These are texts on contingency, its cultural positivity, and its social normalization—on the relationship between modernity, postmodernity, and classical modernity—on architectures of functionalist socialization, spaces of institutionalized self-unfolding, and the political logic of totalitarian infrastructures—on urban revolts, metropolitan ways of life, and the ambivalence of mobility—on discourses of crisis, concepts of hope, and the sense of possibility as a mode of existence—on the middle class, mass culture, and the aestheticization of the social—on the border, the horizon, the sea, the Hansaviertel, and Potsdamer Platz—on Romanticism, the avant-garde, modern literature, and abstract painting—on progress, competition, rivalry, and the social compulsion toward permanent optimization.
The theory of modernity set out in these texts conceives of modernity as a culture of contingency – that is, as a reflexively constructed relationship to the world in which what is could also be otherwise, because it has no necessary basis for existence. Contingency is therefore not the negative consequence of modernity, as is widely asserted, but its positive prerequisite. Nevertheless, it is not ontologised here, but analysed as the modal structure of a society’s self-constitution in the light of its conceptual and material forms. This distinguishes this approach from the melancholic concepts of modernity, which understand modernity as the loss of a concrete totality of experience. The analyses presented here do not share such interpretations. Rather, their methodological stance is one of calculated distance from culturally critical diagnoses and socially critical problematisations that define modernity primarily in terms of alienation, deprivation and the erosion of order. Accordingly, contingency here is neither meaninglessness nor arbitrariness; nor does it manifest itself solely as insecurity, uncertainty or a lack of orientation. Contingency here is, first and foremost, openness to possibility. It is an openness that is realised concretely in the plurality of contemporary ways of life and abstractly in the potentiality of their future alternatives. And ‘modernity’ is the name given to the cultural form in which this openness to possibility is institutionalised. It stands for the self-conception of a society that constitutes itself through organised indeterminacy.
All of the texts on these pages have already been published elsewhere and are brought together here in digital form. They form the body of material on which this theory is based. The analytical coordinate system that organises it is spanned in terms of a conceptual basis and a systematic outline, which are also available as files. In addition, most of the articles, essays, and studies in this collection of texts are summarized in detailed, chronologically arranged abstracts. The paintings, photographs, and objects on these pages, however, are not elements of this theory. Rather, they represent the "other" of the theory—that is, they simply stand for themselves.