Alienation and acceleration : towards a critical theory of late-modern temporality

Beskrivelse

Modern life is speeding-up, incessantly. Strange as it is, while the art of saving time reaches unprecedented heights through the introduction of ever-new technologies of communication and production, it nevertheless feels like we are running out of time. In all western societies alike, time-famine is rising and individuals report the impression that they have to run faster and faster each year - not in order to get somewhere, but just to stay in place! This book presents an analytic framework to identify the causes and effects of the various speed-up-processes which define modernity - and it develops A Critical Theory of late-modern temporality. Crucial for this is the idea that acceleration in the end leads to monstrous forms of alienation from time and space, from things and actions - and from self and others.

Indhold

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Part One: A theory of social acceleration -- 1. What is social acceleration? -- 2. The driving-wheels of social acceleration -- 3. What is social deceleraton? -- 4. Why there is acceleration rather deceleration -- 5. Why does it matter? -- Acceleration and the transformation of our ’Being in the world’ -- Part Two: Social acceleration and the contemporary -- Versions of critical theory -- 6. Requirements of a critical theory -- 7. Acceleration and the ’Critique of the conditions of communication’ -- 8. Acceleration and the ’Critique of the conditions of social recognition’ -- 9. Acceleration as a new form of Totalitarianism -- Part Three: Outlines of a critical theory of social acceleration -- 10. Three variants of a critique of temporal conditions -- 11. The functionalist critique: Pathologies of de-synchronization -- 12. The normative critique: Ideology revisited. Unmasking the hidden social norms of temporality -- 13. The ethical critique 1: The broken promise of modernity -- 14. The ethical critique 2: Alienation revisited - Why social acceleration leads to ’Entfremdung’