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.14 In 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.
No simple assessments or short-term solutions should be expected from any sociological analysis of the society of singularities, and this is because the causes of the opportunities and the causes of the problems in today’s society cannot be neatly separated. On the contrary, they are identical. In themselves, processes of singularization are neither good nor bad. It is therefore no more appropriate to join a romantic celebration of singularities or the uncritical choir of hopeful optimists than it is to reserve a luxury suite at the “Grand Hotel Abyss” – that is, to offer a sweeping cultural-critical condemnation of late modernity as a refuge for irrational and calamitous affect against the general. This does not mean, however, that sociology should make itself too comfortable on the high seat of the distanced observer. In my understanding, it should rather be engaged in a critical analysis of the present and its genesis. For me, however, critical analysis does not mean normative theory. Rather, it entails developing a sensibility for the configurations of the social and its historicity in order to recognize how it engenders structures of domination and hegemony whose participants might only be hazily aware of them. In such a way, it is possible to identify significant fields of tension, unintended consequences, and new mechanisms of exclusion.15 Without imposing any conclusions itself, this book aims to consider the personal and political implications that can be drawn from the social constellation at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Part I provides fundamental theoretical explanations of the social logic of singularities, how it differs from the social logic of the general, and how it is associated with culture, culturalization, and valorization. With this background, it will then be possible to distinguish historical phases of social development from the standpoint of singularization. The part concludes with a brief summary of the specific structure of late modernity, which will serve as a guide for the following chapters. An examination of the transformation of the economy and (media) technologies forms the core of the book. In Part II, I discuss the structural shift from industrial society to the economy of singularities and its cultural capitalism. The first chapter is concerned with what it means to singularize goods, while the second chapter concentrates on the transformation of markets into markets of singularity, with their specific configurations of attention, visibility, and valorization. Part III focuses on the transformation of the working world and demonstrates how it is now characterized by singularistic criteria such as creativity, talent, profiles, and performance (which have bright and dark sides). Part IV is devoted to the key technology of late modernity – to the complex of algorithms, digitality, and the internet – and it investigates how it promotes both cultural and automated aspects of singularization.
Having described the economic and technological foundations of the society of singularities, I then turn in Part V to the question of how it has affected lifestyles and the structure of society. Here it is shown that the contradictory basic formula of a singularistic lifestyle is that of “successful self-actualization” and that its most significant proponents are the members of the new, highly educated middle class. A central aspect of the social structure of late modernity is not only social, but also cultural, polarization between this new middle class and new underclass, a divide that involves aspects of the culturalization of inequality. Part VI is concerned with the singularization and culturalization of the political – with the politics of the particular. Here it is shown that late modernity is characterized by political antagonism between liberal hyperculture, which is the basis of both economic and social liberalism today, and communitarian cultural essentialism of various sorts. In my conclusion, I offer an outlook in response to the main socio-political question raised by the society of singularities: is there a crisis of the general?
In a fundamental way, this study is connected to my previous book, which dealt with processes of social aestheticization.16 Thus, certain structural features, which I referred to there as the “creativity dispositif,” can also be found in the economy of singularities, its cultural capitalism, as well as in the digital culture machine and on the level of lifestyles. Now, however, my focus has shifted. Whereas The Invention of Creativity was chiefly concerned with historical genealogy, The Society of Singularities has at its heart a social-theoretical claim. On the one hand, it is more theoretically oriented, while on the other hand it is more strongly focused on the present. For this reason, I have also sought to address certain traditional issues of sociological analysis – labor, technology, class, and politics, for instance – in light of how the transformation to the society of singularities has affected such matters. My impression is that this shift of analytic focus from the guiding concept of creativity to that of singularity or singularization – and the
