The late-modern society produces singularities. It does no longer aim at the general, standardized and average solely, but promotes and expects uniqueness. Things, individuals, events, places and communities – everything wants to be special… The result is a competition of attention and evaluation for the status of this uniqueness, the so-called singularity. The result: they are losers and winners. Digital technologies, such as social media platforms and smartphones, are a necessary condition of the process. Andreas Reckwitz asks in his lecture on the society of singularities: To what extent can digitalisation be interpreted as a mechanism of social singularisation and what are the consequences?
Andreas Reckwitz is Professor of Comparative Cultural Sociology at the European University Viadrina. His works are large-scale sociological studies on social tendencies such as subjectivation, aestheticization or singularization. Most recently published books are The Invention of Creativity (Polity Press 2017) and Ästhetik und Gesellschaft (Suhrkamp 2015), while at the end of 2017 the book Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten (Suhrkamp) was published, which examines digitisation as a mechanism of social change. From April to July 2019 Reckwitz is Thomas Mann Fellow at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles.