Etica & Politica/ Ethics & Politics
http://www.units.it/etica/2005_2/SCAFF.htm
Weber, Art, and Social Theory
Department of
Political Science
|
Abstract Max Weber’s contribution
to cultural sociology has received insufficient attention, due to the
unfinished character of his work and its reception. This paper investigates aspects of his
contribution in relation to the field of art, broadly conceived, and in terms
of the uses of his ideas by historians of art and design, such as T. J.
Clark. Weber’s social theory considers
art from two perspectives: the
relative autonomy of cultural and artistic forms and modes of expression, and
the social construction of works of art and culture. From the latter point of view technics and
the technical become important factors in a double sense: The technologies of modern civilization
external to art shape the “spirit” of art and its contents, and development
in art proceeds as an effort to solve technical problems internal to the art
form itself. Examples from painting,
architecture and music illustrate the relationships. It is these perspectives that characterize
the Weberian approach to art and invite further investigation as contributions
to cultural sociology and social theory. |
1. Introduction
Max Weber is not known primarily for his cultural sociology or sociology of culture and art. When scholars think of his contributions to sociology as a science or to the “Weberian paradigm” in the social sciences, using the terms of one recent collection (Albert et al. 2003), what comes to mind is the seminal work in the sociology of religion, comparative historical sociology, the sociology of law, political sociology, the study of institutions and organizations, social stratification, and the philosophy of science or the methodology of the social sciences. Today we should also add Weber’s long-overlooked contributions to economic sociology, revived through the work of Richard Swedberg (1998; Weber 1999). But cultural sociology appears to have remained in the shadows, even characterized surprisingly in a recent work by Jeffrey Alexander as a “mysterious” gap in Weber’s thinking (2003, p. 8).
There are obvious exceptions to
such a generalization. What is The
Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, after all, if not a
brilliant essay in cultural sociology? A
careful reader might reasonably conclude that the entire manuscript bristles
with the data and perspectives of a cultural analysis (for examples, see Swatos
and Kaelber 2005). Then there are the
partial sociologies of the cultural field:
the investigation of music, for instance, where Weber’s unfinished
manuscript has increasingly attracted attention (Weber 1958, Braun 1992,
Schießl 1998; de la Fuente 2004); or the example of Weber’s interest in
literature and literary modernism (Weiller 1994; Kiesel 1994; Whimster
1999). With respect to the former,
Weber’s essay on music is to be sure still a fragment, a limited historical and
comparative sociological study of one aspect of culture that defies ready-made
categories and facile systematization.
But it signals a preoccupation of Weber’s that finds expression in
central aspects of his work. Concerning
the latter, there is ample basis in his writings for investigating a range of
engaging topics, an undertaking that has barely begun. One might say the true
mystery is that there should be any mystery at all about Weber’s contributions
to a cultural sociology or a science of culture. (1)
In one sense the perception of an
alleged “gap” or absence might be considered an artifact of a particular kind
of reception-history that emphasized the Collected Essays in the Sociology
of Religion (especially Talcott Parsons’ translation of The Protestant
Ethic) and the first part of Economy and Society. It is true that as he took up the tasks of
editing the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik after 1909, of which Economy
and Society was a small section, Weber increasingly turned away from the
terminology of what he referred to as “cultural science” (Kulturwissenschaft)
to a different kind of language emphasizing the interpretive understanding of
social action and processes of sociation or Vergesellschaftung in
different social orders. This is already
apparent in the key transitional text, “Some Categories of Interpretive
Sociology” (Weber 1913b, 1981), where the notion of a cultural science is
reformulated through a concern with verstehende sociology and its basic
categories (e.g., social action, exchange, conflict, association, institution,
organization, legitimate domination), its relationship to other sciences such
as psychology; and its distinctive methodological problems (e.g., the ideal
type, adequate causation, conceptions of “rationality”). This turn of thought is a preview for Economy
and Society, in which the topics of the partial (and unfinished)
sociologies of religion, law, bureaucracy, domination, and the like are treated
in detail. Thus, a skeptic might
conclude that while “culture” remains important, from the standpoint of a such
a division of subject matter, a “cultural sociology” or a sociology of culture
as such would appear to be far too general to provide much clarity or
direction. The sociology of religion
itself would have to be a sub-category of such an all-encompassing abstraction.
We should remember, however, that
the emphasis Weber placed on social science as a “cultural science” or Kulturwissenschaft
was central to his reflections on scientific knowledge and method in his
programmatic essay, “The ‘Objectivity’ of Knowledge in Social Science and
Social Policy” (1904b). Working through
the problem of the “economic interpretation of history” and the
base/superstructure model of explanation drawn from Marx’s work, that essay was
an effort to spell out the presuppositions for a cultural science that must
take into account the intended meanings of actor-subjects, the cultural
significance of problems, and the culturally conditioned perspectives of the
observer. The concept of “culture”
itself was subjected to careful scrutiny, as I have suggested previously (Scaff
1994), as were the methodological underpinnings for any cultural science. These views then carried over to major parts
of Weber’s best-known work, such as the problematic of The Protestant Ethic
and the “Spirit” of Capitalism (1904-05) and the important synthetic
“Introduction” to the Collected Essays in the Sociology of Religion, the
three-volume Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie published in
1920.
It is important to note too that
Weber’s mature sociology was centrally concerned with adjudicating the issue of
what has been called “cultural meaning” as related to “structural forces,”
appropriately illustrated by the famous metaphor in his chapter on the economic
ethics of the world religions: «Not ideas, but material and ideal interests,
directly govern men’s conduct. Yet very
frequently the “world images” that have been created by “ideas” have, like
switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the
dynamic of interest» (Weber 1946, p. 280).
Pursuing the problem of the relationship between
cultural meaning and socio-economic structure, to stay with our example from
modern sociology, it is noteworthy that when Alexander outlines the criteria
for his preferred “strong program” in cultural sociology, the three general
principles he puts forward to define the program are already found embedded
Weber’s work: first, the claim for
cultural autonomy or the relative autonomy of culture, so central to the
thematic of The Protestant Ethic; second, the affirmation of a
hermeneutic or “interpretive” reconstruction of social texts; and third, the
insistence on focusing not so much on collective abstractions, such as
“society” generally considered, but on particular social actors and the
“meaning” attached to their actions by themselves and others (Alexander 2003,
pp. 13-14).
Important aspects of Weber’s thought should be
placed in precisely such an intellectual and scientific context. In this essay I propose to pursue this
“cultural” dimension of Weber’s science of society, exploring some of the
possibilities for developing his thinking as a contribution to cultural sociology,
filling in the alleged “gap,” so to speak.
Within the larger domain of cultural sociology, I propose to focus
attention particularly on selected aspects of art (the term Kunst in
Weber’s usage) or the fine arts, as one could say in English, an amorphous
notion that includes the painting and the visual arts, sculpture and the
plastic arts, design, applied art (that is, angewandte Kunst) and
architecture or the art of building. I
shall do so by considering as a starting point the uses of Weber’s ideas in a
location where we might not expect to find them at all, namely, among
contemporary historians of art and design.
In tracing their concerns in Weber’s writings and experience, I shall
suggest that he approached the questions about “culture” in two different ways,
one quite familiar to us and the other less well known. The first had to do with the relative
“autonomy” of culture, using today’s terminology, and the second dealt with the
reverse hypothesis, so to speak: the
social forces that determined or contributed to the development of what Weber
referred to as the “contents of culture.”
Weber probably devoted more pages of his writings to the former notion,
and yet the latter and less familiar perspective holds at least equal promise
for setting forth a comprehensive and vital cultural sociology. Exploring both of these thematics and
perspectives illuminates the entire terrain appropriate to a Weberian cultural
sociology.
2. Weber in Art Criticism
It seems curious that having been consigned
to the mysterious in one current version of cultural sociology, Weber’s ideas
have attracted attention or have been appropriated and reworked in the writings
of contemporary historians of art and design.
One illustrative example is Michael Podro’s important study of the
“critical” historians of art, as he calls the group of visionaries that
includes Alois Riegl, Heinrich Wölfflin and Erwin Panofsky, who laid the
foundations for modern art history as an “empirical science.” Podro acknowledges that it actually was Weber
who first made this case when he credited Burckhardt’s student and successor at
As Weber noted in the essay on
“value freedom” from 1917, in a passage substantially modified from his initial
formulation in the “Gutachten zur Werturteilsdiskussion” delivered at the Verein
für Sozialpolitik (Weber 1913a, p. 129): «In the field of painting, the
elegant unpretentiousness of the formulation of the problem [Fragestellung]
in Wölfflin’s Klassische Kunst is a quite outstanding example of the
possibilities of empirical work».
This sentence is cited by Podro,
and it is then followed in Weber’s text by the elaboration of an essential methodological
clarification: «The complete distinction between the evaluative sphere and the
empirical sphere emerges characteristically in the fact that the application of
a certain particularly “progressive” technique [“fortgeschrittenen” Technik]
tells us nothing at all about the aesthetic value of a work of art.
Works of art with an ever so “primitive” technique – for example, paintings
made in ignorance of perspective – may aesthetically be absolutely equal to
those created completely by means of a rational technique, assuming of course
that the artist confined himself to tasks to which “primitive” technique was
adequate. The creation of new techniques
signifies primarily increasing differentiation and merely offers the possibility
of increasing the “richness” of a work of art in the sense of an
intensification of value [Wertsteigerung].
Actually it has often had the reverse effect of “impoverishing” the
feeling for form [Formgefühl]. For the
empirical-causal study of art, however, changes in “technique” (in the
highest sense of the word) are indeed the most important generally specifiable
factors in the development of art (Weber 1949, p. 32; 1968a, p. 523; Podro
1982, p. 179; translation corrected according to the original).»
The problem-orientation at issue was methodological in
two senses: it involved the
interpretation of “technical progress” in the arts independent from aesthetic
judgment of the value or worth of a work of art; and it raised the question of
the importance of “technics” – the innovations in technique or the
“technologies” of artistic production – as a material determinant of the work
or the product of art. With respect to
the former, Podro realizes, Weber’s comments (and his own) are directed toward
the old problem of subjectivity in aesthetic judgment, already present in
Kant’s and Hegel’s writings on aesthetics, and addressed by Wölfflin through
his paired formal concepts for understanding the development of style in
art: linear/painterly (malerisch),
plane/recession, closed/open form, multiplicity/unity, and absolute/relative
clarity. (2) Concerning that latter, Weber’s brief remarks
point to the issues associated with Marx’s “so-called historical materialism”
(using Weber’s phrase) and the concept of
Technik as a particular instrumentality or procedure for
producing material goods, including the “goods” of art.
For Podro as an art historian, building upon Weber’s
observations, the point is to show that a merely causal account of development in
art becomes insufficient in modern criticism, as is any claim to have found the
“absolute” standpoint, such as the development of “technique,” from which to
determine “progress.” From his point of
view the challenge of clarifying the rational basis for critical judgment of
the work of art, as encountered in Weber’s formulation, is still the task for
modern art criticism. That task cannot
be carried forward through simple observation and accumulation of raw empirical
data; it is a matter for methodological clarification of the conditions for
“objective” critical judgment.
But the problem of the sociological
explanation of the work of art remains.
The work of art exists, we might say, and our question then takes a
Kantian form: How is that possible? Let us bear this question in mind, and as one
possible approach to an answer keep in view the reference to the “most
important generally specifiable factors in the development of art,” a topic to
which I shall return.
A somewhat different route to the
same set of issues is taken in my second example: the work of Frederic Schwartz on the problems
of art and design in the Werkbund, the great fin-de-siècle experimental site,
and one of many movements in thought and practice aimed at reconciling art,
design and the hegemonic “commodification” of life advanced by modern
capitalism. Schwartz retrieves the
literature of social theory and its historical twin, political economy, to note
that even in their own time Werkbund adherents could draw upon fruitful critical
commentary in social theory. One apt
instance is the introductory note Weber penned in 1904 for the inaugural issue
of the new Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, a succinct
statement that deserves more attention than it has received. For in these comments Weber points out that
under its previous editor, the socialist Heinrich Braun, the Archiv had
been distinctively oriented toward addressing the question of the “cultural
significance” of capitalism in its larger context. But under new editorial direction that
context would be expanded even further.
It would include “the fundamental process of transformation experienced
by our economic life and thus by our cultural existence as a whole through the
advance of capitalism.” “Today our journal,”
Weber added, “will have to consider historical and theoretical knowledge of the
general significance of capitalist development as the scientific problem
whose understanding it serves.”
Furthermore, the journal “must depart from a quite specific viewpoint,
namely the economic conditioning of the manifestations of culture
[Kulturerscheinungen]” (Weber 1904a, pp. i, ii, v; Schwartz 1996, p. 78; Scaff
1989, p. 84). These manifestations or
phenomena of culture can include everything from the general and abstract to
the particular and concrete, from the social movements of the time to the
historical problems of capitalist development, as in Weber’s own “Protestant
Ethic” essays. It is the continuities,
innovations and practical effects on the “conduct of life” across such a wide
range of apparently unconnected aspects of society that the new orientation
reveals – an orientation alert to the problem of the “economic conditioning” of
social life.
Schwartz’s thesis is that the Werkbund participants
sought not only a way out of the crisis in art and the impasse of capitalist
commodification, but also a new mode of thought and action for determining, in
his words, “the very nature of the cultural field under conditions of modern
capitalism” (1996, p. 17). To grasp
those conditions required coming to terms with the “iron cage” of a
“specialized humanity” and the “disenchanted” world that Weber analyzed. It is noteworthy that pointing to this
relationship between the Werkbund program and Weber’s social theory, Schwartz
recaptures (though he is unaware of the connection) an important way Weber was
also read by his contemporaries, such as the first secretary of the Werkbund,
Wolf Dohrn. (3) Thus, at the level of applied art, the design
of familiar everyday objects, and the construction of the built environment,
the Werkbund sought a practical “solution” to the rationalization process Weber
had described – a response, that is, to a world of narrowly specialized
humanity populated by those “specialists with spirit” and “hedonists without
heart” described in the closing pages of The Protestant Ethic.
The rationalization and
disenchantment theme is taken a step further, becoming a framing problematic in
T. J. Clark’s far-ranging investigation of modernism in painting. Consider the key statement of the problem
that he places at the beginning of his book, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes
from a History of Modernism: «“Modernity” means contingency. It points to a social order which has turned
from the worship of ancestors and past authorities to the pursuit of a
projected future – of goods, pleasures, freedoms, forms of control over nature,
or infinities of information. This
process goes along with a great emptying and sanitizing of the imagination. Without ancestor-worship, meaning is in short
supply – “meaning” here meaning agreed-on and instituted forms of value and
understanding, implicit order, stories and images in which a culture
crystallizes its sense of the struggle with the realm of necessity and the
realm of pain and death. The phrase Max
Weber borrowed from Schiller, “the disenchantment of the world,” still seems to
me to sum up this side of modernity best…. And of course it is no argument against
Weber’s thesis to say the “we live in the middle of a religious revival,” that
Marxism became a grisly secular messianism in the twentieth century, that
everyday life is still permeated by the leftovers of magic, and so on. The disenchantment of the world is horrible,
intolerable. Any mass movement or cult
figure that promises a way out of it will be clung to like grim death» (1999,
p. 7).
It may seem unusual for
To see modernism as a “way out” of
the impasse created by the culture of capitalism is indeed to connect with one
of the most potent themes in Weber’s cultural science. Moreover, Clark is surely correct both to
grasp the critical theme of capitalism (that is, art as “commodity”) animating
Weber’s purposes and to perceive the attempted flights into reenchantment as
one of the most fascinating subjects, one that emerges repeatedly in Weber’s
observations about the aesthetic culture and social movements of his own fin
de siècle.
What emerges from these three
discussions in art history and criticism is a sense of the usefulness of
Weber’s thought for framing a series of timely questions – methodological and
substantive, theoretical and practical – about three major issues: the cultural consequences of capitalism, the
role of “material” factors in the creation of art, and the modern responses in
art to our “disenchanted” world. In the
last analysis these discussions are about aspects of modern experience, that
is, about the problem of expression in an age of subjectivity, the tensions and
contradictions associated with the march of capitalist civilization, the
problem of understanding the possibility of art in an artless and purely
functional world, and the ways to escape from the “great emptying and
sanitizing of the imagination” that so troubles Clark.
It may be that those critics who
are most immersed in thinking about art are also most alert to the modern
situation and to the possibilities that can be found in social theory for
analysis, diagnosis, and guidance concerning the condition of aesthetics and
artistic expression. These writers point
in any case to aspects of Weber’s thought that are alive to the modern
situation and open to useful reinterpretation.
3. The Theme of Art
The dialogue between Weber and the
practitioners and observers of art is actually much older than the commentaries
by Podro, Schwartz and Clark suggest.
Starting with Max Weber: Ein Lebensbild (1926), Marianne Weber’s
account of her husband’s early education emphasizes his omnivorous appetite for
history, politics, the classics, and the popular novelists of his time. She offers a substantial menu of sources
extending from Homer and Cicero to Mommsen, Treitschke and Sir Walter Scott. As she notes, “books were the most important
thing in his rich boyhood” (1988, p. 45), recapitulating Max’s own declaration
at age fifteen: “I don’t fall into
raptures or write poetry, so what should I do except read” (
Marianne Weber was of course alert
to the theme herself, introducing it in her biographical account with the
amusing story of the Max Klinger nude etchings the newly weds used to decorate
their Freiburg apartment and declare their avant garde allegiance,
alarming her mother-in-law’s sense of decorum:
“Was it really possible to sit down on the sofa under a little Eve
meditating by a dusky forest pond? Or
could one take an unembarrassed look at the nude figure of a male stretching
toward the light from a dark ground, which the artist had called Und dennoch
[And yet]” (1988, p. 203; Chalcraft 1999).
She never loses sight of the theme of “art” in the context of Weber’s
expanding interest in Kulturwissenschaft and the various spheres of “culture,”
from religion to music and literature.
But she does not develop the cultural theme in relation to art in depth
or detail.
Today we know considerably more than we used to know about
Weber’s engagement with the art and artistic movements of his time, thanks in
part to the work of the Max Weber Gesamtausgabe and its continuing
publication of his correspondence, and in part to improved access to archive
sources. We have known for some time
that Weber followed the cultural movements of the time with intense interest,
especially starting around 1902/03 after his partial recovery from
illness. But we have not fully
appreciated the extent and quality of his aesthetic education, especially
during his prolonged residence and wanderings in
For this aesthetic education Weber’s other important
source and guide was his colleague, Carl Neumann, the art historian. Already years earlier Neumann had sent him an
essay on Burckhardt, eliciting Weber’s revealing comment: “For me right now the necessary bridge to
your area of studies is still missing – not objectively, but in terms of the
‘spirit of my discipline’ – since my specialization condemns me to bury myself
first in the conditions of antiquity, and only in this difficult,
substantive roundabout way to reach the human beings of antiquity” (14
March 1898; Max Weber Papers, 30/4). (6) The sense of frustration and envy is
unmistakable in this kind of comment, one that is typical of the mature
Weber. The remark points toward the
route to understanding that he in fact began to follow in an effort to grasp
not merely the external “orders” of life, but also the inner personality, the
total conduct of life or Lebensführung, the individual’s habitus
and its conditioning by those social orders and powers – a direction that also
led to a deeper understanding of the aesthetic realm.
Glimpses into Weber’s developing
interest appear in other ways as well.
His trip to
Among the more fruitful
consequences were what Weber referred to as the “spiritualization” of the
personality and a sense for the “timelessly great” in art. The experience was interpreted,
sociologically, as a lesson in the relative autonomy of cultural ideas in the
production of the work of art and the shaping of the personality, the habitus
of the individual.
But this episode stood only at the beginning of more
than a decade of engagement with cultural topics, brought into sharper focus in
Weber’s proposals for a sociology of the press, voluntary associations and the
professions, and by his comments on art at the first meeting of the German
Sociological Society in 1910. It was then
amplified through his work as editor for the massive revision of the Grundriss
der Sozialökonomik. Wrestling with
the scope and subject matter of the Grundriss project, for instance, he
came to realize that the cultural science topics and themes that he wanted to
cover in the contributions included much more than could be accommodated in the
space and time allotted to the volumes.
Thus, at the end of 1913 we find him suggesting to Paul Siebeck, his
publisher, following an outline of the text he had written to date: «Later
I hope to provide you with a sociology of the contents of culture (art,
literature, Weltanschauung), outside of this work or as an independent
supplementary volume» (30 December 1913; Weber 2000). (7)
This hope remained unfulfilled, and stated in such a
brief and general way it can barely hint at what a Weberian cultural sociology
and sociology of art might have looked like.
Coming on the heels of his efforts in the German Sociological Society,
we might assume he intended to pursue the directions announced in that
context: an investigation of the
external social conditions that produce certain cultural forms, combined with
the “inner workings” of such forms on the “personality,” as he put it (Weber 2002b,
p. 202). But did Weber have in mind an
application of his sociological perspective to different spheres of cultural
expression, from painting and lyric poetry to sports and the media? Could his planned study of Tolstoy, never
begun, have been part of this effort? Or
was he interested in following through on his earlier ideas from 1904 about a
“cultural science?” By mentioning Weltanschauungen
as part of the subject-matter, did he mean to suggest an investigation of
practical life-orientations (Lebensführung), or a critique of
ideologies? Or were all these avenues
and varied combinations present in Weber’s thinking?
Whatever the case, the intention suggests intriguing
possibilities. Had he completed this
work, we might have a fully developed cultural sociology equivalent to his
writings in comparative-historical, political or economic sociology. Instead we have only scattered hints,
including toward the end of his writings the kind mentioned in the 1915 “Intermediate
Reflection” and the 1920 “Introduction” to the Collected Essays on the
Sociology of Religion. Those hints,
however, suggest two main lines of reasoning for a Weberian cultural
sociology: one dealing with cultural
forces and expressions as an “autonomous” agent of social change and a guarantor
of social organization, and the other concerned with the social determinants of
cultural forms and processes. It is
noteworthy, furthermore, that each contrasting perspective brings out the
relationship between the external general social order and the internal
particular meaning of that order for the individual.
4. The
Problem of Cultural Autonomy
Considering Weber’s published work as a whole, the
argument for the relative autonomy of cultural factors is usually drawn from
his “‘spiritualist’ construction of the modern economy,” as he once called it,
formulated in the pages of The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of
Capitalism. (8) As I have suggested above, Weber saw the
essay as a contribution to cultural history, an effort to trace the “ideal
interests” expressed in ascetic religion that stood at the beginning of a
series of sweeping changes in the material social and economic world. The historical relationship between ascetic
Protestantism and the capitalist “spirit” could best be seen in Weber’s
vocabulary as an “elective affinity” between a particular religious ethos
and the preconditions for a certain kind of market-centered economic
order. His thesis linking the moral
order with the material world thus proposed “causality” in the weakest of
senses, though with the proviso that religious or moral consciousness could
hypothetically play an independent role in mediating historical development.
But Weber’s essay on ascetic rationalism was, to be
sure, concerned with only one side of the “causal chain,” as he warned in the
final sentences that are too often overlooked: «It cannot, of course, be our
purpose to replace a one-sided “materialist” causal interpretation of culture
and history with an equally one-sided spiritual one. Both
are equally possible, but neither will serve historical truth if they
claim to be the conclusion of
the investigation rather than merely the preliminary
work for it (Weber 1920, pp. 205-6; 1930, p. 183; 2002a, p. 122)». (9)
The priority or alleged “autonomy”
of cultural factors, in other words, is to be treated as an hypothesis that
should be put to an empirical test in any particular historical situation, not one
that had to be defended dogmatically as a proven theoretical
generalization. We might call this
Weberian methodological position the postulate of reciprocal causality
to distinguish it from the unqualified assertion of “culture” as either “cause”
or “effect” in relation to the noncultural material forces, economic
characteristics or technological factors operative in social life.
In view of this clear postulate, it
is instructive that Weber’s later synthetic treatment of the sociology of
religion in Economy and Society opens with a discussion of primitive
religion and its developmental history.
Though the context has changed, the theme is a reminder of Weber’s
appropriation of Carl Neumann’s work on Rembrandt: in both cases the theme has to do with the
socio-religious foundations of artistic expression. With respect to primitive religion, the
anthropological evidence for relatively undifferentiated human communities with
a simplified division of labor points toward a development from religious
“naturalism,” such as a belief in the efficacy of spirits and magical powers,
to the emergence of symbolic representations of religiosity. Magic, as Weber points out, “is transformed
from a direct manipulation of forces into a symbolic activity” that sets
off a widespread “proliferation of symbolic acts” (1968b, pp. 403, 404). The development has far-reaching consequences
for culture – for art, music, dance, even medical treatments and therapies:
«The religious stereotyping of the products of pictorial art, the oldest form
of stylization, was directly determined [bedingt] by magical conceptions and
indirectly determined by the fact that these artifacts came to be produced
professionally for their magical significance; professional production tended
automatically to favor the creation of art objects based upon design rather
than upon representational reproduction of the natural object. The full extent of the influence exerted by
the religious factor in art is exemplfied in
With respect to artistic
representations, stylization means not only that art emerges as a symbolic
activity, but that its practice can be defined, preserved and transmitted by
specialized training and the cultivation of expert knowledge. In the religious sources of art and style we
thus also find the beginnings of specialization and a sociology of the
professions.
Such patterns of conditioning
through religion are only the starting point of an extended development, of
course, for the close relationship between religion and art also exists
alongside sharp tensions and contradictions between the two. These tensions are a feature of social and
religious life that play a conspicuous role in The Protestant Ethic and the
“Spirit” of Capitalism, emerging for example in inner-worldly asceticism’s
stance vis-á-vis sport, dress, speech, entertainment, or sexuality. They return in the later essays on the
sociology of religion and in passages in Economy and Society. Thus, we can say on the one hand that
religion has inspired varied forms of artistic expression and style, amply
evident in the construction of temples, basilica and churches; in the
production of totems, kachinas, icons, altars, paintings and craft objects of
all kinds; and in the composition of chants, chorales, instrumental music and
so forth, in seemingly endless variety.
In this positive sense, then, religion is “conducive to community
formation and conducive to the compatibility of art with the religious will to
salvation” (Weber 1968b, p. 608).
Appropriate illustrations of the connection are not difficult to find in
the history of art. Consider, for
example, Michelangelo’s famous David in Florence, or Duccio’s Maestà, the
magnificent multiple-paneled Marian altar commissioned by the Siena commune,
both enduring works of art with Biblical references that performed a specific
social function, embodying not only aesthetic ideals, but also serving simultaneously
as self-conscious expressions and symbols of civic identity.
On the other hand, however, as is
well-known, at one time or another religion has also assaulted and devalued art
in all its forms, visual and audible. In
Weber’s work this line of argument is stated most forcefully in the
“Intermediate Reflection” that ends the first volume of the Sociology of
Religion – or as it is identified in the Gerth and Mills’ translation,
“Religious Rejections of the World and Their Directions.” The reason for the opposition has to do with
the irreconcilable conflict between religion as an authentic means of salvation
and art as its direct competitor, a conflict that becomes especially evident in
a modern era that unleashes the forces of rationalization, disenchantment and
“intellectualism” that occupy Clark’s attention in his “history of modernism”
in painting. In these circumstances,
unlike those characteristic of the medieval and early modern commune, citing
Weber’s words, «Art takes over the function of a this-worldly salvation, no
matter how this may be interpreted. It
provides a salvation from the routines of everyday life, and especially
from the increasing pressures of theoretical and practical rationalism….Art
becomes an ‘idolatry,’ a competing power, and a deceptive bedazzlement; and the
images and the allegory of religious subjects appear as blasphemy» (Weber 1920,
pp. 555-56; 1946, pp. 342-43).
For the secular cultural movements
of the modern era it is not so much the charges of irreverence and profanity
that determine their course, though such accusations are heard often enough,
but rather the bedazzling inspiration of the aesthetic itself, the search for
compensation through art for loss of organic connections which then promises a
way out of the cul-de-sac of disenchantment.
For
In Weber’s own commentary the
conflict and the search for a route of escape can be heightened especially with
music because it is the most “inward” of the art forms, and thus it can
threaten to become “an irresponsible Ersatz for primary religious
experience.” This is the substitute path
pursued by Richard Wagner and numerous Wagnerians in Weber’s own time, and as a
generalized devotion to aestheticism subjected to withering attack by Tolstoy
in his manifesto, What is Art? In
the case of the Wagnerians and other similar phenomena, the aesthetic sphere of
value and order of life has become the province of a particular kind of social
movement, one that negates through substitution the established and
religiously-sanctioned ethical order. In
their purest expressions there is no room for mediation between the two. They are alternative and opposed cultural
forms.
Taking stock of these points of view, we should note
that the shifting verbs of relationship or “causal” connection – to determine,
to influence, to condition – suggest the difficulty and ambiguity in formulating
a precise relation between the “ideal” and the “material,” so to speak. Moreover, the varied and manifold character
of Weber’s accounts illustrates the ambivalence of claims about “cultural
autonomy.” What does the claim actually
mean?
The Weberian response appears to be two-fold: according to the postulate of reciprocal
causality, “autonomy” must entail the notion that aspects of culture can be
distinguished and set apart as agents of social change, as factors in the
formation of collective identity or the shaping of personality and the habitus
of the individual. But the complex
sphere of “culture” must itself be disaggregated, its components identified in
relation to each other, distinguished in terms of their reciprocal
relationships. Otherwise the concept of
“culture” becomes either an all-encompassing and overdetermined abstraction, or
an empty and meaningless label, with the consequence that the notion of
“autonomy” becomes merely the vaguest of assertions. Of these two responses, the latter appears
more interesting and challenging. Let us
consider its implications as we turn to the other line of thinking in Weber’s
work, beginning with “technique” as a factor in the development of art.
5. The Social Construction of Art
I have noted previously that Weber and contemporary
critics, such as Michael Podro, have been aware of the problem of changes in
“technique” and the effect of such changes on the development of art. To grasp the logic of Weber’s perspective,
referenced by Podro, requires considering its earliest statement, namely, the
one occasion in which some of his ideas on the topic were expressed at length,
though in a somewhat jumbled, off-the-cuff format, as he later admitted: the 1910 meeting of the German Sociological
Society, where the problem of technics and civilization was the subject of
debate. In his initial report to his
colleagues at this meeting, Weber made it clear in outlining the possibilities
for studying social phenomena, such as the press or the voluntary association,
that he was most interested in the way which such phenomena contributed to the
formation and specific peculiarities of the modern person (see Weber 1911a,
1976, 1998, 2002b). Then responding to a
presentation by Werner Sombart on “Technik and Culture,” he plotted a
line of inquiry into various cultural forms – painting, poetry, literature,
music, architecture, science itself – from the standpoint of their social
determinants.
Provoked by the cultural and political crisis of the
time, the initial question dominating these discussions appeared to be quite
straightforward: could there be a
distinctive, unique “socialist” art and set of aesthetic values? Viewing the socialist movements as a cultural
movement, as he preferred to do, Weber framed the problem in a way that seemed
most interesting, urging that socialism « offered the emotional hope of
generating from within itself completely new values in all spheres [of
culture] to set against those of the bourgeois world. I ask, then, have any sort of formal
values [Formwerte] emerged from this movement in the artistic or literary
sphere?»
The
notion of “formal values” alluded to the possibilities for a qualitatively
different kind of art or kind of artistic criteria and aesthetic sensibility. At this level of questioning Weber thought
the evidence yielded only negative results:
class position, class membership or class consciousness as such could
not produce new aesthetic forms or formal values.
However,
this negative conclusion still begged the central question for a cultural
sociology in search of social determinants and explanations. Weber took up that challenge in a lengthy
comment, whose translation and wider dissemination is
long
overdue: «But if we ask» he proposed,
«whether that which in the usual meaning of the word one calls modern Technik
stands nevertheless in a relationship with formal-aesthetic values, then in my
opinion one should without a doubt answer affirmatively, in so far as
definite formal values in our modern artistic culture could only be created
through the existence of the modern metropolis. This means the modern metropolis with its
streetcars, subways, electrical and other street lighting, window displays,
concert halls, restaurants, cafés, smoke stacks, monumental stone buildings,
and all the wild dance of impressions in sound and color – this metropolis
works its effects on the sexual fantasies and the first-hand experience of variations in the soul’s constitution in the
mass of humanity starved and searching for the apparently inexhaustible
possibilities for the conduct of one’s life and one’s happiness. Art appears partly as a protest, as a
specific means of escape from this [mechanized] reality – that is, escape through
the highest aesthetic abstractions or the deepest dream-states or more intense
forms of excitation – and partly as a means of adaptation, an apology for its
own fantastic and intoxicating rhythmics.
Gentlemen, I believe that lyric poetry like Stefan George’s – that is,
poetry characterized by such intense consciousness of the last impregnable
fortress of purely artistic form, yet aware of the frenzy produced by the technique of our lives – could not be
written at all without the poet allowing the experience of the modern
metropolis to flow through himself, even though these impressions devour him,
shatter and parcel out his soul, and even though he may condemn them to the
abyss. Certainly a lyric poetry could
not be written like that of [Emile] Verhaeren, who embraces the experience of
the modern metropolis emphatically and looks for its immanent and adequate
forms and unities. I believe as well
that certain definite formal values of modern painting could not be seen at
all, that their achievement would not have been possible … without the remarkable
impressions offered to the human eye, as never before in history, that the
modern metropolis produces during the day, but especially in an overpowering
way at night. And because the visible
(and that is the only matter at issue here) has significance for the peculiar
character of every modern metropolis in its finest detail primarily not
because of property relations and social constellations, but because of modern
Technik – that is a point in which Technik purely as such has very far-reaching
meaning for artistic culture» (1911b, pp. 98-99; 1924, pp. 453-54).
The
concept of “Technik,” derived from tekne (literally, art or craft), is
notoriously ambiguous, as the confusing and multi-layered terminology in
English demonstrates: technics,
technique, technical, technology. Weber
actually defines the concept as a particular method or procedure
(“Verfahrensweise” is his term), generally used for producing material things
or “goods” (1911b, p. 96; 1924, p. 450).
These efforts at clarification emerge directly out of an engagement with
Marx’s well-known encomium for
technological determinism in The Poverty of Philosophy: «the handmill gives you society with the
feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist». Though Marx surely disavowed any literal
interpretation of his enigmatic declaration, the sentence has stood the test of
time and served nevertheless as a convenient target, then and now, providing
Weber with an opportunity to inveigh against the notion that there is any kind of
“ultimate” of “final” cause that will account for social and historical
development.
Notwithstanding
such a qualification, in Weber’s commentary the technical basis for modern life
in the visually-oriented world of the metropolis is interpreted as having
overshadowed the old relations of production, at least with respect to
understanding modern art-forms, their “spirit” and content, and the artists who
create them. The point of view about the
technical conditioning of culture is paradoxical: art can be seen as both a reflection of the
urban environment, its rhythms and pace, as well as an effort to criticize,
overcome and escape from its impersonal domination of the self. The same is true of the modern artist: a mirror of the times, yet a rebellious figure;
a defender of l’art pour l’art, but a proponent of art in the service of
personal redemption and social revolt.
“Ecstatic” symbolist poetry exhibits the pattern, as does the painting
of the Fauves and Weber’s
contemporary German expressionists in Die Brücke and Der blaue Reiter. For a cultural sociology these artistic
circles demonstrate the possibility of successfully creating, for a time, a
separate protected zone of authenticity, but typically only by adopting the most
basic of all Weberian forms of sociation:
the sect-like association. Surely
the Circle around Stefan George, with its special rituals, codes, gestures and
sacred icons represents the most perfect example of such an outcome.
Technics,
however, must be viewed from a double perspective. The first perspective involves the external
relations between the “spirit” of an art-form and its contents on the one side,
and the technologies of everyday life and civilization on the other. It is a matter of the dependence of the
development of art on extra-artistic conditions. But the alternative second aspect of
“Technik” has to do with the internal relations within a form of artist
expression itself as it struggles to solve “technical” problems particular
to the art-form. It is concerned with
the dependence of artistic development on its own internal technical means of
expression and production of the work of art.
Weber
also initially introduced this second problem in his 1910 remarks to the German
Sociological Society on the history of music and architecture. Beginning with music, he suggested «Probably
in no other sphere of culture have changes in style been motivated by such purely
technical factors. I know of no other
case where this can be said, at least according to our current state of
knowledge. But technics [Technik] has
its own immanent law-like character [immanente Gesetzlichkeit], even when it
serves artistic purposes. In the history
of architecture the transition to the gothic style was not a “discovery” of the
pointed arch, which was already known, but a “solution” to a quite specific
structural problem of the vaulted dome…. in this case a purely technical
factor in building became decisive for the creative process» (1911b, p. 99;
1924, p. 454).
The
notion of an internally consistent “lawfulness” found in technics is of course
another way for articulating the hypothesis of the relative autonomy of
technology or the technical. The
hypothesis actually becomes the theme that Weber explores in his well-known
1920 introductory remarks added to the Collected Essays in the Sociology of
Religion, where it took the form of a commentary on “the specific and
peculiar rationalism of Western culture” (Weber 1930, p. 26; 2002a, p.
365).
With respect to music, Weber
proposed tracing the inner logic of tonal relationships and the paths of
rationalization inherent in the tonal material.
For the western musical aesthetic harmonic rationalization begins with
the solution to the two fundamental problems of musical composition: symmetrical division of the octave, and the
closed circle of fifths. Both solutions
come about through the imposition in a system of notation or tempered intonation,
thereby eliminating the accoustically correct, but “irrational” properties of
the Pythagorean scale. The result for
the trained ear, among other things, is creation of a point of “rest” in the
tonic, and hence the introduction of a musical language of “tension” and
“resolution,” with the contrasting interest provided by factors like major and
minor keys, modulation, and chromatics.
Instrumentation and the evolution and social significance of particular
instruments, especially the organ and piano, contribute to the process. Possibilities for invention begin to
emerge: the rationalism of harmonic
composition is set against the “irrationality” of the melodic line. This dissolution of key (chromaticism) can
release latent possibilities of expression, as in Tristan and Isolde. The
scale can be redefined with whole tones and open fifths, as with Debussy’s
“impressionism.” Tonality itself can be
dissolved in “free atonality” and dissonance, as explored by Webern, Schönberg
and Paul von Klenau in Weber’s own time.
Instrumentation can be questioned:
Stockhausen’s electronic adaptations can challenge the principles of
harmonic composition. Or the quest for
“absolute music” can end in John Cage’s homage to silence. Thus, like the other arts, music’s development
can be understood from the perspective of the rationalization of technique that
pervades western culture as a whole.
As with music, so also with
architecture. In the 1920 introduction,
among numerous examples one set of comparisons stands out in particular: «There
have been Gothic arches as decorative features elsewhere, in the ancient world
and in
The remark could be read as a summation of Weber’s
encounter with the culture of the Renaissance in
Consider a final example drawn from Italian
Renaissance painting, where a perfect illustration of the role performed by
“technique” can be found in the quattrocento work of Piero della
Francesca. Though not mentioned by
Weber, Piero’s efforts as a mathematician in his theoretical treatise, De
prospectiva pingendi, to solve the geometrical problems of commensuratio
or perspective contributed directly to his accomplishments as an
innovative artist. The solution he
proposed to the technical problem of proportionality was constitutive of the
art-form, as is especially evident in the well-documented The Flagellation
of Christ (sometimes also referred to as The Dream of St. Jerome). In this small scene for an altarpiece, the
scientific proof of perspective becomes the basis for Piero’s unusual
asymmetrical format and perspectival structure, a radical departure from
traditional representations of the familiar biblical scene (see Elkins
1987). The split scene in the Flagellation,
a foreground of three figures conversing in the piazza on the right, the
flagellation proper of three figures and two observers retreating within the
praetorium on the left, permits a complex treatment of light, which geometric
reconstruction (aided today by computerized models) shows coming from opposite
directions. One authority concludes that
“Piero has employed an entirely rational construction to create an effect that
appears irrational.” But of course there
is a “rational” point to the method: “By
doing so, he marks the Praetorium [where the flagellation occurs] as a divine
sanctuary and the biblical event taking place within it as a miraculous
apparition” (Lavin 1992, pp. 21-22).
Piero’s carefully calculated asymmetries have also opened the doors
through the centuries to widely divergent levels of interpretation of the
painting’s subject and meaning, from the view that it is really an allegory of
Christian persecution to the proposition that it is a premonition of the
nightmare of invasion from the East! For
Piero’s scientific mind, of course, the Flagellation represented a
small-scale study from the draftsman’s table demonstrating how to apply in art
his own scientific proof of perspective.
It is another instance, borrowing Weber’s comment on Leonardo, of
“raising art to the level of ‘science’” (1951, p. 151).
6. Conclusion
I began this essay with a reference
to the allegation of a “mysterious” gap in Max Weber’s thinking about cultural
sociology. I would like to end it with
the suggestion that enough has been said to bridge that gap and disperse the
fog of mystery with the clarifying breeze of understanding. Of course, as my discussion and the
observations of the historians of art and design have shown, Weber’s own
fragmentary reflections on cultural sociology and art occur within a larger
field of concepts, ideal types, hypotheses, methodological prescriptions, and
historical problematics. But it is not
necessary to master the complexity in all these topics for informed and
insightful investigation to proceed. The
advantage of the Weberian approach is not that it is theoretically driven or
methodologically constrained, but rather that it is open to the formulation of problems
which address the possibility – social,
economic, technical, intellectual, spiritual, religious – of the production,
consumption and subjective meaning of the work of art.
We could say, then, that a
concentrated dose of “theorizing” the work of art can go a long way, and that
“method” has its limits. In this respect
the growth of our knowledge is not so much a matter of staking a methodological
claim to “strong” or “weak” programs in cultural sociology, but of identifying
engaging substantive problematics. Only
when we investigate the problems posed by art, as illustrated briefly in these
pages, will we have begun to trace the contours of a Weberian cultural
sociology and give it significant intellectual content.
Notes
(1) For work that agrees with my assertion see
Peukert 1989, Schroeder 1992, Gephart 1999, Kim 2002.
(2) Weber would have been familiar with
Wölfflin’s ideas not only from Classic Art (1st ed. 1898) and
Principles of Art History (lst ed., 1915), but also from Wölfflin’s
synoptic statement, “Ueber den Begriff des Malerischen [On the Concept of the Painterly]”
(1913), published as the lead article in the same number of Logos as
Weber’s own essay, “On Some Categories Interpretive Sociology” (1913b).
(3) The evidence in the case of Dohrn comes
from a letter of Marianne Weber’s to Max Weber, 28 April 1908 (Max Weber
Papers, Berlin, 30/1), reporting on a day spent with Dohrn and Karl Schmidt,
owner of the Dresdner Werkstätten, conversing about “democracy” and the new
garden city development at Hellerau, where Dohrn became director. Dohrn, she reported, “reads your
methodological writings with ardor.”
Dohrn was also a follower of
Friedrich Naumann, then a member of the Reichstag and the Webers’ close
personal friend, who wrote numerous articles on the new directions in art and
design.
(4) The suggestion that Weber “liked to quote”
Schiller’s phrase is made by Hans Gerth in the “Introduction” to Weber 1946, p.
51. But Schiller never used the Entzauberung
der Welt phrase, instead commenting on the Entgötterung der Natur in
one of his famous poems, “The Gods of Greece,” which begins with the line,
“Beautiful world, where have you gone? Return
again… [Schöne Welt, wo bist du? – Kehre wieder…]” This “dis-godding” or
depriving of deities and divine nature is at the center of Schiller’s lament
for the passing of an age in which divinity dwelled in the world, inhabiting
souls and objects in polytheistic delight.
Schiller also viewed our post-classical world as so deeply and
fundamentally secularized and rationalized as to make a return to these origins
impossible. Nevertheless, the poem
announces that humanity would not be able to resist the longing for a return to
mythic and archaic origins, for a condition of de-differentiation, for a life
in the imaginary “other world” of divine or “pure” presence and transcendent
meaning. A possible moment of
reconciliation between our rationalized world and our deepest longings is
expressed in the last lines: “All that
is to live in endless song/ Must in lifetime first be drowned [Was unsterblich
im Gesang soll leben/ Muss im Leben untergehen]” (revised second version). Notwithstanding the linguistic differences,
it can be said that in a general sense Weber’s commentary is congruent with
Schiller’s message. As an example of the
association, when Marianne Weber first introduced the idea of disenchantment in
the biography of her husband, she chose the following words: “…religious feelings and experiences are
treated intellectually, the process of rationalization dissolves the
magical notions and increasingly ‘disenchants’ the world and renders it godless
[‘entzaubert’ und entgöttert zunehmend die Welt]” (1988, p. 333; 1926, p. 348),
a revealing juxtaposition of Weberian and Schillerian language.
(5) In 1908
Weber mentions using the two volume
(6)
Probably the essay, “Das Werk und der Künstler,” first published in 1898 in the
Deutsche Rundschau, and reprinted in Neumann 1927, ch. 7. The original
letter reads, “Da mein Fach mich verdammt, mich zunächst in die Zustände
des Altertums zu vergraben und nur über diesen zäh-materiellen Umweg an den Menschen
des Altertums gelangen zu können, so fehlt für mich vorerst noch die – nicht
objektiv, aber nach dem “Geist meines Ressorts” – notwendige Brücke zu dem
Gebiet Ihrer Studien.”
(7) Because of
ambiguities in the terminology, Weber’s original bears quoting: “Später hoffe ich Ihnen einmal eine
Soziologie der Cultur-Inhalte (Kunst, Litteratur, Weltanschauung) zu
liefern, auβerhalb dieses
Werkes oder als selbständigen Ergänzungsband.”
(8) The phrase
appears in Weber’s letter to Heinrich Rickert, 2 April 1905, in which he
announces the completion of the second part of The Protestant Ethic: “Im Juni/Juli erhalten Sie einen Sie
vielleicht interessierenden culturgeschichtlichen Aufsatz (Askese des Protestantismus
als Grundlage der modernen Berufscultur, eine Art ‘spiritualistischer’
Construktion der modernen Wirtschaft” (Max Weber Papers , 25).
(9) I quote
the Baehr and Wells translation, based on the original 1904/1905 essays. Parsons’ published translation, based on the
revised 1920 text, reads: “But it is, of
course, not my aim to substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally
one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and history. Each is equally possible, but each, if it
does not serve as the preparation, but as the conclusion of an investigation,
accomplishes equally little in the interest of historical truth” (1930, p.
183). The publisher deleted the italics
and inverted commas from Parsons’ actual original version, thus diminishing the
force of the passage, a regrettable editorial “correction” that obscured
Weber’s meaning, as I have shown in detail elsewhere (Scaff 2006
[forthcoming]).
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