Objective Culture' and the Development of Nonknowledge

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DOI: 10.1177/17499755124454312012 6: 422 originally published online 2 May 2012Cultural Sociology

Matthias Grossand the Reverse Side of Knowing

'Objective Culture' and the Development of Nonknowledge: Georg Simmel

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Cultural Sociology

6(4) 422 –437

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‘Objective Culture’ and theDevelopment of Nonknowledge:Georg Simmel and the ReverseSide of Knowing

Matthias GrossUFZ, Leipzig, Germany

AbstractRecent debates about the knowledge society have furthered awareness of the limits of knowing

and, in turn, have fuelled sociological debates about the persistence and intensification of

ignorance. In view of the ubiquity of the notion of ignorance, this paper focuses on Georg Simmel’s

insightful observations about Nichtwissen (nonknowledge) as the reverse side of knowledge. The

paper seeks to relate the notion of nonknowledge to Simmel’s conceptualization of objective and

subjective culture. In Simmel’s view, modern society produces cultural objects in order to satisfy

individuals’ inherent drive to become social beings. Ever more nonknowledge can be understood

as an outcome of the growing difficulties in absorbing the achievement of objective culture into

subjective culture. To illustrate the crucial importance of such a view of the unknown for today’s

debates on the knowledge society, the paper uses illustrative examples ranging from the strategic

acknowledgement of nonknowledge in personal relationships to public encounters and the right

not to know one’s own genetic identity.

Keywords

ignorance, knowledge society, nonknowledge, objective culture, sociology of knowledge

Introduction: Risk, Reflexivity, and Unknowns

Accounting for unknown dynamics and variables poses a more fundamental problem for

today’s cultures of risk than the inability to analyse known interactions accurately.

Debates about BSE, global warming, ecological changes, the safety of new technologies,

embryo stem cell research and new infectious diseases, in which the unknown features

ever more prominently as the flip side of accepted knowledge, can be seen as an

Corresponding author:

Matthias Gross, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ, Permoserstr. 15, 04318 Leipzig,

Germany

Email: [email protected]

445431CUS6410.1177/1749975512445431GrossCultural Sociology2012

Article








Gross 423

indication that knowledge generated through scientific expertise is starting to take a

backseat role in the face of the significance of ignorance. The discussion on ignorance

can be seen as part of a discourse that apparently runs counter to prevalent perceptions

that the impacts of unpredictable events can be controlled nowadays by making calcula-

tions of probability. Hazards are no longer communicated as external, unavoidable influ-ences or perceived to be in the hands of the powers-that-be; instead, they are more likely

to be attributed to decisions made by individuals or institutions. At first glance this obser-

vation appears to be warranted. Earthquakes are indeed no longer seen as inevitable natu-

ral catastrophes, and floods are not perceived simply as a natural phenomenon, as their

causes can be attributed in large part to human decision-making. On this basis, attempts

are made to make future uncertainty less uncertain through risk analysis or actuarial

valuation. Coincidences, misfortunes and gaps in knowledge are to be avoided at all

costs.

At the same time, however, it is also becoming apparent that many events elude theframeworks of actuarial prediction, ‘in part because there is little or no direct historical

experience to fall back on in evaluating them’ (Jasanoff, 2010: 16). Central to this strand

of thinking is the possibility of shifting away from traditional strategies of risk assess-

ment or reducing uncertainty and moving instead toward an enhanced capacity to cope

with ignorance. This is a shift that scientists have begun to acknowledge – that poten-

tially harmful consequences cannot be established reliably by further research and risk

assessments because they belong to the domain of ignorance (cf. Böschen, 2009;

Hoffmann-Riem and Wynne, 2002; Wehling, 2006).

Risk is most widely understood as the probability of a harmful event multiplied bythe amount of harm the event is expected to inflict. In these terms, dealing with igno-

rance clearly differs from taking or limiting risks, since the risk of a certain event

occurring presupposes a knowledge of both the type of events that may occur and the

probability that they will do so; this allows the risk to be quantified. In sociology and

other social sciences, many conceptions of risk are available. For instance, in socio-

logical systems theory the idea of risk has moved away from the above definition to

define risk as a decision that may be regretted if the possible loss that one hopes to

avoid nevertheless occurs (cf. Luhmann, 1993). However, besides the fact that this is

clearly a one-sided, negative notion of risk, this broad understanding raises the ques-tion of what would not be a risk-related decision.1 Furthermore, there are many other

terms and concepts available that do exactly cover risk in the above defined form, such

as Erving Goffman’s understanding of action. For Goffman ‘action is to be found

wherever the individual knowingly takes consequential chances perceived as avoida-

ble’ (1967: 194).

In general, since no absolute distinction has been made in risk research to date between

risk and risk perception (i.e. a distinction between objective, or statistical, risk and risk

perceptions filtered through cultural patterns), those involved in the sociology of science

and knowledge have begun over the past 20 years to concentrate on varying shadings of

knowledge and ignorance, or nonknowledge. In most cases, the term nonknowledge –

unlike, say, ignorance or uncertainty – is seen as the ‘natural’ reverse side of knowledge.

This is a reference – often augmented by Robert Merton’s (1987) notion of ‘specified

ignorance’ – to the fact that there can (and indeed should) be knowledge about the







424 Cultural Sociology 6(4)

unknown, that is, a conception encompassing some awareness of what is not known. In

order to do something successfully, a person needs a known residue of ignorance, which

philosopher and classical sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918) in the German original

referred to as Nichtwissen. This term points to the symmetry between knowledge (Wissen)

and its natural flip side ( Nichtwissen) to denote that there can be knowledge (Wissen)about what is not known. This aspect is not captured in the English word ‘ignorance’. A

literal translation of the word Nichtwissen would be ‘nonknowledge’, a term rarely used

in English-speaking sociology. As the English term ‘ignorance’ seems to capture too

many different meanings and in order not to conflate terms, in this paper I will talk about

nonknowledge as a direct translation of Simmel’s Nichtwissen. In most of Simmel’s

usages, nonknowledge should not generally be understood as ignorance, unawareness, or

as the mere absence of knowledge, but rather as a specific kind of knowledge about what

is not known. Nichtwissen is present when there is not sufficient knowledge about a cer-

tain issue or problem to be solved and when the actors involved are aware of what it isthey do not know.

In addressing the importance of handling unknowns, many debates in the field of

sociology today can be regarded as part of the discourse on a reflexive politics of knowl-

edge. The debate about the governance of knowledge and about a reflexive politics of

knowledge points to a major change in the way new scientific insights are generated (cf.

Grundmann, 2007; Stehr, 2005; Wehling, 2006). This even leads on occasion to calls for

public monitoring of knowledge production, as new scientific and technological innova-

tions frequently give rise to striking forms of unknowns that are less than desirable. This

has meant that the challenge posed by ignorance in the modern knowledge society hasmoved further towards centre stage in sociology. I contend that Simmel’s use of the term

nonknowledge can be useful in advancing the current debate about the ‘as yet unknown’

in the reflexive knowledge society.

In the following section I shall briefly introduce some general ideas on the growth of

ignorance. I shall then connect these to current debates on the knowledge society as a

means of embedding and developing further Simmel’s reflections on nonknowledge

within the broader context of contemporary social thought on the topic. I do this in order

to illustrate how Simmel’s ideas offer some useful pointers for developing current

debates about nonknowledge and to bring more sharply into relief the way Simmel seesnonknowledge as both inevitable and productive rather than as purely negative. I shall

subsequently show how Simmel’s notion of Nichtwissen relates to his account of objec-

tive and subjective culture, the aim here being to systematize some of his ideas and relate

them to what he occasionally referred to as the importance of surprise in everyday life. I

do this to show how Simmel’s ideas about nonknowledge can give rise to a space that

may be useful in driving contemporary debate forward.

It should be noted that Simmel himself did not develop the conceptual linkage between

objective culture and nonknowledge. However, he did refer to nonknowledge in different

contexts in his oeuvre, as in his writings on social types (the stranger, the adventurer) and

on social relationships (secrecy, sexual affairs). My aim here, then, is to follow the com-

mon thread running through all these usages, thereby making it possible to connect the

importance of nonknowledge to his writings on subjective and objective culture. On this

note, the following discussion is not principally about Simmel’s work per se. Rather, I







Gross 425

engage some of Simmel’s work for the sake of deriving new ideas from it which I con-

sider to be important for cultural sociology and related fields today.

The Growth of the UnknownIn general, uses of terms such as ignorance, nonknowledge or nescience can indi-

cate that there is awareness that any growth in knowledge can bring about a con-

comitant growth in what is not known. Already Herbert Spencer put it this way:

‘Regarding science as a gradually increasing sphere, we may say that every addition

to its surface does bring it into wider contact with surrounding nescience’ (1862:

16–17). Almost 150 years later, philosopher Jürgen Mittelstrass (2007) used the

metaphor of the ‘knowledge sphere’ to describe the growth of ignorance: every

problem solved – not only in science – brings in its train new, unsolved problems

and thus new horizons regarding the unknown. The knowledge sphere metaphor stems originally from French physicist, mathematician and philosopher Blaise

Pascal (1623–1662). Similar to Spencer, for Pascal, knowledge was like a sphere

floating in a universe of ignorance. Whenever knowledge grows, so too does igno-

rance. As the knowledge sphere becomes larger, the surface of knowledge expands

with it, inexorably generating yet more points of contact with ignorance.2 As

Mittelstrass clarifies, this metaphor can be interpreted in both optimistic and pes-

simistic terms. In the pessimistic interpretation, knowledge is represented by the

radius of the sphere, so that knowledge grows more slowly than ignorance. Thus as

the sphere becomes larger, the surface area increases faster than the radius, so thatawareness of ignorance grows faster than knowledge. In the knowledge society,

then, the process of knowledge production would be such that ignorance grows

faster than knowledge. The optimistic interpretation considers knowledge to reside

in the volume of the sphere, so that knowledge grows faster than ignorance, i.e. the

points of contact of the surface with the unknown do not increase as fast as the vol-

ume. Mittelstrass summarized this phenomenon as follows: ‘Whichever interpreta-

tion of this sphere of knowledge one chooses, one thing is clear in this picture and

probably also in the experience of those scientists who do not deal immediately

with the grand theories of their disciplines or with the grand design of all knowl-edge: The growth of knowledge does not make the world of the unknown – of the

not-yet-explored – any smaller, but rather larger’ (Mittelstrass, 2007: 4). In the

words of Spencer: ‘There must ever remain therefore two antithetical modes of

mental action. Throughout all future time, as now, the human mind may occupy

itself, not only with ascertained phenomena and their relations, but also with that

unascertained something which phenomena and their relations imply’ (Spencer,

1862: 17). In today’s knowledge society, however, this raises yet more questions,

such as: how do we deal in specific instances with these unascertained ‘somethings’,

that is, our growing ignorance? What do we not need to know and from what knowl-

edge do we perhaps even need to protect ourselves? But also: could it even be that

ignorance is an important resource for successful action?

In classical sociology it was Simmel who first worked with the concept of Nichtwissen

(nonknowledge).3 In his discussion of Plato’s definition of the philosopher as one who








stands in between those who know and those who do not know, Simmel notes with regard

to the relation between knowledge and nonknowledge:

It is only the fact that we always stand on the boundary between knowledge and nonknowledge

that makes our existence what it is. It would be a completely different life if the boundary werefixed, that is, if as our lives moved forward – in the sense of both life as a whole and with each

individual activity – uncertain things became genuinely certain and certainty became more

questionable. (Simmel, 1918: 20)

In other words, human existence per se is constantly a matter of playfully experiment-

ing with what is known and what is not known. Simmel discussed the topic in more detail

in a chapter of his 1908 work Soziologie entitled ‘The Secret and the Secret Society’

(1992: 383–455), although he also used the term in many other contexts – from many of

his essays in cultural theory to his final writings in Lebensphilosophie. In general, Simmelstressed that, in addition to knowledge about each other, it is more important to understand

the complex ‘interweavings’ of what is known and what is not known; it is this, he con-

tends, that constitutes the quality, the depth, and the nuances of relationships and interac-

tions between people (cf. Simmel, 1993: 108). Individuals as well as groups such as secret

societies steer and control social relations through their strategic distributions and manip-

ulations of the ratio between knowledge and nonknowledge (see Table 1).

Alongside the afore-mentioned emergence of ever new ignorance and its associated

unintentional side-effects, the debate about the knowledge society is also an important

topic within current discussions surrounding the reflexive turn in societies of the 21st

century. When we speak of the knowledge society, it is not simply a matter of fundamen-

tal transformation from an industrialized society to one in which the acquisition and use

of knowledge take centre stage; instead, it is about the fact that knowledge generation

always includes the growth of nonknowledge as well. Here, the knowledge society

describes a society that is increasingly pervaded by the indeterminacies entailed by vari-

ous forms of knowledge production. In the following I seek to contribute to the debate

about the character of the knowledge society by outlining Simmel’s theoretical reflec-

tions and giving examples of his unique terminology.

Nonknowledge and the Knowledge Society

The term ‘knowledge society’ refers to a trend in which scientific knowledge and exper-

tise come to acquire increasing importance in many areas of society. Essentially, sociol-

ogy started out as a discipline of industrialized societies, in which organizations

manufacture goods using natural resources. The knowledge society, by contrast, denotes

a fundamental structural shift away from an industrialized society to a new form of social

co-existence, in which attention comes to be focused on knowledge as a sector of the

economy. With the growing importance of different types of implicit knowledge – that is,

sets of knowledge that cannot always be formulated explicitly but can often only bedemonstrated on demand (cf. Collins, 2010) – the significance of forms of knowledge

work not aimed specifically at generating scientific knowledge also becomes apparent.

This development also serves to blur the distinction between science-related knowledge







Gross 427

and the experiential knowledge of the wider society, leading to a greater focus on the

close connection between scientific expertise, politics, and the public sphere (cf. De

Krom and Oosterveer, 2010; Hess, 2009; Maasen and Weingart, 2005; Moore, 2008).

The emergence of environmental services companies (organizations that perform a

bridging function between the systems of science, business and politics) provides an

illustration of this (cf. Guggenheim, 2006), as do current debates about the increasing

significance of new forms of research collaborations (cf. Parker et al., 2010). ‘Knowledge

society’ thus means that customary contrasts such as ‘science versus society’ or ‘knowl-edge versus application’ appear to be dissolving. Nonetheless, due to the origins of sci-

ence in the institutional spaces of the laboratory and of theoretical discourse, where there

is no imperative to act, the myth of the difference between ‘pure’ scientific activity and

non-scientific context has been sustained for longer than empirical observations in vari-

ous areas of society might suggest.

Unlike the work of Daniel Bell (1973), who regarded theoretical knowledge in late

20th-century modernity as society’s most important resource, current debates are con-

cerned less with the economic aspects of knowledge and more with the growth of igno-

rance (cf. Wehling, 2006). The use of new knowledge is necessarily associated with agrowth in new indeterminacies. Indeterminacy surrounds the extent to which knowledge

modelling and technical designs will be proven empirically, and uncertainty emerges as

a result of the unknown conditions in which modelled knowledge is embedded in a con-

text. In this sense, descriptions of current society as a knowledge society also serve to

Table 1. Simmel and nonknowledge

Type of Nonknowledge Trait Example in Simmel’s writings

Secret intentional nonknowledge; a regulation

of the distribution of knowledge bycreating and maintaining conditions of nonknowledge

the secret society, one

person’s secret is anotherperson’s nonknowledge

Strategic nonknowledgein personalrelationships

knowledge about what is not knownbut considered either unimportant ordangerous. The strategic element is toavoid boredom and ‘banal habituation’.

restriction of possibilities inintimate relationships, e.g.sexual affairs

Strategic nonknowledgein public

that which should not be known forreasons of politeness

seating arrangements onpublic transport such asbuses and trains

Unknown expertise one person’s nonknowledge makesanother person an expert

stranger relationships andthe modern division of labour

The not-yet-known can lead to positive and negativeoutcomes; something to be knownby forcing oneself out of the normalcourse of life

the adventurer who seeks tofind something by breakingfree of the normal courseof life

Note: Simmel often pointed to the general importance of not knowing in the order of modern life, but healso provided specific usages and examples of the notion of nonknowledge (Nichtwissen), some of which aresummarized here.









bring the surprising consequences of scientific research and technical development more

and more into the field of view of sociological analysis.

The importance of experimental practices in this regard has been well established in

the sociology of science. A range of empirical studies has shown that such practices can

also be found in various areas of the wider contemporary society (Fisher and Lightner,2009; Gross, 2010; Latour, 2011; Sørensen et al., 2010).4 Viewed in this way, the knowl-

edge society is pervaded by research strategies – frequently labelled otherwise – that

make use of experimental practices. ‘Knowledge society’ thus describes a society that

bases its existence on practices which may lead to unpredictable outcomes. Put in gen-

eral terms, the assertion is that the search for new knowledge and the application of tried

and tested knowledge go hand in hand in the modern knowledge society. The application

of knowledge often leads to the discovery of gaps in knowledge and new uncertainties,

while at the same time new decisions need to be made about interventions on the basis of

incomplete and sketchy knowledge. As the experimental character of these innovation processes is communicated more openly (cf. Sabel and Zeitlin, 2010), the need for insti-

tutions capable of fostering social acceptance and political legitimation becomes more

obvious. This in turn leads to a further – rather unexplored – feature of the knowledge

society. The knowledge society is distinctive because norms and conventions are now

more often being replaced by decisions based on nonknowledge and situation-specific

circumstances. Given that new knowledge always opens up the possibility of recogniz-

ing and better determining new nonknowledge, the uncertainty associated with that new

nonknowledge becomes one of the key features of the knowledge society. Making deci-

sions in the context of nonknowledge is highly likely to become one of the determiningfeatures of decision-making in societies of the future. Even if the theatres of decision-

making are not among the traditional locations of science, they nonetheless import and

make use of study and research methods. The knowledge society would then end up

being a society that develops further by playfully experimenting with nonknowledge

outside the sphere of science.

Objective Culture and the Everyday Surprise of

Nonknowledge

One of Simmel’s key discussions in which he used the notion of nonknowledge

( Nichtwissen) was in his reflections on secrets. ‘The secret’, writes Simmel, is ‘the conceal-

ment of realities by negative or positive means’ and is thus one ‘of the greatest of human-

ity’s achievements’ (1992: 406).5 He is referring here to the relationship between that

which is secret and ‘knownness’, which begins to change in modernity because many

things that were once openly accessible are increasingly treated as a secret. By the same

token, he says, many things that used to be a secret are becoming increasingly public. As

Nedim Karakayali (2006: 320) has shown, Simmel used the domain of secrecy to invoke

the sphere of privacy and the clandestine on the one hand, and the magical and the mysteri-ous on the other. The category of the stranger also emerges both as a person to whom one’s

intimate secrets are passed (since the stranger is an outsider who enjoys confidence), and

also as a relation through which secret potentials in a society might be revealed, since the

stranger’s expertise makes people aware of what they do not know. This lends a very broad







Gross 429

meaning to the notion of nonknowledge in the context of secrecy, including instances of

what must not be known, what is kept invisible, and what one does not want to know or is

afraid to know. What Simmel is basically concerned to show is that the secret is a structur-

ing principle of modern culture. He states that ‘in view of our arbitrary and deficient adap-

tations to our life conditions, there is no doubt that we cherish not only as much truth, butalso as much nonknowledge, and attain to as much error as is useful for our practical pur-

poses’ (1992: 385–6). In other words, new interpretations and strategies to act are based on

the acknowledgement of nonknowledge. This acknowledgement is fostered through a chal-

lenge of routines, traditions, or accepted sets of knowledge. Daily routines can collapse

because new knowledge has uncovered new nonknowledge.

At this point in the discussion I shall attempt to integrate Simmel’s idea of objective culture

with the concept of nonknowledge, based on what Simmel has called the modern relationship

between subjective and objective culture in his famous essay on ‘The Notion and Tragedy of

Culture’ (Simmel, 1998). Simmel suggests that, in modern society, the products of culture areincreasingly separated from concrete human activity and come to confront human beings as

objective, often anonymous forces. Individuals often feel that they are surrounded by cultural

elements they do not fully understand – even though the latter are human-made. For instance,

norms and laws invented by humans become (seemingly) predictable recurring phenomena

and therefore objective phenomena or ‘forces’. In his view, the things of subjective culture that

were originally created and designed by humans for humans ‘follow an immanent logic of

development, that estranges them both from their origin as well as from their purpose’ (1998:

213). For Simmel, subjective culture entails individuals’ capacity to produce, transform and

improve elements of objective culture for their own needs. Simmel saw that individuals couldnot escape from participating in a culture and from the ever more limiting consequences of

objective forms that derive from the creative processes of that very culture. Discussing the

connection between freedom in subjective culture on the one hand, and lack of knowledge

about objective culture (e.g. of certain norms) on the other, Simmel explains:

Insofar as our actions are directed towards other people, the practical consequences of these

two possibilities coincide. Nonknowledge in terms of other people’s future capriciousness

apparently affects my own behaviour just the same, regardless of whether this nonknowledge

derives from a lack of objective determination or from the inadequacy of my own awareness of

the latter. (Simmel, 1892: 234)

Thus understood, the effects of nonknowledge can either develop out of the oppress-

ing force of objective culture or the subject’s lack of capacity to meaningfully cope with

it. Analytically, the effects on the individual are the same.

What Simmel observed was that the growth of objective culture sometimes outstrips the

pace of growth of subjective culture, so that objective culture sometimes runs counter to

subjective forces. This, in Simmel’s writings, is the tragic conflict that permeates all

domains of modern society. Furthermore, as Simmel wrote with regard to intellectual work,

as soon as the human-made work is completed (dasteht ), it not only has an objective being and

an individual existence ( Eigenleben) independent of humans, but it also holds in its being

(Selbstsein) … strengths and weaknesses, components and significances ( Bedeutsamkeiten) of

which we are completely innocent and which often take us by surprise. (Simmel, 1892: 234)









Simmel points here to the fact that although humans have invented something, their

own creation is able to surprise them through the form it assumes when it becomes part of

‘objective’ culture. Among the many shadings of Simmel’s usage of the term ‘culture’, it is

perhaps the idea of culture as a process by which human beings create their own ‘subjective

culture’. Donald Levine (2008: 245) called this the ‘process by which certain human con-

structions come to follow their own inner laws of development’. To Simmel, this relation-

ship between the two cultures is at the centre of a radical – though often latent – change in

the modern era, since an individual’s subjective ideas and intentions frequently fall prey to

objective culture, causing them to take on a quite different – and unintended – life of their

own. One can interpret Simmel that this development will lead to ever more nonknowledge

as one outcome of the inability to absorb objective products into subjective culture.

Traditionally, all that had been concealed and secret was to be moved into the illuminated

sphere of knowledge. However, in Simmel’s idea of objective culture and our processing

of nonknowledge, the more new knowledge, new technologies, new laws and customs

people generate, the more they can be surprised by their own success and, in the process,

become more frequently aware of their own nonknowledge. The continuing existence and

ever new emergence of nonknowledge and the ever recurring generation of secrets at first

sight seem to contradict the modernist assumption that the unknown can be banished from

social life by modern science and the rationalization of the world.

Adventures, Secrets and Trust: Some Achievements of

Nonknowledge in PublicAnother area where Simmel brings in the notion of nonknowledge is in his discussion of

the adventure (1998). According to Simmel, an adventure is a voluntary interruption of

the continuum between the normal course of life and an unusual event that somebody has

hoped for. Since in an adventure the individual is longing for something unexpected to

happen, it can be understood as a chance to regain control after predictably losing control

(at least for a moment) in generally trying circumstances. This can be called an antici-

pated surprise. However, it is also more than this: it is something that goes against the

very grain of life, since an adventure stands out from the ‘hanging together’ of the normal

course of life, as Simmel called it. He continues: ‘The adventurer treats the incalculable

element in life in the way we ordinarily treat only what we think is by definition calcula-

ble’ (1998: 30). This can be related to the concept of ‘edgework’, that is, voluntary risk

taking, as most prominently put forward by Stephen Lyng (2008). However, Simmel did

not have to deal with the broad and blurred notion of risk prevalent in some of today’s

sociology (cf. Green, 2009). Instead he described adventurous edgework in terms of

‘tinkering with’ nonknowledge:6

The certainty with which we know – justifiably or in error – about a successful outcome gives

our activity a special kind of quality. If, however, we are uncertain whether we will reach thedestination towards which we have set out – if we are aware of our nonknowledge about

whether we will succeed – then this means not only less certainty in quantitative terms but also

a unique kind of practical conduct, both within ourselves and towards the outside world.

(Simmel, 1998: 30)








Gross 431

In other words, the fact that the adventurer knows exactly what he or she does not

know is what makes an adventure adventurous. And, further still, modern life – ‘the

problematic nature of our position in the world’, as Simmel called it – ‘turns us all into

adventurers’ (1998: 37). One could thus interpret Simmel’s essay on the adventure as

follows. Due to the increase in objective culture, both nonknowledge and surprisingturns of events are on the increase. So what can the adventurer rely upon at all in the

modern world? Surely on the nonknowledge with which she or he is able to master their

next steps!7

In Simmel’s conceptual model of the development of modern society, the gap between

subjective and objective culture may become larger – but this need not necessarily be so.

The deliberate creation of objective culture, whether it take the form of scientific inter-

ventions in the natural environment or forms of social interaction, almost always, one

might say, leads to new forms of knowledge and – particularly in modern knowledge

societies – to ever more new nonknowledge. It is the recognition of nonknowledge thatrepresents a key aspect of the modern world. On this point, Simmel notes: ‘The fact that

we ourselves are aware of our knowledge and our nonknowledge and in turn also know

of this overarching knowledge (and so forth into potential infinity) – this is the real

unboundedness (Unendlichkeit ) of the movement of life at the level of the intellect’

(Simmel, 1918: 7). Simmel introduces trust as the connecting link between knowledge

and nonknowledge: ‘We rest our most serious decisions upon a complicated system of

conceptions, the majority of which presuppose trust that we have not been deceived’

(Simmel, 1992: 389). Furthermore, he wrote: ‘Trust, as a hypothesis of future conduct

that is sufficiently sure in order to form the basis of practical action, is qua hypothesis amediate condition between knowledge and nonknowledge of a person’ (1992: 393).8 In

his analysis of an accelerating modern society, this meant that ever new nonknowledge

was the main feature of the emerging objective culture. Simmel writes on this point: ‘The

objectification of culture referred to above has sharply differentiated the amounts of

knowledge and nonknowledge essential as the condition of trust’ (Simmel, 1992: 394).

However, there is no clear connection in Simmel’s work between acquired knowledge

and depth of trust, as even in the case of very little knowledge, great trust can exist in

another person or a thing – and vice versa.

As mentioned above, Simmel illustrates the importance of nonknowledge and trustusing the example of secrecy. He notes fundamental changes in the relationship between

things unknown and known in the modern world. It is indeed the case that many things

which were formerly rendered secret (e.g. sexual intimacy) have become more public,

and experiences such as face-to-face contact with strangers (for example, via seating

arrangements in trains) have become more anonymous as people increasingly tend to

protect their ‘public privacy’ by, for example, averting their gaze from fellow passengers.

He called for ‘a right to secrecy’ (Simmel, 1992: 406). In his famous excursus on the

stranger, Simmel uses the category of the stranger as emerging both as a person to whom

most intimate secrets are passed and through which hitherto unexplored insights and pos-

sibilities might be fostered or at least revealed. To this end Karakayali (2006: 325–6) has

made the distinction between two types of stranger, the highly skilled stranger and the

stranger who lacks special skills. The former is accepted because he or she is able to

carry out tasks that the natives are incapable of doing, while the latter can be employed








in jobs that the natives are unwilling to do. This, as I suggest, points to two different

types of nonknowledge. In the first case, the nonknowledge involved has a positive con-

notation, since the natives know what they do not know (a certain skill possessed by a

stranger) and would probably like to be able to know. The second case involves a type of

nonknowledge which they are content to leave to the realm of ‘secrecy’ (e.g. cleaning jobs or prostitution).

There is yet another form of secrecy involved in stranger relationships that we can

find in Simmel. This is what I would like to call ‘strategic nonknowledge in public’ (see

also Table 1). In his excursus on the sociology of the senses, which comes immediately

prior to the one on the stranger in his book Soziologie, Simmel wrote:

Before the development of omnibuses, trains, and trams in the 19th century, human individuals

were never in a position to be forced to look at each other without talking to one another for

periods of minutes to hours. … The greater mysteriousness that characterises what is seencompared to what has been heard certainly supports the suggested shift in the set of issues

pertaining to the modern attitude towards life. It is a feeling of greater disorientation in

collective life, an increase in loneliness, and a feeling of being surrounded by closed doors. A

sociologically highly feasible compensation of the differences in activities of the senses is to be

found in a much stronger ability towards remembering what has been heard in comparison to

what has been seen. (Simmel, 1992: 727)

This shows that nonknowledge is promoted when people avoid talking to one another,

even though they know that others are present. This can also lead to a lack of eye contact,

since people try to avoid looking at each other. Sometimes individuals gain more knowl-edge about their peers through visual clues – whether they want to or not. Since the time

Simmel wrote these words, the individual’s experience on the train, plane, and bus, in

waiting rooms, in shops and in almost every public place has changed even more rapidly.

Today the use of earphones to listen to music or to use a mobile phone has certainly

amplified what Simmel referred to as a stronger sense of hearing in public in comparison

to what is seen. It has also led to more strategic forms of using nonknowledge in public.

Stefan Hirschauer (2005) has contributed the idea of what he calls ‘civil inattentiveness’.

By this he means ‘normalised non-relations’ between people in settings such as lifts in

order to remain strangers to one another. It can certainly be said that seating arrange-ments in trains today support civil inattentiveness even more and thus help human actors

to ‘recant’ their presence and certify to the other person(s) present that one does not want

to know what another person looks like or what he or she is doing or saying.

On a different note, for Simmel the lack of what he called ‘reciprocal discretion’ can

lead to the failure of many marriages – ‘that is, they degenerate into a charmless, banal

habituation, into a matter of course which leaves no room for surprises’ (1992: 406). His

point is that even a married couple needs to seem to each other to have secrets, hidden

depths, so that they do not become deadly boring to one another. This is where, in his

conceptualization of things known and unknown, the notion of nonknowledge( Nichtwissen) comes in. To be social beings who are able to cope successfully with their

social environment, people need clearly defined realms of unknowns for themselves (see

Table 1 for a comparison of different types of nonknowledge found in Simmel’s oeuvre).

To repeat, nonknowledge for Simmel is understood as a special form of the unknown: it







Gross 433

is not lack of knowledge, error, or mere ignorance, but rather a clearly defined realm of

what is unknown, one that is needed to structure everyday life.

Nonknowledge as NormalityFollowing Simmel’s line of argument, I would now like to point to the everyday normal-

ity of nonknowledge. Consider an example. If you ask someone when they last fell in

love and how it happened, they will often proudly put it down to coincidence or say that

they do not really know: ‘I don’t know how it happened to me’; ‘I wasn’t looking for

love, I was struck by lightning’, and so forth. Yet this nonknowledge is not considered to

be a knowledge deficit; instead, it is that unascertained something necessary for ‘explain-

ing’ the distinctiveness – and even the ‘magic’ – involved. This example again makes it

clear that nonknowledge need not be a cause for alarm. Rather, it can be an important

basis for everyday individual and collective explanations and decisions.On a more pessimistic note, researchers today are increasingly addressing the limits

and the (occasional) ‘dark sides’ of knowledge (Wehling, 2006). Against this back-

ground, precautionary action cannot continue to be limited to estimating and managing

clearly calculable risks; instead, it must get to grips with the problem of what is not

known and cannot be predicted. The question is, first, why something is not known and,

second – and possibly more important – what actions and decisions are appropriate given

this lack of knowledge. This, as Stocking and Holstein (2009) have shown, also means

that ignorance can be explicitly used in rhetorical claims to sow doubt among the public

and discredit scientific credibility in controversial issues such as global climate changeor the amplification of gaps in Darwin’s theory of evolution. Strategies such as these

pose a major challenge on how to lay open the limits of scientific knowledge to the pub-

lic without losing public confidence. This aspect is crucial since all processes of research

and innovation promote the growth of new nonknowledge by revealing new limits to

knowledge. Thus new surprises can emerge through the wide gap between knowledge

and nonknowledge. Unlike in many current discussions on ignorance, in Simmel’s work

this is not necessarily a negative thing, but rather a normal process of cultural develop-

ment. The outcomes of surprises from, say, technical development, are described by him

in neutral terms as ‘by-products’ (Simmel, 1998: 213), which he sees as a normal part of any modern social development. Simmel sees no synthesis or any end point to this devel-

opment (cf. Gross, 2008).

Let us look at a contemporary example where the secret in the reflexive knowledge

society really does turn out to be a great human achievement, as Simmel called it. The

heated debates that have been conducted over the last 20 years or so around the legal

right not to (have to) know one’s own genetic identity are certainly a part of this. This

issue appears to be gaining greater significance nowadays. In so-called preventive

genetic diagnostics, the aim is to identify genetic specificities which may indicate an

increased probability of illness, usually at an advanced age (cf. Wehling, 2006).

Preventive genetics is generally regarded as a highly modern method in disease preven-

tion. What seems problematic here, though, is that the predictions relate to long periods

of time. Moreover, it is still unclear when a disease will manifest and indeed whether it

will do so at all. More important still is the danger that the boundary between illness and








health becomes blurred for those affected, as a disadvantageous test result may have an

impact on healthy people’s sense of well-being in their everyday lives. Knowing that you

do not know when (or whether) you may fall seriously ill once a probability has been

established, is almost certain to make you feel afraid. The right not to know becomes

relevant when, in the process of genetic testing, relatives are also informed (without their consent) about their genetic risk (cf. Duttge, 2010). Since the options for treating and

healing such ‘diseases’ are often very limited as well, preventive genetic testing throws

the shadow of a possibility of future illness over the present without providing any mean-

ingful prospects for dealing with it (and often none at all). The right to nonknowledge is

therefore intended to ensure that no one can be forced to acquire knowledge of their

genetic characteristics. Along this line of argumentation, some jurists today even argue

that in the 21st century the right to know and the right to nonknowledge need to be con-

nected with ‘the right to be let alone’ (Duttge, 2010: 36) in the sense that people have a

right to not even be informed on what they do not know. This seems to contradict themodern notion of more knowledge as a driver of progress. However, nonknowledge

here, according to Peter Wehling, is ‘not devalued as a knowledge deficit that should be

made up as quickly as possible or as a moral deficit, but is being spoken of – perhaps for

the first time in modern societies – as a legally protected right whose protection is

intended to cushion the risks and ambiguities of (scientific) knowledge’ (Wehling, 2006:

327; emphasis in original).

Outlook: We Don’t Know, and Yet – Yes We Can!

Some one hundred years ago Simmel outlined an understanding of a technicized society

based on fundamental uncertainty and characterized by the constant generation of new

knowledge and new technological products: objective culture. As we have seen, Simmel’s

writings can be interpreted in such a way that this phenomenon leads to ever more non-

knowledge as the result of the increasing inability to meaningfully implement and inte-

grate products of objective culture into the everyday practices of subjective culture. It is

important to note that, for Simmel, this development does not inevitably lead to despair

but is incorporated readily into ordinary, everyday life. In Simmel’s work, the significance

of nonknowledge and its associated unexpected by-products, both in relation to other people and in relation to the interaction with different forms of objective culture, can be

viewed as standing at the centre of cultural development. For him, the production of non-

knowledge was not seen as a deviation or as an obscure residual category of moderniza-

tion oriented towards the ‘revelation’ of unknown phenomena, but as a normal everyday

aspect of modern society. Indeed, one could read Simmel as saying that elements of sur-

prise and the recognition of nonknowledge are the driving forces behind everyday interac-

tions and perhaps modernity itself. Mishaps and setbacks in everyday life which occur

through the emergence of objective culture are not fundamentally a sign of human error

or of imperfection but are rather highly probable and perhaps even unavoidable.

The production of new knowledge always leads to sudden or unexpected events so that

unknowns become apparent, something Simmel called Nichtwissen. The right strategy can-

not be to do nothing or to wait until certain knowledge is available. Instead, after becoming

aware of one’s own nonknowledge, Simmel assumed that objective culture needs to be







Gross 435

successfully ‘resubjectivated’ (Simmel, 1998: 213) – although only in order to be merged

again into new inventions and ‘objective’ cultural achievements. It can be imagined as a

circuit respectively linked through different shadings of nonknowledge (see Table 1) where

objective culture is a prerequisite for subjective culture and vice versa. Consequently, such

a recursive practice must continuously include the acknowledgement of unknowns. By pointing to this phenomenon, Simmel has laid a new conceptual foundation for understand-

ing the relationship between everyday knowledge and nonknowledge production.

Furthermore, this supports the observation introduced in the first part of this article, namely,

that the uncertainties surrounding debates on the general uncertainty of life in the emerging

knowledge society might better be interpreted, first and foremost, not in terms of concepts

of risk but increasingly in terms of strategic or accidental constructions of nonknowledge.

Notes

1. For a general discussion and fundamental critique of different sociological conceptions of

risk, see e.g. Alario and Freudenburg (2010), Campbell and Currie (2006) and Green (2009).

2. Many versions of this metaphor exist. John Wheeler, physicist and Noble Prize winner, put it

this way: ‘We live on an island surrounded by a sea of ignorance. As our island of knowledge

grows, so does the shore of our ignorance’ (as quoted in Horgan, 1992: 10). Johann Wolfgang

von Goethe (1749–1832) is said to have stated: ‘The greater the knowledge, the greater the

doubt’, and John F. Kennedy: ‘The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance

unfolds’ (quotes can be found all over the internet). Be that as it may, Pascal lived long before

the above notabilities, so I refer to him as the original and follow Mittelstrass’s interpretation.

3. Save for very few remarks (e.g. Spencer, see above), other classical sociologists did not deal

with the challenge of nonknowledge in modern culture at all, which is why Simmel’s ideas

can be regarded as quite original.

4. Among others, Ian Hacking (1991) has demonstrated that experimental practices cannot be

reduced to a supporting role in the formulation of theories but rather lead a relatively inde-

pendent life of their own apart from theory development.

5. The quotes by Simmel from his chapter on secrecy are my translations from the German

based on the first English translation by Albion W. Small (Simmel, 1906). All other transla-

tions are solely my own.

6. It is interesting to note here that even Lyng himself states that ‘it would perhaps be more accu-

rate to describe the edgework perspective as a general theory of uncertainty seeking rather

than a theory of risk seeking per se’ (Lyng, 2008: 109; emphasis in original).7. This conceptualization and the importance attributed to adventures in everyday life can be

linked to Erving Goffman’s notion of ‘fateful activities’ (1967: 260), activities that are prob-

lematic but nevertheless voluntarily taken since they are highly valued by some members of

a group or a society, e.g. as acts of honour.

8. Today, trust has become an increasingly important variable in studies on uncertainty manage-

ment, decision-making, and organization studies. In general, trust requires an actor or a party

to enter into a position of contingency. The actor or the party involved then becomes vulner-

able to the possible opportunistic behaviour of the other party. Placement of trust also allows

activities to be conducted based on incomplete information.

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Matthias Gross is Senior Researcher at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ

in Leipzig, and Adjunct Professor (Privatdozent) in sociology at the Martin Luther University

Halle, Germany. He is the author of five books, most recently Ignorance and Surprise: Science,

Society, and Ecological Design (MIT Press, 2010), and numerous articles in the fields of nature

and culture relations, history of sociology, and science and technology studies. His recent research

focuses on coping with ignorance in geothermal energy systems.

Documents

Objective Culture' and the Development of Nonknowledge