For the concept of alienation, which has a long tradition in modern philosophy and was recently taken up again by Axel Honneth and Rahel Jaeggi (2016), is an inherently problematic category. Here, the erosion of the capacity to appropriate the workplace, working tools, processes, and products, and to identify with them, appears to account for a tendency toward alienation from work and even for pathological symptoms like the burnout disease. Rosa’s latest book continues on the path of Alienation and Acceleration. The last section discusses the ambivalent consequences for working conditions and experiences. Section 4.2 then identifies the logic of competition, the modern cultural ideal of an “eternal life before death,” and the self-propelling nature of the “acceleration cycle” as the main driving wheels of social acceleration. 4.1 reconstructs technological acceleration, the acceleration of social change, and the acceleration of the pace of life as the three defining processes of modernization.
This chapter is divided in three sections: Sect. Thus, information and communication technologies are at the heart of the latest wave of acceleration in the twenty-first century. Many of the core elements of social acceleration are produced and experienced at the workplace, where the attraction as well as the pressures for speed are felt most vigorously. Situational Politics: Paradoxical Time Horizons Between Desynchronization and Disintegrationġ2.The progressive speeding up of social life is a central and defining feature of modern societies. HR: Hartmut Rosa BS: Bjrn Schiermer BS: In the Scandinavian context probably it is the same in Germany you are still first and foremost known to the broader audience for your work on acceleration. Situational Identity: Of Drifters and Playersġ1.
Acceleration and Growth: External Drivers of Social Accelerationġ0. The Speeding Up of Society as a Self-Propelling Process: The Circle of Accelerationħ. The Acceleration of the "Pace of Life" and Paradoxes in the Experience of TimeĦ. Slipping Slopes: The Acceleration of Social Change and the Increase of Contingencyĥ. Technical Acceleration and the Revolutionizing of the Space-Time RegimeĤ.
Mechanisms and Manifestations: A Phenomenology of Social Accelerationģ. From the Love of Movement to the Law of Acceleration: Observations of Modernity The Categorial Framework of a Systematic Theory of Social Accelerationġ. As Rosa deftly shows, this self-reinforcing feedback loop fundamentally determines the character of modern life. It is as if we are standing on "slipping slopes," a steep social terrain that is itself in motion and in turn demands faster lives and technology. When this phenomenon combines with technological acceleration and the increasing pace of life, time seems to flow ever faster, making our relationships to each other and the world fluid and problematic. According to Rosa, both the structural and cultural aspects of our institutions and practices are marked by the "shrinking of the present," a decreasing time period during which expectations based on past experience reliably match the future.
He identifies three categories of change in the tempo of modern social life: technological acceleration, evident in transportation, communication, and production the acceleration of social change, reflected in cultural knowledge, social institutions, and personal relationships and acceleration in the pace of life, which happens despite the expectation that technological change should increase an individual's free time. Hartmut Rosa advances an account of the temporal structure of society from the perspective of critical theory.