The Social Organization of Openness to Possibilities—A Systematic Outline of a Theory of Modernity.

1.  Pre-modern Consciousness of Possibility
2. Modern Consciousness 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 Consciousness of Possibility

Even if the concept of contingency has almost become a voodoo word with which one conjures up rather than explains the matter at hand, it does not denote indeterminacy as such, but rather the bounded indeterminacy in which something is neither necessary nor impossible. However, this property belongs not only to the accidental, but also to the manipulable. The concept thus denotes both what is unavailable and changeable and what is available and alterable. The matter is therefore already systematically dependent on interpretation. Historically, however, its dependence on interpretation becomes absolute, because the history of truth also reveals the necessary and the impossible as something just as mutable as the possible. What is necessary, possible, or impossible at a given time, in a given culture, and in a given society—and why—therefore marks the specific horizon of possibility that characterises it and distinguishes it unmistakably from other times, other cultures, and other societies. For this reason, the concept of contingency does not denote an ontological given that would precede all history, all culture, and all society as a factum brutum, but rather a modal structure, a fundamental processual disposition that determines the relationship between reality and possibility at a given time, in a given culture, and in a given society.

Not only for antiquity, but well into the early modern period, the relationship between reality and possibility corresponded to a consciousness of possibility that clearly distinguished the sphere of human action and power from that which eluded human control and limited the scope of meaningful human action. In this, the ontological limitation of the human sphere by ancient cosmology was initially realised. Ancient consciousness of contingency assumed that only ever events, but not spheres of events and their horizons of possibility, were contingent. Contingency was accordingly realised in the concrete plurality of actual alternatives. And action referred exclusively to empirical objects and intersubjective relations that existed within a finite horizon of possibility. The medieval concept of contingency de-bound, universalised, and radicalised this consciousness of possibility. Unlike in antiquity, the entire world was now subject to disposition because its existence depended solely on the will of God. In principle, everything was now possible. Corresponding to this was the theological claim to total knowledge and organisation; but corresponding to it as well was the premise that the whole of reality was guaranteed by a single transcendent instance—and that not only its order, but also its existence could be annulled by this transmundane instance.

2. Modern Consciousness of Possibility

The medieval radicalisation of contingency stripped reality of the immanently grounded stability it had possessed as a momentarily evident actuality in antiquity. But with the end of the theological worldview, its transcendently guaranteed stability was lost as well. As a result, man was, on the one hand, compelled to create this stability himself. On the other hand, however, he was simultaneously released from the bonds of a given world order. This is the origin of the early modern idea of a self-empowered expansion and de-bounding of the sphere of human action. For now, it is not only the realia through which action is realised that are contingent; the actuality in which these realia stand is now contingent as well. Following the end of the cosmological worldview and within the receding horizon of the theological worldview, contingency therefore captures not only the concept of possibility, but also the concept of reality. Reality is no longer conceived as a momentarily evident actuality as in the cosmological worldview of antiquity, nor as a guaranteed actuality as in the theological worldview of the Middle Ages, but as the autonomous realisation of a coherent, self-consistent context. This constructivist disposition corresponds to the emergence of a project-designing reason, which manifests itself in the shift of technical constructions from improvements to inventions, of aesthetic designs from imitation to construction, and of economic undertakings from expansions of trade to its de-bounding and from the improvement of productive forces to their unleashing. Contingency is thus not only dimensioned differently in the modern era, but also generates a consciousness of possibility that points beyond the hitherto effective limitations of human thought and action—not merely gradually, but fundamentally—revealing the contours of a culture for which contingency is no longer an incidental fact, but a constitutive one.

Only now can one speak of a culture of contingency in the strict sense—that is, of a qualitative relationship to self and world for which reality could fundamentally, and not just partially, be otherwise. In the course of modernity, this meant that the realm subject to human power could be increasingly expanded, opening up possibilities in emerging modern societies that were previously not only untapped or unknown, but entirely unimaginable or unthinkable. At the same time, the plurality of concrete possibilities remaining in the finite space of concrete actors and their actions was expanded by the potentiality of abstract possibilities and, above all, redefined politically within the open horizon of revolutionary feasibility. This is the emphatic side of modern contingency consciousness. It is realised, on the one hand, 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 consciousness of contingency has been temporalised and led out of the adventive-closed horizon of eschatological teleologies into the futuristic-open horizon of progress-logical finalisations. But the situation was experienced not only as a gain in human freedom, but from the very beginning also as acute orientationlessness, bottomless groundlessness, and frightening insecurity. For while the domain in which things could be otherwise no longer had a definitive boundary, the necessity of such a boundary continued to be presupposed and sought in holistic blueprints for a new order of reality and a new totality of experience. This is the other, problematic side of modern contingency consciousness, which held no doubt that contingency was something that ultimately had to be sublated. Together, however, the open horizons of possibility and the closed expectations of reality impart to the modern relationship to self and world that characteristic deep structure which oscillates between constructivist production of reality and comprehensive experience of senselessness, forming the foundational figure of all melancholic dispositions that determine not only the dominant aesthetic, 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 between the technical and aesthetic shifts from imitation to construction points to a crucial element of contingency culture, namely the essential significance of a new, reflexive fictionalisation of the horizon of possibility. What can be designed and invented is no longer cosmologically or theologically determined, but anthropologically, because it springs from unleashed human curiosity and imagination. Perhaps this fictionalisation of the horizon of possibility is ultimately the decisive element of a modernity that has understood itself from the outset as a culture of an ontologically unbound and anthropologically bound capacity for construction, grounded in a human nature open to possibilities. In any case, the fictionalisation of the horizon of possibility is a process that has been realised in two different modes. These, in turn, ground two distinct tendencies of political, social, aesthetic, and cultural modernity, corresponding to two opposing modal-structural paradigms: utopia and optimisation. While the difference between these two paradigms might appear at first glance as secondary as the contingency-conceptual distinction between changeability and alterability or the modal-theoretical distinction between plurality-contingency and potentiality-contingency, it is in fact of structural rather than merely gradual significance. This is because it is just as crucial for the social embedding of technisation as it is for the autonomisation of the aesthetic and for the various forms in which both can be politically instrumentalised.

The concept of utopia is an absolute concept. It implies the complete sublation 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 unsurpassably final and thus definitive order of reality. The concept of optimisation, by contrast, is a relative concept. It denotes the situationally extrapolated, fundamentally endless, and irreducibly open-ended outdoing of any state in an abstract expectation that subjects every seemingly given, but above all every self-empoweringly achieved state to 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 outdoing possibilities. After all, optimisation precisely does not mean the sublation, elimination, or reduction of contingency, but its preservation, perpetuation, 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 renders contingency permanent. Optimisation thus generates a dispositif of fundamental inconclusiveness, whereas utopia strives for an ideal and therefore concluding order of reality. The fact that utopia thereby strictly speaking represents the modern option for a pre-modern structure of reality—because it stands structurally within the closed horizon of cosmological or theological ontologies—is therefore not its most secondary characteristic.

4. The Sublation of Contingency through the Strategic Use of Contingency—Classical Modernity

The experience of senselessness and insecurity bound the philosophical, political, social, and aesthetic self-understanding of modernity well into the 20th century to the rationality of comprehensive expectations of order and reality, and in return rendered counterfactual concepts of an order of reality as meaningful as it was definitive plausible. The emphasis thus fell almost necessarily on the side of comprehensive and definitive constructions that were meant to surpass all previous constructions and in this way sublate the contingency that seemingly captured the whole world. If one wished to reduce this disposition to a formula that could serve as an operational structural formula for the political, social, aesthetic, and philosophical claims to organisation in Classical Modernity, that formula would be: definitive sublation of contingency through strategic use of contingency. This has nothing to do with what is commonly referred to—just as sweepingly as it is obsessed with order—as coping with contingency. Yet in the comprehensive expectation of order and reality expressed by this formula, the claim to totality of an all-pervading reason manifests itself, corresponding to the sovereign political, socio-technical, or aesthetic utopias that had all rationality on their side in Classical Modernity. Precisely in the self-evidence of their claims to totality, these utopias stood within the receding horizon of the theological conception of the world and its secular derivative, the idea of a sovereign order-instituting authority—even if that authority were as abstract as modern reason.

However, if technisation, even where it remains within the instrumental realm, is the organised expansion of the constructive possibilities of human action, it generates not only a disposition towards surpassing all natural givens, but also a disposition towards the surpassability of all artificial realities. After all, there is no construction that could not be replaced by another construction. Potentiality is thus not only sectorally institutionalised, but largely structurally codified. And precisely this has far-reaching consequences. For under this condition, a culture of contingency cannot paradoxically consist in sublating contingency within a new definitive order of reality, as almost the whole of Classical Modernity attempted to do by translating contingency consciousness into technical, aesthetic, and political fictions of sovereignty. The establishment of a culture of contingency can under this condition only consist in integrating contingency into a new, fundamentally transitory, and structurally changeable order of reality. But this requires that the open-endedness of constructive action be institutionalised through the establishment of durable modal-structural dispositions which, for their part, dispense with ontological foundations.

5. The Limitation of Contingency through Institutionalized Openness to Possibility—Consolidated Modernity

This renunciation grounds the demanding self-foundation of a modern society. Nevertheless, its openness to possibility is primarily interpreted as a problem and—in light of persisting social insecurity, rampant economic inequality, dramatic ecological crises, and alarming technological unpredictability—simultaneously downplayed and instrumentalised as a pathology of society. But what is interpreted as a problem and provokes therapeutic expectations as a pathology is actually a general disposition that unfolds in the synthesis of processes of technisation and aestheticisation, establishing itself as institutionalised openness to possibility in all its ambivalence of feasibility and insecurity. Its systematic condition is the fictionalisation of the horizon of possibility, which confronts fundamentally every state not only with its changeability, but also with its surpassability. Its historical condition, however, is that immanent self-foundation of the epoch in which social reality becomes a qualitative and hegemonic reality that determines not only the social, but the general fate of man. For in the centrality of the social, the transitory, the open-ended, and the infinite manifest themselves as the ultimate horizon of all possible events, corresponding not only to the emphasis on productivity and feasibility in a modern society, but also to the constitution of its genuine personality type: namely the individual who is open in terms of position and status, grounded in multidimensional mobility, and oriented towards intransitive self-unfolding in 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 conducting one's life, an implicit logic of self-relation, and a self-evident vanishing point of the imagination. That which is can therefore never have been everything, because there must always be yet another possibility. Because this dispositif encompasses not merely specific objects and concrete functions, but above all grounds indeterminate self-relations and abstract world-relations, it forms the modal structure of a social modernity that corresponds to the constructivist deep structure of a culture of contingency, but—unlike in Classical Modernity—establishes an abstract social world in which permanent openness to possibility has all rationality on its side, in which the positivity of contingency is an unquestionable metaphysical given, and in which the competitive outdoing of every achieved state becomes an inescapable social compulsion. It is a social compulsion that, through the simultaneous communicative normalisation of openness to possibility, produces an absolutism of the social that seemingly knows no outside. This institutionalisation of openness to possibility gives its modal structure a durable, fundamentally transitory form, rather than sublating it definitively as in the utopian paradigm. Despite all experiences of insecurity and senselessness, and despite the generalised competition that becomes the principle of social organisation, society's claim to be the sole super-individual reference capable of exerting a pressure toward conformity following the end of cosmological and theological world conceptions is therefore perhaps the actual problem of a modernity that has constituted itself—only seemingly paradoxically—in organised indeterminacy.

6. Theory of Modernity as a Critical Project

The absolutism of the social is not a pathology of contingency culture, and its quasi-transcendental structures are not ideologies. They are rather manifestations of a successful societal self-constitution that accords them, through institutionalisation, the status of unquestionable self-evidences. Against these self-evidences is directed the critical potential of a theory that understands modernity as a culture of contingency. After all, its 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 natural necessity. Critique does not claim, however, that the social form of organised openness to possibility declares something contingent to be necessary and thus turns against its own premises. Modern societies also generate functioning structures that are indispensable to their own constitution, even though they are contingent, remain contingent, and are realised and reflected upon as contingent. Competitive optimisation, communicative normalisation, and boundless socialisation are real, effective, and constitutive elements of modern societies. Therefore, their functional positivity is indeed largely unquestioned even when their negative effects are treated as pathologies. But they become objects of critique the moment their unquestioned functional positivity becomes an unquestionable self-evidence, thereby attaining the status of an immutable, transhistorical truth.

If contingency is a historical modal structure and modernity the culture of its institutionalisation, then the critique of this culture and this society can neither orient itself by external normative standards nor restrict itself to its internal contradictions. Nor can it play off plurality-contingency against potentiality-contingency, because no intransitive modal structure can be caught up by a transitive modal structure, and no utopia can put an end to optimisation—not even by force. A critique of institutionalised contingency must therefore address the conditions of plausibility of its unquestioned certainties and deconstruct the unquestionable self-evidences that have emerged from these certainties and acquired transcendental significance. Competitive optimisation, communicative normalisation, and the absolutism of the social do not merely have all rationality on their side in a culture of contingency; rather, this rationality has acquired the ultra-meaning of a natural given that is no longer problematised because it successfully organises openness to possibility and accomplishes societal self-foundation in indeterminacy. However, the fact that it thereby simultaneously determines which possibilities can be perceived, articulated, and realised at all points to the reverse side of this rationality. Critique is therefore directed not against modernity as such, but against those dispositions of institutionalised openness to possibility that, as normative self-evidences of a society, have attained the status of axioms that structurally marginalise, discriminate against, or exclude other possibilities of relating to self and world. It is therefore a matter of letting none of these self-evidences pass incognito and leaving none of these certainties unexamined. And for this reason, the critical dimension of this theory of modernity is not a rejection of contingency culture—not even a partial one. It is, 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.

However, what lends all these works a certain inner coherence, regardless of their theoretical place within this horizon, is perhaps the only question truly worth thinking about: namely, how one might gain distance from the implicit dispositions of one’s own culture, since, from the perspective of a history of cultural self-evidences, these dispositions have invariably revealed themselves to be historical and therefore transient dispositions.