Eugene Wolters, in his review of Harmut Rosa’s latest book Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity
'... strongly defends the idea that our society is, in fact, accelerating. While that sounds fairly straight forward, and somewhat boring, Rosa manages to complicate (for the better) the question of time to explain how time functions as a social structure.“But wait!”, you ask, “that’s what Marxists have been saying years.” After all, it’s the technological development of capitalist production that undergirds all of this accelerating business. Advances in computers, transportation and machinery are all pushed by the capital’s quest to squeeze more surplus value out of its laborers.' But he continues: '
But what Rosa is arguing is far more nuanced, and somewhat contradictory, to the Marxist argument. He argues:
However, this kind of reductionistic interpretation seems inadequate on two grounds. In the first place, it is precisely not capable of clarifying the process that mediates between economic structural imperative and subjective acceleration of their consumption behavior and thus their pace of life when for them it is not only the case that they have no economic incentive to do so but also that it would land them in financial difficulty…In the second place, the materialistic reduction remains blind to the ideational and cultural presuppositions of the unleashing of the forces of production and acceleration, as the representatives of a cultural criticism of the economic primacy thesis would argue.Amid all of this talk of acceleration, that are in fact zones of strategic “deceleration” that serve ideological purposes. “Unplugging” oneself from technology, the proliferation of yoga and meditation, and the recreational return to the “old ways” of woodworking, fishing, hunting etc are all ideological tools to offset the havoc that social acceleration has wrought on our society.'
To read the entire review, go here.
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