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Book Summary & Highlights: Social Acceleration

Book Summary & Highlights: Social Acceleration

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Pub Date:

2013

Amazon Summary

Hartmut Rosa advances an account of the temporal structure of society from the perspective of critical theory. He identifies three categories of change in the tempo of modern social life:

  • Technological acceleration, evident in transportation, communication, and production
  • Acceleration of social change, reflected in cultural knowledge, social institutions, and personal relationships
  • Acceleration in the pace of life, which happens despite the expectation that technological change should increase an individual's free time.

According to Rosa, both the structural and cultural aspects of our institutions and practices are marked by the "shrinking of the present," a decreasing time period during which expectations based on past experience reliably match the future. When this phenomenon combines with technological acceleration and the increasing pace of life, time seems to flow ever faster, making our relationships to each other and the world fluid and problematic. It is as if we are standing on "slipping slopes," a steep social terrain that is itself in motion and in turn demands faster lives and technology. As Rosa deftly shows, this self-reinforcing feedback loop fundamentally determines the character of modern life.

About Author: Hartmut Rosa

Hartmut Rosa is professor of sociology and political science at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. He is the author of Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality and coeditor, with William E. Scheuerman, High-Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity

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Author Presentations

Big & Surprising Ideas

  • "The simple claim that in modernity “everything goes faster and faster,” which is pervasive not just in the features pages and the popular press but also in academic works, is both undifferentiated and transparently false."
  • Technology creates time
  • Rapid cultural change actually hides a lack of development
    • Humans are moving their physical less and less
  • Acceleration erodes the ability of societies and individuals to make meaning
  • Acceleration leads to
    • Dehistorification
    • Hurry sickness (yuppie flu)
  • Five Sources Of Deceleration. Rather than saying, everything is going to accelerate in a smooth, curve, he goes deep into five sources of deceleration and their implications.
    • Natural geophysical, biological, and anthropological speed limits
    • Territorial, cultural, and structural “islands of deceleration,”
    • Action blockages and slowdowns that occur again and again as unintended side effects of acceleration
    • Intentional deceleration
    • Cultural and structural rigidity

Contents

Introduction

Temporal Structures In Society

Part 1. The Categorical Framework Of A Systematic Theory Of Social Acceleration

Acceleration And The Culture Of Modernity

Acceleration is fundamentally intertwined with modernity since the Renaissance

Since the Renaissance, which began a historically reconstructible debate concerning the “newtime” (neue Zeit), the defenders and the despisers of modernity have agreed on one point: its constitutive experience is that of a monstrous acceleration of the world, of life, and of each individual’s stream of experience. A series of recent historical works has made clear just how much the entire cultural history of modernity to the present day can be interpreted in light of this basic experience. Their common focus lies in the construal of the cultural self-understanding of modernity as a reaction to a changed experience of time and space.1
In his book of that title (with the subtitle The Experience of Modernity) Berman writes: There is a mode of vital experience—experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils—that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience, “modernity.” . . . Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, “all that is solid melts into air.”3
Berman consistently speaks of modernism as a reaction to modernization.

Symptoms Of Acceleration

If we view the emergence of a new medical-pathological discourse of acceleration or the widespread diagnosis of a new speed-induced kind of sickness as the most unambiguous symptom of a phase of comprehensive acceleration, as Joachim Radkau suggests, then the flood of talk about “neurasthenia” that followed the introduction of this diagnostic category by George M. Beard in 1881 (and is echoed in Adams’s text) also bears witness to the significance of the changes occurring around 1900.41 It is this that leads Radkau to name the first decade of the twentieth century the “age of nervousness” (Nervosität).42 If one uses this kind of indicator, then it turns out that there are strong signs of a new, recent phase of acceleration in the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century: from “hurry sickness” and “yuppie flu” to the recently ubiquitous attention deficit disorder in children and youth and on to clinical depression as a reaction to the speed demands of a globalized society, the diagnoses of speed-induced sicknesses are proliferating at present.4

Historical Dosing

Historical Underdosing: To live in a period of time when nothing seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts. Historical Overdosing: To live in a period when too much seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.”56

Modernization, Acceleration, and Social Theory

Acceleration In Classical And Contemporary Social Theories

By means of successive waves of acceleration through revolutions in transportation, transmission, and, most recently, transplantation (i.e., increases in speed through the organic fusion of body and machine, of genetic engineering and computer technology) we arrive at the victory of time over space.95 The space-time dispositif is replaced by a speed-space, the coordination of action increasingly takes place in and through time and less and less through space, and chronopolitics gains in importance relative to geopolitics.

Acceleration And Modernization: Attempt At A Systematization

"Social formations and social developments can then be investigated under each of these four aspects in a principled way. If one places these perspectives in relation to the approaches that were reviewed in the previous section, it becomes apparent that the modernization process can be and has been culturally interpreted as rationalization, social-structurally as differentiation, with respect to the development of the predominant subjective self-understanding or personality type as individualization and in terms of the relation to nature as instrumentalization or domestication

Preliminary Considerations: Acceleration And Escalation

Three Dimensions Of Social Acceleration

Technical Acceleration

The most evident and consequential shape that modern acceleration takes is the intentional, technical, and above all technological (i.e., machine-based) acceleration of goal-directed processes. Paradigmatic examples are processes of transportation, communication, and production (of goods and services). This is the form of acceleration that can be most easily measured and demonstrated (despite all the problems confronting an exact establishment of average velocities). The history of the acceleration of movement from premodern and preindustrial society to the present, and hence from travel on foot, horse riding, and the steamship to the railway, the automobile, and finally to the airplane and the spaceship is familiar to everyone and well documented, so it requires no repetition. In its course top speeds multiplied from roughly 15 to well over 1,000 kilometers per hour, or, if one takes into account space travel, to several thousand kilometers per hour, therefore at least by a factor of 102.17 Leaving aside the absolute top speed, the speed limits of the particular modes of transport also climbed at the same time: cars, ships, locomotives, airplanes, space shuttles, and even bicycles today achieve much higher speeds than when they were introduced, although we are approaching the limits of the possible (and reasonable).
The most exact measure for the form of social acceleration connected to the acceleration of transport would be the quantity of goods and persons that can be transported per unit of time and their average velocity. As we will see in the next section, these two values sometimes stand in a negative relationship to each other: the more persons that simultaneously wish to move, the lower their average speed if congestion effects occur as a result of overloaded infrastructures. This explains why the average speed of several forms of transport (for instance, urban traffic) seems to sink rather than climb.

Annihilation Of Space By Time

The experience of space is to a great extent a function of the length of time it takes to traverse it. (“How far is it from Berlin to Paris?”—“10 hours by car or one hour by plane.”) While in the eighteenth century it took several weeks to get from Europe to America, today the journey only requires around six hours by plane. As a consequence the world seems to have shrunk to something like a sixtieth of its original size. Accelerating innovations in transportation are therefore mostly responsible for what can be described, following David Harvey and others, as “the annihilation of space by time.”19

Communication Technologies

While the inversion of the priority of space into a priority of time has been caused by the acceleration of movement, the acceleration of information transmission has been just as influential. The narrative of acceleration in this case is also well-documented and familiar: from “marathon runners” through horse-riding messengers, smoke signals, and mail pigeons to telegraphs and telephones and finally to the, in the truest sense of the word, u-topian, space-less Internet, where pieces of information lose their location and can be transmitted at the speed of light. In the course of this development it was not just the speed of message transmission but also the quantity transmittable per unit of time (in a particular medium) that continuously grew. This “transmission revolution” comes a bit later chronologically than the “transport revolution” and appears to be in various respects a reaction to the latter.20 According to Karlheinz Geißler’s estimate, in the twentieth century alone the speed of communication increased by a factor of 107; Francis Heylighen even calculates the increase during the last two hundred years to be a factor of 1010.21 Presumably, however, what is decisive for the character of interpersonal communication is less the quantity of data that machines can make available worldwide at the speed of light than the fact that both asynchronous (i.e., through e-mail or answering machine) and synchronous communicative interactions are possible at any time independent of the respective location of the conversation partners.

Five Categories Of Inertia

  • Natural limits to speed (geo-physical, physical, biological, anthropological). Processes whose duration and velocity absolutely cannot be manipulated or can be only at the price of a massive qualitative transformation of the process accelerated.
  • Islands of Deceleration (Amish). Further, one naturally finds both territorial and social niches or oases of deceleration that have until now been partly or entirely left out of the accelerating processes of modernization. In these places, in these groups (e.g., in certain sects like the Amish communities in Ohio or in socially excluded groups) or these contexts of practice,60 it literally appears that “time stood still”: this customary figure of speech indicates a social form that is resistant to such processes, one that becomes increasingly anachronistic in comparison with the surrounding temporally dynamic social systems.
  • Slowdown As Dysfunctional Side Effect. Without a doubt, the most well-known example of dysfunctional deceleration is the traffic jam: for instance, for several years the average speed of traffic in American urban centers has been sinking as a result of the continuous rise in traffic levels. With respect to pathological slowdowns, recent research yields increasing support for the notion that depression and related disorders may appear as a pathological reaction to and withdrawal from the social pressure to accelerate. In phases of depression it often seems to the sick person that time stands still or turns into a toughened mass.62 One can also include in this category the exclusion of employees from the labor force insofar as its structural ground lies in escalations of tempo (and hence productivity) in the production process, something that often results in the inability of those affected to keep up with the high speed of work and innovation demanded, leading to extreme deceleration in the form of undesired unemployment.63 Economic recessions, characterized in English-speaking regions precisely as “slowdowns,” can themselves also presumably be interpreted as dysfunctional side effects of the successful acceleration of the production process.64
  • Two Forms Of Intentional Deceleration. (ideological) decelerating movements, which often appear as a basically oppositional force with decidedly antimodern features, and slowdown efforts that aim at maintaining or even promoting functional and accelerative capabilities (whether individual or social) and thus actually represent, in the end, strategies of acceleration.
    • Ideological Movement. The longing for a lost world of calm, stability, and leisure that is almost constitutive of modernity is borne by fantasy images of premodernity that become connected in social protest movements to the ideas of a decelerated post- or countermodernity.
  • Structural And Cultural Rigidity. Perhaps the most interesting form of an (at least superficially) opposing deceleration in the context of a theory of social acceleration are the phenomena of cultural and structural rigidification or crystallization, already encountered multiple times, that constitute the fifth and last category of slowdown or inertia. As has been shown, they are paradoxically closely connected to social manifestations of acceleration and have led to theories, such as those of the “end of history,” the “exhaustion of utopian energies,” “cultural crystallization” and the “utopia of the zero-option,”86 that postulate a paralyzing standstill in the inner development of modern societies complementary to the diagnosis of an acceleration of social change.

On The Relation Between Movement And Inertia In Modernity

In principle, two possibilities are conceivable here.

  • Equilibrium. The first consists in a basic equilibrium of the forces of inertia and movement, i.e., we find processes of both acceleration and deceleration in the temporal structures of society without being able to identify a dominant long-term trend.
  • Acceleration. The second, in contrast, rests in the possibility that the balance actually shifts in the direction of movement and acceleration, i.e., in favor of progressive dynamization. Such a diagnosis would be justified if (and only if) discernible (and nonfunctional) elements of slowdown and inertia were proved to be either residual or reactive with respect to the forces of acceleration
Thus it becomes apparent that the relationship between inertia and movement in the history of modernity is not to be understood as a linear advance from the former to the latter and hence as a linear acceleration of social change. Rather, in a peculiar way, it follows more closely the dialectical developmental logic of forces of production and relations of production worked out by Marx and Engels. It seems that the dynamic forces of acceleration themselves produce the institutions and forms of practice they need in accordance with the respective requirements of their further unfolding and then annihilate them again upon reaching the speed limits those forms have made possible. From this perspective, surprisingly, it appears that it is the increase of speed rather than the unfolding of forces of production (though these are naturally closely connected to the acceleration dynamic) that is the real driving force of (modern) history. However, such a way of looking at the modern process of acceleration naturally harbors the danger of unreflectively making acceleration into a macrosubject of history.

Mechanisms And Manifestations: A Phenomenology Of Social Acceleration

Technical Acceleration And The Revolutionizing Of The Space-Time Regime

Slipping Slopes: The Acceleration Of Social Change And The Increase Of Contingency

The Acceleration Of The "Pace Of Life" And Paradoxes In The Experience Of Time

Objective Parameters: The Escalation Of The Speed Of Action

Subjective Parameters: Time Pressure And The Experience Of Racing Time

Temporal Structures And Self-Relations

Causes

The Speeding Up Of Society As A Self-Propelling Process: The Circle Of Acceleration

Acceleration And Growth: External Driving Forces Of Social Acceleration

Time Is Money: The Economic Motor

The Promise Of Acceleration: The Cultural Motor

The Temporalization Of Complexity The Socio-Structural Motor

Summing up, we can observe here that the search for the causes of the modern acceleration dynamic has led beyond the logic of the self-propelling circle of acceleration that was worked out in chapter 6 to three further, as it were, “external” driving motors whose complex complementary interaction is capable of explaining the deep-seated relationship of mutual escalation between growth and acceleration that is so characteristic of modernity. This relation proves to be: 1. Structurally a linkage of the increase and temporalization of complexity 2. Culturally a consequence of a conception of the world in which acceleration, as a strategy for aligning the time of the world and the time of life, becomes a secular replacement for eternity 3. Economically a result of the logic of capital valorization (cf. figure 7.1). Each of these three driving principles can be primarily attributed to one of the three dimensions of acceleration, although, naturally, given the way the circle of speed functions, each “motor,” in addition, always drives the spiral of acceleration as a whole: the economic logic serves as a primary accelerator for technical acceleration, the cultural logic of escalation drives forth the acceleration of the pace of life, and the structural principle of functional differentiation accelerates social change in a historically unprecedented way. In the last part of our causal analysis, we need to inquire about the institutional conditions that historically enabled and supported the unfolding of this interconnection of escalation and acceleration.

Power, War, and Speed: State and Military As Key Institutional Accelerators

Consequences

Acceleration, Globalization, Postmodernity

The claim to be justified in what follows is that developed societies of the Western type have experienced a further surge of acceleration in recent decades that once again transformed their foundational space-time regime and brought them to a critical tipping point for individual and collective forms of selfhood, identity, and agency.

Acceleration Indicators

1. Natural speed limits are attacked with redoubled fury (for example, where an attempt is made to stimulate infant learning even before birth, where the acceleration of brain functions by computer-technological implantations is pondered, or where biological changes through genetic engineering are achieved in a fraction of the time that natural cultivation would require for a similar result) 2. Social islands of deceleration are everywhere coming under increased erosive pressure (as when modern traditions practiced for decades, for instance, in university systems, but also in production processes and even in transportation systems, fall victim to rationalizing measures) 3. In op-ed pages and academic journals there are increasing reports of dysfunctional side effects in the form of pathological individual “deceleration reactions” such as “hurry sickness” or the “national malaise,” depression.13 At the same time, it seems that in our cultural self-observation the impression is growing stronger that accelerated social change is only occurring at the “user interface” of society and actually hides a deep-seated cultural standstill.14 Meanwhile, the “ideological” call for deceleration is swelling tremendously. Possibly the most interesting development, though, is occurring in the domain of functional or accelerative deceleration. As I worked out in the previous chapter, the pressure to accelerate has now become so great that the braking and steering institutional scheme of “classical modernity,” which enabled long-term acceleration precisely through its short-term braking effect—the economic activity of the state is doubtless to be placed in this category15—can no longer withstand the “unlimited acceleration” of late modernity. The consequences are still unforeseeable.16
The exchange or movement of information, money, commodities, and people, or even of ideas and diseases, across large distances is not new: what is new is the speed and lack of resistance with which such processes transpire.18
Naturally, this reduction of the costs, resistances, and time needed to overcome distances has effected a quantitative increase of the corresponding volume of transactions. Therefore, David Held and his colleagues, in their meticulous empirical study, can characterize globalization as a state defined simultaneously by measures of extensity, intensity, velocity, and impact propensity.19 Because extensity, i.e., the large spatial extension of transaction processes, is an analytically defining criterion of globality, an alteration in the degree of globalization can only be measured by the other three parameters. Thus the investigation of Held and colleagues quite consistently yields the result that the newness of contemporary globalization consists above all in an escalation of the global velocity and intensity of transactions in many spheres of society.20 The heightening of the degree of impact propensity is then primarily a consequence of increases in those two dimensions. Both increases of velocity and of intensity, however, illustrate nothing other than processes of social acceleration: the first dimension comprises the acceleration of transportation and communication, the latter the escalation of the number of transactions per unit of time.
The contraction or annihilation of space by time or, better, by acceleration is a constitutive feature of modernity per se and as such is certainly nothing new. But it occurs in historical waves that lead, in particular following the introduction of new transportation and communications technologies... Therefore, a new wave of time-space compression has wide-ranging social and cultural consequences, which are definitely capable of founding a qualitatively new society when the critical tipping points of an existing regime are passed.
Temporal orientation without a spatial foundation seems to be a difficult undertaking.
The new world order identified in the diagnoses of globalization and post-modernity is therefore not free from relations of power and domination, but these are no longer democratically legitimated and no longer politically accountable: from the viewpoint of individual and collective actors they prove to be unchecked, unsteered, and unsteerable. In this sense acceleration is unmasked as a political strategy of immunizing the power of streams that underlies the political project of globalization, understood as a politics of eliminating the modern demand for democratic steering.45
The contemporary age consists in the fact that the tempo of social change has surpassed a critical threshold—namely, that of the succession of generations—and therefore compels a pattern of time perception and time processing that can be described as the temporalization of time itself and hence as a detemporalization of life, history, and society. As I will show, the temporal-structural conditions of the predominance of ideas of a “timeless time,” a static-dynamic simultaneity, and the end of history can be almost effortlessly reconstructed with the help of this concept of the acceleration-induced transformation of individual and cultural time perspectives.
Both the fragmentation, multiplication, and diffusion of social identities (“the end of the subject”) and the apparent abandonment of a political shaping and normative steering of society (“the end of politics”) are equally central themes of postmodern social theory.

Situational Identity: Of Drifters And Players

Situational Politics: Paradoxical Time Horizons Between Desynchronization And Disintegration

Acceleration And Rigidity: An Attempt To Redefine Modernity

My Summary

  • There is a content perspective where you look at everything changing.
  • There is a structural perspective where you look at the rigidity that holds the content.
  • In this chapter, he makes the case that content acceleration causes structural rigidity.
  • In addition, there is a contraction of the present — the length of paradigms decreases
  • People loss their direction
  • Change doesn’t create a feeling of progress
  • What creates a feeling of progress is…
  • Loss of direction creates a psychological sense of standing still.
  • We have devices which move us fast physically.
  • But we are actually moving less and less.
  • Even when we are moving in a transportation vehicle (ie, car), we are not physically moving our body. We are like a postage parcel. (Virilio 1993)

Highlights

it is undeniable that modernization implies an acceleration of structural change insofar as it increases the speed of change in familial and employment structures and causes associations and milieus to tend to become short-lived and volatile.7 This makes it increasingly difficult to identify associational structures that are socially and politically significant. Both structural developments are accompanied by potentially problematic side effects.

Contraction of the present: “The progressive shortening of the periods of time for which one can count on stable stocks of knowledge, action orientations, and forms of practice.”

The acceleration of cultural change in the form of comparatively faster and easier changes in lifestyles, fashions, leisure time practices, stocks of knowledge, familial, spatial, political, and religious bonds and orientations thus constitutes one of the main traits of cultural modernization.

Challenge to paradox of choice: “Regardless of how self-evident and commonplace they may sound, all these claims about growing choices over social contexts give not just a crude but a downright misleading and one-sided picture of the realities of a modern social structure. They serve me here merely as a foil against the backdrop of which I would like to consider the exactly opposite claim: namely, that it is precisely modern societies which are characterized by a high degree of rigidity and inflexibility.”9

Principle of constant sums: “the more options that we make available to ourselves, the less optional is the institutional framework with whose help we make them available.”10

To the extent that the material structures of the lifeworld, the networks of relationships and associational structures, and the concrete value orientations, practices, and action orientations change, the abstract structural logics that drive substantial societal transformations harden into the “iron cage” bemoaned by Max Weber. Frenetic standstill therefore means that nothing remains the way it is while at the same time nothing essential changes.

Frenetic Standstill: Frenetic standstill therefore means that nothing remains the way it is while at the same time nothing essential changes.

The counter-diagnosis here is that the rapid cultural change actually hides a lack of development. For reasons specifically arising from acceleration that I have worked out in previous chapters, the perception of an “end of history” and a “return of the ever same” even comes to overshadow the perception of profound transformation.11 Society thereby loses its character as a project, as something to be shaped through political action; it has exhausted, so it seems, its utopian energies and resources of meaning. Correspondingly, one can observe an astonishing stability and solidification on the cultural side of the modernization process, a fact that is quite susceptible to interpretation as ongoing “pattern maintenance,” to use Talcott Parsons’s term. From a cultural perspective, the value orientations of activism, universalism, rationalism, and individualism prove to be the necessary complementary principles of the mutually escalating interconnection of growth and acceleration.12 Therefore, from both cultural and structural points of view, the history of acceleration and modernity can also be told without contradiction as the story of a progressive rigidification whose traces are also visible from a psychological perspective, i.e., in relation to the development of personality and individual relations to self. As I have shown, the acceleration or compression of episodes of action and experience constantly threatens to flip over from a stimulating “heightening of sensory life” (Steigerung des Nervenlebens, Simmel) into its opposite, namely, the experience of an eventless, existential tedium (l’ennui) and, in extreme cases, even the pathological experience of the “frozen” time of depression. Our finding, then, is that in both the individual and the collective case the impression of a standstill (in spite of or precisely because of a very dynamic field of events) is created by the transition from a form of movement that is experienced as directed to a directionless dynamization.

Physical Movement Decreasing

According to him, the progressive speed revolutions of transportation, transmission, and finally transplantation lead paradoxically to a growing physical immobility of, in the first place, the human body, but potentially of the whole material universe. The switch from forward motion with the help of one’s own bodily power to motion using the metabolic speed of external entities (e.g., riding horses or carriages) already slowed down the speed and movement of one’s own body. However, it was only in the wake of the “dromocratic revolution,” in which the discovery of technical speed replaced the metabolic, body-bound production of tempos, that human beings became a passively borne, more or less tied up, “parcel”: for instance, in automobiles, planes, and, above all, in rockets. In other words, they became by and large unmoving moved objects that sit tight in a “projectile” and are thereby also increasingly sealed off from the sensory experience of movement.14
The fact that we have to move our bodies from time to time while we are, as it were, “idling,” i.e., not really going anywhere at all (for instance, running on treadmills), simply in order to keep them functional, just confirms their acceleration-historical obsolescence from this point of view.
With the transition from transportation to transmission as the leading medium of acceleration, the movement of one’s own body across the surface of the earth is increasingly replaced by the “channeling and downloading” of the world through the TV and the computer: to the extent that physical mobility is replaced by much faster digital and virtual transmission,

As complexity increases, rigidity and error increase?

Beyond this, the technologically accelerated mastery and processing of nature is accompanied by a growing risk of systematically incalculable breakdowns and accidents, as Charles Perrow showed in a much discussed study.16 These suddenly and unexpectedly bring the rapid processing of nature enabled by modern industrial technology to a standstill. So here again accelerated movement flips over into paralyzed inertia: a server crash in a computer network can illustrate this just as well as a necessary shutdown of a nuclear reactor.

Erosion of resources for meaning making

As I have shown, the processes of losing control (Steuerung) and disintegration that accompany the functional differentiation of society can be interpreted as an effect of desynchronization under conditions of acceleration. Moreover, the erosion of resources of meaning, as the “flip side” of rationalization that seemingly culminates in the extinguishing of meaning once and for all in posthistoire, is caused not least by the accelerated devaluation or invalidation of traditions, bodies of knowledge, and action routines as well as the continual alteration of associational structures.

From mastery of nature to its destruction

Further, the inversion of the mastery of nature into the destruction of nature (and the potential destruction of ourselves by nature) seems to be primarily a result of a lack of respect for the “intrinsic temporalities” of nature.

Feeling of loss of autonomy

Last, the widespread alarm in cultural criticism concerning a loss of autonomy (in “mass culture”) that paradoxically accompanies and complements the process of individualization is grounded in the acceleration-induced experience of “uprootedness” and/or “alienation.” Such an experience is expressed, for instance, in the growing feeling of not having any time (for that which is “genuinely” important) even though more and more time resources are being saved by means of technological acceleration.17

Capitalism is a side effect of acceleration

the various phases and manifestations of capitalism can be conceived as expressions of a unified logic of acceleration.

Conclusion: Frenetic Standstill? The End Of History

IF ONE TAKES SERIOUSLY THE idea that the constitution of society and social processes is radically temporal in nature, then talk of the acceleration of society does indeed appear to be justified.
One may assert more generally that in the history of modernity each wave of technological, organizational, or cultural acceleration at first encounters massive resistance and widespread skepticism but eventually triumphs, gradually silencing its critics.
Nevertheless the simple claim that in modernity “everything goes faster and faster,” which is pervasive not just in the features pages and the popular press but also in academic works, is both undifferentiated and transparently false.

Three Fundamental Dimensions Of Social Acceleration

  • Technical (transportation, communication, production)
  • Social Change (structures, knowledge, social practices, and action orientations that lead to changes in fashions, lifestyles, work, family structures, political and religious ties, etc.)
  • Pace Of Life "represents a reaction to the scarcity of (uncommitted) time resources. This is why, on the one hand, it is expressed in the experience of stress and a lack of time, and, on the other, it can be defined as an increase in the number of episodes of action and/or experience per unit of time."

Time Scarcity

Technical acceleration and the acceleration of the pace of life stand in a peculiar paradoxical relationship to each other: the former frees up time resources by shortening the duration of processes and thus by itself leads to a decrease of the pace of life; prima facie, it makes more free time available. Therefore, the fact that modern society is characterized by the simultaneous appearance of both forms of acceleration requires an additional explanation. I have located this in a specific connection between growth and acceleration: a scarcity of time resources in the face of simultaneous technical acceleration can only occur when the quantitative rates of increase (of the production of goods and services, of the number of communications performed, of the distances covered, of the completed activities, etc.) surpass the rates of acceleration of the corresponding processes. The more the rates of acceleration lag behind the rates of growth, the greater the time scarcity will be. On the other hand, the more the former outpace the latter, the more time resources will be freed up.

Forces Of Deceleration

  1. Natural geophysical, biological, and anthropological speed limits
  2. Territorial, cultural, and structural “islands of deceleration,”
  3. Action blockages and slowdowns that occur again and again as unintended side effects of acceleration
  4. Intentional deceleration
  5. Cultural and structural rigidity

How will the history of acceleration unfold, or how will it end?

  1. Formation of a new form of institutional facilitation and stabilization of the acceleration process and thus the attainment of a new equilibrium at a higher level of speed.
  2. Abandonment of modernism. "Definitive abandonment of the project of modernity, which could lead to the emergence of genuinely “postmodern” forms of subjectivity and a new kind of (sub-)politics (for instance, in the sense of the spontaneous self-organization of the “multitude” hoped for by Hardt and Negri) that would dispense with the claims of autonomy and control and for just this reason be able to affirm late modern manifestations of social acceleration. New modes of perception, new ways to process speed, and new forms of individual and collective self-relations would have to develop, and, by definition, nothing can yet be said about them. Of course, synchronization problems would persist. The end of the history of acceleration would remain unforeseeable.
  3. Unbridled onward rush into an abyss (most likely according to Hartmutt). From a logical point of view, this abyss is characterized by the final collapse of the antinomies of movement and inertia and the realization of the vision, which has accompanied modernity from the very start, of a frenetic standstill as the flip side of a total mobilization. From an empirical point of view, however, presumably long before that point is reached the abyss will be embodied in either the collapse of the ecosystem or in the ultimate breakdown of the modern social order and its values under the pressure of growing acceleration pathologies and the power of the enemies these foster. It stands to reason that modern society will have to pay for the loss of the ability to balance movement and inertia with nuclear or climatic catastrophes, with the diffusion at a furious pace of new diseases, or with new forms of political collapse and the eruption of uncontrolled violence, which can be particularly expected where the masses excluded from the processes of acceleration and growth take a stand against the acceleration society.

Visuals

Four Aspects Of The Modernization Process

1. Culturally interpreted as rationalization

Increasing functional differentiation, and the related phenomena of a division of labor and increasing specialization, lead to impressive gains in productivity and the general ability to process complexity, but also a tendency toward societal disintegration.

2. Social-structurally as differentiation

3. As individuation with respect to the development of the predominant subjective self-understanding or personality type 4. In terms of the relation to nature as instrumentalization or domestication

image

Acceleration As Increase In Quantity Per Unit Of Time

Acceleration can then be defined as an increase in quantity per unit of time (or, logically equivalent, as a reduction of the amount of time per fixed quantity). Various things may serve as the quantity measured: distance traveled, total number of communicated messages, amount of goods produced (category 1) or the number of jobs per working lifetime or change in intimate partners per year (category 2) or action episodes per unit of time (category 3).

Acceleration as increase in quantity per unit of time
Acceleration as increase in quantity per unit of time

Now to understand the relationship between technical acceleration and acceleration of the pace of life it is of decisive importance to get the exact connection between quantitative growth and acceleration into view. If it is a matter of processes of continuous (i.e., uninterruptedly advancing) “production,” then acceleration results in exponential growth (cf. figure 2.2). A paradigm example of this kind of growth curve is, for instance, the increase in world population during the last three hundred years.6 Similar acceleration curves are found in, say, the rampant growth of cancer cells and also in the increase in the diffusion of commodities or technological innovations: for example in the amount of scientific publications or the number of Internet connections or e-mails sent per year.7

Exponential growth as a result of acceleration of continuous processes
Exponential growth as a result of acceleration of continuous processes

However, it is of crucial significance that processes of transportation, production, and communication, which constitute the focal points of technological acceleration, are all noncontinuous and therefore display no intrinsic tendencies of growth. The fact that today it is possible to cover the distance from A to B in a shorter time neither logically nor causally implies that we do (or should) cover these distances more frequently or control larger expanses, and, likewise, the possibility of communicating a certain quantity of signs in less time (across a certain distance) neither logically nor causally brings with it the duty or even the tendency to communicate larger quantities or more often. In itself the capability of producing a given quantity of goods faster is independent of any escalation of production. Yet if the quantity transported, communicated, or produced remains constant, the “pace of life” decreases rather than increases as a logical consequence of technological acceleration, since the time needed for the fulfillment of a given task shrinks: “free time” arises in the sense of a freeing up of formerly tied-down time resources (cf. figure 2.3). Under these conditions the problem of time scarcity progressively slackens.

Time use with constant quantity of activities in an age of technological acceleration
Time use with constant quantity of activities in an age of technological acceleration
So if the subjective phenomena of stress, hecticness, and lack of time are traced back over and over again in pop science literature to the immense technical acceleration of numerous processes, which at first glance appear to be the most powerful drivers of a ubiquitous social and cultural acceleration, then this is a result of the unreflective assertion that in modernity more or less “everything” becomes faster. This fallacy is as blatant as it is widespread. The dynamics and the temporal compulsions of social and psychic life in industrial and postindustrial society cannot be derived from achievements in technologically supported acceleration, since in fact the latter stand in direct logical contradiction to the former. The heightening of the “pace of life,” the temporal scarcity of modernity, arise not because but rather even though enormous gains in time through acceleration have been registered in almost all areas of social life. On the basis of this insight it is clear the acceleration of the pace of life or the growing scarcity of time is a consequence of a quantitative increase that has to be logically independent from the processes of technical acceleration: we produce, communicate, and transport not just faster but also more than earlier social epochs. For a progressive shortfall in time resources can in principle only arise if either more time is needed to tackle a given task, i.e., in cases of technical deceleration, or if the growth rate (of production of goods and services, of the number of transmitted communications, of distances covered, of activities to be completed) outpaces the rate of acceleration of the corresponding processes. Only in the latter case do technical acceleration and the acceleration of the pace of life appear simultaneously. This case occurs where, for instance, the quantity of distance to be covered (of goods to be produced, of communications) at an initial point in time t1 triples at a later point in time t2 while the speed of movement (of production, of communication) has only doubled. The more strongly the rates of acceleration lag behind the rates of growth, the greater the shortage of time will be; on the other hand, the more the former exceed the latter, the more time resources will be set free, i.e., the less scarce time will become. If the two rates of increase are identical, then the pace of life or the shortage (or excess) of time will not change, regardless of how high or low the rates of technical acceleration may be (figure 2.4).8 Thus the guiding hypothesis of this work runs as follows: modern society can be understood as an “acceleration society” in the sense that it displays a highly conditioned (voraussetzungsreiche) structural and cultural linkage of both forms of acceleration—technical acceleration and an increase in the pace of life due to chronic shortage of time resources—and therefore also a strong linkage of acceleration and growth. This implies that the average rate of growth (defined as increase of the total quantity of things produced, communicated, distances covered, etc.) exceeds the average rate of acceleration.9
"Free Time" and "Time Scarcity" as consequences of the relation of the rates of growth and acceleration. (1)=Decreasing, (2)=Increasing pace of life. When the rates are identical the pace of life does not change.
"Free Time" and "Time Scarcity" as consequences of the relation of the rates of growth and acceleration. (1)=Decreasing, (2)=Increasing pace of life. When the rates are identical the pace of life does not change.

And in fact there is now sufficient empirical evidence for the claim that the temporal resources “gained” or set free by technological acceleration, for instance, in the household by means of washing machines, microwaves, vacuum cleaners, etc., are simply tied up once again through corresponding quantitative increases in activity. Thus investigations from the 1960s and ’70s indicate that the time spent at home surprisingly tends to increase rather than fall with the number of household appliances. According to an extensive countrywide American study of time use from 1975 involving 2,406 respondents, owners of dishwashing machines spent on average one minute and owners of laundry machines four minutes more at home each day than adults without these appliances, and the vacuum cleaner saved only one minute.10 From this, John Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey conclude, in agreement with the hypothesis developed here, that “what likely occurred with other technology is happening with the microwave oven: potential time savings are turned into increased output or improved quality.”11

This pattern is also confirmed by the effects of the automobile on time resources: the possession of a passenger car did change the amount of time spent underway, but not in the direction of less. Instead, the acceleration-induced gain in time is invested in more frequent or longer travels so that in time budgets the time allotted for transportation seems to be invariant relative to the speed of movement.12

From the observation that the usage of time in particular fields of activity like the household and transportation remains relatively stable, i.e., behaves largely neutral with respect to technological innovations, Robinson and Godbey conclude that growth and acceleration rates develop in parallel, hence that gains in time from technology and losses in time from qualitative and quantitative intensification stay in balance. According to the definition we have developed, congruent rates of growth and acceleration are neutral with respect to the pace of life, although Robinson and Godbey as well as those questioned by them assert an acceleration of the pace of life (one the authors find inexplicable). If one assumes that it is not merely a question of an objectively unjustified phenomenon resulting from distorted subjective perception,13 then two mutually supplementary possible explanations present themselves, both of which are difficult to operationalize in time use studies: first, relative constancy in the time resources devoted to a particular kind of activity does not in any way confirm an agreement in rates of growth and acceleration since higher growth rates can be balanced out by a condensation (or thickening) of episodes of action or by “multitasking.”14 For instance if the speed of movement doubles through technological innovation, but the distance to be covered triples, then one way of keeping the transport time constant is to reduce time spent resting. Similarly, if the increase in the quantity of tasks outpaces technological acceleration, then the time spent at home can be held constant by, say, cooking and vacuuming at the same time where these activities were previously done in succession.15 In such cases the growth rate exceeds the rate of acceleration and, as a consequence, the pace of life quickens, since formerly free microtemporal resources within the time dedicated to a given field of activity now become tied up.

A second explanation for the quickening of the pace of life can be found in a specific “side effect” of new technologies: the opening up of new fields and new possibilities of action. Making use of these often requires additional time resources (one thinks for instance of the time use effects of the video recorder), and this may even lead to a net loss of free time resources. I will come back to this later. However, we can already conjecture at this point that the multiplication of options and contingencies is among the main causes of the acceleration of the pace of life.16 The former is nevertheless in no way a simple consequence of technological innovations. Indeed it is not even in general derivable from them without further assumptions (e.g., regarding why the complete exhaustion of new options or the opening up of new fields of action appears attractive in the first place). As will be shown later, it can only be more precisely understood in the context of the phenomena that have been classified here under the category of the acceleration of social change.

Keywords

  • Fragmentary Simultaneity . "The breaking up of national states and the overcoming of institutional boundaries between functional spheres, for instance, between art and the economy, the economy and politics, politics and science, etc."
  • Dromocratic Revolution. which is how Virilio interprets the industrial revolution),94 in the course of which “metabolic” speed (of human and animal bodies) is replaced by a new, ever increasable “technological” speed.
  • Keys of modernization process
    • Differentiation (Durkheim)
      • See also: division of labor and increasing specialization
      • "Functional differentiation causes acceleration and at the same time represents a promising strategy in the face of the pressure to accelerate because it makes possible the externalization of costs and the acceleration of systemic processing, hence also the (mutually reinforcing) escalation and temporalization of complexity."
      • This extraordinarily consequential aspect of modernization typically allows immense gains in processing speed and productivity. But these gains themselves tend to induce faster social change because they multiply social arenas of action; as a result there arises a very serious need for coordination and synchronization across domains that can only be met in the first instance by strict temporal regimentation and time discipline.

        • Rosa, Hartmut; Rosa, Hartmut; Rosa, Hartmut. Social Acceleration (New Directions in Critical Theory) . Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition.

      • Positive: Impressive gains in productivity and the general ability to process complexity
      • Negative: Social disintegration
    • Rationalization (Weber)
      • Efficiency increases in means-ends relationships and for processes
      • Negative: "The rationalization of cultural and social life leads to an erosion of meaning resources."
    • Domestication (Marx)
      • An escalation of exchange processes with nature.
      • Positive: Advancing technological domestication of nature that promised to liberate humankind from material want and thus usher in a transition from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom
      • Negative: Potential of ecological catastrophe.26
    • Individualization (Simmel)
      • "Individualization is a cause as well as an effect of social acceleration insofar as individuals are more mobile and flexible in adapting to social change and faster in making decisions than collectivities."
      • Negative
        • Mass culture: "The same processes that lead to the greater prominence of individuality in modern life also seem bound up with the emergence of an industrially produced and stereotyped “mass culture,” the social and political salience of “the masses” and other forms of “massification” that plague modern societies and seem to make nonsense of their promise to liberate individuals to realize their own “unique” possibilities.25"

        Rosa, Hartmut; Rosa, Hartmut; Rosa, Hartmut. Social Acceleration (New Directions in Critical Theory) . Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition.

  • Frenetic Standstill (see also polar inertia and directionless dynamization). "Frenetic standstill therefore means that nothing remains the way it is while at the same time nothing essential changes."
  • Weber's Ongoing Erosion Of Meaning. "Weber already saw the flip side of the Western process of rationalization as an ongoing erosion of meaning resources resulting from inherent necessities (Sachzwänge) that arise from the ruthless autonomization of structural dynamics and that in the end take the form of a spiritless iron cage whose logic (e.g., escalation and acceleration) cannot be stopped even when its continued existence proves to be highly irrational."
  • Globalization
    • New round or further escalation of time-space compression. —David Harvey
    • Progressive achievement of a new level of time-space distanciation, i.e., the enlargement of the extent of temporal and spatial capacities of social coordination. —Anthony Giddens
    • New condition, an altered space-time regime formed as a result of the most recent time-space compression. It is characterized spatially by the replacement of the stable and the fixed with perpetually moving “flows” and temporally by the dissolution of stable rhythms and sequences following the ubiquitous contemporization (Vergleichzeitigung) of even the noncontemporaneous.
    • Eliminate the hindrances to the circulation of “global flows.”
  • Dehistorification
    • New perception of time - inversion in our perception of time from sequential patterns to forms of simultaneity.
    • Collapse of a meaningful past or future horizon,
    • Research in the sociology and ethnology of time present us here with one unanimous finding containing two essential points: first, measurements of time, perceptions of time, and time horizons are highly culturally dependent and change with the social structure of societies. Otthein Rammstedt worked this out systematically in an influential essay that postulates four forms of experienced time and time consciousness that unfold in accordance with the evolutionary development of social structures and are accompanied by very different time horizons and thus produce radically different action orientations and self-relations.18 According to this scheme, simple, undifferentiated societies tend to have an “occasional” time consciousness whose experience of time only differentiates in general between a “now” and a “not now,” so that past and future are fused together as the (mythically constituted) Other of the present. The claim that human beings “always already” had at their disposal quite concrete and similar representations of past and future is thus rendered permanently suspect.19
  • Liquidity
    • In contrast, in premodern society time necessarily appeared as motionless and static, as a foil against whose traditionally defined background the undirected contingencies and vicissitudes of life transpired. The reason for this is that fundamental social structures changed more slowly than the complete turnover of the three generations that can be alive together at any given time. If the pace of social change is instead higher than that of the replacement of generations, then, as I will soon argue, the idea of stable personal identities can no longer be sustained. It is only in classical modernity, which lies between these two dynamic limiting cases, that each respective new generation can become the bearer of structural and cultural innovation, as Ansgar Weyman has shown.21 Thus a kind of intergenerational work of renewal, or generational project, is contained in the identity-finding task as previously defined, but this also comes with a promise of generational stability.
    • "These are reasons to consider “fluidity” or “liquidity” as fitting metaphors when we wish to grasp the nature of the present, in many ways novel, phase in the history of modernity.28"
    • Eternal Ephemerality - “The space of flows . . . dissolves time by disordering the sequence of events and making them simultaneous, thus installing society in eternal ephemerality.”30

Compression Of Space Through The Acceleration Of Transportation

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Technical Acceleration And The Transformation Of Relations To The World

Untitled

AccelerationChangeImplication

Space & Time

Dissolves the archaic bond between subjects and territorially delimited spaces

Human To Human

Bring each person into communicative connection with every other person around the world at all times Easier to dissolve and to change relationships Relationships capable of being maintained over large distances Increase and rapid turnover of communication partners Alteration of communications media, which undeniably influences the quality of social interaction and hence social relationships themselves.

Relationship to things

However, the transformation of our relationship to time and space, or the social space-time regime, is not the only way in which the mode of subjects’ “placement-in-the-world” is revolutionized by technical acceleration. Rather, one can assert in a simplified and schematizing formula that just as our relationship to space was above all transformed by the acceleration of transportation, our relationship to human beings was revolutionized by the acceleration of communication and our relationship to things by the acceleration of (re)production. All three types of acceleration have therefore contributed to the transformation of our relationship to time itself (cf. figure 3.2). The transformation of our relationships to space, to other humans, and to the material structures of the world of things follows the shared logic that is characteristic of the modernization process as a whole: it becomes, as it were, “liquefied,” i.e., transitory, quickly changeable, and contingent.18 Thus the mobilization of society through transportation technology dissolves the archaic bond between subjects and territorially delimited spaces, while the development of communications technology in modernity, which tends to bring each person into communicative connection with every other person around the world at all times,19 represents an essential presupposition for the transformation of social relationships in the modernization process. This transformation consists, in the first place, in the fact that patterns of association and relationship are no longer or to a lesser extent bound to one common geographical space (and thus, on the one hand, easier to dissolve and to change while, on the other, also capable of being maintained over large distances); in the second place, in the increase and rapid turnover of communication partners; and, in the third place, in the alteration of communications media, which undeniably influences the quality of social interaction and hence social relationships themselves. The manifold differences between face-to-face contact and mediated interaction are the most well-known example of this.20

Rosa, Hartmut; Rosa, Hartmut; Rosa, Hartmut. Social Acceleration (New Directions in Critical Theory) (pp. 104-105). Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition.

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Driving Forces Of Of Acceleration 1: The Circle Of Acceleration

The generalizable cause of the ubiquitous feeling of being, as it were, “always already too late” with respect to a “runaway world”16 is not an individual or collective waste of time or “dawdling,” but rather the growing structural incongruence of the time of the world and the time of life in the advance of modernization. The heightening of the pace of life in view of newly scarce time resources is thus a direct (and in the end unavoidable) consequence of the acceleration of social change
The circle of acceleration is thus a good example of the divergence of individual and collective rationality: what appears to be a solution to the problem of time scarcity from a microsocial perspective—the technical acceleration of goal-directed processes—proves to be an essential element of its causation at the macrosocial level. In everyday practical contexts this state of affairs is reflected in our desire for the maximal acceleration of all routine processes, which implies that everyone else with whom we come into contact should hurry up as much as possible so that we can have some time—an obviously self-undermining strategy. As we have already seen, though, the paradoxical time-reducing effect of technical acceleration shows up in still another way in our everyday behaviors, namely, in the alteration of the implicit temporal standards and rationalities of action: we send an e-mail message instead of a letter because this saves time resources (and of course also mental energy) and thereby risk already getting an answer a few hours (instead of several days) later and hence once again being under pressure to act. As the line of argument developed here has shown, this is also a form of the “contraction of the present,” one that harbors an inherent impulse toward the accelerated continuation of chains of communication and action.
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Driving Forces Of Of Acceleration 2: External Motors

Summing up, we can observe here that the search for the causes of the modern acceleration dynamic has led beyond the logic of the self-propelling circle of acceleration that was worked out in chapter 6 to three further, as it were, “external” driving motors whose complex complementary interaction is capable of explaining the deep-seated relationship of mutual escalation between growth and acceleration that is so characteristic of modernity. This relation proves to be: 1. Structurally a linkage of the increase and temporalization of complexity 2. Culturally a consequence of a conception of the world in which acceleration, as a strategy for aligning the time of the world and the time of life, becomes a secular replacement for eternity 3. Economically a result of the logic of capital valorization (cf. figure 7.1). Each of these three driving principles can be primarily attributed to one of the three dimensions of acceleration, although, naturally, given the way the circle of speed functions, each “motor,” in addition, always drives the spiral of acceleration as a whole: the economic logic serves as a primary accelerator for technical acceleration, the cultural logic of escalation drives forth the acceleration of the pace of life, and the structural principle of functional differentiation accelerates social change in a historically unprecedented way. In the last part of our causal analysis, we need to inquire about the institutional conditions that historically enabled and supported the unfolding of this interconnection of escalation and acceleration.
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Paradoxes Of Political Time

My thesis is thus that toward the end of the twentieth century the role of politics as a social pacesetter that was undisputed in classical modernity has been lost because the intrinsic temporality of the political is largely resistant to or incapable of acceleration (the pacesetter role now seems to be occupied by the economy). Political time horizons increasingly exhibit a highly paradoxical structure. As I hope to show, time within politics is becoming thoroughly disorganized and confused (durcheinander), and this is also bringing the classical modern conception of the role of politics in time to the brink of collapse. The paradoxical nature of political time in late modernity consists in the development of a twofold divergence of its constitutive time horizons and in the relationship of time resources to time needs. The accelerative pressure on the political system to deliver collectively binding decisions rapidly is in the first place a direct consequence of the acceleration of the tempo of development and change in other social systems, in particular in the areas of economic circulation and scientific-technical innovation. It brings about a situation in which the time resources available for a political
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First, if and so long as politics wants to maintain its claim to regulate the parameters of economic and technological development, it must either: 1. Adapt itself to the accelerated rate of innovation in the relevant social spheres and become, as it were, a “motorized legislator” (Carl Schmitt) 2. Decisively intervene in their developmental autonomy and thereby repeal the principle of functional differentiation in favor of a renewed political dominance.38 It could thus impose the (slower) change tempo of the political system on the other functional systems and bring about a kind of “forced resynchronization.” The latter option is the solution that acceleration-skeptical authors like Fritz Reheis or Matthias Eberling have in mind when they call for a politics of time intent on social deceleration: “the politics of time must stop the artificial acceleration of evolutionarily emergent processes through phased interventions or introduce deceleration,” as Reheis succinctly puts it.39

The Modernization Process 2a

Regardless of how self-evident and commonplace they may sound, all these claims about growing choices over social contexts give not just a crude but a downright misleading and one-sided picture of the realities of a modern social structure. They serve me here merely as a foil against the backdrop of which I would like to consider the exactly opposite claim: namely, that it is precisely modern societies which are characterized by a high degree of rigidity and inflexibility.”9
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He comes to the conclusion that this structural rigidity is the result of the specific mode in which contingency is processed in modernity. Through specialization and functional differentiation, this mode simultaneously brings about 1. A tremendous heightening of complexity and thus contingency and, as a result, 2. A sharpening of the systemic processing filters with which political, economic, scientific, and legal problems are identified and “solved.” The more options multiply and change, the more “the institutional and structural premises according to which contingency operates . . . transcend being at our political, or even intellectual, disposition.”

The Modernization Process 2b

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Types Of Modernity

  • Modernity
    • “Modernity is about the acceleration of time.” —Peter Conrad
  • Classical
  • Postmodernity
    • the world or “life” is no longer legible, comprehensible, and shapable from the perspective of subjects and politics—and also that it no longer needs to be, since aspirations to control and autonomy were only chimeras of modernity anyway.
    • Attainment of a social state in which the acceleration of social relations rooted in modernity surpasses a critical point or takes on a new quality such that the linearity and sequentiality of the perception and processing of problems and changes, at both individual and social levels, is broken up and the aspiration to integration is abandoned. The rapid pace compels a nonintegrated form of parallel processing that leads to fragmentation and a loss of steering, intelligibility, and malleability (Gestaltbarkeit) on the individual as well as the sociopolitical level.
    • it is in the nature of these streams, in particular streams of capital, to flow in another direction at the slightest political or economic resistance, it has become an urgent aim of (national state) politics to create the most favorable possible conditions of circulation in one’s own area of influence, because otherwise exclusion in the sense of avoidance or being passed by threatens—here one sees the novel residual relevance of territory postulated earlier.
  • Early
  • Late Modernity
  • Reflexive Modernization
  • Second Modernity

Second-Order Implications

  • Creeping irrelevance of space with respect to time (from spaces to flows)
  • Acceleration isn't just accelerating because of Moore's Law. It is more a loop. Faster cultural change and competition and expectations leads to faster technological evolution. It is a true hamster wheel—exciting and like a cage. It's like a roller coaster ride we cannot leave.
    • The increasing scarcity of time resources is unavoidable if actor orientations are to remain synchronized with structural developments.
    • "Social acceleration in modernity is not only driven by its own internal dynamic but also by, as it were, “external” cultural and structural causal factors that set the circle in motion and maintain and heat up the complex reciprocal dynamic of growth and acceleration even where it does not result from the feedback circle itself... Thus an intentional political interruption of the circle of acceleration must be capable of opposing the independent cultural and structural forces of acceleration and not just its internal dynamic."
  • There is a significant cost to decelerating time. This makes it hard for individuals to exit unless they have resources.
    • Nevertheless, the circle of acceleration turns out to be largely immune to individual attempts to interrupt it, pace the recommendations of self-help manuals. Whoever individually refrains from using time-saving techniques pays the price of a partial desynchronization: she cannot stay “up to date” and loses opportunities (which potentially become relevant to her later) because, for reasons of time, she must drop out of at least some contexts of interaction.
    • "The only ones who can manage this [creating an oasis of deceleration] (especially on a repeated basis) are those who are not dependent on holding all options open and who can, possibly by letting others work for them, ensure that in the following week they can catch up on the accumulated “time arrears”: one’s e-mail account will be full, the call will be made as well as the visit; if the TV program is really important, one can get the DVD, etc. All this leads to a sharpened scarcity of time resources outside the oasis of deceleration and thus several opportunities will be irrevocably lost. And, even aside from this, someone who stops being available in this way has to reckon with social obligations of justification since the technological possibilities have been incorporated into social expectations: “how come you didn’t visit me, call me, e-mail me?” In view of the considerable costs of individual deceleration, a rational actor will presumably choose the option of spending a weekend on the farm that keeps open all the technically possible opportunities, though with a strong resolve not to use them. Yet the fact that it would be easy to “just quickly send off the attachment” or “watch just this one TV program” or “drive to Freiburg for just this one concert” significantly changes the cost-benefit calculation regarding the use of technology and thus also shifts the burden of justification against the intended deceleration. If the possibilities of acceleration are even available on site, the “oasis” can hardly be preserved.

      • Rosa, Hartmut; Rosa, Hartmut; Rosa, Hartmut. Social Acceleration (New Directions in Critical Theory) (p. 158). Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition.

Rosa, Hartmut; Rosa, Hartmut; Rosa, Hartmut. Social Acceleration (New Directions in Critical Theory) (p. 157). Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition.

  • Harder and harder for society to metabolize the change
    • Adaptive lag
    • Creating historical meaning
    • Difficult to integrate developments into cultural world pictures, narratives, educational institutions, and patterns of interpretation.
    • philosophy is too slow for late modern society.
  • The end of politics
  • The end of the subject - The fragmentation, multiplication, and diffusion of social identities
  • Annihilation Of Space By Tim
    • The coordination of action increasingly takes place in and through time and less and less through space
    • Chronopolitics gains in importance relative to geopolitics.
    • [In the past], the experience of space is to a great extent a function of the length of time it takes to traverse it. (“How far is it from Berlin to Paris?”—“10 hours by car or one hour by plane.”)

      • Rosa, Hartmut; Rosa, Hartmut; Rosa, Hartmut. Social Acceleration (New Directions in Critical Theory) (p. 72). Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition.

  • Nomadism (no long-term commitments to space, things. etc)
  • Increasing power of capital over labor

Over-arching Mechanism

  • Technology is the core of modernization. "Waves of acceleration, as the core of the modernization process, are produced in particular by technical innovations and their industrial implementation. The introduction of the steam engine into factories and, soon after, the construction of railroads; the mass diffusion of bicycles and then automobiles and later planes; the acceleration of communication through telegraphs and then through telephones and finally through the Internet; the social entrenchment of transistor radios and “moving pictures”
  • Technology is reducing friction (fees, middle-men, digitization)
  • This multiplies the rate of flow, turnover and amount of flow just like a mountain eroding river banks to allow for follow (see Adrian Bejan's work).
  • This turns solids into flows
  • Examples of flows include atoms and bits:
    • Capital
    • Labor
    • Goods/Services
    • Diseases
    • Information
    • Risks
    • Ideas
  • Examples of things increasing per unit of time:
    • Category 1
      • Distance traveled
      • Total number of communicated messages
      • Amount of goods produced
    • Category 2
      • The number of jobs per working lifetime
      • Change in intimate partners per year
    • Category 3
      • Action episodes per unit of time
  • Acceleration comes in waves not as smooth, even, continuous
  • There is a new subjective experience with hurry sickness symptoms:
    • Experiences of standing still go along with the feeling of a heightening rate of change and action and even seem to be its complement or flip side.
    • Feeling a shortness of time (Time Famine)
    • Insomnia
    • "The busiest century in the world’s history was also the one afflicted by enervation, attracted by sleeping sickness.”52
    • "Collapse of a meaningful past or future horizon"e

Action Principles

  • Optionality. Avoid long-term commitments that require huge friction to get out of. "Being bound to a place and having insufficient time sovereignty (that is, being caught in the space of places and long-term commitments) are things that make the socially subordinate classes appear backward and “left behind” and signal a danger of exclusion."
  • Embrace Speed. Fundamentally, we can't avoid speed. If we wish it away, then we get the feeling of standing still while the world (social, politicial, technological, etc) changes around us.

Examples Of Acceleration

List From John Urry

  • Changes in information and communications technology that make possible a simultaneous worldwide exchange of and access to information and ideas
  • (Organizational-)technological changes that make the distinctions between day and night, workdays and weekends, free time and work disappear
  • The growing interchangeability of goods, places, and images in a “throwaway society”
  • The increasing fluidity and ephemerality of fashions, goods, work processes, ideas, and images
  • A sharpened “temporariness” of goods, jobs, careers, nature, values, and relationships
  • The often boundary-crossing prevalence of new commodities, flexible forms of technology, and enormous trash heaps
  • The growth of short-term labor contracts and a “just-in-time” workforce as well as the tendency to draw up long task lists
  • The increase of worldwide nonstop trade in securities and currencies
  • The growing “modularization” of free time, training and continuing education, and work
  • The extreme increase in the availability of goods and customs from highly different societies in all parts of the world
  • Growing divorce rates and other forms of the dissolution of households
  • Disappearing intergenerational trust and decreasing intergenerational solidarity
  • The (worldwide) feeling of an overly fast pace of life that is in contradiction with basic human experiences
  • Growing volatility of political voting behavior

Examples Of Oppositional Forces To Acceleration

Despite there being more interest in deceleration, that doesn't take away the fact that there are significant costs to it. Also, the reinforcing circle of acceleration is so strong that it would take huge amounts of people, institutions, etc mobilizing. There are also weird game mechanics that when when someone else slows down, there is a bigger advantage to accelerating.

Institutional

Compare Harvey: “Capitalism is always under the impulsion to accelerate turnover time, to speed up the circulation of capital and consequently to revolutionize the time horizon of development. But it can do so only through longterm investments (in, e.g., the built environment as well as in elaborate and stable infrastructures for production, consumption, exchange, communication, and the like). Moreover, a major stratagem of crisis avoidance lies in absorbing overaccumulated capital in long-term projects (e.g., the famous ‘public works’ launched by the state in times of depression) and this slows down the turnover time of capital” (2000b:58)

Slow Movement

Book

  • Fritz Reheis’ The Creativity of Slowness
  • Sten Nadolny’s Discovery of Slowness
  • Union for the Slowing Down of Time

Other

  • Spa Treatments
  • Vacations
  • Wellness Oases

Other Works & People Cited

  • Modern Times, Modern Places by Peter Conrad
  • Charles Perrow
  • Fritz Reheis’ The Creativity of Slowness
    • Fritz Reheis’s best seller, The Creativity of Slowness (Die Kreativität der Langsamkeit), presents us with a critique of the social demands of acceleration in modern society from a psychological and ecological perspective. Reheis builds his analysis of the temporal structures of late capitalist society, which are, in his view, dysfunctional, on the systems-theoretical model of three nested basic systems. 1. The environment or nature forms the comprehensive system for all social processes and is fundamental for the second level 2. The system culture/society 3. Physical and psychological system of the individual. Alterations at one level always affect both the other systems, though naturally the rates of change and the characteristic tempos (Eigenzeiten) of the respective systems differ: individuals can transform themselves or adapt faster than societies, and nature requires still longer periods of time to reproduce its resources or regenerate itself. The explicitly Marx-inspired “ecological-materialist” central thesis is then that unfettered capitalism (as the core element of the modern culture/society) disrespects the natural rhythms and tempos of all three systems because of an inherent compulsion to accelerate rooted in the law of profit.97 This desynchronizes and overtaxes the other systems’ capacities to adapt and learn both separately and in their mutual relationships, and that in turn leads to dysfunctional phenomena within and between all three systems.98 But Reheis’s analysis of the dynamic of acceleration itself does not go beyond Marx if he sees it as rooted in the evolutionary logic of capital. And furthermore he proceeds very selectively and one-sidedly in his interpretation of the consequences and limits of acceleration by reducing them all to the common denominator of “diseased people, declining society and desiccated nature.”99

Fritz Reheis’s best seller, The Creativity of Slowness (Die Kreativität der Langsamkeit), presents us with a critique of the social demands of acceleration in modern society from a psychological and ecological perspective. Reheis builds his analysis of the temporal structures of late capitalist society, which are, in his view, dysfunctional, on the systems-theoretical model of three nested basic systems. The environment or nature forms the comprehensive system for all social processes and is fundamental for the second level, the system culture/society, which in turn is prior to the physical and psychological system of the individual. Alterations at one level always affect both the other systems, though naturally the rates of change and the characteristic tempos (Eigenzeiten) of the respective systems differ: individuals can transform themselves or adapt faster than societies, and nature requires still longer periods of time to reproduce its resources or regenerate itself. The explicitly Marx-inspired “ecological-materialist” central thesis is then that unfettered capitalism (as the core element of the modern culture/society) disrespects the natural rhythms and tempos of all three systems because of an inherent compulsion to accelerate rooted in the law of profit.97 This desynchronizes and overtaxes the other systems’ capacities to adapt and learn both separately and in their mutual relationships, and that in turn leads to dysfunctional phenomena within and between all three systems.98 But Reheis’s analysis of the dynamic of acceleration itself does not go beyond Marx if he sees it as rooted in the evolutionary logic of capital. And furthermore he proceeds very selectively and one-sidedly in his interpretation of the consequences and limits of acceleration by reducing them all to the common denominator of “diseased people, declining society and desiccated nature.”99

Rosa, Hartmut; Rosa, Hartmut; Rosa, Hartmut. Social Acceleration (New Directions in Critical Theory) (p. 57). Columbia University Press. Kindle Edition.

  • All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity by Marshall Berman
  • Peter Glotz
  • Henry Adams, author of The Education Of Henry Adams has a chapter called "A Law Of Acceleration"
    • "Nothing so revolutionary had happened since the year 300. Thought had more than once been upset, but never caught and whirled about in the vortex of infinite forces. Power leaped from every atom, and enough of it to supply the stellar universe showed itself running to waste at every pore of matter. Man could no longer hold it off. Forces grasped his wrists and flung him about as though he had hold of a live wire or a runaway automobile; which was very nearly the exact truth. . . . Impossibilities no longer stood in the way. One’s life had fattened on impossibilities. Before the boy was six years old, he had seen four impossibilities made actual—the ocean steamer, the railway, the electric telegraph, and the Daguerrotype; nor could he ever learn which of the four had most hurried others to come. . . . Every day Nature violently revolted, causing so-called accidents with enormous destruction of property and life, while plainly laughing at man, who helplessly groaned and shrieked and shuddered, but never for a single instant could stop. The railways alone approached the carnage of war; automobiles and fire-arms ravaged society, until an earthquake became almost a nervous relaxation."
  • Virillo.
    • "Virilio’s reflections are particularly stimulating where it is a matter of interpreting the consequences of technological acceleration and its military-political driving forces or the complementarity of accelerating and inertial tendencies.
    • But one cannot get a systematic foundation for a theory of acceleration from his work, because, first, he rejects systematic theory building out of principle and instead structures his works with associative leaps, amassing countless neologisms, obscure analogies, and seemingly esoteric allusions, and second, with the self-confidence of an autodidact he foregoes any links to existing social theories. Yet it seems to me that the weightiest objection lies in the fact that Virilio’s approach remains conceptually truncated since he only conceives acceleration as technological acceleration and leaves no categorial place for the other two analytically independent aspects of acceleration, those of social change and the pace of life.
  • Hermann Lübbe
  • Anthony Giddens
  • Joseph Schumpeter
  • Ulrich Beck
  • David Harvey
  • Clause Offe
  • Manuel Castells
  • Frederic Jameson
  • John Urry
  • Bauman
  • Some of the few exceptions are the works of Paul Virilio, Fritz Reheis, and Kay Kirchmann, who all set themselves the task of a theoretical definition of social acceleration.
  • Reinhart Koselleck conjectures, we can become accustomed even to experiences of acceleration)
  • Siemens and Adams - process of acceleration itself accelerates insofar as the waves of acceleration in the various spheres of life appear in ever thicker sequences, such that the rate of change itself increases until we arrive at a permanent transformation, an idea suggested by the “laws of acceleration” postulated by Siemens and Adams.
  • Founding fathers of sociology
    • Weber
    • Emile Durkheim
    • Simmel
    • Ferdinand Tönnies,

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