Andreas Reckwitz - Society of Singularities

The practices that constitute the social world are always based on typification – that is, on making the individual elements of the world comprehensible and manageable in such a way that they can be categorized as particular examples of general sorts or types: people, animals, things, gods, and so on. If it is true that the “life-world of everyday life” is largely based on custom and repetition, this implies that, in the semantics of natural language and in implicit knowledge, typifying classifications are regularly performed, and thus that the particular, with which everyone is constantly confronted, is regularly subsumed under the general. 5Here the particular is, so to speak, the general-particular . Such a logic of typification prevailed to a great extent in archaic “cold societies” (in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s terms) of illiterate premodernity, which were relatively resistant to change, but it of course also features in (late) modern societies as well. As typifications, however, socially relevant generalities are usually not the object of rationalization; they are not, that is, subjected to systematic control and reflection. In the mode of typification, accordingly, it is not to be expected that general concepts are necessarily distinguished from one another in a sharp manner. As semantic prototypes, they rather represent zones of similarities . 6

In premodern societies, too, there were also specific complexes of behavior that were instrumentally or normatively rational and formed something like insular complexes of rationalization. These distinguished themselves through the targeted systematization of behavior according to explicit rules and principles. The techne of these societies, for instance, was instrumentally rational and based more on practical than on theoretical knowledge. It is thus indicative of a systematic activity for processing nature, an activity that enabled these societies to domesticate and distance themselves from the world. Later, with the creation of high-cultural empires and their administrative and legal practices, normative practices also began to be systematized, and this led not only to the codification of social rules but also to the intellectual systematization of (especially religious) views of the world, not least through the medium of writing. 7

The historically early forms of a rationalistic logic of the general have the same cause as the more sophisticated forms that came later: they can all be interpreted as a social response to scarcity and disorder . Society’s relation to nature is defined first and foremost by scarcity and imminent shortages. With instrumentally rational practices, societies attempt to counteract scarcity by conserving means, labor, time, and energy. Instrumentally rational practices follow a rule of thrift in order to reduce scarcity and, at best, to fulfill all of society’s demands. In addition, however, there is also a basic problem of order that, though also relevant to society’s relation to external nature, concerns above all the relation between its subjects. This problem became especially acute at the moment when tribal and nomadic social forms were displaced by social systems under the conditions of sedentariness and elementary divisions of labor, which applied to people regardless of their physical presence. Normative rationalizations were thus attempts – by means of legal systems, for instance – to guarantee social coordination and control on a permanent basis.

Modern society went beyond the isolated instrumentally rational and normative-rational practices of traditional societies. Western modernity, which originated in early-modern Europe and began to flourish toward the end of the eighteenth century with the rise of industrialization, science, market economies, urbanization, and democratization, is essentially synonymous with the expansive institutionalization of entire systems of social practices that involved the systematic and lasting rationalization of behavior, production, things, subjects, and knowledge by means of a social logic of the general. Thus, modernity is both an extensive and an intensive generalization machine . Now, the social logic of the general no longer involved the mere typification of similarities, though this practice continued to take place on the margins; rather, its essential feature was that of an expansive systematization of the world in the form of standardization, formalization, and generalization. Conversely, one could say that what we refer to as “modern society” is nothing more than the expansion of this social generalization machine. Its precondition was modernity’s awareness of contingency, which gradually encompassed all social practices and turned them into an object of targeted transformation that more or less led in only one direction: toward the general. 8

From a praxeological perspective, the process of “rationalization” operates on both the macro and the micro levels. It is not the case that, at a particular point in time, a structure of formal rationality is put in place once and for all and remains fixed from that moment on. Rather, individual elements of the social – objects, subjects, collectives, spaces, times – are each made the object of rationalization through particular practices. They are repeatedly “made rational” through the practices of observation, evaluation, production, and appropriation. 9It is the interplay of many local acts of rational­ization that gives rise to the large-scale formal rationalization of society as a whole. Within the framework of the modern project of rationalization, this profound transformation of the social world and its relation to nature pursues the goal of optimization (that is, systematic improvement), which has often culminated in the semantics of progress. 10The modern pursuit of progress was likewise a response to the basic problems of scarcity in nature and the preservation of social order, but to some extent the social response was far more aggressive than defensive. No longer was it enough simply to avoid shortages and anarchy; over the course of systematically rationalizing all realms of society, modernity sought to overcome the problems of scarcity and social disorder once and for all.

Since the eighteenth century, the pervasive formal rationalization of modern society has taken place in three areas and approaches. What I have in mind is technical rationalization, cognitive rationalization, and normative rationalization, each of which involves specific practices and different variants of “doing generality.”

Technical rationalization is mainly found in the fields of production, natural processing (industrial agriculture, the extraction of raw materials), the industrial manufacturing of capital and consumer goods, as well as in urban development and the trans­portation sector. 11It entails reconfiguring behavior and implementing technology in order to increase the efficiency of the production and distribution of goods (as well as that of the behavioral coordination needed to do both). Here the practice of the general is one of standardization : to increase efficiency, it is necessary to standardize, homogenize, and identically reproduce the optimal types of behavior within the human–machine configuration in order to coordinate them according to a predictable pattern. At the same time, these human–machine configurations enable the production of standardized entities, especially identical goods in a seemingly unlimited number.

The locus of cognitive rationalization is the sciences – particularly the natural sciences, but the behavioral sciences as well. Here the practice of the general is one of generalizing knowledge, and its goal is to produce general, empirically tested theories with which to provide generally valid descriptions and explanations of reality, the ultimate aim being to subject reality to technological control. This general knowledge can then be conveyed to subjects within the framework of education. The intention of both technical and cognitive rationalization is to quantify and measure the general entities that they require and produce. For this reason, standardization and generalization are related to the modern ideal of quantification, according to which seemingly everything has to be measured, be it in terms of correlations, growth, or quantities. 12