What is Social Acceleration? Part Four: Hartmut Rosa and the Contraction of the Present

So if the accelerating rhythm of advanced capitalist / post-industrialist / late-modern society is captured by the metaphor of the wheel spin, is it susceptible to a more analytic account, and will it be possible to provide a description of the motors that are driving this acceleration?

Rosa distinguishes between three manifestations of social acceleration; the acceleration of technological change, of social change and of the pace of life ⁽¹⁾. The acceleration of technological change is the easiest to objectively verify. Moore’s law states that computer processing speeds will double every eighteen months and this has proved to be the case since it’s formulation in the 1960’s. Concurrent with this change in processing speed has been a proliferation of technical innovations giving rise to a perpetual revolution in all areas of society, but perhaps most significantly in the field of communication.

Social change, whilst less easy to quantify, is nonetheless fairly familiar. It relates to the rate of circulation and change of attitudes, fashions, lifestyles and the institutional vehicles for these things. This highlights something that gets to the heart of what people mean when they talk about modernity. Obviously people mean a lot of different, not always compatible, things when they talk about modernity, but at the very least, it must indicate a certain relation to time. Being modern, in terms of fashion, attitudes and tastes made perfect sense in the 1960’s. It must have made sense in the 1860’s because Nietzsche railed against it soon after. But in the 13^th century? Modernity implies a temporal directionality that was absent, or very differently conceived, before the renaissance.

Acceleration of the pace of life is the most subjective of the three. It relates to feelings of hurriedness, time pressure and the perception that one is unable to keep pace. One way of analysing it objectively would be by quantifying the amount of time people spend engaged in certain activities such as eating, sleeping and talking to one’s friends or family. However, I think this would be to neutralise the most interesting approach to the topic and our most immediate experience of the phenomenon. After this is, after all, where social acceleration really bites. But more of that later.

Separating out these three forms of acceleration is obviously a pragmatic way of highlighting features of a sociological and phenomenological situation which is highly complex, many sided and inter-related. However a concession is made to their interpenetration when Rosa considers a paradox inherent to social acceleration, namely that whilst the acceleration of technology is, in many cases, a response to the desire to save time, the consequence seems to be that time is becoming an increasingly scarce commodity. This links back to an earlier posting in which I suggested that all of these time saving gadgets and mechanisms should have left us wallowing in a glut of surplus time, but that this is patently not the case.

Rosa accounts for this by arguing that the acceleration of technological innovation has been outstripped by the increase in the quantity of activity. So, we may be in possession of an impressive array of time-saving devices, but if the amount things that we need to do is increasing faster than the time being saved by all our gadgets, then rather than saving us time, their macro effect is to increase the metabolic rate of our interactions. This creates a feedback loop. Technological innovation enables increases in social and commercial activity, which, in turn, generate time scarcity, the alleviation of which requires further technological innovation. Social networking sites make it quick and easy to stay in touch with people. Soon you’re in touch with vastly more people than you previously were and you’re spending far more time maintaining those contacts than you ever would have when the only option was to write a letter. Widespread ownership of cars was never going to mean that people’s travelling time was slashed to a fraction of what it had previously been, even if this was the initial attraction. The macro result was that new scales of interaction were introduced that gave rise to a reconfiguration of the field of social and commercial interaction.

This seems to be the pattern. There is a micro change in technology which enables something to be done faster or more efficiently. This has an obvious benefit so long as the macro environment in which the change took place remains unaffected. However, before too long the cumulative effect of such micro changes is to re-configure that macro environment, ushering in new expectations and assumptions regarding scales, velocities and rates of productivity.

From a certain perspective, the replacement of the handloom by the power loom towards the end of the 18^th century was indisputably a good thing. How could you possibly argue that the slower, less productive technology was preferable to the faster alternative? On a purely micro level this might be the case. The weaver who previously spent the entire day producing a given quantity of cloth could now complete the task in a matter of hours and spend the rest of the day wallowing in that glut of surplus time. Of course this is not at all what happened. For a start, ownership of the power loom required capital investment, so the handloom owner could forget it. Instead their livelihood and way of life was going to be utterly displaced by a new macro environment involving highly productive factories regulated by the timetable and hourly rates of pay and powered by external sources of power (external to the previously existing community that is. Obviously innovations of this sort played havoc with the meaning and scale of community).

In his article Steel Axes for Stone Age Australians(2), Lauriston Sharp showed how the introduction of steel axes into an aborigine society that ascribed symbolic and social importance to the traditionally made stone axes had the effect of de-structuring the social bonds that held the society together. The production of the stone axe had an important role to play in maintaining social links with neighbouring tribes, ownership of the axes was important in maintaining the social hierarchy and the stone axes held an important symbolic position in the mythology of the Yir Yoront. When the first kid was offered a steel axe by a missionary, this was surely a good thing- she didn’t have to go and pester her father for this symbolically important object- she could just take it and chop the damn wood. However the macro effects of the ready availability of steel axes were devastating.

When we get that new iPad, sign up to that new social networking site or buy that wonderfully clean, efficient and fast Nespresso maker the micro benefits are all to clear to see. What we tend to be completely unaware of are the tectonic transformations that are taking place at a macro level. Which is not to say I'm a Luddite, I think the question of evaluation is particularly thorny and generally used to forestall further consideration of the topic. I don't think the point is to either give our assent to or withhold our assent from such developments, but rather to recognise them for what they are, which is to say in the context which is appropriate to them. The car was never a labour saving and time saving technology. It was, and is, a symptomatic component of the cultural and psychological upheaval that is affecting societies and peoples across the planet. It is the visible sign of a metabolic shift which is taking place both in our societies and in ourselves. And so is the iPad. And the Nespresso maker. It seems to me that the nature of that metabolic shift is worth thinking about.

One of the ways Rosa approaches this is by talking about the 'contraction of the present'. Rosa defines the past as that which no longer holds or is no longer relevant to us and the future as that which does not hold yet. The present then is “the time span for which the horizon of experience and expectation coincide”. Rosa claims that this time span has been gradually contracting. Focusing primarily on the areas of work and family, he suggests that the pace of change has itself changed from being inter-generational, through being generational to the present situation where it is intra-generational.

“Thus, the ideal-typical family structure in agrarian society tended to remain stable over the centuries, with generational turnover leaving the basic structure intact. In classical modernity, this structure was built to last for just a generation: it was organized around a couple and tended to disperse with the death of the couple. In late modernity, there is a growing tendency for family life-cycles to last less than an individual lifespan: increasing rates of divorce and remarriage are the most obvious evidence for this.” (1)

While there is something intuitively convincing about this characterisation of the decaying time span of the present, it is a little unsatisfying in that the treatment that it receives from Rosa doesn’t really do justice to its importance as a determining feature of the transformation of our societies at a macro level in the postmodern era. Also I think that the relation to temporality holds promise as an mode of analysis that has the capacity to connect the extraneous technologies and timetables with the apparently subjective sense of the pressingness of time, or, to use Gleick’s phrase, ‘hurry-sickness'. It's for this reason that I find Rosa most interesting when he engages with such 'subjective' features such as pace of life, but also find his analysis a little bound by his apparent obligation to the methodological conventions sociological research. David Harvey, in his book The Condition of Postmodernity, provides a far fuller, though differently conceived, account of the contraction of the present, which he calls “space-time compression”. I will look at Harvey’s account in the next posting along with a consideration of possible motors of social acceleration.

1. Hartmut, R. (2003) Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronized High–Speed Society, Constellations, Vol. 10 Issue 1, Ps 3-33

2. Sharp, L. (1952) Steel Axes for Stone age Australians, Human Organization, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 17-22.