Modern society appears as if cursed to
be trapped in Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the
Tortoise: in our societies we run faster and
faster with the perception of remaining in the
same place. Hartmut Rosa, 47, professor of
Sociology at Friedrich Schiller University of
Jena, brilliantly explains such a paradox in his
studies on "social acceleration". Among his books
translated into English are Alienation and
Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of
Late-Modern Temporality and High Speed
Society, Social Acceleration, Power, and
Modernity, edited with William E Scheuerman.
Columbia University Press is about to publish
Social Acceleration: The Change in Temporal
Structures in Modernity".
Claudio
Gallo: The globalization are eating
world's space but in your studies you outlined
that post-modern society are eating
time as well.
Is social acceleration a necessity or is it a
"successful" accident across the course of
history?
Hartmut Rosa: In
fact, this question is not easy to answer. What is
evident is the fact that in modernity, social
acceleration has become a necessity. Modern
societies can only reproduce, they can only
maintain the status quo if they grow and innovate
and accelerate. You can easily see this in the
realm of the economy: if our modern, capitalist
economies do not grow, the system is in crisis and
decline. We lose jobs, companies close down,
tax-revenues decline, welfare systems are strained
and this puts pressure on the political system as
well. Thus, acceleration and growth are
necessities for modern societies, for they can
only stabilize dynamically: no stability without
acceleration.
But it has not always been
this way. Most pre-modern societies followed a
more static form of stabilization: they reproduced
and maintained the status quo by keeping things as
they are. This does not mean that they never
accelerated or innovated, but they only did so
accidentally or due to circumstantial pressures or
changes. They did not have an inherent need for
acceleration.
CG: We live in
a speed society, everything is going faster
leaving the individuals with a feeling to have to
cope with completely inhuman rhythms. Is this
acceleration in your opinion an inherent
consequence of modern technik or the "philosophy"
of technology is only one face of turbo-capitalism
for which "time is money" as Benjamin Franklin put
it?
HR: In my view,
technology clearly is not the cause of social
acceleration. Rather, it is the other way round:
modern technology arose - it was invented -
because of the time-famine of modernity. You can
make this point historically as well as logically:
most technologies help us to save time. More than
this: it is the purpose of almost all modern
technologies to save time. Thus, cars,
hair-dryers, microwave-ovens or telephones are all
machines built for the purpose of speeding-up
"natural" processes.
Logically, this
should create free time-resources for us. Take the
email: to write and send an email only takes half
the time of writing and sending a letter. Thus, if
you have to write 10 messages and 10 letters take
one hour, while 10 emails take half an hour, you
gain 30 minutes. But where are they? Why is it
that you have even less time now than before the
email age?
The answer is easy: because you
do not read and write 10 emails instead of 10
letters, but 20, 30 or 40. But this is not the
fault of technology, it is not inherent in the
logic of technology. Rather, it is the general
logic of increase and growth that speeds up social
life and creates the hunger for technological
speed-up. This logic of increase itself is not
driven by technology, but by social competition
and economic capitalism.
Historically, you
can observe the same connection. In the 17th
century, people tried to speed-up social processes
BEFORE the invention of new technologies like the
steam-engine. They tried, for example, to build
straight instead of curved roads or to exchange
the horses before the carts more often in order to
reduce traveling time, or they tried to use
mirrors to speed-up communication. It was this
hunger for time-resources that eventually
triggered the industrial revolution.
CG: So, our strained
perception is due to the fact that the growth of
opportunities exceeds the rate of acceleration ...
HR: Actually, with each new
round of technological innovation, we can observe
the same "acceleration cycle". If 10 email
messages take half the time of 10 old-fashioned
letters, 20 emails written (and read) take the
same amount of time as 10 letters, except for the
fact that now you have to think about 20 different
recipients and subject matters.
This by
itself is a stress-causing factor: even though you
still need one hour to do your communication, you
now have to deal with twice as many "episodes of
action". But things are worse: on average, we now
read or write 30 or 40 emails (or even more),
while we only read and wrote 10 letters in the
past. Hence, we either need to spend more time for
communication or we have to speed up our thinking
and writing. The rate of augmentation and growth
is above the acceleration-rate, and this creates
stress.
It is the same with transport. Of
course, the car is much faster than the horse or
the pedestrian, say, three times as fast. However,
in the time since we introduced the car as a
regular means of transport, the distances we need
to cross for schooling, work, family life and
leisure have increased by the same factor at
least, and they tend to increase even more. Or
take the washing-machine: of course it helps us to
save time. But since we have got it, we change our
clothes on a daily basis. Thus, growth-rates
regularly exceed acceleration-rates, and this is
why time becomes more and more scarce despite
technological acceleration.
CG: The acceleration of
social change in Western societies is indissolubly
linked to the dominant cultural ideals of
modernity in which every change is always a
progress and every change is made for the sake of
change. Which is the importance in this context of
what you call the "Cultural Motor"?
HR: "The cultural motor is
what I call the "promise of acceleration". For
quite obviously we are not just the victims of
speed; we also enjoy speed. Speed is linked to our
innermost conceptions of freedom, of
self-determination and of happiness. It is
essentially linked to the aspiration to overcome
barriers and boundaries. In addition, I think
modern secular societies have come to measure the
quality of life by its richness and wealth of
experiences: a life, in this perspective, can be
defined as the sum of experiences made and
potentialities explored and developed.
Now, once you adopt this cultural
perspective, it seems that you can increase your
life by speeding up: since we can double the
number of experiences and potentialities explored
by doubling the speed of life or action,
acceleration becomes a permanent temptation and an
essential promise. In the end, acceleration might
be Western culture's secular answer to the problem
of finitude and death: if we live fast enough, or,
more accurately, infinitely fast, we can have an
"eternal life before death". There are
immeasurable options and experiences in front of
us before we die. (It is a different matter that
this perspective, of course, is based on a number
of confusions and self-deceptions).
I am
not so sure whether this element of the cultural
motor holds for Asia, too. But what is important
indeed is the linkage between acceleration and
progress: modernity creates the experiences of
permanent change and motion, and it is absolutely
vital for individuals to be able to interpret this
change, or this motion, as directed - as connected
to progress. For then, acceleration means that
life gets better.
But at least in
so-called "developed" Western societies, this
perspective is almost completely lost: people here
are convinced that our economies will keep
growing, technologies will keep accelerating, and
markets will keep innovating, but they no longer
think that this will make life any better - there
will always be fierce competition, scarcity of
time, scarcity of resources and so forth. Thus,
the overwhelming sense is this: we will have to
run faster and faster - just to stay in place. The
"race" is no longer about reaching a goal or
improving our position, it is only about not
falling back, not regressing into chaos and
crisis.
Thus, for the first time in the
history of modernity, parents no longer believe
their kids will have a better life - rather, they
fear it will be worse, despite acceleration. This
is a vital change in perspective. For me this is
the moment when modernity turns into
late-modernity.
CG: We
can no longer do as Machiavelli did in his use of
Romans as a mirror of his own society because our
fast-changing present is too different from our
past: is velocity destroying history?
HR: Well, I think in the
first place velocity created history. We only
developed a sense of history as a moving, singular
subject when we noticed that there were not just
random events and stories in the world, but that
society a such seemed to move and change in a
direction. This sense could only grow when social
change was fast enough to become noticeable for
the three generations who lived together in one
world. This moment arose when the grandmother,
while talking to her grandson, noticed that "her
world" was different from "his world". "In my
time", she might say, "it was not right to miss
Sunday service in church. But in your world, this
is all right".
I call this the pace of
generational change, when social change was linked
to the exchange of generations. As the historian
Reinhart Koselleck has pointed out, this sense of
directed history arose in the 18th century.
However, from my own analysis, it appears that
"history" in this sense is now, in the 21st
century, about to die. We have now reached a pace
of intra-generational change, when generations can
no longer speak about "their" respective worlds.
Instead the world changes every decade, or rather,
every couple of years.
We have to adopt to
ever-changing circumstances. In this process, we
lose the sense of direction: there is frantic, but
non-directed change. History is standing still
amidst frantic change, there are changing episodes
of individual and collective life without an
inherent continuity or direction.
CG:May we say
that you are skeptical about the "ideologies of
deceleration" and rather you prefer to point out
that deceleration is a dialectical consequence of
acceleration?
HR: Well, in
fact, every wave of social and technological
acceleration has been met by a lot of cultural and
political skepticism and protest. People fiercely
protested, for example, the introduction of the
steam-train and the railway system. They claimed
that this would kill not just our culture and
politics but it would literally make us sick and
corrupt our brains. Exactly the same story
repeated itself, for example, with the invention
of the TV or, later on, with the advent of the
computer and now the smartphone. There are always
groups who call to resistance and refusal - and
they always lose out.
In the late 19th
century, some dandies in Paris walked their
turtles on a leash to protest against the high
speed of urban life. Similarly, today, there are
movements like "slow food" or "slow science" etc.
They are well-meaning, no doubt. But very often,
these movements only play a compensatory role: It
becomes a luxurious pleasure to cook and dine
slowly once a week or once a month on a Sunday,
while the rest of life speeds up. So yes, I am
skeptical of many decelerator movements.
Nevertheless, in my view, there are at
least two contemporary social movements that I am
inclined to take more seriously: on the one hand,
significant parts of the so-called "de-growth"
movement are much more serious and theoretically
ambitious than the simple "folkloristic"
oppositions. They realize that the speed game
comes at a high price for the ecology of the Earth
and for our psychic health, and they try to
develop sustainable forms of "post-growth"
society.
On the other hand, it appears
that there is a growing number of "elite
youngsters" who are equipped with an enormous
amount of social and cultural capital and who
refuse to take the elite positions. They refuse to
become CEOs or bankers or professors or
politicians because they realize that their
rat-race life is not worth it. This, I think, is
the most serious challenge to the current
capitalist speed game.
CG: The global economy
is pushing on very effectively with its concept of
space and time, but don't you think that in the
East there still persists a different conception
of time?
HR: It is obvious
that Asian cultures can draw on experiences and
conceptions of time that are very different from
the linear, acceleratory logic of Western,
capitalist time. These divergent conceptions of
time, of course, are very often related to
religious traditions. Confucian, Daoist, Hinduist
or Buddhist perspectives of time are free from the
acceleratory logic of increase that is
characteristic of Western time.
Nevertheless, what one can observe at
present is a "colonization" of these traditional
perspectives. It appears that they do not so much
provide viable alternatives or oppositions to the
logic of acceleration, but rather individual and
collective resources that can be used in the
global speed-game. It might give Asian cultures
even a competitive edge in the drive towards speed
- but in the end, I am afraid, Eastern cultures
and perspectives will probably also be sucked up
in the acceleration-cycle.
You can already
see this from the speed of Asian cities, from the
race towards acceleration in production,
circulation, communication and consumption.
Obviously, the speed-up is even higher in Eastern
countries than in Western ones: developments that
have taken centuries in the West are made and
overtaken within a couple of years in Eastern
countries. Thus, I think, the Eastern traditions
will help them to overtake the West in most realms
of life and to become the leaders in speed - but I
doubt it will help them to turn the tide and
decelerate the world.
Claudio
Gallo is world news editor of Italian daily La
Stampa.
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