concerns their role in late-modern politics), and more briefly in Part IV (which addresses how they relate to digital communities). 33 See Latour, Reassembling the Social, p. 72. The concept of affordance was first formulated by James J. Gibson in his book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1966). 34 The phrase is from René Pollesch, “Lob des litauischen Regieassistenten im grauen Kittel,” in Kreation und Depression: Freiheit im gegenwärtigen Kapitalismus, ed. Christoph Menke and Juliane Rebentisch (Berlin: Kadmos, 2016), pp. 243–9. 35 Here, observation is used as an overarching concept for the practices of representation and understanding. 36 This can require a tentative inclination toward interpretations that are not self-evident but rather have to be reached through a sort of open-ended inquiry (as in interpretations of works of art, people, and so on). On the concept of interpretation, see Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 37 The same can be said of any orientation toward the general, which can also be systematically fostered or inhibited. 38 On processes of evaluation and the field of “valuation studies,” see Michèle Lamont, “Toward a Comparative Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation,” Annual Review of Sociology 38 (2012), pp. 201–21. 39 This distinction stems from Émile Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1915), though I use it more generally here. See also Michael Thompson’s Rubbish Theory, in which a distinction is drawn between goods of lasting value, goods that lose their value, and “rubbish.” 40 In this regard, see also Boris Groys, On the New, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2014). It should be kept in mind, however, that the discovery and reframing of idiosyncrasies can itself become an independent and complex production process (the efforts of the music industry to find new local music is an example of this, as is the attempt to turn something into a classic design by reframing the narrative around it). 41 See Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 133–48. 42 In archaic and traditional societies, for instance, the cultural sphere is not oriented toward innovation. 43 Appropriation is an umbrella term for the practices of dealing with objects, subjects, etc. Such practices include, for instance, utilization and reception. 44 For various approaches to the concept of lived experience, which has a rich tradition, see Georg Simmel, “Die historische Formung,” in Simmel, Aufsätze und Abhandlungen, 1909–1918 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), pp. 321–69; Alfred Schütz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. George Walsh and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), pp. 215–17; and Gerhard Schulze, Die Erlebnisgesellschaft: Kultursoziologie der Gegenwart (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1992), pp. 34–88. 45 On this matter, see Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); and Michaela Ott, Affizierung: Zu einer ästhetisch-epistemischen Figur (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 2010). Under the concept of “resonance,” Hartmut Rosa has discussed a specifically normative form of affecting; see his book Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (Cambridge: Polity, 2019). 46 Under certain conditions, practices of lived experience can acquire an especially intensive form. In an experience in the narrow sense, the subject structure of the participating individuals can be transformed, or emotions can be felt that had never been felt before. See, for instance, Victor Turner’s discussion of liminal experiences in his book The Ritual Process. 47 On performativity, see Erika Fischer-Lichte, ed., Performativität und Ereignis (Tübingen: Francke, 2003); and Jörg Volbers, Performative Kultur: Eine Einführung (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2014). 48 On the affectivity of the social, see Luc Ciompi, Die emotionalen Grundlagen des Denkens: Entwurf einer fraktalen Affektlogik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997); and Andreas Reckwitz, “Practices and Their Affects,” in The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations, Practitioners, ed. Allison Hui et al. (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 114–25.
3 Culture and Culturalization
The social logic of singularities is closely linked to the dimension of the social that has traditionally been referred to as culture. Indeed, one could maintain that, if we proceed from the distinction between the logic of the general and that of singularities, it will be possible to shed new and informative light on “culture” – an ambiguous academic and political concept that is now encrusted in a layer of patina – and the cultural dimension of society. Conversely, recourse to the concept of culture makes it possible to anchor our analysis of singularities in social theory. The crucial point is this: at its core, culture is composed of singularities. The cultural sphere of a society is formed from social entities that are recognized to be unique – singular objects, subjects, places, events, and collectives – together with the affiliated practices of observation, evaluation, production, and appropriation. The logic of the particular is related to culture just as the logic of the general is related to formal rationality. Whereas the social logic of the general is expressed through a social process of rationalization, the social logic of singularities is expressed through a social process of culturalization. Rationalization and culturalization are the two opposing forms of socialization.
Culture as a Sphere of Valorization and De-valorization
The concept of culturalization may seem alien at first. Haven’t we learned that everything is culture, that all things social are formed and coded by contexts of meaning that lend them direction and significance? How, then, can one speak of culturalization? Such a concept of enhancement and intensification ultimately seems to require certain precultural elements that are then abandoned in a second step toward a specific cultural formation.
Culture is one of the most dazzling concepts of the human sciences; at the same time, it has also been central to the self-perception of modernity from its very beginning.1 In the nineteenth century, culture was at first understood as a select, “cultivated” (that is, normatively desirable) form of life that strives for harmonious perfection (the normative concept of culture). Over time, the concept was then restricted to a social subsystem that essentially encompassed the artistic and intellectual spheres (the differentiation-theoretical concept of culture). Conversely, the concept of culture would also be radically opened up and applied to all ways of life in all of their diversity (the holistic concept of culture) and ultimately – in a more theoretically challenging turn – related to the symbolic and meaningful dimension of the social (the meaning-oriented concept of culture). In this case, culture designates the orders of knowledge and systems of classification against the backdrop of which social practices first become conceivable.2
For our context, however, none of these four concepts of culture is really suitable. They are either too broad or too narrow. From the perspective of the holistic and meaning-oriented concepts of culture, every social phenomenon can be understood as cultural, whereas the normative and differentiation-theoretical concepts of culture restrict what counts as culture to the bourgeois high culture of modernity and its products. What are the alternatives? I propose drawing a distinction between two levels: a weak or broad concept of culture, which denotes the cultural as a whole, and a strong or specific concept of culture, which pertains to objects or other entities to which society attributes particular qualities. What is meant by culture in the broad sense is thus all social and cultural practices and their orders of knowledge. In the specific sense, however, culture encompasses only those social entities (objects, subjects, spaces, temporalities, collectives) that have a particular feature: society ascribes to them not (or not only) utility or a function, but rather value. In addition to this character of value, the cultural entities in question also have a second significant feature: to a considerable extent, they produce (positive) affects. These cultural entities thus form a cultural sphere in which social processes of valorization and affecting take place.
According to the broad or weak concept of culture, the cultural designates the level of socially relevant contexts of meaning as a whole.3 All social practices contain implicit orders of knowledge, which classify the phenomena of the world in a particular way and therefore assign a specific meaning to them. They regulate how the world is represented and which
