Parenthasis

The series of posts, "Globalalisation, Space-Time compression and Symbolic exchange", will continue just as soon as I've worked out what the hell it is I want to say. In the meantime, a couple of things.

First, some further reflections on the treadmill on my other blog, The Long Legged Fly. This loosely connects to my discussion of Hartmut Rosa's metaphor of the treadmill in the series of posts, "What is Social Acceleration".

Also, further to the discussion of Earth and World in the last posting on this blog, I came across this short piece by Heidegger entitled "Why Do I Stay in the Provinces". Let's say it provides ballast to postmodern fripperies. I want to ridicule the piece, especially the last lines, but can't quite bring myself to do it.

What is Social Acceleration? Part Six: The Cultural Motor

As I indicated in the previous posting, Rosa saw the economy as just one of three motors of social acceleration. The other two he labelled as cultural and structural. I think we’ve got to take all these designations with a pinch of salt. Depending on how the analysis is structured, one can give primacy to one or other area. The important thing to recognise is that that there is a dialectical relationship between these areas- they all act upon, influence and transform each other.

Rosa’s treatment of the cultural motor is a case in point. He draws upon the works of Hans Blumenberg and Marianne Gronemeyer to present a reworking of the early and pre-modern notion of the good life being equated with the fulfilled life. In this version, the idea of the fulfilled life is striped of its religious connotations of a higher life attained after death and is reworked in light of the decline of religion and the secularisation of time. This is to say, we no longer have confidence that time is articulated in terms of a religious narrative. We do not feel ourselves to be participants in an unfolding drama of sin, repentance and salvation. In the absence of this, time drained of its meaning and calls out for an alternative interpretation.

We no longer believe that by being virtuous and patient in this life we will be rewarded with fulfilment in the next. However, fulfilment remains an important, perhaps the important, goal of life. In the absence of transcendent, otherworldly fulfilment, which might relativize the limited nature of mortal life, what we are left with is a kind of nagging imperative to experience as much of the world and of life as possible in the time available to us. However the options available to us inevitably outstrip our capacity to explore them, prompting us to become ever more frenetic in our pursuit of fulfilment.

It’s not difficult to see what’s meant here. Imagine the broad acceptance that people had of their position in life and the possibilities that they were afforded by that position a few hundred years ago. You were the blacksmith’s son, you would go on to be the blacksmith. Work was a necessary evil and your obligation to the community. There was little option about who you were and what you did. People didn’t expect to be fulfilled in their personal lives (if such a notion even existed). The expectation was that they would lead a sufficiently virtuous life to guarantee the safe passage of their souls after death.

What a difference from now when people not only expect to feel fulfilled in the here and now, but consider it a failure if they are not. And there’s the catch, because fulfilment is most definitely not something that people experience as a matter of course, but they don’t want to be stigmatised as a failure and so the only way out is to pretend. Think about how routinely people exaggerate the satisfaction that they derive from their work. It seems that to express dissatisfaction or boredom is a sign of failure and people flee from it. The willingness to maintain the illusion of satisfied fulfilment is, socially, far more important than the reality which such insistent claims of satisfaction mask. The best way for someone to convince themselves and others that they are both satisfied and fulfilled is to stay busy. And even if one remains unconvinced, at least there is less time in which to think about it.

So the basic plot of our lives has changed from a sweeping theological drama in which the individual played a highly relativised, marginal part, to a personalised drama in which the individual, and his or her quest for personal fulfilment, takes centre stage.

Time becomes highly rationalised and the goal becomes to maximise the effective use of that time. Time is divided up into fragile structures such as work time and leisure time, being with friends time or being with partner/family time. We attend to these different temporalities and relationships in a way that is not dissimilar to the way we attend to the various websites, social networks and blogs to which we subscribe. We browse them, keep them ticking over, do what is required to maintain them, knowing that they are but one among many, that they are dispensable and that it wouldn’t do to get too bogged down in any one area, because there is so much more to attend to.

Doing nothing in particular provokes anxiety because the sense of unproductive, meaningless time becomes tangible. The meaningfulness of our lives has become externalised in temporal structures which act as temporary bulwarks against the meaninglessness which throws us back upon our own, much depleted, resources. Time becomes a weight that presses down upon us, provoking mild, but nagging feelings of guilt and emptiness. It is not dissimilar to the situation whereby multinationals like Monsanto sell genetically modified seeds to farmers, producing temporarily improved yields at the cost of the farmer’s autonomy.

And I don’t think this parallelism is accidental. It brings us back to the question of causes and whether all this can be seen as determined by the economic motor. To say that our cultural activities, our social lives, our relationships have been increasingly subverted by and subordinated to the demands of the market is not necessarily to argue in favour of economic determinism, however there is no question that economic factors were at the heart of the many tendencies that have been transforming our cultures and our way of life since the middle of the last millennium. Changing attitudes towards religion, new ways of thinking and technological innovation have all played an important role and one could construct a narrative in which any one of these areas is fundamental. However it is the development of universal, abstract money that has acted as the enzyme capable of catalysing all areas of human activity, reducing them relentlessly to a universal and abstract value. And following the logic of capitalism, the effect of this enzyme is to increase the rate of metabolic change within the social flows.

This has been a very fragmented, partial and un-nuanced survey. My intention has been more to throw up some ideas (none original) and see how they land than to construct a convincing argument. In the next and final posting in this series I will consider how to evaluate this process I have been describing and consider the limitation of some of the terminology I have been employing.

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.

What is Social Acceleration? Part Three: Hartmut Rosa on the Motorbike and the Treadmill

In his recent article, Full Speed Burnout? Hartmut Rosa offers two metaphors which he believes capture the metabolic rhythm of modernity and late-modernity. The first, relating to modernity, is the motorcycle, the second, relating to late-modernity, is the treadmill. More than just metaphors, each represents a practice embedded in the period to which he refers.

The motorbike was the embodiment of man’s longing for individual liberation through the conquering of time and space.

“The power and attraction of the motorbike is in the sensual experience of mastering life at high speeds, of being able—and having the power—to autonomously control and steer one’s motion; it is the promise of mastering space and time and conquering the world while leaving behind “all that is solid,” sluggish, earth-bound, heavy or burdensome.” ⁽¹⁾

This is most definitely directional stuff. It is about the autonomous individual taking the measure of the vastness of the horizon and annihilating it through mechanically induced speed. Paradoxically, while the biker seeks to overcome space and time through speed, he also depends upon both in order to carry out the performance of annihilation. In the same way, speed is contrasted to the “inertia and resistance” of everyday life, thereby creating a dependence upon such inertia.

One could equally think of the 70’s rock guitar solo. In both cases the individual frees himself from the monotonous rhythms that were holding him back to breathe the finer air that only the risk of crashing at high speed can make available.

This metaphor is clearly connected to the highways and big, open spaces of the United States as opposed to the swarms of mopeds that clog up the streets of southern European cities. These people are more likely than not on their way to work, and that’s definitely not the idea.

By contrast, the treadmill represents the transposition of this acceleration into the productive circuits of everyday life. Directional speed and the longing for liberation become accelerated rhythms of production and consumption, which reach into, and transform, every area of our lives. This is exemplified by the tightly-coupled networks that were considered from Gleick’s book. Competition in post-industrial societies, driven by the capitalistic requirement for capital accumulation, requires tighter and tighter margins, ever greater efficiency savings and increased consumption. As Rosa says;

The social logic of competition is such that the competitors have to invest more and more of their energy into the preservation of their competitiveness, until keeping up the latter is no longer a means to lead an autonomous life according to self-defined ends, but the single overarching goal of social and individual life alike. ⁽¹⁾

Rosa considers the motorbike to have been displaced by the treadmill as a guiding metaphor for our times. Clearly there are plenty of objections that one might raise to such a sweeping caricature. Nonetheless, the metaphor of the motorbike resonates strongly, evoking key features of what has come to be called modernity, most notably relating to space, time and personal autonomy.

However, I would take issue with Rosa’s second metaphor, the treadmill, because I don’t think it does the work that is required of it. It’s not the drudgery of everyday life that he wants to pick out here, but the increasingly frenetic rhythm of social life and the requirement that you keep up. The treadmill may work as a metaphor if you think Bill Murray struggling to keep his balance on a hotel treadmill that has gone rogue, but I’m not sure this is the first image to come to mind.

I think the wheel spin is a better one.

The wheel is rooted to the ground, but spinning irrelevantly as it seeks to gain traction. The faster it spins the less possibility there is of forward motion, but the driver, unable to conceive of any course of action other than increasing the velocity, keeps his foot firmly on the accelerator. The situation is clearly unsustainable and the only possible outcome is a rapid overheating and blowing of the engine.

As was mentioned earlier, in the case of the motorcycle, time and space remain in place and the sense of liberation is won through annihilating them through speed. In the case of the wheel-spinning car, the relation to space and time is severed as the vehicle embarks upon a metabolic intensification, which can only lead to a system failure.

In The Pataphysics of the Year 2000, Baudrillard invokes a similar dynamic, although by means of a different metaphor;

“…one might suppose that the acceleration of modernity, of technology, events and media, of all exchanges- economic political and sexual- has propelled us to escape velocity, with the result that we have flown free from the referential sphere of the real and of history. We are liberated in every sense of the term, so liberated that we have taken leave of a certain space-time, passed beyond a certain horizon in which the real is possible because gravitation is still strong enough for things to be reflected and thus, in some way to endure and have some consequence.” ⁽²⁾

Escape velocity, in this case, would be the equivalent of the moment at which the wheel loses traction with the ground. It then enters a hyper-reality in which forward motion is no longer possible and the vehicle becomes autonomous, responding only to the dynamics of its own metabolic intensification, until the point at which overheating occurs, or the stress on the components becomes unbearable.

In their frenetic search for investment opportunities and value, the capital markets invest in non-existent future markets, non-existent wealth that the banking sector persuade people to borrow, mortgaging their future earning capacity in order to generate value now and non-existent companies that, while they don’t produce anything, may convince others that others may be convinced that they are worth investing in. If ever there was a metaphor for our having reached escape velocity, or entered full wheel-spin, the financial markets surely provide it. And, as has been made plain in recent weeks, it is those markets which control our destiny far more effectively than any government.

So much for metaphors, in the next posting, I will look more closely at the theoretical underpinnings of Rosa’s position and connect it with David Harvey’s notion of space time compression.

(1) http://ijms.nova.edu/Spring2010/IJMS_Artcl.Rosa.html accessed 16/05/10

(2) Baudrillard, J. (1995) The Illusion of the End, Polity Press