accelerating world. I will consider this argument in light of research that suggests that timekeeping has been a longer standing practice, and not necessarily a negative one.
While the time discipline involved in capitalist forms of production has played a key role in the shaping of modern time, by itself it cannot explain the changing cultural significance of speed. It is hard to exaggerate the efect of steam engines, railways, and the telegraph on people’s experience of time-space compression. The railway journey, depicted by Charles Dickens and Marcel Proust, is iconic of a transformed sense of the tempo of everyday life. The traveler’s view of landscape as a multitude of swiftly moving visual impressions was unprecedented.
However, it is only with the rapid shift to urban living that speed and change for its own sake have become celebrated as the general condition of modernity. Speed is one of several aspects of modern metropolitan life that becomes culturally valorized by artists and intellectuals, and it remains a key explanation of the time-pressure paradox. Georg Simmel’s depiction of the emergent modern time consciousness as one involving immediacy, simultaneity, and presentism still resonates today. So too does his astute analysis of the alternate responses it would continue to incite, signaling both extraordinary opportunities and the corrosion of moral character. (Richard Sennett would later go on to identify shorttermism as a unique consequence of new capitalism; see chapter 4) In my view, Simmel can well be reclaimed as the first theorist of the acceleration society.
In the twentieth century, the automobile came to symbolize speed, freedom, and liberty. It held out the possibility of change for groups and individuals who wished to escape traditional social confinement. The viability of boundless physical movement undoubtedly had political implications and examples of this will be discussed. However, as with all technology, the automobile’s impact was far from straightforward. The same motorcar that promised unlimited movement also led to gridlock. And while the velocity of machines increasingly came to signify the driving force of progress and economic growth, the euphoria of constant motion also became associated with violence and destruction. These cultural contradictions remain central to the dynamics of acceleration.
Yet, the allure of pure speed continues to seduce. This is evident in the sociological turn to mobility, fluidity, and travel as the key descriptors of our present condition. Speed and perpetual motion are assumed to be universal desires of existence, realizable only through faster, more eficient machines. Accounts of this ilk are tied to linear narratives about the role of technical innovation in making modern times. In reality, technologies evolve through practical use and therefore come to mean quite diferent things to diferent people. Indeed, the ability of some to move fast and frequently can itself cause stasis for others. As such, technological acceleration is always accompanied by various kinds of slow down. It is no wonder, then, that our response to acceleration has always been characterized by profound ambivalence.
Chapter two
38