Futures of the Study of Culture

Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Global Challenges

Doris Bachmann-Medick, Jens Kugele, Ansgar Nünning, Doris Bachmann-Medick, Jens Kugele, Ansgar Nünning

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110669541
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

How can we approach possible but unknown futures of the study of culture? This volume explores this question in the context of a changing global world.

The contributions in this volume discuss the necessity of significant shifts in our conceptual and epistemological frameworks. Taking into account changing institutional research settings, the authors develop pathways to future cultural research, addressing the crucial concerns of the cultural and social worlds themselves. The contributions thereby utilize contact zones within a wide range of disciplines such as cultural anthropology, sociology, cultural history, literary studies, the history of science and bioethics as well as the environmental and medical humanities.

Examining emerging inter- and transdisciplinary points of reference, the volume invites scholars in the humanities and social sciences to take part in a conversation about theories, methods, and practices for the future study of culture.

III Theorizing Pasts, Presents, Futures

The Society of Singularities

Reckwitz Andreas

Note: This article is touching on a topic that I explore in greater detail in Reckwitz 2017a.

Regardless of where we look in contemporary society, what is socially and ­culturally expected on both the local and global levels is not the general but the particular. What is increasingly being advanced and demanded and what has become the focus of people’s hopes and longings is not the standardized and regulated but the unique, the singular.

Travel destinations, for example, can no longer simply be uniform vacation locations suited for mass tourism. It is the uniqueness of a place – a special city with an authentic vibe, an exceptional landscape, an unusual local culture – that attracts tourists’ attention. A similar development has taken hold of the entire late modern global economy. True for material goods and services alike is the fact that the mass production of uniform products so characteristic of the old industrial economy has been replaced in the cultural capitalism of the present by events and objects that are not similar or identical but that strive to be singular. The passions of subjects are focused on extraordinary live concerts and music festivals, on sporting and artistic events, as well as on lifestyle sports and the imaginary worlds of computer games (see generally Rifkin 2000; Howkins 2001).

And yet the displacement of the general by the particular goes far beyond this, extending, for example, into the field of education. It is no longer sufficient, as it was 20 years ago, for schools to teach the material mandated by the state. Every school wants and is compelled to be different, to cultivate its own profile, to enable students to shape their own education, to have its own spirit. Or take the field of architecture, where the International Style, with its now purportedly dull serial buildings, has been cast aside in favor of the predictable surprises of star architects and their singular museum constructions, concert houses, residential buildings, and flagship stores (see McNeill 2009). The singular has quite clearly extended its reign over the subjects who move about in these different settings as well. In late modernity the subject is not just responsible for themselves, as is typically suggested by the term ‘individualization,’ but strives above all to be unique. Digital social media – perhaps paradigmatically the Facebook profile with its carefully curated and updated postings from one’s personal life, with photos and likes and links not to be found anywhere else – offer a central location for the presentation and formation of this singular self and its performance of authenticity (see Miller 2011). But this displacement of forms of generality by those of particularity also extends to the social, collective, and political realms. Formal organizations, major political parties, ultimately even the modern form of the bureaucratic state are on the defensive, having lost some of their appeal. On the rise are those particularistic and temporary forms of sociality that are not universally identical but claim instead to be unique. This is true of a wide range of forms of sociality, including professional and political projects, each of which is singular as an emotional entity with selected participants and an expiration date. It is true of scenes, events, short-lived aesthetic networks, and gatherings. And it is, finally, true in a different sense of neo-collectives – the new religious, national, or regional imagined communities that promise to endow members with identity in a way that bureaucracies or institutional churches do not seem capable of (see Castells 1997).

I have begun with a kaleidoscope of empirical phenomena that all point in the same direction. In late modernity, societies are being reconfigured based not on a social logic of generality but on a social logic of particularity – a particularity that I will attempt to define by means of the term singularity. This phenomenon involves a very crucial transformation of what defines modernity and modern society. I would like to sketch out this fundamental argument and then explore it in greater detail. I consider it of central importance that as a result of this logic of singularities, the structural principles of classic modernity, a modernity of industrially organized societies, are being eclipsed by new structural principles. The basic precepts of classic modernity were generalization and standardization, which were associated with the process of formal rationalization (see Wagner 1994). The antithesis to modernist rationalization is culturalization, and the phenomena of singularization and culturalization are inextricably connected to one another. In the first part I will therefore examine the oppositional differences between a social logic of generality and a social logic of particularity.

In the second part I will look more closely at two institutional mainstays at the center of late modern society. One is the transformation of the capitalistic economy from industrial mass production to cultural production, that is, to an economy of singularities (Karpik 2010), with the associated restructuring of markets, labor, professions, and forms of consumption. The second is the digital revolution of media technologies, which in turn also fosters singularities in subjects, images, texts, and other cultural elements. This is a decisive insight that I would like to emphasize: while in classic modernity the economy and technology were the most important motors of the standardization of the world, that is, of a social logic of generality, the most advanced forms of this same modern economy and this same technology have become powerful generators of singularities and culturalization.

1 The Social Logic of Singularization

To justify my diagnosis, I must first clarify how a modernity of rationalization and generalization and a modernity of singularities and culturalization are distinct from one another. To do this I will first describe the structural principles that gave rise to modern industrial society. Though quite easy to oversee, the fundamental trait of classic modernity is that it systematically strives to achieve the total generalization, schematization, standardization, and universalization of all elements. At the core of classic modernity is what I would call a social logic of generality. This standardization and universalization of social structures and processes, of subjects and objects, is closely related to the fundamental process of modernity that Max Weber (1968) referred to as formal rationalization.

The formal rationalization of classic modernity attempts to systematically foster a social logic of generality. The social logic of generality means that all potential elements of the world are observed, evaluated, produced, and adapted as copies or instances of generally valid patterns. The social logic of generality follows in part the principles of theoretical generalization (as required by the modern sciences) and in part those of normative universalization (as required by modern law with its precepts of equality). Yet, above all, formal rationalization is an expedient to achieve a comprehensive optimization of all societal conditions and an institutionalization of rules, which are intended to generate predictability, efficiency, and innovation. The reign of the general is to be found on all levels: objects are produced and used in a standardized and uniform manner. Disciplined subjects find orientation in functional roles and performance standards that apply to everyone. Space is utilized in invariable constructive series so that industrial cities appear interchangeable. Time also becomes an object of rationalization in the sense that it is systematically controlled and the future is, so to speak, colonized. Rationalized orders are objectified orders in which emotions are controlled and emotional intensity is minimized.

Of course, the modernity of formal rationalization and the reign of generality and uniformity are not dead. Many of these structural principles have been retained in late modernity, that is, in the period after 1980. Yet the countertendency that I mentioned at the outset is also to be observed: the spread of a social logic of singularities that is connected to a process of culturalization. To clarify this, I would like to more precisely define the term ‘singularity,’¹ which up until now I have been using in a somewhat ad hoc manner based on different ­examples.

1. An entity is singular in a sociocultural context when it is not produced, experienced, and evaluated as a uniform copy of a general type but as something particular. As such it appears to be unique, incomparable, and non-­interchangeable. Singularity makes reference to a certain quality and cannot be reduced to quantitative properties,² which places it outside the schemata of generality. For in the realm of generality, entities can also differ from one another to some extent, but these differences can be described by such terms as better/worse, more/less, that is, they can be compared. Singularities, on the other hand, do not just vary to a greater or lesser extent, they have a completely different quality, they are distinct – and for this reason do not seem interchangeable. A Bach cantata seems fundamentally different from a Janis Joplin song. A trip to Venice is completely different from one to Nepal. And for the creative agency, employee X with his special profile and talents isn’t just slightly different – the way applicants with different exam notes might be – but offers a critical qualitative advantage for the company. Of course, as Kant (2000) pointed out, there is always and inevitably the general and the particular, whereby – at least according to Kant – the general emerges from concepts (Begriffe) and the particular from intuition (Anschauung). But what is sociologically interesting is the fact that dependent on the form of society, a complete social logics of singularity can emerge, in which singularities are observed, evaluated, fabricated, and adapted in a certain way.
2. It is of central importance that singularities emerge in the form of very different entities and elements relevant to the social world. For this reason, singularity differs from the concept of individuality, though the two are, of course, related. As a rule, individuals are human subjects, yet to attribute singularities to humans alone would be to greatly underestimate their importance. Singularities can be observed on one initial level that I would like to put ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introductions: Futures of the Study of Culture
• I Horizons for Future Reflections
• II No Future? Politics and Concerns
• III Theorizing Pasts, Presents, Futures
• IV Future Connectivities: Economy, Natural Sciences, Ecology
• Index