Things that are genuinely helpful but a little hard to explain are given a special kind of neglect. When you enter a seminar room with David Gauntlett’s theory cards arranged on the table, you’ll recognize a pattern. Marshall McLuhan is reached for. Stuart Hall is the target of fingers. Bell hooks are always grabbed early by someone. What about the Georg Simmel card? It is placed close to the edge, carefully lifted, flipped over several times, and then quietly placed back down. Perhaps the most illuminating aspect of how we truly interact with social theory is that moment, which has been repeated in classrooms and workshops for years.
The purpose of Gauntlett’s card collection was to force thinkers to step outside of the hierarchy and engage in more candid discussions about ideas. Here, the physical format is important. The pretense of a reading list is eliminated when you hold a card in your hand and read a thinker’s name embossed in neat type. When all the cards are the same size, you cannot act as though one is more significant than the others. However, in reality, a subdued hierarchy always comes back together.
The victim of this reassembly is Simmel. This is odd, to be honest, since his concepts are neither obscure nor unimportant. His ideas about social forms, how relationships solidify into structures, and how people simultaneously manage distance and belonging go right to the core of how culture truly works. For example, his idea of the stranger—someone who is simultaneously close and far away—captures a feature of contemporary social experience that seems almost more relevant now than it did when he first articulated it in the early 20th century. Consider the dynamics of any comment section, group chat, or office where employees work remotely from different continents. Now, the stranger can be found everywhere.
The Simmel card may be disregarded because his theories defy the concise summaries provided by other theorists. You get a bumper sticker from McLuhan. Hall provides you with a structure. Instead of providing you with a diagram that you can replicate on a whiteboard, Simmel gives you a sensibility, a method of observing the texture of social life.
That is more difficult to demonstrate in a discussion and to teach quickly. However, the point is the difficulty. It takes more than just memorized frameworks to develop cultural intelligence—real cultural intelligence, the kind that truly helps people navigate genuinely different environments. It stems from the habit of observing the structural weight of small interactions.
The Gauntlett collection as a whole seems to have always been aiming for this kind of awkward, fruitful interaction. Gauntlett has written about bringing theory to life and dismantling the authority that prevents people from pursuing their own intellectual interests. Compared to nearly every other card in the deck, the Simmel card best suits that mission. You don’t get answers from it. It requests that you take a closer look.
As you watch practitioners and students go through the collection, something quickly becomes clear. The cards that spark the most engaging discussions aren’t always the ones that are used with the greatest assurance. The Simmel card, when someone does finally engage with it — really sits with it, works through the ideas rather than just reading the summary — tends to crack something open. A cross-cultural miscommunication is mentioned. Another person associates it with the feeling of being both included and excluded at the same time. The space moves.
That is not insignificant. In actuality, theory is meant to accomplish that. The Gauntlett collection’s Georg Simmel card isn’t just waiting for the right person to find it. It is waiting for someone who is prepared to pick it up and not put it down again.
