Defuturization, Hyperpresentification, Depresentification at the Time of Accelerationby Umberto Pagano

Salvador Dal, La Desintegracin de la Persistencia de la Memoria (oil on canvas, 1954).

The history of modernity is a history of acceleration. This process has now led the contemporary world to a seemingly paradoxical situation, for which frenzy and stagnation, speed and paralysis, not only coexist, but are actually complementary.From the cultural point of view it tends to strengthen more and more a condition for which "the time savings has value in itself, regardless of the purpose and meaning of action[footnoteRef:2]. [2: Paolucci G. (2003), Il potere della velocit. Laccelerazione della vita sociale nella citt contemporanea; Introduzione a Paolucci G. (edited by), Cronofagia. La contrazione del tempo e dello spazio nellera della globalizzazione, pp. 13-31, Guerini e Associati, Milano (n.d.a. translation is mine).]

The acceleration is destiny of complex societies: the increasing specialization creates interdependent deadlines and time pressure on people, as already Georg Simmel argued in his studies of metropolitan life. The segmentation in sub-systems generates a proliferation of roles, time-expectations and time-pressures on individuals, expectations and pressures often alternative and antagonistic[footnoteRef:3]. [3: Cf. Fusaro D. (2010), Essere senza tempo. Accelerazione della storia e della vita, Bompiani, Milano, pp. 294-295.]

The action is increasingly hectic and pulverized: on the one hand the acceleration prevents the projecting, on the other the lack of future generates a present randomized and empty. The projectual reason - according to Richard Sennett - needs time and life-narration[footnoteRef:4] denied by contemporary social organization. And the loss of narrative-projectual perspective takes away time from everyday-life, lived as a suspension in the infinite void of a representation without a plot in which the identity of the subject is lost, as eternal return of nonsense. Here is how it happens the quotidianity without future degenerates into an insubstantial present. [4: Sennett R. (1998), The Corrosion of Character. The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, Norton & Company, New York-London; trad. it. L'uomo flessibile. Le conseguenze del nuovo capitalismo sulla vita personale, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1999.]

Speed is a harbinger of a pace-oriented rationality which somehow weakens our purposive rationality, and our capacity to project the existence. The life is more and more reduced to a seriality of automatic and imitative behaviours that remind the Heideggerian They (Das Man), the heart of inauthenticity and impersonality[footnoteRef:5]. [5: Cf. Heidegger M. (1927), Sein und Zeit, Halle an der Saale, Nieymeyer; trad. it. Essere e tempo, Longanesi, Milano, 2005, pp. 157-162.]

In this age of speed and acceleration there is a paradox: the dischrony between pace of Lebenswelt(lifeworld) and life-stories. More and more, in spite of the running world around us, our lives seem substantially stuck. Although the time of daily-life, the individual biographies are getting slower and slower: the milestones of individual existence (entry into the labor market, independence from the family of origin, living with a partner, having children...) are moved forward in the life-time. On this side, Italy appears to be an example. But that is only apparently a paradox, our lives are not blocked despite the speed of the context, but because of it. The biographical slowdown is simply "an internal element, a complementary principle, of the acceleration process"[footnoteRef:6]. [6: Rosa H. (2010), Riflessioni sul tempo come materia prima o del perch la modernit una storia di accelerazione, in AA.VV., As soon as possible. Tempo e accelerazione sociale, J.M. Bradburne (edited by), Edizioni Alias, Firenze, 2010.]

The triad speed, immediacy and simultaneity is now the key to the system; a system in which the technical-capitalistic domain imposed an acceleration that weakens the ability of projecting the future, without leaving even a chance to live fully and consciously the present. In fact, the pace of the system is such that the present, in fact, does not have time to "express itself", to take place, to be present. Heidegger calls space-of-time the unity of the three temporal dimensions (past, present, future). This space-of time has nothing to do with the conventional meaning of interval between events. Space-of-time is the authentic time, a condition where the being-present is not confined in the present but widespread in the mutual offering of dimensions. This mutual offering, this ontological integration, is the fourth dimension of time (Authentic time is quadri-dimensional)[footnoteRef:7]. But as Heidegger notes what we call fourth dimension of time is actually the very first dimension of time: the offering by which all is determined. [7: Heidegger M. (1969), Zur Sache des Denkens, Mohr, Tbingen, 1969; trad. it. Tempo e essere, Longanesi, Milano, 2007, p. 20.]

The time lack is proportional to obsession of measuring time and having it. Somehow not having time is necessarily related with not being time[footnoteRef:8]. The more we yearn time the more we experience the lack of time. Reducing the time to the sole dimension of how much time one has got, means shrinking it (and life) at dimension of now. [8: The Dasein (Being-there), understood in its extreme possibility of being, "is time itself and not in the time" [Cf. Heidegger M. (1924), Der Begriff der Zeit, Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tbingen, 1989; trad. it. Il concetto di tempo, Adelphi, Milano, 1998, p. 40]. It is evident how the fundamental item in relationship between man and time is not a matter of measuring, it is a matter of being.]

In this kind of "now", the "now" of the watches, there is not a hint of space-of-time, there is only the option for a mathematization of time through which everything is presentificated: the past is no-more-present, the future is not-yet-present. Thats it. Once the time is defined chronometrically, there is no more chance to achieve its original, true, meaning[footnoteRef:9]. [9: Cf. Ivi, p. 46.]

Everyday life is set up as a sort of continuous unprojected anticipation, suffocating, as constant breathless race towards something else, first of all and mostly as a dimension in which we are not. The omni-present is, in the words of Franco Crespi, the time of the non-presence[footnoteRef:10]. [10: Cf. Crespi F. (1983), Le risque du quotidien, in Cahiers Internationaux de Sociologie, Volume LXXIV, Trentime Anne, Janvier-Juin 1983, pp. 39-46, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, p. 43.]

Still a (apparent) paradox: through its eternalization and its omnipresence, the present ends up shrinking: hyper-presentification is de-presentification; this is the end of the present as a temporal "place" for choice and rational action[footnoteRef:11]. But this condition of the present is mutilating for the future as well: hyperpresentification generates non only depresentification but also, necessarily, defuturization and, more generally, detemporalization. Obviously, depresentification of present, as we intend it here, is not its disappearance but its emptying through fractal proliferation (using Baudrillard's lexicon); a proliferation contaminating everything and leading us towards the end of the presence. More than a depresentification, we properly experience the depresencification. [11: Cf. Leccardi C. (2003), La high-speed-society, i suoi rischi e i suoi antidoti, in Paolucci G. (edited by), Cronofagia. La contrazione del tempo e dello spazio nellera della globalizzazione, pp. 7591, Guerini e Associati, Milano.]

As noted by Pierre Bourdieu, the present is by now a precarious time in a radical sense, a dimension with no possibility, in which not only the forms of rational anticipation seem impracticable, but where the idea itself of grasping the world is vanishing. The loss of control has spread, in other words, from the future to the present. At the roots of this difficulty there is the fragmentation of present into a plurality of segments without mutual relation, mere detemporalized surfaces[footnoteRef:12]. Present disappears as procedural time dimension and human action is increasingly characterized by randomness and inertia[footnoteRef:13]. [12: Bourdieu P. (1998), La prcariet est aujourdhui partout, in Id., Contrefeux: propos pour servir la resistance contre linvasion no-liberale, pp. 95-101, Liber-Raisons dAgir, Paris (translation is mine).] [13: Ibidem.]

An interesting contribution to the analysis of relationship between defuturization and depresentification in complex societies was provided by Niklas Luhmann[footnoteRef:14]. He stated a distinction between "present future" (ie current perceptions of future) and "future presents" (ie the future in its effectual realization as present)[footnoteRef:15] - interprets the category of defuturization as flattening of time on the current dimension of present, that means a drastic reduction in the abundance of the present-futures. [14: Cf. Luhmann N. (1976), The Future Cannot Begin: Temporal Structures in Modern Society, in Social Research, Volume 43, Number 1 (Spring), pp. 130-152.] [15: Ibidem, p. 140.]

The depth of Luhmannian depresentification is related to the extent of defuturization understood as "closure" of the horizon of possibility of present-future, as reduction of current perspectives of future.We experience our future Luhmann writes as a generalized horizon of surplus possibilities that have to be reduced as we approach them. We can think of degrees of openness and call futurization increasing and defuturization decreasing the openness of a present future. Defuturization may lead to the limiting condition where the present future merges with the future presents and only one future is possible[footnoteRef:16]. [16: Ibidem, p. 141.]

The missing step, or at least what is not explicit in the Luhmanns reasoning, is that the "closing" of the present-future (i.e. the future perceived hic et nunc) is determined not by lack of possibilities but, on the contrary, by the enormity of their number, which creates uncertainty. The range of probabilities is such huge to leave the individual unable to pro-ject, to "see" and build its future, at the mercy of an immeasurable risk and a substantial immobility.As well as information overload entails a substantial lack of information, a proliferation of unmanageable possibilities generates a substantial absence of possibility. The more the number of possibilities and combinations of them, the complexity increases. It is this greater complexity that makes the time (which in itself is not) scarce; moreover, Luhmann himself had guessed that "in situations of high complexity time becomes scarce"[footnoteRef:17], and Schps echoes him: "The need for coordination and communication among the various social spheres that became autonomous requires more time the more a society has become complex. (...) Each activity is strictly dependent on the other, the complexity of each action program continuously generates problems that take time to be resolved"[footnoteRef:18]. [17: Luhmann N. (1971), Die Knappheit der Zeit und die Vordringlichkeit des Befristeten, in Politische Planung. Aufstze zur Soziologie von Politik und Verwaltung, pp. 143164, West-Deutscher Verlag, Opladen-Wiesbaden; trad. it. Il tempo scarso e il carattere vincolante della scadenza in Tabboni S. (edited by), Tempo e societ, FrancoAngeli, Milano, 1985, p. 140 (translation is mine).] [18: Schps M. (1980), Zeit und Gesellschaft, Ferdinand Enke Verlag, Stuttgart., pp. 155 and 158.]

The tragedy of the contemporary world is mostly in the opening of a huge gap between possibility and choice, or rather between proliferation of possibilities and narrowing of the possibility of choosing them, between hypertrophy of the possible and dystrophy of the probable (what is uncertainty, basically, if not this gap?).

3