Uncategorized – Culture, Cognition, and Action (culturecog)

Gabriel Tarde on Belief and Desire

How did the late 19th and early 20th century French sociologist Gabriel Tarde understand belief and desire? He did so with much novelty, I want to argue, because he did not associate either belief or desire with “content” (see Hutto 2013). Neither did he associate them with what we might call today qualitative data. Consider the following statement from his most thorough treatment of the topic: “attention is the desire to clarify the nascent sensation, this amounts to saying that it is the desire for an increase in current belief” (1880: 152). Here, attention is a type of desire linked with belief. We pay attention to increase belief. Moreover, we achieve sensation based on belief, which refers to an amount (of something) associated with the clarity of sensation.

Lots of moving parts here! And the arrangement among them, and the relations between them, are novel (and, as I will claim below, perhaps quite contemporary), particularly if we are used to hearing belief and desire linked in a customary, deductive folk-psychological model.

Tarde gives the example of a child questioning whether to walk underneath a large rock teetering on a ledge as he makes his way down a narrow path. The child thinks “if this rock falls it will crush me.” The image of the falling movement of the rock “presents itself to the child’s mind; and his mind … establishes no link of positive or negative faith between the two ideas,” either the rock falling or it not falling. But “he desires, he needs to believe, to affirm or deny. This desire, which has a future belief as its object, is questioning” (153). The premise here seems to be that to walk under the rock, the child needs to establish a positive faith that it will not fall.

So desire and belief are linked, in Tarde’s view, and both are associated with a theory of action, but if both are also quantitative, then the operant question is less what you believe or what your desire is, than it is how much you believe and desire, which is a question we cannot answer without attending to perception. Thus, “belief, no more than desire, is neither logically nor psychologically posterior to sensations; that far from arising from the aggregation of these, it is indispensable to their formation, as well as their grouping” (152).

As Tarde explains, his thesis is that “belief and desire are quantities,” and that “sensation is not in itself a quantity” (161). Thus, it makes no sense to say that we sense something with greater or lesser intensity, though it does make sense to say that we believe or desire with greater or lesser intensity.

Suppose that we are a candidate for public office and it is election night. With each new bit of news and gossip our hopes and fears rise and fall. As Tarde puts it, “the calculation of probabilities plays no role in this. But what is quite clear is the very marked quantitative character of these hopes and fears” (172). Our being elected to office, as a particular event in the world, becomes more or less likely, though that is not because we actually calculate a statistical percentage (e.g. 90% chance it will happen). Contrary to the present-day association of the quantitative with the frequency of occurrence of many events, Tarde associates quantitative with particularity. Thus, the only way a frequency of occurrence helps us is by increasing our quantity of belief, though to do this it would have, seemingly paradoxically, to have the effect of making whatever is counted with frequency appear more particular and less diffuse.

Suppose, further, that we see someone at a distance who might be our friend. Initially, we have little belief as all we can see is a mere speck on the horizon. However, “our faith in the reality of [our friend’s] presence” steadily grows as they approach us (172). As Tarde explains, “here again no application of the calculus of probabilities is possible or imaginable. However, these are, I believe, quantitative variations in the same way as the rise or fall of temperature.”

Tarde draws a simple but paradoxical lesson from these examples: quantification increases alongside individualization or particularization. In other words, as the indefinite speck comes into view as our friend Bob, we have quantitatively more belief; meanwhile, as the gossip winds blow strongly against us, we quantitatively lose hope. In both cases, the “clarity of sensation” entails a future object, which implies that Tarde’s statements are of the order of prediction.

Thus, as Tarde himself suggests, probability is integral to belief and desire. As he puts it, “if the calculation of probabilities has a real basis, if it is not a false calculation,” then probability cannot have a mathematical meaning. For belief to directly track “mathematical reasons for believing,” then our “increases and decreases of belief” would need to be “proportioned exactly to the increases and decreases of what one might call the mathematical reasons for believing.” Yet the “reasons for believing” are not reflective of “intrinsic characteristics of things.” If they were, that would “restore an objective meaning to probability.” Rather, as Tarde claims:

These are entirely subjective reasons themselves, which consist in the knowledge we have, not of the causes of an expected and unknown event, but of the limits of the field [du champ] outside of which we are sure they will not occur, and of the division of this domain into two unequal portions, one called favorable chances, the other adverse chances, the inequality of which can be quantified (170).

For Tarde, then, belief and desire are not only quantitative, and characterized by increase and decrease, but also probabilistic, and characterized by prediction. (Notably, Tarde was an admirer of the obscure 19th century French philosopher Antoine Auguste Cournot who associated probability with a “higher faculty whereby we comprehend the order and rationality of things,” and which he in turn associated with “those unshakeable beliefs we call common sense.”) Belief and desire reflects an expansion and contraction in the field of possibility. Outside the field, there is no possibility. Within the field, that possibility is dictated by a relative weighing of chances for and chances again. Quantification, again, traces the clarity of our sensation of something particular—the more particular our object of it is, the more clear our sensation. Our prediction of future events is based on our perceptual information and what appears to be the kind of weight it lends to a field of possibility.

If belief and desire are “psychological” properties in Tarde’s view, that does not mean they are discrete and “contentful.” Thus, they are not “qualitative,” nor can they be treated as qualitative data. They are intentional attitudes, however, as belief and desire is about something that exists in some state of extension relative to us (e.g. distance either in space or in time). When we believe and desire we exhibit a directedness toward something; but we cannot dissect our belief or desire into a propositional attitude. They do not, in other words, have a representational content that makes a proposal about the world (e.g. “I believe that” or “I desire that”). Instead, they function more as continuums of greater or lesser.

The image the Tarde provides is comparable to what I have elsewhere theorized as a loop. Tarde makes it clear that we feel “belief” and “desire,” they are affectual, intensive states, but they appear to be moderated by probability. Tarde does not endorse the separation of belief and desire from perception: “All the force of belief and desire at our disposal and which flows, not without loss, into our conduct and our thoughts, is produced, in fact, or rather provoked by the continual experiences of our senses” (174). As Tarde would say: “belief (la croyance), desire (le désir) and sensation (le sensation),” these are seuls éléments de Vâme (the only elements of the soul) (153). Perception (sensation) provokes belief and desire, though if belief equals “stabilization” and desire equals “extension”, then the “double power” that Tarde alludes to has something of a contradictory task.

If any of this is accurate, then Tarde would seem to anticipate, quite closely, the basic mechanism introduced by the predictive processing paradigm according to which, likewise, the brain is not a representation engine but a prediction engine that also features a kind of double power (see Reeder, Sala and van Leeuwen 2024). Here, perception is achieved through a balanced weighing of predictions based on prior knowledge (top-down) and sensory information from the environment (bottom-up). As Tarde puts it, belief and desire are of the order of transcendental conditions for sensation:

… it is time to enter into the very heart of our subject, – belief and desire are, in our opinion, like space and time, quantities which, serving as a link and support for qualities, make them participate in their quantitative character; they are, in other words, constant identities which, far from preventing the heterogeneity of the things embedded within them, enhance them, penetrate them entirely without, however, constituting them, unite them without confusing them, and subsist unalterably in their midst despite the close intimacy of this union. … My thesis, as we see, implies two: 1. belief and desire are quantities; 2. there are no others in psychology, or there are only derivatives of these; which amounts to saying that sensation is not in itself a quantity (161).

In an optimal perceptual system, priors (expectation) will be deployed prior to perception, so that the least amount of energy will be spent in updating one’s internal model with the accumulation of sensual information. “Prediction error” refers to the difference between predicted and actual sensory input. It is inherent to top-down mechanisms of perception. What Tarde argues about sensation and its lack of quantity, makes a parallel point. Belief and desire secure sensation by moving toward clarity in a nascent sensation.

On these grounds, Tarde asks whether it is legitimate to “totalize” belief and desire, which seems to mean whether he can talk about them as taking on a collective form. His argument is that sensations differ between individuals, but “if believing and desiring also differed, tradition would be nothing but an empty phrase; nothing human could be transmitted unaltered from one generation to the next” (175). Tarde’s point, again, only makes sense if we do not assume that belief and desire has “content.” As he continues, “only through belief, only through desire, do we collaborate, we fight; only through this, therefore, do we resemble each other.” For Tarde, “the totalization of the quantities of belief or desire of distinct individuals is legitimate.” (176). We present such a totalization when we track “variations in the market value of things, statistical figures …” However, to explain these (really existing) “totalities” as ones of content (e.g. beliefs that or values that) would be deeply misleading.

Weber deflected his own probabilistic approach from Tarde’s on two occasions (2019/1921-22: 100-01; 1981/1913: 167-68). Both times he pivots from Tarde’s principle of “imitation” to a consideration of objective probability. If there is “consensus,” Weber argues, it means that “action oriented toward expectations about the behavior of others has an empirically realistic chance of seeing these expectations fulfilled because of the objective probability that these others will, in reality, treat those expectations as meaningfully “valid” for their behavior, despite the absence of an explicit agreement” (1981/1913: 168). But as Weber continues, “the objectively ‘valid’ consensus—in the sense of calculable probabilities—is naturally not to be confused with the individual actor’s reliance that others will treat his expectations as valid.” It is instead because of the relation of “adequate causation between the average objective validity of the probability and the currently average subjective expectation” (168). This would imply that the source of consensus is also not to be found in content, and that it also arises as a probabilistic alignment of individuals.

Weber, thus, might have more in common with Tarde then he imagines. But I’ll save that for another post.

References

Hutto, Daniel (2013). “Why Believe in Contentless Beliefs?” Pp. 55-74 in New Essays on Belief. Springer.

Reeder, Reshanne, Giovanni Sala, Tessa M van Leeuwen (2024). “A Novel Model of Divergent Predictive Perception.” Neuroscience of Consciousness 2024, no. 1: niae006.

Tarde, Gabriel (1880). “La Croyance et le Désir: La Possibilité de leur Mesure.” Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger (July-December): 150-80.

Weber, Max (2019/1920-21). Economy and Society: A New Translation. Harvard University Press.

_____. (1981/1913). “Some Categories of Interpretive Sociology.” Sociological Quarterly 22, no. 2: 151-80.

Toward a Theory of Habitus Breakage

In the synthesis of theories of practice and predictive processing (here and here), it becomes clear that what concepts like habitus and agency mean cannot be separated from what prediction and objective probability mean. Habitus formation is just another word for learning probabilities and for making predictions accordingly. This implies that the more exposure we have to certain objective probabilities, as in a field configuration, the more objective will become our predictions, the more we will do what is expected, and the better we will anticipate what those similarly ensconced in the field as us can recognize as, appropriately, a “next thing to do.” But as, in this sense, our action becomes almost entirely a form of social action, it also loses its purely subjective imprint, which in probabilistic terms, can be redefined as its randomness, its unpredictability, and surprise.

Rephrased this becomes the now classical question of whether a habitus can be broken or how, once acquired, habitus does not just become a determinative, “reproductive” mechanism. In probabilistic terms, this means that learned probabilities become limits of action and perception, which is not to say that action is fully predictable, only that we can find boundaries across which it will not go, perceptions which it will not perceive. For some, the fact that surprise is still possible negates the very presence of habitus (King 2000). For others, including Bourdieu (2000: 234) himself, the “relative autonomy of the symbolic order” is available to prevent the reproductive tendencies of habitus, by providing moments when objective probabilities themselves break and learned expectations no longer matter. This mimics objective situations (“critical moments”) when the loop really does break, and symbolic orders that have no specific grip on the world become just as likely as anything else to loop into the future. But we should not expect that this symbolic escape can be sustained as a replacement (Bourdieu 1988: chap. 5).

In this post, I want to suggest something different. In spaces of highly developed objective probability, “saturated with history” to such an extent that what can be done shows very little deviation from what has been done, an engagement with chance can allow for a form of habitus breakage. The space in question will be the field of art, which, so saturated with history, means that it is rife with reproduction and cliche. The interesting thing is that, in the examples below, some artists take note of this and engage chance in order to prevent themselves from being fully “objective” and therefore cliched. Such a standpoint on art-making can be described as follows, but this statement can easily be extrapolated toward a probabilistic theory of agency more generally:

If we consider a canvas before the painter begins working, all the places on it seem to be equivalent; they are all equally “probable.” And if they are not equivalent, it is because the canvas is a well- defined surface, with limits and a center. But even more so, it depends on what the painter wants to do, and what he has in his head: this or that place becomes privileged in relation to this or that project. The painter has a more or less precise idea of what he wants to do, and this pre-pictorial idea is enough to make the probabilities unequal. There is thus an entire order of equal and unequal probabilities on the canvas. And it is when the unequal probability becomes almost a certitude that I can begin to paint. But at that very moment, once I have begun, how do I proceed so that what I paint does not become a cliche? (Deleuze 2003: 93).

In the predictions that shape action, the artist will predict only what is already objective, which is to say, what is historical and has already been done. They will do this even as they try to do what is “improbable” as this is associated with artistic “worth” as the performance of creativity. As this suggests, to recognize an action as artistic requires some link to expectation: what one does is what is expected relative to those who are, likewise, oriented toward certain objective possibilities. More specifically, if we perceive only what we cannot predict, and if the experienced artist can predict most things about their own work, this means that they perceive less, which is a phenomenon that seems to follow from the acquisition of any form of expertise (Dreyfus 2004). Hence, art “experts” cannot help but fall into cliche and objective rationalization.

So how to break out of this? Consider the following description of what the art historian Yve-Alain Bois describes as “compositional art.” In this instance, the facts of composition are clear and speak directly to a specifically designed presence:

Composition is an intended, ordered relationship of discrete parts, a relationship that suggests-that at once builds and needs-an interiority, a solid, plotted depth that fills both the artist as intentional actor and the visual field, however flat, that underpins the painting: one is an analogue for the other … Composition names the pictorial relationship of discrete parts across a field, parts arranged according to a visual order that both underlies the whole, and of which it-the painting as a whole-is an individual instance, proof of laws and orders … The composed object, the structured or designed one, appears right and it appears necessary and specific-because the ordered relationship between the parts of the object structure a relationship between the object and the viewer, and more, between vision as conception and the world (Singerman 2003: 131).

Thus, what is composed is “flat,” “ordered,” “right” and “necessary.” It fulfills expectations. It can serve as proof of what art or a kind of art (a “style” or “genre”) should be. But all of this is exactly what non-composition attempts to work against, prevent and break. “Non-compositional art” is that which attempts to work against composition by finding its origin in what Bois calls the “motivation of the arbitrary.”

For Bois, in the most prominent examples of this kind of art-making, the technique used serves as a direct analogue to inviting chance in, because it is precisely the inclusion of non-compositional, chance mechanisms (invited in) that make it possible to find this very peculiar kind of motivation. An example of this is the approach taken by the artist Ellsworth Kelly and his effort, in the 1950s, to “escape the weight of Picasso.”

What is there left to do in the wake of someone who has invented everything? In this respect, at least, Kelly remains an American in Paris. Like Pollock and an entire generation along with him, he knows that, if he wants to accomplish anything, his first task is to escape the weight of Picasso. And since the latter cannot be outdone, the trick is not to try to outdo him. How? By eliminating the human figure, to start with which means not just refraining from producing effigies ex nihilo, but also not engendering them by displacement or condensation, since even at this little game, Picasso is unbeatable (he has a magician’s touch: not only does he have an infinite array of images in reserve, but he also has the ability to make something out of nothing) … But getting away from Picasso also entails renouncing all choice, all composition (Bois 1992: 16).

Thus, Kelly will set about evading Picasso by essentially trying to undermine his own compositional skills, or what we can appreciate as Kelly’s attempt to break his habitus as it can only reproduce objective possibilities that Picasso has done the most to define. Kelly first attempts a method of transfer, what he calls “transformed already-made” in which he simply sketches what is already there: “we are dealing here with a simple transfer—along the same lines as a photograph or an imprint … The raw material remains untransformed, but above all … it is almost untransformable: just try to make a human shape out of a grid!” (Bois 16). This includes sketching the lines of windows, seaweed, of objects seen in churches, of tennis courts, of street patterns, and most notably perhaps, of the awnings of a hotel (Awnings, Avenue Matignon). Thus in his answer to Picasso, Kelly can now say: “No need to play sorcerer’s apprentice; the figurative intention is not a necessary condition of esthetic transubstantiation; art can be made without transforming anything, without having to re-baptise; anything goes.” The goal, as Rosalind Krauss (1977) put it, is to produce an “index” without a “referent” as the epitome of the figurative opacity of the modernist movement.

*Awnings, Avenue Matignon*, Ellsworth Kelly, 1950

*Automatic Drawing: Pine Branches VI*, Ellsworth Kelly, 1950

Yet everything is still too compositional for Kelly, and so his habitus breakage engages with a second stage. This includes a more forthright practice with chance mechanisms. He begins to sketch under conditions of sensory deprivation (with his eyes closed, not looking at the paper) a clear effort to not allow himself to predict his own perceptions (Automatic Drawing, Pine Branches VI). Yet the problem he encounters are that the drawings come out as “too perfect, testifying to an exemplary motor coordination, or they are illegible failures that Kelly is not willing to accept as such, first because they look more like straightforward clumsiness than the product of chance, and also because, a priori, there is nothing to prevent one from detecting ‘unconscious’ images in them, and thus falling back—the old surrealist saw—into figuration” (Bois 25). What he realizes is that the “aleatory as such does not so easily give itself up to the eye … for the strictest order of chance to manifest itself, it has to be opposed to the strictest possible order …” And so Kelly makes a third attempt at habitus breakage, now more systematic. In a series of collages, Kelly would use chance mechanisms for their composition: he would cut a drawing into identically-shaped squares and then glue them in an order that tries to reproduce the original composition.

As Bois puts it, “it is impossible not to notice the unpredictable character of the joints … the geometrical distribution ends up being ever so slightly disrupted …” (25). In arguably his most famous efforts in this direction, Kelly starts with a modular grid and, then, pulling numbers from a box and darkening the corresponding blocks in the grid, produces a representation of light flickering on the surface of the Seine River. In another engagement with chance, Kelly uses a stock of gummed papers he happened to discover in a stationary shop, and taking the small squares of color, arranges them intuitively within a modular grid, “using no system or scientific method except to proceed progressively from the grid’s lateral sides toward the center.” In still other collages he would number the grids randomly, number the colors, and then put the colored squares into their corresponding boxes.

Study for *Seine*, Ellsworth Kelly, 1951

*Spectrum of Colors Arranged by Chance II*, Ellsworth Kelly, 1951

Thus, in these works, “the system presiding over [them] is in every case rigorous, but also conceived as a pure receptacle of chance. The notion of a systematic art flowed from the necessity of suppressing the arbitrariness of composition, but the arbitrariness presiding over the choice of system remained. Kelly’s extraordinary insight was to counterbalance that of the system with the still greater arbitrariness of chance, so as best to eliminate all subjective determination” (Bois (1999: 26). While this marks an attempt to get beyond and exterior to “subjectivity” in compositional decision-making, it is not an engagement with “end of author” approaches that would otherwise, in familiar fashion, emphasize structure or signification, over hermeneutics and depth. Rather, as Bois’ emphasizes, non-composition appears in technique, as practice, and in this capacity directly engages with chance as the antithesis to “subjective decision-making” and its compositional effects.

*Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer (on Light Ground)*, Francis Bacon, 1964

For other painters like Francis Bacon, the engagement with chance comes in the form of making “free marks” on the canvas, “so as to destroy the nascent figuration in it and to give the Figure a chance, which is the improbable itself. These marks are accidental, ‘by chance’; but clearly the same word, ‘chance,’ no longer designates probabilities, but now designates a type of choice or action without probability” (Deleuze 94). In the case of Three Studies for a Portrait of George Dyer (on Light Ground), the white mark drawn to shape Dyer’s face and strewn across it, is exactly this kind of “free mark” that seems to prevent the painting, based on a photograph, from being figurative. In Painting, Bacon describes how he first tried to draw a bird in a yard, but it turned out to be a man with an umbrella: “Well, one of the pictures I did in 1946, the one like a butcher’s shop, came to me as an accident. I was attempting to make a bird alighting on a field. … suddenly the lines that I’d drawn suggested something totally different, and out of this suggestion arose this picture. I had no intention to do this picture; I never thought of it in that way. It was like one continuous accident mounting on top of another. … I don’t think the bird suggested the umbrella; it suddenly suggested this whole image.” In this case, the marks that Bacon made turn out to be free marks, as they seem to elude the initial predictions he was making of his own work, such that he would eventually produce what he set out to. And so he, instead, fills the canvas with free marks.

What is notable about each of these “non-compositions” is that, as examples of inviting chance in, they also demonstrate the evident connection between probability and action. Merleau-Ponty (1964) describes the painter Henri Matisse, having been captured painting with a slow motion camera, amazed at how deliberate his brushstrokes appeared to be from this vantage, when from his vantage they were anything but deliberate. Using this engagement with time, it became clear that while viewing the recorded brush-strokes, the viewer (and Matisse himself) could witness an “infinite number of data … an infinite number of options” as possible. “Matisse’s hand did hesitate,” as Merleau-Ponty put its, choosing among “twenty conditions which were unformulated or even informulable for anyone but Matisse, since they were only defined and imposed by the intention of executing this painting which did not yet exist” (46).

It becomes evident that “art” or “painting” or “modernist painting” is not a structure of signification, though it still remains something that we can call objective. In this case, it is not Matisse’s creation; he, instead, works with it. But what he works with are probabilities, or historically-developed chances, ones that his hand transforms into something actual, that in some sense looks like it should, as he puts brush to canvas. This entire process, as Merleau-Ponty emphasizes, is not different from what happens when we write or speak. What we do not do with language is “dwell in already elaborated signs and in an already speaking world” and simply “reorganize our significations according to the indications of the signs.” In this rendering, there is no space for probability, because all possibilities have already been determined. In Bourdieu’s distinction, this is more accurately described as an apparatus that requires no motivation on the part of actors in order to use it, because objective rationalization so completely displaces all uncertainty.

This is a false picture, however, because a structure tends to ignore certain minor facts like what happens when we speak, and that as we do we engage not with pre-established signs the meaning of which is removed from probability. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, “to speak is not to put a word under each thought; if it were, nothing would ever be said.” Instead, language constitutes a space of objective probabilities that our action (speaking, writing) can be oriented to and which, in this case, acquires its meaning at least partially through the words we use to evoke our thought and make it actual (just as Matisse uses art to make his painting actual). Thus, the meaning of what we speak and write is at least partially determined by how probable or improbable our words are, what else we could have said given the objective probabilities of language at a given historical time, plus an interlocutor who has likewise learned those probabilities.

Both language and art are objectively constituted by probability, and when we engage with them, we therefore “take chances” and engage with uncertainty. That uncertainty can widely vary both subjectively and objectively. When we have not (yet) formed expectations, or learned objective probabilities, we might experience lots of (subjective) uncertainty, even if what we are doing is not improbable (objectively speaking). By the same token, an objective uncertainty can apply to what we do because what we do is improbable (at least at the current moment). If we return to non-compositional art, we can better appreciate what it means to invite chance in as, in this case, a technique to interrupt a kind of self-feeding loop that occurs when expectations so perfectly match probabilities that it can only result in, as Bois puts it, “the communication of form.” To engage in non-compositional technique, then, breaks habitus by making chance decide what will happen next, where the hand will go next, what will be the next result, rather than a finely-attuned set of expectations that can, essentially, do nothing unexpected in relation to what is objectively probable.

References

Bois, Yve-Alain. (1992). “Ellsworth Kelly in France: Anti- Composition in its many Guises” in Ellsworth Kelly : the Years in France, 1948-1954. National Gallery of Art.

_____. (1999). “Kelly’s Trouvailles: Findings in France” in Ellsworth Kelly: The Early Drawings, 1948-1955. Harvard Art Museum.

Bourdieu, Pierre. (1988). Homo Academicus. Stanford UP.

_____. (2000). Pascalian Meditations. Stanford UP.

Deleuze, Gilles. (2003). Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Continuum.

Dreyfus, Stuart. (2004). “The Five-Stage Model of Adult Skill Acquisition.” Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 24: 177-181.

King, Antony. (2000). “Thinking with Bourdieu Against Bourdieu: A ‘Practical’ Critique of the Habitus.” Sociological Theory 18: 417-433.

Krauss, Rosalind. (1977). “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. Part 2.” October 4: 58-67.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1964). “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” in Signs. Northwestern UP.

Singerman, Howard. (2003). “Non-Compositional Effects, or the Process of Painting in 1970.” Oxford Art Journal 26: 125-250.

The Cognitive Hesitation: or, CSS’s Sociological Predecessor

Simmel is widely considered to be the seminal figure from the classical sociological tradition on social network analysis. As certain principles and tools of network analysis have been transposed to empirical domains beyond their conventional home, Simmel has also become the classical predecessor for formal sociology, giving license to the effort and providing a host of formal techniques with which to pursue the work (Erikson 2013; Silver and Lee 2012). As Silver and Brocic (2019) argue, part of the appeal of Simmel’s “form” is its pragmatic utility and adaptability. Simmel demonstrates this in applying different versions of form to different empirical objects ( e.g. “the stranger” versus “exchange”). This suggests that we need not make much headway on deciphering what “form” actually is and still practice a formal sociology.

Though it may not seem like it, these recent efforts at formal sociology find their heritage in a sometimes rancorous debate etched deeply into Simmel’s cross-Atlantic translation into American sociology (and therefore not insignificant on shaping cross-field perceptions of sociology as “science”). Historically, this has found proponents of a middle-range application of form set against those who appeal to a more diffuse concern with the status of form. The debate has proven contentious enough, including at least one occasion of translation/retranslation of terminology from Simmel’s work. Robert Merton retranslated the German term ubersehbar to mean “visible to” (in the sentence from “The Nobility” [or Aristocracy”] discussion in Soziologie: “If it is to be effective as a whole, the aristocratic group must be “visible to” [ubersehbar] every single member of it. Each element must be personally acquainted with every other”) instead of what Kurt Wolff had originally translated as “surveyable by.” For various reasons, “visible to” carried far less of a “phenomenological penumbra” and fit with Merton’s interest (e.g. disciplinary position-taking) in structure, but arguably did not match Simmel’s own interest in finding the “vital conditions of an aristocracy” (see Jaworski 1990).

More recently, a kind of detente has emerged between the two sides. To the degree that there is any concern for the status of “form” itself, formal sociology has taken on board what is arguably the most thoroughgoing defense of Simmel’s “phenomenology” to date: the philosopher Gary Backhaus’ 1999 argument for Simmel’s “eidetic social science.” Backhaus reads Simmel with the help of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, and therefore reads him against the grain of what the philosophically-minded had conventionally read as Simmel’s more straightforward neo-Kantianism. In part, this detente with phenomenology has been done because Backhaus made it easy to do. His reading does not require that formal sociology do anything that would deviate from network analysis’ own bracketing of the content of social ties from the formal pattern of social ties. His reading of Simmel also remains compatible with a pluralist/pragmatist application of form.

The purpose of this post is threefold: (1) to question that the status of Simmel’s “form” is philosophical and therefore capable of being resolved into either a phenomenology or neo-Kantianism; (2) to situate Simmel as part of a lost 19th century interscience (volkerpsychologie) that, instead of philosophical, potentially makes “form” cognitive in a surprisingly contemporary way; and (3) to perhaps in the process rejuvenate theoretical interest in the status of “form” separate from its application.

Backhaus (1999) argued that Simmel’s formal sociology has an “affinity with” the phenomenology of Husserl, in particular the intentional relationality of mental acts, or the structures of pure consciousness (eides) that, in Simmel’s case, apply to forms of association. Instead of identifying empirical patterns or correlations, formal sociology registers the “cognition of an eidetic structure” (e.g. of “competition,” “conflict,” or “marriage”) (Backhaus 273). Like Husserl’s phenomenology, Simmel identifies these structures as transcendent in relation to particular, sensible and empirical instantiations; but he also does not suggest that forms are “empirical universals” that do not vary according to their instantiations or are not independent from them. If that were the case, then formal sociology would be an empirical science with a “body of collective positive content” that predetermines what can and cannot be present in a specific empirical setting and therefore what counts as having a “legitimate epistemic status” (such as the causes and effects of conflict). Simmel’s emphasis, by contrast, focuses on the analysis of form as it exhibits a “necessary structure” and allows the empirical “given” to appear as it does (Backhaus 264).

More generally, Backhaus concludes as follows:

The attempt to fit Simmel’s a priori structures of the forms of association into a Kantian formal a priori is not possible. Both … interactional and cognitive structures characterize the objects of sociological observation and are not structures inherent to the subjective conditions of the observer (Backhaus 262).

Backhaus’ argument here has given a certain license to formal sociology to spread beyond the friendly confines of network analysis. That spread is contingent on finding forms “not constituted by transactions but instead [giving] form to transactions—because they posit discrete, pregiven, and fixed entities that exist outside of the material plane prior to their instantiation” (Erikson 2013: 225). To posit these entities does not require finding a cognitive structure for the purposes of meaningful synthesis (in Kantian pure cognition). Simmel refers to forms of sociation as instead “[residing] a priori in the elements themselves, through which they combine, in reality, into the synthesis, society” (1971: 38).

So here is the puzzle. If we follow Backhaus’ lead and not read forms of sociation as Kantian categories, then we commit (eo ipso) to a priori elements as part of social relations, not simply in faculties of reason. How is that possible? Backhaus interprets this as being equivalent to the material a priori proposed by Husserl, in which forms of sociation are analogous to intentional objects (1999: 262). In principle, there is much to recommend this argument, not least that it resonates with Simmel’s methodological pluralism vis-a-vis form (Levine 1998). However, the best that Backhaus can do to support a Husserl/Simmel connection is to say that Simmel’s thought has an “affinity with” Husserl’s phenomenology. As he writes elsewhere:

Simmel was neither collaborator nor student of Husserl, and Simmel’s works appear earlier than the Husserlian influenced philosophers who were to become the first generation phenomenologists. Based on the supposition that Simmel’s later thought does parallel Husserl’s, can it be said that Simmel was coming to some of the same conclusions as Husserl, but yet did not recognize that what he was doing was unfolding an emergent philosophical orientation? An affirmative answer appears plausible. Yet, it is likely that Husserl was an influence on Simmel, without receiving public acknowledgement, since Simmel infrequently cites other thinkers within the body of his texts or within his limited use of footnotes (2003: 223-224).

And yet there is no available evidence (to date) that can document a direct influence of Husserl’s phenomenology on Simmel’s theory of forms (and/or vice versa). Beyond this, the timelines for such an influence do not exactly match, although Simmel and Husserl were contemporaries and, by all accounts, friends. While they did exchange letters, of the ones that survive there is (at least according to one interpretation) nothing of “philosophical value” in them (Staiti 2004: 173; though see Goodstein 2017: 18n9). Simmel’s concern with “psychology” long predates the publication of Husserl’s Logical Investigations in 1900-01. Simmel’s Philosophy of Money was published around the same time (1900) and marked his most extensive engagement with formal sociology by that point (as Simmel called it, “the first work … that is really my work”). Husserl, however, does not discuss the material a priori in Logical Investigations. In fact, the key source for Husserl’s claims about it doesn’t appear until much later: his 1919-1927 Natur und Geist lectures (Staiti 2004: chap 5). While Husserl does discuss “eidetic ontologies” in the first volume of Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (1912), written during Husserl’s tenure at the University of Gottingen (1901-1916), it seems relevant that Simmel’s two key discussions of “form” (in the Levine reader: “How is Society Possible?” and “The Problem of Sociology”) are both found in Simmel’s 1908 Soziologie: Untersuchungen uber die Formen der Vergesellschaftung and draw from material that appears much earlier (Goodstein 2017: 66).

None of this omits or definitively puts to rest an influence of Husserl on Simmel that, as Backhaus suggests, goes uncited and cannot be traced through published work. All of these details of a connection still without an authoritative answer makes Goodstein (2017: 18n9) propose tracking down the personal and intellectual relationship between Husserl and Simmel as a “good dissertation topic.” At the very least, this suggests that there might be more to the story apropos the status of “form” than we understand at this point and which is enough to reopen a (seemingly) closed case on which formal sociology (at least partially) rests, making this about a lot more than just an obscure footnote in the boring annals of sociology. It also seems relevant to emphasize a possible different reason why Husserl’s eidos and Simmel’s forms seem so similar, but in fact are not.

There is a definite parallel between Husserl and Simmel in that they both took positions against experimental psychology at the time. However, to assume that this means they both took the same position (which, in this case, would be one that Husserl would be credited with making, and which was against “psychologism” in toto) could make the most sense in retrospect only because the historical context has not yet been thoroughly described enough to allow us to see a different position available at the time, one whose content could be described (in the negative) as not experimental psychology, not phenomenology and not descriptive psychology. On these terms, this remains effectively a non-position in the present-day disciplinary landscape, with experimental psychology, phenomenology and descriptive psychology (qua culture) all being more or less still recognizable between now and then. This is only true, however, if we omit a nascent position (still) to be made now, possibly as cognitive social science (see Lizardo 2014), and which was available then as volkerpsychologie.

All of this suggests contextual reasons not to settle for reading Simmel as a phenomenologist. What I want to propose is that there are also further biographical reasons only recently come to light. Elizabeth Goodstein points in the direction with her insight that when Simmel uses the term “‘a priori … this usage … extends the notion of epistemological prerequisites to include their cultural-psychological and sociological formation [which] had its intellectual roots in Volkerpsychologie” (Goodstein 2017: 65; see also Frisby 1984). Goodstein here draws from the late German scholar Klaus Kohnke in what is arguably the most authoritative source on Simmel’s early influences: Kohnke’s untranslated Der junge Simmel in Theoriebeziehungen und sozialen Bewegungen (1996). Goodstein interprets this reading of Simmel’s a priori (both non-Kantian and non-phenomenological) as “[recognizing] the constructive role of culture and narrative framework in constituting and maintaining knowledge practices” (65). Even this is not completely satisfactory, however, as Kohnke (1990) himself suggests by observing the direct influence of volkerpsychologie on Simmel’s appropriation of two of its major themes—“condensation” and “apperception”—which can be categorized as “cultural” (in any contemporary meaning of the word) only very partially (see also Frisby 1984).

So where are we? Simmel’s a priori is essential to formal sociology, but it is not Kantian. We also have little reason to believe that is phenomenological, though this currently provides its best defense. It also cannot be translated as cultural, at least not in a contemporary sense. What we are left with is the influence of volkerpsychologie as part of Simmel’s intellectual history.

We are helped in defining volkerpsychologie by the fact that it has recently become a topic of conversation among historians of science (see Hopos Spring 2020). This interest has been piqued by a recognition of volkerpsychologie as a kind of interscientific space in the developing universe of the human sciences in the 19th century. Specifically, it was not experimental psychology (Wilhelm Wundt) and not descriptive psychology (Wilhelm Dilthey). In the latter sense, it was not an antidote to experimentalism and did not center around “understanding.” In the former sense, it promoted an explanatory framework but outside of the laboratory. Officially, Volkerpsychologie was initiated by the philosophers and philologists Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal in the mid-19th century. When Simmel entered Berlin University in 1876, his initial interest was history, studying with Theodor Mommsen. His interests soon shifted to psychology, however, and Lazarus became his main teacher.

The subsequent influence of Lazarus and Steinthal on Simmel is clear. Much of Simmel’s initial work in the early 1880s (including his rejected dissertation on music; Simmel [1882] 1968) was published in the journal that Lazarus and Steinthal founded and edited: Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (Reiners 2020). Simmel sent his essay (1892) on a nascent sociologie (“Das probleme der sociologie”) to Lazarus on his seventieth birthday, adding a letter in which Simmel wrote that the essay constituted “the most recent result of lines of thought that you first awakened in me. For however, divergent my subsequent development became, I shall nonetheless never forget that before all others, you directed me to the problem of the superindividual and its depths, whose investigation will probably fill out the productive time that remains to me” (quoted in Goodstein 2017: 65). In 1891, Steinthal directed readers of the journal that replaced Volkerpsychologie (Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde) to the “work of Georg Simmel” in order to see how volkerpsychologie and the nascent field of sociology both search for “the psychological processes of human society” (Kusch 2019: 264).

If Simmel was influenced by volkerpsychologie, he was far from alone (Klautke 2013). Durkheim was familiar with the volkerpsychologie, particularly the work of Lazarus and Steinthal. In fact, he cites (1995/1912:12n14) volkerpsychologie in the Elementary Forms as “putting the hypothesis first for “mental constitution [as depending] at least in part upon historical, hence social factors … Once this hypothesis is accepted, the problem of knowledge can be framed in new terms.” Durkheim references the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie and mentions Steinthal in particular. Franz Boas (1904), meanwhile, gives “special mention” to volkerpsychologie as being a major influence on the history of anthropology for proposing “psychic actions that take place in the individual as a social unit,” also referencing the work of Steinthal (520). For his part, Bronislaw Malinowski had studied with Wundt in Leipzig and started an (unfinished) dissertation in volkerpsychologie (Forster 2010: 204ff). Boas and Malinowski provide a direct link from Lazarus and Steinhal’s volkerpsychologie to the “culture concept” (see Stocking 1966; Kalmar 1987). Mikhail Bakhtin also mentions Lazarus and Steinhal’s volkerpsychologie as an influence on his definition of dialogics and speech genres or “problems of types of speech.” Volkerpsychologie anticipates “a comparable way of conceptualizing collective consciousness” (see Reitan 2010).

This historiography thus finds the influence of volkerpsychologie on a variety of recognized disciplines and influences that reach into the present. More recent efforts are able to distinguish that influence from the influence of descriptive psychology, which is well-documented. Volkerpsychologie constituted a space of possibility in human science that did not settle into the disciplinary arrangement of the research university that still persists largely unchanged into the present (Clark 2008). As Goodstein (2017) notes, Simmel himself mirrors this with an oeuvre that remains unrecognizable from any single disciplinary guise. If Simmel did not identify with volkerpsychologie when certain bureaucratic requirements required him to declare a scholarly identity, this was at least partially because of the association of volkerpsychologie with scholars of Jewish heritage (including Lazarus and Steinthal), combined with prevailing anti-Semitism, with which Simmel was all too familiar (Kusch 2019: 267ff). Volkerpsychologie itself would later be terminologically appropriated by the Nazified “volk” which further contributed to the erasure of its 19th century history.

The purpose of recounting this history (obscure no doubt) is to perhaps rejuvenate interest in Simmel’s formal approach as more appropriately situated within a disciplinary space that anticipates cognitive social science. The ramifications of this are far beyond the scope of this post to draw out in sufficient detail. That will be saved for a later post (maybe). To close, I’ll just sketch one possible implication, using Omar’s recent distinction between “cognitive” and “cultural kinds.”

To make that distinction requires some way of distinguishing the cognitive from the cultural, i.e. giving it a “mark.” The philosopher Mark Rowlands (2013: 212) attempts this as follows: what marks the cognitive is “(1) the manipulation and transformation of information-bearing structures, where this (2) has the proper function of making available, either to the subject or to subsequent processing operations, information that was hitherto unavailable, where (3) this making available is achieved by way of the production, in the subject of the process, of a representational state and (4) the process belongs to a cognitive subject.” Rowlands subscribes to extended, enactive, embodied and embedded (4Es) cognition in making this argument, in which the key claim is not about “the mind” but about “mental phenomena.”

The proposal here is that a volkerpsychologie reading could be more accurate in situating “form” as having something more like a “mark of the cognitive” than the material a priori. For his part, Backhaus (1999) is careful to bracket the level of eidos from what he calls psychological associations and empirical universals. Perhaps, what would be identified as form could be empirically identified as carrying a cognitive content as “information-bearing structures.” This suggests an alternate way of finding a priori conditions in social relations. The problem is that this would commit a far more egregious “reading into” Simmel than reading Husserl into him. Any such effort would erase the historicism that guides my critique of Backhaus.

However, to the degree that volkerpsychologie is situated in a similar disciplinary space as cognitive social science (akin to 4Es cognition) this might lessen the violation. One historical effort (Kusch 2019) reads much of the original German-language research, published alongside Simmel’s own, and finds general commitments to relativism and materialism, meaning that (following the “strong” version of Lazarus and Steinthal) volkerpsychologie finds apperceptions “compressed” in even unproblematic forms of consciousness and locates these in an “objective spirit” as language, institutions and tools. Stronger versions also took umbrage with a normative application of volkerpsychologie because this arbitrarily bracketed an explanatory focus that endorsed only a relativist metaphysics (to an empirical context). Stronger versions even took a de facto Kantian critique a step further in attempting psychological explanations for what could be posited through logical inference (like freedom of the will). This did not mean resorting to cultural explanation, however. In fact, Dilthey distanced himself from volkerpsychologie because of its explanatory thrust. He developed his more “descriptive” approach (in part) in opposition to this. Strong versions of volkerpsychologie attempted generative explanations of intuitions derived from an original (empirical) context.

If there is any legitimate parallel between volkerpsychologie and formal sociology, then “form” could be given an entirely different treatment: conveying cognitive kinds that, among other things, allow for instances of particular cultural kinds.

References

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____. (2003). “Husserlian Affinities in Simmel’s Later Philosophy of History: The 1918 Essay.” Human Studies 26: 223-258.

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Staiti, Andrea (2004). Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology: Nature, Sprit and Life. Cambridge U Press.