Modernity: The Romantic Revolution of the Unique
The break between traditional society and modernity – in its early bourgeois form, which emerged at the end of the eighteenth century and lasted until the beginning of the twentieth – was dramatic. I have already discussed the technical, cognitive, and normative processes of rationalization that were initiated at this time.7 The large-scale phenomenon of “doing generality,” which propelled early modernity toward industrial revolution, capitalization, socialization, the nation state, and globalization, is well known. However, the structural transformation of culturalization was no less significant. It gave rise to the lifestyle of the bourgeoisie, the bourgeois conception of art, and the radical aesthetic movement of Romanticism. Even in its early phase, modernity was thus distinguished not only by a radical social logic of the general but also by a historically unprecedented social logic of the particular, though the latter was admittedly a subordinate counter-tendency.
The bourgeois lifestyle was characterized by the ambivalence between its claim of cultural generality and its orientation toward the singular (understood as the individual). The bourgeois way of life laid claim to the concept of culture, and it did so emphatically.8 In this lifestyle, aesthetic practices (engaging with art, experiencing nature, etc.) went hand in hand with hermeneutic-narrative practices (education through engaging with texts). The bourgeoisie thus lived off of the idea of the general validity of whatever might be recognized as culturally valuable. The education of the subject – of his or her character and general virtue – became a matter of enculturation in the strict sense. The aim of this lifestyle was to create a sphere of aimlessness, “disinterested pleasure” (as Kant called it), and education for its own sake. The bourgeois lifestyle thus found support in educational institutions as well as in the renewed field of the arts (literature, visual art, the theater, and music).
The modern field of art, which began to form around the year 1800, was the social field of modernity, which was systematically oriented toward the fabrication of unique entities. Its works of art appeared with a claim to singularity, which came to be expressed in the semantics of originality and artistic genius.9 Modern art is, in fact, fundamentally different from premodern art: no longer interested in perfecting known forms according to a rule-based aesthetics, it is rather concerned with breaking rules and creating ever-new singularities. Singularity became linked to a regime of aesthetic novelty. In this context, artists too became matters of fascination on account of their radical singularity – their “individuality.” They sought to actualize themselves expressively in their work. The bourgeois field of art was thus the first to institutionalize an attention market for cultural singularity goods. At the same time, however, bourgeois culture also endeavored to restrict uniqueness by tying it to normative and general principles, particularly by coupling aesthetics with the aforementioned ideal of education.10 It was hoped that works of art would express a sort of normative generality and even universality (humanity, reason, etc.), and that education would involve appropriating a canon of individual works from that past that were generally recognized as valuable.
This complex synthesis of the particular and the general, which characterized bourgeois culture, was made dynamic by the revolutionary singularism that developed with the counter-cultural movement of Romanticism. The significance of Romanticism for modernity’s culture of singularities cannot be overstated.11 This was the first radically singularistic cultural movement in history, and it closely associated uniqueness with the ideal of authenticity. The immediate significance of Romanticism lies in the fact that it radically oriented the human subject toward singularity, which was treated in the semantics of “individuality.” This then served the comprehensive project of singularizing all elements of the world. Here, too, the experience of art played an important role, and there also developed a radically in-the-moment, aesthetic awareness of time. But the experience of nature (not understood as a mechanical natural space but as an ensemble of singular landscapes), the experience of picturesque places, the experience of other subjects in the form of friendship and love, the singular formation of the material world (in the case of hand-crafted objects, for instance), a sensitivity to history as a venue for narratives and memories, the experiential sphere of religion, and identifying with the singularities of peoples and nations were all areas in which Romanticism subjected the world to a comprehensive process of singularization.
It has often been maintained that Romanticism was an attempt to re-enchant or re-mystify the world. It would be more accurate, however, to describe this process as a culturalization of the world that made it possible to transfer potentially everything from the side of the profane to that of the sacred. In the end, even a pair of shoes or a lover’s birthmark could be of cultural value. This Romantic valorization of the world was enabled by its comprehensive tendency to singularize. The world was rediscovered as a realm of fascinating inherent complexities and was reconfigured as such. The fundamental postulate was this: any subject who wished to be authentic must have authentic experiences by engaging with the singularities of the world. In Romanticism, the explicit struggle against the modernity of the general – from Enlightenment philosophy to industrialization – was the constant downside to the comprehensive singularization of the world. From its beginning, this Romantic culture of singularity had entirely unpredictable effects on the calculated balance of bourgeois culture.
Ultimately, the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century concentrated on just one aspect of Romantic singularization and culturalization: that of collectives, which now meant the nation. With the “imagined communities” of nations, collectives were aggressively understood as singularities. Of course, the idiosyncrasies of social collectives – from tribes and clans to villages and principalities – also existed in traditional societies. Yet it was modernity, with its politicization of collectives, that first not only enforced the general existence of collectives in “freedom and equality,” but also imposed an understanding of collective and historical singularities.12 This development took place not only in Europe but also in the global anti-colonial nationalist movements (in India, China, the Near East) that arose at the end of the nineteenth century. Nationalisms frequently give rise to a genuine sort of culturalism that essentially identifies societies with a homogeneous and incommensurable culture.
In retrospect, it becomes clear to what extent early, bourgeois modernity had laid significant groundwork for the modern culture of singularities that has remained formative to the present day. In this regard, it could be said that the following factors were equally influential: the Romantic culture of authenticity and its comprehensive project of singularization, the idea of modeling art according to a regime of aesthetic originality, the cultural orientation of the bourgeois lifestyle, and the politicization of authenticity along nationalistic lines.
Organized Modernity: Mass Culture
Organized, industrial modernity, which extended from around 1920 to the middle or end of the 1970s, represents a breach within modernity itself. In its socialist instantiation, it was aggressively anti-bourgeois and anti-Romantic. Its lasting influence, however, derives from its Western version, which was largely propelled by the United States and its combination of Fordism and Americanism. As we have already seen, industrial modernity represents the zenith of the modern process of formal rationalization, with its expansive social logic of the general. It would be one-sided, however, to reduce it to that alone, for it also caused its own shift with respect to culturalization, especially in the fields of consumption and audiovisual media. Bourgeois-Romantic culture did not vanish entirely; instead, it was fundamentally subordinated to the social logic of the general in such a way that, from the perspective of bourgeois cultural traditions, little seemed to remain beyond anti-individualistic mass society.
Fordism was based on mass production and mass consumption alike. In the 1920s, the world of consumption began to develop into a new cultural sphere. In short, a consumption revolution took place.13 Goods, which had previously served instrumental purposes above all, were now increasingly subjected to culturalization – that is, they started to become narrative, aesthetic, expressive, or
