Society of Singularities. Andreas Reckwitz
the reduction of affect does not mean its absence. In fact, rational complexes often have an emotional aspect, for instance the desire to create an orderly bureaucracy or the aesthetic pleasure taken in the symmetry of architecture. 15 See Geert J. Somsen, “A History of Universalism: Conceptions of the Internationality of Science from the Enlightenment to the Cold War,” Minerva 46 (2008), pp. 361–79. 16 I will keep the question open about which elements or entities in fact “assemble” the social. For further discussion of this issue, see Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford University Press, 2005). 17 See Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things.” The classical locus of criticism against the standardization of the world of objects has been the arts-and-crafts movement. 18 On both models, see Riesman, The Lonely Crowd. 19 I will treat this concept in greater detail in the next chapter. 20 This is the effect of individualization that, according to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, characterizes disciplinary societies. Notably, Simmel associated this sort of individualism with freedom and equality; see, for instance, Georg Simmel, Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms, trans. Anthony J. Blasi et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 637–8. 21 For a clear discussion of this phenomenon in the twentieth century, see Theo Hilpert, Die funktionelle Stadt: Le Corbusiers Stadtvision – Bedingungen, Motive, Hintergründe (Braunschweig: F. Vieweg und Sohn, 1979). 22 See Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (New York: Verso, 1995). It could be said in short that, according to the social logic of the general, all spaces are non-places. 23 See Barbara Adam, Time and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), pp. 123–5. 24 See Weber, Economy and Society; and Niklas Luhmann, Legitimität durch Verfahren (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969). 25 See Jürgen Habermas, “Labour and Interaction: Remarks on Hegel’s Jena Philosophy of Mind,” in Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (London: Heinemann, 1974), pp. 142–69. 26 I refer to the first two phases of modernity as classical modernity because the social logic of the general is dominant in both of them. 27 German Idealism, within whose framework the particular can only be the general-particular, represents the high point of the philosophical foundation of the logic of the general. 28 On this phase, see also Andreas Reckwitz, Das hybride Subjekt: Eine Theorie der Subjektkulturen von der bürgerlichen Moderne zur Postmoderne (Weilerwist: Velbrück Wissenschaften, 2006), pp. 336–439; Peter Wagner, A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 73–122; and Scott Lash and John Urry, The End of Organized Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), pp. 17–87. Here I use the terms “organized modernity” and “industrial modernity” synonymously. 29 On the concepts of Americanism and Fordism, see Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), pp. 277–318. On the concept of organized capitalism, see Rudolf Hilferding, Organisierter Kapitalismus (Kiel, 1927). 30 See Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977); and Maury Klein, The Flowering of the Third America: The Making of Organizational Society, 1850–1920 (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 1993). 31 See Raymond Aron, 18 Lectures on Industrial Society, trans. M. K. Bottomore (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1967). 32 See Cecelia Tichi, Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); and Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970 (New York: Viking, 1989). 33 See John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 2nd edn. (London: Hamilton, 1969). Regarding the trente glorieuses, see Jean Fourastié, Les trente glorieuses, ou la révolution invisible de 1946 à 1975 (Paris: Fayard, 1979). 34 On the state, see Pierre Rosanvallon, The Society of Equals, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). On the city, see Hilpert, Die funktionelle Stadt. 35 On my discussion below, see William Graebner, The Engineering of Consent: Democracy and Authority in Twentieth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956); and Riesman, The Lonely Crowd. 36 See Martin Kohli, “Gesellschaftszeit und Lebenszeit: Der Lebenslauf im Strukturwandel,” in Die Moderne: Kontinuitäten und Zäsuren, ed. Johannes Berger (Göttingen: Schwartz, 1986), pp. 183–204. 37 On the construction of abnormality, see Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Verso, 2003); Howard Saul Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Free Press, 1963); and Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence. 38 On the level of subjects, de-singularization is not the same thing as de-individualization. As an achievement society, organized modernity was based through and through on the post-traditional self-responsibility of subjects, which Georg Simmel referred to as the “individualism of freedom and responsibility.” Thus, it cannot be said that organized modernity was characterized by de-individualization.
2 The Social Logic of the Particular
At first glance, the idea of a social logic of singularities may seem oxymoronic. Is not the social, after all, the natural counterpart of the particular? Is it not the déformation professionnelle of sociology to focus exclusively on crowds and collectives, rules and schemata? At its heart, that is, is sociology not a science devoted to the social logic of the general?1 It is certainly no coincidence that sociology emerged as a discipline during the age of industrial modernity, and it still carries around a great deal of conceptual baggage from that time. Therefore, it might not seem well equipped to analyze processes of singularization – a problematic shortcoming if the goal is to understand late-modern society, which is organized around these very processes. In order to investigate the latter in a sociological and yet appropriate manner, it is necessary from the beginning to set aside the idea that sociality and singularity are fundamentally incompatible with one another. In fact, I would like to oppose this idea in decisive terms. In the case of singularities, it is not a matter of individual “vestiges” that remain behind after the social has withdrawn, or some sort of antithesis that battles against the social. Rather, if we remain open and curious about the interrelations and entities that assemble “the social,” it will be possible to view and analyze the logic of singularities, too, as a genuinely social logic.
What do I mean by singularities? In the history of concepts, the term “singularity” is relatively unladen; indeed, it is almost a neologism.2 Yet it seems necessary to employ a little-used term in order to focus on the realm of phenomena that it designates without introducing any false presumptions. It encompasses a broad semantic field of related concepts: the particular and the special, the unusual and the extraordinary, individuality and the individual, the “other” and the peculiar, the unique and idiosyncratic, originality and the original, the exceptional and the exclusive. My concern here is not to relate a detailed conceptual history but rather to focus on the matter itself: the social logic of the particular, which has been central to the existence of late-modern societies.
The General-Particular, Idiosyncrasies, Singularities
In order to understand singularities, it is first necessary to draw a precise distinction between three different forms of the particular: the general-particular, the idiosyncratic, and the singular.
Here it is apt to begin with Kant’s epistemological distinction between the general and the particular.3 In relating to the world, one invariably deals with general concepts. Even before the rise of formal rationalization, a social logic of the general existed in the form of implicit types. At the same time, however, we always take notice of particularities: the individual person, the individual thing, the individual place. Seen in this way, the particular is nothing special, and indeed ubiquitous. This raises the question of the relation between the general and the particular, and it is easy to conclude that practices in the typifying mode classify the particular with the help of the general and categorize it as an example of a general concept. This chair is a chair, this person is a mailman, and so on. In this context, the particular is thus nothing more than a concrete example of something general. Or one could also say that it is the general-particular. As the general-particular, the particular implies concrete exemplars that exist within the social logic of the general; it implies variations and versions of what is essentially