Temporal structures reveal modernity’s underlying principles as if under a magnifying glass.

Evidence

Consequently, if temporal patterns and perspectives represent the paradigmatic site for the mediation of structure and culture, of systemic and actor perspectives, and therefore also of systemic necessities and normative expectations, this immediately suggests that they disclose a privileged point of entry for the social-scientific analysis of the entire cultural and structural formation of an age. Whoever wants to investigate an entire sociocultural arrangement of systemic necessities and cultural orientations—in other words, whoever attempts to get to the bottom of, say, the nature of that meaningful and structural whole that we call modernity with regard to its statics and its dynamics, its inherent tensions and developmental tendencies—would do well to be guided in their work by the specificity, logic, and development of just those structures of time we are exploring here, because the principles and tendencies that underlie modernity are revealed in them as in a magnifying glass. … If it has become the conspicuous problem of the diagnostic disciplines that they can no longer find a common focus and therefore take up, in a seemingly arbitrary fashion, particular structural and cultural phenomena and make them each respectively into an anchor of diagnoses of society as a whole—something that has led to the bewildering proliferation of definitions of contemporary society, e.g., as a work, leisure, experience, risk, information, and multi-option society as well as all the post societies (postconventional, postindustrial, posthistoire, postmodern, postcapitalist, posttraditional)—then the proposed, as it were, “double” diagnosis of the times indicates a promising way out of this dilemma. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 103

Categorization

• XREF: Methodological echo of diagnosing a whole society through one privileged lens — parallels how Foucault reads power through discipline or how the Frankfurt School read society through a single cultural phenomenon. — connects to: Modernity’s own self-observation forces time structures to become sociology’s central object — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 123; Modernity’s temporalization of time restructures every social form and concept. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 199; Modernization fundamentally transforms time structures and horizons themselves, not just events within time. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 80