The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory

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Simmel’s Dialectic of Form and Content in Recent

Work in Cultural Sociology

Omar Lizardo

To cite this article: Omar Lizardo (2019) Simmel’s Dialectic of Form and Content in Recent
Work in Cultural Sociology, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 94:2, 93-100, DOI:
10.1080/00168890.2019.1585664

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The Germanic Review, 94: 93–100, 2019
# 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0016-8890 print / 1930-6962 online
DOI: 10.1080/00168890.2019.1585664

Simmel’s Dialectic of Form and Content in

Recent Work in Cultural Sociology1

Omar Lizardo

The concept of “form,” and the associated problem of the relationship between
“forms” and “contents” is a central theme in Simmel’s overall work. This paper
shows that recent work in cultural sociology has taken a “Simmelian turn” in concep-
tualizing how cultural goods can serve as the primary engines of sociation in (post)-
modern societies. In this, they serve as the most common type of minimal formal
content featured in domains characterized by Simmelian sociability. At the same
time, there has been a renewed concern with rethinking the dynamics of cultural
spread diffusion and their link to cultural identity along Simmelian lines. Here, for-
mal features of cultural goods and consumption styles, such as their quantitative
spread, are transmuted into contentful forms, capable of performing semiotic work.

Keywords: Simmel; Sociability; Fashion; Duality; Forms

INTRODUCTION
he concept of “form,” and the associated problem of the relationship between “forms”
T and “contents” is arguably the most pivotal in Simmel’s overall thought.2 Yet the

Omar Lizardo is the LeRoy Neiman Term Chair Professor in the Department of Sociology at the
University of California, Los Angeles. His areas of research interest include the sociology of culture,
social theory, social networks, the sociology of emotion, social stratification, cognitive social sci-
ence, and organization theory. He is currently a member of the editorial advisory board of Social
Forces, Theory and Society, Poetics, Sociological Forum, Journal for the Theory of Social
Behaviour, and Journal of World- Systems Research; with Rory McVeigh and Sarah Mustillo, he is
one of the current coeditors of American Sociological Review.
1
Based on remarks first presented at “Interdisciplinary Simmel: A Conference” held on September
13-14, 2018 at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. Thanks to Daniel Silver,
Willi Goetschel, Natalia Canto Mila, Thomas Kemple, and Elizabeth Goodstein for useful questions
and suggestions.
2
Rudolph H. Weingartner, “Form and Content in Simmel’s Philosophy of Life,” in Essays on
Sociology, Philosophy, & Aesthetics, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 33–66.

93
94 THE GERMANIC REVIEW ♦ VOLUME 94, NUMBER 2 / 2019

extent to which Simmel can be thought of as a theorist of forms is a heavily contested

issue. For instance, the reception of Simmel as the initiator of a sort of “formal sociology”
was heavily conditioned by the piecemeal and incomplete importation and integration of
his work into early American sociology. The legacy was cemented in the 1970s when the
upstart scientific-intellectual movement around “social network analysis,” selected Simmel
as their core intellectual predecessor in the classical tradition, resulting in a distinct
“formalist” tradition in contemporary social network theory.3 It is now understood that this
“sociological” interpretation of Simmel represents a partial mono-disciplinary understand-
ing of his overall project at the very best.4
While Simmel deployed the idea of form in a multifaceted (and polysemous) way,5
there is no doubt that one of his key interests had to do with specifying the interrelation of
the formal and the “not-formal”; this last category was usually referred to by Simmel as
“content.”6 The notion of content, just like that of form, was also used to refer to an entire
panoply of phenomena, subsuming everything that was particular, time and place-bound,
and idiosyncratic, but also those things that were driven by concrete motives, interests
(whether “economic” or “ideal”), and practicality.7 Nevertheless, Simmel, as a neo-
Kantian, subscribed to the idea that there was no such thing as pure, raw contents. Instead,
all contents, economic, political, scientific, artistic, historical, and so forth presented them-
selves as already mediated via some formal framework, as this was a condition for their
apprehension as such.8 This applied in particular to the “social” forms created by people
as a vehicle to satisfy and further the wide variety of contents (e.g., psychical and motiv-
ational needs, interests, purposes, strivings) that took up their time and energy.9
This is indicated in his reflections on aesthetics, play, and especially sociability, out-
lined in Simmel’s classic essay “The Sociology of Sociability” (“Soziologie der
Geselligkeit”), the keynote address given at the first meeting of the German Sociological
Society.10 According to Simmel, there are social domains and sites of sociation in which
contents recede into the background, and where the predominance of the purely “formal”

3
Emily Erikson, “Formalist and Relationalist Theory in Social Network Analysis,” Sociological
Theory 31, no. 3 (2013): 219–42.
4
Elizabeth S. Goodstein, Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary (Stanford University
Press, 2017).
5
Donald N. Levine, “The Structure of Simmel’s Social Thought,” in Essays on Sociology,
Philosophy, & Aesthetics, ed. Kurt H. Wolff. (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 9–32.
6
Georg Simmel, “The Problem of Sociology,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science 6, no. 3 (1895): 414.
7
Georg Simmel, “The Sociology of Sociability,” The American Journal of Sociology 55, no. 3
(1949): 254–61.
8
Weingartner, “Form and Content in Simmel’s Philosophy of Life”; Georg Simmel, “How Is Society
Possible?,” The American Journal of Sociology 16, no. 3 (1910): 372–91; Georg Simmel, The View
of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays with Journal Aphorisms (University of Chicago Press, 2010), 15.
9
Simmel, “The Problem of Sociology.”
10
Simmel, “The Sociology of Sociability.”.
 LIZARDO ♦ SIMMEL'S DIALECTIC AND CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY 95

can be more easily observed. This made realms of social life characterized by sociability a
strategic site from which to observe the pure operation of forms.
This suggests that for Simmel, the form/content distinction was not a dualism;
instead, it was a duality.11 Form and content co-exist in the social world, as two sides of
the same coin. In some instances, however, the contentful side of a phenomenon may be
more apparent, while in other instances, the formal side comes to the fore more clearly. In
this respect, we can imagine the form/content distinction as representing partially inde-
pendent dimensions, which can be classified against one another. This is given in Table 1.
The diagonals of the table present the (empirically impossible) cases of pure (content-free)
forms or pure (unmediated) contents. The implication being that for Simmel, some of the
most important cases available for analysis and empirically operative in the world are
located in the off-diagonals of the table. In the upper-right, we have the case of a form that
manifests itself via a content. In order for this to happen the content needs to be trivial or
slight enough as to not overwhelm the form. We may call those formal contents. On the
lower-left, we have forms that due to their operation come to acquire the trappings of con-
tent. We may call those contentful forms.
The argument in what follows is that recent work in Cultural Sociology has con-
verged on this Simmelian-inspired classification in order to characterize its core phenom-
ena of interest. On the one hand, there has been a rethinking of the status of the products
of the artistic field and culture industries in contemporary societies as a particular type of
content, particularly suitable for fostering forms of sociation and interaction.12 What sort
of contents are these? The answer is that they meet the conditions of minimal contents
required to foster the most formal type of association, which Simmel referred to as soci-
ability; they play the role of formal contents. On the other hand, Simmel noted that cultural
products, manners, and styles were subject to all kinds of formal processes manifesting
themselves mainly via the numerical preponderance (or lack thereof). The idea here, exem-
plified in such phenomena as popularity-driven cascades and cultural “omnivorousness” is
that their very formal nature is transmuted into content as people come to attach particular
meanings based on their formal status;13 they are contentful forms.

11
Ronald L. Breiger, “The Duality of Persons and Groups,” Social Forces 53, no. 2 (1974): 181–90;
Levine, “The Structure of Simmel’s Social Thought.”
12
Claudio Benzecry and Randall Collins, “The High of Cultural Experience: Toward a
Microsociology of Cultural Consumption,” Sociological Theory 32, no. 4 (2014): 307–26; Paul
DiMaggio, “Classification in Art,” American Sociological Review 52, no. 4 (1987): 440–55; Omar
Lizardo, “Why ‘cultural Matters’ Matter: Culture Talk as the Mobilization of Cultural Capital in
Interaction,” Poetics 58 (2016): 1–17..
13
Stanley Lieberson, A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change (Yale
University Press, 2000); Lizardo, “Why ‘cultural Matters’ Matter: Culture Talk as the Mobilization
of Cultural Capital in Interaction”; Elena Obukhova, Ezra W. Zuckerman, and Jiayin Zhang, “When
Politics Froze Fashion: The Effect of the Cultural Revolution on Naming in Beijing,” The American
Journal of Sociology 120, no. 2 (2014): 555–83.
96 THE GERMANIC REVIEW ♦ VOLUME 94, NUMBER 2 / 2019

FORMAL CONTENTS: CULTURAL TASTE AND SOCIABILITY

Consider the following (reasonably common) scenario: Two people meet for the first time
in a context in which they are motivated to get acquainted with one another, e.g., a first
date, a mixer). This is a core example of the seemingly fleeting, microscopic form of soci-
ation that Simmel saw as the groundwork of larger forms of social life.14 What will they
talk about? Psychologists Peter Renfrow and Samuel Gosling15 asked themselves this
question while noting the fact that there was a dearth of empirical research on the topic.
This is surprising, given the importance of conversational content in conveying informa-
tion about individuals and in shaping the assumptions and impression they make on other
people. To answer this question, Renfrow and Gosling put sixty undergraduate students in
a situation where they were encouraged to get to know one another while interacting in an
online "chatroom" setting for about six weeks.
Half the participants were assigned to same-gender dyads, and half were assigned to
different-gender dyads. They were not given any specific guidance as to what to talk
about, simply being told to “talk about anything” they thought would facilitate their getting
to know one another. When Renfrow and Gosling coded the transcripts, they noted two
things. First, “cultural” topics (e.g., music, movies, sports) were predominant; second,
music towered over all other topics, with 58% of participants talking about music during
the first week. Conspicuous in their relative absence are such weighty topics as religion,
politics, and perhaps, not surprisingly for American college students, school. Why do such
topics as music and movies, the standard products of what such ambivalent Simmelian
epigones as Theodor Adorno derisively referred to as the culture industry,16 figure so
prominently in exploratory interaction among strangers and even in repeated interactions
among close friends?
The argument here is that the contents of mass culture may be many things, but the
main thing they are under conditions of postmodern abundance, is a kind of Simmelian
formal content that, rather than stultifying people or rendering them isolated and atomized,
provide the glue binding individuals, both in fleeting exploratory acts of sociation but also
in more crystalized relationships.17 The products of the culture industry have thus paradox-
ically acquired the status of the pre-eminent formal content in the current setting. The con-
nection between the seemingly trivial cultural contents of the popular arts and the
fomenting of sociability in (post)modern societies is a long-standing sociological observa-
tion; considering these contents as a limiting case of formal contents linking to the purest
form of association provides the answer. What is the elective affinity (if I may use a

14
Simmel, “The Problem of Sociology.”
15
Peter J. Rentfrow and Samuel D. Gosling, “Message in a Ballad: The Role of Music Preferences in
Interpersonal Perception,” Psychological Science 17, no. 3 (March 2006): 236–42.
16
Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (Routledge, 2005).
17
Lizardo, “Why ‘cultural Matters’ Matter: Culture Talk as the Mobilization of Cultural Capital in
Interaction”; Jennifer Schultz and Ronald L. Breiger, “The Strength of Weak Culture,” Poetics 38,
no. 6 (2010): 610–24.
 LIZARDO ♦ SIMMEL'S DIALECTIC AND CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY 97

Weberian turn of phrase) linking movies, music, and books (but not religion, politics, and
other “important matters”) to sociability in (post)modern societies?
There are several features of the phenomenon of sociability that make this connec-
tion natural. First, there is the issue of the purpose of the interaction. According to
Simmel, what makes sociability unique as the “play” (and thus the purest) form of (as)so-
ciation over the other forms linked to particular goals is the muting of those overt instru-
mental purposes as the reason for the initiation (or the continuation) of the interaction.
That is, for sociability to come off, neither party can perceive that the other as driven by
any ulterior motive other than the continuation of the interaction. All other interests,
whether “economic and ideal … warlike and erotic, religious and charitable”18 must be
left off the table. Interaction must occur for its own sake. As Simmel noted in his essay on
“Fashion” this means that “objectively determined subjects such as religious faith, scien-
tific interests, even socialism and individualism” are not suitable, because it is hard for
these contents to be “considered independent of the deeper human motives from which
they have risen.”19
It is perhaps not a coincidence that it is precisely the products of contemporary
popular art that are the closest to such formal contents in the contemporary setting; just
like there is a link between fashion and such contents as “clothing, social conduct,
amusements.”20 Simmel drew this “aesthetic analogy”21 himself in the essay, noting that
sociability and art (as well as play) shared a “common element” across their diverse con-
tents;22 “[s]ociability is, then, the play-form of association and is related to the content-
determined concreteness of association as art is related to reality.”23 In this last respect,
sociability is threatened from two sides; as already noted, from the side of “society” soci-
ability can be punctured if the usual instrumental purposes people normally come to asso-
ciate for end up intervening. This explains why “shop talk” or “work” is not suitable
content for sociability in contemporary settings.24
However, Simmel notes that sociability can be also be suffocated from the side of
the individual if things that are particular to each personality (e.g., “private” matters)
become the focus of conversation: “the most purely and deeply personal qualities [must]
be excluded from sociability. The most personal things—character, mood, and fate—have
thus no place in it”; sociability “stops short of the purely subjective and inward parts” of
the person.25 The playful cultural contents furnished by the modern culture industry have

18
Simmel, “The Sociology of Sociability,” 252.
19
Georg Simmel, “Fashion,” The American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 6 (1957): 544.
20
Ibid.
21
Eduardo de la Fuente, “The Art of Social Forms and the Social Forms of Art: The Sociology-
Aesthetics Nexus in Georg Simmel’s Thought,” Sociological Theory 26, no. 4 (2008): 344–62.
22
Simmel, “The Sociology of Sociability,” 252.
23
Ibid., 255.
24
Bonnie H. Erickson, “Culture, Class, and Connections,” American Journal of Sociology 102, no. 1
(1996): 217–51.
25
Simmel, “The Sociology of Sociability,” 256.
98 THE GERMANIC REVIEW ♦ VOLUME 94, NUMBER 2 / 2019

an advantage in this respect too. Performatively, revealing a taste (or a distaste) gives a
peek into the person without opening up the threatening (because “purely” personal) con-
tents, preserving the sociability bubble. Thus, reveling in tastes for music and movies,
allow people to communicate “personal” things that are not overwhelmingly personal, in
this respect meeting the countervailing criteria of acquiring mutual knowledge in an
acquaintanceship (or even friendship) relation while sustaining the play-form of
association.

CONTENTFUL FORMS: FASHION PROCESSES IN CULTURAL GENRES

If the argument of the “Sociology of Sociability” is to be read as providing an existence
proof of a type of content that fits the play-form of association, and is redeemed by con-
temporary research looking at the role of cultural products as the primary content fostering
sociation in postmodern societies, Simmel’s essay on Fashion represents the necessary
obverse: The characterization of certain purely numerical aspects of mass culture as indi-
cating the possibility that the seemingly formal characteristics of cultural products (and the
people who consume them) transmute into contents, as they serve as platforms from which
people make inferences with regard to the character, moral worth, and overall standing
of persons.
Taking the number of people who have adopted a given manner, style, or cultural
form as a formal feature leads to a new way of considering the argument in the Fashion
essay via Simmel’s form/content dialectic. In the essay, human motivations toward indi-
viduation, imitation, separation, and subsumption under the group represent the typical
contents while fashion represents the social form within which those motivations and inter-
ests are pursued and played out: “fashion represents nothing more than one of the many
forms of life by the aid of which we seek to combine in uniform spheres of activity the
tendency towards social equalization with the desire for individual differentiation and
change.”26 Yet, curiously, the very form of fashion, which in Simmel's essay boils down
to popularity or lack thereof, comes to function as content, since it is the very fact that a
given fashion is either restricted or comes to be adopted by outsiders that determines
whether it is suitable to satisfy the motives of individuation or group affiliation. These for-
mal features of fashion have inherent semiotic import, with the taking up of a style or cul-
tural genre signifying “union with those in the same class, the uniformity of a circle
characterized by it, and, uno actu, the exclusion of all other groups.”27
In contemporary cultural studies in the social sciences, the work of Pierre Bourdieu
is taken as emblematic of an approach linking the semiotics of cultural consumption to the
dynamics of group and class differentiation.28 Here I argue that there is an older
Simmelian legacy to this type of cultural analysis, which provides a distinct set of insights.

26
Simmel, “Fashion,” 543.
27
Ibid., 544.
28
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Harvard University
Press, 1984).
 LIZARDO ♦ SIMMEL'S DIALECTIC AND CULTURAL SOCIOLOGY 99

In particular, Simmel's approach allows us to see how purely "numerical" aspects of cul-
tural forms can acquire semiotic import and themselves become "contents", such that
something becomes suitable simply because it is (un)popular and the consumption of
(un)popular goods comes to "say something" about the individual.29
Take, for instance, a suitable definition of the link between persons and mass cul-
tural forms as analogous to the relationship of "membership" of a person in a group.30 The
primary formal characteristics of groups is numerical size, with small groups as a social
form affording a very different profile of need satisfaction than groups of a larger size.31
Just like we can define tendencies to affiliate with small or larger groups, we can also
identify tendencies to gravitate towards cultural genres that are more or less popular; this
“taste” for popularity,32 can itself become a "marker" of the person in the eyes of others.
That is, a person can be seen as the "type" that is attracted to the mundane and that which
others have already adopted, regardless of whether persons are seeking assimilation into a
more or less anonymous mass, or individuation and uniqueness in the cultural pursuits. A
formal feature of the genre becomes a content defining the person.
In the same way, formal features of persons evident in their cultural choices can
become markers of cultural genres.33 Recent work on cultural sociology has taken one
such formal feature of persons as particularly important, namely, "omnivorousness" or the
number of distinct cultural pursuits that the person engages in.34 The semiotics of this for-
mal marker are themselves of interest since they depend on the conditions, made possible
under postmodern "abundance" in which there is a diversity of cultural goods to choose
from and relatively few social barriers preventing persons from consuming them.35 Here,
the simple "number" of cultural pursuits can go from being indicative of a lack of commit-
ment or a sign of dilettantism to signifying openness to new experience and a rejection of
provincial attachments.36 Thus what began as a form (extensiveness of cultural pursuits) is
transmogrified into a content.
Yet, we can keep going, for in the same way that formal properties of genres (e.g.,
their popularity or lack therefore) can become contentful forms telling us something about
the people who engage them, formal features of genre audiences (e.g., whether they are

29
John Sonnett, “Musical Boundaries: Intersections of Form and Content,” Poetics 32, no. 3
(2004): 247–64.
30
Breiger, “The Duality of Persons and Groups.”
31
Georg Simmel, “The Number of Members as Determining the Sociological Form of the Group. I,”
The American Journal of Sociology 8, no. 1 (1902): 1–46.
32
Lieberson, A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change.
33
Omar Lizardo, “The Mutual Specification of Genres and Audiences: Reflective Two-Mode
Centralities in Person-to-Culture Data,” Poetics 68 (2018): 52–71.
34
Richard A. Peterson and Roger M. Kern, “Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore,”
American Sociological Review 61, no. 5 (1996): 900–907.
35
David Wright, “Making Tastes for Everything: Omnivorousness and Cultural Abundance,” Journal
for Cultural Research 15, no. 4 (2011): 355–71.
36
Michele Ollivier, “Modes of Openness to Cultural Diversity: Humanist, Populist, Practical, and
Indifferent,” Poetics 36, no. 2–3 (2008): 120–47.
100 THE GERMANIC REVIEW ♦ VOLUME 94, NUMBER 2 / 2019

TABLE 1. Cross-classification of the form-content distinction against itself.

Form Content
Form Pure Forms Formal Contents
Content Contentful Forms Pure Contents

the type of persons who consume widely, omnivores, or restrict their consumption to a set
of favorites) can become contentful features of genres. So if persons can be separated, on
the one hand, between omnivores"and “paucivores,” then genres can be separated into
those whose audiences are composed of people whom themselves engage a multiplicity of
other cultural forms, and those who restrict their consumption to a few. Formal properties
of individuals, thus become contentful properties of genres. This type form-to-content
reflection can be systematically specified by piggybacking on Simmel's dual interpretation
of people as the intersection of the cultural genres they choose, and of cultural genres as
the intersection of the people that choose them.37

CONCLUSION
In this paper, I have argued that rather than constituting a “dualism” the form/content dis-
tinction is best thought of as a “duality” in Simmel’s overall thought. As such, we can spe-
cify both as dimensions of social phenomena, such that, even though every specifiable
phenomenon will have aspects of both, some will be more formal than others and will
require contents that have an elective affinity with this aspect of their existence (formal
contents). In addition, some social forms, by virtue of participating in people’s everyday
pursuit of specific motives and interests (e.g., affiliation, differentiation, hierarchical dis-
tinction, individuation from the group) will come to partake of certain functions usually
assigned to content such as communicating something about either people or the groups
they belong (contentful forms).
Notably, it is the aesthetic domain, and in particular the realm of cultural consump-
tion and the culture industry (music, movies, fashion, art) in postmodern societies, that
offer the best examples of these two types of Simmelian phenomena par excellence. This
is consistent with the idea that there is something distinctive about the aesthetic domain,
allowing persons to pursue seemingly playful interests in the most serious, and sometimes
socially consequential, of ways,38 while revealing the subtle interplay between the formal
and contentful aspects of life.

37
Breiger, “The Duality of Persons and Groups”; DiMaggio, “Classification in Art”; Lizardo, “The
Mutual Specification of Genres and Audiences: Reflective Two-Mode Centralities in Person-to-
Culture Data.”
38
Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.