A Close Reading of Georg Simmels Essay How Is Society Possible?

The Thought of the Outside and Its Various Incarnations

Stphane Symons

In the following close reading of Georg Simmels How Is Society Possible? (1910), I have chosen to disregard both the secondary literature on this essay and the various philosophical systems that interested Simmel while writing it to attain a fresh perspective on the text itself and the stakes that it raises. I hope to clarify how Simmel is inspired by a notion of the outside and to hint at how a similar concept will become central, more than a half century later, to poststructuralism. In analyzing an irreducible in-addition that belongs to the individual but remains independent of all attempts to socialize him or her, Simmels essay contains, for the rst time, a philosophical elaboration of the primacy of the outside to society, over the inside of society, that inspired thinkers like Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. Giving substance to the idea that resistance to power is irreducible to a force that is merely reactive, Simmels text presented, almost a century ago, an alternative way of thinking or, rather, a way of thinking the alternative that has lost none of its relevance.

In How Is Society Possible? we learn that the associations through which individuals constitute a community are not irreconcilable with the interests of those individuals themselves. On the contrary, for Simmel, those associations
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form nothing less than the actualization of the individuals fullest potential: Societary life as such is posited upon the presupposition of a fundamental harmony between the individual and the social whole. . . . the socially operative doing is the unied expression of the subjective qualication, that the whole and the permanent of the subjectivity practically objecties itself by virtue of its functions in the society.1 Simmel contends that it is only by virtue of their introduction in society that individuals can fully develop their essence, thus claiming that the true being of the formerand its conditions of possibility can be studied only by understanding it as the telos of the latter: That each individual, by virtue of his own quality, is automatically referred to a determined position within his social milieu, that this position ideally belonging to him is also actually present in the social wholethis is the presupposition from which, as a basis, the individual leads his societary life, and which we may characterize as the universal value of the individuality (HSP, 389). This, however, has the consequence that when a society prevents individuals from fully embracing their potential for association and communication with other individuals, both the latter and the former have to be considered as remaining decient vis--vis their essence:
So far as the individual nds, or does not nd, realization of this apriori of his social existence, i.e., the thoroughgoing correlation of his individual being with the surrounding circles, the integrating necessity of his particularity, determined by his subjective personal life, for the life of the whole, the socialization is incomplete; the society has stopped short of being that gapless reciprocality which its concept foretells. (HSP, 390)

This, writes Simmel, is what happens in a capitalist society:

Man approaches the ideal of absolute objectivity as producer, or purchaser or seller, in a word as a performer of some economic function. Certain individuals in high places excepted, the individual life, the tone of the total personality, has disappeared from the function, the persons are merely the vehicles of an exchange of function and counterfunction occurring according to objective norms, and every thing which does not t into this sheer thingness [Sachlichkeit] has also as a matter of fact disappeared from it. (HSP, 383)

As such, Simmel sees at work, in capitalist society, a certain incommensurability between the individual and society or, rather, a split in the individual,
1. Georg Simmel, How Is Society Possible? American Journal of Sociology 16 (1910): 390. Hereafter cited as HSP.

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between his or her life within society and his or her existence without it, that is, his or her private life. However, the true genius of Simmels essay originates in the feeling that this split between the individual as a societal being and the individual as an individual is not just the harmful effect of modern, capitalist societies inasmuch as the latter became streamlined by such high levels of rationalization and industrialization that the individual as such remains absent in his or her professional existence. Simmels essay goes much farther than the standard Marxist analysis that studies the effects of alienation inherent to capitalist economies. The division between the role of individuals within society and their existence without it is, according to Simmel, not merely the outcome of certain evolutions at the heart of a specic society and, hence, cannot be reduced to the elements of an analysis that deals with one particular type of a society, sinceand this is the foundation of his whole conceptual frameworkthis division needs to be considered as the very condition of possibility of every society. The statement that only societal life can be considered to realize the individuals full potential, that is, does not at all entail that this individual as individual merges with his or her existence in society. Entering into society, an individual does not entirely give up his or her individuality to become a sheer element of society:
Each element of a group is not a societary part, but beyond that something else. This fact operates as social apriori in so far as the part of the individual which is not turned toward the group, or is not dissolved in it, does not lie simply without meaning by the side of his socially signicant phase, is not a something external to the group, for which it nolens volens affords space; but the fact that the individual, with respect to certain sides of his personality, is not an element of the group, constitutes the positive condition for the fact that he is such a group member in other aspects of his being. (HSP, 381)

Every step toward society, hence, inevitably receives its impetus from something that remains irreducibly nonsocialized, as if the decision to move toward society cannot but originate in a place that lies outside it: The sort of his socialized-being [Vergesellschaftet-Seins] is determined or partially determined by the sort of his not-socialized being (HSP, 38182). Every individual has, apart from his or her role in society, what Simmel calls an in-addition that remains nonsocialized: To be sure, individuals, like callings and social situations, are distinguished by the degree of that In-addition which they possess or admit along with their social content (HSP, 382). As such, society is conditioned by what lies beyond it:

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The apriori of the empirical social life is that the life is not entirely social. . . . Still further, one of the most important sociological formations rests on the fact that the societary structures are composed of beings who are at the same time inside and outside of them: namely that between a society and its individuals a relationship may exist like that between two partiesindeed that perhaps such relationship, open or latent, always exists. (HSP, 38384)

Thus, though clearly stating that the individual can fully realize his or her potential only in society, Simmel points to a core within the individual that is exempt from all efforts of socialization and, moreover, even explores the paradox of how this outside of society, that is, the nexus of a purely individualistic entity, is nothing less than the condition of possibility of society. In addition, Simmel nds that not only the impetus that initiates the individuals moment of socialization can as much be considered from the individuals perspective as from a purely societal viewpoint but even the very move of the individual into society and his or her efforts to seek the company of others. In his mind, even an individuals drive to develop an Arendtian public sphere that allows for communal thinking, talking, and acting can be perceived as remaining outside society. The gap within the individual between his or her societal role and his or her existence outside society, that is, is not at all clear and beautifully marked out, since even the individuals socialized part itself can become characterized as being nonsocialized:
We feel that this social diffusion does not completely dissolve our personality. . . . [This] is not only because of the molding of the social contents, whose unity as individual soul is not itself again of social nature, any more than the artistic form, in which the spots of color merge upon the canvas, can be derived from the chemical nature of the colors themselves. It is rather chiey because the total life-content, however completely it may be applicable from the social antecedents and reciprocities, is yet at the same time capable of consideration under the category of the singular life, as experience of the individual and completely oriented with reference to this experience. (HSP, 386)

It is, hence, not despite of the way in which the telos of the individual lies in society that the individual always somehow remains outside it but because of this specic form of dialectics: the move of an individual toward society can nd its origin as much in the need to develop his or her capacities for his or her own sake as in a wish to serve the community. Paradoxically, seeing the society as the end of the individual entails therefore, in Simmels essay, nothing less than acknowledging an intrinsic difference between the logic of function-

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ing of both realms. Society can never be reduced to a perfectly homogeneous whole in which individuals pawn themselves entirely to the communal welfare: On account of the fact that the objects of the societary synthesis are independent beings, psychic centres, personal unities, they resist that absolute merging in the soul of another person, to which the selessness [Selbstlosigkeit] of soulless things must yield (HSP, 375). Likewise, however, the individual can never become a self-sufcient entity that withdraws from society and lives an isolated life:
We know ourselves as a member of society, woven with our life-process and its meaning and purpose quite as interdependently into its coexistence [Nebeneinander] as in the other view into its succession [Nacheinander]. Little as we in our character as natural objects have a self-sufciency, because the intersection of the natural elements proceeds through us as through completely seless structures, and the equality before the laws of nature resolves our existence without remainder into a mere example of their necessity quite as little do we live as societary beings around an autonomous center; but we are from moment to moment composed out of reciprocal relationships to others, and we are thus comparable with the corporeal substance which for us exists only as the sum of many impressions of the senses, but not as a self-sufcient entity. (HSP, 38586)

It is the conceptual difference between, on the one hand, the existence of an individual as an individual and, on the other, the way in which groups of individuals organize themselves and thus give substance to a community that forms the nexus of Simmels essay. For it is, on a purely theoretical level, possible to paint the picture of societyin analogy with those mosaics in which the parts that make up the image are rendered invisible by the totality of the image itselfas completely independent of the individuals that live in it and to explore it as a whole, in a body of ofcials, which as such consists of a denite ordering of positions, of preordination of performances, which, detached from their personnel of a given moment, present an ideal correlation (HSP, 388). Similarly, individuals can be portrayed in isolation from the society they are part of and would thus become visible as elements [that] . . . in a certain sense always remain in their discreteness . . . as though every man has in himself a deepest individuality-nucleus which cannot be subjectively reproduced by another whose deepest individuality is essentially different (HSP, 373, 378). It is therefore crucial to note that, although the individual can nd self-development only in society, and although a society can consist only of

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individuals, it is impossible to bridge the conceptual distance that separates the two realms: the principle that, ideally, organizes a society remains independent of the people who live in it, just as, at the other end of the spectrum, individuals themselves have motivations and interests that are irreducible to the societal ones. The life of society, writes Simmel,
runs its coursenot psychologically, but phenomenologically, regarded purely with respect to its social contentsas though each element were predetermined for its place in this whole. In the case of every break in the harmony of the ideal demands, it runs as though all the members of this whole stood in a relation of unity, which relation, precisely because each member is his particular self, refers him to all the others and all the others to him. (HSP, 389)

Because a society and an individual cannot exist apart from each other even though they function in an intrinsically different manner, the relationship between both can be approached from two angles: rst, as seen from the viewpoint of their theoretical distinctness and, second, from the position of their actual inseparability. For this reason Simmel writes, about the individual, that the standpoint from which [his] existence . . . may be correlated and understood may be assumed either within or without the individual; the totality of the life with all its socially derivable contents may be regarded as the centripetal destiny of its bearer, just as it still may pass, with all the parts reserved to the credit of the individual, as product and element of the social life (HSP, 386), and, two pages later, about society that
if we posit [it] as a purely objective scheme, it appears as an ordering of contents and performances which in space, time, concepts, values are concerned with one another, and as to which we may in so far perform an abstraction from the personality, from the Ego-form, which is the vehicle of its dynamic. If that inequality of the elements now presents every performance or equality within this order as individually marked and in its place unequivocally established, at the same time society appears as a cosmos whose manifoldness in being and in movement is boundless, in which, however, each point can be composed and can develop itself only in that particular way, [if] the structure is not to be changed. (HSP, 388)

This conceptual gap between individual and society has a profound impact on every attempt to answer the question, how is society possible? The philosophical move that endows a subject with an in-addition that eludes all efforts of socialization and that, moreover, can reveal these very efforts of

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socialization as not necessarily socialized inevitably marks society with an outside that has become irreducible. The individual is here not just the vehicle of the division between societys inside and outside but precisely what occupies the singular topos where such a division has become impossible. Individuals are both the building blocks of a society and elements that follow a logic of their own; through them, even the inside of society can become visible as its outside. The essential thing . . . and the meaning of the particular sociological apriori, writes Simmel, is this, that between individual and society the Within and Without are not two determinations which exist alongside of each otheralthough they may occasionally develop in that way, and even to the degree of reciprocal enmitybut that they signify the whole unitary position of the socially living human being (HSP, 38687). If societys inside and outside are not so much in the individual as that, vice versa, the individual is at the same time inside and outside of [society] (HSP, 384), it is because this at the same time can be taken in its most literal sense. In the individual, societys inside and outside are distinct though inseparable from each other: though outside and inside remain inherently different, what is inside of society cannot but be outside it, and vice versa. In this sense, even if society can be seen as the telos of the individual, there is, in the former, no sublation (Aufhebung) of the latter. Though this idea does not go entirely unuttered at the beginning of the text, it escapes a more profound elaboration in what follows and, as a consequence, remains somewhat unclear in its consequences. Only when Simmel writes, on the essays rst pages, that
the decisive difference between the unity of a society and that of nature . . . is this: the latteraccording to the Kantian standpoint here presupposed comes to existence exclusively in the contemplating unity [Subject], it is produced exclusively by that mind upon and out of the sense materials which are not in themselves interconnected. On the contrary, the societary unity is realized by its elements without further mediation, and with no need of an observer, because these elements are consciously and synthetically active (HSP, 373; my emphasis)

does he really point to the stakes of the question that is the title for his essay and, moreover, brilliantly expresses the essence of his suggested answer to it: that there is no such thing as a complete resolution between the individual and the society he or she lives in. The very individuals who shape society inevitably fall outside it; as Simmel puts it himself, A separate consciousness of the unity [of a society] can never be attained (HSP, 377). Preceding

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Emmanuel Lvinas with several decades, though with a substantially different emphasis, Simmel draws attention to the radical alterity of the other, thus aiming to depict the particular stubbornness with which individuals remain irreducible to the relations they have with other people.2 Individuals inevitably elude how they become represented in the minds of other individuals, at all times maintaining some form of otherness and thus continuously falling outside the very ties that form a community:
As cause or as effect of this certainty [of the fact of the thou], we feel the thou as something independent of our representation, something which is just as really for itself [genau so fr sich ist] as our own existence. That this for-itself of the other nevertheless does not prevent us from making it into our representation, that something which cannot be resolved into our representing still becomes the content, and thus the product of our representation this is the profoundest psychologico-epistemological pattern and problem of socialization. (HSP, 37576) The picture which one man gets of another from personal contact is determined by certain distortions which are not simple deceptions from incomplete experience, defective vision, sympathetic or antipathetic prejudice; they are rather changes in principle in the composition of the real object. . . . that this requirement [the structural difference between the deepest individualitynucleus and its reproduction by another whose deepest individuality is essentially different] is not logically compatible with that distance and objective judgment on which the representation of another otherwise rests, is proved by the mere fact that complete knowledge of the individuality of another is denied to us; and all interrelations of men with one another are limited by the varying degrees of this deciency. (HSP, 37879)

According to Simmel, this irredeemable distance between the other and his or her representation in society gives rise to abstraction:
From the common basis of life certain suppositions originate and people look upon one another through them as through a veil. This veil does not, to be sure, simply conceal the peculiarity of the individual, but it gives to this
2. In Simmels text the being-for-itself that characterizes the absolute individuality of the thou is measured to the being-for-itself and the unconditional and unshakable . . . feeling of the existing ego (HSP, 375). The thou is thus, in Simmels (and later Bubers) opinion, other only to the extent that he is like me, that is, an individual in his own right. For Lvinas, on the contrary, the other is other only because he is essentially different from me: the irreducibility of the other to the ego is therefore precisely a consequence of how the former surpasses and severely problematizes the unconditional and unshakable feeling that originates with the latter.

Stphane Symons
personality a new form, since its actual reality melts in this typical transformation into a composite picture. We see the other person not simply as an individual, but as colleague or comrade or fellow partisan; in a word, inhabitant of the same peculiar world; and this unavoidable, quite automatically operative presupposition is one of the means of bringing his personality and reality in the representation of another up to the quality and form demanded of his sociability [Soziabilitt]. (HSP, 380)

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Likewise, the ego itself can never be entirely represented in society and is inevitably deformed by the mask it wears in the presence of others. Though never fully turning into a certain type, it is ceaselessly prone to generalization that subverts its singularity:
Precisely from the complete singularity of a personality we form a picture of it which is not identical with its reality, but still is not a general type. It is rather the picture which the person would present if he were, so to speak, entirely himself, if on the good or bad side he realized the possibility which is in every man. We are all fragments, not only of the universal man, but also of ourselves. We are onsets not merely of the type human being in general, not merely of the type good, bad, etc., but we are onsets of that not further in principle nameable individuality and singularity of our own selves which surrounds our perceptible actuality as though drawn with ideal lines. The vision of our neighbor, however, enlarges this fragment to that which we never are completely and wholly. He cannot see the fragments merely side by side as they are actually given, but as we offset the blind spot in our eye so that we are not conscious of it, in like manner we make of these fragmentary data the completeness of an individuality. (HSP, 37980)

In the above lines Simmel draws attention to an irreducible difference between an individuals essence and his or her expression in society. Individuals inevitably seek the expression of what cannot become fully expressed, that is, the core of their own self. In this way, Simmel clears the way for a deconstructionist way of thinking. That is, acknowledging, on the one hand, the necessity of individuals to represent themselves in society, he does not, on the other, refrain from proclaiming a structural inability of society to represent these individuals as such. Simmels insights read like a criticism of all naive, humanistically oriented political thinking that reduces society to an instrument capable of seamlessly serving the interests of the individuals that live in it because he denies, to these individuals, all possibility to express their selves in that society in the rst place. For Simmel, individuals can never really develop their individuality because the only instance to which they can

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turn while seeking to realize this aim is incapable of truly delivering them to their telos. No societary form can overcome the distance that separates it, as a means of representation, from what it is that it aims to represent (We are all fragments . . . of ourselves. . . . We are onsets of that not further in principle nameable individuality and singularity of our own selves [HSP, 379]). Though Simmel may thus not question the existence of a deepest individualitynucleus (HSP, 378) (as all deconstructionist thinkers will relentlessly do after him), he deconstructs it at the same time by depriving it of the possibility that it could become fully present to itself. However irreducible as a promise of completion and self-fulllment, society can, precisely as the end of the individual, never surpass the gap that separates the latter from the former. On account of an intrinsic difference between a persons singular essence and his or her expression in society (It appears as though every man has in himself a deepest individuality-nucleus which cannot be subjectively reproduced by another whose deepest individuality is essentially different [HSP, 378]), the move toward society that, in Simmels mind, characterizes a human being can never be complete. He sees the form of alienation that individuals undergo when they enter society as inherent to it rather than as a mere effect of certain historical evolutions. For himand this makes up the essence of his essay On the Concept and Tragedy of Culture, which he nished a year later every culture has something tragic to it: the very milieu that allows individuals to develop their singularities further is responsible for the impossibility to ever really represent themselves.

It is only in the following two passages, taken from the essays second half, that Simmel grasps the full extent of his remark, made somewhat in passing at the beginning, that the societary unity . . . is realized without further mediation (HSP, 373; my emphasis): The individual soul can never have a position within a combination outside of which it does not at the same time have a position. . . . it cannot be inserted into an order without nding itself at the same time in opposition to that order (HSP, 384), and the fact of socialization brings the individual into the double situation from which I started: viz., that the individual has his setting in the socialization and at the same time is in antithesis with it, a member of its organism and at the same time a closed organic whole, an existence [Sein] for it and an existence for itself (HSP, 386). Though it is, from a perspective that solely focuses on the stability of a society, nothing but a factor of continuous disorder and disruption, this irrevocable antithesis to socialization should not at all lead to profound pessimism. It is, to be sure, precisely this realm of the irreducible outside

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that gives rise to uninterrupted processes of resistance that can react against unjust or illegitimate manifestations of power and strive to recognize and emancipate those who remain excluded from society. The dialectics-withoutmediation between the individual and society and how it endows each community with the in-addition of an always present antithesis have as a consequence that no system of government can ever completely close itself off from the strategies of resistance that seek to transform or even, in the most extreme cases, overthrow the institutions that rule a society. No societal contract can ever completely do away with the state of nature; no Leviathan can ever distance itself completely from the individuals interests. As such, despite endorsing the notion of an individuality-nucleus, but by emphasizing the irreducibility of the outside, Simmel becomes an unexpected precursor of poststructuralism and, in the rst instance, of themainly French philosophers who were inspired by the notion of the outside (le dehors). It is, to be precise, Foucault and Deleuze who discovered the concept of an irreducible outside as a way to explore the logic behind a society and, more specically, behind the continuous efforts for renewal and resistance that are present in it. While in this philosophical move neither thinker provides proof of a clear and substantial inuence of Simmels insights, their ideas on the outside of and resistance to power can nevertheless be read as a further elaboration, stemming from the same philosophical intuition, of those that are central to Simmel.3 It is indeed the beyond of what Deleuze and Guattari call
3. To my knowledge, Foucault never refers to Simmels texts or ideas. Deleuze, for his part, does mention Simmels analyses of society at least twice. The rst time is when he and Flix Guattari refer to Simmels notion of secret societies in A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 544n76. Hereafter cited as ATP. For Simmels thoughts on secret societies, see The Sociology of Secrecy and of the Secret Societies, American Journal of Sociology 11 (1906): 44198. The second time is when Deleuze and Guattari mention Simmels (and Goffmans) philosophical interest in people who live on the margins of society (the stranger, the outsider, the migrant, etc.) and his notion of pure sociability in Quest-ce que la philosophie? (Paris: Minuit, 1991), 6566, 84. The thought-gures that Deleuze and Guattari deem interesting can be considered as illustrations of Simmels ideas on society and his views on the irreducibility of the outside as they are developed above. The ideas of Foucault and Deleuze are here dealt with as one whole, since there is no real difference between their considerations of the concept of the outside. For both thinkers, the outside is, though caught up in a logic of untamable violence, the locus where forms of resistance originate that cannot ever be contained. This side of philosophical thought has been a part of Deleuzes philosophy from the very start, that is, from his book about Nietzsche (1962) on. For Foucault as well, an interest in the force of the outside has remained present throughout his entire oeuvre. It had already found a clear elaboration in the text on Maurice Blanchot, The Thought of the Outside, from 1966, the middle of his supposedly structuralist period, and retained Foucaults philosophical interest up until his last, poststructuralist texts, written in the early 1980s (e.g., Michel Foucault, What Is Enlightenment? in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow [New York: Pantheon, 1984], 3250).

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the strata of a society that supports their analyses of a collective assemblage of enunciation, a machinic assemblage of desire, one inside the other and both plugged into an immense outside that is a multiplicity in any case (ATP, 23) and allows not only their inuential study A Thousand Plateaus but Deleuzes entire oeuvre to be in line with the self-imposed requirement that a book is politically relevant when it exists only through the outside and on the outside (ATP, 4). Similarly, what is aimed at with the use and further development of concepts like war machines, nomad thinking, rhizomes, and processes of becoming is precisely the realm that seems to be irreducible to the State apparatus, . . . outside its sovereignty and prior to its law: it comes from elsewhere (ATP, 352) and a depiction of the vectors of deterritorialization (ATP, 382) inherent to it. The outcome of the exploration of these forms of the outside is one of the most vitalizing and politically relevant viewpoints that one can possibly think of. From such insights, it becomes clear that Deleuze and Guattari agree with Foucaults central thesis, presented in 1976 in the rst volume of The History of Sexuality, that where there is power, there is resistance (L o il y a pouvoir, il y a rsistance) and that relations of power can exist only through a multiplicity of points of resistance (ne peuvent exister quen fonction dune multiplicit de points de rsistance).4 It is there that their viewpoints meet Foucaults ideas on power and resistance and, moreover, become visible as fully in line with Simmels suggestion that an individual soul . . . cannot be inserted into an order without nding itself at the same time in opposition to [it] and that it has [its] setting in the socialization and at the same time is in antithesis with it (HSP, 384, 386; my emphasis). The ultimate relevance of these ideas, for their part, can become visible only against the background of the Deleuzian-Foucauldian intuition that the domain in which power is exercised is exactly commensurate with the realm in which strategies of resistance to these forms of power are being developed. Erving Goffmans study Asylums can be read as an illustration of how this notion of the irreducibility of the outside can unexpectedly link Simmels ideas to poststructuralist ones. What is given there is a most beautiful account of how every community is visited by some form of secret society (Simmel/Deleuze-Guattari) that, originating in the very heart of its disciplinarian procedures and from underneath the rules and laws through which it exercises power, eludes those measures of societal control. In the chapter The
4. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualit I: La volont de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 125, 126. Hereafter cited as HoS: I. Wherever the French is given, the English translation is mine.

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Underlife of a Public Institution: A Study of Ways of Making Out in a Mental Hospital, Goffman describes the lives of inmates in a mental institution and the various tactics with which they dodge the rules. Using common rooms for personal purposes and thus establishing some sort of privacy, setting up sophisticated networks to move goods or messages from one person to another, and becoming close friends with the staff are just some of the ways in which patients forego prescribed activities, or . . . engage in them in unprescribed ways or for unprescribed purposes and, as such, withdraw from the ofcial self and the world ofcially available to it.5 With his notion of secondary adjustments, that is, how the individual stands apart from the role and the self that were taken for granted for him by the institution (A, 189), and the depiction of the numerous strategies to work the system Goffman denotes precisely what Simmel named the double situation of the individual as an entity that is at the same time both socialized and not fully part of the community he or she lives in: These practices (stemming from the secondary adjustments) together comprise what can be called the underlife of the institution, being to a social establishment what an underworld is to a city (A, 199). In these same attempts of the patients to elude the strict rules that govern the community of a mental hospital, the profound meaning of Simmels intuition that the Within and Without (of society) are not two determinations which exist alongside each other (HSP, 387) is brought to the surface. Referring to concrete instances where patients worked the system by, for instance, going on sick call or refusing to comply with ward discipline just to engage in social interaction, Goffman illustrates how, in mental institutions, the capacity to obtain personal freedoms, prots, and privileges originates in connection to precisely the laws and rules that tend to reduce them: The spirit of the legitimate activity may be maintained but it is carried past the point to which it was meant to go; we have an extension and elaboration of existing sources of legitimate satisfactions, or the exploitation of a whole routine of ofcial activity for private ends (A, 210). As such, it is not by distancing oneself completely from all laws and rules but, on the contrary, by adapting to them and using the privileges contained within them for personal gain and benet that resistance occurs in the most powerful ways. It is therefore in this context that the outside and inside of a society are to be seen as inseparable though distinct from each other. As Goffman clearly illustrates in his depiction of the life and underlife of mental institutions, strategies of resistance originate not in independency
5. Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Anchor, 1961), 187. Hereafter cited as A.

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Georg Simmels How Is Society Possible?

from manifestations of power but precisely in a confrontation with them. There is no inside that lacks an outside: resistance grows in the very soil on which the power of the law makes itself felt.

Pointing to the inseparability of the within and the without of a community, Goffmans text illustrates the profound optimism of Simmels essay. These examples lay bare the signicance of the more abstract intuition that the outside is primary to the inside or, in sociopolitical terms, that the forces of resistance that rule in a society are more originary than the ones that seek to control them. The strategies of the inmates depicted in Goffmans study are not just secondary reactions against the attempts to control their behavior but tokens of a counterforce that cannot be contained. It is a similar sense of the irreducible entanglement between power and resistance that inspired Deleuze and Guattari to write that it is in terms not of independence, but of coexistence and competition in a perpetual eld of interaction, that we must conceive of exteriority and interiority, war machines of metamorphosis and State apparatuses of identity, bands and kingdoms, megamachines and empires and that at the limit, all that counts is the constantly shifting borderline (ATP, 361, 367). Referring to this same potential for emancipation and justice, Deleuzes book on Foucault focuses on a concept of the outside that is not a xed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside.6 Likewise, some of Foucaults own basic ideas and his entire notion of micropower will not be fully grasped when they are seen in isolation from this feeling that power and resistance cannot do without each other and that, consequently, the categories of inside and outside elude a strict separation. Very similar to Simmels phrase (the Within and Without are not two determinations which exist alongside of each other) and Deleuzes words quoted above are the lines in Foucaults What Is Enlightenment? that the philosophical ethos may be characterized as a limit-attitude. We are not talking about a gesture of rejection. We have to move beyond the outside-inside alternative; we have to be at the frontiers.7 Only in this way can the pessimistic undertone reigning in the assessment of an omnipresence of power (omniprsence de pouvoir), and in the feeling that power is everywhere; it is not that it encompasses everything, but it comes from everywhere
6. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (London: Athlone, 1986), 9697. 7. Foucault, What Is Enlightenment? 46.

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(le pouvoir est partout; ce nest pas quil englobe tout, cest quil vient de partout) (HoS: I, 122), nd its counterbalance, inseparable though distinct from it, in the ideas that points of resistance are everywhere in the diagram of power (des points de rsistance sont prsents partout dans le rseau de pouvoir) and that there is no . . . place for a great Refusal in relation to power-spirit of revolt, home of all rebellion, pure law of the revolutionary (il ny a pas . . . par rapport au pouvoir un lieu du grand Refusme de la rvolte, foyer de toutes les rbellions, loi pure du rvolutionnaire) (HoS: I, 126). Thus thinkers like Simmel and Goffman, just like Deleuze and Foucault, reveal the stakes of every analysis of our present societythat is, they lift the veil of what lies beyond power and explore the ability of the outside to, on the one hand, make its power felt within society and, on the other, never become contained by it: [There are only] resistances that are cases of sorts: possible, necessary, improbable, spontaneous, wild, solitary, organized, sleazy, violent, irreconcilable, ready for transaction, engaged or sacricing: it belongs to their essence that they can only exist in the strategic eld of the relations of power ([Il y a seulement] des rsistances qui sont des cas despces: possibles, ncessaires, improbables, spontanes, sauvages, solitaires, concertes, rampantes, violentes, irrconciliables, promptes la transaction, intresses, ou sacricielles; par dnition, elles ne peuvent exister que dans le champ stratgique des relations de pouvoir) (HoS: I, 126). Only in such a way do micropolitics and strategies of resistance reveal themselves as more than just a counterblow to the manifestations of power: They are the other term, in relations of power: they inscribe themselves in it as the irreducible vis--vis (Elles sont lautre terme, dans les relations de pouvoir; elles sy inscrivent comme lirrducible vis--vis) (HoS: I, 127).