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FROM THE LOVE OF MOVEMENT TO THE LAW OF ACCELERATION: OBSERVATIONS OF MODERNITY

1. ACCELERATION AND THE CULTURE OF MODERNITY

Since the Renaissance, which began a historically reconstructible debate concerning the “newtime” (neue Zeit), the defenders and the despisers of modernity have agreed on one point: its constitutive experience is that of a monstrous acceleration of the world, of life, and of each individual’s stream of experience. A series of recent historical works has made clear just how much the entire cultural history of modernity to the present day can be interpreted in light of this basic experience. Their common focus lies in the construal of the cultural self-understanding of modernity as a reaction to a changed experience of time and space.¹

Like Peter Conrad, for whom modernity is quite simply a matter of the acceleration of time (and linked to this the dissolution of fixed spaces),² the political scientist and urbanist Marshall Berman defends the thesis that the term modernity describes a condition of ceaseless dynamism that finds its most vivid expression in the oft-cited formulation from The Communist Manifesto: all that is solid melts into air.

In his book of that title (with the subtitle The Experience of Modernity) Berman writes:

There is a mode of vital experience—experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils—that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience, “modernity.” . . . Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, “all that is solid melts into air.”3

Berman then traces the way this experience of dynamization, transformation, and the continual unsettling of certainties accompanies all processes of modernization. The culture of modernity thus consists in working out, interpreting, and more or less bringing this experience under control. (Berman consistently speaks of modernism as a reaction to modernization.)

He lets modernity in this sense begin with Rousseau’s observation of the tourbillon social or “social whirlwind” in Émile and achieve its first complete artistic expression in Goethe’s Faust.⁴ In the fate of Philemon and Baucis, who in the last act of Faust are literally victims of the setting in motion of the Earth and hence symbolically represent the passing away of the old world of inertia or persistence, Goethe makes visible just how much the social whirlwind links together internal and external changes. As Friedrich Ancillon had already remarked in 1823, this culturally shifts the burden of proof, as it were, from movement to inertia: “Everything has begun to move or will be set in motion. And with the intention or under the pretense of perfecting everything, everything is called into question, everything is doubted and we approach a universal metamorphosis. The love of movement for its own sake, even without a purpose and without a definite goal, is what has resulted from the movement of the times. In it, and in it alone, the true life is sought.”⁵ The burden of proof was borne from then on not by those who wished to change things, but by those who held fast, whether in everyday life, politics, or culture, to what currently existed, something Berman makes clear with a quotation from the New York developer Robert Moses: his bulldozers demolished large parts of New York, and especially the Bronx, with Faustian violence in the middle of the twentieth century (similar to the machines of Haussmann in Paris a hundred years earlier), and, according to him, people who “love things the way they are” have “no hope” in modernity.⁶ The love of movement for its own sake, as Ancillon formulated it, appears to be the fundamental modern principle.

Of course, this principle is experienced as ambivalent from the very beginning, both as a path to the true life and a promise of progress and as a limitless abyss and an all-devouring whirlpool. This ambivalence is constitutive for the entire culture of modernity. It can be seen in Goethe, who vacillated between enthusiasm and admiration for the social and technological achievements of the new world, on the one hand, and concern regarding the deeply destructive qualities of its “velociferian,” Mephistophelian tempo,⁷ and also in Nietzsche, whose dynamic, energetic Overman is overshadowed by the fear of a new barbarism: “With the tremendous acceleration of life mind and eye have become accustomed to seeing and judging partially or inaccurately. . . . From lack of repose our civilization is turning into a new barbarism. At no time have the active, that is to say the restless, counted for more. That is why one of the most necessary corrections to the character of mankind that have to be taken in hand is a considerable strengthening of the contemplative element in it.”8 In the Untimely Meditations Nietzsche leaves no doubt that the acceleration, liquefaction, and dissolution of existing relationships and convictions, “the madly thoughtless shattering and dismantling of all foundations, their dissolution into a continual evolving that flows ceaselessly away, the tireless unspinning and historicizing of all there has ever been by modern man, the great cross-spider at the node of the cosmic web,” is the basic principle of modern culture.⁹

Nietzsche believed that this development was the seed of decline and decadence. When he “thinks of the haste and hurry now universal, of the increasing velocity of life, of the cessation of all contemplativeness and simplicity,” it almost seems to him that “what he is seeing are the symptoms of a total extermination and uprooting of culture.”¹⁰ This ambivalence may also explain the effect of Charles Baudelaire’s influential characterizations of modernity. In his essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” Baudelaire defines (and celebrates) modernity as the passing and always already disappearing, as “the transient, the fugitive, the contingent, one half of art, whose other half is the eternal and the unchangeable.”¹¹ The fleetingness of the modern moment thus actualizes in a new way the longing for the eternal and permanent, the other half of art, on whose behalf Baudelaire greets the constitutively modern idea of (technological) progress with nothing but hatred and contempt, as when he observes that the will to self-annihilation that inhabits the thought of progress is suicidal and leads to eternal despair.¹²

Nevertheless the question here is not that of appraising the experience of an expanding dynamism, but rather of demonstrating its effect on the character of modern culture. From architecture, painting, and sculpture to literature and music, it was definitive in all fields of cultural production.¹³

In the works of the cubists and futurists, like those of Fernand Léger, Jean Metzinger, Giacomo Balla, or Umberto Boccioni, but also of course in the works of William Turner¹⁴ or Marcel Duchamp, who attempted in his picture of 1912, Nude Descending a Staircase, to artistically put into practice Einstein’s idea of expressing space and time through the abstract representation of movement, one sees clearly the effort to translate the dynamization and fragmentation of the experience of space and the world into a new formal language (Formensprache).15 Drawing on the work of Stephen Kern, David Harvey shows how much, say, Robert Delaunay’s cubist painting of the Eiffel Tower (1911) expresses precisely the same idea of representing time through the fragmentation of space that underlies Henry Ford’s acceleration of industrial production through the assembly line.¹⁶

It has often been observed how much the tempo of the performance of classical works in music has sped up since the nineteenth century. If one compares the average duration of recordings of a given work over the decades, one can in fact detect unambiguous “tendencies of compression,” leaving aside a few countermovements that aim at “deceleration.”¹⁷ It has, moreover, been claimed that, in view of the faster pace of contemporary life, works like Beethoven’s symphonies must be played faster in order to bring about comparable effects.¹⁸ However, even in the compositional techniques themselves, contrasts of tempo and hence dynamic effects become more and more important from at least the Baroque period onward. A piano sonata of Schumann rather astonishingly begins with the prescribed tempo “as fast as possible” only to immediately follow this with an indication of “even faster.”¹⁹ The most pronounced experimentation with dynamic effects is perhaps that of Maurice Ravel, whose Boléro, for example, achieves an illusory effect of acceleration through changes in instrumentation. Finally, Darius Milhaud heightens the idea of musical acceleration to the point of absurdity in his three operas minutes (1927) by running through the material of three Greek tragedies in a few minutes.

The musical forms of jazz and many styles of pop and rock music have also repeatedly been interpreted as reflections of the breathless pace of modern urban life. The word jazz itself appears to be a slang expression for speed.²⁰ It doesn’t seem implausible to conjecture that new stylistic movements in pop music display a tendency to become ever faster for a time until a critical limit is reached (that of playability or intelligibility). After this, new forms of expression have to be found or one faces the threat of a loss of popularity. The same holds true for the punk music of the 1970s and ’80s, for heavy metal, which achieved and passed its zenith of popularity in the second half of the 1980s in its breathtakingly fast variety of “speed metal,” and for the techno music of the ’90s, in which there was a genuine competition over the highest number of “beats per minute.”²¹ The effect of such music on the hearer can be thoroughly ambivalent: for example, in her book, Teenage Wasteland, Donna Gaines writes that “thrash [a closely related variety of speed metal—H. R.] is so fast it actually calms you down; it’s relaxing, like Ritalin,” and, regarding the perception of time in the techno scene, Barbara Volkswein reports the effect of a “flipping over” (Umschlagen) of the experience of racing time into a feeling that time is congealing and even standing still that will be central to my general theory of social acceleration.22 Things are different with another phenomenon: the attraction of disco music, as well as a large part of techno music, is clearly in some way essentially related to the fact that its basic tempo lies just above the normal human heartbeat and thus has a snappy stimulative and accelerating effect. Nevertheless, it is in this case much less about artistically working through a transformed experience of time and space than it is about industrially reproducing it. Its traces can also be seen in other developments in popular culture and the media landscape: for instance, in the way image sequences and editing have grown faster and faster in the course of the twentieth century, reaching the point at which the principle of linear narrative connection is technologically replaced by fragmentary, associative, and kaleidoscopic transitions, as, e.g., MTV made popular worldwide through its ads and music videos.²³

Last, in the literature of modernity encounters with that “social whirlwind,” the ongoing, accelerated metamorphosis of existing social forms and the traumatic, shocklike experience of technologically altered lifeworlds are ubiquitous. We find them not only in Goethe and in the novels of Rousseau but also in, for instance, the poetry of the Romantics: in Adelbert Chamisso’s “The Steam Horse,” in the “model of all that is fast,” that “the course of time” leaves behind it,²⁴ in Heinrich Heine’s only half-ironic observation about the annihilation of our basic concepts of space and time by the railroad,²⁵ or in the testimonies of expressionism, for instance, in Georg Heym or Georg Trakl, for whom the “demonic” quality of cities lay in their violent pace of change and dynamic movement.

The great novels of the twentieth century can also be understood as reactions to modernity’s expectations of acceleration. James Joyce’s Ulysses transforms and represents them in a stream of consciousness that appears to only allow for the present, while Marcel Proust sets off in search of a past that seems to be, in the “age of speed,” always already converted into a museum piece and irretrievably lost.²⁶ Thomas Mann sets up his Magic Mountain as a “novel of time” that not only reflects on the paradoxes of the experience of time but even makes acceleration the principle of its narrative structure: time flows faster and faster as the novel progresses, so that the same number of pages recount a few hours of narrated time at the beginning of the book that later portray days and then weeks, until by the end of the work months and years are compressed into a few pages.27

From these observations, David Harvey concludes that the culture of modernity as a whole can only be understood as a reaction to the transformed, crisis-ridden experiences of space and time that result from successive waves of “time-space-compression” and thus must be conceived as consequences of the acceleration of the pace of life and the annihilation of space through time.²⁸

This leads me to conjecture that waves of acceleration, as the core of the modernization process, are produced in particular by technical innovations and their industrial implementation. The introduction of the steam engine into factories and, soon after, the construction of railroads; the mass diffusion of bicycles and then automobiles and later planes; the acceleration of communication through telegraphs and then through telephones and finally through the Internet; the social entrenchment of transistor radios and “moving pictures”: all these forms of the technological acceleration of transport, communication, and production altered the lifeworld and everyday culture in occasionally shocking and traumatic ways and led to a shifting sense (Empfindung) of being-in-time and being-in-the-world. Since the industrial revolution, as Stefan Breuer remarks drawing on Virilio, this world appears to befall subjects “unceasingly, with the violence of an accident,”²⁹ so that medical concepts of shock and trauma appear to be completely appropriate categories to use. In short, these changes led to what Harvey calls time-space compression.³⁰

Ambivalent evaluations of these transformations are characteristic of modernity and show up over and over again in cultural conflicts about each of these innovations: in contemporary testimonials of various associations one often recognizes the experience of the “alluring and at the same time frightening” remarked by Heine. For instance, in 1877 W. G. Greg already formulates it like this: “doubtless the outstanding mark of life in the second half of the nineteenth century is speed—the hurry that fills it, the speed with which we move, the great pressure under which we work—and it behooves us, first, to consider the question whether this great speed is something intrinsically good, and second, the question whether it is worth the price we pay for it—a price that we can only estimate and reliably determine with difficulty.”³¹

The introduction of each speed-enhancing innovation led to a form of culture war in which the defenders of the new technology who praised the new possibilities it promised faced off against just as determined opponents who warned of both a loss of human scale and control of the lifeworld as well as the physically and psychologically damaging consequences. The warnings ran the gamut: from “bicycle face” caused by high wind resistance to brain damage and digestive problems caused by the high velocity of railroad and later automobile travel32—all the way to apocalyptic visions of the complete disappearance of culture as a result of massive television consumption or incurable depressive isolation caused by the expansion of e-mail communication and excessive use of the Internet.³³ Seen in this light, the widespread warnings of harmful effects on the brain from cell phone use give one a sense of déjà vu.

Three systematic conclusions can be drawn from the history of cultural war over technologies of acceleration: first, the technological acceleration process does not run in a uniformly linear fashion, but comes in surges, continually encountering obstacles, resistances, and countermovements that can slow it down, interrupt it, or even temporarily reverse it.³⁴

Second, almost every surge of acceleration is followed by a discourse of acceleration and deceleration in which, as a rule, the call for deceleration and the nostalgic desire for the lost “slow world,” whose slowness first becomes a distinct quality in retrospect, outweighs the excitement about gains in speed.³⁵ Cultural movements like Marinetti’s futurism (in particular his manifesto of 1909) that euphorically celebrate the intoxication and triumph of the newly created and from then on “eternal, ever-present speed,” glimpsing in it at first a new aesthetic and later even a new religion and morality, remained the exception.³⁶ In this vein the oppositional adherents of a deliberative deceleration were also never at loss for original ways to express their protest against speed, whether it be in the manner of the Parisian fad of taking turtles for walks on the boulevards in 1840, noted by Walter Benjamin in his essay on the flaneur, or in the manner of Peter Heintel’s present-day Union for the Slowing Down of Time (Verein zur Verzögerung der Zeit).³⁷

Third, even in the face of the discursive hegemony enjoyed by decelerators in high culture, every single one of these “culture wars” has so far ended with the victory of the accelerators, i.e., with the introduction and entrenchment of the new technology. The triumphal march of the accelerating technologies is flanked here by a popular culture enthused by promised time gains in advertisement, sports, and everyday life, some of whose paradigmatic expressions are, for instance, the fascination with, and success of, “fast food,” Blitzkrieg, Formula One racing, luge, or radio stations that broadcast the news two minutes before the hour and advertise themselves with slogans like “on Radio Such-and-Such, always informed two minutes earlier.”

Although it is rather pointless to argue about when exactly the strongest phase of acceleration occurred since, on the one hand, technological and organizational innovations are always appearing and the cultural debate about the dynamization of life never quiets down and, on the other, the phases of innovation in the various fields of transportation, production, and communication do not always occur simultaneously, there is nevertheless a broad consensus in the scholarly literature about two significant waves of acceleration. First, it is undisputed that a revolution in speed occurred in the decades before and after 1900 as a result of the industrial revolution and the wide impact its technological innovations had on almost all spheres of life.38 It is certainly not a coincidence that right about this time (1886 and 1904, respectively) Werner Siemens and Henry Adams each independently postulate a “law of acceleration” in the development of culture. The “clear and evident law of our current cultural development is that of continuous acceleration,” explains Siemens,³⁹ and in his autobiographical work The Education of Henry Adams Adams delivers us an impressive and palpable example of the experience of modern culture as steered by explosive, violent, inescapable, and impersonal powers. (Adams continuously speaks, somewhat mysteriously, of “the force” and “the forces” that drive the acceleration process forward.) It is instructive to consider a longer excerpt from a chapter entitled “A Law of Acceleration” that deals with the transformations observed by Adams after the 1890s:

Nothing so revolutionary had happened since the year 300. Thought had more than once been upset, but never caught and whirled about in the vortex of infinite forces. Power leaped from every atom, and enough of it to supply the stellar universe showed itself running to waste at every pore of matter. Man could no longer hold it off. Forces grasped his wrists and flung him about as though he had hold of a live wire or a runaway automobile; which was very nearly the exact truth. . . . Impossibilities no longer stood in the way. One’s life had fattened on impossibilities. Before the boy was six years old, he had seen four impossibilities made actual—the ocean steamer, the railway, the electric telegraph, and the Daguerrotype; nor could he ever learn which of the four had most hurried others to come. . . . Every day Nature violently revolted, causing so-called accidents with enormous destruction of property and life, while plainly laughing at man, who helplessly groaned and shrieked and shuddered, but never for a single instant could stop. The railways alone approached the carnage of war; automobiles and fire-arms ravaged society, until an earthquake became almost a nervous relaxation.40

If we view the emergence of a new medical-pathological discourse of acceleration or the widespread diagnosis of a new speed-induced kind of sickness as the most unambiguous symptom of a phase of comprehensive acceleration, as Joachim Radkau suggests, then the flood of talk about “neurasthenia” that followed the introduction of this diagnostic category by George M. Beard in 1881 (and is echoed in Adams’s text) also bears witness to the significance of the changes occurring around 1900.⁴¹ It is this that leads Radkau to name the first decade of the twentieth century the “age of nervousness” (Nervosität).⁴² If one uses this kind of indicator, then it turns out that there are strong signs of a new, recent phase of acceleration in the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century: from “hurry sickness” and “yuppie flu” to the recently ubiquitous attention deficit disorder in children and youth and on to clinical depression as a reaction to the speed demands of a globalized society, the diagnoses of speed-induced sicknesses are proliferating at present.⁴³

In agreement with this, from 1989 to the turn of the century the discourse of acceleration and deceleration has swelled as a reaction to the increase in speed through the digital and political revolutions of this period. Lack of time and acceleration are continuous themes in the popular science media and in the op-ed and essay sections of the major newspapers, works offering guidance and counseling about improved time management sell rapidly,⁴⁴ and the admonitory voices of oppositional decelerators launch into a mighty crescendo. Books and movements that have committed themselves to a conscious slowing down, for example, Fritz Reheis’s best seller The Creativity of Slowness or Sten Nadolny’s Discovery of Slowness or even the aforementioned Union for the Slowing Down of Time, have such a wide appeal that Peter Glotz sees in them the emergence of a new, dominant oppositional ideology.⁴⁵

At the same time, both the apologists and the critics of a new culture of “postmodernity” agree that one has to include the recent increase in the speed of social processes among its distinctive characteristics and driving forces.⁴⁶

Here the question whether the digital revolution and the increased speed of transactions discussed under the heading of globalization are actually without historical precedent or whether they instead pale by comparison with the transformations of experience wrought by the industrial revolution (even if only because, as Reinhart Koselleck conjectures, we can become accustomed even to experiences of acceleration) is both hardly capable of being answered and also not particularly relevant.47 Insofar as the phenomena in question concern the heightening of speed in transportation, communication, and production, the individual mechanisms of acceleration have a cumulative effect: the corresponding processes become ever more accelerated.

In contrast, a different, far-reaching question is whether the process of acceleration itself accelerates insofar as the waves of acceleration in the various spheres of life appear in ever thicker sequences, such that the rate of change itself increases until we arrive at a permanent transformation, an idea suggested by the “laws of acceleration” postulated by Siemens and Adams.⁴⁸ An acceleration process of this kind cannot be understood as a form of technological acceleration, but must instead be conceived as a symptom of the acceleration of social change.

Two further phenomena to be explained also speak in favor of the necessity for a social-scientific analysis of the modern dynamics of acceleration that is systematic in intent. The first concerns the fact that the experience of acceleration and shortage of time that stands in the center of the modernization process is in no way a simple consequence of technological acceleration. Quite to the contrary, the former appears to be a presupposition of the latter. As authors like Hans Blumenberg, Reinhart Koselleck, Helga Nowotny, or Marianne Gronemeyer have shown, the Enlightenment developed a characteristic form of impatience as a result of the separation of the historical space of experience from the horizon of expectation. This impatience, and associated ideas of Progress, a belated Reason, and an acceleratable History, are constitutive presuppositions for the triumphs of the natural sciences and the industrial revolution that follow.⁴⁹

Koselleck impressively retraces the way the perception of a (secular) social and historical acceleration (partly rooted, of course, in older eschatological expectations) emerges sometime around 1750. It follows the development of a new, “temporalized” understanding of history on the basis of which the space of experience of history and the horizon of expectation of the future can gradually come apart. Wholly independent of but in agreement with these considerations, Marshall Berman and David Harvey also date the beginning of the modern dynamization or time-space-compression from the Renaissance.⁵⁰ The principle of dynamization and acceleration thus appears to be inherent in the culture of modernity from the very beginning, even before becoming observable in its material structures.

Interestingly, the same historical connection is also revealed with respect to the already emphasized “flip side” of acceleration, which characterizes the second of the phenomena that require explanation here, namely, the expanding experience of processes of rigidification. These are not only discernible in theoretically oriented sketches and diagnoses of the times. One also reads them attested in cultural self-observations like a subtext that becomes stronger as modernity moves forward. Experiences of standing still go along with the feeling of a heightening rate of change and action and even seem to be its complement or flip side. Thus long before the industrial revolution, but unmistakably within the horizon of modernity, we find in the culture and discourse of sensitivity (Empfindsamkeit) various countersymptoms to the symptoms of acceleration. For instance, counterposed to Simmel’s qualitative and quantitative “escalation of nervous life” (Steigerung des Nervenlebens) there is “black” melancholia, which leads its victims (who are typically identified as “high-strung over-sensitive types” [überspannte Empfindler]) into a condition of paralysis and stasis, of a pastless and futureless temporal void.51 This experience returns during the second half of the nineteenth century and the fin de siècle in a stronger and discursively different form as the existential feelings of l’ennui, Langeweile, and boredom, which were particularly widespread in literary circles. This was a time when the circumstances of life were indeed undergoing breathtaking change as a result of the industrial revolution: “As if in reaction to the force so freakishly expended in manufacturing and engineering . . . the busiest century in the world’s history was also the one afflicted by enervation, attracted by sleeping sickness.”⁵²

While Baudelaire saw l’ennui as an unavoidable consequence of the bourgeois culture that gave itself over to the worship of the fleeting moment, Nietzsche also thought he perceived the eternal return of the same behind the furious change of modern society and interpreted its cultural tendencies toward acceleration as a flight from a steadily expanding sense of tedium.⁵³ Then in the early twentieth century the very same symptoms were held to be the expression of the acceleration sickness neurasthenia. Thus, if one follows Radkau, the mal du siècle already identified by Alfred de Musset in 1836 becomes, under a new name, the sickness (or guiding discourse) of the early twentieth century.⁵⁴ And, as we have already seen, the experience of time tamely flowing or standing still, of the collapse of a meaningful past or future horizon, is the reverse side of the perception of “racing time” and pervades the culture of Western societies in the transition to the twenty-first century: pathologically as a symptom of clinical depression, discursively in the “posthistory” (posthistoire) debates, and literarily perhaps most clearly in the stories of Douglas Coupland, whose book, Generation X—it was stylized as the “catechism of a late modernity” and a “book of truths at the end of the century” by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Germany’s most important newspapers and at the same time furnished sociology with a keyword for a whole generation55—seems to confirm Frederic Jameson’s thesis of an imminent collapse of the antinomies of change and stasis when he offers us the following definitions of the symptoms of late modern “history poisoning”: “Historical Underdosing: To live in a period of time when nothing seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts. Historical Overdosing: To live in a period when too much seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts.”⁵⁶

All this makes sufficiently clear that the connection between acceleration and modernity is just as deep as it is complex and that the causal effects of the increases in tempo are manifold and contradictory. Therefore in the next two sections I will turn to the sociological and social-scientific tradition to see what conceptual and methodological resources it offers us for the purpose of comprehending and locating the process of dynamization within the context of modernity from a systematic point of view.

2. MODERNIZATION, ACCELERATION, AND SOCIAL THEORY

A) ACCELERATION IN CLASSICAL AND CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL THEORIES

There can be no doubt that the rise of sociology and its establishment as an academic discipline was in large part a reaction to the basic experience of the liquefaction and dynamization of social relations and the revolutionization of their temporal structure. Nor can there be any doubt that the sociological analyses of the so-called founding fathers of the discipline—Weber, Durkheim, Simmel, and also Ferdinand Tönnies, which emerge during precisely the time frame shown in the previous section to be perhaps the sharpest period of acceleration ever, represent, in this sense, analyses of modernity.57 The question that interests us here is what contribution the conceptual schemes of the sociological “classics” can make to the systematic and categorial analysis of the modern process of acceleration, its causes, manifestations, and consequences. Their reflections are attempts to locate the basic cultural experience of modernity within the structural transformation processes of modernization. It is of interest, in this vein, to first go back one step behind that generation of disciplinary founders and return to the other ancestor of modern social theory: Karl Marx.

The formulation from The Communist Manifesto taken up by Marshall Berman, according to which all that is solid is always already dissolving and being transformed or melting into air, already makes clear how much Marx’s reflections are shaped by the nineteenth-century experience of a shocking mobilization and dynamization of all material and social relations. In Marx’s view the reason for this is the capitalist mode of production, which makes the continual revolutionizing of the means of production a necessity and hence also the transformation of social relations as well as the constant annihilation of what already exists and has been produced. According to Marx, it is the core principle of all modernization processes. It is also a historically new form of social acceleration because all older socioeconomic formations tend to lay down and naturalize relations of production once they are established, statically preserving them from change for as long as possible, in contrast to capitalism, for which the primacy of change over inertia is constitutive.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the relations of society as a whole. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and movement distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.⁵⁸

So in Marx’s analysis of history and capitalism the modernization process does indeed appear to be an acceleration process, one in which two distinct principles of acceleration can be analytically distinguished. In the first place, as is well known, Marx defends a dynamic understanding of history according to which historical development transpires on the basis of a dialectical interplay between the forces of production that continually further unfold and the relations of production that alter in a corresponding fashion (i.e., at one moment favoring the development of the forces of production, in the next moment hindering it and then being revolutionized). Insofar as factors that are endogenous to capitalism drive this process forward, it accelerates the development of the unfolding productive forces, and hence ultimately the progress of history, in a historically unprecedented way: “The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?”59

Marx’s approach is therefore a truly paradigmatic example of the development of Koselleck’s “temporalized” conceptions of history, in which history itself has a direction and becomes as it were a collective subject, which is itself a presupposition of the idea that history can accelerate (and be accelerated). Historical materialism’s image of history, then, is based on the notion of a linear historical time that approaches a more or less “closed,” that is, predictable future. However, Marx’s observation of the transformative dynamics of capitalist societies is independent of the assumption of such a telos of history.

In the second place, and quite independent of this historical dimension, time is a factor of production and therefore a scarce good when considered as a resource within the capitalist process of production. Since gains in time can immediately be converted into the (surplus) profits necessary for survival, time comes to stand out as a factor of competition in the modern economic system, one related in multiple ways to money and acceleration (of processes of development, production, and circulation).⁶⁰ This explains in great measure why the acceleration imperatives of modernity aim at the instrumental enhancement of velocities (in transportation, communication, production, and organization) and an increase in the speed of capital circulation and also clarifies the resulting alterations in ways of dealing with time. I will return to this point in chapter 7, where the driving forces of the acceleration process are discussed. Here it is sufficient to note that even though acceleration is only a subordinate, underdeveloped, and rather marginal aspect of a theoretical edifice centered on the basic social contradiction of class conflict, Marx’s approach actually does offer a foundation for the explanation of all three forms of acceleration—technological acceleration, the acceleration of social change, and the acceleration of the pace of life (resulting for Marx and Engels only derivatively from permanent existential insecurity, economic competition, and the subjection of workers to the temporal dictates of machines). A systematic theory of acceleration undoubtedly does well, then, to take seriously the results of the Marxian analysis of capitalist economic processes and to integrate them within itself. As I will show in chapter 7, it is the escalatory principles (Steigerungsprinzipien) of growth and acceleration anchored in the capitalistic economic system that shape the culture and produce the structures of modern society and the modern form of life.⁶¹

Max Weber also had these in mind when he identified capitalism as “the most fateful force in our modern life” in the preliminary remarks to his collected essays on the sociology of religion and thus in the context of his investigations concerning the internal connection between the Protestant ethic and the capitalist form of economic life.⁶² In so doing he makes clear that the analysis of modern time structures should guard itself against an overhasty economistic reductionism. As is well-known, Weber was above all interested in the motivation of action in capitalism. His study of the capitalist ethos, the attitude and conduct of life corresponding to its economic form, reveals a transformation of time horizons that is both analogous to the structural logic identified by Marx and impossible to reduce to it in an economistic fashion. He thereby provides an impressive confirmation of the thesis formulated in the introduction, namely, that the systemic-structural requirements and the orientations of actors are joined together in the temporal structures of society.

For Weber too a defining characteristic of this ethos consists in the treatment of time as a scarce good of the highest rank. This is clear right at the beginning of his essay on the spirit of capitalism in the famous quotation from Benjamin Franklin that starts with the admonition “remember that time is money.” The categorical imperative of the Protestant ethic and the capitalist ethos consists in the obligation to use time as efficiently as possible, to systematically eliminate waste of time or idleness and to give an exact accounting of how time has been spent. According to Weber, then, the restlessness and agitation, the acceleration of the pace of life through the systematic elimination of pauses and absences and the categorical economization of time in the conduct of life that shape the cardinal experience of modernity are the consequence of an originally (Calvinist, Puritan) Protestant spiritual mindset that is later secularized. In this view a second lost once is a second lost forever and the loss of time is the first and “deadliest of all sins.” Through it the, as it were, temporaly ascetic systematization and disciplining of the conduct of life becomes a core element of the modern attitude to life.63 From this perspective, time discipline appears to be much more a cultural presupposition of capitalism, rather than a structural consequence. I will come back to this cultural dimension of the causation of the modern acceleration process in more detail later.

In the context of a search for the starting points of a theory of social acceleration, however, it is above all interesting that for Weber too the Protestant-capitalist evaluation of time is part of an encompassing (and accelerating) historical movement, namely, the underlying Western processes of rationalization.⁶⁴ Insofar as this process is rooted in shortening and enhancing the efficiency of means-ends relations in the sense of instrumental rationality, it can be described as an acceleration process that aims at the accelerated realization of ends through the minimization of the necessary steps or an increase in the effectiveness of the means employed. Rationalization in this sense means to be able to achieve more in less time (and with less input). But the increase of quantities per unit of time, as I will argue, is the most abstract and generalized definition of acceleration. It is this enhancement of speed that, according to Weber, characterizes the main Western forms of rational organization and domination—bureaucracy,⁶⁵ a state under the rule of law (Rechtsstaat), and a capitalistic economic order—and also grounds their historical superiority over all other social formations. For Weber too, then, at the center of the modernization process stand principles of acceleration (although, of course, he was even further away than Marx from developing a theory of social acceleration).

The rationalization of social processes that is central for Weber’s analysis of modernity is inherently linked to the development of the social division of labor or, in other words, the social differentiation of functional and value spheres that stands at the heart of Durkheim’s understanding of modernity. At first glance, Durkheim’s works hardly offer points of approach for a theory of social acceleration and a corresponding redefinition of the modernization process. However, after a closer look it turns out that his intensive search for new forms of social integration and social solidarity is motivated, just like the social theories of the other classical thinkers, by the cardinal experience of a dynamized, fragmented, and accelerated society that results from the condensation of social intercourse.66 In his analysis of anomic forms of the division of labor, which he viewed as one of the greatest dangers of the modern differentiation process, he identified social anomie as a consequence of overly fast social change. As a result of the high rate of change, the awareness and the rules of social interdependence erode before new modes of social integration have enough time to form. Therefore social change and increasing differentiation per se are not the problem for society, but rather their (too) fast tempo.⁶⁷

Durkheim was interested in how social order and stability is possible in the face of the ongoing acceleration and fragmentation of social relations. Nevertheless his reflections offer neither a systematic cultural grounding for the experience of acceleration nor an analysis of its social-structural consequences. For this reason it was left to Niklas Luhmann and representatives of the systems theory he developed to analyze the temporal consequences of functional differentiation and to indicate the systematic internal connection of processes of differentiation and acceleration. According to Luhmann, system structures and temporal structures are tightly correlated, such that the differentiation of modern functional systems also involves the differentiation of their time structures as well as the past and future time horizons they involve.⁶⁸ Here Luhmann shares Koselleck’s view that there has been a “temporalization” or dynamization of time in modernity that is not just an effect of structural differentiation but also just as much underlies it: “with the rise of bourgeois society the structure of time drastically shifted in the direction of higher complexity . . . [therefore] we must assume that this restructuring has an impact on each social structure and every concept. Nothing will retain its earlier meaning. Even if there is a formal continuity in institutions or terminologies, this only hides the fact that each individual form has achieved higher contingency and higher selectivity.”⁶⁹

Through the “temporalization of complexity” characteristic of functionally differentiated societies—which, as I will try to show in chapter 7.3, can be understood as a third structural “motor” of the modern acceleration process—we arrive not only at a progressive shortening of time horizons, and thus possibly an “acceleration of the evolutionary process which is unparalleled in history,”⁷⁰ but also at the desynchronization of the respective systemic time structures discussed in the introduction. Luhmann emphasizes how important a systematic analysis of these developments is for the understanding of modern societies and at the same time makes clear that the conceptual apparatus for this task is dramatically underdeveloped.

We would need to be in a position to estimate the degree of heterogeneity in temporal structures which we can tolerate in the various subsystems of our society; it would be important to know how the shrinking time horizons of families affect the economy and how we could counter the well-known negative influence that the time perspectives of a growing economy have on the political system. . . . It is hard to see how one might go about working on these questions or even trying to answer them. Systems theory appears to be the only conceptual frame of reference equipped with sufficient complexity. Up to now, however, systems theory has only applied very simple chronological concepts of time and futurity and conceived the future simply as the state of a system at a later moment of time.71

Regrettably, Luhmann did not further work out a theory of time despite his repeated affirmations of the indispensable importance of temporality for the understanding of social systems. Instead it was Armin Nassehi who wrote The Time of Society, where, however, acceleration does not even appear as a keyword.⁷² Contrary to Luhmann’s hope, the systems-theoretical conception of time appears to be rather poorly suited for the development of a theory of acceleration since the distinctions employed by it make an analysis of the diachronic change of temporal structures harder rather than easier. This is because it first constitutes time as the difference of past and future in the operations of a given system and only then grasps it chronologically through observation of that system.⁷³ Yet in its reflections on the temporalization of complexity and the influence on social decisions of the “urgency of the short-term” (Vordringlichkeit des Befristeten) that accompanies the scarcity of time in differentiated systems,⁷⁴ systems theory does make an important contribution to a theory of acceleration. I will return to this in the course of the argument.

Meanwhile, the social division of labor and functional differentiation have a necessary correlate in the process of individualization that is a further unmistakable characteristic of modernization and stands at the center of the sociological and social-psychological analyses of George Simmel and work influenced by him. It is not a coincidence that for Simmel the metropolis, as the paradigmatic site of modernity, represents at the same time the site of the most extreme individualization and the most advanced division of labor.⁷⁵ Simmel ties these processes back to the cultural experience of modernity in a much stronger way than Weber, Marx, or Durkheim. For him too this experience is dominated by the overwhelming feeling of an intensification and acceleration of social processes of exchange and a ceaseless dynamization of all social relations. “The metropolitan type of individuality,” writes Simmel at the very beginning of what is perhaps his most influential essay, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” rests on the

intensification of nervous stimulation, which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli. Man is a differentiating creature. His mind is stimulated by the difference between a momentary impression and the one which preceded it. Lasting impressions, impressions which differ only slightly from one another, impressions which take a regular and habitual course and show regular and habitual contrasts—all these use up, so to speak, less consciousness than does the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions. These are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates. With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life. The metropolis exacts from man as a discriminating creature a different amount of consciousness than does rural life. Here the rhythm of life and sensory mental imagery flows more slowly, more habitually, and more evenly.76

In harmony with this characterization, in “On the Influence of Money on the Pace of Life,” a work that appeared in 1897, and whose fundamental arguments return almost word for word in the central closing chapter of The Philosophy of Money (“On the Style of Life”), Simmel defines the tempo of life as the “product of the sum and depth” of the changes in the ideational contents of consciousness per unit of time.⁷⁷ In addition, he emphasizes that in modern society this tempo increases violently and without cease.

In fact all the elements invoked and presented by Simmel as “elective affinities” that distinguish modern life from that of previous eras stand out for their intensified dynamics and movement. According to Simmel, what is characteristic of modernity are the fast city as against the slow countryside, the dominance of the mobile intellect over the more static, slowly changing emotional life, dynamic individualism in the sense of a liberation of individuals from fixed, stable traditions and bonds as against the collective social fabrics of the past that change only incrementally and with difficulty, and thus a specific “disloyalty” (Treulosigkeit) regarding associations, values, and activities as well as a related preference for the rapidly alternating tempo of fashion, etc.78 Simmel then brings all these tendencies into close connection with the expanding monetarization of the modern economy, something that appears to him to be both a cause of social acceleration and an expression of it (pictured in the “rolls of coins” sweeping through social life without resistance).⁷⁹ Modern monetary exchange enables, increases, and accelerates social and commercial transactions and economic circulation and thereby mobilizes almost all social relations. As Simmel summarizes his reflections on the connection between the modern (capitalist) monetary economy and the pace of life: “All this illustrates to what great extent money symbolizes acceleration in the pace of life and how it measures itself against the number and diversity of inflowing and alternating impressions and stimuli,” and he continues, “the tendency of money to converge and accumulate . . . to bring together the interests of and thus the individuals themselves . . . and thus, as determined by the form of value money represents, to concentrate the most diverse elements in the smallest possible space—in short, this tendency and capacity of money has the psychological effect of enhancing the variety and richness of life, that is of increasing its pace.”⁸⁰

Simmel thus follows Baudelaire in defining modernity as an experience of the transitory and the fleeting and he explains it in terms of functional differentiation and especially the effects of money.⁸¹ Yet for him modernization also primarily means a transformation of individual personality structures. These react to the social demands of an accelerated modernity with a change in their inventory of feelings (Gefühlshaushaltes), their attitudes (Gemütsstruktur), their patterns of stimulation (Nervenlebens), and the relationship between feeling and intellect. This is the basis of Simmel’s rather idiosyncratic-sounding definition of the essence of modernity in his essay on the art of Auguste Rodin, where he writes: “The essence of modernity in general is psychologism, experiencing and interpreting the world in accordance with our interior reactions and, in fact, as an interior world, dissolving fixed contents in the fluid element of the soul, which is purified of everything substantial and whose forms are only forms of movement.”⁸² Simmel thus conceives of the modernization process as a shifting of the balance between the universal principles of movement and inertia in favor of the former,⁸³ and thus also as the dissolution of fixed rhythms in favor of permanent change. In this respect money is for him the symbolic manifestation of the “absolutely dynamic character of the world.”84 Individuals react to this shift with, on the one hand, a blasé attitude and indifference toward the contents of the world, and, on the other, in a kind of dialectical inversion, with an addiction to ever newer and more extreme experiences and arousing stimuli:⁸⁵ in short, with all the symptoms of the “neurasthenia” that very much characterized Simmel’s own personality, according to his contemporaries Ernst Troeltsch and S. P. Altmann.⁸⁶ Of all the classical figures of sociology, Simmel thus places the facet of acceleration closest to the center of his definition of modernity, without, however, giving it a self-standing theoretical formulation. Yet those paradoxical processes of individualization (or transformation in personality structures) are what really form the systematic center of his rather fragmentary, sometimes frankly impressionistic works, whose methodology is, as it were, an adaptation to their object domain.

The result of this review of the interpretations proposed by the “classics” is as follows: their still influential definitions of modernity as a process of individualization, rationalization, differentiation, and increasing domination of nature as a result of the development of the forces of production possess a common core that lies in the experience of an immense acceleration, mobilization, and dynamization of social life. They represent at the same time responses to and systematic explanations of that basic experience of modernity. But the transformation of temporal structures itself does not stand in the systematic epicenter of the modernization theory of any of these authors, although it is thematized and serves as a motif in all of them. And thus it was possible for the acceleration process to lose more and more importance relative to other processes in the overwhelmingly “detemporalized” development of sociological and social-scientific definitions of modernity and to play almost no role in later theories of modernization.

This could explain the almost total absence of a theory of acceleration in contemporary social theory. While overflowing debates have been and are conducted about the other basic tendencies of modernization—about the definition and interpretation of processes of rationalization, differentiation, individualization, and domestication (i.e., the development and institutionalization of instrumental reason)—with respect to acceleration one only finds a cluster of individual studies oriented to the manifestations and effects of dynamization regarding particular phenomena in the media,⁸⁷ in the labor market,⁸⁸ in new information technologies,⁸⁹ in the economy,⁹⁰ etc., as well as treatments in the genres of popular science and cultural history91 that do not allow a systematic location and definition of this tendency within the context of a cultural and structural analysis of the modernization process.⁹²

Some of the few exceptions are the works of Paul Virilio, Fritz Reheis, and Kay Kirchmann, who all set themselves the task of a theoretical definition of social acceleration. While I will draw selectively on their work in what follows, in the end they appear to me to offer, for various reasons, an inappropriate basis for a systematic theory of social acceleration. Virilio’s call for and attempt at the founding of a “dromology” as the science of (increasing) speed certainly represents the most prominent approach in the literature. For Virilio, not only modernity but world history in its entirety can be reinterpreted as a history of acceleration in which speed becomes as it were a historical agent (Geschichts-subjekt). His historical reconstruction is moreover an eminently political one because he believes he can discern the driving force of the acceleration process in the domination of the fastest.⁹³ Since historically power has been above all the power of movement, the military and weapons-technological struggle for control proves to be a continuous struggle to achieve greater speed. This battle lies at the root of the “dromocratic revolution” (which is how Virilio interprets the industrial revolution),⁹⁴ in the course of which “metabolic” speed (of human and animal bodies) is replaced by a new, ever increasable “technological” speed.

By means of successive waves of acceleration through revolutions in transportation, transmission, and, most recently, transplantation (i.e., increases in speed through the organic fusion of body and machine, of genetic engineering and computer technology) we arrive at the victory of time over space.⁹⁵ The space-time dispositif is replaced by a speed-space, the coordination of action increasingly takes place in and through time and less and less through space, and chronopolitics gains in importance relative to geopolitics. Virilio’s reflections are particularly stimulating where it is a matter of interpreting the consequences of technological acceleration and its military-political driving forces or the complementarity of accelerating and inertial tendencies. Nevertheless his diagnosis is that the logical endpoint of acceleration lies in a completely rigid state, a frenetic standstill (inertie polaire, rasender Stillstand).⁹⁶ I will come back to both these aspects of Virilio’s thought. But one cannot get a systematic foundation for a theory of acceleration from his work, because, first, he rejects systematic theory building out of principle and instead structures his works with associative leaps, amassing countless neologisms, obscure analogies, and seemingly esoteric allusions, and second, with the self-confidence of an autodidact he foregoes any links to existing social theories. Yet it seems to me that the weightiest objection lies in the fact that Virilio’s approach remains conceptually truncated since he only conceives acceleration as technological acceleration and leaves no categorial place for the other two analytically independent aspects of acceleration, those of social change and the pace of life.

Fritz Reheis’s best seller, The Creativity of Slowness (Die Kreativität der Langsamkeit), presents us with a critique of the social demands of acceleration in modern society from a psychological and ecological perspective. Reheis builds his analysis of the temporal structures of late capitalist society, which are, in his view, dysfunctional, on the systems-theoretical model of three nested basic systems. The environment or nature forms the comprehensive system for all social processes and is fundamental for the second level, the system culture/society, which in turn is prior to the physical and psychological system of the individual. Alterations at one level always affect both the other systems, though naturally the rates of change and the characteristic tempos (Eigenzeiten) of the respective systems differ: individuals can transform themselves or adapt faster than societies, and nature requires still longer periods of time to reproduce its resources or regenerate itself. The explicitly Marx-inspired “ecological-materialist” central thesis is then that unfettered capitalism (as the core element of the modern culture/society) disrespects the natural rhythms and tempos of all three systems because of an inherent compulsion to accelerate rooted in the law of profit.97 This desynchronizes and overtaxes the other systems’ capacities to adapt and learn both separately and in their mutual relationships, and that in turn leads to dysfunctional phenomena within and between all three systems.⁹⁸ But Reheis’s analysis of the dynamic of acceleration itself does not go beyond Marx if he sees it as rooted in the evolutionary logic of capital. And furthermore he proceeds very selectively and one-sidedly in his interpretation of the consequences and limits of acceleration by reducing them all to the common denominator of “diseased people, declining society and desiccated nature.”⁹⁹

Last, Kirchmann draws on Norbert Elias in his systematic investigation of the connection between the acceleration of social processes and the development of the media in modernity in that he interprets both as complementary elements of the modern civilizing process.¹⁰⁰ His work also provides a series of interesting insights. However, it is too fixated on the analysis of acceleration in the mass media to serve as a starting point for a systematic account of the causes, characteristic phenomena, and consequences of social acceleration. In particular it remains unclear in the final analysis what drives forth the mechanism of escalation (Steigerung) in the interplay between the media, speed, and the civilizing process as a procedure of condensation or slowdown.

Thus in view of the current state of theory on this subject, and in accordance with the goal of the present work—namely, to provide a theoretically substantial, empirically grounded account of the functioning, scope, and influence of the acceleration process and also of its limits and effects in the context of modernization—the most promising course in the search for a systematic approach is to build upon the foundation of the classical sociological theories of modernization discussed in this chapter.

B) ACCELERATION AND MODERNIZATION: ATTEMPT AT A SYSTEMATIZATION

Dealing with the heterogeneous and partially contradictory multiplicity of both processes of change and analytical perspectives is a fundamental problem for every systematic theory of modernization. Drawing on a suggestion of Hans van der Loo and Willem van Reijen,101 who themselves unmistakably build upon the (notoriously detemporalized) general action schema of Talcott Parsons,¹⁰² it seems sensible to me to distinguish between perspectives focused on social structure, on culture, on personality structure (or on the subject), and finally on society’s relationship to nature. Social formations and social developments can then be investigated under each of these four aspects in a principled way. If one places these perspectives in relation to the approaches that were reviewed in the previous section, it becomes apparent that the modernization process can be and has been culturally interpreted as rationalization, social-structurally as differentiation, with respect to the development of the predominant subjective self-understanding or personality type as individualization and in terms of the relation to nature as instrumentalization or domestication (see figure 1.1).¹⁰³

In the works of the sociological classics and contemporary research that follows them one mostly finds that a single aspect serves as a central, guiding perspective. Thus, for instance, Max Weber understands modernization above all as a process of rationalization. This also constitutes the core of the project of modernity as it has been defined by, for instance, Jürgen Habermas and his followers.¹⁰⁴ In contrast to this, processes of the division of labor and functional differentiation stand, as we have seen, at the center not only of Durkheim’s investigations but also of contemporary systems theory. In turn, after having been thematized in a multifaceted way by Simmel, individualization is a social tendency that takes on central importance in, for instance, the diagnoses of the times of Ulrich Beck or Gerhard Schulze. Finally, the way in which nature, and consequently the character of an individual and a society, is processed and transformed constitutes the starting point for the analyses of modernity of Karl Marx and the social scientists inspired by him. From this point of view, modernization appears to be in the first instance the immensely successful tendency to instrumentalize and thereby domesticate both inner and outer nature, i.e., to make it controllable and useful for human ends. The ambivalence of this tendency was perhaps most strikingly worked out by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment.105

Of course in all four dimensions one finds that modernization processes not only display a profound ambivalence but also invariably seem to carry their own contradiction with them as a paradoxical flip side.¹⁰⁶ Thus as a result of its unintended consequences mastery over nature threatens to turn into the annihilation or destruction of nature or into an annihilation of the basis of human life by nature in the form of an ecological catastrophe. Similarly, according to its cultural critics modernity is not just characterized by a tendency for individual particularities to develop but just as much by one toward “massification” (Vermassung) in a homogenized mass culture. This is why Simmel believed he could observe not only the increase of “quantitative” individuality but also, at the same time, the disappearance of original, “qualitative” individuality as a result of the subordination of subjective culture to objective culture.¹⁰⁷ Again, Weber already saw the flip side of the Western process of rationalization as an ongoing erosion of meaning resources resulting from inherent necessities (Sachzwänge) that arise from the ruthless autonomization of structural dynamics and that in the end take the form of a spiritless iron cage whose logic (e.g., escalation and acceleration) cannot be stopped even when its continued existence proves to be highly irrational.¹⁰⁸

It is somewhat more difficult to identify a paradoxical flip side of the process of differentiation. Here, in fact, two paradoxical developmental tendencies immediately come into view: on the one hand, processes of ever finer differentiation are accompanied by a parallel growth of (today global) chains of interdependence and, on the other hand, the unity and coherence of the whole of society seems to disappear in the wake of (stability- and efficiency-increasing) differentiation: as Luhmann never tires of emphasizing, modern society must get along without a peak, a center, or a “central perspective.”¹⁰⁹ In this sense the flip side of differentiation is social disintegration.

1.1. The Modernization Process I

In light of this grid (see figure 1.1), whose respective elements have so far dominated sociological analyses of modernity, it is difficult to indicate a systematic location or starting point for a reinterpretation from the perspective of social acceleration. The first thought that occurs is simply to solve the problem by introducing an additional perspective: just as modernization from a cultural point of view can be understood as rationalization and from the standpoint of personality psychology as individualization, so it can be understood with respect to the dimension of time or temporal structures as acceleration. And just as, for instance, processes of individualization or rationalization do not transpire evenly or continuously, but rather come in waves, so too with processes of acceleration (as we have seen). Just as surges of individualization are accompanied by “communitarian” fears and corresponding countermovements and as “traditionalist” warnings and efforts grow loud in the face of each wave of rationalization,¹¹⁰ rejection and resistance are mobilized against each new round of acceleration. And in each case, even if there are hesitations and modifications in the end, the modernization process inexorably advances. Further, exactly as in the case of the other four basic processes of modernization, social acceleration always carries its own paradoxical countertendency within itself: social rigidity. Therefore the central question for an understanding of the statics and dynamics of modernity is how to conceive social acceleration and societal crystallization together on both cultural and structural levels. Only an analysis that is capable of giving an account of this can claim to do theoretical justice to the historical formation of modernity.

Nevertheless it seems to me that this solution to the conceptual problem is extremely unsuitable.111 From a conceptual point of view, time cannot simply be placed next to culture, structure, nature, and personality, since it is rather a central and constitutive dimension of them. Furthermore, acceleration proves to be an aspect and element of each of the four types of development linked to it. Indeed it actually seems to represent the principle that connects and drives them, in which respect it appears now as a cause and then as an effect of the other tendencies of modernity.¹¹² In part 4 I will pursue various indications that acceleration is more fundamental than the other categories insofar as processes of differentiation, rationalization, or individualization come to a standstill or even turn into their opposite just in case they become dysfunctional for further social acceleration. It does not in fact seem implausible, as we will see, to interpret those four modernization processes as (unintended) consequences of social acceleration: social disintegration would accordingly be a consequence of growing societal desynchronization, environmental devastation an effect of overtaxed natural regeneration times, the loss of “qualitative” individuality a side effect of the increased pace of life, and the surrender of rational autonomy the result of the “temporalization of time.” From this perspective, the other modernization tendencies thus appear to be, as it were, modes of functioning or manifestations of acceleration.

If one accepts that social acceleration irreducibly cuts across the cornerstones of the “classical” analytical grid, then it seems that Luhmann’s suggested distinction between material, temporal, and social (Sach-, Zeit-, Sozial-) dimensions of meaning offers a second strategy for locating acceleration in the categorial framework of modernization theory. Acceleration would then be simply a central developmental principle of the temporal dimension of modernity. Yet even this method of reducing complexity necessarily fails: the characteristic transformation of temporal structures occurs precisely in the material and social dimensions of modern society. Indeed I hold that development in the material and social dimensions follows precisely the specific transformational logic of acceleration. Therefore the reinterpretation of modernization in terms of social acceleration makes a more comprehensive claim than the distinction between the three dimensions would suggest.

For this reason, my strategy cannot be satisfied with analyzing acceleration as an isolatable, partial aspect of modernization. It cannot avoid defining and analyzing the process of acceleration along all four dimensions (structure, culture, nature, and personality) and with respect to all three dimensions of meaning. The categorial framework that has been worked out is meant to serve as a heuristic tool for the analytical differentiation of theoretical perspectives that can also sharpen our view of the complexity of the modernization process and of the diverse interactions between identified developmental tendencies. It is their dynamic that now has to be deciphered. However, the layout of the book’s argument does not follow the, as it were, “external” specifications of the categorial system, but rather the “internal” conceptual and material logic of social acceleration itself. Nevertheless, at the end of the book I will attempt to reintegrate the results of the inquiry into this schema so that I can, in accordance with the aim of the work, render more precise the account of the function and status of acceleration in the context of modernization.