Marginalized groups’ deceleration does not falsify acceleration as modernity’s defining trait

Evidence

A foundational problem of investigations aimed at diagnosing the times consists in the fact that for every observable trend there are countertrends that can be found and for all the evidence there is counterevidence. This difficulty is essentially responsible for the uncertainty that predominates regarding, for instance, the significance of diagnoses of globalization and individualization. Problems are posed in a similar way for a theory of acceleration that, in the first place, must be able to determine empirically the systematic importance of phenomena of deceleration in such a way that they appear as residual, as reactions to or side effects of primary processes of acceleration. In the second place, it has to answer the question of the systematic significance of quantities. If the main hypothesis of this work is that acceleration phenomena are fundamental to the cultural and structural development of modern society, it is not refuted by a demonstration that large groups within the population are excluded by the identified phenomena of acceleration because they are, say, unemployed, sick, without rights, or marginalized in some other way. Insofar as they are excluded from precisely those social spheres that are decisive for social development, their importance for the structural and cultural transformation of society remains limited regardless of their quantity. So an increasing number of forcefully decelerated “victims of modernization” does not falsify the thesis that acceleration is a defining characteristic of modernization. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 138

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Deceleration tendencies are secondary reactions to, not equals of, acceleration in modernization. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 125