As to what social theory can accomplish in and of itself—it resembles the focusing power of a magnifying glass. Only when the social sciences no longer sparked a single thought would the time for social theory be past.
—JÜRGEN HABERMAS, The Theory of Communicative Action
1. TEMPORAL STRUCTURES IN SOCIETY
The belief that all events, objects, and states of affairs in the social world are dynamic processes and that time is therefore a key category for any appropriate analysis of society has become a commonplace in the social sciences. But it looks as if even disciplines that realize this have not known how to make much of it. Over and over one finds the astonished realization that almost all social phenomena can be “temporally reconstructed,” that is, redescribed in terms of their temporal aspects, whether it be techniques of domination, class distinctions, intercultural problems, socioeconomic underdevelopment, gender relations, welfare regimes, or the experience of hospitals, prisons, and drugs.1 As a general rule, however, this observation fails to have any lasting effect. The redescription of the phenomena of the respective problem area in terms of time results in little cumulative gain for either sociological theory or practice and the findings of disparate investigations of this sort hardly seem capable of being brought together in a systematic sociology of time.
So it is hardly surprising that even into the late 1980s treatises on the sociology of time consistently began with the almost stereotypical observation that time is a fundamental category of social reality and that until the appearance of the respective work there was no sociology of time worth mentioning, which the author of course intended to change.2 Yet, in important and detailed literature reviews at the beginning of that decade, Robert Lauer and Werner Bergmann had already shown that, contrary to this stubbornly persistent conviction, there was in fact a large amount of research on the sociology of time.3 Nevertheless their verdict was that a social-scientific analysis of time that carefully linked theory formation and empirical research was still lacking.
In view of this, Bergmann claims that the principal obstacle for the sociology of time consists in the lack of a well-founded, systematic connection to general sociological theory formation. As a rule, existing social-scientific studies of time are based on pretheoretical and arbitrarily selected models of time that for the most part rest loosely on philosophical, anthropological, or even everyday concepts. As a consequence, the sociological literature on time is made up of a variety of unconnected, noncumulative studies that are virtually “solipsistic” since they lack a sufficient connection to general approaches in social theory.4 So far not much has changed in this respect. Of course today books hardly ever begin with the assertion that until they appeared there was practically no sociology of time. Instead they usually start off with an overview of the most important philosophical or sociological studies, organized either chronologically or by subdiscipline, and these inquiries are then said to be unconnected and unsatisfactory. What follows, though, is all too often yet another “solipsistic” treatise, typically one that makes selective use of authors or theses that support its argument.5
As a result, existing social-scientific work on the theme of time can be grouped in general into three categories. In the first falls a surprisingly large number of survey works that take up and systematize previous reflections on the sociology of time from extremely diverse points of view. These treatises almost always culminate in the claim that the surveyed material is sufficient to show how important and diverse temporal structures are in the social world and why it is urgently necessary to devote more attention to them.6 The second category includes an increasingly salient group of very detailed studies of time and temporal structures that belong to particular subdisciplines of the social sciences. In the overwhelming majority of these cases one can add that the analyses remain too immediately focused on the particular phenomena being investigated. Rather theoretically impoverished and methodologically eclectic, they tend to treat time as a self-evident quantity.7
Finally, by way of contrast, the third category encompasses a series of theoretically oriented analyses of time that aim at the systematic clarification of a social-scientific or social-philosophical concept of time. They rise to such a high level of abstraction, though, that the investigation of empirically relevant phenomena not only completely drops out of view but also threatens to become unworkable8—not to mention the fact that so far these attempts at conceptualization also operate in a predominantly “solipsistic” fashion. Because of this they do not open up the prospect of a unified, social-scientific concept of time. As Barbara Adam remarks: “None of the writers has the same focus. Everyone asks different questions. No two theorists have the same view on what it means to make time central to social theory. . . . There are no signposts for orientation in this maze of conceptual chaos.”9 So, despite promises by Giddens and Luhmann to make time an essential concept in the formation of their own theories,10 a systematic linkage of the sociology of time to the development of empirical research programs is still an unfulfilled desideratum.
The suggestion, made by Adam and others, that in such a difficulty we should fall back on a philosophical approach to time as a unified foundation for our efforts, quickly proves to be just as unpromising when we take a closer look: philosophical concepts of time, formulated by the likes of Augustine, Immanuel Kant, Henri-Louis Bergson, John Ellis McTaggart, Martin Heidegger, or Margaret Mead and debated in their wake, are no less heterogeneous, incommensurable, and incompatible. These thinkers disagree on even the most elementary questions concerning the reality of time, whether it is a natural category, or one belonging to intuition or the understanding, or rather instead a social construct.11 Approaches based on the philosophy of time are thus just as much inclined to let time appear to be an unfathomable puzzle as the more theoretical investigations of the sociology of time are, while the empirical analyses that remain closer to the phenomena are equally disappointing since as a rule they simply take time to be a self-evident quantity. Thus, at first glance, the problem noted by Tabboni, that analyses of time fall with great regularity into either the “self-evidence trap” or the “enigma trap,” seems to be irresolvable.12 So it is hardly surprising that in the debate on the nature of time the favorite citation continues to be that pregnant passage from Augustine’s Confessions, where he states his own back-and-forth oscillation between these two poles: “What is time? When no one asks me, I know. But if I seek to explain it to someone who asks me about it, then I do not.”13
The consequences of the sociology of time’s rather weak condition are serious not only in view of the difficulties of establishing it as a subfield within the canonical disciplines of the social sciences but above all with respect to the contemporary formulation of theories of society, analyses of modernity, and diagnoses of the times. Because research in the sociology of time has so far been relatively unfruitful and difficult to connect to theoretical projects in the social sciences and social philosophy, these have been practically forced to continue operating in a way that excludes a temporal perspective. So Pierre Bourdieu’s dictum that the practice of social theory is so “detemporalized” that it even rules out the very idea of what it excludes still seems correct, despite all the metatheoretical protestations and pronouncements to the contrary.14
Against this background the present work is not envisaged as a contribution to the sociology of time as such, i.e., it does not ask what time is, nor in what way it enters into and affects social practices and structures. Instead it seeks to contribute an adequate social-theoretical grasp of current social developments and problems in the context of the process of modernization and also the debate concerning a fracture in this process between a “classical” age of modernity and a “second” age of late or post modernity. Further, it aims to systematically work out their ethical and political implications. My guiding hypothesis is that modernization is not only a multileveled process in time but also signifies first and foremost a structural (and culturally highly significant) transformation of time structures and horizons themselves. Accordingly, the direction of alteration is best captured by the concept of social acceleration. The thesis is that without treating the temporal dimension as a categorial and central consideration in social theory one cannot account for present-day changes in social practices, institutions, and self-relations in Western societies. The point is neither to establish a further subfield (“the sociology of acceleration”) nor to justify an existing one (“the sociology of time”), but rather to reconceptualize contemporary social theory. Thus in what follows I will generally draw on ideas from the philosophy and sociology of time only where this seems appropriate for systematic reasons.
One decisive advantage of temporal-analytic points of entry to social-theoretical questions consists in the fact that temporal structures and horizons represent one, if not the, systematic link between actor and system perspectives. As is well known, social changes can be either analyzed “macrosociologically” as alterations in “objective” social or systemic structures or investigated “microsociologically” from the viewpoint of a subject-centered social science as a transformation of logics of action and self-relations. While almost all varieties of social theory since Talcott Parsons have striven to overcome this structure/agency division, the question concerning the mechanisms by which systemic-structural logics and imperatives and actor orientations become mutually adjusted to one another or mediated with each other still remains perhaps one of the most puzzling and least well-understood problems of the social world.
Thus it is more or less obvious that social-structural processes of modernization cannot occur without some correspondence in the construction of subjective senses of self, in other words that social-structural transformation through modernization must necessarily go hand in hand with a transformation of identity.15 It is very unclear, however, how in fact actors in liberal societies, who not only respect but also actively cultivate the principle of individual ethical autonomy, develop the action orientations that are required from a systemic point of view.16 In this context, analyzing the almost miraculous mutual adjustment of systemic logics and those of action from the perspective of time appears to be a promising method. On the one hand, time horizons and time structures are constitutive for action orientations and self-relations. On the other, they are not at the disposal of individuals insofar as time, regardless of its social construction and systemic production, confronts actors as a “natural fact” or a “given.” Because the solid facticity of time and its nonetheless social nature are therefore indissolubly intertwined, temporal structures form the central site for the coordination and integration of individual life plans and “systemic” requirements. And, furthermore, insofar as ethical and political questions basically concern how we want to spend our time,17 they are also the place where social-scientific structural analyses and ethical-philosophical inquiries can and must be tied together.
Research in the sociology and ethnology of time present us here with one unanimous finding containing two essential points: first, measurements of time, perceptions of time, and time horizons are highly culturally dependent and change with the social structure of societies. Otthein Rammstedt worked this out systematically in an influential essay that postulates four forms of experienced time and time consciousness that unfold in accordance with the evolutionary development of social structures and are accompanied by very different time horizons and thus produce radically different action orientations and self-relations.18 According to this scheme, simple, undifferentiated societies tend to have an “occasional” time consciousness whose experience of time only differentiates in general between a “now” and a “not now,” so that past and future are fused together as the (mythically constituted) Other of the present. The claim that human beings “always already” had at their disposal quite concrete and similar representations of past and future is thus rendered permanently suspect.19
This conception portrays segmental and archaic caste-differentiated societies as dominated by a cyclical time consciousness in which time is experienced as a circulation of continuously recurring processes and states of affairs. Therefore the primary form of experienced time differentiates between before and after. Nevertheless, past and future are structurally identical here: the memory of the past is equivalent to the prediction of the future; the space of experience and the horizon of expectation are congruent.20 This experience of time appears in an extreme form as the “eternal return of the same” (Friedrich Nietzsche), in which memory extends across the future. In contrast to this, in the more starkly differentiated societies of early modernity a linear time consciousness gradually prevails that replaces the circle of time with an irreversible line running from the past through the present into the future. Here, for the first time, the dominant experience of time is one oriented by the difference between past, present, and future, with the future in particular appearing as fixed or closed in the sense of a telos of history (for instance, in Christianity or Marxism).21
In the functionally differentiated society of high modernity, finally, a linear time consciousness with an open future predominates: historical development is no longer understood as running toward a determinate goal, and its ending remains uncertain. According to Otthein Rammstedt, the corresponding experience of time is that of continuous movement or acceleration. Naturally this typology is schematic and simplified and hence empirically questionable. Rammstedt himself emphasizes that the four forms of time consciousness are superimposed on each other and do not form a historically unambiguous series. Empirical research has verified this supposition: for instance, coexistent cyclical and linear conceptions of time are found in almost all cultures, albeit with different emphases and characteristics.22 The central claim that the experience of time and the consciousness of time vary depending on social structures and cultural models is thus not placed in doubt by such objections.23
Second, the temporal structures of a given society are both cognitively and normatively binding as well as anchored deep within the personality structure that determines the habitus of individuals. Thus Norbert Elias emphasizes, on the one hand, the functional character of concepts of time, which for him serve primarily to coordinate and synchronize social processes and therefore develop and become further refined to the extent that the growing social complexity and length of chains of interdependence require more precise planning, regulation, and ordering of time. On the other hand, he stresses that the individual’s socially produced consciousness of time is, as a social habitus and as it were second nature, an inextricable component of one’s personality: “The experience of time of an individual belonging to a society that strictly regulates time is one example out of many for personality structures that are no less compulsory than biological characteristics and yet are socially acquired.”24
Interestingly, Elias already sees in this interlacing of systemic and individual-psychological structures an explanation for the (rapid) tempo of life in modern societies.
One of the characteristics which make this connection between the size of and pressure within the network of interdependence on the one hand, and the psychological make-up of the individual on the other particularly clear, is what we call the “tempo” of our time. This “tempo” is in fact nothing other than a manifestation of the multitude of intertwining chains of interdependence which run through every single social function that people have to perform . . . [it] is an expression of the multitude of interdependent actions, of the length and density of the chains composed by the individual actions, and of the intensity of the competitive chains composed by the individual actions. . . . A function situated at the junction of so many chains of action demands an exact allocation of time; it makes people become accustomed to subordinating momentary inclinations to the overriding necessities of interdependence; it trains them to eliminate all irregularities from behavior and to achieve permanent self-control.25
In the following chapters I will explore in detail the connection between social structure and pace of life postulated by Elias. For the moment, let me just emphasize that the normalizing character embodied in the temporal structures of society unfolds, as it were, behind the backs of actors in such a way that a higher degree of social normalization, on the one hand and a lower degree of morally authoritative codes or a maximum degree of individual ethical self-determination, on the other become compatible.26 The works of Elias and Michel Foucault thus suggest that the modern “disciplinary society” essentially achieves its disciplining and planning power by means of the establishment and internalization of time structures. And indeed, as countless studies have shown in the meantime, the key institutions of the disciplinary process, prisons, schools, barracks, hospitals, and workhouses, are characterized above all by their strict regulation of time.27
Nevertheless the process by which systemic temporal perspectives and patterns are aligned with those of individuals, and thereby social-structural requirements with individual dispositions, is not limited to specific institutional contexts but occurs continuously in all realms of life and society. Following Peter Ahlheit and Anthony Giddens, from the actor perspective one can situate the process of temporal mediation at three levels.28 Actors always simultaneously develop three distinct temporal perspectives whose relations with each other they must repeatedly reconsider and work out in their temporal practices. In the first place, they must deal with the time structures of their everyday lives, for instance, the recurring routines and rhythms of work and leisure time, waking up and going to sleep, etc., and the connected problems of synchronization, speed, duration, and the sequencing of actions. (How will I manage to get my work done at the office and pick up my daughter from kindergarten on time? Should I go shopping before or after swimming?) The extent to which time becomes a problem on this plane also depends upon the degree of routinization and habitualization, which in late modernity seems to be decreasing again. Nevertheless, everyday time has had to this day a mostly repetitive and cyclical character, since it is, as Giddens emphasizes, constitutive for the reproduction of social structures.29
In the second place, however, actors also constantly develop a temporal perspective on life as a whole in which they reflect upon their “lifetime.” The question how we wish to spend our time is not only posed to us with respect to our everyday life but also with respect to our life as a whole, which is why Giddens reverts to Heidegger’s concept of Dasein for this temporal dimension. Here as well the questions of synchronization, speed, duration, and the sequencing of actions are posed. How long do I want to (may I) go to school? Do I want to (can I) have kids, before I’m done with my degree? Do I really want to be a judge all my life? When will I retire?
In the third place, actors experience their everyday time and their lifetime as embedded in the encompassing time of their epoch, their generation, and their age (longue durée in the terminology Giddens uses following Fernand Braudel). “Our time” is therefore always simultaneously the time of our days, our lives, and our epoch, something that becomes clear when older people say “in my time things were different,” “in our time these traditions are obsolete,” or when people speak of “Goethe and his time.”
Only the interplay of all three of these levels of time and their respective time horizons determines the being-in-time of an actor,30 and they must be brought into accord with each other in a continuously renewed fashion. For example, when the daily routine of a student consists in waking up at noon, then going to the café, and finally to the revolutionary student club, sooner or later the pressing question will arise whether this is compatible with his plan to become a bona fide university professor and spend his retirement comfortably in Tuscany and whether this kind of routine can be seriously maintained if he doesn’t want to be economically excluded in the middle to long run. Similarly, the question will arise whether his life plan is in general still in step with the times—and whether it is still in step with the times to make long-term life plans.
Formulated more generally, this means that the allocation of temporal resources always depends on considerations pertaining to all three levels: how much time someone spends on professional work, family, leisure activities, and physical well-being depends on her daily routines, her life perspective, and her estimation of what is “in step with the times” (or of the demands of time and the future). Enduring divergences in perspectives force one to adopt strategies of adaptation: either the daily routine gets changed or the long-term life goal is redefined. (The possibility of a strategic alteration of the temporal patterns and perspectives of a given epoch only enters the consciousness of actors in exceptional situations.) All three levels have, first, their own temporal patterns (rhythms, sequences, speeds, synchronization requirements) and perspectives (i.e., their own conceptions or horizons of past, present, and future and of their relevance for the given action).31 Second, they are to a great extent determined by social structures. The rhythm, speed, duration, and sequence of our activities and practices are almost never determined by us as individuals but rather almost always prescribed by the collective temporal patterns and synchronization requirements of society (by hours of operation, transportation schedules, institutional rhythms, time-regulating contracts, deadlines, etc.).32
The social-structural constitution of temporal practices is illustrated particularly well by the time patterns of modern society. Again and again one finds the fact that individuals in Western societies rigidly plan and sequence their time, in other words, that the duration of events and the order of activities follows an abstractly fixed time plan external to the actions themselves, bemoaned by cultural critics and celebrated as an achievement by handbooks of time management. Yet this temporal practice is not the consequence of individual decisions or life plans, but results almost inevitably from the structural principle of functional differentiation according to which particular social spheres each follow their own respective temporal logic and individuals are only partially embedded in the respective areas of work, family, union, church, party, committee, department of government, etc. For this reason, as Georg Simmel and Talcott Parsons had already noticed, and as Eviatar Zerubavel worked out in great detail,33 they are compelled on pain of exclusion to precisely sequence their involvement in the respective social spheres with the help of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly planners and, correspondingly, to synchronize the respective area-specific time patterns. So the oft-remarked dominance of abstract time over “event time” in modern societies—something revealed, for instance, by the fact that events like a talk, a seminar, or a workday do not end when the relevant tasks are finished, but rather when a certain period of time has elapsed—is not some cultural peculiarity, but rather a social-structural necessity. The apparent possibility of reversing it in favor of a “(re-) temporalization of time” in present-day society therefore requires a meticulous cultural and structural analysis, as will be shown in part 4 of this book.
The collective nature of each respective concrete time pattern results in particular from the need for synchronization. We constantly have to orient our action toward the complementary activities and time patterns of our interaction partners and secure at least temporary synchronization. In functionally differentiated societies, this unavoidably leads to a large amount of shorter or longer waiting times, on the one hand, and to correlative phenomena of time pressure, on the other. Something similar holds true for our life perspectives. As will be shown more clearly in the course of the argument, both the idea of a life plan and its ideal-typical division into the three phases of education, gainful employment, and retirement, or childhood (in the family of origin), adulthood (with one’s own nuclear family), and old age (after the kids have moved out), are sociocultural constructions that cannot in anyway claim universal validity and definitely show signs of eroding in contemporary society. Whether, how, and to what extent the future is planned depends to a great degree on the stability and predictability of the social and cultural environment. Finally, the third plane of time, historical time or the epoch, almost entirely eludes the possibility of being shaped by individuals. Here individual actors only retain the possibility of behaving affirmatively or negatively to the respective demands of “their time.” Therefore the meaning of past, present, and future (i.e., temporal perspective) and the temporal pattern of action, which together determine the manner of our being-in-time, are always the complex product of structural and cultural relations and their refraction through the perspective of particular acting subjects.
The interconnection of the three levels of time in the perspective of actors always follows narrative patterns. Everyday time, biographical time, and historical time are related to each other, and mutually criticized and justified, in cultural and individual narratives. The meaning and relative weight of the past, present, and future and thus also the relevance and relative weight of tradition and change are determined simultaneously in narrative schemata (Entwürfe). In them every present appears grounded upon a past and related to a future. Cultural and institutional forms of change and persistence are legitimated, and sometimes criticized, through the narrative interrelation of everyday time, life history, and world history, though of course the balance between dynamic and stabilizing forces, between movement and inertia, varies historically.
As philosophers like Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre have recently emphasized, the linkage of past, present, and future in one’s own life history is always performed against the background of the historical framework of a cultural community or a narrated world history.34 Knowledge of the finitude of individual existence allows the discrepancy between a limited lifetime and the perspectivally unlimited time of the world to become a narrative and practical life problem.35 In almost all developed cultures the problem of reconciling this discrepancy is solved by the introduction of a fourth level of time through the notion of a sacred time.36 This “holy time” over arches the linear time of life and history, establishes its beginning and its end, and sublates life history and world history in a common, higher, and, so to speak, timeless time.
In Christian life, for instance, the time of life and the time of the world are brought together in such a way that both aim toward a future end of the world in the final judgment. In contrast to the linear, quantitative profane time that belongs to the immanent world and everyday (“work day”) life, sacred time has a timeless, cyclical, qualitative character and belongs to another or higher world.37 It is bound together with profane time in extraordinary or more-than-everyday “nodal” points, i.e., in specific moments, rituals, and festivals (e.g., in Christian cultural milieus Sundays, Christmas, or Easter) when it clearly interrupts everyday time, as it were, in a “time-out,” and thereby also gives the sequential flow of the latter a structure.38
With the help of sacred time, everyday time, the time of life and the time of the world are bound together in a meaningful whole that orients culture and action, one in which cultural patterns and structural necessities, systemic requirements and actor perspectives are made congruent. This temporal concordance is by no means always already secured. Instead it has to be produced in political and social processes of contestation. This makes clear how much the establishment and harmonization of the three social levels of time is always connected to questions of social and political power. The question who determines the rhythm, duration, sequencing, and synchronization of activities and events forms a central arena for conflicts of interest and power struggles. Chronopolitics is thus a central component of any form of domination, and in the historical process, as, above all, Paul Virilio never tires of postulating and elucidating, domination is as a rule the domination of the faster.39
So, in the context of everyday practices, temporal strategies like letting others wait, holding back, beating them to the punch, hesitating, changing the rhythm, varying the duration, etc., often lie at the center of social contestation,40 while on the middle level of time the struggle for time in life, that is, concerning time for education and retirement, vacations and holidays, weekend and night work, or periods of compensation for sickness or unemployment, often shapes economic and political debates in capitalistic societies even more than demands for a certain wage level.41 This type of controversy encroaches on the third level of culturally and politically determined epochal time in a fluid manner, as is easily seen in the conflict over Sundays and holidays, which was historically played out as a power struggle between church and capital and thus one between sacred and profane time.
It is not a coincidence that political upheavals have again and again played out as struggles over the determination of the calendar (something easily demonstrated by the history of the establishment of the Gregorian calendar) and that new holders of power often seek to cement their position by introducing a new one: for instance, at the beginning of modernity in the new time of the revolutionary calendar of 1793 or in Stalin’s efforts at calendar reform.42 The fact that both attempts at reform ultimately failed makes strikingly clear again just how much inherited time structures and perspectives become, so to speak, second nature to actors. The reformed calendars appeared “unnatural” or “contrary to nature,” even though—at least in the case of the revolutionary calendar—they explicitly strove to be closer to nature.43 The high degree of internalization of time patterns is therefore also responsible for the fact that the temporal dispositions of actors can often be adjusted to new structural conditions only through a long and generally violent process of reeducation, as E. P. Thompson made clear in his celebrated work on the “new dispensation” of time in the lives of workers during early industrialization.44
Consequently, if temporal patterns and perspectives represent the paradigmatic site for the mediation of structure and culture, of systemic and actor perspectives, and therefore also of systemic necessities and normative expectations, this immediately suggests that they disclose a privileged point of entry for the social-scientific analysis of the entire cultural and structural formation of an age. Whoever wants to investigate an entire sociocultural arrangement of systemic necessities and cultural orientations—in other words, whoever attempts to get to the bottom of, say, the nature of that meaningful and structural whole that we call modernity with regard to its statics and its dynamics, its inherent tensions and developmental tendencies—would do well to be guided in their work by the specificity, logic, and development of just those structures of time we are exploring here, because the principles and tendencies that underlie modernity are revealed in them as in a magnifying glass. The present work is therefore based on the conviction that adequate social-scientific diagnoses of the times (Zeitdiagnose) should in fact literally be diagnoses of its time, i.e., its temporal structures (Zeit-diagnosen). If it has become the conspicuous problem of the diagnostic disciplines that they can no longer find a common focus and therefore take up, in a seemingly arbitrary fashion, particular structural and cultural phenomena and make them each respectively into an anchor of diagnoses of society as a whole—something that has led to the bewildering proliferation of definitions of contemporary society, e.g., as a work, leisure, experience, risk, information, and multi-option society as well as all the post societies (postconventional, postindustrial, posthistoire, postmodern, postcapitalist, posttraditional)—then the proposed, as it were, “double” diagnosis of the times indicates a promising way out of this dilemma.45 The justification of this postulate is the aim and task of the present study.
2. TWO CONTEMPORARY DIAGNOSES OF THE TIMES
The feeling that one’s own age is “out of joint” is certainly nothing new. The critical observer’s gaze discerns symptoms of a “time of crisis” almost without fail and in cultural history this appears to be virtually constitutive for all attempts at characterizing one’s own position or epoch. However, as Reinhart Koselleck has meticulously shown in various works, within the horizon of modernity a new experience is added to this: the feeling, even the explicit conviction, that it is the time itself that is out of joint,46 that the ongoing time of crisis is the result of a crisis of time.47
Observers of modernity are at one in their diagnosis of the kind of transformation of time at issue, even if they disagree about how to evaluate it: reports of the perception of an immense acceleration of time and history, often expressing a state of bewilderment, appear in rapidly increasing number since roughly 1750, which is identified by the editors of the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe series as marking an epochal threshold (literally a “saddle period”: Sattelzeit).48 Note that this is long before the beginning of the industrial revolution and even before the French Revolution.49 With the introduction of the railroad this feeling intensified, and in the wake of the industrial revolution the practice of everyday life became, as it were, experientially saturated by it. As I show in the next chapter, in the subsequent historical process of modernity there followed wave after wave of diagnoses of an acceleration of tempo (of life, of the world, of society, of history—or even of time itself), so that Peter Conrad, in his mammoth cultural history, Modern Times, Modern Places, can make the brief and trenchant declaration: “Modernity is about the acceleration of time.”50
The experience of acceleration remains crucial today and has left its trace in almost every popular and academic diagnosis of the times. In fact, in the wake of the political revolution of 1989, the roughly contemporaneous “digital revolution” in communications technology, and the strengthened processes of global interconnectedness they both made possible, a new discourse about acceleration arises. In 2000 Gundolf S. Freyermuth, here representative of legions of essayists, op-ed writers, politicians, and economists, and with full awareness of the historical career of diagnoses of acceleration, summarizes this discourse as follows: “We are contemporaries of a phase of acceleration that is unique in the history of humankind—and makes industrialization look cozy in hindsight.”51 From the ivory tower, philosophers like Stefan Breuer (“Speed is doubtless the god of our era”)52 and sociologists like Frederic Jameson (“Time is today a function of speed, and evidently perceptible only in terms of its rate or velocity as such”)53 confirm this culturally predominant perception.
“Everything’s getting faster and faster.” Everything is constantly in flux, and the future is therefore completely open and uncertain and no longer simply derivable from the past and the present. This basic experience of modernity, characteristic of all its phases, only defines one side of the currently prevalent critical diagnoses of the times. Alongside it there is, paradoxically, a second, diametrically opposed observation society makes of itself. Even though it was already formulated by, for instance, Max Weber and Alexandre Kojève and was present as, so to speak, a subtext from the very beginning of modern times, toward the end of the twentieth century it occupies increasing amounts of space in the public mind and appears to affect the experience of reality of the majority of our contemporaries. People speak here of a “crystallization” of the cultural and structural formations of their own age, of its appearing to be an “iron cage” in which nothing essential changes anymore and nothing new occurs. In this view of contemporary society, the current epoch is characterized precisely by the way all motion seems to come to an end: utopian energies are exhausted because all the intellectual and spiritual possibilities appear to have been tried, and this threatens to expand into an uneventful (ereignislose) boredom. One finds the most striking formulations of this thesis, of course, in the discourse of posthistoire and Fukuyama’s claim about the “end of history,”54 but it is also reflected in the ex negativo definitions of one’s own age as a “post” and “end” period, a post-age at the end of reason, the subject, values, education, narratives, politics, history, etc. These last diagnoses of an epochal shift are naturally historically new insofar as they appear asymmetrical or “halved”: they are observations of an epochal break without a corresponding vision of a cultural new beginning, thus without a new meaningful linkage of past, present, and future.55
The two diagnoses of the time that appear so contradictory, social acceleration and societal rigidity, are only at first glance contrary to one another. In the memorable metaphor of a “frenetic standstill” (rasender Stillstand), which we owe to an inspired translation of Paul Virilio’s inertie polaire, they are synthesized into a posthistoire diagnosis in which the rush of historical events only provides scant cover for (and ultimately, in effect, produces) a standstill in the development of ideas and deep social structures.56 In the next chapter I will attempt to show that the complementarity of these critical experiences of time is not just an academic construct estranged from reality but is emphatically reflected in the cultural self-expression of society.57
Under this description the paradoxical basic structure of time in modernity (and, a fortiori, in late modernity), namely, that experiences of acceleration can repeatedly flip over into their diametrical opposites, can be observed not only on the level of historical time but also on the levels of lifetime and everyday time. Analogous to the paradoxical “double diagnosis” of the simultaneous acceleration of social change and halting of social development, one finds in the history of modernity periodic complaints about an increase in the pace of life and an ever more hectic lifestyle, which is said to have all manner of pathological characteristics, especially in the form of overstimulation and task overload (Überforderung). This grievance is interestingly accompanied by an opposing subtext in which the uneventful boredom of modern life is bemoaned. L’ennui becomes a catchword precisely at the time the industrial revolution is multiplying “velocity in all realms of human experience,” as Peter Conrad remarks.58 These are accompanied by the feeling that life “flies by” faster and faster, although the average lifespan in Western societies has continuously lengthened. The experience of time standing still becomes pathological here in the form of clinical depression. More than a few psychologists suspect that this represents a reaction to unfulfillable expectations of acceleration. According to many studies, depressive ailments appear to be on the rise in contemporary society.59
The accelerated transformation of social circumstances, institutions, and relationships, that is, the acceleration of social change, poses the following problem to individuals: they have to plan their lives over the long term in order to lend them an element of time-resistant stability, although in view of the growing contingency of social relations they cannot do this rationally. As I will show in part 4, this difficulty, one that sharpens in late modernity, is not just posed to individual actors but also to society as a whole, and to its subsystems, as the problem of steering (Steuerung) or coping with contingency. It proves to be a fundamental problem of “our time.”
Finally, from the perspective of everyday life in modern societies, as everyone knows from their own experience, time appears as fundamentally paradoxical insofar as it is saved in ever greater quantities through the ever more refined deployment of modern technology and organizational planning in almost all everyday practices, while it does not lose its scarce character at all. On the contrary: “the more time we save, the less we have,” runs a well-known piece of folk wisdom impressively illustrated in Michael Ende’s Momo.60 Despite a quantitatively large amount of “free time” in the sense of free time resources that do not have to be spent on the performance of necessary productive or reproductive activities, social scientists since Staffan B. Linder’s influential study, The Harried Leisure Class, have diagnosed an acute “time starvation” that afflicts contemporary society and is manifest at all three levels of time.61 “At present, American Society is starving—not the starvation of the Somalis or other traditional cultures, who die for lack of food, but for the ultimate scarcity of the postmodern world, time,” write the time-budget researchers John P. Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey (who are, incidentally, strictly empirically oriented). They add that “starving for time does not result in death, but rather, as ancient Athenian philosophers observed, in never beginning to live.”62
Whether acceleration per se is judged to be a malign or benign temporal change depends of course on the consequences taken into consideration. In view of the essential limitation of a human lifetime one may assume that the acceleration of goal-directed processes (the production of goods or states of affairs, the traversal of transport routes, the transmission of information) is, in principal, viewed as desirable. Nevertheless, an evident danger here consists in the potential desynchronization of processes, systems, and perspectives as a result of one-sided acceleration. Acceleration in one subregion of society only remains compatible with the rest of society if corresponding increases in tempo at structural and cultural points of intersection allow for frictionless “translation.”63 In a growing number of diagnoses of the time, however, one finds the implicit or explicit claim that just this “translation” or “resynchronization” is becoming increasingly problematic in many areas of society. If one tries to systematize these desynchronization diagnoses, it becomes apparent that they involve three analytically distinct developments. In the first place, as I have already made clear, it is always possible that systemically institutionalized or structurally induced temporal patterns and perspectives, on the one hand, and the temporal patterns and perspectives of actors, on the other, increasingly diverge, i.e., that these two structures of time fall apart (and thus desynchronize) as a consequence of migration or a rapid system change. As Simmel already lucidly observed, the institutionally and structurally induced tempo can be too high for acting subjects or, conversely, appear to the latter as having an excessive amount of rigidity and inertia.64 So both structural developments and cultural changes can be the (endogenous) cause of such a temporal bifurcation (Entzweiung).65 The resynchronization process can then run in favor of the one side or the other: either actors take on and internalize new temporal orientations, as in the process described by E. P. Thompson, or a systemic change occurs in whose course the overly inflexible and sluggish structures are replaced by faster and more mobile arrangements (or vice versa), as happened, for example, in the case of the former socialist states of eastern Europe.
A diagnosis of the times that fits this pattern is presented by many social scientists when they argue that systemic processes of modern society have become too fast for the individuals that live in them.66 The converse reproach—that actors are too inflexible, sluggish, and comfortable, in other words too slow for the “challenges of the time”—is not infrequently made by employers, economists, and politicians when they need to explain systemic deficiencies or misallocations (e.g., unemployment).
In contrast, a second form of desynchronization is represented by Peter Ahlheit’s postulation of a growing incongruence of the three actor-guiding horizons of time (that is, a disintegration of the perspectives of everyday time, biographical time, and historical time) in modern capitalist societies. In his view their irreconcilability causes individuals to perceive “their” time (in all three frames of reference) as “alienated.” This leads to a loss of the ability to narratively embed one’s own life in a past giving one a point of reference and a future lending meaning to one’s endeavors such that, at least in the middle term, a time-resistant action orientation is achieved.67 Naturally this actor-related form of desynchronization can be a consequence of desynchronization processes of the first kind. This is made clear, for instance, in the work of Richard Sennett.68
In the third place, social subsystems or functional systems can also be desynchronized with respect to each other. This is the gist of a widespread diagnosis of the times found in the social sciences and even in the op-ed pages and everyday politics according to which, roughly, the economy, science, technology, and the developments to which they give rise, have become too fast for a political steering and legal regulation of social transformation; the economy, science, and technology, on the one hand, and law and politics, on the other, have fallen “out of step,” that is, become desynchronized.69 Later on I will come back to all these forms of desynchronization and attempt to elucidate their internal connection to the tendencies of acceleration inherent in modernity. Here it is enough to observe that the (ongoing) acceleration of even one social subsystem can raise problematic temporal side effects for the other systems, and the individuals acting within them, in virtue of the temporal aspects of the “structural coupling” of social systems and the need for synchronization that results from it.70
If one tries to survey the current diagnoses of the times (and diagnoses of time) as a whole, it is striking that on one critical point they appear to converge. Common to a great variety of otherwise rather different contemporary interpretations of society is the belief that one can discern a more or less accentuated break in the development of modernity that forces one to redefine the present age as a second modernity,71 a reflexive modernity,72 an extended liberal modernity,73 a late modernity,74 or even a postmodernity.75 However, the basis on which this postulated break rests (is it structural or cultural?), where and when it sets in historically (is it a matter of a new age? if so, when does it begin?), and how far-reaching it is are all highly contested topics in the social sciences. Is it a question of a break in modernity or of a break with modernity? The concepts just mentioned already make clear that most of the interpreters incline to the first diagnosis and claim to observe a radicalization of modern principles. But then it becomes questionable what is genuinely new about the identified historical period.76
The path to an adequate answer to this question opens up only when one takes a look at the diagnoses of time already discussed: phenomena of acceleration and desynchronization lie at the heart of almost all definitions of the “new age.” This is particularly true of those diagnoses of the time that closely connect the postulated new social formations to the phenomena gathered together under the catchword globalization. As I argue in the chapter 9, the genuinely new thing about present-day globalization consists not in the appearance of the processes discussed under this heading, but rather in the speed with which they transpire.
This particular process of acceleration undoubtedly brings with it a series of structural and cultural consequences that lead to noticeable differences from the social formation of “classical modernity.”77 At first glance, of course, it proves to be an unprecedented process of global synchronization: the “age of globalization” is emblematically condensed in the placeless, “u-topian” Internet, where all events occur simultaneously worldwide. Nevertheless, complementary to this, as it were, intersocietal, intercontinental synchronization, almost all the intrasocietal phenomena of desynchronization discussed appear to sharpen. The information and financial markets in which transactions span the world in fractions of a second now hardly allow for a resynchronization of actor and system perspectives and, above all, no longer admit of political, and in part not even of legal, steering. Individuals and nation-states have grown too slow for the rate of transaction in globalized modernity. Education, politics, and law cannot keep pace with the developments of the era. At the same time, quantitatively large but marginalized groups in the so-called Third World, and certainly in the industrialized societies as well, are becoming “desynchronized” in that they are excluded from the decisive structural and cultural developments. All the diagnoses of globalization agree that the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous is rapidly increasing: the Stone Age and the Cyber Era exist next to each other in an unmediated fashion.
Indeed, it appears that an acceptance of these processes of desynchronization is the common core of what apologists of the “postmodern” celebrate and their opponents are battling against. The surrender of a political steering of economic, technological, and social processes of development (the “end of politics”) or even of the attempt to understand these developments at all (the “end of Science/Reason”); the renunciation of the demand for a meaningful, narrative integration of the past, present, and future, both biographical and collective (“the end of metanarratives”), and thus for an integration of everyday time, biographical time, and historical time in the project of a personal identity (“the end of the subject/the terror of identity”); the acceptance of desynchronized and disintegrated processing on the part of social subsystems (“the end of Society”) and finally acquiescence in the desynchronized and disintegrated development of different social groups—all these characterize the essence of both the postmodern philosophical ideology and the postmodern sociological diagnosis of the times. Therefore in what follows I argue that the assumption of a temporal perspective makes it possible to bring together the manifold observations of a “break” in the development of Western societies in such a way as to allow for an account of this break that is theoretical in substance, empirically verifiable, and capable of giving a selective, and hence normatively useful, diagnosis of the times. My guiding heuristic hypothesis here is that the acceleration that is a constitutive part of modernity crosses a critical threshold in “late modernity” beyond which the demand for societal synchronization and social integration can no longer be met.78
The consequence of this, as will be shown, is a fundamental, qualitative transformation in the forms of societal steering and individual identity that entails the abandonment of the claim to individual and collective autonomy and thus of the normative project of modernity. At this point of inflection, the quality of biographical and historical time changes as well: individual and collective time patterns and perspectives become situational and are continually redefined with the flow of time in a context-dependent manner in historically novel forms of “situational identity” and “situational politics.” Finally, in light of these considerations, one can theoretically locate and analytically specify the paradoxical simultaneity of diagnoses of a “total” dynamization of all social relations and a contemporaneous complete rigidification of historical and life-historical development of any kind, both of which show up precisely in diagnoses of “postmodernity.”79
3. A THEORY OF SOCIAL ACCELERATION: PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS
As I have tried to show, the requirement that we make temporal structures themselves the focus of social-scientific diagnoses of the times and definitions of modernity arises as it were naturally from the self-observation of modernity and in effect imposes itself on the sensitive social researcher. It grounds the hope that the cogent aspects of the various diagnoses and postulates concerning contemporary developments (globalization, disintegration, individualization, the information society, etc.) will reveal themselves to be diverse manifestations of a unified developmental logic. Therefore in the next chapter I interrogate the systematic content of the available self-observations of modernity regarding time more rigorously in order to lay down the foundations of my own theory of acceleration. In the first place, though, the methodological and theoretical presuppositions of such an enterprise should be made clear.
The initial hypothesis of this work runs as follows: the experience of modernization is an experience of acceleration. However, the question of which analytical categories lead to the most revealing interpretation and explanation of the structural and cultural developmental dynamics of modernity can only be answered by social-scientific analysis itself. So the cogency and explanatory potential of the conjecture that acceleration is the central feature of the transformation of time structures, and as such a fundamental force that shapes the culture and social structure of modernity, has to prove itself in what follows. In contrast, several authors have recently objected that the defining experience of time in late modernity is no longer that of acceleration, but rather that of the simultaneity of highly heterogeneous events and processes, which leads to the temporal perspective of a prolonged (Hanns-Georg Brose) or stretched (Helga Nowotny) present.80 I agree with this diagnosis to a great extent, but I will argue that this observed alteration in the consciousness of time and the time horizon represents a consequence and manifestation, or a new level, of the process of acceleration and cannot be interpreted as its replacement by a new temporal principle. Thus we are dealing with something that results from processes of acceleration.
According to another objection to the acceleration diagnosis, processes of acceleration are almost always accompanied by complementary tendencies of hesitation, delay, and slowing down such that changes in time structures invariably have to be interpreted as complex manifestations of this reciprocal relationship. Acceleration and deceleration have, in this view, an equal claim to being universal basic temporal tendencies. While I accept this objection to the extent that any theory of acceleration with a systematic intent has to take into consideration corresponding processes of slowdown, I am convinced I can show that in the modernization process forces of acceleration and deceleration do not balance out, but are instead very unequal in distribution: discernible tendencies of deceleration can be interpreted either as residual or as reactions to acceleration processes (and occasionally as functional for the latter). They are therefore in all cases secondary to the forces of acceleration. This holds true irrespective of the observation that lies at the heart of this book, namely, that the forces of acceleration bear within themselves a time-altering quality that leads to epiphenomenal appearances of inertia.
A social-theoretical definition of modernity that takes as its starting point the category of acceleration confronts in the first place the question, as obvious as it is difficult to answer, of what social acceleration is and what exactly is actually being accelerated in the modernization process. In fact, just as much confusion and disagreement reigns regarding the correct answer to this question as there is agreement about the fact of social acceleration as such. There is today no cleanly defined social-scientific concept of acceleration, let alone a theory of it.81 Very often, with a culpable neglect of logic and the categories of physics, the concepts of speed and acceleration are used synonymously, i.e., perceptions of acceleration and processes occurring at great speed are taken to be the same thing. Nevertheless, things are no better with regard to the concept of speed, which has also been given no precise meaning over and above its physical one, as Stefan Breuer remarks in his study of Paul Virilio’s “dromology” (which unfortunately rejects exact definitions of concepts as a matter of principle): “How little we know about speed! Sociology deals with meaning, economics with wealth (or poverty), political science with domination—in other words, phenomena that have little or nothing to do with speed. . . . Should the equation v = s/t be all there is to say over a phenomenon on which nothing less than the continued existence of this planet depends?”82
What is unclear here is not just what one conceives of as pertaining to social acceleration but also that to which it actually refers, that is, what its object domain comprises. Up to now the diagnoses of the times that are available in the social sciences, high culture, and everyday life offer a series of candidates, usually without further justification. History,83 culture,84 society, the pace of life,85 or even time itself is accelerating.86 Similarly in the course of the modernization process, from its very beginning to the present day, such things are claimed again and again, but here the diagnoses can be combined at will and as a rule their concepts can be used to describe the same phenomena, i.e., used as synonyms and hence without the power to discriminate analytically between different things. So it can hardly be surprising that in countless works of social science (and not only second-rate ones) one finds the crude and unqualified assertion that in modern or contemporary society absolutely everything is accelerating.87
That this is false hardly bears mentioning. Even a cursory glance at daily life shows that a wide array of processes are slowing down (most unhappily, for example, in traffic and legislative deadlock), while others stubbornly resist any attempts at acceleration (the most palpable here are those relating to one’s own body, e.g., colds and pregnancies). For this reason, a systematic theory of acceleration cannot avoid undertaking an analytically precise categorial definition of acceleration phenomena (chapter 2.1–2 and chapters 3–5), and it is particularly important to determine to what extent the identified phenomena of acceleration, taken together, can be described as an acceleration of society (as a whole). This is a claim that is categorically distinct from the thesis of an acceleration of central developments within society. One can only decide between these when one places alongside the definition of processes of acceleration an analogous but contrasting categorial identification of the socially relevant phenomena of slowdown and inertia (chapter 2.3). On this basis, then, the crucial task will be to understand more precisely the interrelationship of the forces of acceleration and deceleration (or of movement and stasis) (chapter 2.4).
For this reason, in part 2 I undertake a “phenomenological” analysis, that is, an analysis of the manifestations and modes of functioning of the three domains of social acceleration whose categories have been distinguished earlier—technological acceleration (chapter 3), the acceleration of social change (chapter 4), and the acceleration of the pace of life (chapter 5)—before I turn in part 3 to an identification of the context in which these processes of acceleration occur and the forces that drive them. Only if it can be shown that these phenomena of acceleration cannot be reduced without remainder to side effects of other basic tendencies of the modernization process (e.g., functional differentiation or individualization) can my hypothesis, namely, that acceleration constitutes an independent basic principle of modernity, claim a certain amount of plausibility in the first place. As I will demonstrate, the modern dynamic of acceleration can indeed be identified as a self-propelling circular process (the circle of acceleration) that is set in motion and driven forth by three analytically distinguishable “external” motors, of an economic, cultural, and social-structural nature, with which it stands in a dynamic reciprocal relationship (chapters 6 and 7). Compared to this, the tremendously historically influential accelerators represented by the state and the military recede into the background in late modernity and today appear to exert a decelerating force on social processes of development rather than an energizing one (chapter 8).
In the fourth and final part of the book, then, I will turn to the consequences of the process of social acceleration worked out in the previous parts. As has been shown, an analysis of the time structures of society offers the possibility of grasping, on the one hand, structural and systemic developments and, on the other, changes related to actors or subjects at the same time and also in relation to each other. As I have already indicated, the forces of acceleration in contemporary society at the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century are in fact causing just as much of an alteration and redefinition of individual and collective self-understandings (Selbstverhältnisse), i.e., dominant forms of identity, as they are of the shape taken by the political self-intervention or steering of society (chapters 10 and 11).
My argument assumes that the acceleration process of modernity does not take a simple linear form. Due to the complex multidimensionality that has already been discussed, the acceleration of social processes and developments is not simply a process of quantitative increase that would leave the nature of those processes and developments unchanged. Just as, for instance, the acceleration of a series of pictures beyond a certain speed can suddenly bring it to life, in that a movie emerges from individual photos, or again as the accelerated motion of molecules alters at critical points the aggregate condition of matter (frozen, liquid, gaseous), so too the acceleration of social processes beyond certain speeds causes a transmutation of these processes themselves. The thesis developed in chapters 9 through 12 states that the dynamics of the time structures of early modernity produced fundamentally different consequences than those of the transition into the twenty-first century. The latter generate a transformative break in the social structure, culture, and forms of identity of modern society that in fact results in a different society.
Having set myself the objective of defining and locating the dynamic of acceleration in the structural and cultural web of modernity, I conceive of this work as a contribution to a systematic theory of society anchored in empirical research and a social-theoretical redefinition of modernity. Although, like any theory of society that wants to be taken seriously, it orders and attempts to interpret empirical phenomena by postulating structural and cultural interconnections that of course can and must be subject to empirical testing, it does not claim to be itself an empirical investigation. Insofar as it diagnoses and postulates social developments, it obviously lays itself open to the possibility of empirical confirmation or critique. However, the cogency of the fundamental reflections underlying this work cannot be tested by means of a unified, closed methodology, because there is no method of empirical social research that can simultaneously grasp the interrelated theoretical observations concerning structures, actions, and subjects and the complexity of the differently scaled temporal structures and perspectives.
As I hope to make clear in the next chapter, the demand for such a controlled and unified method shackles the gaze to sharply restricted surface phenomena and does not allow one to grasp deep structures and distant connections. In particular, the temporal linkage of structural necessities and cultural perspectives is quite systematically lost from view in empirically oriented studies (as in analyses of time budgets or investigations of the time patterns and time requirements of organizations). The connection of my work to empirical research is therefore twofold: first, wherever the argument rests on empirically testable assumptions, I will make use of available data drawn from a multitude of a very different studies in the sociology and psychology of time in a necessarily eclectic fashion. In this respect, it belongs to the “intellectual honesty” already demanded by Max Weber not to proceed in accordance with a logic of subsumption, only accounting for those inquiries that confirm the hypothesis of acceleration, but rather to examine all findings in an impartial spirit.88
Here, for instance, the copiously available analyses of time usage are very informative.89 They are indispensable when it comes to the confirmation of an increase in the pace of life, even though, as will be shown, they are more appropriate for the analysis of the highly temporally differentiated arrangements of classical modernity than they are for the investigation of the dedifferentiated time structures of late modernity. In the latter context they display grave conceptual and methodological inadequacies for an inquiry into the compression of episodes of action and experience and fail to register the relevant key indicators. So just as indispensable are qualitative investigations that try to probe the experience and perception of time by individuals and the reasons for changes in their temporal practices and perspectives.90 Without consideration of such qualitative findings, the logic of the translation of systemic imperatives into individual motives for action cannot be deciphered.
Thus, in order to discern the temporally specific alterations in patterns of identity, I will draw on sociological and psychological identity research. Where it is rather a matter of deciphering systemic time patterns, I will make use of investigations of structures and horizons of time in politics, law, and the economy. Information on temporal-structural changes in contemporary society can also be gleaned from analyses of so-called globalization and investigations of the geography of time.91
There is another particular difficulty involved in empirically testing the postulated acceleration of social change. The problem here is not simply the general lack of comparative historical data. The situation is further complicated by the fact that there is no consensus in the social sciences about what constitute valid indicators of social change—and thus still less clarity concerning how one might ascertain an acceleration of this change. One hypothesis that suggests itself, namely, that acceleration can be defined in terms of an increase in the rate of innovation, fails empirically from the very start since it is unclear what counts as an innovation baseline in the respective realms of society (e.g., in science, in the economy, in art, etc.). I will thus first develop a definition of the acceleration of social change oriented by the philosopher Hermann Lübbe’s concept of a “contraction of the present” and only then search for evidence and counterevidence for a corresponding change in the rate of change. Analyses of change in the structure of education, occupational life, and the family, for instance, might yield decisive indications on this point.
This already makes clear the second way in which this work is tied back to empirical research. As a social-theoretical investigation, it claims to open new horizons of inquiry for future empirical research and to offer new guidance here through its capacity to translate a thesis, as diffuse as it is pervasive, of “general acceleration” in social life into a field of empirically specifiable research questions.92 In accordance with the definition of the relation between social theory and the social sciences from Jürgen Habermas cited at the beginning of this introduction, this work aims to have the “focusing power of a magnifying glass” and establish a new research paradigm at whose center stands an acceleration in the temporal structures of modern society.
Before I begin the actual investigation, I would like to respond to three predictable methodological objections. The first touches on the question of the systematic significance of empirical findings. A foundational problem of investigations aimed at diagnosing the times consists in the fact that for every observable trend there are countertrends that can be found and for all the evidence there is counterevidence. This difficulty is essentially responsible for the uncertainty that predominates regarding, for instance, the significance of diagnoses of globalization and individualization. Problems are posed in a similar way for a theory of acceleration that, in the first place, must be able to determine empirically the systematic importance of phenomena of deceleration in such a way that they appear as residual, as reactions to or side effects of primary processes of acceleration. In the second place, it has to answer the question of the systematic significance of quantities. If the main hypothesis of this work is that acceleration phenomena are fundamental to the cultural and structural development of modern society, it is not refuted by a demonstration that large groups within the population are excluded by the identified phenomena of acceleration because they are, say, unemployed, sick, without rights, or marginalized in some other way. Insofar as they are excluded from precisely those social spheres that are decisive for social development, their importance for the structural and cultural transformation of society remains limited regardless of their quantity.93 So an increasing number of forcefully decelerated “victims of modernization” does not falsify the thesis that acceleration is a defining characteristic of modernization.
In view of group-specific differences in the experience and shaping of time, there is a further continuing debate in the social sciences concerning the question of the “genderedness” of time, i.e., the differences in the temporal behavior and experience of men and women and their cultural and structural causes. That this question is not given much attention in the present work does not mean that I think it is irrelevant. However, it appears to me to be of rather secondary importance with respect to a systematic acceleration-theoretical analysis of modernity. The compulsions to accelerate affect men and women alike, although it can probably be shown that working women with children are subject to it in greater measure than men, since they are still burdened with the brunt of the tasks of family life.94
Doesn’t someone who demands a temporal-analytical redefinition of the modernization process culpably neglect the complementary transformation of the qualities of space? Whoever speaks of time must also speak of space runs the second methodological objection to be discussed here. This idea rests on a considerations going back to Kant and Émile Durkheim according to which space and time have to be taken as equally fundamental forms of intuition or understanding. As a consequence of this, many of the developments in contemporary social science that are central for this work are described in terms of the inclusion of the spatial dimension as “Time-Space-Distanciation,”95 “Time-Space-Compression”96 or as the annihilation of space by time,97 or even under a prioritization of the spatial perspective as a liquefying of space into flows and scapes.98
That perception and the mastery of space and time are tightly linked to one another is incontestable. Yet if these categories count for Kant as given a priori, for Durkheim they appear as a historically and culturally variable social construct, although one individuals in any given society cannot avoid.99 In what follows I hold that, with respect to the modernization process, space and time do not have the same status. It is incontestable that the experience of space has both phylogenetic and ontogenetic priority over the experience of time.100 If the former more strongly suggests a Kantian a priori, the latter displays in far greater measure the characteristics of sociohistorical variability. Ontogenetically there can hardly be any doubt that the sense of space and the spatial orientation of the child develop much earlier than the sense of time. In virtue of the force of gravity and the physical order of the sense organs and limbs, the distinctions between above and below and between in front of and behind are directly embodied (due to the symmetrical construction of the body, the difference between right and left is, in contrast, an artificial synthetic achievement that children learn much later and sometimes master only incompletely). Over against the primary spatial distinctions, temporal orientations, i.e., the capacity to estimate temporal distances or the duration of events, are essentially more complicated and abstract and are first learned much later. The sense of time is only fully developed in the period of adolescence.101 Phylogenetically the priority of space lies in the fact that perceptions and concepts of time develop in accordance with changes in spatial qualities: the locally observable differences between day and night and between the seasons, along with the natural and social rhythms connected to these, are the starting points for the determination of time and the development of a temporal vocabulary.102 Thus in cultural development time is always in the first place local time, determined by the position of the sun and the seasonal development of nature at a specific location.
The reason why temporal structures and perspectives are more sociohistorically variable quantities, however, lies precisely in their weaker anthropological anchoring in comparison to the perception of space. Temporal structures can alter to an extent that spatial ones never can. Therefore changes in the “space-time regime” of a society always arise from altered temporal structures and not from spatial changes. The birth hour of modernity, one might say with some plausibility, was the emancipation of time from space that stands at the beginning of the acceleration process. Through the introduction of the mechanical clock and, later, standardization, time is liberated from place and can be indicated independently of the qualities of the latter. Philosophically, the emancipation of time is achieved with Hobbes (and modern physics), in that the principle of movement (as freedom) finally gains priority over (Aristotelian) rest, and in the thought of Kant, who allows time to have a greater weight than space insofar as it constitutes the inner sense.103 Similarly it is not controversial in recent discussions of the change in how space is perceived to hold that here one is dealing with consequences of transformations in temporal structures.104 The often observed progressive contraction of space since the introduction of railroads and steamships is a consequence of the faster crossing of distances. The compression of space postulated by the geographer David Harvey is explicitly introduced by him as an “annihilation of space through time” caused by temporal processes of acceleration.105 And the “flows” and “scapes” of globalized modernity that loose themselves from a stable fixation in geographical space can hardly be grasped otherwise than as consequences of a rate of circulation of streams of information that has been sped up to the point of global simultaneity. Therefore my claim runs as follows: there is no independent spatial moment of change in modernity analogous to acceleration; the transformation of spatiotemporal structures is primarily driven by its temporal dynamic of change.
The postulation of a sociological priority of time (in contrast to an anthropological priority of space) will certainly provoke opposition and at this point is only intended to help kick off a debate. The theoretical fruitfulness of the guiding hypothesis and overall approach of the present work do not depend on the correctness of this postulate. Change in temporal structures and its causes, effects, and consequences can be analyzed independently of the question how, parallel to this, spatial structures change. That does not at all mean that there are no highly relevant empirical connections between the two, for instance, regarding the organization of political domination. For this reason, space will play a significant role in the following investigation. Yet, in contrast to time, it appears primarily as a dependent variable.
Finally, the third and last objection to be discussed here concerns the question of the concept of time underlying a theory of acceleration. Doesn’t the focus on the acceleration of processes and changes imply a certain Eurocentric conception of time, i.e., a linear, abstract, commodified one? Isn’t it the case that anyone who tries to develop a “theory of acceleration” must extensively study the time patterns and perspectives of non-European peoples and cultures? My reply to this criticism is that the present investigation does not aim at being a universal history of time or at the development of an ahistorical concept of social time, but rather represents an attempt to understand the essence and the developmental dynamic of modernity following Western patterns. It is an engagement with the temporal structures and perspectives of modernized Western societies. One may conjecture, with sufficient empirical plausibility, that wherever processes of modernization occur they will bring in train a corresponding transformation of concepts of time.106 A systematic analysis of premodern or non-European cultures in which modernization processes have not yet transpired is not required for this enterprise. I will therefore only make use of related ethnological and historical studies of time to the extent that they help illuminate, by way of contrast, the change in the temporal structures and perspectives of modernity.
The same holds true for the “new” concepts of time that are forming in the natural sciences. In the social-scientific literature it has almost become an obsession to make reference to the relativization and revision of the linear, abstract Newtonian concept of an “absolute mathematical time” and the importance of the insights of, in particular, Albert Einstein’s general relativity theory, quantum physics, and Ilya Prigogine’s theory of dissipative structures as well as the discovery of a number of forms of intrinsic biological temporalities (biologischer Eigenzeiten). Repeated stereotypically here is the assertion that these insights revolutionize our understanding of time and have powerful consequences for society and hence also for any social-scientific conception of time.107
On the basis of an often astonishing mixture of esoteric and holistic ideas whose respectability in the natural sciences is certainly a matter of dispute, interesting though they may be, the emergence of a completely new understanding of time is announced, one which, so we are assured, will not only revolutionize the social sciences but also life in modern society as a whole: “A different picture emerges . . . once we put the Newtonian and Cartesian understanding aside and concentrate on the infinite connections and relations. With such a shift of focus and emphasis, existing assumptions and classifications begin to become meaningless.”108 As if in confirmation of this claim, the popular time researcher Karlheinz Geißler announces that as a result of Einstein’s relativity theory the end of clock time, punctuality, and the distinction between past, present, and future is in sight, even with regard to our everyday life: “Einstein proved in his relativity theory that clocks in moving systems run at different speeds when the systems themselves have different speeds. . . . With this pathbreaking insight clock time was relativized. . . . In 1955, Einstein remarked in a letter that time is ‘only an illusion, even if a stubborn one.’ This illusion no longer appears to be so stubborn after all. The once solid belief in the all-powerful time of the clock is disappearing.”109
Now I do not mean in any way to contest the extraordinary interest that the discoveries of physics have for our theoretical and philosophical understanding of time, nor even the idea that in the long run they will probably have effects on our social practices.110 At present, however, they help at most to strengthen the enigmatic character of time. Therefore I hold both of these assertions to be mistaken: the relativization of time in the natural sciences does not lead to the collapse of temporal structures in our social institutions and our temporal orientations and horizons. It leaves time structures and perspectives at all three levels (everyday time, the time of life, and historical time) untouched. At best, “relativized time,” especially when combined with esoteric bodies of thought, may take on the functions of a new sacred time for some actors. Even then they cannot bring about any immediate practical consequences for human action, since in particular the relevant phenomena of physics remain entirely inaccessible to direct experience.
So if there is any empirical evidence for the change in temporal experience and practice postulated by Adam and Geißler, its explanation must be sought in the context of social and cultural practices. A half-baked esoteric-holistic, pseudo-scientific concept of time cannot contribute very much to social science research and work in social philosophy on this point.
The popularity of non-European, esoteric-mystical, and alternative quantum- or astrophysical concepts of time is due to the hope that they might provide a foothold for the development of a normative critique of late modern, late capitalist society on the basis of its treatment of time. As I have argued, this move has an initial plausibility because temporal structures carry fundamental normative implications. Insofar as the basic ethical question of the good life is the question how human beings desire to or should spend “their” time, time structures and horizons, which are always social in nature, lie at the center of ethics.111 So it is hardly surprising that even empirical studies of time tend to discuss questions of the good life and alternative ways of living.
This work certainly shares the basic intention of social criticism. Nevertheless it seeks to obtain its criteria for the diagnosis of “pathological” developments, as it were, from within society by on the one hand drawing our attention to the phenomena of desynchronization and disintegration resulting from social acceleration and on the other holding the temporal perspectives relevant to action and culture up against the structurally imposed patterns of time. Where the three (or, if one includes sacred time, four) levels of the individual’s experience of time can no longer be brought into accord with one another and with the systemic patterns of time, severe consequences unavoidably result for actors, both individual and collective. A resynchronization is then only possible at the cost of a (temporal-) cultural or (temporal-) structural “revolution.” In this respect, I also understand the following reflections as a contribution to an as-yet-unwritten sociology of the good life. Unlike a philosophy of the good life, which would have to develop abstract ethical criteria for the conduct of life, this form of critical sociology wields the socially predominant ideas of a successful life, whether explicitly formulated or implicitly held, against the structural conditions under which those conceptions are pursued.112