Elizabeth S Goodstein

Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Elizabeth S. Goodstein is Professor of Liberal Arts at Emory University and the author of the award-winning Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford, 2005).

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 384
• Erscheinungstermin: 4. Januar 2017
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 257mm x 178mm x 25mm
• Gewicht: 839g
• ISBN-13: 9780804798365
• ISBN-10: 0804798362
• Artikelnr.: 45001750

Autorenporträt

Elizabeth S. Goodstein is Professor of Liberal Arts at Emory University and the author of the award-winning Experience without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity (Stanford, 2005).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Prologue: Modernist Philosophy and the History of Theory
chapter abstract
The Prologue sets out the challenge of understanding a thinker who does not
fit comfortably into disciplinary categories, presenting Simmel, who was
known as a sociologist, a neo-Kantian, and a philosopher of life, as a
liminal thinker whose fame and subsequent marginalization index a
theoretically significant illegibility. Embracing this marginality and
foregrounding the complexity and multiplicity of his oeuvre, it argues, can
render Simmel's historical and theoretical significance visible, helping
establish critical perspective on contemporary modes of thought by exposing
the intertwined genealogies of the academic disciplines of philosophy and
sociology and of the metadisciplinary divisions between the humanities and
natural and social sciences. Approaching Simmel as modernist philosopher
suggests a strategy for rereading the intellectual history of the twentieth
century that recognizes his inter- and trans-disciplinary theoretical
contributions even as it identifies unrealized possibilities in the liminal
space before the modern disciplinary ordering of inquiry was naturalized.
1Introduction: Simmel's Modernity
chapter abstract
Drawing on primary sources that attest to Simmel's wide-ranging impact on
modernist cultural and intellectual life, but also to his checkered
academic career, Chapter 1 situates the world-famous philosopher,
sociologist, and public intellectual in the historical and cultural milieu
of fin-de-siècle Berlin. It introduces the problem of disciplinarity:
Simmel's contributions to social science were initially regarded as
philosophical innovations, and his self-understanding as a thinker changed
over time. Thinking back beyond the naturalized bifurcation of reflection
on social and cultural life into humanistic and social scientific
disciplines by exploring the meaning of Simmel's shifting self-definition
can disclose new resources for cultural theory. Although Simmel's
conceptual and methodological role in helping reframe the philosophical
inheritance goes largely unrecognized today, terms and concepts with
important histories in twentieth-century theory-including constellation,
condensation, configuration, form of life, and life-world-may be traced to
his work.
2Simmel as Classic: Representation and the Rhetoric of Disciplinarity
chapter abstract
Exploring the relations between Simmel's evolving self-understanding and
the paradigm shift that brought the modern social sciences into being, this
chapter focuses on the relativistic or perspectivist rethinking of concepts
underpinning his mature, modernist approach to philosophizing. Presenting
Simmel as a mostly forgotten founding father of modern cultural and
critical theory whose work anticipated and influenced subsequent thinkers
in many different fields, it begins a critical genealogy of his
canonization that uncovers the distorting effects of Simmel's own
self-representations. Arguing that he has been systematically
misrepresented as an unsystematic thinker through his reception as a
sociologist, it places him in the dialectical philosophical tradition,
foregrounding Simmel's distinctive conception of form and underlining the
importance of the focus on "super-individual" cultural and linguistic
formations he inherited from Lazarus and Steinthal's Völkerpsychologie
(cultural psychology).
3Memory/Legacy: Georg Simmel as (Mostly) Forgotten Founding Father
chapter abstract
This chapter considers how Simmel has been represented and read into the
disciplinary canon and history of sociology. Centered on a close
examination of the American reception that played a decisive role in
establishing, but also marginalizing Simmel as a canonical sociologist, it
foregrounds the repeated failures of efforts to overcome the clichés and
misrepresentations that have shaped his reception. The hermeneutically
questionable reading practices that have facilitated the entry of Simmel's
ideas into social science have simultaneously rendered them fertile and
obscured the larger philosophical horizons of his thinking. The combination
of institutional and disciplinary liminality during his lifetime and a
reception marked by ambivalence is historically and theoretically
significant: Simmel's apparent illegibility, the chapter argues, can become
a site for reflection on constitutive features of the modern disciplinary
imaginary that do not form part of methodological self-consciousness and
thereby disclose new theoretical resources for today.
4Style as Substance: Simmel's Modernism and the Disciplinary Imaginary
chapter abstract
This chapter begins (re)reading key Simmelian texts for still-urgent
theoretical and methodological concerns, presenting a work considered the
first sociology of modernity, his 1900 Philosophy of Money, as a
masterpiece of modernist philosophy and the twentieth century's most
significant mostly unread theoretical text. Arguing that its highly
selective reception in sociology has obscured the philosophical import of
Simmel's approach to everyday social and cultural phenomena, it foregrounds
the philosophical and methodological ambition of the work to render visible
the contours of an influential modernist style of thought that helped
reorient philosophy toward historically and culturally situated, lived
experience. The chapter concludes with an examination of Simmel's
rethinking of the concepts of culture and spirit, underlining the
philosophical significance of the famous discussion of "The Style of Life"
that concludes a work that "aspires to be a philosophy of historical and
social life as a whole."
5Performing Relativity: Money and Modernist Philosophy
chapter abstract
Framed by a close reading of the Preface to the Philosophy of Money, this
chapter interrogates the tensions between Simmel's methodological ambition
and his avowed relativism. Tracing how the project initially conceived as a
"psychology of money" took on philosophical contours, it examines how
thinking money led Simmel to redefine his disciplinary identity. It then
brings the Philosophy of Money's frequently misconstrued effort to create a
"new story beneath historical materialism" into conversation with Simmel's
conception of the value-, meaning-, and knowledge-generating "cultural
process" in and through which, on his post-Nietzschean view, subjectivity
and objectivity evolve. Finally, the chapter examines his phenomenological
method for illuminating the contradictory multiplicity of (historical,
spiritual, cultural) life through a systematic use of "phenomenal series"
or "arrays of appearances" to perform a modernist affirmation of the
complexity and contradiction of lived experience from the perspective of a
cogent metaphysical relativism.
6Disciplining the Philosophy of Money
chapter abstract
Understanding Simmel's relativism as modernist method, this chapter
considers how the Philosophy of Money destabilizes what have since become
very real boundaries between philosophy and social science. It begins by
examining early responses to the work, foregrounding the differential
reactions to a modernist mode of theorizing that intervenes in multiple
discourses without becoming part of the disciplines that generate them,
then considers how the disciplining of Simmel's work as a sociological
classic legitimates the very practices of selective reading through which
his methodological and theoretical contributions are obscured. Simmel's
self-reflexive attempt to illuminate the phenomenon of signification as a
dimension of human (collective and individual) life remains liminal for
both sociology and philosophy today. Presenting that liminality as a
symptom of lacunae constitutive for the modern disciplinary imaginary as a
whole, this chapter sets the stage for a return to Simmel's mature
Sociology in Part III.
7Thinking Liminality, Rethinking Disciplinarity
chapter abstract
This chapter returns to Simmel's disciplinary identity from the perspective
of the history of philosophy, attempting to understand a mode of theorizing
not just interdisciplinary but preceding, thematizing, and opposing the
disciplining of thinking in the early twentieth century. Taking up "the
problem of sociology," then returning once again to the Philosophy of Money
to consider the account of sciences and disciplines, norms and laws
developed there, it asks how the intellectual-cultural and institutional
formation of inquiry shapes what can be thought. After foregrounding
Simmel's insistence that the cultural-intellectual configurations that
organize our modes of inquiry must be grasped in their contingency and
specificity, that we need to rethink conceptual consistency by developing
"a new concept of cohesion" that refigures thinking about foundations and
values in a relativist (historicist, culturalist) key, it returns to
Simmel's highly self-reflexive conception of disciplinarity as a
historically and culturally contingent formation.
8The Stranger and the Sociological Imagination
chapter abstract
This chapter returns to the problem of Simmel's disciplinarity to explore
the theoretical potential of his marginality. Examining how his mature
reformulation of the "problem of sociology" resituates the figure of the
stranger in the dialectical philosophical tradition, it demonstrates that
the pervasive troping of Simmel as the stranger he theorized has a
symptomatic quality that casts light on the significance of history for
theory. Only in light of the ambition and accomplishment of the Philosophy
of Money, it argues, do the disciplinary and meta-disciplinary
contributions of the Sociology become legible. Here, too, Simmel's
modernist reimagining of conceptual consistency is conveyed performatively,
via phenomenological series that refigure thinking in a relativist
(historicist, culturalist) key. Disclosing new theoretical perspectives on
difference and strangeness in (theorizing) culture and society, Simmel's
modernist writing transgresses oppositions between humanistic and social
scientific, metaphysical and empirical, that are constitutive for the
contemporary disciplinary imaginary.
Epilogue: Georg Simmel as Modernist Philosopher
chapter abstract
As a mature thinker and public intellectual, Simmel strove to foster
"philosophical culture" in the face of increasing disciplinary
specialization and the professionalization of thought itself in the
emergent modern research university. His late work, though frequently
misconstrued as turning from sociology to a metaphysical philosophy of
life, is continuous with the effort to modernize philosophy in the
Philosophy of Money. Considering Simmel's time in Strasbourg and the impact
of World War I on his thought and life, the Epilogue briefly discusses his
influential late essays on culture and his final masterwork, the View of
Life, underlining the significance of his subsequent virtual erasure from
intellectual history. Letters written in the weeks before his death attest
to Simmel's own insight into the untimeliness of his thought and suggest
that his modernist revisioning of the very oldest aims of philosophy and
philosophizing may provide a model for theoretical innovation today.