Last Christmas, a column by Manuel Vicent entitled Time. The text, originally published by EL PAÍS in 2009, went viral during the holidays, perhaps because only when the routine is interrupted do we have a few seconds to address questions like those raised by the writer. “Time does not exist,” Vicent begins. “Time is only the things that happen to you, that's why it passes so quickly when nothing happens to you anymore.”
Time is a problem that has always occupied philosophers, physicists, mathematicians, theologians, filmmakers, farmers, basketball players, musicians and writers, that is, everyone, and its nature has been the subject of thousands of discussions. One of the most famous was the one that maintained the physical Albert Einstein and the philosopher Henri Bergson in 1922, with the entire press of the time in suspense. Finally, the more scientific vision of the first prevailed, but the feeling of being overwhelmed and the anguish because time is something that is always lacking continued to grow throughout the 20th century.
And our experience of time has less to do with physics or metaphysics than with the way we have organized our societies. Shakespeare put in Hamlet's mouth that famous phrase that is difficult to translate: “The time is out of joint” (“time is out of joint” or “the hours have lost their clock”, in a more poetic interpretation) and, since then , as we have accumulated technologies and contracts, things have only gotten worse.
Social acceleration: a phenomenon with two faces
Hartmut Rosa is one of the authors who has best described the relationship of contemporary societies with time. In tests like Alienation and acceleration (2012, Katz Editores) maintains that social acceleration is an obstacle to the realization of a good life and that we are “dominated and repressed” by a temporary regime that “could be disputed and transgressed” because, although it may seem that way, it is not “ a natural force beyond the reach of politics.” In short: it seems to us that the hours are losing thickness because they contain more and more activities and our rhythms are so frenetic that they even overwhelm our ability to perceive everything that happens to us in an orderly manner.
On the other hand, if the culture seems stuck in nostalgia (what has been called retromania) It is because the endless demand for new features, for example, from digital platforms, has exceeded the imaginative capacity of creators who, paradoxically, have had to look back so that the number of productions per year continues to grow: in the cinema, new installments of films that already existed, in music, covers of gigantic hits from the past.
Rosa uses the timely example of a disabling cold to illustrate how there are phenomena that, despite widespread acceleration, cannot be compressed in time, and insists that the causes of this acceleration are always social: technology facilitates it, but, Above all, it would be caused by competition between contemporary professionals (in modern societies the status of an individual depends on their performance) and by the desire to accumulate varied experiences within a finite life (now that religious belief in another life after death).
Andrea Genovart is the author of Preferably consume (Anagrama, 2023), a novel whose protagonist shares with all the young people of his generation the impression that, literally and metaphorically, he arrives late everywhere. The writer confirms that, more than ever, “we live time in a problematic way and with many contradictions.” “We complain that we don't have time,” explains Genovart, “that everything is fleeting and passes us by, but at the same time, we ourselves operate by a logic of productivity and we don't feel comfortable when ambiguity, suspension appear. , patience or waiting, which are aspects that resist accelerated temporality. We are not at ease with any of the forms of time.”
For his part, Miguel Ángel Hernández, professor of Art History and author of The gift of the nap (Anagrama, 2020), almost a pamphlet against haste and in favor of snoozing, remembers that “the reflection on the transience of time and evanescent time is purely baroque” and specifies that “what would be typical of modernity is not the awareness of the end, but an elimination of the time necessary to think about the end. The time of the assembly line does not allow pause to think, it does not allow metaphysical time and the pause is essential to get out of that repetitive, almost cinematic time, and to be able to experience what Byung Chul Han calls the aroma of time.
The fear of being left behind
Hartmut Rosa is forceful: social acceleration is a totalitarian and omnipresent regime that generates terror in those who suffer from it (that is, in all of us). Our lives are subject to countless deadlines, calendars, schedules and other temporal limits that function as a silent regulation whose failure to comply could leave us behind. And the fear of being left behind (unemployed, sick or unable to keep up) is what pushes us to accelerate and productively occupy every moment of what could have been free time.
In this context, stopping or giving yourself a break (just a vacation, for example, in the case of a self-employed person) is a class privilege. Genovart develops it like this: “The greatest privilege is to stop in a pleasant way. You may have done it because you are unemployed or because of a health problem, but you will experience that in a guilty way or with distrust. When you stop and live it pleasantly it is because you project security, because there is no possibility of loss thanks to a cushion or relationships that can always rescue you. There are times when life forces us to deviate and slow down and if we do not enjoy that privilege, we experience the lack of guarantees in a very distressing way.”
Hernández goes further and considers that boredom is also both a privilege “because it means having free time” and an achievement “because it means not using those times that we all finally have.” “Boredom is one of the conditions for thinking. We need it to find things without looking for them, but today no one is bored anymore. We occupy time at all times, making it productive for ourselves (because we carry out work) or for the system (because we consume entertainment or any other merchandise). There are no downtimes because we always have something on hand to take advantage of the ellipses.”
The problem is structural, and many experts warn that some individual deceleration strategies (which usually consist of “withdrawals” or a “disconnection” with a deadline), which they call “functional deceleration,” perpetuate in a camouflaged way the acceleration logic. What these patches actually propose is to regain strength to perform better as soon as possible.
Internet time and entertainment time
EP Thompson was one of the first authors to be concerned with temporal discipline in industrial societies and studied everything that “the clock demands of workers.” Today we add to these demands those imposed by entertainment culture: we viewers must constantly update ourselves.
Genovart believes that we do not have time to enjoy (or even to fully understand) the films we watch or the news we read: “There is an assimilation between what is seen and what is perceived that does not take into account that it takes time dilated to rescue knowledge of entertainment. Entertainment culture does not contemplate that you dialogue with what it proposes, it is designed so that you do not return to it. And, precisely, returning to a proposal is what allows you to think about it when you polish everything that you were not able to discover in a first meeting.”
Although the Internet, with its scroll infinite, seems to reinforce this dynamic of disposable content, it could also, with its apparent suspension and with the loss of references entailed by navigation from link to link or from conversation to conversation, be proposing new forms of temporality. “He scroll It is a vertical line through which you descend without being able to go back,” explains the writer. “What the Internet adds is a community feeling in the temporal experience. You must assimilate the content in the time it offers to belong to a community, and there is an obligation: just as you are going to check if your cat has food, you must check that you have not missed anything new. That possible loss is that of belonging to a community that shares, that laughs, that comments… You have to function at certain speeds to not be left alone in front of a crowd. The temporary and community experience are added, something that moves away from the clichéd idea that one chooses alone and isolated what he or she will see on a digital platform.”
“In social networks,” Hernández continues, “there is a pure present that continually falls behind. It is the timeline of X (formerly Twitter) that makes what happened yesterday (or three hours ago) discarded. The stories, states and photos have no sense of permanence or memory (I write or photograph it to leave a record), but rather of here and now, of sharing a now that will no longer have meaning later.” Of course, although social networks, as a link between what happens outside and what happens inside the Internet, remain in a perpetual and pressing present, the network as a whole would rather be, again according to the professor, “the world without time and without space that Saint Augustine imagined in The City of God. Everything at once everywhere, although your body is not the Augustinian one, but is sitting in a specific context that we do not see. But on the Internet everything is without schedules, also without dates: past and present intertwined, as in an archive and repository of everything.”
In Disrupted times (Akal, 2016) Mieke Bal studies the work of artists such as Stan Douglas or Jussi Niva, who questioned the contemporary uses of time by involving, almost kidnapping, the viewer. But beyond contemporary art, full of examples, or some fictions (from Alice in Wonderland until Tenet) our time management is barely discussed despite the fact that, again according to Rosa, “it causes real suffering in millions of people.” Miguel Ángel Hernández suggests looking back and taking advantage of close examples: “I remember my father sitting under the fig tree, looking at the horizon, every afternoon, after coming home from work. He was bored? Don't know. He inhabited time. He was with himself.” And, although time makes us suffer, we must remember that, beyond atoms, it is a social construction.
You can follow ICON on Facebook, x, instagram,or subscribe here to the Newsletter.
#greatest #privilege #stop #time #devours #social #networks #solve
