Rationalization Paradoxes of closure and openness

This dissertation examines the paradoxical logic of contemporary capitalism via a rehabilitation of the concept of rationalization. Originally coined by Max Weber, the concept was later developed by the Frankfurt School to capture the proliferation of ‘instrumental reason’—a technical logic of control advancing at the expense of political rationalities. Through this concept, they tracked tendencies of centralization, bureaucratization and commensuration—tendencies I summarize as ‘closure’. Following the sociocultural transformations of the 1970s, however, sociologists began to register a new, ‘second’ modernity, in which this closure gave way to what I term ‘openness’: the fluidity, flexibility and open-endedness of social life. The rationalization thesis was consequently shelved. And yet, closure and control have never disappeared, as is apparent in today’s digital platforms, neoliberal bureaucracy and resurgent authoritarianism. How, this dissertation therefore asks, can social closure and openness be conceptualized as interconnected phenomena?
My argument states that whereas social closure was always already paradoxically enveloped in social openness, today’s openness is conditioned by closure. Rather than a historical shift from closure to openness, I argue that the 1970s has instead seen a transformation in the ‘mode of rationalization’: a generalized strategy of navigating paradoxes of closure and openness. Synthesizing Niklas Luhmann’s sociocybernetics and critical theory, I reconceptualize the closure of instrumental reason as the ‘operational closure’ of technical systems which is nevertheless the product of a contingent history and which opens up a politically charged future. By contrast, today’s ‘cybernetic’ rationalization expressly seeks to put these paradoxes to work by provoking openness through closure. Hence, what is new to contemporary modernity is not the existence of paradoxes, but the way in which they are governed.