on the variable reputation that its symbolic goods happen to acquire in the eyes of consumers. Cognitive-cultural capitalism turns out to be a capitalism of extremes that has also paved the way for the widespread economization of the social.
In the fourth chapter – “The Weariness of Self-Actualization: The Late-Modern Individual and the Paradoxes of Emotional Culture” – I examine the culturally dominant lifestyle of the late-modern self, and particularly its everyday practices and psychological dynamics. What does it mean to lead a life that aims to combine the “Romantic” aspiration of self-development with the “bourgeois” goal of social success? This chapter identifies the dilemmas of a late-modern way of life in which subjective experience and psychological contentment have become fragile measures of a success. It is characterized by a paradoxical emotional culture that, on the one hand (and to an extreme extent), is based on positive feelings as a goal in life, and yet, on the other hand, it offers no way of dealing with the negative feelings – such as disappointment and frustration – that it systematically generates.
The final chapter – “The Crisis of Liberalism and the Search for the New Political Paradigm: From Apertistic to Regulatory Liberalism” – is concerned with the current political crisis, in which liberalism and populism stand in opposition to one another. Here, I present an alternative interpretation of political developments since 1945. Rather than being defined by mere shifts between the left and the right, these developments have been shaped above all by a transformation of the overarching political paradigms of social regulation and dynamization. The current crisis of liberalism – which has been dominant since the 1980s as a synthesis of neoliberalism and progressive liberalism – can thus be interpreted as a “crisis of excessive dynamization.” Finally, I ask what would be needed to establish a form of “regulatory liberalism,” which could replace the present paradigm and also offer an alternative to the rising wave of populism.
Four of the five chapters were written specifically for this book, the exception being the first chapter, which has already appeared in two earlier versions.12 I have composed them in such a way that they can be read and understood independently. Thus, they do not have to be read in any particular order. Readers should simply go where their curiosity takes them!
Notes
1 1 On the rise of Donald Trump, see Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (London: Penguin, 2019).
2 2 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992).
3 3 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
4 4 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. Charles F. Atkinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, trans. Anthony Kerrigan (Notre Dame University Press, 1985).
5 5 Interesting in other ways are recent fictional dystopias, such as those depicted in film. Examples include Blade Runner 2049, directed by Denis Villeneuve (Burbank, CA: Warner Bros. Pictures, 2017); and War for the Planet of the Apes, directed by Matt Reeves (Los Angeles: 20th Century Fox, 2017).
6 6 For a critique of the disappearance of society’s ability to tolerate ambiguity, see Thomas Bauer, Die Vereindeutigung der Welt: Über den Verlust an Mehrdeutigkeit und Vielfalt (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2018).
7 7 Andreas Reckwitz, The Society of Singularities, trans. Valentine A. Pakis (Cambridge: Polity, 2020).
8 8 Pierre Rosanvallon, The Society of Equals, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
9 9 See Reckwitz, The Society of Singularities.
10 10 The term “individualism” is usually used to denote a culture that favors the self-responsibility of the individual over social solidarity, and “individualizing” is typically used to denote the process of “freeing” the individual from such collective bonds. See Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (London: SAGE, 1992).
11 11 On the topic of singularization, see also Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 64–91.
12 12 The work was first published online as “Zwischen Hyperkultur und Kulturessenzialismus,” Soziopolis (October 24, 2016), https://soziopolis.de/beobachten/kultur/artikel/zwischen-hyperkultur-und-kulturessenzialismus. On April 30, 2017, a revised version of the text – now titled “Hyperkultur und Kulturessenzialismus: Der Kampf um das Kulturverständnis” – was broadcast as part of Deutschlandfunk’s radio series Essay und Diskurs.
1 Cultural Conflicts as a Struggle over Culture: Hyperculture and Cultural Essentialism
In his much-discussed book The Clash of Civilizations, which was published shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the American political scientist Samuel Huntington formulated an unsettling thesis.1 According to Huntington, the end of the conflict between the East and the West would not lead to everlasting peace. Instead, a new, more complex, and threatening conflict would emerge: a global struggle between cultures – between the West, Russia, China, India, the Arab world, and other parts of the globe. Huntington’s thesis was rejected at first. During the 1990s, the prevailing wind was one of unlimited liberal optimism and globalization, and most observers assumed that modernization (of a Western sort) would triumph worldwide. In fact, things turned out differently. What we see today is clearly an intensification of new cultural conflicts: terrorist attacks by Islamic fundamentalists, nationalistic tendencies in Eastern and Southern Europe, China’s and India’s self-confident defensiveness regarding their cultures, and finally the centrifugal forces of right-wing populism in the West itself (even in two of its core nations, France and the United States).
In light of the complexity of this conflict situation, it is easy at first to fall back on Samuel Huntington’s thesis about the clash of cultures. His thesis is seductive, but ultimately it is far too simple. Of course, both within national societies and on the global level, these conflicts are often and undoubtedly about culture, and the question of culture is closely tied to that of identity. Moreover, it is also the case that, in today’s late-modern societies, culture is attributed a level of significance that can hardly be overestimated. It is astonishing how often and intensively questions of culture – from the issue of “parallel cultures” to that of the “dominant culture” – become heated topics in public debates. Contrary to Huntington’s thesis, however, these conflicts should be seen not as a simple clash of cultures but as something different: a conflict about culture – that is, a debate over what should be understood by culture and what place it should take. Instead of an antagonistic struggle between diverse cultures and their cultural patterns, what we are witnessing in late modernity – and this is my opening thesis – is a far more fundamental conflict between two opposed regimes of culturalization, as I would like to call them. This is not a matter of various cultural patterns facing one another; rather – and on an even more fundamental level – there are two oppositional understandings of what culture means in general, and, accordingly, there are two contrary formats in which culture is organized.
In late modernity, the culturalization of the social is taking place on a broad front, and this process has assumed two different forms. On one side – and here I am speaking of “Culturalization I” – we observe a culturalization of lifestyles in which individuals striving for self-development surround themselves with cultural set pieces
