matter of processing and receiving the world.
What is central to practices of experience – whether attending an opera or meditating, base flying or visiting a city, going to the opening match of the World Cup or simply hearing the national anthem on the radio – is that the singular entities in question affect their recipients.45 It is the affective nature of the logic of singularities that structures, in a specific way, appropriation as experience. Whenever singular objects, subjects, places, events, or collectives are appropriated, intensive (positive or ambivalent) emotions are often at play: passion and admiration; affection and inspiration; shock and desire; fear and disgust; feelings of elation, pride, or beautiful harmony. And even when the intensity of these emotions is relatively weak – if someone is merely stimulated by something interesting, cool, or exciting – they remain at the heart of the matter. In that singular entities affect people, their appropriation incites a degree of emotional intensity. The latter, however, should not be understood as a behaviorist stimulus-and-response sequence but rather as an interpretive praxis: only those who interpret nature in a certain way, for instance, are able to “experience” it.46
Lived experience can take on a wide variety of forms. It can have an intersubjective character (when a group or audience is present), or it can involve a private act of engaging with an object. It can be of a primarily mental nature, with little or no bodily involvement, or it can expressly involve an active physical practice. In many cases, too, production and experience can go hand in hand (when people play a game together, for instance). Fundamentally, however, it must be said that subjective experience is not self-contained but is rather itself a component of social praxis – of the practices of appropriation that give it shape in a specific way. Compared to the appropriation of social elements in the mode of the general, which is relatively stable, the appropriation of singularities is riskier and more unpredictable on account of its psycho-physical aspect. It can fail altogether, it is not something that can be forced, and it may not result in any real experience at all.
Performativity as a Mode of Praxis and Automated Singularization
Regarding the social logic of the general, I discussed above a general structure of social praxis – a mode of praxis – that more or less applies to all four of the practices of observation, evaluation, production, and appropriation: the mode of instrumentally rational and socially coordinated activity. The social praxis of the general is thus essentially one of labor and interaction. How, in this regard, do things look in the social logic of singularities? What is its overarching mode of praxis? Basically, the social praxis of the particular has the structure of a performance, so that performativity is its central characteristic. In the mode of the singular, the social manifests itself in the situation of one or more people performing something for an audience that is meant to have cultural value. Singular entities are not primarily used in an instrumental way (like instrumentally rational activity) or treated normatively (like normative activity); rather, they are presented in the mode of performativity. Singular subjects, places, and objects are presented; as events, singular temporalities have a performative character; and singular collectives live off of this collective performativity. Singularities thus exist as performances of singularity before a social audience.47
Performances of singularity operate affectively. This is what fundamentally distinguishes the mode of praxis of the particular from that of the rationalized general, where affect is kept to a minimum. Things are quite different with the performance of singularity, in which, as we have already seen, the intensity of affect plays a decisive role. It should be noted that affects are not the internal emotions or feelings of subjects; rather, they should be thought about in terms of the processes and relations of affecting. This means that singular objects, subjects, places, events, and collectives are characterized by the fact that they address social participants affectively.48 The social entities of the singular mobilize affective intensities primarily in the form of the positive affects of desire and interest, but also in ambivalent mixtures of these with fear or anger. The phenomenon of being affected in such ways is especially clear to see in the appropriation and experience of singularities, but it is also part of the practices of production, interpretive observation, and valorization. The process of affecting others characterizes the overall mode of praxis of the logic of singularities. In short, without affecting others, there are no singularities, and without singularities, people are not (or only minimally) affected.
Especially in late modernity, however, one encounters a form of singularization that fundamentally differs from such affecting performances and might best be called automated singularization. Although I will discuss this phenomenon in greater detail later on, it makes sense to mention it here in brief. This form of singularization has been present in various areas of life since the 1990s, and it is primarily an effect of digitalization. One example of mechanically fabricated uniqueness is the algorithmically generated profiles of internet users, which depend on data tracking. Noteworthy, too, is genome analysis, which makes it possible to examine the unique genetic composition of individuals. Further examples can be found in the field of human resources, which is concerned with systematically determining the talents and potential of employees. Automated singularization, however, not only is interesting with respect to subjects but also is applied in ways related to collectives, as in the case of marketing (which focuses on social niches with particular tastes and opinions) or in the case of political campaigns (which target particular groups of voters).
At first glance, one might be tempted to think that such cases are illustrative of the logic of the general and its instrumentally rational practices, and indeed they do involve instrumentally rational techniques. However, the techniques in question are not applied within the framework of the social logic of the general. Whereas the rationalistic technologies of industrial modernity produced standardized things and people, the technologies of late modernity have largely been transformed into infrastructures of the particular. That is, there is now an intrinsic technological and institutional interest in, and capacity for, making singularities visible and fabricating them automatically. Unlike rationalism and its inclination to generalize, this institutional and technological interest is not oriented toward treating unique entities as exemplars of general types but rather toward reconstructing individual entities in their uniqueness. Whereas the traditional medical perspective, for instance, evaluated individual patients in terms of general symptoms or health standards, the aim of genome analysis is to ascertain the incommensurability of every individual’s genetic composition.
Even these automated singularities can be analyzed as the results of a fabrication process involving the practices of observation, evaluation, production, and appropriation. Here, however, these practices are internal mechanical techniques; they are conducted automatically by the technologies in question. Even more significant is the fact that automated singularities do not necessarily exist as performances before an audience that experiences them and is affected by them. Often, singularities produced in such a way are themselves the object of instrumentally rational practices, such as a type of medical treatment based on genome analysis or a consumer decision steered by an automatically tailored profile on an online shopping platform. Here the singularity is not experienced but rather used. In other cases, however, automated singularities can indeed put on an (automatically generated) performance, for instance by arranging images and texts on someone’s social media platform in a tailored fashion that the user finds interesting, stimulating, and exciting.
All in all, late modernity’s systems of automated singularization are highly remarkable. Intelligent technologies no longer simply standardize, as was the case during the period of industrial rationalization; they singularize as well. They have thus contributed to a transformation away from instrumentally rational practices toward a greater sensitivity to uniqueness and toward the establishment of a comprehensive technical infrastructure for the performance of the singular.
Notes
1 This déformation professionnelle is also a legacy from Western
