and to sharpen my perspective.17
In any case, this is not a book about other books, a theory about other theories. The social theory that I have practiced here is actually curious about social reality. As I see it, theory and empirical research are inextricably intertwined and mutually nourishing. This book has been fed by the many empirical studies from various social and cultural-theoretical disciplines that I have had occasion to cite throughout its pages. At the same time, it is theory above all that lends a cogent structure to the multiple facets of sociology. While writing, I was often surprised how a conceptual heuristic adjustment – looking at things through the lens of singularization and valorization – could make empirical circumstances appear in a different light, so much so that the ostensibly isolated elements of late modernity began to fit together like puzzle pieces to form a coherent image. This is not to say that all the work has been done. This book is not a monolithic creation but rather just a nodal point in an open network. It hopes to contribute heuristics to a sociological research program for analyzing modernity that might stimulate further work and be taken in new and perhaps unforeseen directions. One matter, however, seems crucial to me, and this is that social scientists and cultural theorists will have to take seriously the social logic of singularities and processes of culturalization.
Notes
1 On cultural capitalism, see Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life is a Paid-for Experience (New York: Putnam, 2000); and Pierre-Michel Menger, The Economics of Creativity: Art and Achievement Under Uncertainty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 2 Although here I am using the terms “singular,” “unique,” and “particular” as synonyms, over the course of this book I will distinguish various social forms of the particular. 3 See David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950). 4 See Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: Sage, 1992). 5 For a socio-economic discussion of this concept, see Lucien Karpik, Valuing the Unique: The Economics of Singularities (Princeton University Press, 2010). For a cultural-anthropological viewpoint, see Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 64–91. Kopytoff and Karpik have been my two greatest sources of inspiration. My use of the concept of the singular or singularity differs from the way that it is used by artificial-intelligence researchers or by transhumanists such as Ray Kurzweil. See the latter’s The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin, 2005). 6 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 172–8; Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 271–84. For a brief overview of Kant’s discussion, see Rainer Kuhlen, “Allgemeines/Besonderes,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. I, ed. Joachim Ritter et al. (Basel: Schwabe, 1971), pp. 181–3. 7 William I. Thomas and Dorothy S. Thomas, The Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs (New York: Knopf, 1928), p. 571. 8 See Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); and Beverley Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture (London: Routledge, 2004). 9 See Max Weber, “Author’s Introduction,” in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), pp. 13–31. 10 See David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin (Cambridge: Polity, 1985); Sam Whimster, “The Secular Ethic and the Culture of Modernism,” in Max Weber, Rationality, and Modernity, ed. Sam Whimster and Scott Lash (London: Routledge, 1987), pp. 259–90; and Volker Gerhardt, Pathos und Distanz: Studien zur Philosophie Friedrich Nietzsches (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1988), pp. 12–45. 11 In a sense quite different from that proposed by Eric Hobsbawm in his book The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994). 12 On the concept of infrastructure, see Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure,” American Behavioral Scientist 43 (1999), pp. 377–91. 13 See, for instance, Priya Hays, Advancing Healthcare through Personalized Medicine (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2017). 14 Of course, economic and cultural processes of transformation outside of Europe and North America have had a different form and a different rhythm. In no way is it possible to proceed from the assumption that these regions have simply copied Western patterns. Rather, it is necessary to take into account hybrid forms and “multiple modernities,” which would require precise case studies for each individual region of global society. 15 For a similar understanding of the role of critique, see Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), pp. 32–50. 16 Andreas Reckwitz, The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New, trans. Steven Black (Cambridge: Polity, 2017). 17 Under modern conditions, the social logic of singularities is often (if not always) associated with a regime of cultural novelty. The aestheticization of the social can be understood as an element of the culturalization of the social.
I Modernity Between the Social Logic of the General and the Social Logic of the Particular
Throughout modernity, a social logic of the general and a social logic of the particular have competed with one another. This basic assumption is the starting point from which this book proceeds. The logic of the general is associated with the social process of formal rationalization, while the logic of singularities is related to a process of culturalization. Whereas, during classical – and, above all, industrial – modernity, processes of singularization and culturalization represented antipodes to the dominance of the general and were structurally subordinate to it, in late modernity they have become guiding and formative forces for the whole of society. At the same time, rationalization has changed its form and largely become a background structure for processes of singularization. In order to make a case for this thesis, I will first have to explain certain concepts and my historical schematic. My first goal in this part is to delineate the social logic of the general in classical modernity and its practice of formal rationalization (1). The next section will describe the concept of singularities, the features of the social logic of the particular, and its practices (2). This will be followed by a discussion of the connection between singularization and culturalization, and remarks will also be made about the revision of a strong concept of culture that revolves around processes of valorization and the question of “value” (3). With this background, it will then be possible to turn to the historical and social development from premodern societies to late modernity in order to identify phases of cultural transformation in which the social relation between the general and the particular has changed (4).
1 The Social Logic of the General
Modernity and Generality
What is modernity? What are the central features of modern society in its classical form? In my view, the answer is clear: the structural core of classical modernity, since its beginnings in eighteenth-century Western Europe, is a social logic of the general that encouraged the standardization, formalization, and generalization of all entities of society. Modernity fundamentally reformulated the world of traditional societies by thoroughly and relentlessly imposing new forms of the general on their practices, discourses, and institutional complexes. As an overarching praxis, it could be said that modernity “enacted generality” in the world.
Such an understanding of classical modernity can be associated with a particular sociological theory, but it elevates this theory to a more abstract level as well: modernity should be understood first and foremost as a process of formal rationalization. For its part, formal rationalization means that modernity transformed society in such a way that traditional customs were replaced by large-scale complexes of predictable rules, which in turn entailed technically or normatively regulated manners of behavior. Formal rationalization can be derived from the telos of optimization, whose ultimate aims are the efficient processing of nature and the transparent ordering of society. This understanding
