Society of Singularities. Andreas Reckwitz
complex synthesis of the particular and the general, which characterized bourgeois culture, was made dynamic by the revolutionary singularism that developed with the counter-cultural movement of Romanticism. The significance of Romanticism for modernity’s culture of singularities cannot be overstated.11 This was the first radically singularistic cultural movement in history, and it closely associated uniqueness with the ideal of authenticity. The immediate significance of Romanticism lies in the fact that it radically oriented the human subject toward singularity, which was treated in the semantics of “individuality.” This then served the comprehensive project of singularizing all elements of the world. Here, too, the experience of art played an important role, and there also developed a radically in-the-moment, aesthetic awareness of time. But the experience of nature (not understood as a mechanical natural space but as an ensemble of singular landscapes), the experience of picturesque places, the experience of other subjects in the form of friendship and love, the singular formation of the material world (in the case of hand-crafted objects, for instance), a sensitivity to history as a venue for narratives and memories, the experiential sphere of religion, and identifying with the singularities of peoples and nations were all areas in which Romanticism subjected the world to a comprehensive process of singularization.
It has often been maintained that Romanticism was an attempt to re-enchant or re-mystify the world. It would be more accurate, however, to describe this process as a culturalization of the world that made it possible to transfer potentially everything from the side of the profane to that of the sacred. In the end, even a pair of shoes or a lover’s birthmark could be of cultural value. This Romantic valorization of the world was enabled by its comprehensive tendency to singularize. The world was rediscovered as a realm of fascinating inherent complexities and was reconfigured as such. The fundamental postulate was this: any subject who wished to be authentic must have authentic experiences by engaging with the singularities of the world. In Romanticism, the explicit struggle against the modernity of the general – from Enlightenment philosophy to industrialization – was the constant downside to the comprehensive singularization of the world. From its beginning, this Romantic culture of singularity had entirely unpredictable effects on the calculated balance of bourgeois culture.
Ultimately, the nationalist movements of the nineteenth century concentrated on just one aspect of Romantic singularization and culturalization: that of collectives, which now meant the nation. With the “imagined communities” of nations, collectives were aggressively understood as singularities. Of course, the idiosyncrasies of social collectives – from tribes and clans to villages and principalities – also existed in traditional societies. Yet it was modernity, with its politicization of collectives, that first not only enforced the general existence of collectives in “freedom and equality,” but also imposed an understanding of collective and historical singularities.12 This development took place not only in Europe but also in the global anti-colonial nationalist movements (in India, China, the Near East) that arose at the end of the nineteenth century. Nationalisms frequently give rise to a genuine sort of culturalism that essentially identifies societies with a homogeneous and incommensurable culture.
In retrospect, it becomes clear to what extent early, bourgeois modernity had laid significant groundwork for the modern culture of singularities that has remained formative to the present day. In this regard, it could be said that the following factors were equally influential: the Romantic culture of authenticity and its comprehensive project of singularization, the idea of modeling art according to a regime of aesthetic originality, the cultural orientation of the bourgeois lifestyle, and the politicization of authenticity along nationalistic lines.
Organized Modernity: Mass Culture
Organized, industrial modernity, which extended from around 1920 to the middle or end of the 1970s, represents a breach within modernity itself. In its socialist instantiation, it was aggressively anti-bourgeois and anti-Romantic. Its lasting influence, however, derives from its Western version, which was largely propelled by the United States and its combination of Fordism and Americanism. As we have already seen, industrial modernity represents the zenith of the modern process of formal rationalization, with its expansive social logic of the general. It would be one-sided, however, to reduce it to that alone, for it also caused its own shift with respect to culturalization, especially in the fields of consumption and audiovisual media. Bourgeois-Romantic culture did not vanish entirely; instead, it was fundamentally subordinated to the social logic of the general in such a way that, from the perspective of bourgeois cultural traditions, little seemed to remain beyond anti-individualistic mass society.
Fordism was based on mass production and mass consumption alike. In the 1920s, the world of consumption began to develop into a new cultural sphere. In short, a consumption revolution took place.13 Goods, which had previously served instrumental purposes above all, were now increasingly subjected to culturalization – that is, they started to become narrative, aesthetic, expressive, or ludic ends in themselves. Consumption drastically broadened the scope of culture and its processes of valorization beyond the confines of bourgeois art and education. The central point is this: in that goods were now currying the favor of consumers within a commercial market constellation, culture was no longer tied to the state but rather to the economy. Here, in individual segments, it is already possible to observe mechanisms of cultural innovation and differentiation that resemble something like a “fashion cycle.”14 That said, organized modernity posed two limitations. On the one hand, the culturalization of the world of goods was quite limited in comparison to the situation to come in late modernity. Most goods primarily served instrumentally rational purposes or the social function of preserving status. On the other hand, the value of these objects as singular entities was often limited. Given the influence of Fordism, they were mostly standardized, and in this sense we are dealing here with a mass culture.15 Even the consuming subject in organized modernity was not concerned with being distinct but rather with demonstrating his or her general normality: the ideal model was that of “keeping up with the Joneses.”16
Within the framework of this post-bourgeois culture, audiovisual media acquired a specific status. This was especially true of movies, which became the center of what came to be called the culture industry.17 In the case of films, the new field of consumption intertwined with the old field of art. Films are clearly culturalized goods with both narrative-hermeneutic and aesthetic qualities. At the same time, every film promises something non-interchangeable and different, so that a system of valorization formed around them to gauge their value and appeal. In the cinematic sphere, the regime of aesthetic novelty, which constantly demands new originality and surprises, is even more prevalent than it is in bourgeois art. The social field of the film was pioneering to the extent that, as of the 1920s, it established a broad and hypercompetitive market around a cultural good whose respective value is uncertain and contentious.
To a certain degree, the culture industry also promoted the singularization of subjects, and especially in the form of “stars” (it would not take long, however, for such people to be denounced for their “prefabricated” nature, which did not meet the standards of bourgeois culture).18 All typecasting aside, it remains true that if a star wanted to have any power of attraction, he or she would have to be regarded as unique. In a sense, the star thus inherited the role of the artistic subject. Both cases involve the social recognition and glorification of subjective singularity, though now it was not a matter of a unique work of art but rather the performance and glamor of subjects themselves. Throughout organized modernity, the star remained an exclusive and inimitable figure who stood outside of the reality of the leveled middle-class society.
Organized modernity thus carried out its own shift in the nature of culturalization. Whereas the culturalization of bourgeois society was one of intensifying culture through the bourgeois and Romantic practices of art and education, the culturalization of organized modernity entailed the extension of culture – that is, its large-scale dissemination through consumption and mass media. Whereas bourgeois intensification was related above all to the aesthetic-hermeneutic inner world of subjects, the Fordistic extension of culture was primarily directed toward the visual surfaces of subjects and objects.