The Social Organization of Openness to Possibilities—A Systematic Outline of a Theory of Modernity.
1. Pre-modern Awareness of Possibility
2. Modern Awareness of Possibility
3. The Fictionalization of the Horizon of Possibility and the Distinction Between Utopia and Optimization
4. The Sublation of Contingency through the Strategic Utilization of Contingency—Classical Modernity
5. The Limitation of Contingency through Institutionalized Openness to Possibility—Consolidated Modernity
6. Theory of Modernity as a Critical Project
7. Overview
1. Pre-modern Awareness of Possibility
Even though the concept of contingency has almost become a voodoo-word—used more to conjure up a state of affairs than to explain it—it does not denote indeterminacy in general, but rather that bounded indeterminacy in which something is neither necessary nor impossible. However, this property applies equally to the available and manipulable, as well as to the unavailable and accidental. Consequently, the state of affairs is already systematically relative to interpretation. Historically, however, its dependence on interpretation becomes absolute, because the history of truth also renders the necessary and the impossible recognizable as something just as mutable as the possible. What is neither necessary nor impossible at a given time, in a given culture, and in a given society—and why—therefore marks the specific horizon of possibility that characterizes it and unmistakably distinguishes it from other times, other cultures, and other societies. For this reason, the concept of contingency does not denote an ontological given that precedes all history, all culture, and all society as a factum brutum, but rather a historically variable modal structure that determines the relationship between actuality and possibility at a given time, in a given culture, and in a given society.
Not only in antiquity, but well into the early modern period, the relationship between actuality and possibility corresponded to an awareness of possibility that clearly distinguished the sphere of human action and power from that which eluded human reach and limited the scope of meaningful action. Initially, this realized the ontological restriction of the human sphere by ancient cosmology. Ancient awareness of contingency assumed that only events, but never domains of events and their horizons of possibility, were contingent. Accordingly, contingency was realized in the concrete plurality of actual alternatives. Action exclusively referred to empirical objects and intersubjective relations that stood within a finite horizon of possibility. Medieval awareness of contingency de-bounded, universalised, and radicalised this conception. Unlike in antiquity, the entire world was now at the disposal of will, because its existence depended solely on the will of God. This corresponded not only to the theological claim to a totality of knowledge and shaping, but also to the premise that the entire reality was guaranteed by a single transcendent instance—and that not only its order, but also its existence could be annulled by it if necessary.
2. Modern Awareness of Possibility
The medieval radicalisation of contingency stripped actuality of the immanent stability it possessed as a momentarily evident reality in antiquity. Yet with the end of the theological worldview, its transcendentally guaranteed stability was likewise lost. Consequently, humans were compelled, on the one hand, to produce this stability themselves, while on the other hand they were simultaneously liberated from the ties of a pre-given world order. This is the origin of the modern idea of the principle availability of the realm of action. Contingent are now not only the actualities through which action is realised; contingent is now also the reality in which these actions and actualities are situated. Following the end of the cosmological worldview and within the waning horizon of the theological worldview, contingency therefore encompasses not only the concept of possibility, but also the concept of actuality. Actuality is no longer conceived as a momentarily evident reality, as in the cosmological worldview of antiquity, or as a guaranteed reality, as in the theological worldview of the Middle Ages, but rather as the self-authorising realisation of a coherent context. This constructivist disposition corresponds to the emergence of a reason that designs projects, manifesting itself in the shift of technical constructions from improvements to inventions, of aesthetic designs from imitation to construction, and of economic enterprises from extensions to the de-bounding of trade and the unleashing of productive forces. Thus, in the modern era, contingency is not only dimensioned differently, but also generates an awareness of possibility that points beyond the hitherto valid limitations of human thought and action—not merely in degree, but in principle—and allows the contours of a culture to emerge for which contingency is no longer an incidental, but a constitutive fact.
Only now is it possible to speak of a culture of contingency in the strict sense—that is, of a qualitative self-relation and world-relation for which reality could not only partially, but fundamentally be otherwise. In the course of the modern era, this led to a progressive expansion of the sphere subject to human power, opening up possibilities in emerging modern societies that had previously been not merely unexploited or unknown, but utterly unimaginable and unthinkable. At the same time, the plurality of concrete possibilities remaining within the finite space of interrelated actors and their actions was expanded by the potentiality of abstract possibilities and, above all, redefined politically within the open horizon of revolutionary malleability. This is the emphatic side of the modern awareness of contingency. On the one hand, it is realised in the shift of technical and aesthetic thought and action from imitation to construction. On the other hand, it manifests itself in that transformation of the conception of the future in which the contingency awareness has been temporalised, being led out of the adventist-closed horizon of eschatological teleologies and into the futuristic-open horizon of progress-logical finalisations. However, the situation was experienced not only as a gain in human freedom, but from the very beginning also as acute disorientation, groundless instability, and frightening uncertainty. For although the sphere in which things could also be otherwise no longer possessed a definitive limit, the necessity of such a limit continued to be presupposed and sought in holistic blueprints for a new order of actuality and a totality of experience. This is the other, problematic side of the modern awareness of contingency, which harboured no doubt that contingency was something that had to be sublated (aufgehoben). Yet both together—open horizons of possibility and closed expectations of actuality—lend the modern self-relation and world-relation that characteristic depth structure which oscillates between constructivist production of meaning and comprehensive meaninglessness, forming the fundamental figure of all melancholic dispositions that determine not only the dominant aesthetic tendencies, but also the dominant theoretical tendencies of modernity.
3. The Fictionalization of the Horizon of Possibility and the Distinction Between Utopia and Optimization
The parallelism of the technical and aesthetic shift from imitation to construction points to a decisive moment of the culture of contingency, namely the essential significance of a new, reflexive fictionalisation of the horizon of possibility. What can be designed and invented is no longer determined cosmologically or theologically, but anthropologically, because it springs from liberated human curiosity and imagination. Perhaps this fictionalisation of the horizon of possibility is ultimately the decisive moment of a modernity that has understood itself from the outset as a culture of ontologically liberated and anthropologically bound constructive capacity, grounded in an open-to-possibility human nature. In any case, however, the fictionalisation of the horizon of possibility is a process realised in two different modes, which in turn underlie two distinct tendencies of political, social, aesthetic, and cultural modernity, corresponding to two opposing modal-structural paradigms: utopia and optimisation. The difference between these two paradigms may at first glance appear as marginal as the distinction between transformability and mutability within the concept of contingency, or the modal-theoretical distinction between plurality contingency and potentiality contingency; in reality, however, it is of structural and not merely gradual significance, because it is just as crucial for the social embedding of technisation as it is for the autonomisation of the aesthetic and the various forms in which both can be politically instrumented.
The concept of utopia is an absolute concept. It implies the complete sublation (Aufhebung) of all contingency in an ideal and therefore unsurpassable state—in a new totality of experience that is as closed as it is concrete, and in an insuperably final and hence definitive order of actuality. The concept of optimisation, on the other hand, is a relative concept. It denotes the situationally extrapolated, fundamentally incessant, and irreducibly open-ended surpassing of every state within an abstract expectation that places every seemingly given, but above all every self-powerfully achieved state up for disposition. One may see in this an exclusive modal-structural difference, because utopia aims at the definitive standstill of all possibilities, whereas optimisation unleashes the competition of mutually surpassing possibilities. After all, optimisation precisely does not mean the sublation, elimination, or limitation of contingency, but rather its preservation, perpetuation, expansion, and cultivation. This constitutes the eminent difference that fails to attain analytical significance if the concept of utopia and the concept of optimisation are blurred into one another. Realised utopia, to put the difference in a nutshell, sublates contingency, whereas realised optimisation perpetuates contingency. Optimisation thereby generates a dispositif of fundamental non-closure, whereas utopia strives for an ideal and therefore concluding order of actuality. The fact that utopia thereby strictly represents the modern option for a pre-modern structure of actuality—because it structurally stands within the closed horizon of cosmological or theological ontologies—is not its most incidental characteristic.
4. The Sublation of Contingency through the Strategic Utilization of Contingency—Classical Modernity
The experience of meaninglessness and uncertainty bound not only the philosophical, but also the political, social, and aesthetic self-understanding of modernity deep into the 20th century to the rationality of comprehensive expectations of order and actuality, thereby rendering counterfactual concepts of an order of actuality that was as meaningful as it was definitive plausible. The accent thus lay almost compulsively on the side of comprehensive and definitive constructions that surpass all previous constructions and were intended in this way to sublate the contingency that seemingly had engulfed the entire world. If one were to condense this disposition into a formula that could serve as an operative structural formula for the political, social, aesthetic, and philosophical design claims of Classical Modernity, that formula would be: the definitive sublation of contingency through the strategic use of contingency. While this has nothing to do with what is commonly and sweepingly termed 'coping with contingency' (Kontingenzbewältigung) in an order-fixated sense, the comprehensive expectations of order and actuality expressed by this formula nevertheless manifest the claim to totality of an all-ruling reason corresponding to the sovereign political, socio-technical, or aesthetic utopias that commanded all rationality on their side within Classical Modernity. Precisely in the self-evidence of their claims to totality, these utopias stood indeed within the waning horizon of the theological world-view and its secular derivative—the idea of a sovereign, order-establishing authority, however abstract, such as Enlightenment reason.
Yet if technisation, even where it remains within the instrumental, is the organised expansion of the constructive possibilities of human action, it generates not only an imperative to surpass all natural givens, but also a disposition toward the surpassability of all constructed actualities. After all, there is no construction that could not be surpassed by another construction. Potentiality is thus not merely institutionalised sectorally, but widely entrenched structurally. And this has far-reaching consequences. For under this presupposition, a culture of contingency can paradoxically not consist in sublation of contingency within a new definitive order of actuality—as almost the entirety of Classical Modernity attempted by translating contingency awareness into technical, aesthetic, and political fictions of sovereignty. Under this presupposition, the foundation of a culture of contingency can only consist in integrating contingency into a new, fundamentally transitory order of actuality. This, however, requires institutionalising the open-endedness of constructive action through the establishment of durable modal-structural dispositions that in turn dispense with ontological foundations.
5. The Limitation of Contingency through Institutionalized Openness to Possibility—Consolidated Modernity
This renunciation forms the bedrock of the demanding self-founding of modern society. Nevertheless, contingency is primarily grasped as a problem and—in view of persisting social uncertainty, rampant economic inequality, dramatic ecological crises, and unsettling technological unpredictability—interpreted and isolated as a pathology of society. Yet what is interpreted as a pathology and evokes therapeutic expectations is actually a general disposition unfolding in the synthesis of processes of technisation and aestheticisation, and establishing itself in all its ambivalence as institutionalised openness to possibility. Its systematic condition is the fictionalisation of the horizon of possibility, which fundamentally confronts every state not only with its transformability, but also with its surpassability. Its historical condition, however, is that immanent self-founding of the epoch in which social actuality becomes a qualitatively distinct and all-determining actuality that determines not only the social destiny of human beings, but their general destiny as well. This centrality of the social manifests the transitory, open-ended, and infinite character that corresponds not only to the productivity and malleability euphoria of modern society, but also to the constitution of its genuine personality type: namely, the individual oriented towards position and status openness, grounded in multi-dimensional mobility, and focused on intransitive self-unfolding within an open-ended conduct of life.
This personality type corresponds to a society in which the positivity of contingency has established itself as a general dispositif of optimisation—optimisation not only in the concrete, transitive sense of specific technical, administrative, or economic improvements in forms of production, organisation, distribution, and consumption, but also in the abstract, intransitive sense of a general form of conduct of life, an implicit self-relation, and a matter-of-course vanishing point of the imagination. By underpinning not only specific objects and concrete functions, but above all indeterminate self-relations and abstract world-relations, this dispositif constitutes the modal structure of a social modernity which, while corresponding to the constructivist depth structure of a culture of contingency, establishes—unlike in Classical Modernity—an abstract social world in which permanent openness to possibility commands all rationality on its side, in which the positivity of contingency is an unquestionable metaphysical datum, and in which the competitive surpassing of every achieved state becomes an inescapable social compulsion. It is a social compulsion that, through the communicative normalisation of contingency, produces an absolutism of the social that seemingly knows no outside. The limitation therefore applies only to contingency itself: its institutionalization gives its modal structure a permanent, in principle transitory form, rather than, as in the utopian paradigm, abolishing it once and for all or leaving it unstructured. Its social foundation, the social realm, is not limited by this form, however; on the contrary, it is de-bounded. Despite all experiences of uncertainty and meaninglessness, and despite the generalised competition that became the principle of social organisation, this boundless claim of the social is ultimately perhaps the actual problem of a modernity that has consolidated itself—only seemingly paradoxically—through self-founding within openness to possibility.
6. Theory of Modernity as a Critical Project
The absolutism of the social is no pathology of the culture of contingency, and its special transcendental structures—in which socialisation and individualisation form the complementary sides of a single dispositif—are no ideologies. Rather, both are manifestations of a successful societal self-constitution that emerged in modernity and, through their institutionalisation, gained the status of unquestionable matters of course. The critical potential of this theory of modernity, which conceives of modernity as a culture of contingency, is directed precisely at these matters of course. After all, their specific modalities—competitive optimisation, communicative normalisation, and boundless socialisation—are likewise contingent and remain so even when the social compulsion they exert lends them the appearance of a natural necessity. However, critique does not claim that the social form of organised openness to possibility declares something contingent to be necessary, thereby turning against its own presuppositions. Modern societies indeed generate functioning structures that are indispensable for their own constitution, even though they are and remain contingent. Communication, sociality, participation, networking, or optimisation are real, effective, and constitutive elements of modern societies. Hence, their positivity remains largely unquestioned even when their negative effects are treated as pathologies. Yet they become objects of critique at the moment when their unquestioned positivity turns into an unquestionable matter of course, thereby attaining the status of an irrefutable transhistorical truth.
If contingency is a historical modal structure and modernity is the culture of its institutionalisation, then critique of this culture and this society can neither be oriented towards external normative standards nor restricted to its internal contradictions. Nor can it play plurality off against potentiality, because no intransitive modal structure can be retrieved by a transitive real structure—not even by force. Rather, a critique of institutionalised contingency must take as its starting point the conditions of plausibility of its unquestioned certainties and deconstruct the unquestionable matters of course that have arisen from these certainties. In a culture of contingency, competitive optimisation, communicative normalisation, and the absolutism of the social not only have all rationality on their side—this rationality has rather attained the ultra-significance of a natural datum that is no longer problematised because it successfully organises openness to possibility and realises societal self-founding in indeterminacy. Yet the fact that it simultaneously determines thereby which possibilities can be perceived, articulated, and realised at all points to the flip side of this rationality. Critique is therefore directed not against modernity as such, but against those specific dispositions of institutionalised openness to possibility that have acquired the status of axioms as evident truths of a societal self-constitution, thereby marginalising, discriminating against, or excluding other possibilities of a modern self-relation and world-relation. Therefore, the task is to let none of these matters of course pass incognito and none of these certainties stand unexamined. And for this reason, the critical dimension of this theory of modernity is not a rejection of the culture of contingency—not even a partial one—but rather its productive application to itself.
7. Overview
This is what the texts brought together in these pages stand for. "Modernity as an Ontological State of Emergency?" reconstructs the genesis of the modern experience of contingency from Walter Benjamin's theory of modernity and unfolds modernity as the loss of ontological taken-for-grantedness as well as an attempt at its aesthetic processing in the wake of European melancholy. "Modernity and Contingency" expands this perspective into a general theory of the modern era, in which contingency becomes the fundamental concept of a social and cultural self-understanding that treats it primarily as a problem to be solved either through socio-technical functionalism or through political and aesthetic constructivism. Finally, "Theory of Mass Culture" examines the cultural formation in which contingency is no longer primarily problematized but is instead positively redefined—through communicative pressures to connect and competitive forms of socialization—as an open-ended possibility that can be organized. The three books, therefore, do not simply address different topics, but rather explore the same fundamental question from different perspectives and synthesize them into a historical-systematic theory of modernity. This fundamental question is: How is a society possible that constitutes itself under conditions of contingency that are as inescapable as they are thoroughly desirable? The articles, essays, and studies also take up this question. However, they are not supplements to the monographs, but rather elaborations of transitions, clarifications of tangential lines, and experimental in-depth explorations of aspects that are only hinted at in the books. Furthermore, they occasionally discuss subjects that do not seek an answer to this question and therefore lie only very distantly on the horizon of this theory of modernity.