Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronized High-Speed Society (trans. Dorota Chabrajska)

Hartmut ROSA

Institut für Soziologie, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Carl-Zeiß- -Straße 2, 07743 Jena, Germany , Germany

Dorota CHABRAJSKA

John Paul II Institute, Faculty of Philosophy, John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Al. Racławickie 14, 20-950 Lublin, Poland , Poland

Abstract

The author examines the processes of acceleration in politics, economics, culture, and society at large, focusing on why and how the high-speed contours of crucial forms of social activity now shape so many facets of human existence. The author’s claim is that we cannot adequately understand the nature and character of modernity or the logic of its structural and cultural development unless we take the temporal perspective into account. The temporal dimension runs across the «material» dimensions of society and cannot neatly be separated from them in phenomenological terms, thus one cannot speak of «social time» independent of social structure or culture. The dominant changes in the latter, i.e., individualization, differentiation, rationalization, and domestication, are closely linked to the cardi nal change in temporal patterns (acceleration), which appears both as their cause and their effect. In fact, it is argued, many instances of the former are actually driven by the logic of acceleration. In the closing section of the paper, the author demonstrates that the drive towards social acceleration in modern societies might in fact be so overriding that we might actually find phenomena of de-differentiation and de-individualization in cases where differentiation and individualization have become hindrances to social acceleration.

Summarized by Dorota Chabrajska

Keywords:

social acceleration, modernity, differentiation, rationalization, domestication, individualization, identity, social change, contraction of the present