ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Georg Simmel's outlook on things who introduced objects, where Simmel's work is concrete in the sense that he takes things seriously in their profaneness and superficiality. It discusses money as a mediator and enactment of relations and picks Simmel's essay on the bridge and the door as an example of the way that he often sets out to drop a plumb line from the surface of things to metaphysical realities. Simmel's approach is crucial in that it explores social interactions through objects. This was termed the methodological fetishism of his analysis of money, a move that turns attention to the things themselves: it is precisely by following the motion and circulation of money that Simmel is able to illuminate its socio-cultural and human context modern society. Although in his programmatic texts Simmel sought pure social forms, his theorizing on cultural objects places material heterogeneity at the heart of the social and of culture.
