La chiave e il martello: vita e tragedia degli oggetti culturali nella teoria sociologica di Georg Simmel

Abstract

The key and the hammer: life and tragedy of cultural objects in the sociological theory of Georg Simmel. Once Georg Simmel lectured in Berlin that sociology, as a new discipline amongst humanites, must be compared to a “new key for old masters” or to a “new hammer for old walnuts”. Sociology has a specific task: it explores the life of interactions, not only in regard to the human relationships, but extending this principle to the dynamics of the processes amongst subjects and objects. Firstly, the present essay aims to explore the sociological theory of Georg Simmel toward cultural objects, addressing how strong the seeming pretext of analyzing specific objects (vase loop, frame, chair, clothes, etc.) through metaphors actually represents the need to reconsider the world of objects from a strictly sociological perspective. The order of cultural objects must be interpreted through the codification and understanding of the social order. Secondly, for Simmel the achievement of modernity consists of the “becoming- society” of the world (of cultural objects). In other words, objects represent, trigger, and “irritate” social behaviors, and they operate as instruments of a shared and communal ritual. This peculiar order emerges into the intertwined triad of language (symbolic sphere), culture (value sphere) and social order (intersubjective sphere): within this frame any subject and object might assume its own meaning due to the order given by a unifing and organizing form.

Keywords

• simmel
• sociology of culture
• cultural objects
• tragedy of culture
• subject/object