Читать книгу Society of Singularities - Andreas Reckwitz - Страница 25

The concept of culturalization may seem alien at first. Haven’t we learned that everything is culture, that all things social are formed and coded by contexts of meaning that lend them direction and significance? How, then, can one speak of culturalization? Such a concept of enhancement and intensification ultimately seems to require certain precultural elements that are then abandoned in a second step toward a specific cultural formation.

Culture is one of the most dazzling concepts of the human sciences; at the same time, it has also been central to the self-perception of modernity from its very beginning.¹ In the nineteenth century, culture was at first understood as a select, “cultivated” (that is, normatively desirable) form of life that strives for harmonious perfection (the normative concept of culture). Over time, the concept was then restricted to a social subsystem that essentially encompassed the artistic and intellectual spheres (the differentiation-theoretical concept of culture). Conversely, the concept of culture would also be radically opened up and applied to all ways of life in all of their diversity (the holistic concept of culture) and ultimately – in a more theoretically challenging turn – related to the symbolic and meaningful dimension of the social (the meaning-oriented concept of culture). In this case, culture designates the orders of knowledge and systems of classification against the backdrop of which social practices first become conceivable.²

For our context, however, none of these four concepts of culture is really suitable. They are either too broad or too narrow. From the perspective of the holistic and meaning-oriented concepts of culture, every social phenomenon can be understood as cultural, whereas the normative and differentiation-theoretical concepts of culture restrict what counts as culture to the bourgeois high culture of modernity and its products. What are the alternatives? I propose drawing a distinction between two levels: a weak or broad concept of culture, which denotes the cultural as a whole, and a strong or specific concept of culture, which pertains to objects or other entities to which society attributes particular qualities. What is meant by culture in the broad sense is thus all social and cultural practices and their orders of knowledge. In the specific sense, however, culture encompasses only those social entities (objects, subjects, spaces, temporalities, collectives) that have a particular feature: society ascribes to them not (or not only) utility or a function, but rather value. In addition to this character of value, the cultural entities in question also have a second significant feature: to a considerable extent, they produce (positive) affects. These cultural entities thus form a cultural sphere in which social processes of valorization and affecting take place.

According to the broad or weak concept of culture, the cultural designates the level of socially relevant contexts of meaning as a whole.³ All social practices contain implicit orders of knowledge, which classify the phenomena of the world in a particular way and therefore assign a specific meaning to them. They regulate how the world is represented and which practices appear possible, urgent, and sensible in it. In this sense, the social is always cultural; social practices are always cultural practices. From the perspective of this broad understanding of culture, moreover, social rationalization and the social logic of the general can also be regarded as cultural. Technical, cognitive, and normative rationalization depends on culturally specific criteria such as efficiency, equality, or truth. This involves a cultural process of enacting rationality, which constantly distinguishes the rational from the non-rational.

In the sea of the cultural in this broad sense, culture in the strong and specific sense forms distinct islands. It denotes a specific realm of the socio-cultural world, namely the cultural sphere in which objects and other entities of particular quality circulate. By asking what this qualification consists of, we can now draw a connection to our thoughts about the social logic of singularities and simultaneously build a bridge to the traditional concept of culture. This bridge can be erected on the level of the concept of value. My assumption is this: precisely those social entities (that is, those objects, subjects, spaces, temporalities, and collectives) that are socially singularized attain the qualities necessary for becoming entities of culture in this social context. Singular social entities become cultural entities, and the process of their singularization is also a process of their culturalization. Cultural entities are fabricated within the framework of all four practices of singularization discussed above: the practices of observation, evaluation/valorization, production, and appropriation/experience. From the perspective of cultural quality, however, one of these practices has a leading role: valorization, which is the fundamental process of assigning or denying value and thus certifies what counts as unique and as a cultural entity in general (and also what does not count and thus exists outside of the singular and outside of culture).

We have already seen the extent to which the specific practices of valorization, which are typical of the social logic of singularities, differ from the classifying and ranking forms of evaluation that characterize rationalism and the social logic of the general. Whereas, in the latter, the entities of the social are classified according to their utility and function, in the former they are attributed value in the strict sense – an intrinsic value that does not derive from anything else. It is a matter of things, objects, people, places, events, and collectives being recognized as valuable, and it is their acknowledged inherent complexity that makes them seem to be such. As bearers of value, they are not a means to an end; in a sense, they are ends in themselves.⁴ Together, cultural entities thus form a sphere of the valuable in which, conversely, that which lacks value is rejected. The cultural sphere is therefore the sphere in which these values circulate.

It may come as a surprise that, in the wake of the social-constructivist turn and its radical expansion of the cultural, I would venture to advocate such a limited concept of culture, and one based on values at that. Wouldn’t this be equivalent to turning back the clock to a restricted and normative concept of culture? I am of the opinion that the expansion of the cultural by theorists since the 1970s has undoubtedly been beneficial, for it means that more and more phenomena have been recognized as being culturally constituted and subjected to cultural-theoretical analysis. At the same time, however, this has left a noticeable gap, for it involved sacrificing the classical understanding of culture, according to which culture denotes specific qualities of the social. When the conceptual differentiation between culture and non-culture is abandoned, this has problematic consequences for a theory of modernity. I would go as far as to say that identifying modernity with a process of formal rationalization – and thus accepting a one-dimensional image of modernity as the large-scale machinery of the social logic of the general – requires losing the distinction between culture and non-culture, between the sphere of value (and affect) and the system of utility and function. By failing to distinguish between these two dimensions, one also fails to see modernity’s dual structure, which consists of both rationalization and culturalization.

The concept of value can be salvaged from the legacy of the classical concept of culture and allow us to think against the grain. Today, its restricted applications to the bourgeois high culture of the nineteenth century and later to the limited subsystem of “art and culture” are rightly regarded as narrow-minded. The classical, normative concept of culture had associated value with particular high-cultural practices of the bourgeoisie – with the practices of education and art appreciation – and presupposed that cultural critique could only be undertaken from this perspective.⁵ Its truly interesting legacy only comes to light, however, when one thinks about it abstractly and reconsiders the concept of value from a fresh cultural-theoretical perspective. Then it is possible to recognize that the value of cultural entities does not consist in the fact that a cultural critic finds them remarkable and has established their “objective value” but rather in the fact that these entities are valuable in the social world of the participants themselves. Culture exists wherever value is socially assigned.

The value-oriented concept of culture thus allows there to be a distinction, in an abstract form, between two different ways in which social entities are formatted by society: either as a cultural quality to which value is attributed, or as functional, standardized, and generalized entities of the social that are of instrumental use. Cultural entities are considered ends in themselves; they are regarded as having an intrinsic value of their own. In contrast, functional entities (functional objects, subjects, spaces, temporalities, and collectives) seem to be means to an end, and to this extent they have an extrinsic or instrumental structure. As to which specific entities are valorized and which are not, this is now an open question of social dynamics. Paintings, noteworthy places, or subcultures can become cultural entities just as baseball games, urinals (as in Duchamp’s example), religious relics, or nations can. The social logic of singularities determines what counts as particular and therefore as “culturally valuable.” Accordingly, there are also things in society that exist outside of culture – namely, those social entities that are regarded as valueless.

From what I have said so far, it is clear that the concept of culture is not the only thing that needs to be renewed. It is also necessary to dust off the concept of value if it is to become a matter of interest to contemporary sociology and cultural theory. Value should not be understood as a neo-Kantian value system that precedes praxis and motivationally guides it. This is not a matter of individual people or a society having certain values. Rather, the concept of value has to be understood in praxeological terms, so that the practices of valorizing individual objects become visible.⁶ Values have to be interpreted as part of the social dynamics of circulation. These are open-ended and often controversial; it is here where culture wars take place, which are essentially conflicts about valorization. In processes of valorization, entities of the social are singularized and de-singularized; they are assigned or denied inherent complexities. Here, elements of idiosyncrasies or the general-particular are transformed into singularities, but they can also lose this value in turn.

If the praxis of culture is roughly understood as a praxis of valorization and de-valorization, it will also become clear that the conservative connotations of the old concept of culture can be stripped away and that it is possible to develop a value-theoretical and heuristically fruitful perspective on the mechanisms of power and domination that are inherent to culture. In social processes of valorization, value is assigned and value is denied. In these processes of de-valorization or devaluation, which are also processes of de-singularization, it becomes clear that more or less subtle mechanisms of exclusion are at work in the cultural sphere.⁷ Whereas some social entities are recognized as valuable and unique, others remain invisible, are dismissed as general-particular, or are negatively singularized. In short: works of art, attractive cities, and remarkable people are not the only things that circulate in the sphere of culture; it also produces rubbish, flyover country, and white trash. De-valorization is a sort of devaluation that affects not only things/objects, places, and events but also subjects and collectives. Under modern conditions, it is no surprise that these cycles of valorization and devaluation do not form a monolithic block but rather always entail counter-valorizations and readjustments to the criteria of evaluation.

Accordingly, the cultural sphere creates not only (positive) singularities qua valorization but also, under certain circumstances, negative singularities. Of course, most social entities that never achieve singularization – the things that do not seem unique or the people who lack originality, for instance – remain invisible in the cultural sphere. This is not a matter of negativity but rather of indifference.⁸ Negativity, in fact, was a defining feature of normative rationalization and the logic of the general. Under that logic, people distanced themselves from that which did not follow the general pattern – from the particular and abnormal (which was in turn classified as a type). Beyond indifference, however, instances of strong devaluation can occasionally occur in the cultural sphere, so that something will be regarded as worthless or as a sort of “non-value” and thus be seen as problematic, threatening, or inferior. What is crucial here is that the “other” from which people keep their distance is in fact a singularity with inherent complexity, yet it has been endowed with a decidedly negative valence.

When they appear, negative singularities are met with considerable cultural, and above all narrative and aesthetic, interest. In the case of subjects, for instances, negative singularities have included serial killers, mass murderers, and terrorists, who tend to capture modernity’s cultural imagination. A less drastic example would be a troublemaker politician who attracts attention and negative recognition. Other subjects can become stigmatized singularities, which are more than mere abnormal types.⁹ It is also possible for places, events, and things to be negatively singularized: certain “no-go areas” in cities or entire problematic regions (West Virginia, for example, as the stronghold of hillbilly culture), repulsive and disgusting objects, violent rituals, or horrific historical events (such as the Holocaust). Finally, collectives can mutually perceive one another as negative singularities (fundamentalist communities versus liberal metropolitan culture). In the form of devaluation, de-valorization often involves a complicated dynamic. Here, in Julia Kristeva’s terms, the “other,” or the negative singularity, becomes something “abject” – an abject singularity and the object of condemnation.¹⁰ Negative singularities are closely associated with negative affects, but even more often with ambivalent – or even fascinating – horror.

With this we have come to yet another element that, in addition to the concept of value, has to be salvaged from the legacy of the traditional concept of culture in order to develop a contemporary conception of culture and culturalization: the affective character of culture. In the traditional understanding, which is familiar from the comparison between culture and civilization or society,¹¹ culture was identified as a counterforce to formal rationality – as a non-rational or even irrational force that generates strong emotions and cannot be tamed by the rational and moderating rules of civilization. Although the opposition between culture and civilization may be obsolete today, the association of culture with the non-rational, the emotional, and its unpredictable possibilities can still be used analytically. As I have already noted, culturally endowed objects, subjects, places, events, and collectives function in a thoroughly affective manner; they exude a considerable affective intensity.¹² Here, too, we can draw a connection to our analysis of the social logic of singularities: a central feature of singularized objects, subjects, etc., is their ability to affect people, whereas the entities in the realm of the logic of the general produce little if any emotions and are treated in an almost affect-neutral manner.

To summarize: in the cultural sphere in the strong sense, singularities are endowed with value and have affective qualities. We are moved or touched by them, fascinated or disgusted in a compelling way; we experience a sense of horror or comfort in their presence. Positive singularities affect people in an intensely positive way, negative singularities in an intensely negative way. These affective processes are not, however, irrational. They have a sociologically comprehensible logic of their own. Valorizing objects, subjects, events, and collectives as unique and being affected by them are inextricably linked to one another. They are both formational components of the culture’s sphere of circulation and its logic of singularities. That which seems to be valuable and unique operates in an affective manner because it is valuable and unique. And that which produces considerable emotions seems to be valuable and unique because it operates in such a strongly affective manner.