a.

celebrity philosopher / paypal.me/certainwoman

[certainwoman]

"However, as the process of social acceleration moves from the generational pace of social change to an intra-generational tempo – as we move from ‘classical modernity’ to ‘late modernity’ in the sense define above – the struggle for recognition changes its form once again. Today, it is not enough to reach pre-fixed positions in a competitive game: Jobs and families do not last a life-time, nor do political or religious affiliations. Thus, it is not enough to be a manager, an editor, or a professor (on the higher end of social strata) or a cleaning-person, security guard or doorman (towards the lower end): Recognition (and all that goes with it: wealth, security, privileges etc.) is distributed in accordance with performance: A manager who performs badly in light of the quarterly reports, an editor whose audience-quota falls, or a professor who does not publish in high-ranking journals on a regular basis incessantly lose ground – and may be sacked sooner or later. And   even cleaning-men and doorwomen are hired on tempo­rary contracts and get new contracts depending on their performance. In this way, the struggle for recognition changes from position to performance; recognition is no longer a life-time achievement, but more and more a day-to-day business. The triumphs and achievements of yesterday count little tomorrow. Recognition does not accumulate any more – it is always in danger of being completely devalued by the constant flow of events and by the shift of social landscapes. The positions you hold are important for your chances to keep or gain social esteem – but you never hold them for certain, and you never can be sure that those positions remain valuable tomorrow."

Hartmut Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality

[certainwoman]

Hartmut Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality

[certainwoman]

“We can only function as human actors if we have a sense of where we should be going and what. constitutes a good and meaningful life. Hence, the most promising route for a Critical Theory that does not start from an idea of human nature or essence, but from the socially caused sufferings of real people, lies in a critical comparison between those conceptions of the good and the actual social practices and institutions. Thus, social conditions which structurally cause subjects to pursue conceptions of the good they necessarily fail to realize under those same conditions surely need to be a prime target for social criticism. Hence, in my view, the ideas of freedom and (individual as well as collective) autonomy in the sense of self-determination of the form of life we realize, and the struggle for emancipation from political, structural and institutional obstacles for the realization of this autonomy, which have always been central in the tradition of Critical Theory, need not be justified on universalist normative grounds: The promise of autonomy and self-determination, the idea that individuals should have the right and the chance to find a way of life that (‘authentically’) fits their desires, aspirations and capacities, and that, to this end, the political community should be organized democratically in order to allow for a collective political shaping of society, are at the heart of modernity, they form – to use a Habermasian term – the core of the ‘project of modernity.’ Therefore, social conditions which undermine our capacity at self-determination, which undercut our potentials for individual and collective autonomy, can and should be identified and criticized because they systematically disable people to realize their conceptions of the good.”

Hartmut Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality

[certainwoman]

"The fact that spatial proximity no longer is a necessity for keeping close social relations, furthermore, has significant consequences for the social relationships people maintain and hence for the structures of the social world, too. Social and emotional closeness and distance are no longer related to spatial distance, which means that our neighbor might be a complete stranger to us, whereas someone at the other side of the world might be our most intimate partner. Furthermore, the contraction of the present (i.e. of periods of stability) with respect to social associations and the vast increase in social contacts people have not only, but mainly through the help of modern media of communication, leads to the ‘saturated self’ in the sense defined by Kenneth Gergen

(...)

the ‘classical’ modern sense of identity based on an individual ‘life-plan’ and self-definition rooted in ‘strong evaluations’ capable of orienting a life-course, tends to be replaced by new forms of flexible, ‘situational identity’ that accept the temporariness of all self-definitions and parameters of identity and no longer try to follow a life-plan, but take to ‘wave-riding’: Whenever there is a new, attractive opportunity, one must be ready to jump. As Kenneth Gergen puts it, ‘it is the difference between swimming with deliberation to a point in the ocean – mastering the waves to reach a goal – and floating harmoniously with the unpredictable movements of the waves’"

Hartmut Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality

[certainwoman]

Hartmut Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality

[certainwoman]

"Hence, it is easy to see how and why tech­nological acceleration is prone to go hand in hand with the acceleration of social change in the form of changing social structures and patterns, orientations, and evalua­tions of action. Furthermore, if the acceleration of social change entails a ‘contraction of the present’ in the sense discussed above, this naturally leads to an acceleration of ‘the pace of life.’ The explanation for this is to be found in a phenomenon that is well known from the realm of capitalist production and might be called the ‘slippery slope phenomenon’ of competitive society: The capitalist cannot pause and rest, stop the race and secure his position, since he either goes up or goes down. There is no point of equilibrium, for standing still is equivalent to falling behind, as Marx as well as Weber pointed out"

Hartmut Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality, 30-31

[certainwoman]

“Furthermore, from the perspective of individuals, there is an ongoing competitive struggle over educational degrees and job-positions, income, ostentative consumer goods, the success of kids, but also, and most importantly, about winning and keeping a spouse and a number of friends. It is no chance that ads for intimate relationships are placed between the market-sections for cars, jobs and real-estate in the newspapers. And we all know that we can easily lose our ‘competitiveness’ in the struggle over social-ties: If we do not prove nice and interesting and entertaining and handsome enough, our friends and even relatives quickly won’t call us up any more.”

Hartmut Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality

[certainwoman]

"Perhaps the most pressing and astonishing facet of social acceleration is the spectacular and epidemic ‘time- famine’ of modern (Western) societies. In modernity, social actors increasingly feel that they are running out of time, that they are short on time. It seems as if time was perceived like a raw-material which is consumed like oil and which is, therefore, getting more and more scarce and expensive.

(...)

Since technological acceleration means that less time is needed to fulfill a task at hand, time should become abundant. If, quite to the contrary, in modern society time becomes more and more scarce, this is a paradoxical effect that calls for a sociological explanation.

We might start to find such an answer when we consider the pre-conditions for the expected time-abundance or deceleration: As stated above, the time-resources needed to fulfill the tasks of our everyday lives significantly shrink given that their quantity remains the same. But does it? Just think of the consequences the introduction of the email-technology had for our time- budget. It is quite accurate to assume that writing an email-message is twice as fast as writing a conventional letter. Assume further that in 1990, you wrote and received on average ten letters per working day, for which you needed a total of two hours of work. With the introduction of the new technology, you only need one hour for your daily correspondence, given that the number of messages sent and received remains the same. Hence, you won one hour of ‘free time’ you can use for something else. Is this what happened? I bet not. In fact, if the number of messages you read and send doubled, then you need the same amount of time for getting done with your daily correspondence But I suspect that by now, you read and write 40, 50 or even 70 email-messages per day. Hence, you need much more time for the communication-stuff than you needed before the worldwide web was invented. And in fact, the same thing happened a century ago with the introduction of the car, and later on, with the invention of the washing machine: Of course, we would have gained a lot of free time resources if we crossed the same distances as before, and did our washing as often as before – but we don’t. We now drive or even fly hundreds of miles for work or pleasure, when before we might have covered only a circle of a few miles in all our life, and we change our clothing daily now, when we only did so once a month (or less) a century ago."

Hartmut Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality

[certainwoman]

(…) our actions and orientations are coordinated and made compatible to the ‘systemic imperatives’ of modern capitalist societies through temporal norms, deadlines and regulations.

Hence, I contend that modern societies are regulated, coordinated and dominated by a tight and strict temporal regime which is not articulated in ethical terms. Hence, modern subjects can be described as minimally restricted by ethical rules and sanctions, and therefore as ‘free,’ while they are tightly regulated, dominated and suppressed by a largely invisible, de-politicized, undiscussed, under-theorized and unarticulated time-regime. This time-regime can in fact be analyzed under a a single, unifying concept: The logic of social acceleration.

Hartmut Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality

[certainwoman]

Images of self as of late

[certainwoman]

Nowhere (1997), dir. Gregg Araki

[certainwoman]

Eric Andre via Perfectly Imperfect Newsletter

[certainwoman]

the last two seasons of frasier have niles and daphne being the cutest at times but they also have some of the most annoying baffling episodes. just awful. i wish the reboot had the original characters, maybe it would not get cancelled then and it would be worth seeing.

[certainwoman]

Ticket of No Return (1979), dir. Ulrike Ottinger

[certainwoman]

Devil's Bride (1974), dir. Arūnas Žebriūnas

[certainwoman]

i am a huge fan of daphne and niles's relationship in the television series frasier. i had to skip through my rewatch because i could not wait for the season 7 finale. this is my confession for the day.

[certainwoman]

Evil Does Not Exist (2024), dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi