For more than two centuries, time has been felt to be passing more and more quickly. Scholars tell us that since the twin revolutions of the 18th century — industrial and political — a general sense of time speeding up has been recorded with regularity in documents of all kinds. Political and technical progress somehow meant that people were always losing ground, unable to keep up, out of breath. Rousseau spoke in Émile of the encroaching tourbillon social irresistibly overtaking everything, and the enduring popularity of Walden no doubt owes something to its condemnation of the way we squander rather than savor our time. Marx’s bourgeoisie, of course, “cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the means of production,” and toward the end of the century, Nietzsche diagnosed the malady of the modern age in “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” — lines that come from the aptly titled Untimely Meditations. (...)
If one’s leisure time feels like work that one doesn’t have time for, work itself increasingly feels like work one doesn’t have time for. From the Amazon warehouses that track employees’ speed to the call centers that monitor times and keystrokes to the work that follows you home, a sense of speedup has obliterated, as in a lightning war, the time-saving promise of the technologies of the past. Entire industries disappear with uncanny speed: textiles gradually left New York over the course of forty years, starting in the 1950s, but American steel production, the world’s largest, fully collapsed within five years in the 1980s. Even the stock trading floor has been replaced by nanosecond-responsive computerized trading systems, with brokers seeking ever finer time-advantages over competitors, reflective in turn of a corporate world ever more concerned to deliver quick dividends to shareholders. These shareholders enjoy the spectacle of trigger-happy CEOs mowing down workers in mass layoffs. According to one estimate, the white-collar workers in these companies once switched jobs an average of four times over the course of their careers; now they can expect to switch more than a dozen times. These jobs are increasingly self-managed, with workers expected to approach their jobs with a “self-employed mind-set,” in the words of one management theorist. The loosening of the nine-to-five workday and the granting of more “flexibility” has resulted in workers feeling the need to give themselves wholly to their companies.
So the speedup is real. But why do we have it? “Capitalism” is the obvious and grating answer, and there’s no question that the need to increase not only productivity, but also circulation and distribution (what Marx saw as the need to cut down on “turnover time”), have driven ever faster cycles of accumulation. But acceleration at the heart of production doesn’t immediately explain acceleration in society, or the feeling that life itself has accelerated. The need to consume more, and consume better and faster — to be first in line for the bendy iPhone 6 — doesn’t give a human being a competitive advantage the way producing a phone without human beings, and delivering that phone all over the planet, does. And of course most of the cultural presuppositions that girded speedup, such as the “Protestant work ethic” and secularization, which led to emphasis on accumulating “this-worldly” achievements (rather than waiting for the “sacral time” after death), preceded the actual acceleration in production.
Nor does it follow that we should have less time as a result of the speedup of production. In fact, the problem may be that we have finally ended up with more free time — and yet don’t feel that we have more time. The centrality of this feeling to our age, and to the ages that preceded it, has received its most comprehensive treatment in the recent work of German theorist Hartmut Rosa and his concept of an “acceleration society.” For Rosa, the sense of speedup created by labor-saving is one of the major paradoxes of modernity, and one of the exemplary versions of this paradox is that “the dramatic rise in feelings of stress and lack of time” in our epoch has been “accompanied by an equally significant increase in free time.” For nearly every population group, even working women, the amount of time free from remunerated labor, obligatory household activities, and bodily self-care actually rose from the 1960s to the 1990s, with working women (who nonetheless continue to serve the much-despised “second shift”) gaining at least 3.7 hours a week. Though the gains have been unevenly distributed — with declining welfare payments for the poor and stagnant wages for working classes leading people to work several jobs — labor-saving technologies have mostly saved us time. But every surveyed group over that period feels we have lost it.
The key is that a society undergoing acceleration gets caught in a feedback loop it cannot escape, whereby acceleration in production, circulation, and distribution (in Rosa’s terms, “technical acceleration”) drives social change. The institutions of society no longer guarantee stable life paths. If in classical modernity people could imagine their lives in intergenerational terms — say, the same firm passing down through a bourgeois family — in late capitalism, turnover is so accelerated that it becomes hard to imagine one’s life course even within a few years, let alone a few generations. This in turn drives a sense of the acceleration of the “pace of life,” the psychological feeling of always being out of breath — which in turn drives the desire for more labor-saving technology, and technical change. There have been world-historical short-circuits in this loop — the 1930s, which spelled forced leisure for thousands, and the 1970s, when advances in technical change and the rate of profitability they promised seemed to meet a historic limit — but overall the pressure hasn’t slackened. For Rosa, modernity is defined by a continual sense of the present contracting—a feeling that what one is able to do within a given time frame is shrinking. The feeling comes about because the variety of social experiences available is ceaselessly proliferating: the number of things you might be able to do becomes impossibly large, and expands every day with implacable speed.
by Editors, N+1 | Read more:
Image: Speed
