provides efficiency and stability. The culturalization of the social, in contrast, can be seen as a response to the social problem of meaning and motivation. Here the issue is why life should be lived in a certain way. Cultural practices – from telling mythical stories and engaging in collective rituals to traveling abroad and playing computer games – are answers to the question of to what end (collective or individual) life should be lived when privation and disorder have been averted. Whereas rationalization is a response to the question of how, culturalization answers the question of why. Essentially, cultural praxis and the cultural sphere make it possible for people to distance themselves from the necessities of the life-world and formal rationalization, and they do so not by reducing complexity along formal parameters but rather by allowing it to unfold. Above all, they promise to provide value and affect.
Cultural and social theorists have been fully aware of the existence of the problem of meaning and motivation, and they have written extensively about its role in archaic and traditional societies, with their magic, myths, religions, images, rites, games, and celebrations. To some extent, however, the prevailing interpretation of modernity as a process of formal rationalization implies that culturalization defines traditional societies just as rationalization defines modernity. This makes it seem as though the “irrational” culturalization of older societies was supplanted by the culturally neutral rationalization of modernity.15 Put simply, older societies were concerned with meaning, while modernity has been concerned exclusively with efficiency. This interpretation, however, leaves us with just a one-dimensional image of things. Apart from the fact that premodern societies had their own formats of rationalization and were far more rational than modern thinkers would like to believe, modern societies have also developed their own forms of culturalization, their own social logic of singularities. Shrewd proponents of the rationalization narrative – Max Weber among them – have at least identified a problem in modernity’s presumed replacement of culture by rationality, a problem that has been subjected to all sorts of cultural critique under the rubrics of disenchantment and the loss of meaning.16 In reality, culture – with its valorizing and affecting nature and its preference for the unique – has not disappeared from modernity at all, and certainly not from late modernity, where it has experienced a historically unprecedented surge and structural transformation. The problem of meaning and motivation, to which culturalization is a response, is in general just as present as the problem of efficiency and order – and as soon as problems of efficiency and order became less pressing, it even took center stage. The truly interesting question, then, is not whether processes of culturalization simply represent a sort of problem of excess or luxury, but, rather, which form the cultural sphere has adopted and what exact relationship has developed between culturalization and rationalization in individual forms of society.
Qualities of Cultural Praxis: Between Sense and Sensibility
In what respects can social entities acquire a cultural quality? To answer this question, it will be necessary again to fall back on cultural theory and its sensitivity to cultural singularities, which I would like to apply to my sociological analysis of the social processes of culturalization. It is possible to distinguish five features or qualities that qualify objects, subjects, places, events, and collectives as valuable and affecting cultural entities: the aesthetic, the narrative-hermeneutic, the ethical, the creative, and the ludic quality. These pertain to all singularized entities. Objects, for example, can develop an aesthetic quality; they can be attributed an ethical quality; their primary content can be narrative and hermeneutic; they can be creative objects, or the objects of play. They can possess just one of these qualities or combine several of them together. The same is true of singularized places and events, subjects and collectives. These qualities are assigned or denied through practices of valorization, and they manifest themselves affectively. It is possible to provide some structure to this sequence of five qualities if we proceed from the assumption that, as far as cultural praxis is concerned, we are always dealing with two dimensions: with sense (or meaning) and sensibility (or sensuousness). On the one hand, cultural entities have a meaningful aspect: they describe, narrate, explain, and justify. On the other hand, they possess a peculiar sensuous dimension to the extent that they address our sensory perception in a particular way. Many cultural theories have foregrounded either the one or the other quality of culture and have therefore understood it either hermeneutically or aesthetically. It would be best, however, to think about them together.
The meaningful quality of culture has frequently been associated with myths, religious beliefs, or world views. On a more fundamental level, this is really a matter of the narrative-hermeneutic quality that objects, places, events, subjects, and collectives can acquire. The sensuous aspect of culture can in turn be described as its aesthetic quality. With their narrative-hermeneutic quality, cultural entities provide narratives about the world of nature and society, about the past and the future, about people, things, and gods. At issue here is understanding the context of the world and the place of the subject within this context.17 With their aesthetic quality, cultural entities present themselves as objects of intensified sensory perception. The aesthetic can be associated with the imaginary – that is, with the capacity to imagine alternative worlds or things beyond what can be perceived by the senses.18 When singularities happen to be performative, it is usually in these two ways. The singularized objects, places, events, collectives, and subjects that I have discussed above and that will continue to concern us throughout this book are always aestheticized and/or hermeneuticized in a variable manner. This is just as true of travel destinations and religious communities as it is of food, internet profiles, bodies, events, cities, nations, and media products. The inherent complexity and inner density that such things develop may be structured on a stronger aesthetic basis or on a stronger hermeneutic basis, or both aspects can be defining to the same extent.
Both in its narrative-hermeneutic and its aesthetic-imaginative quality, the praxis of the cultural sphere reconfigures the structures of everyday practices and (especially) instrumentally rational practices in a fundamental way. This applies equally to the status of representations of the world and to the status of sensory perceptions. In the pragmatic world of everyday life (and all the more so after the formal rationalization of activity), both representations and perceptions possess the (instrumental) character of information claiming to depict reality. Over the course of their rationalization, representations and perceptions acquire a sort of cognitive structure and serve the thrift-driven understanding of reality with the goal of making the natural or social world as efficient and orderly as possible. The praxis of culture does not provide any information of this sort but rather creates interpretive contexts (that is, stories) that are meant to depict the world (individual biographies, political history, cosmological structures, etc.) in all its complexity. Such stories can be told by places but also by events, communities, and objects – from works of art to consumer products. Something analogous is also true of sensory perceptions. The praxis of culture is not concerned with producing neutral perceptions of an informational nature; the aim here is rather intensive perception in all sensory dimensions and for its own sake. Any social entity can be the object of such aesthetic perception. In general, it can be said that information requires utility and a function, while narratives and aesthetic perceptions require value. Information is emotionally impoverished and objective; narratives and aesthetic perceptions mobilize affects.
In addition to these two basic qualities – the narrative-hermeneutic and the aesthetic – there are three further cultural qualities that, though related to the first two,19 nevertheless have their own independent character: the ethical, the creative, and the ludic. All three can in turn apply to all entities – that is, to objects, subjects, places, events, and collectives. That these can acquire an ethical quality may at first come as a surprise. After all, is the ethical not a dimension of normative rationalization? The answer is no, and this has to do with the distinction between morals and ethics. In short, it comes down to the fact that the index of morals belongs to the logic of (normative) rationality, whereas the index of the ethical belongs to the logic of culture.20 Morality is part of the social logic of the general to the extent that its principles and imperatives have a generally valid and universal character
