Andreas Reckwitz - Society of Singularities

The main impulse behind this second dimension – the dimension of non-rationalistic modernity – can be traced all the way back to the artistic movement of Romanticism around the year 1800, which may seem to have been marginal at first glance. It was the Romantics who first “discovered” and sought to promote singularities on all levels: the originality of works of art and hand-crafted objects; the diversity and poetry of nature; the particular features of picturesque locations; the beauty of a single moment; unique people, cultural circles, and nations; and, of course, the emphatic individuality and self-development of the subject. These themes did not die out during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; rather, they pervaded all of modernity – for instance, in the field of art, in religion, and also in certain versions of the political. The Romantic tradition, which gives primacy to the singular, exerted a decisive influence over any number of aesthetic and cultural-revolutionary movements opposed to rationalistic modernity, the most recent large-scale example of which was the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. It was this tradition, too, that also instigated the new middle class’s post-materialistic shift in values, which revolved around the idea of self-actualization and thus became a crucial precondition for late modernity’s culture of particularity. In fact, I think it is possible to explain the rise of widespread singularization and culturalization as a convergence of three mutually enhancing structural moments: the emergence of cultural capitalism, the triumph of digital media technologies, and the new middle class’s post-Romantic, revolutionary yearning for authenticity. All three of these developments will be examined in the present book.

Upon closer inspection, then, it becomes clear that modernity has been influenced from the beginning by standardization and singularization, rationalization and culturalization, reification and the intensification of affect. Without a doubt, modernity is modern in that it radicalizes and pushes rationalization to the extreme. Yet it is also and no less modern for having developed singularities in an extreme fashion. If, however, modernity is two-faced in this way and an age of extremes, 11what is the precise novelty of late modernity? To what extent is it really a genuinely different and new form of modernity? As I hope to show over the course of this book, these questions can be answered by taking a close look at how the relation between the social logic of the general and the social logic of the particular has changed over the last 40 years. Of course, this process has not caused formal rationalization to vanish entirely. Instead, it has changed its status . This much can be said in advance: whereas, in industrial modernity, these two logics formed an asymmetrical dualism, in late modernity they have transformed into a foreground structure and a background structure.

Strangely enough, the mechanisms of formal rationality have been restructured in such a way that they are now “in the background” and function as general infrastructures for the systematic production of particularities. 12Now, essentially instrumentally rational technologies are systematically able to produce unique objects. A prominent example of this is genetic research, which promotes a medical perspective that no longer classifies human beings according to types of illness or standard values but rather identifies them as being irreducibly particular. 13A second prominent example is the act of data tracking by search engines and internet companies, which use anonymous algorithms to register the unique movements of users in order to determine their specific consumer preferences or political opinions and thus to “personalize” the internet for them. Instrumentally rational infrastructures for creating uniqueness can also be found in complex valorization technologies that, by means of ratings and rankings, make it possible to compare the particular features of restaurants, universities, coaches, or potential spouses. In short, late modernity also has its share of standardization techniques, but they are often part of complex background structures that help to keep the processes of singularization running smoothly.

In order to understand the society of singularities, it is necessary to examine its forms, consequences, and contradictions in various areas. Its basic structure can be seen in the Western societies of Europe and North America. It is in these traditional regions of bygone industrial modernity that the transition to post-industrial society has most clearly taken place. This book is thus about more than just Germany or the national “container” of German society. Rather, I have had to adopt an international perspective from the beginning. National differences notwithstanding, the economic, social, and political patterns of the society of singularities can be found in the United States as well as in France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Scandinavia, or Australia. Besides, it would be shortsighted to reduce this configuration to the West alone. The process of globalization has made the clear geographical boundaries between the global North and the global South porous, so that the formats of cultural capitalism, digitalization, cultural and knowledge-based labor, singularistic lifestyles, creative cities, liberal politics, and cultural essentialism now circulate throughout the entire globe and can thus be seen in certain areas of Latin America, Asia, or Africa as well. 14In many places, the societies of the former global South have thus also begun to orient themselves toward the society of singularities. In all likelihood, they will determine our global future.

How does the late-modern present and future look? Will it be easy or difficult? For now, present-day society seems profoundly contradictory. On the one hand, there is a “brave new world” of design objects and international vacations with home exchanges, YouTube hits, the creative California lifestyle, events, projects, and aestheticized city districts from Shanghai to Copenhagen; on the other hand, there are also higher levels of stress, the social marginalization of a new underclass, and various sorts of nationalism, fundamentalism, and populism. In recent years, public commentary on late modernity has thus been extremely volatile, even nervous at times. Euphoric hopes for a knowledge society lacking the toil of industrialization, for an experiential society of multiple aesthetic pleasures, and not least for a digital society that profits from the opportunities of computer networks can be heard alongside pessimistic prognostications that foresee a dramatic rise in social inequality, excessive psychological stress, and global culture wars.

This book will take a step back from these frequently alarmist commentaries in order to make the more comprehensive panorama of modernity recognizable and, within this framework, to take a closer look at the specific structures of late modernity. And this is precisely what should be expected of sociology: that it should not fall prey to the ever-shifting trends of media debates, with their tug-of-war sort of emotional communication, but rather that it should analyze the longue durée of social development in terms of its structures and processes, which can be measured in decades (or even in centuries). With this perspective on (late) modernity in mind, it will be difficult to dismiss the idea that the opportunities and promises of today’s society have the same structural cause as its problems and dilemmas: they are both based on industrial society’s logic of the general losing its primacy to late-modern society’s logic of the particular.

Without a doubt, the society of singularities has led to considerable increases in autonomy and satisfaction, particularly within the new, highly qualified, and mobile middle class. It has a fundamentally libertarian streak, which tends to tear down social barriers to opportunity, and it enables the self-development of individuals to an extent unimaginable during classical modernity. At the same time, however, it has also become clear that the problems burdening late modernity stem from the erosion of classical modernity’s logic of the general and the rise of the structures of the society of singularities, and that it is only within the latter’s framework that they can be understood at all. Thus, first, the high value that late-modern culture places on uniqueness and self-development represents a systematic generator of disappointment that does much to explain today’s high levels of psychological disorder. Second, the post-industrial economy of singularities is responsible for the blatant divide between the forms of work that characterize the highly qualified knowledge and culture economies, on the one hand, and the deindustrialized service economy on the other, which has given rise to new social and cultural polarization, class inequality, and grossly divergent lifestyles. Third, and at the same time, it is the culturalization and singularization of collectives, with their current preference for particular identities, that has prompted the rise of late-modern nationalism, fundamentalism, and populism, with their aggressive antagonism between the valuable and valueless.