Is more flexibility the only answer?

Last week UK government floated a proposal to offer subsidies to people who want to re-locate in order to find work. It seems people are just still not flexible enough.

The solution to the economic crisis of the 1970's, was to introduce a series of measures designed to make the global economy more flexible and dynamic and thus create new possibilities for growth. Floating exchange rates were introduced, the principals of free trade were advanced and increasingly countries that didn't get with the programme were punished by international financial organisations such as the World Bank and the IMF. What this meant domestically was that as manufacturing industry was decimated, at an accelerated rate during the 1980's, the workforce was expected to be highly flexible in its pursuit of employment. They had to be willing and able to re-skill, re-locate and reduce their expectations in terms of salaries and workers rights. While the salaries of the rich have grown exponentially since the 1970's, average salaries have fallen in real terms.

This flexibility affected every area of our lives. We were expected to be flexible in our employment choices, flexible in our working practices, flexible in our choices of where to live. Such flexibility inevitably extended to other areas such as values, social bonds between people, loyalty to a region or a specific place and our way of seeing the world.

Of course the narrative is that all of this flexibility has been in order to make the UK more competitive. What this really means, if you don't view it through a nationalist prism, is that people are expected to live their lives increasingly in the service of capital accumulation. Not their own accumulation of capital, of course, but that tiny minority who, in one way or another, are playing the stock market. Any doubt about this should have been dispelled by the role the markets played in UK elections. Political and social processes were subordinated to the reaction of the market.

So the government's response to the crisis is more of the same, but with greater intensity and at a faster rate of acceleration. Why are we collectively incapable of seeing how manipulated we are? Why are we not talking about the damage which has been done to the social fabric by so much flexibility and thinking seriously about alternatives. Have we given up on trying to assert the value and importance of, for example, social relationships over and above the demands of the economy?

It seems to me that the economic crisis should provide an opportunity for a major reassessment of the values that we have been pursuing up until now- but nothing of the sort is happening. The government in the UK, and in other countries, has committed itself to a continuation of the policies of the 1980's and 1990's that got us into this mess in the first place and we believe them when they say there is no alternative. Talk about subdued!

In this video David Harvey talks about this and related themes.

What is Social Acceleration? Part Five: David Harvey on Time-Space Compression

The contraction of the present, as Hartmut Rosa presents it, strikes an intuitive chord, but seems to be too rooted in the realm of sociological theory. Something like this seems to be the case, but experiential flesh needs to be put on to the theoretical bones. A lot of the elements seem to be there in previous postings, the tightly-knitted networks of production, the proliferation of weightless social contacts through social networking sites, the increasing pressingness of time as we struggle not only to meet our obligations, but also to avail ourselves of all the good things that are made instantaneously available to us at any time of day or night. But what are we supposed to make of all this? How are we supposed to knit these disparate observations into something that may serve as an explanatory model- something that helps us to understand our world?

Here lies one of the fault-lines between modernism and post-modernism. Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition (1) announces the disintegration and de-legitimisation of what he calls Meta-Narratives. On the one hand, to provide a generalised account of social acceleration, is to build a meta-narrative which seeks to enclose within its interpretive framework a heterogeneous bundle of ‘facts’ or ‘insights’ or ‘language-games’. Such language-games are drawn from very different and individualised contexts and the meta-narrative imposes upon them a homogeneity that no longer allows them to speak for themselves. Hence the oppressive nature of theory. This is, of course, the criticism that is often levelled at Marxism. On the other hand, do things really speak for themselves? Isn’t it the case that the immaculately turned out George Clooney, inviting us, from our television screen, to partake of his beautiful lifestyle consisting as it does of stylish machines, flirtatious encounters and sophisticated coffee, expressly obscures and conceals the nature of the commodity that is on offer and the mode of production through which it came to be on offer. And in the absence of an explanatory model that seeks to make connections between disparate phenomena, are we not left only with mute post-modern irony in the face of Clooney’s collusion with the forces of naked capital accumulation?

Perhaps we don’t need to worry away at these dichotomies and we should simply mobilize all the linguistic resources at our disposal to create the desired effect.

This is a subject that has been argued over a lot and I raise it here only in order to situate what follows.

David Harvey, in his The Condition of Postmodernity (2), picks out the same phenomenon of the contraction of the present as does Rosa. Harvey describes this as space-time compression. At one point in the book he describes it in a fairly similar way;

“…accelerations in turnover times in production, exchange and consumption […] produce, as it were, the loss of a sense of the future, except and in so far as the future can be discounted into the present. Volatility and ephemerality similarly make it difficult to maintain any firm sense of community. Past experience gets compressed into some overwhelming present.” (Harvey, D. p. 291)

Harvey is coming from the position of an economic determinist when he says this, which is to say that he considers the capitalist requirement for capital accumulation to be the driving force behind this process. Whilst this is an historical process whose origins coincide with the beginnings of modernity, he focuses particularly on the economic shift towards flexible capital accumulation in the 1970’s. I’ll look more closely at what is meant by this later, and whether it is too narrow an approach, but suffice it to say for now that however one accounts for space-time compression, its effects are felt across multiple contexts and on multiple scales.

From the financial markets which discount future trading operations into the demand of the present for the extraction of value, to the exploitation of the earth’s resources in order to make money now. From the cashing in of the study of history in order exploit it’s potential to amuse in the form of for-TV television dramas, to the reviving of old acquaintances on Facebook in order to burn up an un-productive half hour or so. From slit screen rolling news delivered in segments of no more than 20 seconds, turning context and analysis into a parody of itself in order to maximise audience share, to the ubiquity of gadgets that keep us perpetually alert to any new information that might stimulate us where we would previously have waited for the nine o’clock news or to get back and listen to messages on the answer phone.

And that’s all prioritising time. One need look no further than the process of globalisation to see how space is being compressed. Restaurants from every corner of the world in every city of the world, distance learning, cut-price air travel, American series disseminated globally via the internet, completely rupturing that outdated commitment to scheduling, all feverishly exploiting value, interest and novelty to stimulate us right here, right now.

The breeching of what used to be called values is another matter again, not immediately connected with time or space, but generally a prerequisite if spatial and temporal limits are going to be dismantled.

This is where the evaluation part gets so difficult, because it would seem from what I have written that I am outraged and alarmed by all this. In fact I lap it up. As I have said previously, evaluation tends to get used to forestall further discussion.

What seems incontestable is that there is some historical process taking place which demands to be understood. If it is not an historical process, and I don’t entirely discount the possibility, then it is unimaginably strange.

Harvey is clear on this point. He an economic determinist (a nuanced one, but one nonetheless) and sees the acceleration of social processes to follow naturally from the need for capital accumulation that sits at the heart of our economic system. The processes of technological innovation and globalisation were both generated by the particular dynamic of capitalism, whereby in order to stay competitive the productive sector must grow, creating the potential for crisis when that growth hits a limit, for instance in the capacity of people to consume. According to Harvey this is what happened in the 1970’s, after the post-war consumer boom petered out and there was little opportunity for fresh growth within Europe and the States. How else can demand be stimulated?

One way is through expanding the market. What had been done a century earlier through colonialisation was now repeated, but under the banner of globalisation. Exchange rates floated freely, free trade was either encouraged or effectively imposed by the international financial institutions and the project to convert the world into one great integrated market was set in motion. This market provided not only consumer demand, but also a vast and impoverished labour market.

Another is through technological innovation. Individual ingenuity probably has a part to play in this, however staying ahead of the game with respect to your competitors is certainly what lends the process of technological innovation its dynamism.

Something else that Harvey points out should be added. The de-industrialisation of western economies was also, in part, a response to the need to accelerate turnover times in production and consumption. Manufactured goods take too long to produce and they last too long. Built in obsolencence and disposable commodities have had a part to play in addressing this. Equally important has been an increased reliance on the service industries. With many service industries, value can be extracted from nothing, literally in the case of the financial sector (futures markets, credit financing etc…), and virtually in the case of the media, advertising, image consultancies and PR to name but a few of the slew of industries that have proliferated in recent years. The speed and scale upon which value can be extracted is, of course, greatly expanded by both the new technologies and globalisation. But so too is the need for expansion and growth.

Here, once again, we see a feedback mechanism whereby the demands of capital accumulation give rise to an acceleration in technological innovation which compresses space, creating a new form of global market, new forms of behaviour and new opportunities for accumulating capital which must be exploited to the full if the company is to remain competitive.

This connects to another important idea, that of the creative destruction of capitalism. In order to exploit any opportunities for capital accumulation capitalism tends to destroy all manner of established structures which act as barriers. This might be outdated manufacturing industries, maintained by subsidies because of the social importance that they have to the community or they may be the social values mentioned above that prevent, for example, Spanish shops from opening on Sundays.

Capitalism seeks to dynamise production and consumption through a perpetual revolution in values, institutions, loyalties and allegiances. Given the nature of capital accumulation, this is bound to occur at ever accelerating speeds, accounting in large part for why we live frenetic, over-stimulated lives, in spite of the technology we have at our disposal, in spite of the fact that the work force was massively increased by the introduction of women, in spite of so many factors that should logically lead to a reduction in working time and a capacity to spread the wealth more equitably and a focus upon how to live well as opposed to how to accumulate and do as much as possible in the time available. As to the question of where all that extra productive capacity has gone the answer is clear- profit. There is a tiny elite that controls an immensely exaggerated proportion of the worlds capital (and material) resources.

In Rosa Hartmut’s treatment of the topic he identifies three motors of this process of social acceleration. The first is the economy, and is broadly in agreement with Harvey’s analysis. In addition to this he considers the ‘cultural motor’ and the ‘structural motor’. In the next posting I’ll consider these approaches and, if time permits, start to consider how Baudrillard sought to reframe the debate in terms of the virtualisation of all aspects of social relations.

1. Lyotard, J-F. (1986) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester University Press.

2. Harvey, D. (1995) The Condition of Postmodernity, Blackwell

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.

Parenthesis

I've added this video of David Harvey in which he talks about the financial / social crisis and capitalism's tendency to shift crises from one place to another both geographically and socially.