#hartmut rosa

[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

[1000rh]

Our own everyday lives and actions seem to be increasingly beyond our own control, and not even the experts who appear to be the guardians of ‘theoretical’ controllability are capable of creating the impression of control through calculation. The expansion of our technological reach is not increasing our self-efficacy, but undermining it. We feel ourselves powerless or blameworthy in an unresponsive world.

– Hartmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World (2020)

[apesoformythoughts]

The driving cultural force of that form of life we call ‘modern’ is the desire to make the world controllable. Yet it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world – only then do we feel touched, moved and alive. A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world.

Our lives are played out on the border between what we can control and that which lies outside our control. But because we late-modern human beings seek to make the world controllable, we tend to encounter the world as a series of objects that we have to conquer, master or exploit. And precisely because of this, ‘life,’ the experience of feeling alive and truly encountering the world, always seems to elude us. This in turn leads to frustration, anger and even despair, which then manifest themselves in, among other things, acts of impotent political aggression. For Rosa, to encounter the world and achieve resonance with it requires us to be open to that which extends beyond our control. The outcome of this process cannot be predicted, and this is why moments of resonance are always concomitant with moments of uncontrollability.

This short book – the sequel to Rosa’s path-breaking work on social acceleration and resonance – will be of great interest students and scholars in sociology and the social sciences and to anyone concerned with the nature of modern social life.

[exhaled-spirals]

« The idea of the fulfilled life no longer supposes a “higher life” waiting for us after death, but rather consists in realizing as many options as possible from the vast possibilities the world has to offer. To taste life in all its heights and depths and in its full complexity becomes a central aspiration of modern man. But, as it turns out, the world always seems to have more to offer than can be experienced in a single lifetime. Acceleration of the pace of life appears to be a natural solution to this problem: if we live twice as fast, if we take only half the time to realize an action, goal, or experience, we can double what we can do within our lifetime. Our “efficacy,” the proportion of realized options to potentially realizable options, doubles.

However, due to the self-propelling dynamic of the acceleration cycle, the promise of acceleration never is fulfilled, for the very same techniques, methods, and inventions that allow for an accelerated realization of options simultaneously increase the number of options at an exponential rate. For example, the Internet not only speeds up information and communication, it also opens up wholly new domains of exchange, service, communication, and entertainment. Hence, whenever we surf the Net, we could potentially surf hundreds and thousands of other sites that might even better serve our purposes. The same holds true for cable TV: whereas thirty years ago we missed only two or three other programs by watching one channel, we now miss hundreds.

As a consequence, our “share of the world”, the proportion of realized world options from potentially realizable ones, decreases, no matter how much we increase the pace of life. And this is the cultural explanation for the paradoxical phenomenon of simultaneous technological acceleration and increasing time scarcity. »

— Hartmut Rosa, High-Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity

[batchmox]

[Gegenwart] lässt sich definieren als ein Zeitraum der Dauer bzw. Stabilität, für welchen [...] Erfahrungsraum und Erwartungshorizont unverändert und damit deckungsgleich sind. Nur innerhalb solcher Zeiträume lassen sich aus gemachten Erfahrungen Schlüsse für die Gegenwart und Zukunft ziehen, und nur für sie haben Erfahrungen und Lernprozesse eine Handlungsorientierende Kraft, weil ein bestimmtes Maß an Erwartungssicherheit besteht. Vergangenheit bezeichnet aus dieser Perspektive dann all das, was nicht mehr gilt, Zukunft dagegen umfasst dasjenige, was noch nicht gilt.

Rosa, Hartmut. Beschleunigung. Die Veränderung der Zeitstruktur in der Moderne, Frankfurt am Main 2005, S. 124-138

[certainwoman]

“Thus, individuals in modern societies feel morally and ethically ‘free’ to a quite unprecedented degree: No one tells them what to do, what to believe in, how to live, think or love, nor where or whom to live with. From the perspective of the modern liberal ideology as well as from individuals’ self-perception, there virtually appear to be no binding social, religious or cultural norms; there is an enormous plurality of conceptions of the good life and a most far-reaching freedom of choice among myriads of options in all spheres of life. Hence, modern societies and individuals experience themselves quite rightly as ‘excessively free.’ Now, how is this possible? How can we be completely free and yet excessively coordinated, regulated and synchronized, in both cases to unprecedented degrees? Now, in fact, it is not too difficult to see the solution to this seeming paradox of modernity.

For underneath the dominant liberal self-perception of freedom there is another overwhelming social awareness that points in quite the opposite direction. Whilst individuals experience themselves as completely free, they also feel completely dominated by an ever-increasing, excessive list of social demands. Quite in accordance with the observed need for tight social regulation, actors in modern societies feel subject to heterogeneous pressures and demands they cannot control to a degree quite unknown to any other society. Nowhere outside the realm of Western modernity, I daresay, are everyday actions so consistently justified by the rhetorics of the ‘must’: We always legitimate to ourselves as well as to others what we are doing by reference to some external demand: ‘I really have to go to work now, I really need to fill in the tax form; I have to do something for my fitness; I got to learn a foreign language, I must update my hard- or software now, I have to catch up with the news’ – the list is boundless, and in the end, we ‘really have to do something to relax and calm down and get some rest’ – otherwise we are threatened by a heart-attack, by depression, or by burn-out. ‘Daily life has become a drowning sea of demands,’ Kenneth Gergen (2000: 75) states, and Robinson and Godbey (1999:33, cf. 305) confirm from their data the well-known sensation that we ‘have to run faster and faster each year just to stay in place.’"

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

[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]

"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