April 2019

In recent years, the rise of right-wing populism in Germany, France or Italy, the Brexit-decision in Britain are signals of a deep crisis in which European liberal politics, dominating since the 1980s, have got. What are the causes of this crisis? In his lecture series Andreas Reckwitz elucidates that beneath the surface of political conflict there has been a profound transformation on the economic and cultural level taking place in all European countries which swept away the foundations of former industrial modernity. As a consequence of postindustrialization and value change a new structure of social and cultural classes has emerged which imply antagonistic forms of life. Above all, the new antagonism between a new middle class and a traditional middle class turns out as the background of the political crisis.

Andreas Reckwitz is professor of sociology at the European University of Frankfurt/ Oder, Germany. He is currently Thomas-Mann-Fellow at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles and was awarded with the Leibniz prize 2019. He is the author of several books in the field of social theory and cultural sociology. His recent book “The Society of Singularities. The transformation of modernity” (Suhrkamp 2017) was awarded with several book prizes and is translated into five languages. He is a regular author of the German weekly paper Die Zeit.

In recent years, the rise of right-wing populism in Germany, France or Italy, the Brexit-decision in Britain are signals of a deep crisis in which European liberal politics, dominating since the 1980s, have got. What are the causes of this crisis? In his lecture series Andreas Reckwitz elucidates that beneath the surface of political conflict there has been a profound transformation on the economic and cultural level taking place in all European countries which swept away the foundations of former industrial modernity. As a consequence of postindustrialization and value change a new structure of social and cultural classes has emerged which imply antagonistic forms of life. Above all, the new antagonism between a new middle class and a traditional middle class turns out as the background of the political crisis.

Andreas Reckwitz is professor of sociology at the European University of Frankfurt/ Oder, Germany. He is currently Thomas-Mann-Fellow at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles and was awarded with the Leibniz prize 2019. He is the author of several books in the field of social theory and cultural sociology. His recent book “The Society of Singularities. The transformation of modernity” (Suhrkamp 2017) was awarded with several book prizes and is translated into five languages. He is a regular author of the German weekly paper Die Zeit.

Thomas Mann Fellow Andreas Platthaus is invited to Dartmouth College for a presentation at the Department of German Studies, to investigate: An American in Berlin — What Kept Lyonel Feininger? For his upcoming book project on the Bauhaus, Platthaus is looking at the forced ruptures within the history of Bauhaus—the move from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, the relocation to Berlin in 1932, and the forced closure of the school in 1933—and the resulting transformation in self-concept, aesthetics, and politics of the Bauhaus. In this project, Andreas Platthaus is turning in particular to Lyonel Feininger. The American at Bauhaus remained in Nazi-Germany until 1938,when he returned to the United States, but always remained true to his convictions. Platthaus will speak of the pressure to adapt and the forces of resistance in times of rising social radicalization.

Andreas Platthaus is a German journalist and author based in Leipzig and Frankfurt (Main). He studied economics and rhetorics, philosophy, and history in Aachen and Tübingen. He is vice directing editor of the cultural section, as well as editor for literature at the German daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In 2018, he received a Thomas Mann Fellowship and he is the author of multiple books, including “Der Krieg nach dem Krieg — Deutschland zwischen Revolution und Versailles 1918/19” (Rowohlt, 2018).

The culture of Western late-modernity is not that of industrial modernity any more: To a high degree it is centered around the fabrication of singularities, i.e. of entities like objects, subjects, places, events and collectivities which are grasped as unique and particular. Attention, valorization and affect is given to the apparently unique, not to the standardized. There is a paradoxical social logic of singularization taking place embracing cultural capitalism, media technologies, life-styles and politics. What are the causes, patterns and consequences of this society of singularities? It turns out that as soon as singularizations are the focus of wide-ranging social patterns they tend to asymmetries and polarizations which are characteristic of the late-modern present.

The book "The Society of Singularities" was published 2018 in German at Suhrkamp, received several book prizes and is currently translated into five languages. The English edition appears at Polity, Cambridge.

Andreas Reckwitz is professor of sociology at the European University of Frankfurt/ Oder, Germany. He is currently Thomas-Mann-Fellow at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles and was awarded with the Leibniz prize 2019. He is the author of several books in the field of social theory and cultural sociology. His recent book “The Society of Singularities. The transformation of modernity” (Suhrkamp 2017) was awarded with several book prizes and is translated into five languages. He is a regular author of the German weekly paper Die Zeit.