Simmel bridge and door pdf

The piece opens-up some observations relating to the bridge and door as an aesthetic and material presence in the social world, each performing particular social roles. Simmel, as usual, is very good at uncovering interesting insights and generating questions — often without systemically answering them.

In this case Simmel compares the roles played by the bridge and the door to explore their social presence. At the heart of the piece is an observation on the human impulses or drives that are embodied in the bridge and door. He points towards an apparent need to connect that competes with a need to keep separate. As is often the case in his work, Simmel points towards a kind of tension bound within a dual process — often this is a tension entangled within a need to be social whilst individual, or a need to both connect with people and divide ourselves from others.

In this case, the bridge and door become marks on the landscape that reflect our desire to connect and to border — to link whilst maintaining some separation. The bridge allows for connections whilst the door allows us to manage our separation. The door helps us to manage to separate-out our space amongst the social or public space — cutting off but with the potential to intermittently open to let us out or others in. The door represents both enclosure and limits as well as freedom and movement.

He begins with paths, which visibly connect two places. Here we see the material landscape being connected to particular social impulses or wills. The road or path exists because of the desire to connect, the bridge is the same but its scale and complexity mean that it is even more powerful in revealing the depth of this will to connect. Share This Paper. Citation Type. Has PDF. Publication Type. More Filters. In this chapter, we investigate experiences of air passengers in the airside setting of commercial airports.

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View 1 excerpt, cites background. The latter is mute, but the door speaks. It is absolutely essential for humanity that it set itself a boundary, but with freedom, that is, in such a way that it can also remove this boundary again, that it can place itself outside it. And the human being is likewise the bordering creature who has no border. The enclosure of his or her domestic being by the door means, to be sure, that they have separated out a piece from the uninterrupted unity of natural being.

But just as the formless limitation takes on a shape, its limitedness finds its significance and dignity only in that which the mobility of the door illustrates: in the possibility at any moment of stepping out of this limitation into freedom. Posted by Darby O'Shea at In speaking to colleagues, friends, family, and neighbors, I recognize how varied the consequences of this pandemic are.

From the tiniest changes in daily circumstances to significant losses of money and delayed retirement, the world is like the wild west. No one has really charted this territory before. Simone Weil taught me every separation is a link. With the majority of our connection moving online, a gift economy is opening up. Audible has made classic and contemporary stories available to listen to for free.

Zoos all over the world are sharing live camera feeds of animal habitats. Resources for home education are being shared widely. Libraries are opening their sources. There is something remarkable happening right now amidst social distancing that the pioneering thinker on society, Georg Simmel, intuits as early as It has to do with the bridge and the door.