SocioAesthetics: A symposium on aesthetics, culture and social life

Copenhagen, Denmark. August 23-25, 2009.

Sub specie aeternitatis:

The Socio-Aesthetics of Snapshots, from Georg Simmel to Jeff Wall
Thomas M. Kemple
University of British Columbia
Department of Sociology
6303 N. W. Marine Drive
Vancouver, B. C. V6T 1Z1
CANADA

ABSTRACT (short version)

This essay expands upon Georg Simmels unique use of the sociological
allegory his experimental narratives and lyrical snapshots that exceed the repertoire of
sociological types (the stranger, the metropolitan type, the prostitute, the pauper,
the miser, and so on) for which his work is best known. Not only does he narrate
imaginative stories with a sociological moral; he also composes aphorisms, sketches
object lessons (Denkbilder), and epigrammatic texts in order to articulate socio-aesthetic
insights. My aim is to outline the theoretical and methodological importance of this
innovative literary style with special attention to the series of pieces Simmel published
under the title Momentbilder specie aeternitatis (which might roughly be translated
snapshots under the aspect of eternity) and to particular works by Vancouver
photographer Jeff Wall. I argue that Walls method extends Simmels by addressing the
atypicality and eventfulness of image-making. In challenging conventional ideas
about the photograph as a prosthetic extension of vision and of text as a discursive
representation of reality, each is especially concerned with the experiential and ideal
dimensions of verbal and visual expression.

EXTENDED ABSTRACT

Sociability is an art form, and social life has an irreducible aesthetic dimension.
This apparently simple thesis is the starting point for the project of a sociological
aesthetics inaugurated by Georg Simmel at the end of the nineteenth century:
The essence of aesthetic contemplation and interpretation for us consists in the
following: What is unique emphasizes what is typical, what is accidental appears
as normal, and the superficial and fleeting stands for what is essential and basic
Every point contains within itself the potential of being redeemed to absolute
aesthetic importance. To the adequately trained eye the totality of beauty, the
complete meaning of the world as a whole, radiates from every single point
(Simmel, 1968 [1896]: 69).

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The contradictions of contemporary experience are epitomized in modernist art-forms
with their emphasis on the accelerated perception and representation of distance,
abstraction, and sublimation. But modern society is not only analogous to art in its
attention to the style, artifice and form of symbolic interaction and techniques of self-
presentation. Art does not just satisfy a desire for catharsis, ornamentation, and ideal
beauty insofar as the experience of modernity itself must itself be expressed and
comprehended in aesthetic terms (de la Fuente 2008; Kemple 2009).
In a short excursus spliced into the first chapter of his great masterpiece of 1908,
Soziologie: Untersuchungen ber die Formen der Vergesellschaftung [Sociology:
Inquiries on the Forms of Sociation], Simmel asks: How is Society Possible? His
answer outlines a set of axes of sociability -- conditions under which a social world
becomes practicable and conceivable -- which also constitute thresholds of alterity -- the
liminal frontiers beyond which actions are taken over by others or through which
identities are transformed (Kemple 2007). These sociological a prioris are related to
one another not only pragmatically as dimensions of actual experience, but also
systematically as regulative ideals delimiting social fields. The first a priori combines the
commonsense view and aesthetic perspective regarding how social life initially coheres at
some point along the line between the primordial perceptual polarities of generality and
uniqueness:
We conceive of each man and this is a fact which has a specific effect upon our
practical behaviour toward him as being the human type which is suggested by
his individuality. We think of him in terms not only of his singularity but also in
terms of a general category (1971 [1908a]: 10).
Our relations with others are not given all at once, but are more or less skillfully pieced
together through a kind of perceptual, pragmatic, and even poetic bricolage, a practice
of life which is based on those modifications and supplementations, on the transformation
of the given fragments into the generality of a type. But the aim of this process is not
necessarily to conceive the completeness of the ideal personality. Rather, the singularity
of a lover or a friend or the stereotype of the prostitute or the Jew, for example, always
emerges out of a mixture of taken-for-granted categories with the shock of the new and
the experience of the unexpected.
The problem of sociation, of understanding how unique individuals are
differentiated and integrated generic human groupings, is also an aesthetic endeavour. In
the modern age, this task often involves accentuating the singularity of human and non-
human nature against social forces which threaten to homogenize and or level them
(Simmel 1997 [1908]). Simmels own style of sociological writing is remarkable for the
variety of genres he employs to display and perform these tensions. In addition to well
crafted books, systematic treatises, and scholarly essays which portray a repertoire of
standard sociological types -- the stranger, the citydweller, the prostitute, the pauper, the
miser, and so on --, he also experiments with shorter and more fragmented genres:
excurses, aphorisms, poems, fairy tales, object sketches, and short epigrammatic writings.
The latter include a series of eight pieces published between 1899 and 1903 in the avant-
garde Illustrated Munich Weekly for Art and Life Der Jugend under the title
Momentbilder sub specie aeternitatis(Rammstedt 1991). These often strange and vivid
snapshots of everyday and cultural life in the modern world attempt to recover an ideal
and even absolute perspective on the contingent and chaotic experience of the here and

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now. Simmel seeks to unite the fugitive insights which the moderns have into their
fleeing impressions of the present with the eternal wisdom of the ancients which Spinoza
placed under the divine light of reason:
Whatever the mind understands under a species of eternity [sub species
aeternitatis], it understands not from the fact that it conceives the bodys present
actual existence, but from the fact that it conceives the bodys essence under a
species of eternity (Spinoza 1994 [1667]: 174; Book V, Proposition 29).
One of the Momentbilder which appeared in Der Jugend on April 24, 1901 (Simmel
2004), for instance, reports on a conversation he overheard between well-fed people
after a rich meal about the old adage that money alone makes one happy. Almost
instantaneously they divide themselves between those who argue that money is the
greatest of all culture-carriers and others who see money as a slave of the passions: At
once the miracle of banality became clear to me he writes: opposing standpoints only
need to be elevated to the heights of the absolute in order to be defended with equal
vehemence, and ultimately they cancel one another out. The moral which Simmel draws
from the anecdote goes beyond the aristocratic musing about whether owning things can
bring happiness to consider the equally plausible plebian perspective that beholding the
eternal aspect of things which one cannot possess might also bring happiness.
Although Simmels Momentbilder are relatively self-contained sketches
produced during a four year intermezzo early on in his career, they also prefigure the
array of Denkbilder which he developed at various points in his later work. These
thought-images take ordinary objects, events, or situations as a point of reference for
interrogating and reflecting on the perennial symbols or enduring ideas they embody. For
example, the bridge and the door do not just provide empirical or allegorical illustrations
of philosophical themes and theoretical problems worked out elsewhere. They also
instantiate broader processes of cultural objectification and social subjectification. These
two great technical achievements in the history of human ingenuity reveal and articulate
elemental features of the human condition: in the immediate as well as the symbolic
sense, in the corporeal as well as the spiritual sense, we are at any moment those who
separate the connected or connect the separate (Simmel, 1997 [1909]: 171). From the
standpoint of everyday experience, the door is a threshold for negotiating intimacy and
anonymity, a material boundary between public and private domains, and a feature of
domestically regulated and humanly habitable space. The bridge likewise reveals the
ordinary limits and separations of social and natural realms a town and a river, a road
and an embankment but at the time it connects and gathers them within a common form
of life. From the perspective of eternity sub specie aeternitatis we can see that the
door enables formless limitation to take shape while also providing a threshold for
stepping out of this limitation into freedom, and that the bridge both connects and
separates points in space to allow a singular living entity to reach out over itself
[hinausgreifen ber sich selbst] (Simmel 1971 [1908b]). The bridge and door expose an
essential aspect of human being: its capacity as the bordering creature whose situated
embodiment shapes and is shaped in every dimension by the spatial and temporal
boundaries of existence (1997 [1909]: 174).
Although Simmels snapshots of everyday life and ordinary objects were
produced before the technological innovations which facilitated the widespread use of
photography, in many ways they can be seen to prefigure and intersect with the

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sociological and aesthetic concerns of contemporary photographer Jeff Wall. Their ideas
and methods converge at the point where Walls backward gaze into a pictorial tradition
which stretches from Valesquez and Poussin to Delacroix and Manet meets Simmels
forward looking speculations into such contemporary artistic movements as naturalism,
impressionism, symbolism, expressionism, and art nouveau. Each is concerned to
address the atypicality and eventfulness of words and images: Wall by challenging
conventional ideas about photography as a prosthetic extension of vision and Simmel by
playing with generic forms which question the notion of texts as discursive representa-
tions of reality. In The Bridge (1980, see the Appendix below), Wall stretches the
motifs of panoramic landscape painting to provide a sprawling documentary portrait of a
cityscape devoid of picturesque, emotional, or dramatic features. The eye-work of the
viewer -- in noticing houses, streets, people, cars, clouds, smoke and a bridge stretching
into an ill-defined horizon -- is obliged follow the mechanical work of the camera in
framing and providing perspective on the scene, and even the labour of landscaping and
cityscaping itself. In Doorpusher (1984) Wall retraces the path back from topology to
typology by dramatizing the inside/outside character of liminal space through the
depiction of an ambiguous figure who seems to be caught in a transitional moment
between criminality and heroism, dereliction and civic-mindedness (see the Appendix).
When we note that this photograph also plays on the conventions of the history of
painting not the great masters in this case, but the popular pictures of Jesus Knocking
at the Door then the image projects something of the iconic theatricality which can
often be glimpsed in the minute gestures of ordinary life (Wall, in Vischer and Naef
2005: 294-295). Taken together, these snapshots do not just offer particular illustrations
of the generic bridge and door as much as they perform and re-enact the making and
mediation of borders through the social arts of photography itself: first, in separating and
framing distinct elements from within the continuous flow and composite unity of natural
and social events, and then by creatively reconfiguring these parts within a new totality
endowed with figural, abstract, or even emotional significance (Simmel 1994 [1902]).
I consider these snapshots by Wall and Simmel sociological allegories in the
sense that they experiment with and combine the traditions of both sociological thought
and allegorical narrative in innovative ways. Just as sociology first emerged as a kind of
third culture between the literary arts and the empirical sciences, so allegory occupies a
kind of intermediate space between the figurative and descriptive, the metaphorical and
literal tasks of communication (Clifford 1988; De Man 1979). Allegories are typically
said to operate on two mutually reinforcing levels of denotation or literal meaning and of
connotation or symbolic significance. Each of these levels or registers must cohere
within a specific time and place of understanding, however remote or near, fantastic or
real they may seem. But when we also consider how an image or a narrative might be re-
cited in a different cultural setting or taken up again in another time period beyond its
original expression or reception, we are confronted with yet a third dimension of
allegorical meaning at the level of performative signification. Here the general sense
conveyed at the metaphorical or symbolic level is applied, or rather respecified in a
new frame of reference (Barthes 1985: 47-58). This exorbitant or somehow obtuse third
meaning is the semantic medium and pragmatic vehicle by which the aesthetics of social
life becomes actual, and through which the sociology of art can begin to entertain the
possibility of reading, writing, thinking and seeing otherwise.

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De la Fuente, Eduardo (2008) The Art of Social Forms and the Forms of Art: The
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De Man, Paul (1979) Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche,

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Experience [1908b]. In Georg Simmel on Individuality and Social Forms. Donald N.
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Appendix

Jeff Wall, The Bridge 1980

Transparency in lightbox
60.5cm x 228.6cm

Jeff Wall, Doorpusher 1984

Transparency in lightbox
249 cm x 122 cm