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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
We live in a time of great uncertainty about the future. Those heady days of the late twentieth century, when the end of the Cold War seemed to be ushering in a new and more optimistic age, now seem like a distant memory. During the last couple of decades, we've been battered by one crisis after another and the idea that humanity is on a progressive path to a better future seems like an illusion. It is only now that we can see clearly the real scope and structure of the profound shifts that Western societies have undergone over the last 30 years. Classical industrial society has been transformed into a late-modern society that is molded by polarization and paradoxes. The pervasive singularization of the social, the orientation toward the unique and exceptional, generates systematic asymmetries and disparities, and hence progress and unease go hand in hand. Reckwitz examines this dual structure of singularization and polarization as it plays itself out in the different sectors of our societies and, in so doing, he outlines the central structural features of the present: the new class society, the characteristics of a postindustrial economy, the conflict about culture and identity, the exhaustion of the self resulting from the imperative to seek authentic fulfillment, and the political crisis of liberalism. Building on his path-breaking work The Society of Singularities, this new book will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, politics, and the social sciences generally, and to anyone concerned with the great social and political issues of our time.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Figures and Tables
Figures
Tables
Introduction: The Disillusioned Present
Progress, Dystopia, Nostalgia
Disillusionment as an Opportunity
From Industrial Modernity to the Society of Singularities
Notes
1 Cultural Conflicts as a Struggle over Culture: Hyperculture and Cultural Essentialism
The Culturalization of the Social
Culturalization I: Hyperculture
Culturalization II: Cultural Essentialism
Hyperculture and Cultural Essentialism: Between Coexistence and Conflict
“Doing Universality” – The Culture of the General as an Alternative?
Notes
2 From the Leveled Middle-Class Society to the Three-Class Society: The New Middle Class, the Old Middle Class, and the Precarious Class
The Global and Historical Context
Underlying Conditions: Post-Industrialization, the Expansion of Education, a Shift in Values
In the Paternoster Elevator of the Three-Class Society
The New Middle Class: Successful Self-Actualization and Urban Cosmopolitanism
The Old Middle Class: Sedentariness, Order, and Cultural Defensiveness
The Precarious Class: Muddling Through and Losing Status
The Upper Class: Distance due to Assets
Cross-Sectional Characteristics: Gender, Migration, Regions, Milieus
A Trend toward Political Polarization and Future Social Scenarios
Notes
3 Beyond Industrial Society: Polarized Post-Industrialism and Cognitive-Cultural Capitalism
The Rise and Fall of Industrial Fordism
The Saturation Crisis
The Production Crisis and Polarized Post-Industrialism
Globalization, Neoliberalism, Financialization
Cognitive Capitalism and Immaterial Capital
Cultural Goods and Cultural Capitalism
Winner-Take-All Markets: The Scalability and Attractiveness of Cognitive and Cultural Goods
Extreme Capitalism: The Economization of the Social
Notes
4 The Weariness of Self-Actualization: The Late-Modern Individual and the Paradoxes of Emotional Culture
From Self-Discipline to Self-Actualization
Successful Self-Actualization: An Ambitious Dual Structure
The Culture of Self-Actualization as a Generator of Negative Emotions
Ways Out of the Spiral of Disappointment?
Notes
5 The Crisis of Liberalism and the Search for the New Political Paradigm: From Apertistic to Regulatory Liberalism
Political Paradigms and Political Paradoxes
Problems and Solutions: Between the Paradigms of Regulation and Dynamization
The Rise of the Social-Corporatist Paradigm
The Crisis of Overregulation
The Rise of the Paradigm of Apertistic Liberalism
The Threefold Crisis of Apertistic Liberalism
Populism as a Symptom
“Regulatory Liberalism” as the Paradigm of the Future?
Challenges Facing Regulatory Liberalism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1.1 Relations between Culturalization I and Culturalization II
Chapter 5
Table 5.1 The left–right distinction and political paradigms
Table 5.2 Political paradigms and social problems since 1945
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 The social structure of West Germany in 1965.
Figure 2.2 Percentage of the US population older than 25 who completed high school or colle...
Figure 2.3 The three-class structure of late-modern society.
Figure 2.4 Socio-cultural milieus according to the SINUS studies and their “translat...
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 The development of employment and GDP in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1950...
Figure 3.2 Technological revolutions since 1770 (a graph based on the work of Carlota Perez...
Figure 3.3 The percentage change in employment share by job-quality decile in OECD countrie...
Figure 3.4 The development of investment in tangible and intangible capital relative to GDP...
Figure 3.5 The pyramid of goods.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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The End of Illusions
Politics, Economy, and Culture in Late Modernity
Andreas Reckwitz
Translated by Valentine A. Pakis
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in German as Das Ende der Illusionen – Politik, Ökonomie und Kultur in der Spätmoderne © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2019. All rights by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2021
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.
Figure 2.1 ‘Hausmodell’ from Ralf Dahrendorf: Gesellschaft und Demokratie in Deutschland © 1965 Piper Verlag GmbH, München
Figure 3.3 from Maarten Goos and Alan Manning, “Lousy and Lovely Jobs: The Rising Polarization of Work in Britain,” The Review of Economics and Statistics, 89:1 (February, 2007), pp. 118–33. © 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4569-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4570-4 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Reckwitz, Andreas, author.
Title: The end of illusions : politics, economy, and culture in late modernity / Andreas Reckwitz ; translated by Valentine A. Pakis.
Other titles: Ende der Illusionen. English
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A leading social thinker examines the key structural features of our disillusioned age”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021000323 (print) | LCCN 2021000324 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509545698 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509545704 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509545711 (epub) | ISBN 9781509548057 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Social history--21st century. | Social conflict. | Social change. | Populism. | Capitalism--Social aspects. | Culture. | Civilization, Modern--21st century.
Classification: LCC HN18.3 .R43413 2021 (print) | LCC HN18.3 (ebook) | DDC 306--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000323
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000324
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Figures and Tables
Figures
2.1 The social structure of West Germany in 1965. Ralf Dahrendorf’s ‘house model’ was originally published in Dahrendorf, Gesellschaft und Demokratie (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1965, p. 516)
2.2 Percentage of the US population older than 25 who completed high school or college (by age group, 1940–2015). © United States Census Bureau
2.3 The three-class structure of late-modern society
2.4 Socio-cultural milieus according to the SINUS studies and their “translation” into the three-class model (pertaining to Germany in 2018). Published by the Sinus-Institut (www.sinus-institut.de/sinus-loesungen/sinus-milieus-deutschland)
3.1 The development of employment and GDP in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1950–2017
3.2 Technological revolutions since 1770 (a graph based on the work of Carlota Perez)
3.3 The percentage change in employment share by job quality decile in OECD countries, 1979–1999. From Maarten Goos and Alan Manning, “Lousy and Lovely Jobs: The Rising Polarization of Work in Britain,” The Review of Economics and Statistics, 89:1 (February, 2007), pp. 118–33
3.4 The development of investment in tangible and intangible capital relative to GDP in Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Great Britain, 1998–2013. From Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake, Capitalism Without Capital (Princeton University Press, 2018). © Princeton University Press
3.5 The pyramid of goods
Tables
1.1Relations between Culturalization I and Culturalization II
5.1 The left–right distinction and political paradigms
5.2 Political paradigms and social problems since 1945
Introduction: The Disillusioned Present
It’s a strange thing. Some events that are retrospectively considered epoch-changing are perceived as merely marginal when they occur, whereas, in the case of others, one can remember precisely – even years later – the moment when “it happened,” and also one’s own feelings of bafflement, helplessness, fear, or incredulous joy in response to something seemingly impossible taking place.
Just as I still have vivid memories of “my” November 9, 1989 (the day the Berlin Wall came down) and “my” September 11, 2001 (the day of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center), the morning of November 9, 2016 is still present in my mind. Like many other people around the world, I felt a growing sense of unease during the months leading up to the American presidential election, which featured the surprising nomination of Donald Trump as the candidate for the Republican Party and his ugly, brutal campaign against Hillary Clinton, the candidate for the Democrats. On that morning, I checked the news on my tablet and was forced to accept that something had happened which, until the very last moment, I had been loath to admit as a real possibility: the populist candidate, who had made the headlines mostly because of his misogynistic and xenophobic demagoguery and his deep distrust of international cooperation and democratic institutions, and who seemed utterly unpredictable, had just been elected as the 45th President of the United States, thereby becoming the commander-in-chief of the leading Western nation.1 My reaction on that morning, and even weeks later, was one of horror. I had the feeling that things could fall apart, without knowing where this might lead: How was this possible, and how would things now proceed? It felt like a historical rupture.
Trump’s election, however, was not the only political earthquake that we have experienced in recent years. Elsewhere, too, elections and referenda have shaken up seemingly stable political orders. In June of 2016, a majority of British citizens voted for their country’s exit from the European Union. In the French presidential election of 2017, none of the candidates from established parties made it to the second round of voting, but the right-wing populist Marine Le Pen did. She then lost to Emmanuel Macron, the founder of the new liberal party En Marche!, who then in 2018 and 2019 had to confront large-scale protests by the gilets jaunes. In Italy, a (right-wing) populist government came to power in 2018, and in Hungary and Poland, two former model democracies in post-communist Europe, democratic institutions are now under attack. The European Union, which had been regarded by many as the inevitable outcome of political development on a continent that had learned from its past wars, as well as the traditional left–right schema for the landscape of the political parties have suddenly proved to be fragile. And we have experienced further uncertainties: in 2007, a system that many economists had extolled as a reliable money-making machine was brought to the brink of collapse by the global financial crisis. Terrorist attacks, such as the attack in Paris in 2015 (by the “Islamic State”) and the attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2018 have demonstrated the fragile nature of everyday life in Western societies. There is a widespread feeling that, clearly, the danger is closing in.
Why do these events make people feel so unsettled? The answer may be painful. We no longer perceive these events as individual incidents that would allow us swiftly to return to our daily routines. Rather, a clear pattern has emerged: the hopeful expectations about the development of society, which many people in Western countries had harbored since the end of the Cold War in 1989/90, have been fundamentally disappointed, or at least relativized. Today, these expectations have been revealed to be illusions, and the result of this is disillusionment. This is true not only in Germany but, rather, in all Western societies, and in many respects it is even the case for global society. After 1990, the general tendency in the media, in politics, in business, and even in large swaths of intellectual debate was to weave a grand narrative of progress: of economic, political, social, cultural, and technological advancement. Borrowing from Hegel and Alexandre Kojève, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama encapsulated this narrative with his concept of the “end of history.” It seemed as though we had come to the home stretch of world history and had achieved a condition in which the institutional orders of politics and economics had taken on a form that no longer needed to be changed – or even one that was impossible to change.2 From today’s perspective, this narrative seems rather naïve.
The essentially liberal narrative of progress over the last 30 years is supported by an abundance of empirical evidence, and this should not be forgotten. Regarding political progress, one can point to the pro-democracy movements in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa, which led to the replacement of authoritarian regimes by largely liberal-democratic systems. In addition, global cooperation between nations also intensified, and the European Union is just one example of this. There is plenty of evidence, too, of economic progress. Globalization and the integration of large parts of the global South into the world market have accelerated industrialization, especially in emerging countries such as China and India, and this has led to a significant reduction of poverty and to the rise of a strong middle class. In North America and Europe, a post-industrial knowledge economy has been established, and the latter has profited considerably from the digital revolution.
The process of digitalization – the defining technological development of the last two decades – at first seemed to fit seamlessly into this narrative of progress. A network of individuals and organizations, the internet as an experimental space for new identities and cooperation, and finally a borderless form of communication that vitalizes democracy – such were the expectations of tech euphoria. Lastly, the narrative of progress also has a socio-political component. Consider the great gains that have been made in liberalization and emancipation over the last few decades: a shift toward gender equality, toward the equal rights of sexual minorities (gay men, lesbian women, and the transgender community, for instance), and toward a transformation of the Western way of life, which has become more hedonistic and cosmopolitan in the best sense and thus left behind so much of the rigidity of postwar society. In particular, the new and young middle class moves around in the globalized world like a fish in water. A sense that the world is fundamentally open has been spreading over the past few decades, and by now this seems like a firmly established attitude toward life.
Of course, these developments have happened, and they are significant. The liberal narrative of progress is not false. It does not, however, tell the whole truth. Whoever believes that the idea of progress can ever correspond perfectly to social reality is prey to an illusion. Moreover, it is also an illusion that processes, once set in motion, will somehow naturally be perpetuated. The financial crisis, Brexit, terrorist attacks, Trump’s election, and other events of the recent past illustrate that social reality is more contradictory and fragile than the narrative of progress would have us believe. Furthermore, it should be assumed that these events are ultimately expressions of or reactions to contradictions, conflicts, and moments of crisis that have long been developing on the structural level of late-modern society.
Progress, Dystopia, Nostalgia
The fact that, until recently, the liberal narrative of progress was able to seem so ubiquitous is not especially unusual if we broaden our perspective and consider the cultural history of modernity as a whole. Over the course of industrialization, democratization, urbanization, marketization, emancipation, and the rise of science, modern society has been developing slowly but steadily since the eighteenth century (and at first in Western nations), and it has always been inextricably linked to a vision of making progress: to the “project of modernity.” As Reinhart Koselleck observed, the rise of the semantics of progress coincided with the reality of (political, economic, and technological) revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century; the semantics of progress accompanied these revolutions and, in part, actively impelled them.3 In a sense, modernity converted the religious belief in the assurance of salvation into a firm belief in progress.
Of course, throughout the history of modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there were often heated debates over what, exactly, this realized or desired progress ought to be about: technology, freedom, equality, welfare and comfort, self-determination, or emancipation? In addition, there have always been alternating phases of progressive optimism and cultural-critical self-doubt. In nineteenth-century Europe, the Napoleonic Wars were followed by a long phase of bourgeois self-confidence and the unwavering hope for civilizational progress (accompanied, not coincidentally, by imperialism and colonialism). At the beginning of the twentieth century, the baton of progressive optimism was passed on to burgeoning socialist movements. The First World War was then followed by a phase of gnawing intellectual uncertainty and widespread skepticism, which gave rise, among certain thinkers, to an outright catastrophic outlook concerning the downfall of European modernity. In this regard, it is enough to read Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West or José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses.4 After the civilizational upheaval of fascism, the Holocaust, and the Second World War, liberal progressive optimism resurfaced astonishingly quickly in Western Europe and North America. What followed was the trente glorieuses (as Jean Fourastié called these three decades), which were characterized by the rise of affluent societies in the West and by visions of creating a perfect form of industrial-technical modernity. In the 1970s, these societies were confronted with economic and ecological debates over the “limits to growth” and with the discomforting social critique in the wake of 1968. Then the communist system collapsed, the final and most radical thrust toward globalization commenced, and the digital revolution began, thus initiating a renewed phase of the liberal narrative of progress in an era of presumably unlimited opportunity. Today, this narrative is stridently being called into question.
It is instructive to keep in mind these previous upsurges of the social discourse of progress. A historical perspective relativizes many things – both the blind faith that people sometimes have in the conflict-free progress of human development, and the defeatist and catastrophic attitude that inevitably follows. Our current situation, at any rate, is characterized by the genre of dystopia.5 For many people, the sense of disappointment over the failure of the liberal ideal of progress is so great that now, driven by strong emotions such as rage or despair, they tend to fall into the opposite extreme. If public discourse were a psychiatric patient, we would have to say that it displays symptoms of manic depression: boundless euphoria is immediately followed by feelings of profound hopelessness (which, in many people, seem to be accompanied by a quiet sense of pleasure about the impending disaster).
The current dystopias point in different directions. Enormously present in the media – particularly in the digital world, but also in the popular book market – are the diagnoses of downfall from members of the New Right. They have ultimately revived the cyclical philosophy of history found in Spengler’s The Decline of the West. In contrast, one hears entirely different opinions from left-wing critics who, in the wake of the financial crisis, have been gathering evidence for the imminent implosion of capitalism – a collapse that many of these authors themselves, owing to the lack of a socialist alternative, can only imagine as a hopeless ongoing crisis. On top of this, the public discourse about digitalization has meanwhile almost fully transformed from one of tech euphoria into a sweeping critique of technology. The latter discourse now prefers to associate the digital revolution with the all-encompassing control of users by business-related or government data collectors, with filter bubbles and caustic communication, and finally with automation and the threat of mass unemployment.
In light of these catastrophic scenarios, today’s public and political discourse often grasps at the straws of nostalgia. In particular, the period of industrial modernity between 1945 and 1975, which just a few years ago seemed like an entirely distant past, has meanwhile been transformed into a projection screen for various sorts of nostalgic longing – nostalgia from the right, from the left, and from the center. Right-wing nostalgia in the United States, France, or Germany glorifies the traditional family values and gender roles that were still dominant in those years, as well as the era’s conservative morality and supposed cultural homogeneity. Left-wing nostalgia looks back to that period and yearns for its greater social equality, for its strong industrial workforce, and for the welfare state of the old industrial society. Finally, centrist nostalgia looks wistfully back to an era of people’s parties, the large middle class, and a presumably more leisurely pace of life. Such trips down memory lane often have less to do with politics than they do with retro aesthetic trends, but they can also serve the ends of various forms of political populism in an effective way.
Disillusionment as an Opportunity
The transformation of public debate from unwavering progressive optimism into dystopia and nostalgia – from one selective view to the next – does not exactly make it easier for us to understand and deal with the structures of contemporary society. However, the end of illusions does not necessarily have to lead to all-encompassing pessimism. The absence of illusions can also be a virtue that enables sober realism and opens up space for analysis. Beyond becoming mired in dystopian and nostalgic moods, it is possible to develop an undogmatic and differentiated perspective that can be critical without drifting into an untenable general account of the present. This is where sociology comes into play, because it can provide just such a sober analysis of the present. Unencumbered by belief in progress, sociology as I understand it does not, in its analysis of social structures and transformational processes, gloss over the contradictions and ambivalences that define late modernity; sociology neither whitewashes over such things in the name of morality, nor dwells on scenarios of social collapse. Rather, a realistic “socio-analysis” shares, in many respects, parallels with psychoanalysis, which Sigmund Freud developed to study individuals and culture. Psychoanalysis similarly makes no promise to resolve contradictions into a reconciled, harmonious existence. Gaining clarity – that is, making analytical progress – rather involves bringing paradoxes and ambivalences to light in order to reflect upon them and to encourage the patient, with the help of this newfound perspective, to take realistic steps toward changing his or her circumstances.
In this sense, the chapters of this book are attempts to examine the contradictory structures of contemporary society in a way that avoids both the overly simplistic narrative of progress and alarmist diagnoses of social decay. Unambiguous assessments and simple solutions are therefore not to be expected. On the contrary, whoever can tolerate ambivalences and deal with them productively is clearly at an advantage in late modernity. In today’s climate of debate, however, with its clear distinctions between friend and foe, the elementary psychological ability to tolerate ambiguity is in a sorry state.6 In my book The Society of Singularities, I attempted to develop a systematic theory of late-modern society that takes into account its ambivalences.7 In the present book, I intend to refine certain aspects of this theory. Here, I will be equally concerned with political, economic, and cultural dimensions. My analysis of contemporary society, moreover, is not restricted to Germany but, rather, pertains to the Western world as a whole, which – despite national differences – is presently undergoing similar transformations and facing similar problems throughout Europe and North America. The transformation of the West, in turn, can only be understood within a global framework.
From Industrial Modernity to the Society of Singularities
The point of departure for my perspective on today’s society is that, over the last 30 years, we have been experiencing a profound structural shift, over the course of which classical industrial modernity has transformed into a new form of modernity, which I call late modernity. Our understanding of the structures of late modernity, however, is still underdeveloped.
Industrial modernity first took shape at the beginning of the twentieth century, and it reached its zenith in the affluent postwar societies of the aforementioned trente glorieuses, which extended into the 1970s. This was a form of society based on rationalization, mechanization, and planning. Industrial mass production in large factories was just as characteristic of this society as large-scale housing projects, Keynesian economic planning, the expansion of the welfare state, and the firm belief in technical progress. For individuals, industrial modernity meant existing in an affluent society (in John Kenneth Galbraith’s terms) with a relatively egalitarian standard of living. Social control, cultural homogeneity, and cultural conformism were at a high; a clear division of gender roles and discrimination against sexual and ethnic minorities were not the exception but the rule. Following the French historian Pierre Rosanvallon, one could say that this was a “society of equals,” with all its bright and dark sides: a society governed by the rules of the general and the collective.8
This classical industrial society no longer exists, even though certain thinkers still regard it as a guiding light. Of course, many of its elements persist; there is, after all, some overlap between historical periods. However, it has been supplanted as the dominant form of society by another form that some sociologists have designated postmodern and others have called high-modern, hyper-modern, or the second modernity. I prefer the term “late modernity.” This structural shift was already well on its way in the 1970s and 1980s, and its emblematic events include the student revolts of 1968, the oil crisis and the collapse of the Bretton Woods financial system in 1973, and the development of the Apple I (the first affordable personal computer) in 1976. Late modernity has been maturing since the 1990s. It is characterized by, among other things, radical globalization, which has dissolved the formerly clear separation between the “first,” “second,” and “third” world, and which increasingly blurs the boundaries between the global North and the global South. In regions of the South, rapid modernization is now taking place, while regions of the North are losing their traditional status.
It remains challenging to formulate a coherent understanding of the structural features of late modernity. The liberal narrative of progress, which I discussed above, might focus here on globalization (understood positively), democratization, the expansion of markets, liberalization, and digital networking. In this way, the structural shift at hand could be understood from one side as a linear development. We have to learn, however, to understand late modernity as a contradictory and conflicted societal formation that is characterized simultaneously by social growth and decline, by cultural valuation and devaluation, and ultimately by processes of polarization. This, in essence, is what makes it explosive. In large part, these asymmetries and structural disparities have been neither planned nor consciously brought about; rather, they are what sociologists refer to as unintended consequences. For this very reason, they are irritating. Unlike industrial modernity’s society of equals, late modernity has increasingly been taking on the form of a society of singularities.9 In short, this means: whereas industrial modernity was based, in so many facets of life, on the reproduction of standards, normality, and uniformity – and one could say that “generality” reigned supreme – late-modern society is oriented toward the production of unique and singular entities and experiences and it values qualitative differences, individuality, particularity, and the unusual. If one would prefer to use more familiar terms from sociological and political debates, one could loosely describe late modernity as a society of radicalized individualism. In a sense, it takes this individualism, which has been a part of modernity from the beginning, to an extreme level. To me, however, the traditional concept of “individualism” – as well as that of “individualization” – seems both too broad and too narrow to describe the social and political processes that characterize late modernity.10
I therefore prefer the term “singularization.” It more accurately denotes the social processes in which particularity and uniqueness, non-exchangeability, incomparability, and superlatives are expected, fabricated, positively evaluated, and experienced.11 In late modernity, a social logic of singularization has been established on a large scale, whereas during earlier phases of modernity such logic was only able to exist in small segments of society. It has an inevitably paradoxical structure: core areas of society have now developed general structures and practices whose interest is systematically oriented toward the particular. Thus, singularities neither exist outside of the social world nor are they directed against it – rather, they are at its center. They are not “released into the wild.” On the contrary, they are produced by and are part of the everyday praxis of society.
Unlike the processes of individualization, those of singularization are not restricted to human individuals. Of course, late-modern society admires the particularity of individual people – an excellent performance at work, a top athlete, a prominent environmental activist, or an extraordinary blogger, for instance – but it also admires the singularity of things and objects, such as the authenticity and non-exchangeability of sought-after goods and brands, which are now in part esteemed like works of art. These processes also subject spatial entities to singularization – such as cities or landscapes as recognizably “valuable” places – and they do the same to temporal entities, which can interest us as singular events or memorable moments. Finally, late-modern society even singularizes its collectives: from projects and networks to voluntarily chosen “neo-communities” (of a religious or regional sort, for instance), each of which promises to be incomparable. Late modernity’s systems of evaluation typically frown upon that which is merely standardized and functional – “average” individuals who are mere role players, things that are industrial goods bought “off the rack,” spaces that are “faceless,” and temporal routines that are dull and forgettable – and instead direct society’s interest toward that which is felt to be singular and is valorized as such. Only the latter is attributed value in the true sense.
Broadly speaking, late modernity has thus turned out to be an extremely ambitious form of society in which it is no longer sufficient for anything to be average. Instead, it is expected of individuals, things, events, places, and collectives that they leave the average in the dust. It is only the singularization of the social that promises contentment, prestige, and the power of identification; it alone, from the perspective of late-modern culture, makes people and the world valuable. The transformation from the society of equals to the society of singularities has several causes: the most important among them are the structural shift of the economy from industrial to cognitive-cultural capitalism, the technological revolution of digitalization, and finally the socio-cultural process in which a new urban middle class of highly qualified and educated people, who are oriented toward self-development and individual prestige, has advanced to become society’s new leading milieu.
The “singularistic” structure of late-modern society, however, necessarily comes with its reverse side: that which is unable or unwilling to be singular (or forbidden from being so). Such entities are disdained; they remain invisible in the background, and they receive only minimal – if any – recognition. Inevitably, there are thus winners and losers; there is appreciation and devaluation. This insight is central: the singularization of the social is not a linear process in which everyone and everything receives recognition for his, her, or its uniqueness. Processes of singularization have not caused us to enter a postmodern “realm of freedom” on the heels of industrial modernity’s “realm of necessity.” Rather, society’s valorization of the singular entails the devaluation of that which is standardized and common (and therefore disappears into the background). Under today’s conditions, the ubiquitous singularization of the social inexorably and systematically generates structural asymmetries and disparities.
This dual structure of singularization and polarization applies to every dimension of the tectonic shift that late modern societies have been experiencing. Some of these dimensions will be discussed in the chapters of this book.
Regarding the economy, today’s ambitious and globally networked cognitive-cultural capitalism, which is oriented toward developing complex goods – things, services, events, media formats – that are highly innovative, creative, and appealing, has the reverse side that so-called simple services (routine and repetitive jobs held by low-qualified individuals, whose prestige and social security are minimal) have become more widespread. Conversely, cognitive-cultural capitalism is governed by market structures that follow a winner-take-all logic, so that extremely lucrative goods – from high-tech pharmaceuticals and top football players to globally renowned artwork and desirable real estate – lead to an excessive production of wealth.
In the late-modern educational system, the rapidly growing number of university graduates and the heated profile competition between schools, between universities, and between graduates for excellence and unique selling points is only one side of things. The reverse side of this is the indirect devaluation of lower or mid-rank educational degrees. Today, what was once a normal level of achievement is regarded as no more than average.
High ambition and devaluation also go hand in hand in the area of lifestyles. The lifestyle model of “successful self-actualization,” which strives for uniqueness and the accumulation of singularity capital, turns daily life, work, leisure, and family life into an ambitious challenge. The new middle class rises to this challenge. The reverse side of this process is the subtle cultural devaluation or massive social downgrading that the traditional middle class and the precarious class have been experiencing. In addition, however, there is also a great deal of frustration among members of the new middle class who have failed to live up to their own ambitious standards: the singularistic lifestyle is systematically prone to cause disappointment.
The digital world, too, is based on a fundamental asymmetry: between those individuals (and also goods, places, institutions) that attract attention and appreciation (occasionally in excess), and those that largely remain invisible, are poorly networked and isolated, and either lack recognition or become the focus of negative attention (they are hated or disdained, for instance).
On the level of spatial structures, the current popularity of metropolitan areas is characteristic of late modernity. Appealing cities attract new businesses, workers, and visitors, and a trans-regional competition is now taking place between cities vying to offer the best quality of life. The reverse side is that this has given rise to “left-behind” areas, which are now in a downward spiral of depopulation and waning attractiveness.
In the end, it is only logical that the singularism of late-modern society has also led to polarization in the sphere of politics. Since the 1980s, the dominant form of politics has been a new type of liberalism that is radically based on competition and difference, dynamism, and the removal of social, economic, and cultural boundaries on a global scale. What has recently emerged as a reaction to this liberalism is an aggressive form of populism that propagates the social isolation of nation states. It is supported above all by those segments of the population that were either ignored or threatened by the liberal program of modernization. Populism is thus an articulation of the disgruntled reverse side of the society of singularities.
* * *
In the first chapter – “Cultural Conflicts as a Struggle over Culture: Hyperculture and Cultural Essentialism” – I discuss the ways in which late-modern societies are defined by conflicts over culture and identity. Contrary to Samuel Huntington’s prominent thesis that we are dealing with a struggle between cultural spheres, I show that, across the globe, there are now two fundamentally oppositional ways of dealing with culture. One approach – that of hyperculture – allows for individual self-development and provides space for diversity on global markets, while the other approach – that of cultural essentialism – understands culture as a fixed entity or as the medium of a given community’s collective identity. Here I examine the relationship between these two forms of “culturalization” and ask whether there might be an alternative to both of them.
The second chapter – “From the Leveled Middle-Class Society to the Three-Class Society: The New Middle Class, the Old Middle Class, and the Precarious Class” – investigates the new differentiation that presently characterizes the social structure in Western nations. Over the course of post-industrialization and the expansion of education, the formerly all-encompassing middle class of industrial modernity gave way to a new, tripartite class structure. On one end, a highly educated and urban new middle class has risen to the fore – the new leading milieu of late modernity – while on the other end, there is a new precarious class comprised primarily of working-class employees in the service industry. Between these two, there remains the traditional middle class, which is oriented toward order and sedentariness. It will be shown that the relationship among these classes cannot be reduced to material inequalities but is, rather, fundamentally defined by the cultural factor of symbolic valuation and devaluation.
“Beyond Industrial Society: Polarized Post-Industrialism and Cognitive-Cultural Capitalism,” the third chapter, is devoted to the structural transformation of Western capitalism. In the West, the industrial economy has lost its structural and formational significance. But what does it mean to say that we live in a post-industrial society? This chapter explains the transformation from the industrial to the post-industrial economy as a response to a dual crisis of saturation and productivity. Here I identify the features of cognitive capitalism, which is based on intangible assets, knowledge, and scalability, and I also examine the mechanisms of cultural capitalism, whose markets depend 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
On the rise of Donald Trump, see Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt,
How Democracies Die
(London: Penguin, 2019).
2
Francis Fukuyama,
The End of History and the Last Man
(New York: The Free Press, 1992).
3
Reinhart Koselleck,
Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time
, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
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
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
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
Andreas Reckwitz,
The Society of Singularities
, trans. Valentine A. Pakis (Cambridge: Polity, 2020).
8
Pierre Rosanvallon,
The Society of Equals
, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
9
See Reckwitz,
The Society of Singularities
.
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
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
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
.
1Cultural 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 from a mobile global market. This is a cosmopolitan understanding of culture that 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
