Not having time while we are always gaining more of it. Emblematic of our times, this paradox challenges more and more authors, frightened by the absorption of our lives by the pressure of time, which pushes us to compress the present.
From Paul Virilio to Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber, who published Trop vite (Albin Michel), many study the forms and effects of speed on our ways of working, governing, thinking, loving… For the German philosopher Hartmut Rosa, author of a rich reflection on the question, Accélération, une critique sociale du temps, it is a real “crisis of time” that our societies are confronted with.
For him, this acceleration defines modernity and affects our social practices: how will I finish my work at the office, pick up my daughter from school, do my shopping after the swimming pool? Time has become a problem, a source of anxiety.
To better understand her infinite subject, Rosa identifies three types of acceleration:
technical acceleration, which should slow down the pace of life; acceleration of the pace of life, which therefore represents a form of paradoxical acceleration; finally, acceleration of the speed of social and cultural transformations, which completes a complex edifice. The combined effects of these three types of acceleration call into question individual and political forms of organization.
The abundant time we so hoped for – let us remember the “free time” promised at the beginning of the 1980s – is nothing more than an illusion, a deception of consciousness: we believe we are conquering it when it escapes us since it cannot be deployed in the flow of our daily constraints. What Hartmut Rosa brilliantly analyzes is the illusion effect that hides beneath the transformations of societies of acceleration.
It is in reality a profound immobility that marks our speedy times: a “petrification of history” in which nothing essential happens anymore, despite the speed of changes on the surface. The law of social acceleration stages what Virilio calls a “dazzling immobility” : it is between “ascents” of speed and deceptive “descents” that the modern individual navigates by sight.
As he runs faster and faster, he becomes exhausted from not moving forward. A large part of contemporary melancholy is played out in the fury of these rhythms that cancel each other out.
