Social Aesthetics

This chapter presents Simmel’s social aesthetics, wrongly considered as one of the vaguest aspects of his thought. The ‘Excursus on the Sociology of Sense Impressions’ is considered as the starting point of Simmel’s reflection, which suggests that aisthesis is the point of departure for any analysis of the social. The idea of a ‘sensory a priori’ of social life can be developed both from an anthropological and from a historical-sociological point of view. In the first direction, we analyse the role that the senses play mediating and qualifying social interactions, giving them a particular ‘aesthetic impression’. This is what Simmel defines, using an explicitly aesthetic lexicon, as the ‘color’ (Färbung) of a relationship, its specific sensorial and emotional totality (Stimmung, Atmosphäre) and what he defines as its ‘style’, its specific formal constitution. The sensory dimension of social recognition is illustrated by the example particularly dear to Simmel of olfactory disgust. In the second direction, the historical constitution of the modern ‘sensorium’ is analysed. The peculiar aesthetic environment of modernity is exemplarily represented by the metropolis and by the new forms of urban experience: the organisation of perception around the primacy of sight, hyperesthesia, shock, fashion, advertising, and conspicuous consumption, the rise of qualitative individualism, the multiplication and differentiation of lifestyles, the reciprocity between aesthetic and economic values. The chapter ends by demonstrating the deep consistency of Simmel’s social aesthetics and its interest in the understanding of some fundamental dynamics of contemporary society, such as marketing, consumerism, and social media.