Society of Singularities. Andreas Reckwitz
What is its overarching mode of praxis? Basically, the social praxis of the particular has the structure of a performance, so that performativity is its central characteristic. In the mode of the singular, the social manifests itself in the situation of one or more people performing something for an audience that is meant to have cultural value. Singular entities are not primarily used in an instrumental way (like instrumentally rational activity) or treated normatively (like normative activity); rather, they are presented in the mode of performativity. Singular subjects, places, and objects are presented; as events, singular temporalities have a performative character; and singular collectives live off of this collective performativity. Singularities thus exist as performances of singularity before a social audience.47
Performances of singularity operate affectively. This is what fundamentally distinguishes the mode of praxis of the particular from that of the rationalized general, where affect is kept to a minimum. Things are quite different with the performance of singularity, in which, as we have already seen, the intensity of affect plays a decisive role. It should be noted that affects are not the internal emotions or feelings of subjects; rather, they should be thought about in terms of the processes and relations of affecting. This means that singular objects, subjects, places, events, and collectives are characterized by the fact that they address social participants affectively.48 The social entities of the singular mobilize affective intensities primarily in the form of the positive affects of desire and interest, but also in ambivalent mixtures of these with fear or anger. The phenomenon of being affected in such ways is especially clear to see in the appropriation and experience of singularities, but it is also part of the practices of production, interpretive observation, and valorization. The process of affecting others characterizes the overall mode of praxis of the logic of singularities. In short, without affecting others, there are no singularities, and without singularities, people are not (or only minimally) affected.
Especially in late modernity, however, one encounters a form of singularization that fundamentally differs from such affecting performances and might best be called automated singularization. Although I will discuss this phenomenon in greater detail later on, it makes sense to mention it here in brief. This form of singularization has been present in various areas of life since the 1990s, and it is primarily an effect of digitalization. One example of mechanically fabricated uniqueness is the algorithmically generated profiles of internet users, which depend on data tracking. Noteworthy, too, is genome analysis, which makes it possible to examine the unique genetic composition of individuals. Further examples can be found in the field of human resources, which is concerned with systematically determining the talents and potential of employees. Automated singularization, however, not only is interesting with respect to subjects but also is applied in ways related to collectives, as in the case of marketing (which focuses on social niches with particular tastes and opinions) or in the case of political campaigns (which target particular groups of voters).
At first glance, one might be tempted to think that such cases are illustrative of the logic of the general and its instrumentally rational practices, and indeed they do involve instrumentally rational techniques. However, the techniques in question are not applied within the framework of the social logic of the general. Whereas the rationalistic technologies of industrial modernity produced standardized things and people, the technologies of late modernity have largely been transformed into infrastructures of the particular. That is, there is now an intrinsic technological and institutional interest in, and capacity for, making singularities visible and fabricating them automatically. Unlike rationalism and its inclination to generalize, this institutional and technological interest is not oriented toward treating unique entities as exemplars of general types but rather toward reconstructing individual entities in their uniqueness. Whereas the traditional medical perspective, for instance, evaluated individual patients in terms of general symptoms or health standards, the aim of genome analysis is to ascertain the incommensurability of every individual’s genetic composition.
Even these automated singularities can be analyzed as the results of a fabrication process involving the practices of observation, evaluation, production, and appropriation. Here, however, these practices are internal mechanical techniques; they are conducted automatically by the technologies in question. Even more significant is the fact that automated singularities do not necessarily exist as performances before an audience that experiences them and is affected by them. Often, singularities produced in such a way are themselves the object of instrumentally rational practices, such as a type of medical treatment based on genome analysis or a consumer decision steered by an automatically tailored profile on an online shopping platform. Here the singularity is not experienced but rather used. In other cases, however, automated singularities can indeed put on an (automatically generated) performance, for instance by arranging images and texts on someone’s social media platform in a tailored fashion that the user finds interesting, stimulating, and exciting.
All in all, late modernity’s systems of automated singularization are highly remarkable. Intelligent technologies no longer simply standardize, as was the case during the period of industrial rationalization; they singularize as well. They have thus contributed to a transformation away from instrumentally rational practices toward a greater sensitivity to uniqueness and toward the establishment of a comprehensive technical infrastructure for the performance of the singular.
Notes
1 This déformation professionnelle is also a legacy from Western philosophy, whose thinking prioritizes the general (at least at its rational and theoretical core from Aristotle to Kant and Hegel). Philosophers who, in various ways, have focused instead on the singular or individual include Spinoza and Deleuze, and in some respects Kierkegaard and Stirner as well. 2 The term has appeared sporadically in scholarly literature, but never with a consistent meaning. The way that I employ it here is inspired by Kopytoff and Karpic, though they apply it more narrowly and primarily to objects. See Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things”; and Karpik, Valuing the Unique. In The Society of Equals (pp. 360–6), Rosanvallon applies the term to subjects. On the earlier history of the concept, above all as it was used in late-medieval and early-modern philosophy (uses which are of no concern to me here), see Klaus Mainzer, “Singulär/Singularität,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. IX, ed. Joachim Ritter et al. (Basel: Schwabe, 1995), pp. 798–808. In a different, normatively laden, form, which I also do not draw upon, the concept has also been used by post-structuralist authors such as Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Antonio Negri. 3 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, pp. 271–84. 4 This is the position to which Deleuze and Guattari are inclined. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Here I have no interest in entering an ontological discussion about the stakes of idiosyncrasies, which would be of no use to the sociology of singularities. 5 As you have come to see, my analytical framework is fundamentally praxeological. On this approach, see Andreas Reckwitz, “Toward a Theory of Social Practices: A Development in Culturalist Theorizing,” European Journal of Social Theory 5 (2002), pp. 243–63; the articles collected in Hilmar Schäfer, ed., Praxistheorie: Ein soziologisches Forschungsprogramm (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016); and Theodore Schatzki, Social Practices: A Wittgensteinian Approach to Human Activity and the Social (Cambridge University Press, 2009). 6 On the concept of complexity, see, for instance, John Holland, Hidden Order: How Adaption Builds Complexity (Reading, MA: Basic Books, 1995); and, from a different angle, Niklas Luhmann, “Komplexität,” in Luhmann, Soziologische Aufklärung 2: Aufsätze zur Theorie der Gesellschaft (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1975), pp. 204–20. The concept features strongly in the tradition of systems theory, which I do not follow. The notion of density was developed by Nelson Goodman in his Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968). Goodman, however, understood the concept in purely art-historical terms, whereas I use it more generally. 7 See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1990). This idea was the basis of all of semiotics and structuralism (up to Pierre Bourdieu’s logic of distinction). 8 Within the context of the theory of science, the concept of incommensurability was established by Thomas