Strukturierte Individualisierung: Über das zeitdiagnostische Potenzial der Freundschaft

As part of the self-reflection of modern societies, the sociological diagnosis of the times analyses processes of social change and their underlying structural dynamics, focusing on specific empirical phenomena from which it derives and illustrates its diagnosis. This article presents the phenomenon of friendship as one such subject area: Modern society’s demands on the individual are reflected in the discourse on friendship and, vice versa, social developments are negotiated in friendship relationships.

In order to illustrate the special time-diagnostic potential of friendship, the article first presents central characteristics of friendship as a structural type of personal relationship. It then brings together two strands of sociological theory of modernisation in order to demonstrate the specific time-diagnostic potential of friendship: Differentiation and individualisation. On the one hand, in functionally differentiated societies, friendship takes on a socially (re)integrating and thus structure-preserving function on a societal level. On the other hand, friendship has a highly individualising effect and provides a space for the self-constitution of modern subjects. Friendship discourses can thus be used to reconstruct not only the relationship between the individual and society and the processes of de- and reintegration of individuals associated with modernisation, but also the constitution of modern subjects itself. Finally it is precisely the ambivalences of this “structured individualisation” that provide sociology with a time-diagnostic instrument in friendship research.