What Georg Simmel can teach us about social distancing
Although it is now a standard part of our vocabularies, “social distancing” is a misnomer. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are being asked to distance ourselves from others physically, but it is both expected and advisable for us to stay close to each other socially. While social and physical space interrelate, often in significant ways, neither is reducible to the other. Our increased reliance on video conferencing and instant messaging apps in the current pandemic illustrates this well.
Only in the last three or four decades has it become common for social scientists to talk about “space”, but the German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel was writing about space from a sociological perspective as early as 1903. He consolidated and expanded upon these writings in a chapter on “Space and the Spatial Order of Society” in his 1908 book Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms.
Although Simmel is now often considered a founding figure in sociology, he remains somewhat underappreciated as an early theorist of social space. This is probably because of the extremely piecemeal way that Anglophone sociologists have received Simmel’s work. There was no complete English translation of Sociology until 2009 and, in sociological circles, the only well-known section of its chapter on space is Simmel’s excursus on “The Stranger”.
“The Stranger” has been available in English for nearly a hundred years and is one of Simmel’s most widely anthologised texts. However, most students of sociology encounter it as a standalone essay rather than as part of Simmel’s general analysis of space.
Despite having been written over a century ago, Simmel’s thoughts on social nearness and distance provide valuable frames for understanding our present situation of decreased physical interaction and increased online interaction in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
To Simmel, space is not purely a social construct, but significant aspects of it are formed socially. In his view, it is impossible to comprehend forms of human sociation without considering their spatial context and how they use space. Indeed, we typically experience social interaction as the filling of space.
However, our relationships in and with space are not straightforward. Major historical changes in society make different kinds of spatial relationship possible. Moreover, every relationship amongst people contains what Simmel describes as a “union of the near and the far” (Sociology, p. 601).
In the case of “the stranger”, by which Simmel means a potential wanderer who does not seek to be assimilated into their host group (e.g. a successful trader), this paradoxical unity of nearness and remoteness appears starkly. The stranger is part of the group and the rest of the group often relies on the stranger, yet we are connected to the stranger through only the most general commonalities. In Simmel’s own words:
“The stranger is near us insofar as we feel similarities of a national or social, occupational or of generally human kind between the stranger and us; the stranger is far from us insofar as these similarities reach over both of us and bind us together only because they bind very many people generally. In this sense a strain of strangeness enters into even the closest relationships.” (Sociology, p. 603)
Furthering the paradox of social nearness and remoteness, we might be more inclined to treat the stranger as a close confidant precisely because the stranger is bound by fewer of the group’s constraints and has more fluid relations with the other group members, which allows the stranger to provide a more objective point of view.
This alertness to the “union of the near and the far” in social relationships is why Simmel can provide useful insights into our current experience of what we misleadingly call “social distancing”.
Online life typically entails both involvement and estrangement. This is especially true of social media platforms, where we frequently have a sizeable number of networked “friends” or “followers”, but only occasionally make substantial engagements with them, otherwise choosing to interact more passively by “liking” posts and comments (or to “lurk” without any such interaction). Within this network, we often have a smaller number of people we contact privately via platforms for instant messaging or audio/video communication.
In the current pandemic, many of us are regularly using video conferencing platforms like Zoom, often to perform work, but also to socialise with friends and acquaintances in a virtual group setting. Likewise, many of us are communicating with individual friends or relatives more frequently because our ability to be socially close has been so dramatically severed from our ability to be physically close. Long exchanges of messages and calls might now provide an even more significant form of human interaction than they did already.
Underlying all this is the seeming irony that one of our primary motivations for avoiding physical nearness is a sense of social responsibility. Many of us who are least vulnerable to the disease practise “social distancing” to avoid spreading the virus to those who are most vulnerable.
None of this is to suggest that online interaction is an adequate substitute for physical interaction. It lacks the emotional intimacy of bodily closeness, even the best platforms for video calls cannot relay all the communicative nuances of conversing in person, and many people find social media overwhelming. Nevertheless, it seems that our increased recourse to virtual spaces for social contact in the COVID-19 crisis nicely illustrates the paradoxical qualities of social space that Simmel identified more than a century ago.
While Simmel would never have imagined our present time of smartphones and social media apps, his keen understanding of how proximity and remoteness exist together in every social relationship, and of how physical and social space interrelate in complex ways, remains surprisingly relevant to our current experiences.
