Cultural Sociology

http://cus.sagepub.com/ 'Objective Culture' and the Development of Nonknowledge: Georg Simmel and the Reverse Side of Knowing
Matthias Gross Cultural Sociology 2012 6: 422 originally published online 2 May 2012 DOI: 10.1177/1749975512445431 The online version of this article can be found at: http://cus.sagepub.com/content/6/4/422

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2012

CUS6410.1177/1749975512445431GrossCultural Sociology

Article

Objective Culture and the Development of Nonknowledge: Georg Simmel and the Reverse Side of Knowing
Matthias Gross
UFZ, Leipzig, Germany

Cultural Sociology 6(4) 422437 The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub. co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1749975512445431 cus.sagepub.com

Abstract
Recent 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 Simmels insightful observations about Nichtwissen (nonknowledge) as the reverse side of knowledge. The paper seeks to relate the notion of nonknowledge to Simmels conceptualization of objective and subjective culture. In Simmels 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 todays 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 ones 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 todays 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: matthias.gross@ufz.de

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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 calculations of probability. Hazards are no longer communicated as external, unavoidable influences 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 observation appears to be warranted. Earthquakes are indeed no longer seen as inevitable natural 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 the frameworks 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 assessment 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 potentially harmful consequences cannot be established reliably by further research and risk assessments because they belong to the domain of ignorance (cf. Bschen, 2009; Hoffmann-Riem and Wynne, 2002; Wehling, 2006). Risk is most widely understood as the probability of a harmful event multiplied by the amount of harm the event is expected to inflict. In these terms, dealing with ignorance 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 sociological 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 question 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 Goffmans understanding of action. For Goffman action is to be found wherever the individual knowingly takes consequential chances perceived as avoidable (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 Mertons (1987) notion of specified ignorance to the fact that there can (and indeed should) be knowledge about the

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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 (18581918) 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 Simmels Nichtwissen. In most of Simmels 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 certain issue or problem to be solved and when the actors involved are aware of what it is they 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 knowledge. 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 innovations 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 has moved further towards centre stage in sociology. I contend that Simmels 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 Simmels reflections on nonknowledge within the broader context of contemporary social thought on the topic. I do this in order to illustrate how Simmels ideas offer some useful pointers for developing current debates about nonknowledge and to bring more sharply into relief the way Simmel sees nonknowledge as both inevitable and productive rather than as purely negative. I shall subsequently show how Simmels notion of Nichtwissen relates to his account of objective 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 Simmels 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 common 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 Simmels work per se. Rather, I

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engage some of Simmels work for the sake of deriving new ideas from it which I consider to be important for cultural sociology and related fields today.

The Growth of the Unknown

In general, uses of terms such as ignorance, nonknowledge or nescience can indicate that there is awareness that any growth in knowledge can bring about a concomitant 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: 1617). Almost 150 years later, philosopher Jrgen 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 (16231662). Similar to Spencer, for Pascal, knowledge was like a sphere floating in a universe of ignorance. Whenever knowledge grows, so too does ignorance. 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 pessimistic 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 that awareness 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 volume. Mittelstrass summarized this phenomenon as follows: Whichever interpretation 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 knowledge: 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 todays 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 knowledge 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 Platos definition of the philosopher as one who

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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 were fixed, 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 experimenting 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: 383455), 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, Simmel stressed 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 contends, that constitutes the quality, the depth, and the nuances of relationships and interactions 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 manipulations 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 fundamental 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 various forms of knowledge production. In the following I seek to contribute to the debate about the character of the knowledge society by outlining Simmels theoretical reflections 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 expertise come to acquire increasing importance in many areas of society. Essentially, sociology 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 be demonstrated 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

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Table 1. Simmel and nonknowledge Type of Nonknowledge Secret Trait

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Example in Simmels writings the secret society, one persons secret is another persons nonknowledge restriction of possibilities in intimate relationships, e.g. sexual affairs seating arrangements on public transport such as buses and trains stranger relationships and the modern division of labour the adventurer who seeks to find something by breaking free of the normal course of life

intentional nonknowledge; a regulation of the distribution of knowledge by creating and maintaining conditions of nonknowledge Strategic nonknowledge knowledge about what is not known in personal but considered either unimportant or relationships dangerous. The strategic element is to avoid boredom and banal habituation. Strategic nonknowledge that which should not be known for in public reasons of politeness Unknown expertise one persons nonknowledge makes another person an expert can lead to positive and negative outcomes; something to be known by forcing oneself out of the normal course of life

The not-yet-known

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

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 knowledge versus application appear to be dissolving. Nonetheless, due to the origins of science 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 various areas of society might suggest. Unlike the work of Daniel Bell (1973), who regarded theoretical knowledge in late 20th-century modernity as societys most important resource, current debates are concerned less with the economic aspects of knowledge and more with the growth of ignorance (cf. Wehling, 2006). The use of new knowledge is necessarily associated with a growth 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 context. In this sense, descriptions of current society as a knowledge society also serve to

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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; Srensen et al., 2010).4 Viewed in this way, the knowledge 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 general 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 institutions 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 recognizing and better determining new nonknowledge, the uncertainty associated with that new nonknowledge becomes one of the key features of the knowledge society. Making decisions in the context of nonknowledge is highly likely to become one of the determining features of decision-making in societies of the future. Even if the theatres of decisionmaking 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 Simmels key discussions in which he used the notion of nonknowledge (Nichtwissen) was in his reflections on secrets. The secret, writes Simmel, is the concealment of realities by negative or positive means and is thus one of the greatest of humanitys 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 mysterious on the other. The category of the stranger also emerges both as a person to whom ones 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 strangers expertise makes people aware of what they do not know. This lends a very broad

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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 structuring principle of modern culture. He states that in view of our arbitrary and deficient adaptations to our life conditions, there is no doubt that we cherish not only as much truth, but also as much nonknowledge, and attain to as much error as is useful for our practical purposes (1992: 3856). In other words, new interpretations and strategies to act are based on the acknowledgement of nonknowledge. This acknowledgement is fostered through a challenge 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 Simmels 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 are increasingly 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 could not 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 peoples 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 oppressing force of objective culture or the subjects 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 Simmels 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)

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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 Simmels 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 constructions come to follow their own inner laws of development. To Simmel, this relationship between the two cultures is at the centre of a radical though often latent change in the modern era, since an individuals 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 Simmels 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 Public

Another 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 anticipated 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 calculable (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 todays 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 the destination 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)

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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 Simmels essay on the adventure as follows. Due to the increase in objective culture, both nonknowledge and surprising turns 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 Simmels 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 interventions 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 that represents 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 a mediate 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 Simmels 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 trust using 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 possibilities might be fostered or at least revealed. To this end Karakayali (2006: 3256) 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

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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 connotation, 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 seen compared 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 knowledge about their peers through visual clues whether they want to or not. Since the time Simmel wrote these words, the individuals 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 arrangements 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 Simmels oeuvre). To repeat, nonknowledge for Simmel is understood as a special form of the unknown: it

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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 Normality
Following Simmels line of argument, I would now like to point to the everyday normality 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 dont know how it happened to me; I wasnt 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 explaining 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 background, 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 change or the amplification of gaps in Darwins theory of evolution. Strategies such as these pose a major challenge on how to lay open the limits of scientific knowledge to the public 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 Simmels work this is not necessarily a negative thing, but rather a normal process of cultural development. 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 development (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 ones 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 prevention. 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

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health becomes blurred for those affected, as a disadvantageous test result may have an impact on healthy peoples 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 meaningful 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 connected 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 the modern 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 Dont 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, Simmels writings can be interpreted in such a way that this phenomenon leads to ever more nonknowledge as the result of the increasing inability to meaningfully implement and integrate 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 Simmels 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 nonknowledge was not seen as a deviation or as an obscure residual category of modernization 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 surprise and the recognition of nonknowledge are the driving forces behind everyday interactions 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 cannot be to do nothing or to wait until certain knowledge is available. Instead, after becoming aware of ones own nonknowledge, Simmel assumed that objective culture needs to be

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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 understanding 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 (17491832) 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 Mittelstrasss 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 Simmels 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 independent 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 translations are solely my own. 6. It is interesting to note here that even Lyng himself states that it would perhaps be more accurate 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 Goffmans notion of fateful activities (1967: 260), activities that are problematic 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 management, 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 vulnerable 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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