„Ich will sagen, dass beschleunigte Prozesse dort problematisch werden, wo sie unser Weltverhältnis so verändern, dass dieses zu Entfremdung führt.“ – Hartmut Rosa in Deutschlandradio Kultur, 2016

Anyone who often feels rushed or recognises the sensation of burning out from within will not find quick solutions in the reflections of the sociologist Hartmut Rosa, but they will find a language to describe precisely this experience – and inspiration to rethink their own relationship with time, the world and themselves. In the third semester of my degree, I came across his writings through a sociology lecture. In his essay ‘Acceleration and Alienation – A Draft of a Critical Theory of Late Modern Temporality’ (2005), the sociologist explores the question of why so many people today feel stressed, controlled by external forces or emotionally empty, even though, objectively speaking, Western societies have never had it so good. Rather than idealistically striving for the ‘good life’, he frames his central question differently: ‘Why, in fact, do we not have a good life?’

Rosa’s starting point is simple: modern society is not only fast-paced; it is permeated by a specific ‘regime of time’, an invisible rhythm that structures and accelerates our days. He begins by assuming that, under current conditions, our personal and social lives are in urgent need of reform. Whether it be deadlines, to-do lists or the pressure to be constantly available – whilst these things may now seem everyday and familiar to us, for Rosa they are an expression of a comprehensive social system that is scarcely consciously perceived or questioned any more. According to Rosa, social acceleration, ‘in its current, totalitarian form, leads to a serious and empirically observable form of social alienation, which can be understood as the greatest obstacles standing in the way of realising a modern conception of the good life in late-modern societies.’

In his essay, Rosa distinguishes between three central forms of social acceleration: technical acceleration (e.g. through rapid means of communication or transport systems), the acceleration of social change (such as through frequent job changes or shifting forms of relationships) and the acceleration of the pace of life – the feeling of never having enough time, which becomes the constant background noise of everyday life. These three forms do not exist in isolation but reinforce one another – Rosa describes this process as the ‘cycle of acceleration’. This cycle is further driven by two major forces: global competition (economic) and the cultural promise that speed ultimately brings happiness and security.

In reality, however, the latter is all too often not fulfilled – in his analysis, Rosa draws on the classic and central concept of alienation from social theory to describe how the aforementioned cycle of acceleration ultimately has a negative impact on people. The term originally comes from Karl Marx, who defined it in the ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ (1844) as follows: ‘The alienation of the worker from his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, acquires an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently of him, and that it becomes an autonomous power in relation to the worker.’ In doing so, Marx was primarily describing the relationship between labour and the worker under capitalism. Rosa takes up this idea and expands upon it. For him, alienation signifies a loss of fulfilling relationships with the world. People feel alienated from their own activities, from objects, from time and from themselves.

As a counter-concept, he develops the idea of resonance: the feeling of being connected to the world, of being in genuine, reciprocal exchange with it. According to him, resonance is not to be confused with harmony in the sense of wellness or esotericism, but rather means “that something touches and changes me, and I respond and react to it”. In a fast-paced world, however, resonance is becoming increasingly rare, according to the sociologist – and he sees this as the core problem standing in the way of a good life. The concept of resonance is therefore not intended as a simple recipe for a better life, but rather describes what matters when people wish to cultivate relationships that not only function but also have meaning. It is about being open to being moved, about openness and the capacity to respond.

One of Rosa’s most provocative theses is the aforementioned comparison of social acceleration with totalitarian rule. This does not refer to political dictatorship, but to a systemic form of external control that intervenes so deeply in life that it eludes democratic control. The described compulsion to accelerate would therefore not be an individual desire, but rather structurally embedded. Rosa ventures to claim that nowhere outside Western modernity are everyday practices so consistently structured by a ‘rhetoric of obligation’. This, he argues, is a logical consequence of the competition-driven game of acceleration, which traps people in an ever-faster-spinning hamster wheel and leads to alienation.

Rosa describes this process as follows: ‘Acceleration initially exerts its pressure on individuals in such a way that they live in constant fear of no longer being able, on the various branches of life (which are becoming ever more numerous as differentiation increases), to keep up to date and thus retain their place; that they will fall behind, be unable to keep up or be ‘left behind’, and thus be excluded from the hamster wheel because they are too slow or need a break.’ And she continues: ‘Those affected by illness or unemployment, for example, fear that they will no longer be able to catch up with the race, that they have already fallen behind. If those who enter the race from privileged positions and with ample resources already have to run as fast as they possibly can and invest all their available energy just to remain competitive, then it makes absolutely no sense for those who start the race already lagging significantly behind to even attempt to compete. (…) As a rule, this regime of compulsion is not perceived as a social construct. Time is still experienced as a mere fact of nature, and people blame themselves for their poor time management when they feel that time is running out.”

The essay ‘Acceleration and Alienation’ has been widely discussed in the social sciences. Rosa’s approach is regarded as one of the most original contributions to the diagnosis of the contemporary world. Among those who voiced criticism was Thomas Gross in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (2013). According to him, Rosa remains too vague in his theory and fails to develop his model consistently. It can be argued, however, that this was never the aim of this essay – Rosa himself describes it as a ‘draft’, which he later developed systematically in Resonance: A Sociology of World Relations (2016).