Accelerating Academia

The Changing Structure of Academic Time

F. Vostal

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137473608
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Filip Vostal examines the changing nature of academic time, and analyzes the 'will to accelerate' that has emerged as a significant cultural and structural force in knowledge production.

1

Thematizing Acceleration

Is acceleration an unprecedented and defining feature of modernity? Or only of late modernity? Is it a sole effect of modern capitalism? Do we live in an ever-accelerating world? If so, what are the social, cultural, psychological, political and ethical implications? In the last two decades a lively debate has emerged around social acceleration as an object of systematic social scientific enquiry and these questions have preoccupied a number of contemporary commentators. Particular attention has been devoted to the investigation in three major and intertwined areas associated with this theme: (1) the implications of the individual and social experience of ‘living in a fast-changing world’; (2) the temporal structures of modernity and associated temporal politics; and (3) the cultural significance of acceleration. This chapter surveys the existing acceleration scholarship and sets the general framework for subsequent analysis.

Against the background of the overview provided, the chapter argues two things. First, classical and modern sociological canons and appraisals of the problem in pop-science and ‘avant-garde’ literature have predetermined the discursive trajectory of the majority of contemporary social scientific treatises on acceleration. Dominant accounts assess acceleration as an a priori negative phenomenon; acceleration, in most existing inquiries, is often rightfully understood as a modern predicament. Hartmut Rosa’s (2013) theory of social acceleration and his re-energized version of the Frankfurt School’s grounded critical theory can be considered the climax of this trajectory. His understanding and epistemological anchoring, however, neglects the gains, conveniences and opportunities associated with acceleration. Thus, and second, to understand acceleration as a multifaceted social phenomenon, more culturally oriented analyses that problematize the dominant discourse are discussed. In sum, the aim of the chapter is both to introduce the relevant literature that frames and animates subsequent analytical tropes of the book, and to highlight that acceleration is by default an ambivalent social occurrence and experience.

Acceleration as a sociological theme

Canonical theorists of modernity and those of late modernity have already touched on the problem of acceleration. In classical sociological thought, acceleration occurred as an incidental appendix to other concepts: Karl Marx fostered the issue of turnover time when illuminating the social relations of production, but his primary concerns were the development of the capitalist economy and class antagonisms; Georg Simmel dealt with the phenomenology of acceleration against the backdrop of the emergence of metropolitan life as well as in relation to philosophy of money¹; Max Weber, when unfolding the dynamics of the bureaucratic organization, made an explicit reference to the problem of acceleration (see Tomlinson 2007a: 5–7). Contemporary social theorists and globalization analysts treat the problem similarly to their classical predecessors: it is an adjunct to other important debates and reflections on digital technologies, connectivity, mobilities and the general transformation of time and space in late modernity. It remains integral yet largely implicit in Zygmunt Bauman’s thesis of ‘liquid modernity’ in which individuals and social formations keep moving on ‘thin ice’ that prevents them from stopping, pausing or reflecting as the risk of ‘drowning’ and stagnation is too high. Manuel Castells’ ‘timeless time’ takes the speed of systems and ‘global flows’ as an implicit context for his influential conceptual apparatuses. There are also important references to acceleration in the work of Helga Nowotny, Barbara Adam’s pivotal contributions to the sociology of time, George Ritzer’s ‘McDonaldization thesis’, John Urry’s ‘mobility studies’ and even from geographers such as Nigel Thrift, Jon May, Jamie Peck, Nik Theodore and David Harvey.²

These scattered treatments of acceleration are often made in substantial debates that aim to thematically and methodologically redress a unilateral concern with space in the social sciences by establishing a ‘temporal turn’ (Jessop 2009; Hassan 2010). Despite that, sociological analyses of time and temporality, as well as the relationship between space and time, are cardinal for understanding acceleration. In this book, acceleration as such will be foregrounded – indeed against the background of the problem of time and temporality, but also as, at least analytically, a distinct social phenomenon. However, rather than conceiving of time and temporality as philosophical and ineffable categories, subsequent chapters will be concerned with the question of temporal ordering (cf. Moore 1963). One of the most important social analysts of time JT Fraser noted:

Individuals and societies no less than commercial, industrial, political and ideological interest groups have their own proper times [Eigenzeiten]. That is, they have differing judgments about the role and importance of their own and of other people’s and groups’ times. Whether as abstract ideas or guidelines for action, all these proper times are in ceaseless conflict or, more precisely, the persons and groups maintaining those proper times are. (Fraser 1994: 4)

Therefore different temporal patterns, rates, rhythms, sequencing, timing–that is different speeds, their encounters, embodiments, implications and cultural meanings and discourses – are at the crux of the present analysis. More specifically, this analysis focuses precisely on the modes of temporal (re)ordering of contemporary academia, a more or less definable social terrain, in which acceleration as unique phenomena – not just as accompanying feature to other processes – has become significant, problematic, experienced and contested.

Pop-science literature is a rich and detailed resource for diagnosing acceleration as a stand-alone phenomenon, yet it also treats the issue descriptively and non-analytically. Nevertheless, it can serve as a valuable backdrop to more sociologically developed arguments. Not only has it animated the substantial analyses discussed in this book, it has also helped to establish a discourse of acceleration and the value-base that is commonly attached to it. These books account for a genre that expresses negative, if not downright apocalyptic, aspects of our relationship to the current age where ‘just about everything is accelerating’ (Gleick 1999); where anxiety-ridden restlessness is the defining experience accompanying the ‘cult of speed’ (Honoré 2004); which in turn results in the frustrations and stresses of having ‘no time’ (Menzies 2005); and consequently, we are advised to nourish ‘thoughtful idleness’ (Schnabel 2014). One problem of the genre is in its covering too many dimensions of social life and doing so far too superficially, scanning over complex terrains ranging from technology, the transformation of work, consumption, celebrity culture, mass media, travel, family, education and many more. In a sense, these treatments are symptomatic of acceleration: they are fast, without dwelling on thorough and detailed analyses, unexpected of this genre of speed(y) literature. They often employ examples from their authors’ experience, recasting them schematically (but also provocatively) into societal problematics.

A similar type of projection and intellectualization of the subjective experience of acceleration is also present in, and may be deployed as the defining characteristic of, the controversial work of Paul Virilio. Virilio’s reception remains ambivalent, though rarely neutral; for some he is the pioneer of ‘dromocratic theory’ and one of the most ‘creative theorists of modern life’ (Armitage 2000; Redhead 2004; Hanke 2010); for others he is a ‘fast-thinking’ nihilist (Breuer 2009). Steve Redhead writes of Virilio: ‘Speed in/of modernity in general, not just in relation to technology and war, has become associated with his name, almost anywhere in the world’ (2004: 3).³ Virilio is concerned with examining the nature of speed, its conditions of emergence, consequences, effects and manifestations. Some credit him as the first to attempt to ‘understand the historical conditions of individual existence under tyranny of an unrelenting acceleration of every coordinate – economic, social, political, cultural’ (Armitage 2000: 145). Virilio’s conclusions are notoriously bleak: speed is the ‘defeat of the world as field, as distance, as matter’ (1986: 133); ‘speed is the essence of war’ and ‘war is the source of all technology’ (2009; Virilio and Lotringer 1983; also Virilio 2000a; 2000b); speed brings about a ‘derangement of senses’ (1991); acceleration leads to ‘liquidation and end of the world’ (2008). In spite of his notoriously inflated and problematic rhetoric, Virilio’s insights and provocations can be considered a foundational benchmark in ‘speed debates’. As will be shown, analytical fields discussed below and contemporary debates around acceleration have been in one way or another provoked by Virilio’s controversial observations. Despite the difficulty and obscurity of his texts, his legacy continues to be – albeit cautiously and critically – acknowledged in the sociological literature.

Critique of the fast world

There are several book-length accounts (Agger 1989; 2004; Eriksen 2001; Brennan 2003; Hassan 2003; 2008; 2009a; 2012; Taylor 2014) which bypass the previously mentioned genres by attempting to outline a social critique of acceleration. This body of literature synthesizes and, taken together, systematizes acceleration as a quintessentially modern and thoroughly (late) capitalist imperative with manifold negative consequences for the social and natural environments, self-determination and autonomy, social (and even biological) reproduction, well-being and mental health. This line of argument develops a sustained criticism for its claims that the acceleration of life under late (global) capitalist modernity and the time-pressures it generates account for a distinctive moment in history due to its largely negative and inhuman effects. The authors often see (the logic of) capitalism as the main determinant and explanatory vehicle of acceleration, a relationship which will be revisited at length in the next chapter.

For his part in the general critique of acceleration, Eriksen comments on the phenomenological implications of time-compression brought about mostly by ever-faster information and communication technologies (ICT). The implications are irreversible and overwhelming. He notes: ‘fast time’ dominates ‘slow time’ and the ‘tyranny of the moment’ is the pressing condition in all walks and registers of life. Taylor, capturing the zeitgeist of late modernity, reflects on the ‘trap of speed’ and ‘speed addictions’ in the following way:

Moore’s law, according to which the speed of computer chips doubles every eighteen months, now seems to apply to life itself. My life is faster than my father’s life, my children’s life is faster than my life, and the lives of their children, already hooked on iPhones and iPads, will be faster than theirs. This is not an idle speculation but a fact …. The speed revolution, it is important to stress, affects different people in different ways; indeed speed has become a, if not the primary, socioeconomic differentiator. As some people speed up, others slow down; as some people work more than they want, others work less than they want or even not at all; as some people get ‘ahead’, others fall ‘behind’. What ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in this new fast-paced economy share are the insecurity, anxiety, and discontent that speed creates. (2014: 1–2)

Where Eriksen’s explanatory resource is the epochal concept of ‘information society’ (for an overview see Webster 2006; for criticism see May 2002), Agger, Hassan, Brennan and Taylor develop their analyses more sociologically and normatively vis-à-vis the forces of neoliberalism, globalization, Protestantism and the (financial) capitalist culture broadly conceived. For Brennan, the speeding-up of contemporary capitalism is causing pollution-induced, immunodeficient and stress-related diseases (Brennan 2003). Agger’s ‘fast capitalism’ thesis purports that capitalism ‘is compressed as the pace of everyday life quickens in order to meet certain economic imperatives and to achieve social control; idle hands are the devil’s workshop’ (2004: 4). Similar to Eriksen, although with more pronounced Marxist leanings, Agger assesses the impact of ever-accelerating ICT on work, family, childhood and the body. Hassan’s theses, ‘chronoscopic society’ and ‘empires of speed’, develop a rich tapestry of claims maintaining that the ‘networked informational ecology’, with its digitally compressed and accelerating time, dramatically affects the individual experience and the nature of the social dynamic. All these treatments conclude with several recommendations that aim to help in breaking free from the frenetic tempo of the late modern condition as a necessary precondition for the ‘good life’ and social emancipation (see also Rosa 2013: 32, 124). Agger, for instance, says that:

capitalism has quickened since WWII, especially with the advent of the Internet. People work harder and more, their private space has been eroded; kids are doing adultlike amounts of homework and activities; people eat badly, on the run, and then embark on crash diets and exercise programs. The world is ever-present and omnipresent, saturating us with stimuli, discourses, directives. It is difficult to gain distance from the everyday in order to appraise it. Our very identities as stable selves are at risk. We need to slow it all down. (Agger 2004: 131)

The main problem with those otherwise illuminating analyses is that they dwell on a quasi-deterministic logic of ICT, globalization, and capitalism and/or neoliberalism being the hegemonic forces that satisfactorily explain and explicate causes of acceleration and its social and individual implications. The effects and social impact of ICT-driven capitalist acceleration are considerable and unprecedented: an environmental and social catastrophe is looming; the self is fragmented (see also Hsu and Elliot 2014); democracy needs to be re-temporalized (see also Chesneaux 2000); biological needs such as sleep are under siege (see Crary 2013; Hsu 2014); our thinking is ‘abbreviated’; concentration is no longer possible; we all are on a verge of a collective burn-out.

Even though such modes of reasoning are valid and no doubt arrestingly relevant, there is at the same time far too much emphasis on individuals as mere victims of fast temporality where the acceleration-oriented dynamic of the ‘neoliberalization-globalization nexus’ and ‘logics of computerization’ dominates. Due to a range of psycho-social acceleration pathologies that should squarely paralyse our individual and collective capacities for emancipation and autonomous existence, most of the critical accounts of an ever-faster life-world maintain that we need to slow down – and fast. However, the question of agency and the ways in which individuals process acceleration and build their own temporal experience is unexamined (on temporal agency and intentionality see especially Flaherty 2011). Not to mention the distinct possibility of there being individuals who might enjoy the liberating powers of acceleration-loaded experience and dynamism without embracing the forces of neoliberal capitalism.

These accounts exhibit another important feature: they amount to theoretically-informed and normatively driven commentaries, not necessarily to systematic theories. Even if we accept the main message postulating that acceleration is a sociologically relevant problem with different causes and manifold consequences, a number of subsequent questions immediately arise: how evenly distributed are such developments? Are different individuals differently positioned in society, and different social arenas affected equally? Can slowdown be an undesirable experience and outcome? Why were non-capitalist regimes of the 20th century also obsessed with acceleration?⁴ Is the social experience of acceleration qualitatively and quantitatively actually new and distinctive of late modernity? Why is there very little reference to acceleration as a positive, convenient and even energizing experience in this literature? Is acceleration reducible to a modern predicament only? We can start to develop answers to these questions by discussing the work of Hartmut Rosa.

Hartmut Rosa: acceleration thesis

Rosa’s project is far more ambitious than those outlined above – he outlines a theory of acceleration that is, moreover, presented as ‘a new theory of modernity’ (Rosa 2013). In comparison with the aforementioned accounts, Rosa’s theory⁵ is not entirely different in its approach or intellectual undertone, but rather in its complexity and coherence. By highlighting acceleration as an inherently modern feature, Rosa aims to go beyond the sociological investigations of time. He posits that sociology of time as a subfield suffers from several shortcomings: disconnectedness of perspectives, methodological eclecticism and extensive reliance on philosophical approaches to time (Rosa 2013: 2–3). Against this background, Rosa’s account offers a reinvigorated conceptualization of the issue of temporality, particularly as it relates to contemporary social development and the modernization process, but also to modern capitalism (particularly the maxims of growth and capitalist competition) and to the teleology and directionality of modernity. His other objective is ‘to contribute to an adequate social-theoretical grasp of current social development and problems in the context of the process of modernization and also the debate concerning a fracture in this process between a “classical” age of modernity and a “second” age of late or postmodernity … [and] … work out their ethical and political implications’ (2013: 4 emphases original). Social actions, processes and experiences transpire with increasing speed, which is the fundamental attribute defining contemporary modernity and which in fact differentiates it from its precursors. Rosa notes: ‘the acceleration that is a constitutive part of modernity crosses a critical threshold in “late modernity” beyond which the demand for societal synchronization and social integration can no longer be met’ (2013: 20). This rift and the resulting pathologies of social, political and personal character comprise the backdrop upon which Rosa advances his theoretical apparatus.

Social acceleration stands for – especially in its late modern iteration–an overarching, inescapable and, to an extent, independent force (see Rosa 2013: 151–159) enveloping the modern individual as well as institutions. Rosa defines it more concretely as follows:

A central, defining fact of modern societies is the fact that a modern society can only stabilize and reproduce itself dynamically. This means that it needs growth, acceleration, and (increasing rates of) innovation in order to maintain its structure, to keep the status quo. Most obviously, this is true for the economic sphere, where the absence of growth and innovation immediately results in decay and crisis, but it is also true for the realms of politics and the welfare state, and even for the production of science and the arts, etc … this results in an all-encompassing process of speedup that transforms the material, the social, and the mental worlds at ever higher rates … [We can increase] the number of options for action, and the number of contacts almost indefinitely, whereas the time we can apply to all these goods, options, and contacts virtually remains the same (namely, 24 h a day or 365 days a year) … Time cannot be increased, it can only be condensed or compressed. (Rosa 2014: 43)

Subsequently, Rosa substantiates his argument by foregrounding an important paradox of social acceleration. In the history of modernity many technical inventions and solutions had been used to save time. One per...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Pulse of Modern Academia
• 1 Thematizing Acceleration
• 2 Continuity and Change in the Temporal Dynamics of Capitalism
• 3 Vehicularity: The Idea of the Knowledge Economy
• 4 Performativity: Competitiveness and Excellence
• 5 Acceleration in the Academic Life-World
• 6 Fast Sites: Igniting and Catapulting Knowledge
• 7 Sociology, Fast and Slow
• Conclusion: For a Temporal Autonomy of Academia
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index