urgent, and sensible in it. In this sense, the social is always cultural; social practices are always cultural practices. From the perspective of this broad understanding of culture, moreover, social rationalization and the social logic of the general can also be regarded as cultural. Technical, cognitive, and normative rationalization depends on culturally specific criteria such as efficiency, equality, or truth. This involves a cultural process of enacting rationality, which constantly distinguishes the rational from the non-rational.
In the sea of the cultural in this broad sense, culture in the strong and specific sense forms distinct islands. It denotes a specific realm of the socio-cultural world, namely the cultural sphere in which objects and other entities of particular quality circulate. By asking what this qualification consists of, we can now draw a connection to our thoughts about the social logic of singularities and simultaneously build a bridge to the traditional concept of culture. This bridge can be erected on the level of the concept of value. My assumption is this: precisely those social entities (that is, those objects, subjects, spaces, temporalities, and collectives) that are socially singularized attain the qualities necessary for becoming entities of culture in this social context. Singular social entities become cultural entities, and the process of their singularization is also a process of their culturalization. Cultural entities are fabricated within the framework of all four practices of singularization discussed above: the practices of observation, evaluation/valorization, production, and appropriation/experience. From the perspective of cultural quality, however, one of these practices has a leading role: valorization, which is the fundamental process of assigning or denying value and thus certifies what counts as unique and as a cultural entity in general (and also what does not count and thus exists outside of the singular and outside of culture).
We have already seen the extent to which the specific practices of valorization, which are typical of the social logic of singularities, differ from the classifying and ranking forms of evaluation that characterize rationalism and the social logic of the general. Whereas, in the latter, the entities of the social are classified according to their utility and function, in the former they are attributed value in the strict sense – an intrinsic value that does not derive from anything else. It is a matter of things, objects, people, places, events, and collectives being recognized as valuable, and it is their acknowledged inherent complexity that makes them seem to be such. As bearers of value, they are not a means to an end; in a sense, they are ends in themselves.4 Together, cultural entities thus form a sphere of the valuable in which, conversely, that which lacks value is rejected. The cultural sphere is therefore the sphere in which these values circulate.
It may come as a surprise that, in the wake of the social-constructivist turn and its radical expansion of the cultural, I would venture to advocate such a limited concept of culture, and one based on values at that. Wouldn’t this be equivalent to turning back the clock to a restricted and normative concept of culture? I am of the opinion that the expansion of the cultural by theorists since the 1970s has undoubtedly been beneficial, for it means that more and more phenomena have been recognized as being culturally constituted and subjected to cultural-theoretical analysis. At the same time, however, this has left a noticeable gap, for it involved sacrificing the classical understanding of culture, according to which culture denotes specific qualities of the social. When the conceptual differentiation between culture and non-culture is abandoned, this has problematic consequences for a theory of modernity. I would go as far as to say that identifying modernity with a process of formal rationalization – and thus accepting a one-dimensional image of modernity as the large-scale machinery of the social logic of the general – requires losing the distinction between culture and non-culture, between the sphere of value (and affect) and the system of utility and function. By failing to distinguish between these two dimensions, one also fails to see modernity’s dual structure, which consists of both rationalization and culturalization.
The concept of value can be salvaged from the legacy of the classical concept of culture and allow us to think against the grain. Today, its restricted applications to the bourgeois high culture of the nineteenth century and later to the limited subsystem of “art and culture” are rightly regarded as narrow-minded. The classical, normative concept of culture had associated value with particular high-cultural practices of the bourgeoisie – with the practices of education and art appreciation – and presupposed that cultural critique could only be undertaken from this perspective.5 Its truly interesting legacy only comes to light, however, when one thinks about it abstractly and reconsiders the concept of value from a fresh cultural-theoretical perspective. Then it is possible to recognize that the value of cultural entities does not consist in the fact that a cultural critic finds them remarkable and has established their “objective value” but rather in the fact that these entities are valuable in the social world of the participants themselves. Culture exists wherever value is socially assigned.
The value-oriented concept of culture thus allows there to be a distinction, in an abstract form, between two different ways in which social entities are formatted by society: either as a cultural quality to which value is attributed, or as functional, standardized, and generalized entities of the social that are of instrumental use. Cultural entities are considered ends in themselves; they are regarded as having an intrinsic value of their own. In contrast, functional entities (functional objects, subjects, spaces, temporalities, and collectives) seem to be means to an end, and to this extent they have an extrinsic or instrumental structure. As to which specific entities are valorized and which are not, this is now an open question of social dynamics. Paintings, noteworthy places, or subcultures can become cultural entities just as baseball games, urinals (as in Duchamp’s example), religious relics, or nations can. The social logic of singularities determines what counts as particular and therefore as “culturally valuable.” Accordingly, there are also things in society that exist outside of culture – namely, those social entities that are regarded as valueless.
From what I have said so far, it is clear that the concept of culture is not the only thing that needs to be renewed. It is also necessary to dust off the concept of value if it is to become a matter of interest to contemporary sociology and cultural theory. Value should not be understood as a neo-Kantian value system that precedes praxis and motivationally guides it. This is not a matter of individual people or a society having certain values. Rather, the concept of value has to be understood in praxeological terms, so that the practices of valorizing individual objects become visible.6 Values have to be interpreted as part of the social dynamics of circulation. These are open-ended and often controversial; it is here where culture wars take place, which are essentially conflicts about valorization. In processes of valorization, entities of the social are singularized and de-singularized; they are assigned or denied inherent complexities. Here, elements of idiosyncrasies or the general-particular are transformed into singularities, but they can also lose this value in turn.
If the praxis of culture is roughly understood as a praxis of valorization and de-valorization, it will also become clear that the conservative connotations of the old concept of culture can be stripped away and that it is possible to develop a value-theoretical and heuristically fruitful perspective on the mechanisms of power and domination that are inherent to culture. In social processes of valorization, value is assigned and value is denied. In these processes of de-valorization or devaluation, which are also processes of de-singularization, it becomes clear that more or less subtle mechanisms of exclusion are at work in the cultural sphere.7 Whereas some social entities are recognized as valuable and unique, others remain invisible, are dismissed as general-particular, or are negatively singularized. In short: works of art, attractive cities, and remarkable people are not the only things that circulate in the sphere of culture; it also produces rubbish, flyover country, and white trash. De-valorization is a sort of devaluation that affects not only things/objects, places, and events but also subjects and collectives. Under modern conditions, it is no surprise that these cycles of valorization and devaluation do not form a monolithic block but rather always entail counter-valorizations and readjustments to the criteria of evaluation.
Accordingly, the cultural sphere
