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Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Verso, 1979); Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977); and Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge: Polity, 1991). 4 On normality and normalism, see Jürgen Link, Versuch über den Normalismus: Wie Normalität produziert wird, 5th edn. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013). 5 See Alfred Schütz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World, 2 vols., trans. Richard M. Zaner et al. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973–89). 6 Similarities thus operate outside of the dualistic logic of identity and difference. See Anil Bhatti et al., “Ähnlichkeit: Ein kulturtheoretisches Paradigma,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der Literatur 36 (2011), pp. 261–75. 7 For such broad understanding of techne, see Hans Blumenberg, Schriften zur Technik (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2015). On the traditional rationalization of religion and law, see the fifth and sixth chapters of Weber’s Economy and Society. 8 On the awareness of contingency, see Michael Makropoulos, Modernität und Kontingenz (Munich: Fink, 1997). 9 See also John Law, Organizing Modernity: Social Ordering and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 10 On the notion of progress, see Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 11 On this complex, see David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); and Yehouda Shenhav, Manufacturing Rationality: The Engineering Foundations of the Managerial Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1999). 12 See H. Floris Cohen, Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (University of Chicago Press, 1994); and Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 1990). 13 See Link, Versuch über den Normalismus. 14 The classic treatment of this subject is Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, rev. edn., trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). Regarding organized modernity, see Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York University Press, 1994). Of course, the reduction of affect does not mean its absence. In fact, rational complexes often have an emotional aspect, for instance the desire to create an orderly bureaucracy or the aesthetic pleasure taken in the symmetry of architecture. 15 See Geert J. Somsen, “A History of Universalism: Conceptions of the Internationality of Science from the Enlightenment to the Cold War,” Minerva 46 (2008), pp. 361–79. 16 I will keep the question open about which elements or entities in fact “assemble” the social. For further discussion of this issue, see Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford University Press, 2005). 17 See Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things.” The classical locus of criticism against the standardization of the world of objects has been the arts-and-crafts movement. 18 On both models, see Riesman, The Lonely Crowd. 19 I will treat this concept in greater detail in the next chapter. 20 This is the effect of individualization that, according to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, characterizes disciplinary societies. Notably, Simmel associated this sort of individualism with freedom and equality; see, for instance, Georg Simmel, Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms, trans. Anthony J. Blasi et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 637–8. 21 For a clear discussion of this phenomenon in the twentieth century, see Theo Hilpert, Die funktionelle Stadt: Le Corbusiers Stadtvision – Bedingungen, Motive, Hintergründe (Braunschweig: F. Vieweg und Sohn, 1979). 22 See Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (New York: Verso, 1995). It could be said in short that, according to the social logic of the general, all spaces are non-places. 23 See Barbara Adam, Time and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), pp. 123–5. 24 See Weber, Economy and Society; and Niklas Luhmann, Legitimität durch Verfahren (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969). 25 See Jürgen Habermas, “Labour and Interaction: Remarks on Hegel’s Jena Philosophy of Mind,” in Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (London: Heinemann, 1974), pp. 142–69. 26 I refer to the first two phases of modernity as classical modernity because the social logic of the general is dominant in both of them. 27 German Idealism, within whose framework the particular can only be the general-particular, represents the high point of the philosophical foundation of the logic of the general. 28 On this phase, see also Andreas Reckwitz, Das hybride Subjekt: Eine Theorie der Subjektkulturen von der bürgerlichen Moderne zur Postmoderne (Weilerwist: Velbrück Wissenschaften, 2006), pp. 336–439; Peter Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 73–122; and Scott Lash and John Urry, The End of Organized Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), pp. 17–87. Here I use the terms “organized modernity” and “industrial modernity” synonymously. 29 On the concepts of Americanism and Fordism, see Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 277–318. On the concept of organized capitalism, see Rudolf Hilferding, Organisierter Kapitalismus (Kiel, 1927). 30 See Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977); and Maury Klein, The Flowering of the Third America: The Making of Organizational Society, 1850–1920 (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1993). 31 See Raymond Aron, 18 Lectures on Industrial Society, trans. M. K. Bottomore (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1967). 32 See Cecelia Tichi, Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); and Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970 (New York: Viking, 1989). 33 See John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 2nd edn. (London: Hamilton, 1969). Regarding the trente glorieuses, see Jean Fourastié, Les trente glorieuses, ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975 (Paris: Fayard, 1979). 34 On the state, see Pierre Rosanvallon, The Society of Equals, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). On the city, see Hilpert, Die funktionelle Stadt. 35 On my discussion below, see William Graebner, The Engineering of Consent: Democracy and Authority in Twentieth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956); and Riesman, The Lonely Crowd. 36 See Martin Kohli, “Gesellschaftszeit und Lebenszeit: Der Lebenslauf im Strukturwandel,” in Die Moderne: Kontinuitäten und Zäsuren, ed. Johannes Berger (Göttingen: Schwartz, 1986), pp. 183–204. 37 On the construction of abnormality, see Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Verso, 2003); Howard Saul Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Free Press, 1963); and Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence. 38 On the level of subjects, de-singularization is not the same thing as de-individualization. As an achievement society, organized modernity was based through and through on the post-traditional self-responsibility of subjects, which Georg Simmel referred to as the “individualism of freedom and responsibility.” Thus, it cannot be said that organized modernity was characterized by de-individualization.
2 The Social Logic of the Particular
At first glance, the idea of a social logic of singularities may seem oxymoronic. Is not the social, after all, the natural counterpart of the particular? Is it not the déformation professionnelle of sociology to focus exclusively on crowds and collectives, rules and schemata? At its heart, that is, is sociology not a science devoted to the social logic of the general?1 It is certainly no coincidence that sociology emerged as a discipline during the age of industrial modernity, and it still carries around a great deal of conceptual baggage from that time. Therefore, it might not seem well equipped to analyze processes of singularization – a problematic shortcoming if the goal is to understand late-modern society, which is organized around these very processes. In order to investigate the latter in a sociological and yet appropriate manner, it is necessary from the beginning to set aside the idea that sociality and singularity are fundamentally incompatible with one another. In fact, I would like to oppose this idea in decisive terms. In the case of singularities, it is not a matter of individual “vestiges” that remain behind after the social has withdrawn, or some sort of antithesis that battles against the social. Rather, if we remain open and curious about the interrelations and entities that assemble “the social,” it will be possible to view and analyze the logic of singularities, too, as a genuinely social logic.
What
