can be called hyperculture. On the other side, we are witness to a form of culturalization that is directed toward collectives and constructs them as moral, identity-based communities. This process – “Culturalization II” – operates on the basis of an inside–outside dualism, and it follows the model of homogeneous communities, which are created as “imagined communities.” The corresponding model of culture is that of cultural essentialism, and it can be found in many forms. Late modernity is characterized by an elementary conflict between these two regimes of culturalization.
The Culturalization of the Social
“Culturalization” may at first sound like a strange term. In sociology, we are familiar with a whole series of such terms that contain the ending -ization or -iation and thus suggest that something is increasing or intensifying: modernization, rationalization, individualization, differentiation, and so on. In a comparable way, the term “culturalization” would then have to denote an extension of culture into areas where it had hitherto not existed. Yet what can that possibly mean in light of the apparent consensus that, to some extent, everything “is” culture, insofar as every human act can only become what it is against the backdrop of contexts and worlds of meaning? Despite this initial consideration, it is possible to furnish the concept of culturalization with social-theoretical significance so long as two important distinctions are kept in mind: first, the distinction between culture in a broad but weak sense, and culture in a narrow but strong sense; second, the distinction between rationalization and culturalization.
How is culture generally understood? And what is its place in modern society? Culture is certainly one of the most controversial and vibrant concepts in the humanities and social sciences. At the same time, the British sociologist Raymond Williams regarded it as a key concept of modernity that began to spread, not coincidentally, at the end of the eighteenth century – that is, with the rise of modernity itself.2 Culture has been defined in a number of entirely different ways.3 In early modernity, culture was understood as an eminent and especially distinguished individual way of life; only a few people, then, were thought to have culture – the nobility, the bourgeoisie, the ecclesiastical elite – whereas everyone else (the great majority of people) presumably lacked it. During the era of German Romanticism, alternatively, Herder defined culture as the way of life practiced by an entire people: “German culture” was thus conceived as being different from, say, Chinese culture. This understanding of culture as a group feature also seems to have been shared by Huntington. In contrast, culture can also be understood in a very narrow sense; such is the case, for instance, at ministries of culture, which tend to identify culture with the high culture of education, the arts, and perhaps also religion. Compared with the latter understanding, the cultural theorists of the twentieth century radically expanded the concept of culture. Ernst Cassirer, for instance, associated culture with the way in which the world is perceived – how it is interpreted in worldviews and everyday ideas – and with the meaning that is attributed to it.4
This latter, broad cultural-theoretical understanding of culture is in many respects sensible and useful. Every praxis can thus be understood as culture by determining the definitions, concepts, distinctions, and interpretive presuppositions that are contained in it. Culture is not restricted to art and religion. Nature, gender, or technology also have a cultural dimension to the extent that they depend on social worlds of meaning that define and interpret nature, gender, or technology in a particular way. Nevertheless, in order to understand the role of culture in modernity, we also need, in addition to this broad and yet weak concept of the cultural, a narrow but strong concept of culture. In the broad cultural-theoretical understanding, everything is to some extent culture because meaning is everywhere at play. The narrow understanding, in contrast, sees culture only where value is at stake.5 This is my point of departure: culture and value are inextricably linked. In the sphere of culture, certain things are attributed value – they are laden with value, while other things are denied value. The sphere of culture is thus the dynamic social sphere in which one “valorizes” (assigns value) or “de-valorizes” (denies value). That which is valuable stands on one side, while that which is without value stands on the other. It is important to note that this is not a matter of individuals “having” values, such as those that are asked about in opinion surveys. The issue is rather that, in social processes, elements of the world are attributed or denied value; I am concerned here, in other words, with the highly dynamic and often controversial process of “doing value.” In this process, any number of things can become valuable, including works of art or certain individuals, gods or an ethical code, pop music or apartments in an old building, fashion, YouTube videos, or a nation’s legal constitution.
Every human society has its own sphere of culture, which means that they all have their own processes for assigning (or not assigning) value to certain things, spaces, events, groups, or subjects. This is also true of modern society, which emerged in the wake of the Enlightenment, industrialization, and the democratic revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century. For a long time, however, it seemed as though modernity’s cultural sphere played no more than a marginal role, and that it was far subordinate to the sphere of utility, functionality, and efficiency. This is because culture has a formidable adversary: (formal) rationality. If culture is the sphere of valorization and de-valorization, rationality is the sphere of practicality, neutral procedures, laws, and cognitive processes. This bifurcation is redolent of Émile Durkheim’s classical distinction between the sacred and the profane.6 The sphere of culture is concerned with large and small forms of the sacred, from God to objects of consumption, whereas the sphere of rationality is home to the profane – to objectivity, dispassion, and disenchantment. The positive and negative valorizations of culture involve strong emotions and affects, whereas rationality remains, in comparison, emotionally impoverished.
From its beginning, modernity developed extreme systems of rationalization. As Max Weber insightfully argued, modernity is firmly based on formal rationalization and on the increased efficiency of technology, commerce, government, and science.7 Classical modernity (that is, the bourgeois modernity of the nineteenth century and the industrial modernity of the first two-thirds of the twentieth century) were thus broadly objectified and secularized. Here, culture existed only in the margins, where, at best, it survived in art and the vestiges of religion. During this phase, traditional bourgeois-oriented cultural institutions such as the theatre, concert halls, and museums formed islands of culture that offered, to a relatively limited audience, temporary refuge from or an alternative to the otherwise dominant logic of industrial, instrumental rationality. At least since the 1970s, however, this insular existence of culture has been a thing of the past, for from then on – and this, in my view, marks the transition from classical modernity to late modernity (or postmodernity) – Western societies began to culturalize themselves.8 Gradually, the sphere of culture expanded, while that of rationality contracted. Of course, powerful forces of rationalization continued to exist (and still exist today), but culture as a dynamic sphere of valorization has expanded in late modernity because more and more things – beyond the question of their utility, interest, and function – have been sucked into the cultural game of valuation and devaluation. More and more, the social in late modernity participates in a logic of assigning value, identity, and affectivity, and this logic has left behind the profane sphere of functionality. This culturalization, however, has been realized in two oppositional forms: as hyperculture or as cultural essentialism.
Culturalization I: Hyperculture
Hyperculture’s form of culturalization has been setting the pace of late modernity since the 1980s. It is supported by a new cosmopolitan middle class that prefers to cluster in the urban centers of Western societies, but is increasingly taking over the aspiring cities of the global South as well. In the context of hyperculture, “culture” no longer denotes the high culture of the educated bourgeoisie, and neither does it denote the conformist and homogeneous mass culture of the postwar period. Instead, culture now refers to the plurality of cultural goods that
