Organized By Allëgra Fryxell
Trumpington Street,Cambridge (52.203087, 0.117285)
Keynote Lecture for the History and Temporality Workshop (University of Cambridge) ~ free entry to all ~ THE ACCELERATION OF SOCIAL CHANGE & THE TRANSFORMATION OF HISTORY: A TALE ABOUT THE TWOFOLD BREAK IN MODERNITY'S TIME Hartmut Rosa (University of Jena) The paper seeks to substantiate the claim that there is a twofold transformation in the modern experience of time, and that this transformation is caused by the acceleration of social change beyond two significant thresholds. Before the ‘Sattelzeit’ identified by Reinhart Koselleck, i.e. before the 18th century, the world was perceived as being the world, i.e., as essentially staying the same, since the three or four generations that lived together at any one point in time basically shared the same experiences. Thus, when a grandmother was talking to her grandson, she could simply refer to the way ‘the world is’. However, with the unfolding of the dynamic character of modernity, social change accelerated beyond the generational threshold: The experienced world changed its fabric at a pace that forced grandma to refer to ‘her world’ as different from ‘the new world of the grandson’, i.e., to distinguish in narratives and orientations between ‘my world’, or ‘the world of my generation’, and ‘his world’. This is what Koselleck refers to when he notices the separation of the space of experience and the horizon of expectation: When the pace of social change crossed the line from an inter-generational to a generational threshold, History in the singular and as a subject was born, historical time was from now on perceived to move forward. By consequence, generations became the bearers of innovation: Every generation defined the world anew, all sons and daughters had to find their own vocational, marital, political or religious stance, they could no longer continuate the traditions of their fathers (and mothers). However, in the years between 1973 and 1990, the pace of social change appears to have crossed another critical threshold: It moved to an infra- or intra-generational pace. This means that generations can no longer refer to ‘their’ world. Grandma and grandson can only agree that ‘right now’, or ‘at present’, things are such and such, but ‘tomorrow’, i.e. in a few years’ time, they will be different. With this second break, the perception of modern time changes once more, and most significantly. In a certain sense, it goes back to the pre-modern sense of time: There are lots of histories of changing conditions and circumstances, but there is no longer a (progressive) direction. We find evidence of such a condition of a ‘frantic standstill’ (rasender Stillstand) in individuals’ biographies (which tend to become episodic), in political accounts of the world (where process of democratization and de-democratization, liberalization and de-liberalization, pacification and militarization, bureaucratization and de-regulation etc. become simultaneous) and in late-modern perceptions of history. Thus, while the paper seeks to establish the tale of social acceleration as the master-narrative of modern time, it also seeks to explain the twofold rupture in modern temporal experience as its predictable consequence.