Sandy KinsockPS 2607 – Democratic Theory and DemocratizationFinal Draft

Social Acceleration and the Future of Democratic Publics

“From space man stole electricity and then the liquid fuels, to make new allies for himself in the motors. Man shaped the metals he had conquered and made flexible withfire, to ally himself with his fuels and electricity. He thereby assembled an army of slaves, dangerous and hostile but sufficiently domesticated to carry him swiftly over the curves of the earth.”

-Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

It has become almost a truism to say that society moves

‘faster’ in the twenty-first century. We have fast food, fast

cars, and fast communication. Whereas previous generations were

attached to ancestral homelands and family trades, in modern

society individuals often change locations and professions

multiple times during the course of their lives. In politics,

crises seem to arise with greater density and urgency than ever

before. If society really is experiencing a general process of

acceleration, it seems natural to assume that this process will

have significant consequences for democracy. But just how can

social acceleration be expected to affect the political

consciousness and participation patterns of the public?

Considerable attention has been devoted to investigating this

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question, but so far there is nothing close to a consensus.

Indeed, modern theorists of democracy cannot even agree on

whether social acceleration is a good thing or a bad thing for

democratic publics, and even those who agree that it is a bad

thing vary wildly in their assessments of just where the problem

lies. In this paper, I will try to clarify some key concepts in

the debate, and I will argue for how these clarifications can

help resolve these persistent disagreements.

In my analysis, I identify the concept of desynchronization

as critical to understanding and resolving the modern debate

about social acceleration in democratic theory. I draw a

distinction between two categories of social problem thought to

be introduced by desynchronization: cultural desynchronization

and economic desynchronization. My argument is twofold. First,

once the distinction between these two concepts of

desynchronization is made clear, it becomes easier to see that

the effects of social acceleration on economic inequality are

what is truly problematic for democracy. Second, cultural

desynchronization is a component of social acceleration which has

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the potential to generate democratic publics capable of resisting

the enervating effects of economic desynchronization.

Before arriving at this argumentative destination, I will

have to define social acceleration in some detail and gesture at

some of the conceptual difficulties which make rigorous analysis

of this purportedly pervasive phenomenon difficult. Then, I will

present the plural-democratic case for why social acceleration

could potentially be a boon for democratic publics. In the third

section, I will outline the major problems with social

acceleration as they are discussed in the literature. These

purported problems include disruptions to deliberation, the

atomization of civil society, disillusionment with politics and

economic inequality. From there I will be able to leverage my

conceptual analysis of desynchronization in order to show which

of these problems are real and which are illusory.

Section I: Defining Social Acceleration

The concept of social acceleration can seem slippery –

another under-defined, pervasive, inescapable, vaguely nauseating

facet of the postmodern condition. Yet the phenomenon itself need

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not be quite so mysterious. The idea that “society is moving

faster” resonates strongly with our theoretical intuitions and

everyday experience of the changing circumstances of modern life.

For example, it is literally true that human beings are

capable of moving from place to place at vastly higher speeds

than they could a century ago. Sheer physical, vehicular speed

carries its own enchantment and serves as a neat metaphor for the

more abstract societal phenomena discussed by theorists of social

acceleration. Of course, vehicular speed is not only a metaphor;

it is also seems to ‘make the world smaller’ by enabling readier

travel between distant points. Spatial compression, as it is

often dubbed in the literature, is a consequence of social

acceleration in the most literal sense. A spatially-compressed

planet is likely to see distant cultures experiencing a greater

density of contact and interchange with one another.

Mere movement of bodies is only the beginning. High-tech

communication networks cause ideas and narratives to proliferate

at exponentially greater rates than they did in the past. This

causes social understandings – and, consequently, social reality

itself – to evolve at an unprecedented pace. The development of

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information technology has transformative consequences for

economies as well; financial systems are integrated and investors

react within seconds to dynamic developments across the globe.

All of the above transformations make it so that major societal

events requiring concerted political attention arise at an

increasingly rapid rate.

However, these basic observations do not completely clarify

the concept of social acceleration. Skeptics might well ask what

makes social acceleration so conceptually distinct from

globalization that it merits its own body of literature. In order

to better specify what social acceleration actually is, it is

necessary to turn to the work of Hartmut Rosa, who in his

influential essay lays out a formal sociological theory of social

acceleration.1

Rosa identifies three defining dimensions of social

acceleration: technological acceleration, acceleration of social

change, and acceleration of the pace of life.2 The first is

intuitively clear; the latter two are more difficult to pin down

and measure empirically. Rosa seeks to better define the

“accelerated processes of social change that rendered social

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constellations and structures as well as patterns of action and

orientation unstable and ephemeral.”3 He does this by suggesting

that, broadly, social change has moved over the last century or

two from an intergenerational to a generational to an

intragenerational scale. The idea is that, whereas it used to be

the case that professions and attachments to place were handed

down from parents to children, increasingly this familial

determination has been weakened and younger generations are

likely to lead different lifestyles in different places from

their parents. In the late-modern era, it is even the case that

professions and attachments to place can change multiple times

within a single individual life. Rosa posits that this pace of

social change constitutes a radical departure from the conditions

of early- and pre-modernity. It is easy to imagine the role that

accelerated transportation and communication might play in this

dynamic. In speaking of an accelerated pace of life, meanwhile,

Rosa is referring to “a measureable contraction of the time spent

on definable episodes… of action like eating, sleeping, going for

a walk, playing, talking to one’s family, etc…” and indicates

that, while much remains doubtful, there exists a substantial

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body of empirical evidence suggesting that people are spending

less and less time on each discrete activity.4

One of the most troubling aspects of social acceleration as

theorized by Rosa is “desynchronization.” The idea is that not

all parts of society accelerate to the same extent or in the same

ways – indeed, the acceleration of some social processes can

force deceleration of others. In a society where high-speed

capital flows are tapped primarily by well-connected capitalist

elites who can afford the technology and the dedicated time

required to react to markets profitably, “the sick, the

unemployed, the poor or… the elderly” do not have the social

resources to react to the rapidly fluctuating state of the

economy, and both their social and their political efficacy

trails behind as a result.5 The concentration of “accelerated”

technology in the hands of wealthy people and wealthy nations

means that there is a “simultaneity of the non-simultaneous”

wherein supposedly ‘antiquated’ economic and political ways of

life are exposed to and destabilized by hair-trigger military

technologies and coercive economic mechanisms wielded by not-

always-scrupulous social elites.6 More broadly, desynchronization

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is theorized to entail short-term ghettoization followed by such

pervasive penetration of capital and hegemonic social

narratives/identities that the result is a “fast-paced, atomized,

kaleidoscopic social amalgam in which highly volatile

associations and lifestyle milieus replace the mosaic of

ghettos.”7

The political implications of such changes for democratic

publics will be assessed later. For now, there remain a handful

of troubling conceptual ambiguities which are not abolished by

Rosa’s analysis. The first is that, for all the clarificatory

power of Rosa’s theory of social acceleration, there is still a

very large amount of overlap with other major concepts. Social

acceleration is obviously closely interrelated with globalization

and it is not clear to what extent the analysis of the former can

be extricated from the analysis of the latter. Furthermore, there

is a tendency in the literature to conflate social acceleration

with (late-)modernity writ large. Is acceleration an attribute of

modernity or is it just a way of referring to modernity itself?

The distinction is not as strong as it might seem. Rosa calls

social acceleration “a constitutive trait of modernity as such”8

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and asserts that “late modernity is nothing other than modern

society accelerated (and desynchronized) beyond the point of

possible reintegration.”9 Still, I want to say that it is best to

preserve the distinction between social acceleration and

“modernity as such” in hope of retaining the specific focus and

conceptual utility of the former idea. The specific phenomena of

accelerated social change and pace of life are not exhaustive of

the idea of late modernity, and they turn out to be key concepts

in my analysis of the evolution of democratic publics.

Another difficulty is posed by the idea of “slow time.” This

concept is employed by many modern theorists (including William

Scheuerman, William Connolly and David McIvor) to refer to ‘non-

accelerated’ aspects of society which (depending on the theorist)

either persist or have been obliterated. Slow time is an

essential concept; for some theorists it acts as a solution to

(or a reprieve from) the putative problems posed by social

acceleration while for others the idea contains all that is

obsolete and parochial about older forms of political society.

The more immediate, conceptual problem is that is just isn’t

clear what slow time is actually supposed to be. Much of the

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literature seems to have taken for granted that, once

acceleration is defined, slow time as the antonym is intuitively

clear. It isn’t.

For example, in his 2011 essay critically examining some of

the political implications of the social acceleration debate,

David McIvor expands on a metaphor employed by William Connolly

in an attempt to clarify how slow time can be essential to

healthy political functioning. Connolly’s suggestion (as

summarized by McIvor) is that an accelerated state can be a boon

for the political vitality of a population in the same way that a

point guard flourishes in the fast-paced environment of a

basketball game by dictating, reacting to and improvising on the

on-court movements of the other nine players. McIvor complicates

this already oblique metaphor with his objection that the point

guard only does so because of the countless practice hours in

“slow time” that have honed his instincts.10 But it is not clear

that there is any sense in which time is “slower” for the point

guard in practice than it is in the game. In fact, due to the

effects of adrenaline, the point guard in a high-pressure game

situation may experience time more slowly – hence the oft-

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repeated sportscaster’s cliché that “the game slows down” for a

good player.

The confusion of this mangled metaphor mirrors the

conceptual confusion involved in the concept of slow time in

general. There is a lurking suspicion that “slow time” is just

another way of saying “deliberation.” More charitably, slow time

may mean “taking our time in whatever we do,” but even this does

not cover all of the associations with meticulous preparation,

due process of law, parliamentary and/or public democratic

deliberation, friendly relationships and natural, healthy

lifestyles that the concept enjoys in the literature. In many

theories, slow time seems to function as an all-purpose

palliative for the putative evils of social acceleration, and

grows only less specific as a concept as its role as a palliative

grows. This under-specification will turn out to be important in

my criticisms of McIvor’s response to some of the problems that

he believes can result from social acceleration.

In this section, social acceleration has been defined along

with a handful of its derivative concepts (spatial compression,

desynchronization, slow time, etc.). With this accomplished, I

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want to turn my attention to the debate in democratic theory over

whether social acceleration is likely to be destructive or

productive for the development of democratic publics.

Section II: The Democratic Potential of Social Acceleration

One of the most enthusiastic contemporary voices in favor of

social acceleration is William Connolly, a self-identified

radical pluralist democrat who abjures what he understands to be

mere doomsaying and slow-time nostalgia. Connolly sees democratic

potential in certain kinds of social fragmentation and

diversification. In the opening pages of an essay on social

speed, culture and cosmopolitanism, he argues that speed can play

a positive role in both intra-state democracy and cross-state

cosmopolitanism.11 Connolly strongly disagrees with those he sees

as overcommitted to the memory of the nation-state as the site of

democratic deliberation, arguing that speed makes possible (not

necessarily probable) cosmopolitan deliberation in something

close to real time.

What accounts for Connolly’s enthusiasm, and what role,

precisely, does social acceleration play in fostering democracy?

Connolly argues that the speed and global scope of communication

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make it easier to form movements for pluralistic recognition of

distinct cultural groups and harder to ignore those movements.12

But this cosmopolitan deliberation in relatively conventional

terms is not much more than what Scheuerman gestures at – nor is

it what makes social acceleration truly powerful and exciting for

Connolly. The mere effectiveness of movements for toleration and

coexistence is only the beginning.

This is because mere rights-based multiculturalism is only a

part of a more general and intense process of cross-cultural

negotiation that, for Connolly, can and ought to pervade every

aspect of society and force dynamic reconsiderations of pre-

established group identities and narratives. Pluralism is an

always-ongoing process that enriches democratic populations

exactly as far as it challenges them to re-think themselves over

and over and over again. Part of what is at the root of

Connolly’s confidence that social acceleration has benign

pluralistic potential is that the “contemporary accentuation of

tempo in interterritorial communications” confronts people with

the historically contingent nature and inherent contestability of

their identities to an unprecedented extent. Another part is the

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disruptive potential of the late-modern tendency toward

“accident and surprise,” which tends to upset preconceived

notions of incontrovertible truth.13 Against the universalistic

prescriptions of Kantians, he says, “as the hope to secure a

single [regulative or moral] perspective is shaken by the

experience of a world spinning faster than heretofore, a window

of opportunity opens to negotiate a plural matrix of

cosmopolitanism.”14

On Connolly’s pluralistic understanding of what constitutes

a ‘healthy’ democratic public, social acceleration is one of the

best medicines around. As long as high-speed cultural collisions

and negotiations continue unabated, democratic publics will

evolve into more and more robust forms. For Connolly, quite

simply, a public can be said to be democratic only so far as it

can be said to be pluralistic. Social acceleration forces us to

come to terms with the limitations of parochialism.

All of this sounds promising, but much of the literature

takes the opposing view that social acceleration actually

presents several grave problems for democracy. In the next

section, I want to identify these supposed problems.

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Section III: The Destructive Potential of Social

Acceleration

One of the earliest theorists to recognize social

acceleration as problematic for democracy was John Dewey. Dewey

was extremely concerned about deliberation and about the

stability of democratic publics more broadly. In a short essay on

“The Mania for Motion and Speed,” he articulated the oft-repeated

refrain that modern technologies served only to distract the

public from political concerns.15 The shortened attention span of

society could only result in the de-politicization of the public.

Widespread preoccupation with new-fangled gadgets was not

Dewey’s only worry. He observed the emergence of “mobile and

fluctuating associational forms” and the weakening of attachments

of place, fretting: “How can a public be organized, we may ask,

when literally it does not stay in place?... Without abiding

attachments associations are too shifting and shaken to permit a

public readily to locate and identify itself.”16 This is much the

same complaint that many modern theorists have about the effect

of social acceleration on changing democratic publics. If the

citizens of a polity do not stay in one place and develop strong

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and long-standing social ties, are they not more likely to behave

atomistically, to chase the quick amusements of modern technology

and allow their political consciousness to atrophy?

Among the modern theorists of social acceleration, perhaps

the one who concurs most thoroughly with the conclusions of Dewey

is William Scheuerman. Scheuerman is careful to avoid hysterical

doomsaying, but McIvor largely correct in identifying “a stitch

of anxiety” in his prognostications for democratic publics in an

accelerated society.17 Before investigating the roots of this

anxiety, I want to provide a brief treatment of Scheuerman’s

broader understanding of the political consequences of social

acceleration. This understanding is more institutionally-focused

than the present paper, but Scheuerman articulates some

assumptions that turn out to be crucial for the question of

democratic publics.

In an article that has helped set the tone for the social

acceleration debate in the twenty-first century, Scheuerman

introduces social acceleration alongside its sister concept,

spatial compression.18 Spatial compression, as mentioned in the

first section of the present paper, is a result of the

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acceleration of transportation and communication and is expressed

in the common intuition that the world is getting ‘smaller.’

Scheuerman’s concerns about social acceleration and spatial

compression stem from their problematic implications for the

conventional institutional schemes of liberal democracies. He

argues that many of these institutions are backgrounded by

assumptions about legislative deliberation and executive dispatch

that increasingly do not hold in modern accelerated polities.19

The legislature, he contends, was designed for slow-paced,

procedural deliberation which does not correspond well to the

demands of our impatient modern world. As the legislature loses

efficacy and credibility before the eyes of a dramatically

accelerated society, the executive branch is likely to

consolidate potentially undemocratic power thanks to its

institutional design as a quick-response failsafe for failures of

legislative deliberation.20

This would be a problematic development because, in

Scheuerman’s view, bicameralism and separation of powers

decelerate decision-making “for the sake of heightening its

cognitive merits.”21 Here Scheuerman discloses a key assumption

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about what makes democratic deliberation desirable, and about why

social acceleration poses problems for democratic publics. If

public discourse and decision-making needs to be slow in order to

be smart, then social acceleration looks like an engine of

foolish politics. This assumption, while intuitive, is not

uncontroversial – especially when generalized to apply to an

entire democratic public.

Yet Scheuerman does seem to make just such a generalization.

He seems sympathetic when he concludes from Locke’s writings on

popular politics that “the reasonableness of popular politics is

accentuated by its slow-moving character.”22 He then proceeds to

treat the question of democratic publics at some length.

Scheuerman is not optimistic that the conditions of slow time

that the founders of the United States relied upon are

retrievable in any meaningful or permanent way, but he does argue

that social acceleration has the potential to be turned to the

benefit of democratic publics. It is imperative, in his view, for

democratic citizens to take advantage of new communication

technologies, because whether or not they do, powerful economic

elites in the corporate sphere certainly will, and given the

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chance these elites will co-opt these new forms of social speed

to reassert hegemonic dominance, and they will do it too quickly

for a public that still operates through slow-time institutions

to react. Relatedly, the “new economy” of flexible capital

encourages a shared social understanding of time (and space) that

is degenerative, even explosive, for the kinds of long-term

attachments that are conventionally understood to be essential

for the formation of an effective and responsible public.23

Clearly, Scheuerman is perfectly aware that we need to

confront the problems posed by social acceleration without making

a nostalgic retreat to slow time and all its problematic

associations with “static and impervious forms of communal

life.”24 Even so, he is strongly reliant upon Dewey-esque notions

about the necessity of some permanent associational forms for the

retention of good deliberative-democratic habits in the public.

This outlook limits his options in terms of productive responses

to the purported pressures of social acceleration outside of

rather mild institutional reforms. He does insist that “there is

no a priori reason for precluding the possibility that

instantaneousness and simultaneity might serve the cause of free-

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wheeling deliberation either in elected representative bodies or

in a broader set of democratic publics.”25 This conclusion of

Scheuerman’s is little more than a hopeful aside, but that

doesn’t change the fact that it seems basically correct (if

trivial) to say that the accelerated news cycle generated by

social media has a strong impact on how democratic publics

interact with politics. Of course one hopes that this

relationship will be optimized and that social media will become

a powerful tool of democratic publics in an accelerated society.

In order to penetrate deeper into the question of how social

acceleration is problematic for democratic publics, however, we

will have to turn elsewhere.

In returning to Hartmut Rosa’s analysis we find one or two

useful concepts that can help clarify just what effect social

acceleration is supposed to have on democratic publics. These

concepts bear more directly on the ‘health’ of democratic

publics, which is itself a vague concept that only seems to come

into focus once the ‘ills’ that a democratic public can suffer

have been identified. Rosa zeroes in on at least one such ill:

the so-called “detemporalization of life.” This is defined as a

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phenomenon by which “life is no longer planned along a line that

stretches from the past into the future; instead, decisions are

taken from time to time according to situational and contextual

needs and desires.”26 In my understanding, contained in the

concept of detemporalization is the idea that late-modern

capitalist economic demands make “stability of character” and

“adherence to a time-resistant life plan” almost irrational

because they leave people at a disadvantage in an economic game

dominated by fast-moving, attachment-free corporate elites. This

concern is articulated by Scheuerman as well, but the concept of

detemporalization enables us to see how desynchronization –

varying rates of change in, and radical fragmentation of,

identities and life plans – concentrates initiative in the hands

of the very wealthy at the expense of the broader democratic

public.

Even if my economic interpretation of detemporalization is

incorrect, Rosa provides an analysis of how detemporalization can

be problematic for the very political consciousness of democratic

publics. Under conditions of social acceleration, “politics, too,

has become situationalist: it confines itself to reacting to

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pressures instead of developing progressive visions of its

own.”27 The democratic public has no vision for the future of

society because it has become accustomed to an accelerated

reality in which it is an ambitious enough goal to merely ‘deal.’

However, it is not clear that any democratic public has ever

actually had a comprehensive progressive vision. The idea that a

public needs to have a long-term plan, associational permanency

and resilient identity (or identities) in order to engage in

savvy politics is fraught with assumptions. If these assumptions

turn out not to hold good, then much that seems threatening about

social acceleration is declawed. Connolly does not buy into these

assumptions, which helps account for his relatively optimistic

outlook.

However, there remains at least one other reason to be

concerned about social acceleration’s implications for democratic

publics. In his own critical summary of the contemporary debate

about social acceleration, David McIvor raises some concerns

about the sanguinity of Connolly’s view, suggesting that Connolly

does not take seriously enough the threat of desynchronization.

McIvor appreciates the appeal of Connolly’s pluralistic vision

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but worries that desynchronization will actually damage the

ability of people to relate to one another in a healthy

pluralistic manner. In support of this objection he cites

research which indicates that economic success in the late-modern

era is negatively correlated with attachment to place and even

attachment to industry – this research also demonstrates that

“success within these parameters leaves individuals less capable of

accepting ambiguity and generously relating to others—the very

foundations of Connolly's normative model for agonistic

citizenship [emphasis his].”28 McIvor cautions that theorists

cannot just assume that social acceleration will spontaneously

generate cross-cultural negotiation – such negotiation itself has

to be strategized.

In a powerful passage worth quoting in full, McIvor insists

that plural-democratic negotiation often relies upon established

personal, geographic and professional attachments and takes

seriously anxieties about social acceleration’s effect on public

faith in political institutions:

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“Those who recoil from slow time may align themselves with a

tendency in late-modern capitalism that tears asunder the

possibilities of democratic negotiations born from

attachment to place, vocation, and familiar others. This

goes well beyond the decline of social capital and the

chilling specter of the lone bowler. It is by now well known

that rapid vocational mobility leads to lower rates of

political and civic participation. Yet these declines are

themselves part of a growing skepticism towards public

institutions as such, a trend that feeds demand for

exclusive and positional goods and further entrenches class-

based inequalities.”29

There is a great deal in this assessment that is vital. It

captures the full strength of Scheuerman and Rosa’s concern that

acceleration and desynchronization will result in the public’s

disillusionment with politics in general, and it crystallizes the

relationship between excessive income inequality and the

deterioration of the vitality of the democratic public.

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Using these criticisms of Connolly as a point of departure,

McIvor aligns himself with Sheldon Wolin in trying to reconcile

the promise and the threat of social acceleration. McIvor shares

with Wolin serious concerns about the destructive effects of

acceleration and desynchronization and advocates a rejuvenation

of slow-time practices in response to some of the ill effects of

acceleration on democratic publics. McIvor and Wolin have in

common an understanding of democracy as a concerted public

project threatened by the rationalization and routinization of

politics supposedly caused by social acceleration.30 Fundamental

democratic practices and values (e.g. equality, citizenship and

the rule of law) inspire not respect but contempt in a public

which has been trained to conceive of political problems as

demanding market solutions and so-called participatory citizens

as mere rational economic animals. This, “all in the interest of

a leaner, more efficient state capable of responding quickly to

an ever-changing global environment.”31

McIvor concludes his article with a synthesis of the

diverging responses of Wolin and Connolly to the

problem/opportunity of social acceleration. In the next section,

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I will address this synthesis and analyze whether it gives us

greater purchase on the implications of social acceleration. I

will then go on to more fully develop an argument that I believe

addresses the concept of desynchronization with greater nuance,

indicating both its pitfalls and its promise for democratic

publics.

Section IV: Evaluating the Threat of Desynchronization

In attempting to go some way toward resolving the

disagreement between Connolly and Wolin, McIvor draws on their

respective conceptions of robust citizenship in an accelerated

age: “bicameral citizenship” and the “multiple civic self.”

Connolly’s revised concept of bicameral citizenship involves a

balancing act between “agonistic respect” among cultures and

“critical responsiveness” to the desynchronizing effects of

social acceleration; Wolin’s concept of the multiple civic self

involves devolution of powers to multiple jurisdictional levels,

including highly local centers of power whose slow-time patterns

of participation, deliberation and negotiation will check the

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alienating effects of the impatient “megastate.”32 McIvor sees

these two ideas as eminently reconcilable.

McIvor’s synthesis is based on a thoroughgoing commitment to

the idea that certain slow-time political practices can and must

be nourished in order to sustain both public political engagement

and Connolly’s cherished “agonistic respect.” McIvor states that

these practices will be “seemingly anachronistic” but does not

specify what they are.33 Instead, he relies on the example of the

“Slow Food” movement as a illustration of the kind of

participation/activism that he deems essential to

counterbalancing the more destructive impulses of an accelerated

society.

This strategy suffers for its reliance on the concept of

slow time, which (we have seen) is an under-specified concept to

begin with. However, this is not to say that the conclusions that

McIvor draws from the Slow Food movement and from the concept of

slowness in general are nonsensical. He frames Slow Food as a

middle way between witless nostalgia for obsolete methods of food

production/distribution and mindless acceptance of the dominance

of modern accelerated agribusiness: “globalized communication and

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transportation networks… create openings and opportunities for

niche markets whereby certain modes of production can thrive

beyond what local practices of consumption could sustain. In this

way the fast sustains the slow, and the slow nurtures the fast.”

McIvor sees in this apparent mutuality between accelerated

processes and decelerated practices a model for how a new kind of

healthy democratic public could emerge.34

Although this is an inspiring outlook, there are problems.

First, the example of Slow Food is a limited one. It is worth

recalling that in Rosa’s paradigm, there are two other dimensions

of social acceleration beyond technological improvements to

transportation and communication. Slow Food’s benign co-optation

of accelerated processes seems limited to this first dimension.

It is not clear how accelerated rates of social change or an

accelerated pace of life can be co-opted to nurture slow-time

practices in such a way that both are sustained. Such a notion

does not even seem coherent.

Once we have recognized this wrinkle, it becomes harder to

see how McIvor’s account resolves the problem of

desynchronization, which is at the root of his own very serious

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criticisms of Connolly and whose problematic effects seem to be

mainly associated with Rosa’s latter two dimensions of social

acceleration – rates of social change and an accelerated pace of

life. After all, it is these two dimensions of social

acceleration that seem to be primarily responsible for what

McIvor called the “tendency in late-modern capitalism that tears

asunder the possibilities of democratic negotiations born from

attachment to place, vocation, and familiar others.” If it

remains unclear how Slow Food and its associated movements can

alleviate these problems, then McIvor is no closer to solving the

ultimate problem of social acceleration than he deems Connolly to

be. What, then, are we to think about the threat posed by

desynchronization to democratic publics?

I think that much of the tension between enthusiasts and

detractors of social acceleration on this issue can be clarified,

if not dissolved, if each side’s assumptions about democracy are

made explicit. I want to briefly attempt such a clarification,

then proceed to introduce a key distinction within the concept of

desynchronization that I believe does go a significant way toward

dissolving what substantive disagreements remain.

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It is important to acknowledge that even from the relatively

sanguine perspective of someone like Connolly, Scheuerman is not,

strictly speaking, wrong about the consequences of social

acceleration. His anxiety about social acceleration is a natural

result of his exclusive focus on a liberal institutionalist

concept of democracy. The two camps’ differing evaluations of

social acceleration are produced by differing understandings

about what democracy is. Connolly does not deny that acceleration

may force dramatic changes in extant democratic institutions – he

only denies that this is an unambiguously bad thing, and this

denial is due to his conception of democracy as a pluralist norm

that penetrates all levels of society. Scheuerman does join Dewey

in voicing concerns about how social acceleration may de-

politicize democratic publics, but ultimately these concerns are

based on presumptions about how the public needs to be in order

to ensure the smooth functioning of familiar liberal-democratic

institutions. The core anxiety in this liberal outlook is that

impermanence and atomization will be destructive to civil society

as understood by liberals. Political consciousness based on permanent

ties to place or vocation has conventionally been important for

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the livelihood of democratic publics in liberal democracies.

Conceptually, there does not seem to be any reason to suppose

that this particular form of civil society will necessarily be

vital for democratic publics that operate under more demanding

radical and/or pluralistic norms of democracy. This is what

allows space for Connolly’s enthusiasm.

What, then, accounts for the concerns of theorists such as

McIvor, who are not wedded to narrowly liberal-democratic norms

but still do not completely share Connolly’s positive stance

toward social acceleration? The answer, as I have emphasized

above, seems to have to do with desynchronization. The concept of

desynchronization itself, however, remains somewhat muddy. Once

some preliminary distinctions within the concept are revisited

and taken seriously, it starts to become clear that there are

actually two sides to the concept of desynchronization. In Rosa’s

account, the two are conflated and thus one takes on the

destructive appearance of the other. I want to call these two

senses economic desynchronization and cultural desynchronization.

The conflation of the two seems to be at the root of McIvor’s

ambivalence toward social acceleration. By articulating the

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distinction between cultural and economic desynchronization, I

will try to show specifically what about social acceleration is

problematic for democratic publics and what about it is

promising.

Cultural desynchronization is expressed in Rosa’s memorable

turn of phrase from above: the advent of a “fast-paced, atomized,

kaleidoscopic social amalgam in which highly volatile

associations and lifestyle milieus replace the mosaic of

ghettos.” I suspect that the fast-paced kaleidoscopic social

amalgam itself is no problem at all; indeed it is precisely what

Connolly is rightfully excited about. I do not think that the

highly volatile associations and lifestyle milieus are inherently

as destructive a force for the permanency and consciousness of

democratic publics as some theorists make them out to be. If

people move quickly between locations, associations, phases of

life and cultural contexts, this seems likely to make them more

open-minded and reflective rather than less.

Concerns about economic desynchronization, meanwhile, seem

to me the only motivation for ambivalence toward social

acceleration other than incipiently liberal slow-time nostalgia.

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Many of the most convincing arguments for why social acceleration

is destructive for democratic publics hinge on some form of the

idea that a helter-skelter world of ‘flexible capital’ forces

people to adjust to a pace of economic life dictated by wealthy

corporate elites. It is this sense of desynchronization – the

idea that social acceleration exacerbates inequality by encoding

yet more systemic advantages for a few wealthy elites into the

logic of late-modern society – that truly captures what it is

about social acceleration that has the potential to enervate the

democratic public. By celebrating vocational mobility while

further and further reducing socioeconomic mobility, the current

capitalist economy tends toward the alienation and fragmentation

of the public.

In the long passage from McIvor quoted above, he argues

that desynchronization, with its attendant consequences for

vocational mobility, saps the public’s faith in political

institutions, which then results in the entrenchment of economic

inequality. The crux of my distinction between economic and

cultural desynchronization is that the capitalistic drive toward

vocational mobility, with the destructive effects diagnosed by

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McIvor, is not identical to the other forms of mobility

(geographic, associational, etc.) associated with late modernity.

It is simultaneous with and related to those forms, but an

enthusiasm for the latter does not necessitate a grudging

acceptance of the former.

The point is that economic desynchronization is not an

intractable problem inseparable from the irreversible process of

social acceleration itself. A host of robust theories and real-

life instances of democratic participation and resistance testify

that democratic publics worldwide are not necessarily fated to be

permanently deactivated as global capital penetrates and uproots

every former site of democratic deliberation and coalition-

building. Additionally, this new distinction within the concept

of desynchronization suggests how social acceleration can in fact

be co-opted and utilized against its more anti-democratic

tendencies.

Cultural desynchronization, with its associations with

geographic mobility and breakdowns in traditional forms of

association, involves rapid and spontaneous contact among

different cultures. Of course there is no guarantee that

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individuals or groups that have similar interests will

automatically develop political solidarity across cultural

boundaries. Collisions between groups with different backgrounds

are as likely to produce new forms of ideological conflict as

they are to produce new mechanisms of political action. However,

this unpredictability is precisely what lends cultural

desynchronization its potential as a counter-hegemonic force.

This is because a society whose cultural and ideational

landscape grows ever more kaleidoscopic and rapidly-shifting

becomes impossible to dominate – and in order for economic

desynchronization to take effect, the narrative of flexible

capital needs to dominate. It is a prescriptive, universalistic

outlook which enshrines certain parochial values. These values

are largely of Western provenance and include productivity,

earnings-directed behavior, employee self-sacrifice for the sake

of employers, and neoliberal politics. The crucial fact is that,

despite their apparent ubiquity, these values are not immune to

the disruptive effects of cultural desynchronization. Like any

other values, they are situated against a particular cultural and

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historical background that cultural desynchronization renders

less and less intelligible.

It may seem overly optimistic to imagine that cultural

desynchronization could dislodge the ideology of flexible

capitalism. However, it is worthwhile to remember that have

always drawn on historical and social narratives as justification

for present conduct. The less sense that these narratives make to

the public, the greater the likelihood that alternative

narratives and alternative politics will emerge. I do not mean to

proclaim that spontaneous, genuinely democratic politics will be

a necessary result of social acceleration – but cultural

desynchronization makes it a possible one.

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1 Rosa, Hartmut. “Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronized High-Speed Society.” In High-Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power and Modernity, 77-112. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009.2 Ibid., 81-87.3 Ibid., 83.4 Ibid., 86.5 Ibid., 103. 6 Ibid., 103-104.7 Ibid., 104.8 Ibid., 77.9 Ibid., 97.10 McIvor, David. “The Politics of Speed: Connolly, Wolin, and the Prospects for Democratic Citizenship in an Accelerated Polity.” Polity 43, no. 1 (2011): 58–83. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23015106.11 Connolly, William. “Speed, Concentric Cultures, and Cosmopolitanism.” In High-Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power and Modernity, 261-285. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009.12 Ibid., 280.13 Ibid., 263.14 Ibid., 285.15 Dewey, John. “The Mania for Motion and Speed.” In High-Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power and Modernity, 61-63. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. p. 61.16 Ibid., 62.17 McIvor, section: “From Scheuerman to Shapiro: Liberal Anxiety to Agonistic Celebration.”18 Scheuerman, William. "Liberal Democracy and the Empire of Speed." Polity 34, no. 1(2001): 41-67. Accessed November 22, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3235508. 41-42.19 Ibid., 50.20 Ibid., 50-52.21 Ibid., 54.22 Ibid., 53.23 Ibid., 59-61.24 Ibid., 61.25 Ibid., 64.26 Rosa. “Social Acceleration.” 100. 27 Ibid., 102.28 McIvor, section: “Connolly: Speed, Democracy, and Difference.”29 Ibid., Connolly section.30 Ibid., section: “Wolin: Democratic Citizenship as a Fugitive Experience.”31 Ibid., Wolin section.32 Ibid., Wolin section.33 Ibid., Wolin section.34 Ibid., Wolin section.