maintain a mystifying attitude toward singularities – which is widespread in the social world of art viewers, religious worshippers, admirers of charismatic leaders, lovers, music fans, brand fetishizers, and unwavering patriots – presume that the things that are valuable and fascinating to them are, in their very essence and independent of their observer, genuinely authentic and unique phenomena. In response to this tendency to mystify the authentic, the function of sociological analysis is to clarify matters. It should not be supposed that singularities are pre-social givens; rather, it is necessary to reconstruct the processes and structures of the social logic of singularities. “Social logic” means that singularities are not, without any ado whatsoever, objectively or subjectively present but are rather socially fabricated through and through. As we will see, that which is regarded and experienced as unique arises exclusively from social practices of perception, evaluation, production, and appropriation in which people, goods, communities, images, books, cities, events, and other such things are singularized. That it is possible to analyze general practices and structures, which themselves revolve around the production of singularities, is not a logical contradiction but rather a genuine paradox. That is precisely the objective of this book: to figure out the patterns, types, and constellations that have emerged from the social fabrication of particularities. Singularities are therefore anything but antisocial or pre-social; in this context, any metaphor suggesting that they are in some way isolated or separated from society would be entirely out of place. On the contrary, singularities are the very things around which the social revolves in late modernity.
To dissect the social logic of particularities without mystifying uniqueness is not, however, the same thing as denying the reality of singularities and revealing them to be mere appearances or ideological constructs. Such efforts at exposure can often be found masquerading as cultural critique. The critic will gleefully set out to demonstrate that the apparent particularities of others are in fact just further examples of general types, examples of popular tastes or of the eternal cycle of circulating of goods: Apple products, the films by the Coen brothers, and gifted children are not really extraordinary, and behind all purported originality there in fact lurks nothing more than conformist, average types. My analysis of the social logic of singularities will go out of its way to avoid such reductionism. As I mentioned above, it is not surprising that, as Kant proposed, everything particular can be interpreted from a different perspective as an example of something general. What appears to be particular can always be typecast. However, the fact that singularities are socially fabricated does not mean that their social reality should be denied. In this case, it might be best to recall the famous “Thomas theorem”: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”7 In our context, this means the following: in that the social world is increasingly oriented toward people, objects, images, groups, places, and events that are felt and understood to be singular – and is in part aimed at creating them as such – the social logic of singularities unfurls for its participants a reality with significant, and even dire, consequences.
The critique that denies individual singularities the value of the particular can itself be interpreted – and must be interpreted – in sociological terms. It is a characteristic component of the evaluative discourses of the society of singularities. These discourses derive their dynamics and unpredictability from the fact that the special value of goods, images, people, works of art, religious beliefs, cities, or events is often disputed and caught up in debates about what society considers valuable or not.8 In general, the social assessments of something as particular or as an example of the general are extremely volatile and have preoccupied late modernity to an enormous extent. Indeed, one could say that late-modern society has become a veritable society of valorization. That which is regarded as exceptional today can be devalued as early as tomorrow and reclassified as something conformist and typical. And whereas, despite all efforts, so many people and things never achieve the status of the extraordinary, others are catapulted into the sphere of singularity by one evaluation process or another. In such a way, a valuable piece of vintage furniture can be dragged out of a garbage heap, and a social misfit can become an accepted nerd. This is to say that, in the society of singularities, processes of singularization and de-singularization go hand in hand. Both processes, however, confirm what is valuable: not the general but the particular.
It must be clearly stated: the social logic of singularity, whose proliferation has been observable since the 1970s or 1980s, fully contradicts that which had constituted the core of modern society for more than 200 years. The society of classical modernity, which crystallized in eighteenth-century Western Europe and reached its zenith as industrial modernity in the United States and Soviet Union during the middle of the twentieth century, was organized in a fundamentally different way. What prevailed then was a social logic of the general, and this prevalence was so radical and drastic as to have been unprecedented in world history. As Max Weber aptly observed, the classical modernity of industrial society was fundamentally a process of profound formal rationalization.9 And, as I would like to add, every manifestation of this formal rationalization – whether in science and technology, economic–industrial production, the state, or the law – promoted and supported the dominance of the general. The focus everywhere was on standardization and formalization, on making sure that the elements produced in the world were equal, homogeneous, and also equally justified: on the assembly lines in industrial factories and in the rows of buildings in the International Style, in the social and constitutional state, in the military, in the “schooling” of children, in ideologies, and in technology.
As long as one remains attached to this old image of modernity, which is shaped by industrial society, it is easy to dismiss the emergence of singularities and singularizations as a mere marginal or superficial phenomenon. The logic of singularities, however, is not in the periphery but is in fact operating at the center of late-modern society. What are the causes of this profound transformation? My first answer to this question, which I will elaborate over the course of this book, is as follows: during the 1970s and 1980s, the two most powerful social engines that had been propelling the standardization of industrial modernity were converted into engines of social singularization: the economy and technology. In late modernity, the economy and technology have become, for the first time in history, large-scale generators of singularization. They have become paradoxical agents of large-scale particularity, and we are the first to experience and understand the whole scope of this process and its social, psychological, and political consequences.
Between industrial modernity and late modernity there thus occurred a twofold structural breach. The first originated in the structural shift from the old industrial economy to cultural capitalism and the economy of singularities, with the creative economy as its main branch. The capitalism of the knowledge and culture economy is that of a post-industrial economy. Its goods are essentially cultural goods, and they are “singularity goods” – that is, things, services, events, or media formats whose success with consumers depends on them being recognized as unique. With this transformation of goods, the structure of markets and employment has fundamentally changed as well. Following the example of classic works such as Karl Marx’s Capital and Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money, social theory has to engage with the most advanced form of the economy if it wants to understand the most advanced form of modernity. The second structural breach is being brought about by the digital revolution, which marks a technological shift away from standardization toward singularization – from the data tracking of profiles and the personalization of digital networks to the use of 3D printers. Like nothing before it, the dominant technology of the digital revolution has the character of a “culture machine” in which primarily cultural elements – images, narratives, and games – are both produced and received.
If one considers just the economy and technology – that is, cultural capitalism and the culture machine – it becomes clear that the society of singularities has afforded a central position to something that the former industrial society had tended to marginalize: culture. For the way that late modernity is structured, culture plays an unusual role. Through its massive preference for rational processes and formal norms – and much to the chagrin of cultural critics – industrial
