Andreas Reckwitz

Society of Singularities

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technology of machines and the technology of the social thus went hand in hand, their common telos being efficient order and the elimination of waste and redundancy. In such a technology-oriented society, the model subjects were technicians and engineers.32

      Whether in the economic, technological, political, or spatial sphere, organized modernity was guided by the semantics of the social, understood as the regulated collective.35 The collectivized social – whether in the form of a crowd, group, political party, workforce, or even the nuclear family – now took on an independent and superior existence, to which the individual was subordinate. Quite fittingly, then, William Whyte and David Riesman referred to the post-bourgeois subject as an “organization man.” This was a subject who developed an extreme sensitivity to the social expectations of his peers, to which he adapted accordingly. Orienting oneself toward the social standards of normality went hand in hand with a radical disciplining of emotions. As noted above, organized modernity was essentially a society of equals, of equality before the law, and of social uniformity. This culture of equality correlated with the uniformity of subjects: individuals were compelled to shape their lives to fit a “normal biography” with clear stages and with the aim of achieving life goals.36 In Simmel’s terms, the subjects of organized modernity were thus representative of an “individualism of equality.”

      The social struggle against this “other” and against anything apparently non-rational was waged above all against ostensibly abnormal or asocial subjects, who were classified by the psycho-social complex as exhibitors of deviant behavior.37 This struggle also led to a distaste for things and objects produced outside of industrial mass production, and encouraged the neglect or destruction of local and historical spaces – and the unique culture associated with them – in favor of the functional city. With its practices, industrial modernity thus enforced the de-singularization of the social. In the practices of observation, a vast system of general concepts and scales was developed for differentiating the general-particular, and this came at the expense of a now marginalized conceptual and perceptive sensitivity to the complexity of singularities. In the practices of evaluation, the result was to discriminate against or pathologize anything that could not be made to fit into the achievement differences determined by the logic of the general. In the practices of production, unique things were either created by mistake or were relicts of premodern niche practices. In their practices of appropriation, subjects thus became successively accustomed to adopting objectifying approaches to things and in large part “unlearned,” so to speak, how to deal with singularities.38

      The rationalistic logic of the general achieved its zenith in organized, industrial modernity. It was during this time that society endeavored once and for all to triumph over the fundamental problems of scarcity and disorder mentioned above. Although many structural decisions made during this phase would remain influential in late modernity, organized modernity as an all-encompassing formation has since become history. Its social logic of the general would go on to serve as a negative example for late modernity, which would distance itself from it with its own social logic of singularities. As we will see, however, matters are somewhat more complicated. Industrial modernity was not organized in an entirely rationalistic manner, and it was not completely de-singularized. For its part, moreover, late modernity has developed its own version of rational­ization, which now serves as an enabling form of infrastructure.

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