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.

Globalisation, Space-Time Compression and Symbolic Exchange. Part One.

What a disorientating, exhilarating image that must have been the first time it was beamed back to Earth and then put out for general consumption, not just in the western world, but everywhere where there were television sets or newspapers.

Earthrise.

Even the word has a dislocating, uncanny quality to it. Sunrise is a word, an image and an idea, which takes its place seamlessly in the framework of words, images and ideas with which we are well familiar. Sunrise; signifying the dawn of a new day, signifying the romantic contemplation of our relation to nature, signifying a precise moment in the morning, it contains a potential potency, albeit one that requires the poet or the artist to retrieve it from the anesthetising familiarity of its habitual usage. Earthrise, however, did not require the poet or the artist to exhibit it in its strangeness and singularity. It didn’t fit into any prescribed contexts of usage or practice, save from the imaginings of science fiction. Earthrise did not simply show the Earth as it had never been seen before, it showed the Earth for the first time; a whole, unsupported, sphere situated in… what? Space? Nothingness? The Solar System? Our central nervous system did not evolve to make sense of perspectives such as this. Here was visual evidence that we didn’t only inhabit London or Delhi or Mexico or China, but that we also lived on a terribly fragile looking planet, what Carl Sagan was soon to liken to a mote of dust.

And I imagine the moment when people from all over the planet first saw that image and were, momentarily, wrenched from the familiarity of the many and various worlds that they inhabited, both individually and collectively, captivated by the image of what, within a hitherto unknown way of thinking, might be considered home. Was there, in that moment, an acknowledgement, however fleeting, of the reality of the planet, of Earth and of space? And would not such an acknowledgement inevitably impel a radical relativisation of the systems of meaning in which people found themselves, be they religious, familial or nationalistic. Did this not represent a reality upon which everyone was compelled to agree?

I don’t know. Perhaps it was nothing like that. I was one at the time and so probably had different priorities. What is clear is that any force that the image once had has long since been drained away as it has taken its place in the field of images that we consume and discard in the traffic of our everyday lives. In fact, it is striking how, in the intervening period, interest in space exploration seems to have evaporated and we seem to be more entrenched than ever in the networks of meaning that constitute our various worlds, as if we were intolerant of the absolute non-functionality of this extra-terrestrial perspective on terrestrial existence.

What I find interesting about this is that the image of the Earth from space seems to represent the culmination of a process of mapping, rationalising and objectifying space that was set in motion at the start of the renaissance. This was the proof, that was no longer even required, that all of those maps really did represent an objective reality. And yet now, 40-odd years on, that proof no longer seems quite so incontrovertible and the rationalisation of space which it vindicated no longer seems quite so secure. What was dislocating about Earthrise was that it referred to an ungraspable, inconceivable reality in the face of which we could only wonder. Now, however, thanks to Google Earth, the updated version of Earthrise, the manipulable globe that shimmers on our screens is fully incorporated into the networks of meaning and significance that constitute our everyday lives. From planning holidays to zooming in on familiar places in our home-town, the Earth has been truly domesticated and assimilated into our mundane routines.

All of which raises the question of Earth and of World and the relationship between them. Is the Earth an objective reality upon which we can agree? Does the Earth take its place within the play of signifiers that constitute our world? Is our world grounded upon the Earth or is the Earth dynamised by the place it holds within our world? Can a sense of the Earth resist such assimilation?

Heidegger addressed this question in his article, The Origin of the Work of Art (1). For Heidegger the work of art provided the locus for a struggle between the antagonistic, but mutually dependant phenomena of Earth and World. In Heidegger’s account, ‘World’ is the less problematic of the two terms. World is concerned with human goals and meanings and constitutes a totality of such meanings. Put simply, it corresponds to our everyday usage of the term when we speak of the “world of work”, the “art world” or the “Islamic world”. In this sense we obviously inhabit multiple worlds all of which interpenetrate each other at various points. Importantly, such a notion, while being well understood, is not grounded upon, or dependant upon, any geographical, or objectively quantifiable idea of space. World, in this sense, is a world of significance and significations. From this point of view, we can rightly assert that the Earth exists as an object in the world, in so far as it, or at least its representation, its idea or its image, is operable within the flow of significations that constitute our world (in the worlds of astronomy, geology and climate studies for example). For Heidegger, Earth is the problematic term. While the work of art seeks to uncover a world, Van Gogh’s “A Pair of Shoes” evoke the world of the peasant who wears them, Earth is that which both provides the possibility for such an uncovering, being the material with which the painting is created, and that which resists human attempts to make it intelligible, to draw it into the web of human signification.

It is not my intention to engage with Heidegger’s terminology or use it in a way that remains faithful to his vision. It is enough, for my purposes, to point out that he is obviously not employing the term “Earth” in any of its habitual uses here. He does not mean planet or soil or anything that is immediately familiar to us and operable within the flows of human meaning. If he is not employing the term in a metaphysical sense, then it is always right on the edge of metaphysics in so far as it is that which resists assimilation into the networks of human meaning. For ‘metaphysical’, one could read ‘religious’ or ‘mystical’.

So much for Heidegger. But what do we mean when we talk about the Earth? Is it an objective reality? Does it provide the ground upon which, within which, we construct our various worlds? Is it an ungraspable something which resists our attempts to represent it and incorporate it into our worlds of significance and meaning? Or is it a perfectly functional concept which operates seamlessly within the everyday exchange of meaning? Is it possible that the reality of Earth as a body in space is achingly vast and exterior to any ideas that we might have about it? Earthrise, or Google Earth?

I don’t think this amounts to semantic quibbling. ‘Globalisation’ is a term that is exchanged freely and unproblematically. It operates seamlessly within our discourse, albeit a discourse dominated by the semantic fields of economics and global politics. Yet with what model of the globe are we operating here and what theory of space does it presuppose? If globalisation defines the new horizon within which cultural, economic and political meaning is articulated, then surely it is only natural that we should subject that horizon to some interrogation.

What is clear is that for virtually all of the natural history of human beings, there was no recourse to this idea of Earth as an objective reality. What’s more, there was no recourse to space and time as objective constants, independent of the lived reality in which people were embedded. Pre-renaissance maps of the world, such as the O-T maps of Christendom, were symbolic in nature. They didn’t presume to map an objectively existing space, but the symbolic world within which people orientated themselves. Hence the O-T maps always placed Jerusalem at their centre. The question that this raises is whether the geographically accurate mapping of space corresponded to an objective reality, or whether it represented the triumph of a culturally specific way of conceptualising the world, which proved to be a highly effective tool in the service of colonial and capitalist domination.

In the following series of postings, I want to explore the concept and phenomenon of globalisation, taking as my point of departure the rupture with the symbolic world of the middle ages and the production, at the time of the renaissance and the voyages of discovery, of universal and objective conceptions of time and space. I will then go on to consider how such conceptions are bearing up in the media saturated world of instantaneous electronic communication.

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 Seven: Conclusion

Capitalism, like any term is loaded. It activates a series of narratives related to Marxism, economics and politics and establishes, for many people, a prescriptive evaluation regarding what is under discussion. Of course nowadays there are plenty of people who, following the likes of Freidman, will hear the term in a broadly favourable way, but for many the term contains an implicit condemnation. This duality is a problem- it introduces a form of oppositional thinking which disfigures that which is under discussion. That’s not to say the term can be circumvented or abandoned. I think that the term captures the central dynamic of the acceleration which is taking place in our societies and in our lives. Not perfectly and not exhaustively; the narrative could be and frequently is recast in quite different terms and is both revealing and compelling. Nonetheless, I don’t think there is anything that captures the dynamic of social acceleration quite as completely as does the designation of capitalism, for all the many reasons that I have discussed in previous postings.

However the problem of evaluation remains, and it is a serious one. After a discussion on some related issue in a class recently a student who quite understandably wanted to defend some facet of the modern world, added somewhat forlornly, “but I don’t want to be a capitalist”. Who would? It hardly secretes ideological glamour (if such a thing is possible). Self-interest, aggressiveness, a dour work ethic perhaps, but not any idealistic desire to right the wrongs of the world. It is not the case that there is, on the one hand, this avaricious capitalistic system driving an acceleration of social processes and on the other, human beings caught up in, but ontologically different from, such processes. We are, rather, its agents, propagators and medium. And what that means is that claims to being in favour of, or opposed to capitalism and the social acceleration that it implies are either superficial or disingenuous. When I attended classes for my Masters in Globalisation at the University of Barcelona, some of the more ideologically committed students would frown upon those of us that drank Coca Cola in class, as if abstinence from certain totemic symbols of capitalism could exempt one from complicity in its logic. This is an obvious example, but examples abound from NGOs and aid organisations to indie rock bands and student demos. All, to varying degrees, ostensibly oppose themselves to the logic of capitalism, whilst carving out niches within its overall architecture. All of which is to say that the logic of capitalism is totalising, leaving barely any corner of our lives or thought processes untouched. Which raises the question of whether, given this totalising characteristic, it really makes sense to designate the manifold processes which are transforming our lives and our world in terms of an economic system. And if we do, does it not, at least, become important that the term resonates slightly differently, so that it does not lend itself so easily to a rather un-nuanced form of oppositional thought.

We might wish to condemn capitalism, but in so doing we will often be implicitly reinforcing a form of traditionalism. Capitalism may have brought us alienating labour practices, massive social inequality and global warming, but it has also been instrumental in the development of rights and inclusiveness for all sorts of previously marginalised or persecuted groups, all the gadgets and technologies that have come to dynamise modern life (see the posting on David Harvey for a description of his views on time-space compression) and a sense of personal autonomy and freedom from the asphyxiating effects of traditional values.

On the first of these points, exclusion of certain groups from the social mainstream also excludes them from the market. This is an intolerable barrier to capitalism, which will then seek to re-insert them within the commercial field. Consider what a boom-market the gay scene has provided since the 1960’s. On the second, there are few among the relatively affluent of the planet who would be willing to dispense with the tools, the internet foremost among them, that have enabled us to so comprehensively overcome barriers of space and time. This can be seen in many different guises from the various dynamised production networks that enable us to buy cheap Chinese imports or provide novel Christmas present ideas on Amazon to the anti-globalisation activists who are able to communicate and organise globally thanks to the space-annihilating new technologies. These processes have been greatly facilitated and accelerated by the tendency of capitalism to creatively overcome barriers to capital accumulation. The third point mentioned above also relates to overcoming barriers, but this time the very intransigent barriers of social values and customs. Here the question of evaluation is particularly problematic and shifting. What seems like an unpardonable breach of a social value today can appear in a very different light with the passing of time. Sunday opening in the UK (the overcoming of an important temporal barrier to capital accumulation) seemed like a big deal when it was first introduced. Nowadays people would probably feel their rights had been violated if they were unable to shop on a Sunday. And how are we to judge the undermining of social institutions like marriage? It could be viewed negatively, in terms of the atomisation of society, or positively in terms personal liberation from confining social conventions. Either way, in the case of this example, people are being forced to re-evaluate and often re-negotiate the ground rules for their relationships. Even if a couple goes for a church wedding followed by a nuclear family, they are well aware that, these days, that this is but one option among many. Previously such an arrangement had not been option, or if it was, it was so to a much lesser degree, and so could not really be seen in terms of a choice. However, once it becomes optional, it also becomes a choice. This phenomenon of optionality is highly subversive of social institutions and identities (see T. de Zengotita, Mediated).

The key words and phrases here seem to be ‘overcoming barriers’ and ‘dynamism’. This seems to get to the heart of the acceleration of societal processes that is taking place. Over the course of the previous postings we have seen repeated examples of systems becoming increasingly dynamic, and how the rhythm of that dynamism is accelerating. This could be seen during the introduction of the factory system, which spelled the end of the craftsman, and the introduction of specialised, repeatable tasks controlled by the rhythm of the machinery. It is clear that technological innovation has been right at the heart of social acceleration as human beings are increasingly forced to adapt to the new technologies that are foisted upon them and which, increasingly, they greedily embrace. The paradigm example was the ‘just-in-time’ production method, where speed of turnover and the tight coupling of the system are of the essence. People have to adapt to the accelerated rhythm of such a production method as best they can. Stress in the work place is not an undesired consequence of imperfect institutional organisation, it is oftentimes a virtual condition of employment. We also saw a similar dynamic at work with airline scheduling, household chores, the working day and the timetable. As people adapt to these technologies and organisational forms, they become subtly reconfigured. In the same way as you can often spot an ex military man because of his mannerisms, way of walking and talking and values, so the curious, but rarely fully committed browsing and skimming of the internet subtly reconfigures our expectations, attention span and tolerance for mental effort (see Nicholas Carr).

It’s as if we have broken free from well established conceptions of time, space and historical development to occupy instead a timeless, spaceless universe in which anything of value from any time or space is decanted into the present in order to extract that value. Such a transformations could not be achieved without some violence to existing systems, conventions or values. Hence the breaking of barriers. Collectively the relatively wealthy of the world, which almost certainly includes everyone reading this blog, are acting like the loving middle class boy who becomes a junky and quickly fritters away all of the emotional and literal capital that he had accumulated over the course of a lifetime of good behaviour, all in service of the next fix. First he drains his trust fund (literal capital) and then starts using his parent’s credit card and stealing from them (emotional capital). The paradigm illustration of this is the stock market which operates both figuratively and literally.

Some embrace this whole transformation. There are a lot of people who simply see technology as the saviour. And the religious language is no accident. The highly influential Ray Kurzweil is convinced, and argues persuasively, that the accelerated rates of technological innovation form an unbroken continuum with the development of RNA and DNA, the evolution of species and the first use of tools by humans. He predicts that the current exponential rate of transformation will result in a paradigm shift sometime around the middle of this century at which point the rate of technological change will be too fast for human beings to cope with from within their existing conceptual paradigms. Technological enthusiasts and futurists of this sort would advocate riding the wave of technological change. It’s heady stuff, although I can’t help being struck by the strong parallel with Christianity and wonder whether it is not an unconscious attempt to redeem religion. Arguments of this sort tend also to be strikingly uncritical and fail to satisfactorily locate technology within a broader social context.

At the other end of the spectrum we find Baudrillard who would have no argument with the idea that society is undergoing a rapid acceleration, though he would see this in terms of the production and consumption of signs. Having replaced the physical commodity as the source of value in society, all manner of signs and symbols are manipulated towards the end of extracting value. This can be clearly seen with companies like Nike which produce nothing. The production of their sportswear is subcontracted to hidden-away sweat-shops in China where the workers can be exploited in 19^th century European factory conditions. The brand, however, is everything and that’s where the money goes and that’s where the value is generated. His vision is ultimately pessimistic in that he senses an extreme desperation in the extraction and utilisation of all types of value, wherever they might be found. For Baudrillard this is what explains palaeontology, archaeology and history. This is not exclusively capitalistic, but part of a social imperative for symbolic meaning which has been largely forgotten and obscured in the West, though it remains alive and well in the Muslim world.

Broadly speaking I am sympathetic towards Baudrillard’s approach, especially the direction in which he took Marxist thought, and in subsequent postings I would like to explore some of the areas that this blog is dedicated to, in the light of Baudrillard’s emphasis on symbolic value. However, with respect to evaluating the social acceleration that I set out to define with this series of postings, I think that before any sort of evaluation can be proffered the multi-faceted phenomena that I have tried to capture with this term must be recognised. That is difficult because we tend only to see what is in front of our noses. We don’t really see the historical processes which we are caught up in, we don’t recognise the degree to which the planet is interconnected and networked and we treat with an apathetic shrug the extraordinary transformations that are being wrought on the planet and on our species. Evaluation tends to be a way of fore-stalling further thought about any of these matters.

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.

Parenthesis

No final installment of "what is social acceleration" this week as I have been working on a posting for my other blog The Long Legged Fly about the Bilderberg meeting in Sitges this weekend. It deals to some extent with the idea of social homeostasis, although I will work that out more fully on this blog. Take a look.

By the way, after watching an installment of David Harvey's fantastic reading of Capital, I go back on what I said about him being and economic determinist.

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