Sociology would not be a science if it did not correct the members' view of society. Where the latter see diversity, freedom and disorder everywhere, the subject must demonstrate uniformity, coercion and order, but at the same time also recognize change and thus be able to differentiate between old and new social formations. In order to still attract public attention here, the claimed distance between the old and the new must be as great as possible, which gives the diagnosis the necessary drama. Be it negative: for more and more people, their social position is deteriorating, or positive: for more and more people their self-realization goals and their actual situation converge.With his work, the Berlin cultural sociologist Andreas Reckwitz has provided a very successful example of such a diagnosis, about which a heated debate has broken out within the subject.
Reckwitz 'colleague Steffen Mau now accuses him of having made a scientific error in defining his class model of "late modernism". Namely, in the definition of the subject of his investigation he had “glued” something that had to be checked first. Reckwitz went into the field with an "extensive assumption of homology between structure and culture", in which the "status situation and cultural pattern or lifestyle" already go together. With Reckwitz, therefore, “class is never just the location, but always also culture”, with him “social class and socio-political camp” merge. That could happen in reality, according to Mau, but you have to check it empirically first and not already assume with your search patterns. Glue ensures a firm hold. Things then stick togetherwhich otherwise would not be connected at all. At Reckwitz, this would create a very compact block of a “cultural structure”, according to Maus.
Empiricism or dogmatism?
If that is true, Reckwitz would not be an empirical social researcher, but a socio-theoretical dogmatist who cannot depict the actual diversity of social reality in his model.
He would then even have to put up with the question of whether he doesn't want to depict this reality at all, because then it would not fit into his condensed frame narrative.
With Reckwitz, Mau complains much more cautiously, there could be “by definition no migration enemies or opponents of the right of adoption for homosexual couples” in the new academic middle class of the progressive creative professions.
Anyone who cultivates an ecological lifestyle must then also approve of the welcoming culture.
But there could be “significant fractions of the post-industrial working class” who did not want to be committed to the cosmopolitan canon of values assumed by Reckwitz. Conversely, after Reckwitz, all skilled workers would then have to vote for AfD, consume a lot of meat and drive diesel. However, it is quite possible that there are “expressions of singularity” in other milieus than the academics who are journalistically glorified by Reckwitz, which he simply overlooks because, by definition, they should not occur. For Reckwitz, pluralization does not appear as a cross-societal phenomenon, but as the privilege of the new middle class.
Of course, Reckwitz long ago admitted that there could indeed be “status inconsistencies” and that social reality was more diverse. But he postponed such critical inquiries to his theory into the field, according to Maus, where they would only appear as “deviations” or “gray areas”. It is not systematic. However, Reckwitz blocked his basic “assumption of consistency” from looking at reality, in which there are many more “both-and-types” that Mau calls “attitude combiners”. What Reckwitz describes as an almost irreconcilable camp of "opinion classes" is at best "attitude tendencies" for Mau. Mau recommends Reckwitz "relaxations": his triad of "culture, structure and (political) conflict" is much too rigid to deal with the changing social structures,To recognize mixed forms and interesting gray areas of society. The reality of life in the classes is presumably “much more confusing than any theory, no matter how clever”, according to Mau. It is also "less elegant and at the same time more shaggy". So less glue, more breaks, contradictions and surprises.