Why Do We Live as We Do?
Harmut Rosa, Time and the World, Polity Press, 2026; Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, Polity Press, 2019; Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, Columbia University Press, 2013.
Social theory, the slow practice of systematically explaining ‘why’, is withering away. It is not that ‘why’ questions have dissipated; to the contrary, with the pace of change, pressing questions confront us with shocking celerity. But now, instead of deeply integrated interrogations, quick event-oriented explanations are de rigueur. They seem to be required by the times. Why did Donald Trump invade Venezuela and then Iran? Why is Gaza still a war zone long after a ceasefire has been announced? Why did a father and a son, probably ISIS-inspired, gun down Jews celebrating Hanukkah? And those questions, as important as they are, will be quickly replaced by new ones as the news cycle moves on, all half-answered at best.
In this accelerating world, explanation is pressed to be immediate, adaptive, correct-line and easily readable. It does not help that most readers, the intellectually trained most poignantly, no longer have the dedicated time to take in systematic theory, but that is only one feature of the malady.
On the production side, the slow task of developing an integrated theoretical approach does not fit with the pressing timeframes, the relentless accounting systems and the demanding impact measures that confront contemporary intellectual practice. Universities have become accounting machines. Think tanks now focus on quickly produced exposés of empirical patterns. And scientific intellectuals have shifted their attention to applied problems, particularly those that generate grants or attract commercial investment.
In the process, theory has been hollowed out. Even when it is wonderfully intriguing, the analytical explanation has become a shiny, elusive exposition that explains little at all. It has turned into short-sentence evocation that can be quickly assimilated through compendiums or laid out as a series of sloganistic tropes: go for abundance, stay with the trouble, follow the money, treat every complexity as an assemblage, distinguish between friends and enemies (as the supposedly defining characteristic of all politics), or ground your theory in what can be discerned during a brief sojourn in the field.
Hence, theories (explanations) of this-and-that quickly empty out after they have served their initial purpose, while their associated metaphors hang around giving the impression of continuing critical depth: we have never been modern; we live in the era of liquid modernity; make rhizomes, not roots, and never plant.
Is an integrated critical theory possible?
In the contemporary crisis condition, both theory and practice need a different kind of approach. As a sign of the times—and ironically when we need them most—there are very few writers who provide solid explanatory frameworks. Prompted by a newly published volume, Time and the World, it is thus worth dwelling on the writings of Hartmut Rosa.
Said to be an heir to the Frankfurt School but relatively little known outside his native Germany, Rosa is one of the key theorists who continue to offer generalising and integrated insights into the manifold crises of the contemporary world. He does not have a theory of intellectual practice—one of the emphases of the Arena group of writers—but as I have hinted in the introduction to this review, his emphasis on the constitutive consequences of worldly acceleration can be brought to bear on the question I have just posed. Why, at the very time when integrated theory is most keenly needed to guide good practice, is slow critical intellectual work in retreat? A Rosa-inspired explanation would focus on the temporal acceleration and thinning out of critical intellectual work. Academics churn out article after article in mass citable form, while few readers, not even university students, have time to dwell on the classics, let alone a complex new theory. I will get back to one of Rosa’s older books, Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, in a moment. First, let me lay out his basic approach.
The underlying theme of Rosa’s work is the meaning of being human in the world, or as the title of the first chapter of his most recent volume, Time and the World, expresses it, ‘Why We Live the Way We Live’. He settles his approach around the proposition that ‘self-interpretation is constitutive of life’.
This does not mean that we are oriented to understanding structural patterns of life; to the contrary, our cognitive-evaluative maps, as he calls them, are largely habitually accumulated notions of what is important. They are often contradictory and always patchy. They are socially constructed and open to all the problems of social media slop and algorithmic sequestering. It is evident in the shallow way in which even the New York Times approaches questions of culture and wellbeing—articles from the weekend that I happened to be writing this review include ‘Quick! What are your dating rules?’, ‘Is the occasional cigarette really that bad’, ‘Is that really narcissism?’. In short, we are reduced to wanting to know how best to get on, while maximising immediate pleasure. This explains the success of superficial handbooks for living, aka self-help books.
In Rosa’s words, ‘Crudely put, then, the way we live depends on how we interpret both ourselves and the world we inhabit with all the opportunities it offers’. In classical theory terms, this makes Rosa more a Weberian than a Marxist, though it should be added he is a post-classical theorist who draws eclectically on both writers and many others—the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor in particular.
Complex lives, Rosa says, cannot be reduced to a simple schema. In the process of self-interpretation, we variously seek recognition and opportunity from those who matter most in our cognitive maps, framed as our orientations are by the dominant social maps of our time. Here, you can see the influence of Rosa’s Frankfurt School mentor Axel Honneth on the social importance of the struggle for recognition, and of the French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu on the interest-based structuring of distinction through seeking cultural capital.
This human drive for recognition and distinction, Rosa argues, is a driver of the reproduction of social structures, and it is intimately connected to patterns of allocation, affecting one’s basic life chances. None of this analysis is particularly insightful or deep. One could say that, at least as expressed so far, the account seems to make the materiality of practice secondary to the capacity for self-interpretation. It is what comes out of this foundation that makes Rosa particularly interesting. He seeks to understand the contradictions of what he calls ‘late-modern’ life.
But first, we need to understand his methodological foundation. The issue here is that while Rosa’s mind is a meld of inquisitive questioning and insightful propositions, his method relies on systems-based model-building that does not always work. For example, Rosa sets up a four-fold matrix which connects what he calls the constitutive features of the modernisation process: structure, culture, personality and stance towards nature. Here, his typologising method goes askew. These are just categories gathered from classical social theory. It is the kind of list that a well-read bricoleur might put together. In his collation, the structure of modernity is differentiation (Durkheim), the culture of modernity is rationalisation (Weber), the personality of modernity is individuation (Simmel), and the stance towards nature of modernity is domestication (supposedly Marx).
While Weber certainly has rationalisation as a key theme, it might be equally argued, using the language of the Arena editors, that Durkheim is primarily concerned with the abstraction of social integration, Simmel with the fragmentation of forms of more embodied forms of association, and Marx with the structuring of power through the commodity abstraction. In other words, they are all (and not just Durkheim) interested in structures— patterns of integration and differentiation. And awkwardly for Rosa, none of them has much to say about the domestication of nature.
Rosa’s analytical moves can thus be a bit mechanical, and they are built on assembled classical categories that do not always fit together elegantly, but it should be emphasised that they are always used as tools without any pretence to immediate answers. It is to this that we can now turn—the strength of his analysis.
The nature of each of these categories of life in modernity, he argues, is linked to ‘the cardinal change in temporal patterns (acceleration)’. This takes the form of a speeding up of changes in our technical capacity to communicate and produce (technological acceleration), a destabilising of prior, more slowly changing social institutions such as work and family (an acceleration of social change), and a fast-tracking of life-experiences, including the subjective pressure to cram more into one’s life (an acceleration of the pace of life).
These three regimes of change are pushed by three associated motors. An economic motor, most obviously based in capitalism and a growth-oriented ideology that drives the production of more, drives the technical cycle of production, exchange and consumption (technological acceleration). This has its point of greatest intensity with the rise of techno-science. Second, a cultural motor expressed in the modern conception of social life as fulfilled by changing experience drives the personal experience of what is good (an acceleration of the pace of life). Here, culturally, modernity holds out the promise of replacing ideas of religious eternity through the transcendental possibility of self-realisation through intensifying acquisition and doing more. And third, a structural motor of functional differentiation across different spheres of life—politics, the economy, the arts, the law, and so on—massively increases the complexity of social life, expanding the options and possibilities for tension (an acceleration of social change). In turn, managing these multiplying connections requires a speeding-up of our responsiveness and an intensification of political management and control, with such political acceleration being impossible except in authoritarian regimes.
In the present period, what Rosa calls ‘late modernity’, the strong positive sense of change in classical modernity that gave us the word ‘progress’ is reaching its limits. Thus, politics is becoming increasingly situationist. Governments constantly react to multiple pressures in short-term, quick-fix ways rather than laying out steady visions of what is possible and good. Extracting the president of Venezuela as a drug criminal, declaring peace in the continuing war zone of Gaza, and setting up a Royal Commission that will explain little about the Bondi massacre are the kind of political reactions that come to stand in for coherent, integrated policy. By racing to enact some new hate laws, deep currents of anti-Semitism will supposedly be curtailed or even eliminated in the foreseeable future. Rosa expresses it more graphically and compactly than I could:
The structural problem at the heart of this disappearance of politics is the democratic political system’s fundamental inability to accelerate. Here we touch on a central structural feature of late modern societies: First, there is a desynchronization of different groups and segments of society. Not all groups accelerate equally: some like the sick, the unemployed, the poor, or, in some respects, the elderly, are forced to ‘decelerate’, while others like the Amish refuse to adopt the temporal structures and horizons of modernity. This desynchronization entails an increasing ‘simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’: high-tech and stone age methods of warfare, transport or communication persist side by side, not only between countries, but even within the same society, and slow and fast paces of life can be observed on one and the same street. The result of this ‘multi-temporality’ is likely to be a progressive disintegration of society.
All of this is elaborated at length in Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. It points to contradictions created by the acceleration regime.
The acceleration regime is compelling, but does it explain the present?
There are a couple of methodological problems that we might take issue with here. First, politics is not disappearing. Rather, it is being reconstituted as a thin spectacle of public grandstanding mixed with populist hyperbole or reactive management. Raymond Williams (drawing on Guy Debord) more accurately describes this as the contradiction between the society of the spectacle and the mobile privatisation of political engagement.
Second, the concept of ‘structure’ is used here variably as a specific category of modernity, the structural motor of institutional differentiation (in this case â la Niklas Luhmann rather than Emile Durkheim) and as a general cross-historical category referring to different patterns of practice—the more usual use of the concept in social theory.
Third, the argument that we are likely to witness the disintegration of society misses the material abstraction of forms of integration, including a dominant form of temporality—in Arena’s terms, abstract relations mediated across space and time that at one level continue to hold our societies and globalised world together, even as it contributes to fracturing our heterogeneous life-worlds. That is, social life is not disintegrating but changing in its form. It is being reintegrated by more abstract processes that, at the same time, fragment local particularities. This explains how one can be integrated into a Facebook or Instagram community with lots of friends and feel increasingly lonely.
Fourth, while emphasising the temporal dimension is critically important, this singular emphasis on time could be treated very differently as a reconstitution of multiple categories of existence—temporality, spatiality, embodiment, epistemology and so on—across different ontological formations, customary, traditional, modern and postmodern ways of living. For me, Rosa is in danger of treating time, and its acceleration, as the master explanatory category of modernity when there are other modes of existence that are equally important.
It is telling that Benedict Anderson’s runaway-brilliant but unintegrated explanation of the formation of nations, Imagined Communities, suffered from a different version of the same problem. Anderson’s book revolutionised nationalism theory, but thereafter he was neither able to integrate the parts of his analysis nor develop upon them. But then, it should be said, that not for decades have any other major theorists of nationalism either.
The first volume of Imagined Communities wraps around the theme of time. It describes how, through print capitalism, the temporal simultaneity created by reading a daily newspaper engendered an imaginary of cotemporaneous relations to a community of others beyond the face-to-face. It made it possible to think and act nationally. Anderson’s thesis is what we might call an ontological argument about time. Other ontological elements stray into his sweep of scrutiny, such as a transformation in the mode of apprehending the world, bringing about a ‘secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning’. In Arena’s terms, this involves an abstraction of the form of epistemology. But for the most part, his explanation, like Rosa’s, focuses on time.
Soon after, in a second edition, Anderson realised the limits of this and added new chapters on the transformations in the ontology of spatiality. And a third edition, never to be written, might well have added chapters on the abstraction of embodiment and epistemology.
However, Benedict Anderson, like Helmut Rosa, is never able to lift his argument above brilliant, engaged intuition. In Rosa’s case, he sort of gets it, but he then misses the necessary next theoretical move—that is, to treat modernity not as an epoch replacing others but as an ontological formation overlaying other formations that have continuing if subordinate presence in the world. Expressed in these alternative terms (as the Arena editors would put it), the modern is a level of existential being (that is, modern ontologies of time, space, embodiment and so on) laid over continuing prior formations and in contradiction with them. Modern and increasingly postmodern ways of being certainly dominate traditional and customary ways, but they do not wipe them out completely.
Rightly critical of mainstream approaches, Rosa writes, ‘Contrary to a widespread view, modernity has not just established a single unitary that synchronizes its various subsystems. Rather the process of functional differentiation resulted in series of almost autopoetic subsystems like the economy, science, law, politics, the arts, etc., all of which follow their own temporal rhythms, patterns and horizons’. He is right that current approaches to modernity do not handle the theme of time as well as they could, but his approach sets up new problems.
The issue with his counter-argument is that these subsystems do in fact operate through the same dominant modern ontology of abstract empty time (to use Anderson’s words borrowed from Walter Benjamin), while they are also at the same time differentiated organisationally. Here, ironically (and in an illogical ontological circularity), Rosa is using modern temporality to define ‘modernity’, and he thus misses out on what differentiates what he misleadingly calls ‘autopoetic’ or self-reproducing subsystems. Subsystems from the economy to the arts live in a world dominated by abstract empty time—time is money, time passes quickly—even if they try to act against it.
Nevertheless, with all that being noted, what the emphasis on time and acceleration allows Rosa to do is work through important tensions and contradictions in contemporary social life. For example, in the sphere of politics, the acceleration regime sets up a legitimation crisis of states as they respond to accelerating change by promising more and undercutting their own capacity to govern. In this world, speed plus short-termism all too often equals shoddy policy. In the personal domain, a similar contradiction prevails. The acceleration regime holds out the never achievable promise of individuals achieving a fully self-determining life—what Arena writers call the ideology of autonomy. This leaves people alienated and unsettled. ‘Individual and collective actors alik’, Rosa says, ‘are struck by their inability to shape and transform their own lives and the conditions of life around them, and they feel powerless in the face of the forces of escalation which they themselves have helped to create’. In these terms, acceleration and alienation are two sides of the late-modern coin that Rosa describes.
As you can sense from the seriousness with which my critique has proceeded, Rosa is an intriguing writer who makes you think. He is a critical theorist in the best sense of that tradition, never letting the apparently obvious rest until it has been thoroughly interrogated. There is, however, another dimension of Rosa’s work that lifts him above the limits of critical theory with its tendency to be brilliant at critique and poor at posing an alternative. In dwelling on the theme of the meaning of being human in the world, Rosa is one of those rare theorists who goes deeply into what makes for good living. And it is to this that I now turn.
What is the other side of acceleration?
If acceleration is the key problem of our modern condition, and if slowing down is not in itself the answer, this is because, as Rosa illustrates, attempts at simple deceleration or stabilisation in the context of a dominant imperative for accelerating change tend either to be reactively ineffective or enabling of conditions for new kinds of acceleration. There must be an alternative; another way of being in the world must be possible.
For Rosa, the answer lies in how we relate to the world and to others, including non-human others. It is the other side of alienation: resonance. Against a world primed to a ‘good life’ forged through conquering new horizons and extending our reach and control, resonance is the dual movement of being touched from the outside (affection) and emotion (answering to that touch). Resonance occurs along three axes: relations to other human beings (social); relations to objects, natural and created (material) and relations to life as such, nature, the universe (existential).
Resonance is embodied. It cannot be acquired instrumentally or by will. It cannot be stored or accumulated. Resonance is finding relations that matter and move. In his words, ‘resonance, above all else, refers to the state or mode of a dynamic relationship in which the subject and the world (in the sense of what can, in a given situation, appear to us as world) are touched and transformed by each other’. In an extension of this metaphor of sound, Rosa is careful to distinguish resonance from consonance and harmony. This means that resonance relies upon an inextinguishable difference between self and other.
In this brief review, I cannot hope to do justice to the complex narration of the possibilities and pitfalls that Rosa describes as the human search for resonance. As he writes in Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World:
[I]t is here that our conceptual problems begin. First, it is possible to identify experiences that exhibit characteristics of ‘negative’ resonance, either because they are directly harmful to subjects or because they have normatively undesirable or even disastrous—‘side-effects’. Second, the longing for total and lasting resonance with the world itself turns out to be a subjectively pathological and in political terms potentially totalitarian tendency. Third (and relatedly), we shall see that forms and phases of alienation are not only unavoidable, but also required for the subsequent development of resonant relationships. It will, moreover, prove necessary to conceptually differentiate between brief, often intense moments of resonant experience and lasting resonant relationships, which are necessary to provide a stable and reliable basis for such repeatable experiences.
There is a substantial political dimension to this theory. It fundamentally calls into question populist calls to revile the Other and find the enemy within as a means of overcoming alienation and the closing of the world. And it existentially challenges the liberal idea of harmony through flattened difference or negative freedom.
However, for all that, any discussion of how resonance is to be achieved collectively, mutually, and as a way of life, is left undeveloped. Even as his book devoted to the subject, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, describes the spaces and moments of possibility—from schools, sunrises and spiritual engagements to walking along a mountain trail, reading Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time or feeling the purr of a cat—it does not offer more than a few generalised notes on the possible pathways to other worlds.
Oh, how I still yearn for a writer who can take us on that bedevilled journey, in theory and in practice. But I do feel resonance with Rosa’s books in a way that I rarely do with contemporary fast-splaining.
Comments
Thanks, Paul. It’s refreshing to read a critical take on writers such as Harmut Rosa. He reminds me of Byung-Chul Han, with a similarly appealing perspective on superficial modern life, but needing a bigger picture, such as what Arena offers.