area in which the rise of the singular has been observable for some time is architecture. With its repetitive structures, the International Style seems rather monotonous, and it has largely been neglected since the 1980s in favor of unique designs, so much so that it seems necessary for today’s museums, concert halls, flagship stores, and apartment buildings to be built in an original style (sometimes these styles are striking, sometimes merely odd). Hidden behind all of this lies a fundamental transformation of spatial structures. In globalized and urbanized late modernity, the interchangeable spaces of classical modernity are to be replaced with recognizable individual places, each with a unique atmosphere that can be associated with specific narratives and memories. In the name of so-called cultural regeneration, cities large and small have thus made concerted efforts to develop their own local logic, one that promises a particular quality of life and has its own unique selling points. And the new middle class has flocked to these teeming cities, while other, less attractive, regions (be they in the United States or France, Great Britain or Germany) are in danger of becoming deserted altogether.
It is no surprise, then, that the late-modern subjects who move in these environments seek satisfaction in the particular. The type of subject that predominated in the West up to the 1970s – that is, the average employee with an average family in the suburbs, whom David Riesman described as being “socially adjusted”3 – has become, in Western societies, an apparently conformist negative foil to be avoided by the late-modern subject. In this regard, Ulrich Beck and others have written a great deal about individualization – meaning that subjects have been liberated from general social expectations and freed to practice self-responsibility.4 Singularization, however, means more than independence and self-optimization. At its heart is a more complex pursuit of uniqueness and exceptionality, which has not only become a subjective desire but also a paradoxical social expectation. This is especially pronounced in the new, highly qualified middle class – that is, in the social product of educational expansion and post-industrialization that has become the main trendsetter of late modernity. Here, everything in one’s lifestyle is measured according to the standard of “specialness”: how one lives, what one eats, where and how one travels, and even one’s own body and circle of friends. In the mode of singularization, life is not simply lived; it is curated. From one situation to the next, the late-modern subject performs his or her particular self to others, who become an audience, and this self will not be found attractive unless it seems authentic. With their profiles, the omnipresent social media are one of the central arenas for crafting this particularity. Here, the subject operates within a comprehensive social market governed by attractiveness, in which there is an ongoing struggle for visibility that can only be won by those who seem exceptional. Late modernity has turned out to be a culture of the authentic that is simultaneously a culture of the attractive.
Finally, the displacement of industrial society’s logic of the general by late modernity’s logic of the particular has had extraordinarily profound effects on the social, collective, and political forms of the early twenty-first century. It is not only individuals and objects that have been singularized: collectives have been singularized as well! Of course, formal organizations, political parties, and the bureaucratic state exist further in the background, yet even they are on the defensive against particular and temporary forms of the social that promise higher degrees of identification. The latter undermine universal rules and standard procedures by cultivating worlds of their own, each with its own identity. This is true of collaborations and projects in the professional and political world that, as affective entities with particular participants and fixed deadlines, are each unique. And it is also true of the scenes, political subcultures, leisure clubs, and consumer groups in the real and virtual worlds that, as aesthetic or hermeneutic voluntary communities with highly specific interests and world views, distance themselves quite far from popular culture and mainstream politics.
The singularization of the social also applies to the ubiquitous political and sub-political neo-communities in which a given historical, geographical, or ethical peculiarity is taken as the basis of a commonly imagined culture. This is a broad field that includes the identity politics of ethnic communities and diasporas that have formed over the course of global migration flows. In many places, too, new religious and fundamentalist communities (mostly Christian or Muslim) have begun to spread that lay claim to a sort of religious exceptionalism. Within this context, the right-wing political populism that has arisen since the turn of the millennium has invoked the cultural authenticity of one’s own people and their national culture. At the same time, but in a different way, “cultural diversity” became a guiding principle of liberal social and cultural politics around the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Like the shapes and colors in a kaleidoscope, the phenomena of present-day society discussed above, which at first seem to be highly heterogeneous, form a pattern, and it is this pattern that I intend to outline in the present book. My main thesis is as follows: in late modernity, a structural transformation has taken place in society, a transformation in which the dominance of the social logic of the general has been usurped by the dominance of a social logic of the particular. In what follows, this exceptionality or uniqueness – in other words, that which seems to be nonexchangeable and incomparable – will be circumscribed with the concept of singularity.5 My theory of late modernity, and of modernity in general, thus hinges on the distinction between the general and the particular. This distinction is not uncomplicated, but it opens up a perspective that helps us to unlock the present. Originally a philosophical matter, the difference between the general and the particular was subjected to a systematic analysis by Kant.6 Here, however, I would like to free it from the corset of epistemology and discuss it in sociological terms. In the human world, of course, the general and the particular always coexist; it is a matter of perspective. According to Kant, “concepts” are always general, whereas “intuition” (Anschauung) is directed toward the particular. Thus, it is possible to interpret every element of the world either as a specific individual entity or as an example of a general type. As far as sociology is concerned, this is trivial. The sociologically interesting question is entirely different: there are social complexes and entire forms of society that systematically promote and prefer the creation of the general while inhibiting and devaluing the particular. And, conversely, there are other social complexes and societies that encourage, value, and actively engage in the practice of singularization at the expense of the general. The general and the particular do not simply exist. They are both social fabrications.
Late-modern society – that is, the form of modernity that has been developing since the 1970s or 1980s – is a society of singularities to the extent that its predominant logic is the social logic of the particular. It is also – and this cannot be stressed enough – the first society in which this is true in a comprehensive sense. In fact, the social logic of the particular governs all dimensions of the social: things and objects as well as subjects, collectives, spaces, and temporalities. “Singularity” and “singularization” are cross-sectional concepts, and they designate a cross-sectional phenomenon that pervades all of society. Although the thought may seem unusual at first, it must be emphasized that singularization has affected more than just human subjects, and it is for this reason that the concept of individuality, which has traditionally been reserved for human beings, is no longer applicable. Singularization also encompasses the fabrication and appropriation of things and objects as particular. It applies to the formation and perception of spaces, temporalities, and – not least – collectives.
To be sure, the structure of the society of singularities is unusual and surprising, and it appears as though we are lacking suitable concepts and perspectives for understanding its complexity. How can a society organize itself in such a way as to be oriented toward the seemingly fleeting and antisocial factor of the particular? Which structures have given shape to the society of singularities, and which forms have been adopted by its economy and technology, its social structure and lifestyles, its working world, cities, and politics? And how can and should a sociological investigation proceed that wishes to subject the social logic of singularization to a detailed analysis? From the outset, it is important for such an investigation to avoid two false approaches: mystification and exposure.
