Publications

We are all friends now: Hybrid practices and Georg Simmel’s modes of interaction

By: Craig Martin

“Life flows forth out of the door from the limitation of isolated separate existence into the limitlessness of all possible directions”. Georg Simmel, ‘Bridge and Door’

One’s experience of the contemporary milieu is, in part, made up of a series of thresholds, junctions and intersections through which we travel; these points of passage and the relational connections they create constitute the multiplicity of the everyday. In routine terms, architectural and geographical boundaries are broached on a regular basis as we pass from the inside to the outside. Via these tropes, distinct points, places and disparate entities are bridged. In academic and cultural environments, the crossing of thresholds between disciplines has traditionally been a somewhat different affair. Typically the ability for one to work across disciplines has been stymied by the notion of ‘specialism’ and the distinction of intent between, for example, the arts and the social sciences. French sociologist, Bruno Latour in his book, We Have Never Been Modern, suggests that there are two opposing tendencies within modernity with regard to the separation of disciplines.1 Firstly, there is the process of ‘purification’, whereby a partition, as Latour calls it, is created between distinct entities; the second process – ‘translation’ – is the...

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