by Thomas Alkemeyer
According to sociologist Andreas Reckwitz's award-winning diagnosis of the present, late modernity is characterised by a social and cultural logic of singularisation: Things, places, times and people are not regarded as specimens of an average, as in industrial modernity, but are singularised in practices of observation, evaluation, production and appropriation, i.e. valued as unique and irreplaceable. According to Reckwitz, the agents of this valorisation come from a new middle class that has emerged since the 1980s as beneficiaries of globalisation, educational expansion and digitalisation. It consists mainly of academics with high-quality educational qualifications who are on the move as knowledge workers. The members of this class live primarily in the metropolises and distinguish themselves from the old middle class of the "levelled middle class society" of the post-war era through a form of lifestyle that is no longer guided by the values of discipline, the fulfilment of duties and the highest possible standard of living, but by 'romantic' ideals of creativity, flexibility and mobility, quality of life and self-realisation. Their lifestyle is characterised by a curatorial attitude in which 'culture' is used as a resource for singularisation work, in which the self presents and realises itself as authentically as possible as unique.
This attitude is widespread in academia. Today's universities obviously provide a good breeding ground for its development. Successfully presenting oneself as an academic subject (or as a university) with one's own unmistakable 'profile' and a special talent is an indispensable prerequisite for being valorised and singularised as a kind of original genius. Incidentally, the invention of the original genius also gave rise to the concept of plagiarism in the first place; and its loud scandalisation can hardly be understood without the widespread valorisation of a special feature based on creative ideas and independent thoughts. For the success of depreciation goes to the substance of the self-image of academic singularities intoxicated by their own performances of particularity. This is expressly not intended to trivialise plagiarism, but rather to make understandable the affective energy with which depreciation is responded to in the academic (as well as the artistic) world, while imitation in other worlds and social classes that are less focused on uniqueness and originality tends to leave people cold.
A similar offence is caused by ChatGPT. This is because the chatbot produces texts that in many cases can hardly be distinguished from the texts produced by scientists, even by experts. This presumably applies in particular to applications for third-party funding, a type of text that is far more standardised and template-based than its creators would like. It thus reacts to expectations of comparability set by research institutions, which, with Reckwitz, should be categorised as industrial modernism rather than post-industrial late modernism. This is likely to have consequences for his social theory, especially if it turns out that the business of academic brainwork aimed at singularity is far easier to accomplish with 'intelligent' machines than the business of down-to-earth manual labour, whose agents are more likely to belong to the old than the new middle classes. In any case, I am not yet aware of any intelligent machine that could fit a piece of kitchen furniture into a crooked old building as skilfully as a skilled kitchen fitter.
The representatives of the academic class, who are all too fond of performing and imagining themselves as singularities, should certainly be concerned if their 'cognitive' work can be performed more easily by machines than the 'practical' work of manual labourers. It is possible that such disillusionment also has a positive effect in terms of understanding and practising one's own academic work in future as an 'ordinary' craft that does not desperately and futilely endeavour to achieve originality with idioms that are all too often repeated in a continuous loop, but rather to produce something solid.
Thomas Alkemeyer, Dr phil. habil., is Professor of Sociology and Sports Sociology at the Institute of Sport Science at the University of Oldenburg.
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