practices and objects. Today, on the contrary, unique objects, places, times, subjects, and collectives are no longer simply perceived as means to an end; in that they are assigned a value of their own – be it aesthetic or ethical – they are now strongly regarded as culture itself. Later, I will go into greater detail about what constitutes culture and how it circulates, but for now it is possible to state that culture always exists wherever value has been assigned to something – that is, wherever processes of valorization are taking place. It is important to understand that practices of valorization and practices of singularization go hand in hand. When people, things, places, or collectives appear to be unique, they are attributed value and seem to be socially valuable. Significantly, however, the inverse is also true: if they appear to lack any unique qualities, they are worthless. In short, the society of singularities is engaged in culturalizing the social, and profoundly so. It is busy playing a grand social game of valorization and singularization (on the one hand) and devaluation and de-singularization (on the other), and it invests objects and practices with a value beyond their functionality. In late modernity, moreover, the sphere of culture has adopted a specific form: no longer a clearly delineated subsystem, it has rather transformed into a global hyperculture in which potentially everything – from Zen meditation to industrial footstools, from Montessori schools to YouTube videos – can be regarded as culture and can become elements of the highly mobile markets of valorization, which entice the participation of subjects with the promise of self-actualization.
We have thus come to another central feature of the society of singularities: the extreme relevance of affects. With its logic of the general and its drive toward rationalization, industrial modernity systematically reduced the role of affect in society. When people, things, events, places, or collectives are singularized and culturalized, however, they then operate by attracting (or repulsing) others. Indeed, it is only by affecting others that they can be regarded as singular at all. Late-modern society is a society of affect in a way that classical modernity never could have been. To a great extent, its components operate in an affective manner, and its subjects long to be affected and to affect others in order to be considered attractive and authentic themselves. In short, whereas the logic of the general is associated with processes of social rationalization and reification, the logic of the singular is related to processes of social culturalization and the intensification of affect.
Thus far, I have focused on the fact that late modernity has undergone a historically unprecedented structural transformation that revolves around singularization and culturalization. Yet are these processes really entirely novel? And, inversely, has the old logic of the general been completely supplanted by the new logic of the singular? The answer to both of these questions has to be no, and this fact complicates the larger picture considerably. First, it is necessary to revise our image of modernity altogether. If we understand late modernity – our present time – as that version of modernity which has replaced industrial society, then we are obliged to discuss the notion of modernity in general. However, the sociological discourse about modernity has frequently been one-dimensional in that it often conflates modernization with the processes of formal rationalization and reification. In my view, however, modernity should not be understood as a one-dimensional process in this sense, for, from its very beginning, it has been composed of two divergently organized dimensions: the rationalistic dimension of standardization, and the cultural dimension that involves the attribution of value, the intensification of affect, and singularization. The encyclopedic thinkers of the nineteenth century – Friedrich Nietzsche and Georg Simmel, for example, but also Max Weber – had a sense for this dual structure.10
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,11 what 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.12 Now, 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.13 A 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
