher in his very insightful comments on this article argues correctly that

I insufficiently distinguish between functional causation and vitalist causality. I amnot a Darwin scholar, so my points remain at a schematic level. Yet I surely want todistinguish between (1) Newtonian causality, (2) Darwinian or functional causalityand (3) vitalist causality. The distinction between (2) and (3) is also the distinctionbetween evolution and creative evolution. In functional causality it is the system’senvironment that selects system attributes. Yet the system must somehow generatethese attributes. Hence functional (evolutionary) causation has an element of self-generation that mechanistic causality lacks. Yet functional causality is somehowbasically extensive, whereas vitalist causality is intensive. Further, in functionalcausality what is being caused is something like a species, whereas in vitalist causal-

ity it is an individual that is being caused. That is, functional causality will talkabout advanced capitalist societies whereas vitalism will speak of a particular advanced capitalist society. All three types of causality are important types of socio-logical causation. Indeed they may be the three types of sociological causation. It isbeyond the scope of this article to take these reflections further.8. This idea of life seems perhaps as much a question of disorder as of self-organizing systems. In the question: how is society possible? – which is a neo-Kantian reworking of positivism – the fear is of total anarchy. Simmel’s vitalism wasnever as all-encompassing as Tarde’s or even Nietzsche’s. It was always a bit morehumanist. In affirming life with Simmel we are looking at flux as much as self-

organizing monads. Contemporary vitalism seems to have these two poles. InDeleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, for example, life is conceived primarily as fluxor desire. In, say, Prigogine and Stengers’s Order out of Chaos (1984), life is pri-marily self-organizing monads. Simmel of course, as we see below, also has a strongnotion of life as form and not just life as substance. Indeed, there are two types of forms in Simmel, monadological (as we shall see) and atomistic; although he speaksmuch more of atomistic forms than monadological ones.9. Josef Bleicher insightfully notes that Simmel’s Moralwissenschaft is indeed ascience of morals more than it is a moral or ethical doctrine. Simmel, Bleicher observes, took the idea of Moralwissenschaft from Dilthey, who himself took it from

J.S. Mill’s moral science. For the Neo-Kantians this Moralwissenschaft had alsobecome the Geistes- or Kulturwissenschaften. Dilthey and Simmel both, Bleicher argues, move from such a neo-Kantianism to a focus on life. Bleicher also arguesthat there was a vitalist strain in Simmel even in his middle period. This articleagrees. Bleicher and this article think that Simmel’s life-long preoccupation withGoethe was very much vitalist. Bleicher argues that this is a hermeneutic readingof life. I think that this is so for Dilthey. But it is much less so for Simmel.Hermeneutics and phenomenology are very closely linked. And this article wantsto develop a notion of vitalism that stands rather in opposition to phenomenology.In phenomenology, the gaze or attitude of the subject throws light on and into the

object. In vitalism, the object already has its own light. In Goethe’s notion of colour,the object (in opposition to the object in Renaissance perspective) too seems topossess its own light. Vitalism in cultural and social theory, it seems to me, doeshave a concern with value. Though I think it breaks with notions of judgement. Italso is not at all primarily a morality or an ethics. It is profoundly anti-Kantian.









Values and norms in vitalism are important for their very facticity rather than aspart of ethical or moral discourse. Because of the path dependency of doubly open(i.e. reflexive and operationally open) vitalist social systems, facticity is of theutmost importance in making practical interventions in social life. This facticity,

however, is not at all identical with that of Durkheimian social facts. Durkheim’sfacts are inscribed in subject–object thinking and have in this sense light thrownupon them by the observer. Vitalist facts are already alive: they contain their ownlight. They are less objects than quasi-objects.10. At stake here is always, of course, reproductive functionality, because evolu-tionism – perhaps creative evolutionism too – always has not somatic cells at centre-stage, but instead germ cells.11. This is very hard to translate. It suggests a self that is process. And this processis of a sort of chronic revolution of this self as process, through a reaching out andabove that is at the same time a reflexive inward movement.

12. The point I am trying to make here is that vitalist morality/ethics/value is atthe same time more ontological and psychological than Kantian ethics. In Kant’ssecond critique the moral imperative is understood in terms of autonomous and notheteronomous legislation. Yet it is still legislation and, in this sense, ‘external’ tothe individual. In its a priorism, it is the condition of possibility of moral actionand in this sense also external. Vitalism for me has no sense unless it is definedagainst Kant and phenomenology. Where Simmel is Kantian or phenomenologicalhe is not vitalist.13. Husserl in the Origins of Geometry traced the Euclidian doctrine as startingout in a logic of means. Heidegger’s in Die Frage nach der Technik spoke aboutabstract means in his idea of Gestell, while in Being and Time he spoke of concretemeans in the idea of the tool and Zuhandenheit. Also Marx’s means of productionare on the one side abstract as exchange-value and on the other concrete as use-value. Simmel of course spoke at length of concrete objects too in his Philosophiedes Geldes.

14. The standard argument, with which I agree, is very much that the early Simmelwas a Spencerian positivist and the late Simmel a Lebensphilosopher. Simmel’s Money and his Soziologie come from his middle period. So does his Schopenhauerand Nietzsche (1995). The Soziologie seems to be basically positivist; Schopenhauer

and Nietzsche is for me very lebensphilosophisch. Simmel’s Money seems to beneither hare nor hound and, in that sense, is perhaps the most singular of his works.15. What I mean here is life as social substance. My point is that there are twonotions of the social in Simmel. One as form, which is constraining and life-destroying, the other as substance.16. ‘Wave-like rhythm of effective life-process’.17. ‘ Inhalt, und gleischsam die Materie der Vergesellschaftung; diese Stoffe mitdenen das Leben sich füllt, Motivierungen die treiben.’18. ‘ “Gesellschaft” an-ihr’ – and the scare quotes around Gesellschaft are Simmel’s– is not of course literally translatable as social substance. Literally it is ‘ “society”-

in-itself’. I think Simmel puts the scare quotes on Gesellschaft because he does notwant us to read it as social form. Social form would of course be not an ‘in-itself’,but a positivistic and constraining ‘for-us’. I am happy if the translation remains‘society-in-itself’, yet readers should be aware that by this Simmel means socialsubstance, or the social as life.









19. Here again at stake are Varela’s first-person truths (see also Obrist, 2004).Durkheim and Kant give us third-person truths. Varela, however, like NiklasLuhmann, would deny that these entail relativism or the privileging of subjectivityper se.

20. Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘body without organs’ is perhaps such an unextendedbody. It is the body as intensive.21. ‘The eternally forward-coursing succession of contents or processes.’ This canof course also be read as a smoother flowing of a stream. Yet Simmel does followNietzsche in understanding ‘ Mehr-Leben’ in terms of tension and discomfort andabrasive processes. Indeed, for Leibniz, the subject is substance, and the subjectcontains in itself its predicates. These predicates can be understood as a series of events. If these events are understood in the above-described Nietzschean/Simmelian sense of Mehr-Leben, then indeed substances are in flux. The same wouldhold for social substances like societies, if they are to be doubly open systems. The

same might hold for the ‘world-system’.

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Scott Lash took his PhD in Sociology from the London School of Econom-ics in Great Britain. He is now Professor of Sociology and Director of theCentre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London.His most recent books are Critique of Information (London: Sage, 2002) and Another Modernity, A Different Rationality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). Gold-smiths’ Centre for Cultural Studies is an ‘antidisciplinary’ centre with a PhDprogramme and MA programmes in Cultural Studies, Interactive Media andPost-colonial Studies. Students often present a combination of text and prac-tical work. We specialize in theory–practice-linked research. Our projectshave also a practical outcome as we work with teams of artists, curators,architects, designers and media producers.


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