Attempts at creating harmony in sociology in terms of its theoretical foundations are essentially doomed to failure. In fact, such a state is not even desirable. The diversity of opinions and approaches is an essential quality of all sciences. In sociology, we are confronted with a multi-paradigmatic situation despite all attempts for unification. However, a state of harmony and the passive acceptance of theoretical discrepancies both lead to a standstill of the same degree. Disputes and controversies, on the other hand, keep the discipline alive. The review symposium on Sociology in a New Key (SNK) (Staubmann 2022) is an encouraging expression of the livelihood of sociology, tackling some of its core disciplinary issues.

First, I want to thank the journal editor, Lawrence T. Nichols, for initiating and supporting the publication of the special issue. It is a great honor that nine distinguished scholars followed the invitation to contribute essays: James J. Chriss (Cleveland State University), Alberto Luis Cordeiro de Farias (State University of Rio de Janeiro), Jayme Gomes (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul), Victor Lidz (Prof. emeritus, Drexel University College of Medicine), Isaac Arial Reed (University of Virginia), Jeremy Tanner (University College London), Frédéric Vandenberghe (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), Raf Vanderstraeten (University of Ghent), and Daniel Wehinger (University of Innsbruck). I would like to express my deep gratitude to all of them. Stephen Turner commented on the review essays on my Facebook page: “The exchanges are a great service,” and indeed they are.

SNK is an attempt at “rethinking sociological theory through aesthetics,” as Jayme Gomes summarized it in the title of his review. Accordingly, the goal of SNK is twofold. In the first instance, it wants to “provide appropriate attention to the expressive and aesthetic aspects of social life” (Lidz). Such an enhancement of social aesthetics, of the senses (aisthetics), and of corporeal conditions in general soon displays the limitations of commonly used concepts and methodologies in sociology. As such, the second goal is to sketch an alternative theoretical approach.

There was another Facebook comment that characterizes the review symposium nicely and adds a favorable conclusion: “I think what is coming through in the different reviews is that the book seems to be speaking to different kinds of scholars. I think that reflects well on it.” (Eduardo de la Fuente). Dealing adequately with the different theoretical perspectives and the broad range of research areas and issues addressed in the essays would easily make for a new book. Given the limited space for a rejoinder, I will bundle my reply around five topics: (1) Aesthetic experiences and metaphors for sociology; (2) Meaning, the senses, and the body; (3) The aesthetic and culture-theoretical common denominator of Adorno, Parsons, and Simmel; (4) Aesthetics and individuality; and (5) Comparisons and prospects for a sociology in a new key.

Aesthetic Experiences and Metaphors: Optional and No-Go Keys for Orchestrating Sociology

The title SNK refers to a classic work by Susanne K. Langer, whose Philosophy in a New Key (1942) argued for a reorientation of modern philosophical thought by a thorough account of symbolism in general and of the arts in particular. In this way, the basic ideas and assumptions of the philosophical tradition should be transposed to new understandings and perspectives. SNK is written in this spirit of Langer’s book, albeit differing in conceptual details and conclusions.

One of the most important influences on SNK is the work of Georg Simmel. The main concern of the project – at least as I have seen it so far – is well captured in a comment that Simmel had made in a letter to his friend Heinrich Rickert. In this letter, he wrote that he had gained several of his general theoretical insights “via the detour of reflections on the essence of art” (Gassen and Landmann 1958: 101 [1904]). Reading James J. Chriss’ review essay (Chriss 2024), it dawned on me that there is something prior to the reflection on art which is even more important for “rekeying” sociology, that is, the aesthetic experience itself. Chriss lays it out nicely: Before and during his PhD studies in sociology, he “pursued interests in music and creative writing … was playing music and writing songs, sometimes performing in bands.” Being a musician and poet and studying sociology at the same time spontaneously raises doubts about “the different ways theory, methods, and data are taught, learned, and applied in the field”. There is quite obviously a need for their alignment with aesthetic experiences and aesthetic creativity. When it comes to details, it is not so easy to sort the wheat from the chaff, as it were, but, as Chriss argues, there are certain positions in sociology that are obviously at odds with aesthetic engagements. I would say that among them are: mechanistic thinking as implied in large parts of empiricist or materialistic sociology; stimulus – response and other trivial machine conceptualizations of human action; the degrading of the social significance of aesthetic culture to a mere means to gain status and power; the narrowing down of human decisions to rationality; the disregard of creativity which is evidently an essential component of music and art; the exclusive focus on typical forms of action and interaction with a neglect of the significance of individuality, which actually is a basic foundation of social life and which, again, becomes particularly evident when dealing with aesthetic (inter-)action.

On the topic of creativity, Chriss writes, “Indeed, it is not even clear to me as a songwriter where songs come from or how they are created.” Creativity is a profound fact of all human life. Henri Bergson, who was a strong influence on Simmel, argued in his Creative Evolution (2023[1907]) that creativity questions mechanistic illusions, illusions that arguably still live on in social research prognosis models. And, based on the same presumption, Bergson questions “finalism” in the sense of what I call – paraphrasing Whitehead – “the fallacy of misplaced intentionality”. Chriss illustrates the problem: “There is often no conscious intent at the beginning of a string of events, and no one in these early stages … possesses the ability to firmly anticipate what lies ahead … or what emerges may have little to do with the original intent.” This is indisputably the case for artistic creation which realizes itself in the course of creation and not in the execution of a rationalistically preconceived plan. The inappropriateness of finalism, to stick to Bergson’s expression, concerns, in a deeper sense, all human action and, in consequence, the understanding of social/societal evolutionary processes. Society undergoes a permanent creative evolution, one could say. It is certainly not a kind of copy machine for norms and meaning patterns from generation to generation.

The juxtaposition of artistic and sociological engagements with social issues displays the necessity to differentiate between “interpretative understanding” (Weber’s deutend verstehen) or “explaining” – in sociological terms or otherwise – and “experiencing” (Simmel’s erleben). The latter is something that, according to a famous founder of an established religion, cannot be taught, but, as I would like to add immediately, it can be developed in the course of non-rational learning processes deeply rooted in bodily conditionsFootnote 1. Experience understood this way refers to human capacities beyond or before rational-intellectual understandings. As I wrote in the excursus on the Rolling Stones, musical experience in itself is the starting point for scholarly reflections on music. Such reflections can then go “inward” to the music in the sense of musicology or “outward” to society and culture, a path we take in sociology. Neither way can be identified with the experience itself. These are formulations Simmel used in his philosophical essay on Rembrandt. I adopted the distinction because it explains the difference between the non-rational aesthetic (or religious) forms of experiencing and the cognitive-rational forms of understanding/interpretation/explanation. This in no way means that experience is quasi-natural while rational understanding is cultural, or worse, that experience can only attain a cultural form through cognition. The two processes are, although in many ways interwoven, subject to different logics of socialization and culturalization. Simplifying somewhat, I would formulate my “thesis 1” in this way: “The sociologists have only interpreted the social world in various ways. The point, however, is to experience it”.

Aesthetic experiences and metaphors can be useful for sociology because they may share the same content with sociology, yet often come up with a richer comprehension of the respective phenomena. In my living room, I have a poster of the famous painting The Banjo Lesson (1893) by Henry Ossawa Tanner. It is a stunning masterpiece in many respects. For the purpose concerned here, I show the painting in my social theory class to demonstrate how socialization and education can be understood in contrast to sociological textbook explanations, which, to a large degree, rest on Durkheimian sociology. The painting is based on a photo Tanner took to document the life of Black people. It shows a grandfather conveying his banjo-playing skills to his grandson. The depicted moving warmth of the relationship, the obvious eagerness of the child to learn how to play, the caring and loving attitude of his grandfather, and the undaunted vitality and optimism shining through the painting, which become particularly palpable in contrast to the deprived situation they live in, all of these elements convey an intuition of what music, education, and social relationships mean. It is obviously way more than “imposing upon the child ways of seeing, thinking, and acting” (Durkheim, 2014 [1895], 23).

This is not to say that norms are not an essential part of human life. I completely agree with Victor Lidz, who, in his essay, shows how norms are interwoven in all of human activity, including artistic expression and conduct, regulations for audiences, etc. What I argue against is the normative reductionism that equates social phenomena with normativity. When social facts are defined as norms there is no place for aesthetic phenomena as social phenomena with the consequence that sociology struggles to conceive the affective bonds that bind people together and serve as the basis of social relationships. In SNK, I refer to social normativity more like a superstructure, an epiphenomenon, or, in Parsonian terms, a parallel and structurally independent action dimension to the diverse impulses to communicate and interact, to enjoy a meal together, to work together or to play and listen to music together. Furthermore, normativity is not a social phenomenon per se. It is a matter of action in general, which implies that norms are not exclusively socio-genetic but also a genuine component of individual personalities. They are also, let’s say, psycho-genetic, for which Simmel created the expression “the law of the individual” (2010 [1918]), and, in a certain sense, norms are probably even a matter of all living systems, as Daniel Wehinger argues in reference to recent trends in philosophical thought.

Max Weber’s Collision between Two Cyclists and Their Rescue by Merleau-Ponty

One of the key propositions of SNK is the unity of the human body, its senses, and the mind. Humans enter the social world in the totality of their existence, and sociology faces the task of arranging its basic concepts in a way that it is able to observe the full picture of social interaction. Besides the social = norm equation of the Durkheimian tradition, it is the success the Weberian legacy had in diverse versions, like in Alfred Schütz’s phenomenological sociology or in cultural sociology (“culture as meaning approach”), which resulted in a blind spot towards the body and its senses as constitutive components for social action. Again, this is not to question the significance of meaning but its exclusiveness in the definition of action.

With the Merleau-Ponty quote, “intersubjectivity is intercorporeity,” in the title of his essay, Daniel Wehinger (2023) lends support to my approach. He argues that there are striking similarities between the arguments in SNK and some recent developments, particularly with what, in philosophy, is called the interaction theory of intersubjectivity in the sense of “mutual incorporation”. These developments are, as he explains, strongly influenced by the work of Merleau-Ponty. He sees “a lot of potential for dialogue between” SNK and these philosophical contemporaries. After studying some of the materials Wehinger refers to, I can confirm that their ideas are highly relevant for further conceptual clarifications in social theory. Sociality, Wehinger summarizes the point, is not primarily a meeting of minds but, to the same degree, an intertwining of bodies.

To reconstruct the arguments, let’s look at an example with which Max Weber illustrates his conception of social action. In his “Basic Concepts in Sociology,” he defines social action as a behavior that is meaningfully oriented toward others. Weber comes up with an example that we would include in the sociology of the senses but which he uses explicitly to exclude bodily contact from his notion of social action and, therefore, as an object of sociological inquiry:

Not every kind of touch between people is of a social nature, but only one’s own behavior that is meaningfully oriented towards the behavior of the other person. A collision between two cyclists, for example, is a mere event of the same sort as any natural event. However, their attempt to get around the other person and the scolding, fighting, or peaceful discussion that follows the collision would be “social action.” (Weber 1988 [1921], 563, my translation)

In this example, the bodies of actors are taken as natural entities, and their touch in the course of a collision or elsewhere, thus, appears to be an occurrence like any natural event. Meaning conclusively is taken as essentially exterior to the body, connected only in the sense of a fee to a telephone call, and comes into play only after the touches happened physically. In philosophical terms, this is a classic case of the Cartesian body – mind divide. The Descartes quote Wehinger provides could well be from Weber’s “Basic Concepts in Sociology”: “… and I deny that it (the body) has anything which belongs to the nature of mind.”

The theoretical challenge Weber’s example poses already starts before the collision. How is it possible to ride a bike, how do cyclists manage to keep their balance and not fall off their bikes immediately? We can be certain that they had to undergo a learning process. Such a learning process is not just a supervision and control of the mind over the body. As explained in the section above, what they learned cannot be taught, it has to be experienced. And based on experiences, the build-up of a complex mechanism of bodily coordination is required, a corporeal “action competence”, to borrow a Parsonian concept. A coaching for prospective cyclists or for our accident victims based on Weberian action theory would not be much of help. Fortunately, we can resort to alternatives to which the intellectual movements Wehinger refers to are highly relevant.

The next step is to look into the interaction of the cyclists in Weber’s example. Not only the mastery of balancing a bike is as much a cultural as a corporeal phenomenon. “Their attempt to get around the other person” may be supported by meaningfully orienting toward others, but for the most part, coordination with others is not carried out “meaningfully”. A group of cyclists coordinates their movements, e.g. their common speed and the safety distances between them, in an intuitive way based on continuous and non-conscious sense perceptions. When we walk on a busy street, we frequently don’t even know that we continuously perceive others and coordinate so that we don’t bump into them. The aesthetic metaphor of finding a common rhythm without conscious coordination attempts is demonstrated by the pendulum swing experiment Wehinger reports on. Participants were asked to find an individually comfortable rhythm in swinging a pendulum. Immediately, a common rhythm emerged, even when participants were told not to adjust to others. Not only did they do so unconsciously, they were “often stunned when … told that they have been coordinating their movements” (Chartrand et al., quoted after Wehinger).

And finally, despite all caution, a collision happens. “… the scolding, fighting or peaceful discussion that follows the collision” presupposes the feeling of bodily pain, the arousal of emotions, of anger, of guilt or embarrassment. It is these emotions that constitute the material of the form of interaction resulting from them. The “scolding” or, hopefully, “peaceful discussion” rests on them, and to explain sociologically what happens before, during, and after the collision only by referring to the content of their “meaningful” communication leaves out the most important part, the affective states anchored in their corporeal conditions. And these are, once again, not naturally given but socialized and culturized qualities. Besides, in this context, socialization and culturalization do not mean “incorporation” in the sense of a mechanistic “import” from society and culture, determined, e.g., by class positions, but a competence built up by individual personalities themselves based on their active orientation toward and interaction with society and culture.

Conscious meaning and norms are not an addendum to “certain physical objects called bodies” (Husserl, 1911, p. 298), they emerge from corporeal conditions, which is obvious from an evolutionary perspective. The question Wehinger raises is if one could assume “biological meaning” and “norms for the organism”. These expressions are cited from works of Merleau-Ponty. In my view, any living or autopoietic system has two characteristics in connection with its self-reproduction: one is a goal orientation, and the other is a representation of the environment. Both are functional issues that, in the case of cognitive consciousness, are encoded in the medium of meaning as defined traditionally in sociology. The same functional issues, however, may be encoded in other media like biological or neurological entities and processes.

The theoretical crucial point is to expand the concept of information beyond the medium of meaning. In SNK, I refer to Gregory Bateson and his dictum that information is a difference that makes a difference. This formal definition is applicable to corporeal, neurological, or sensory differences to the same extent as to differences encoded in meaning.

With this formal or functional concept of information and in analogy, a formal or functional concept of normativity, the Cartesian divide into the natural object “body” and the cultural mind could be resolved. Not even reflexes are “blind processes” – natural events in Weber’s sense – but “they adjust to the ‘sense’ of the situation, and they express our orientation toward a ‘behavioral milieu’” (Merleau-Ponty, quoted by Wehinger). This also applies to the cyclists’ reflexes when they were no longer able to avoid the collision.

Talcott Parsons had educational roots in biology and integrated knowledge about The Wisdom of the Body (Cannon, 1932) into general action theory. Concepts like self-organization, cybernetics, homeostasis/equilibrium, and cultural codes in analogy to genetic codes are examples. What he called the “behavioral organism” was conceptualized as a fourth subsystem of action, which he, due to a critique of Charles Lidz and Victor Lidz, changed into a “behavioral system.” “Skill,” he writes, “is essentially the internalization of certain elements of culture in the organism” (italics by Parsons, 1966, p. 15). This would apply to Weber’s bicyclists in the same way as to the mastery of a musical instrument. Another of Parsons’ arguments is closely related to the question of the role of the senses for (inter-)action: as part of the organisms, they are the source of information to be processed by the brain (1966, 8). In the joint work with Victor Lidz and others on the human condition paradigmFootnote 2, Parsons felt “persuaded … that the organism … should be entirely excluded from the system of action” (Parsons et al. 1978, 353). For my part, I would still insist that the original conceptualization of the behavioral system was an important addition to general action theory. In his review essay, Lidz (2024) restates his position and conclusively disagrees with the status of the senses and the body as advocated in SNK.

When he argues that “the body and senses do not in themselves have meaning to self or others,” I concur insofar as the concepts of meaning and of norms are understood in their narrower sense, but I wonder if their suggested functional or formal take would resolve the disagreement. The rise of neuroscience, Lidz mentions, is definitely a challenge to sociology. “One difficulty is that, although neuroscience has been developing rapidly in the last several decades, it has been created by scientists who view social action entirely reductively. They seek in neuroscience alone answers to problems that require analysis of the relationship between brain and mind” (Lidz 10). In line with this quote, I recently had a conversation with a colleague from the psychology department of my university, and she said that her research clearly shows that, in the end, everything that is needed to explain human behavior is neurological/biological. The problem I see here is reductionism but not neuroscience as such. Neuroscience is not unique in its exclusive claims. We also have widespread reductionism in sociology and in psychology. It is not so easy to argue against any of these reductionisms, because there is no doubt that without human biology, there is no action, and the same holds true for social interaction and for the psychological disposition. To resolve the problem, it is necessary to give up the essentialism in our conceptions of disciplines, which are differentiated by apriori analytical conceptual frames. The interpretation of research on causality in human action and living systems needs to take into account the analytical, non-exclusive character and the multi-dimensionality of action.

“The materialists cannot get to the mind, the idealists cannot get to the body,”Footnote 3 the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once wrote. Efforts to overcome the materialism/idealism dichotomy stood at the very beginning of Parsons’ career. Already in The Structure of Social Action (1937), he sketched a solution which is as simple as it is ingenious: both components need to be taken into account in a structurally independent way and not merged and, “in the last instance,” reduced to one or the other.

Adorno’s Disbelief on the Couch of a Psychoanalyst and His Heterodox Synthesis with Simmel and Parsons

SNK is primarily based on the ideas of Talcott Parsons and Georg Simmel, two pillars around which other ideas that are important for my intentions are synthesized. Among other sources, I found these in the writings of Gregory Bateson, Jean-Marie Guyau, and, to a degree, in Theodor W. Adorno, and I contrasted these ideas with some of Bourdieu’s, Kracauer’s, or Geertz’s. Several of the reviewers commented on the unusual line-up of Adorno with Parsons and Simmel. While Alberto Luis Cordeiro de Farias (“programmatic synthesis between Parsons and Simmel”), Jayme Gomes (“unexpected convergence”), and Jeremy Tanner (“heterodox synthesis,” “unlikely couples”) are basically sympathetic to my endeavors, Frédéric Vandenberghe raises doubts about “the heterodox fusion.” Vandenberghe (2023), in general, is skeptical of SNK. I am glad he decided to publish his critical review and explained his disagreements. It is, after all, the difference that makes the progress – to once more allude to Gregory Bateson.

My intention was not to deal with the works of Adorno, Simmel, and Parsons as such and to compare them, as Donald Levine and Jeffrey Alexander did with Simmel and Parsons. SNK is not in competition with or in contradiction to their work. Moreover, none of my takes on one or the other means an approval or disapproval of all of their work, their political positions or general attitudes in life. Therefore, I do not see the necessity to distance myself, e.g., from Simmel’s initial enthusiasm for WW I or from Adorno’s appalling early judgments on jazz and jazz musicians, and not even from those who criticize “cultural Marxism”, as Vandenberghe calls for. I am deeply convinced that “wholesale mentalities” of this sort are one reason for the “tribal set-up of sociology” (Niklas Luhmann) and obstruct the furthering of social theory. Although there are clearly profound differences between Adorno, Parsons, and Simmel, they did become what could be called “strange bedfellows” in SNK. The reason lies in some of their specific ideas that I integrated to strengthen my case.

Let’s start with an episode Adorno describes in his posthumously published Aesthetic Theory:

When a painter, obeying the pact of total frankness between analyst and patient, mocked the bad Viennese engravings that defaced his walls, she was informed by the analyst that this was nothing but aggression on her part. … In artistic production, unconscious forces are one sort of impulse, material among others. They enter the work mediated by the law of form… Artworks are not Thematic Apperception Tests of their makers. (1997 [1970], 11)

Adorno’s experiences as “a classical trained pianist,” as Vanderstraeten notes, prevented him from going along with the prevailing focus on what I call heteronomous functions of music, neither with regard to individuals, in the case of psychology, nor regarding society, in the case of sociology. The preoccupation “with the hermeneutics of thematic material” overlooks “the categories of form, and, so to speak, transforms the pedantry of sensitive doctors to the most inappropriate objects, such as Leonardo da Vinci or Baudelaire” (1997, 10). This sounds elitist and snobbish, as Vandenberghe rightly remarks, but the message Adorno conveys is clear and highly important for social aesthetics.

The theoretical crux of the matter is essentialism, just as I previously argued against the definition of sociological concepts by content or substance. It is the “immanent problems of form” (Adorno, 1973, p. 7) that can be interpreted as reflections of society and its antagonisms and not the “material” sameness. For Adorno, the literature of Franz Kafka and the music of Arnold Schoenberg are perfect examples of representations of what he interprets as “dissonances” in society. “This, not the insertion of objective elements, defines the relation of art to society” (1973, 7). A sociology of music and art, Adorno demands, would have to be “aesthetic and sociological at the same time” (1973, 9). It needs to take into account “art’s double character as both autonomous and fait social …“ (1973, 7). Given Adorno’s anecdote regarding the episode on the couch of a psychoanalyst, I would suggest referring to a triple character of aesthetic objects. They are not only cultural and social facts but also personal/individual facts.

Here, we have precisely arrived at three of the Parsonian primary subsystems of action. And, what is more, there is an additional complication, which is indispensable for social theory, that Parsons as well as Adorno clearly account for: for an individual person and for the social system, the primary significance of music/art is the phenomenon itself, what I call the autonomous function of culture. There are infinite social and personal options to use aesthetic culture for other reasons. Bach purportedly composed his Goldberg Variations for a certain Count Keyserling, who wanted his harpsichord player, whose surname was Goldberg, to play some tranquilizing music for him to cure his sleeping problems. Meanwhile, there are others who might attend its concert performance to demonstrate a high social status and membership in a certain conservative or progressive cultural milieu, which motivated Adorno to write an essay entitled “Bach Defended Against His Devotees” (in: Adorno 1976, 134–147). Adorno never tired of criticizing what he regarded as a “functionalist” focus of psychology and sociology. Another example is his essay “Veblen’s Attack on Culture” (in: Adorno 1976, 68–92). For Veblen, aesthetic culture was essentially a product of the striving for a high status. Talcott Parsons criticized Veblen on the very same grounds. Adorno erroneously subsumed such subjective personal and instrumental social use under the concept of function. Ironically, it was the anti-functionalists like the famous Parsons critic C. Wright Mills and later iconically Pierre Bourdieu who deconstructed “the symbol sphere,” much like Veblen, as essentially an appearance of a political and economic phenomenon.

Politicization and economization are not the essence of culture but a threat to it, as Simmel repeatedly warned. The creative movement of life brings forth forms (Gebilde), and these forms are objectified in two senses: they are exterior, and they attain a logic of their own. Criteria of judgements on (aesthetic) culture can only refer to the latter. “The most basic error of historicism and psychologism,” and the same holds true of sociologism, “that is repeated in the naturalistic theory of art” is the fusion of cultural creations with the condition of their production and the explanation of culture “from individual specifiable conditions” – see the diagnosis of Adorno’s psychoanalyst – or “out of economic circumstances” (Simmel, 2005 [1916], 147-8). Objectified culture, consequently, is the condition for its assimilation by humans for the realization of their lives. This does not mean a relative autonomy of culture but its structural independence, in the terminology of Talcott Parsons.

To sum up, in terms of the concept of culture, the common denominator is firstly the objectivity (Simmel), the autonomy of the law of form (Adorno) or structural independence (Parsons) of culture, and secondly, the idea that it is precisely the autonomy that constitutes its primary relevance for individuals and society. The epistemological underpinning in all three cases is a non-essentialist approach to society and culture.

“It Takes You a Long Time to Sound like Yourself” (Miles Davis) – Aesthetics and Individuality

Aesthetics and sociology share a “semantic polyvalence” (Welsch, 1997, p. 89). The only semantic content that is incontestable according to its Greek word root is sensory perception. But then the consensus soon ends. In the history of reflections on the senses, three semantic bifurcations may be identified. The first concerns the distinction between empirism, where sense data are the genuine source of knowledge, and rationalism, with the postulate of necessary a priori concepts. In both cases, sense perceptions are a source of rational cognition, of knowledge in the narrower sense. The second and, for our purposes, the decisive distinction is between the transformation of sense data into cognitive knowledge (empirical research), on the one hand, and into information usually denoted as aesthetic on the other. There is a syndrome of meanings associated with the latter: it is described as non-conceptual and intuitive or as an inner/emotional response to sensory stimuli (sensations, sentiments, affective states). In the social world, this is manifested as sympathy, body language, atmosphere in interaction, etc. Simmel’s sociological aesthetics is based on this understanding. In the history of aesthetics as a philosophical discipline, the meaning was soon narrowed down to questions of beauty. The sociology of art, fashion, music, and questions of the significance of beauty in social settings refer to this definition. To keep the sociologically relevant broader meaning and distinguish it from questions of beauty, I suggest using the expression “(social) aisthetics.”

Alberto Luis Cordeiro de Farias, who wrote his dissertation on sociological aesthetics from Kant to Simmel (Cordeiro de Farias 2022), explores a supplementary interpretation of the significance of aesthetics/aisthetics that he traces back to the tradition of idealist philosophy. His suggestion “holds the potential to contribute to future projects focused on systematically redefining social theory.” First of all, he refers back to the meaning of aesthetics “before evolving into a philosophy centered around beauty and art,” particularly to Immanuel Kant’s and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s aesthetics.

The fourth semantic bifurcation, he suggests, is “aesthetics as a reflection and theorization about the forms of intelligibility of the particular-sensible,” which, he claims, “represents one of the most important, albeit neglected, sources of classical social theory.” He starts his argument with the 17th -century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz, who epistemologically justified a kind of knowledge without complete logical clarity. About a century later, Baumgarten went a step further with a distinction of intensive and extensive knowledge. To my understanding, in close analogy to Bergson’s intellect and intuition, Baumgarten argues for two distinct but equally important forms to gain clarity: one is the form of logical cognition associated with “intensive clarity” which is a necessary “condition for explanation by universals”; the other is “extensive clarity” which is a “necessary condition for hermeneutic understanding” of the particular. Therefore, “sensible knowledge … strives to capture …. and define what is unique and incomparable about (an object).” This way, an important “methodological foundation of the humanities” emerges, “the construction of the particular sensible … was indispensable for Geisteswissenschaften and Kulturwissenschaften” (all quotes are from Cordero de Farias’ (2024) review essay).

Cordero de Farias carves out an important implication of aesthetic theory that cannot be overestimated for social theory. The basic idea is that grasping individuality is inextricably linked to immediate sense perception. This insight is associated with acknowledging that individuality is a constitutive feature of social interaction and its forming. Both ideas are as important as far away from common sociological conceptualizations. Georg Simmel’s work is an exception, which, conclusively, some perceive as an “anti-sociology,” as Reed notes, albeit “tongue in cheek”. His early sociology of the senses starts with a distinction which is in accordance with Baumgarten’s intensive and extensive knowledge: “That we perceive fellow human beings at all through our senses, develops in two directions” (1997 [1907], 110). One direction leads to knowledge about the person, the other “provokes feelings of like and dislike in us,” “leads us into the human subject,” and “their spiritual being” (1997 [1907], 111). The late study on Rembrandt (2005 [1016]) brings these ideas to completion. In a chapter on “two conceptions of life,” he argues that identifications of humans by rational concepts, e.g., by psychological character traits or sociological “variables,” are general and exterior to individuals themselves. They are thereby transformed into types. A first impression, “love at first sight,” on the other hand, although perhaps lacking any knowledge of the first sort, opens up a form of comprehension of persons in their individuality. Humans have an “organ”, Simmel writes, a particular sense, for such a form of perception, which, according to Simmel, is particularly visible in Rembrandt’s art. “Understanding” in the sense of such an organ and the “you” is essentially the same. It has, in this respect, the same status as the awareness of oneself. As in the case of love (“the whole human loves the whole human”), it eliminates the body – mind divide, which is the root of the dualism of physical-sensory perception of the body and “meaningful” conclusions about inner spiritual states. By looking at someone, we perceive simultaneously the body and the inner person, a unity of perception that can only be differentiated afterward. No rational conclusion is necessary from sense perceptions of the appearance of a body to the deeper inner layers of a person. The theoretical analogy of art is that it is the art that we perceive (“What do we see in a work of art?” (2005 [1916], 142–151)) and not something like a symbol or an icon that stands for something else and needs to be deduced from the immediate sense impressions we get when we look at an artwork.

Out of the “two conceptions of life,” predominantly, the rational one entered sociology. So, we are dealing with roles, types of people, and types of action and thereby completely miss out on one of the most fundamental factors of sociation: the individuality of other humans and of ourselves. Such a position is not “anti-sociology” or a “countermodel” to sociology, as Vandenberghe criticizes: “It is a bit surprising that Staubmann commends it (Simmel’s Rembrandt) as a model for sociological analysis. It would be more accurate to describe it as a countermodel … Simmel’s abstention from historical description, cultural interpretation, and sociological explanation is seen as a virtue”. In my reading of Simmel, it is not a matter of a neglect of exterior conditional factors, of “historical concerns” (Reed), but the insight that they do not explain in themselves artistic culture, individual action, and forms of interaction, meaning that there is something more and prior to them to which he draws our attention.

One of the virtues we learn from Simmel’s Rembrandt is that individuality is not the singularity of humans in the sense of a particular combination of a multiplicity of qualities developed on the crossing of social circles, as he wrote at the beginning of his sociological endeavors and to which he later referred as quantitative individuality. Qualitative individuality, in contrast, comprises an intrinsic logic that has to be developed in the sense of an ancient postulate, with regards to which Simmel repeatedly cites: “Become who you are!”. The fulfillment of the postulate requires a detour via culture and society. And in reverse, it is the individuality of humans that enters into culture and society. The jazz musician Miles Davis got to the heart of it: “Sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.” Some sadly never do, but Miles Davis accomplished it, and for this very reason, so many people are attracted to him and his music.

(In-)Compatibilities and Prospects

Based on an assessment of the “key theoretical strategies” advocated in SNK, Jeremy Tanner (2024) looks at first into “competing programmes in the cultural sociology and the sociology of art.” He draws parallels with scholars “who criticize the reductionism of mainstream sociology of art” as represented by my favorite antipode (a “contest-worthy dialogue partner” in the words of Isaac Reed), Pierre Bourdieu, or Howard Becker’s “production of culture perspective,” and who acknowledge sensory experiences, the body, and artistic style as core elements of societal developments. He names Eduardo de la Fuente’s “new sociology of art” (referring to a paper with the subtitle: “Putting art back into social science approaches to the arts”), Robert Witkin as well as Tia de Nora, emphasizing the intrinsic agency of aesthetics and that “music is not reducible to language-based semiotics.” Further seminal works in the sociology of art and music by Jeffrey A. Halley, Natalie Heinich, and Antoine Hennion are compared with SNK with the conclusion that “[t]hese important contributions are travelling in very much the same direction of [Staubmann’s] research programme, though apparently with rather limited mutual awareness”. Reading Tanner’s in-depth analysis made it clear to me that SNK would have benefited greatly by the respective awareness, especially by a demonstration of convergences with these scholars.

Particularly pertinent, Tanner writes, is a comparison with the school around Jeffery C. Alexander and the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology. Alexander had started his career as a leading neo-functionalist, a position from which he distanced himself in the course of the building of a “strong program in cultural sociology”. The program stimulated important research in cultural sociology. However, the radical break with “functionalism” reintroduced old theoretical antimonies. Instead of the Parsonian analytic concepts of ideational and material components that overcame the either-or dichotomy of the traditional materialism versus idealism controversies, the new programmatic framework reverted “to the radical and concrete opposition between the meaningful and the material” (Tanner) with the additional assumption “that the deepest foundations of social life are ideal” (Alexander, quoted in Tanner). Both theory decisions, the purported concreteness of basic concepts and the a-priori determination of their significance “give rise to particular difficulties when exploring art and aesthetics.” The example Tanner provides can immediately be compared to Simmel’s ideas about aesthetic perception as sketched above. While in Simmel’s interpretation of art and understanding of an individual person by means of sensory perceptions of the body, the signifier and the signified are identical, in Alexander’s theory of iconic consciousness they are split. Tanner refers to an analysis of the face of the famous actress Greta Garbo. Her face is decoded as an icon that signifies something else, a religious and moral message. Whether such a statement is right or wrong is an empirical question, but the exclusion of the original unity of perception and object and its communicative effects is a conceptual one. Furthermore, as Tanner argues, an “iconic consciousness approach” situates affect and emotions as classical residual categories. The reintegration of these categories for social and cultural theory, Tanner concludes, should be oriented toward available original sources instead of “reinventing an action theoretical wheel” on the basis of a conceptually inconsistent theory.

Tanner emphasizes the “coherent and compelling framework” SNK provides for the analysis “of the significance of the roles that the sensory and the aesthetic play in social interaction”. But he also points to inconsistencies and ways for improvements. He recommends taking recourse to the works of the art historians Alois Riegl and Heinrich Wölfflin and identifies affinities of the theory program advocated in SNK with Karl Mannheim and art theorists oriented at Gestalt psychology. All of these references clearly broaden the perspective and correspond to the suggested transposition in a new key.

The question Isaac Reed (2024) poses is broadly related to the issue of iconicity: “Does an aesthetic sociology need a theory of the sign?” First of all, as in the case of Tanner’s review, he points to an important field of theories that are not sufficiently dealt with in SNK. In particular, these include a theory of the sign in prominent sociological, philosophical, and anthropological traditions. I concur with Reed when he concludes that “an aesthetic sociology must grapple with the sign,” which SNK does in general theoretical terms, e.g., regards “signs with unconscious meanings for persons,” (Reed) but I see the point he makes that a thorough examination of compatibilities with the works he refers to would advance the project.

The “Deep Play” example discussed by Reed touches on the issue. Reed argues that Geertz’s essay “counters the thesis” … “that a semiotic sociology is somehow an anti-aesthetic one” because it “is concerned with emotional modulation in Balinese society, the physical spectacle of the cockfight, and the visceral experience of gathering around.” Indeed, in the study on Balinese cockfights we find key phrases like “what the cockfight says it says in a vocabulary of sentiments – the thrill of a risk, the despair of loss, the pleasure of triumph…” (1973, 449). Geertz, however, did not draw the necessary theoretical conclusions. The semiotic culture concept he espouses believes “with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance,” (1973, 5) where social and cultural phenomena accordingly need to be analyzed by describing these meaning webs. Although Geertz deals with subject areas that fit perfectly into social aesthetics, he does so in semiotic terms. He translates the vocabulary of sentiments into a story, a “cockfight as text” concept. Acknowledging the social and cultural forces in operation, the affective bonds, and the aesthetic experiences as such requires another culture-concept, a formal one, in Simmel’s terminology, where the semiotic dimension is only one layer and the aesthetic another. Thick description may then account for the affective webs in as much as for the webs of significance and diverse other references. The argument of SNK is that Gilbert Ryle’s original version of thick description is in accordance with a formal culture concept.

There is a noteworthy riddle implicit in Reed’s essay when he writes that he “is inclined to agree that Simmel’s account of the individual is preferable to a Parsonian account of the personality system.” Since I consider both concepts as essential for sociology and a theory of action in general, I try to resolve the issue: “The indissoluble unity that the term individual means is not a matter of knowledge at all, but only of experience” (1999 [1917], 65), Simmel writes in his Fundamental Questions of Sociology (Grundfragen der Soziologie) in order to argue against methodological individualism. He continues: “The way in which everyone knows their own individuality and that of others is not comparable to any other type of knowledge” (1999 [1917], 64). The individual as a unity of experience (Erlebniseinheit) in, let’s say, life worlds, has a tremendous impact on the forms of sociation, as argued in connection with Rembrandt’s art and, therefore, this fact cannot be excluded from sociology. However, sociology belongs to a “type of knowledge” that “summarizes given conditions to forms as objects of sciences in a way, which in immediate reality finds no corresponding counterpart” (1916, 64). This is the very idea of Parsons’ analytic realism as the epistemological grounding of the subsystems of action, one of which is the personality system. The analytical conceptual differentiations in Parsons’ theory of personality and the knowledge based on them do not contradict Simmel’s theory of individualism.

While Raf Vanderstraeten (2023) acknowledges that SNK “… aims at exposing conceptual or theoretical bottlenecks in the discipline and at indicating ways to surmount the epistemological obstacles inherited from the classical era,” he points to some conceptual options that are left out by SNK. He basically shares the differentiation-theoretical approach but finds an important theoretical device missing, the theory of symbolically generalized media of communication/interaction, originally elaborated by Talcott Parsons and later adopted in different versions by Niklas Luhmann and Jürgen Habermas.

Differentiation theory is an alternative to monistic concepts of society such as rational modernity or aesthetic post-modernity, to put it simply, and it contests the overall characterization of society by one of its subsystems, e.g. by the economy with the associated conception of a (neo-)liberal capitalist society. Parsons’ solution was a differentiation based on four “action dimensions,” one of which is the affective-cathectic action dimension. They are the matter out of which the respective forms or structures of action systems emerge. Now, communication/interaction requires a medium. In The Social System, Parsons argues that there are exchange processes in the expressive complex based on love or esteem parallel to money in the instrumental complex. Later, he refined these ideas into a comprehensive theory of generalized media. Media like influence or affect are enabling specific expressive exchange processes in a complex differentiated society. I completely concur that the ideas developed that way are one of Parsons’ most sophisticated theory developments, and they are crucial tools for understanding societal differentiation processes. I am not convinced of what Habermas and Luhmann made of it. Love as Passion (Luhmann, 1986) is interpreted as a “specialized communication medium in and for the system of intimate relations” (Vanderstraeten), but it misses the dimensional Parsonian differentiation and remains a semantic template about intimate conduct, thereby leaving out the most important part of intimacy, corporeality, which is taken as a biological environment to intimate meaning based communication. In short, I agree with Vanderstraeten on the significance of Parsonian media theory, and I particularly agree that “perhaps the potential of the differentiation-theoretical perspectives is not yet sufficiently explored within the discipline.”

A second basic point Vanderstraeten makes is his plea for a different approach to the history of sociology and sociological classics for rearrangements in social theory. He advocates for “the benefits of inductive changes within conceptual frameworks” and for “being more thoughtful about ways of doing theory,” assertions he packs into the wonderful aesthetic metaphor that “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”. I would say: yes, once it is cooked. But “cooking the facts,” to put it “in the immortal phrase of A. N. Whitehead” (Parsons, 2007, p. 23), appears to me to be a different task.

Jayme Gomes (2023) focuses on the conceptual consequences growing out of “the rich soil” of aesthetic reflections for social theory. He concurs with the conclusion about the necessity of “a new frame of reference capable of avoiding, on the one hand, the shortcomings of essentialist theoretical approaches and, on the other, the limits of positivistic and hermeneutic methodologies.” Gomes’ approval is obviously rooted in explorations of Parsons’ theory of action in his dissertation In Search of a Theoretical Synthesis (Gomes 2022). Going beyond “the usual clichés and misrepresentations of the American sociologist,” Parsons’ “relentless labor in conceptual and analytical differentiation” could indeed be seen in “the same spirit as Simmel’s and Guyau’s abstract, formalist approach where no matters are a priori excluded from sociology’s auspices”. It is in this context that I see the main challenges of further conceptual, methodological, and epistemological work.

“The main inspiration” (Gomes) is Simmel’s distinction of form and content. Several reviewers point to the vagueness of the concept of form and interpret Simmel’s formal sociology as formalist, as a kind of geometry of social figurations devoid of a substantial approach to social analysis. Simmel’s use of the concept of form indeed may be ambiguous and contain different implicitly interrelated notions, as Silver and Brocic (2019) have argued convincingly. Some implications of the form/content distinction, however, are quite clear: it is a theoretical device for the inclusion of matters as constitutive for forms of social interactions that essentialist approaches exclude a priori. Furthermore, sociology and its basic concepts cannot be defined by a substance or a matter because content-defined phenomena like globalization, urban life, religion, migration, crime, and all the other sociology textbook examples are not social per se, meaning that they are consequently also objects of economic, psychological, or jurisprudential disciplines. Such concepts are useful for pragmatic reasons but they are still in the spirit of 19th -century proto-sociology against which Simmel had argued. Durkheim’s or Weber’s attempts at giving sociology an unambiguous identity were major steps towards a distinct discipline but still involved limitations, as argued in SNK.

Following Georg Simmel, in his early work Substance and Function, (1923 [1910]) Ernst Cassirer presented epistemological conclusions from the radical transformations of the natural and formal sciences. According to him, ancient thinking and, in its wake, sciences up to the pre-modern era were still tied to substantialist concepts. Such thinking with “thing concepts” is still prevalent in our everyday life. However, a developed science is based on functional, relational, or formal concepts. Cassirer used these expressions largely synonymously. They are compatible with Parsons’ “analytic” definitions of concepts in his action frame of reference. The epistemological problems highlighted by Cassirer are no different in the cultural and social sciences. My basic theoretical conclusion in SNK is that sociology’s transition from a substance logic to a formal-functional logic is incomplete, which impedes the development of a genuine social aesthetics. The theoretical problem seems to be clear, but we are still far from a comprehensive solution. The review essays show the complexity of the task ahead.

Coda

Dissonances and consonances are, at last, difficult to define in substantial terms, to transfer a core idea of my theoretical argument to aesthetics. What appears to be a dissonance at some stage might be perceived as being in perfect harmony at some later stage. Mozart’s string quartet called Dissonance may serve as an illustrative example. The audience was uneasy at the beginning. Nevertheless, this piece became one of Mozart’s most acclaimed compositions. For sociology, aesthetic adjustments to uncommonly sounding concepts will not be enough. We do not know what the future of sociology will look like, but we know its present state, and we are determined to shape a prosperous disciplinary future through creative work and open debates. The review symposium contributes a mosaic in this process, a mosaic that hopefully stimulates and encourages further steps.