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International PHD and Postdoctoral Workshop:

Living in a Culture of Immediacy: the Longing for Time in Contemporary Culture

Workshop theme:

Pubic debates about the erosion of national sovereignty and of cultural identity in the digital present are indicative of collective anxiety about our ability to plan the future and to maintain emotional and cultural attachment to the past. The high speed created by the Information Age appears to challenge not only established principles of democratic governance but also the very notion of a socially embedded temporality. J. Tomlinson speaks of a new “culture of immediacy” that strives to cancel the temporal gap between the present and the future by way of “scripts of instant delivery” (Tomlinson 2007). The new cult of immediacy in Tomlinson’s sense thus refers to a technologically enabled instantaneity.

While advocates of such immediacy emphasize the liberating effect of new digital temporalities, critics worry about the negative effects of a “runaway world” (Giddens) and a “timeless time” (M. Castells) that breaks down the social and biological rhythms of the life cycle. For H. U. Gumbrecht the digital era has undermined the experience of “real presence” by reducing our encounters with the world to the level of simulacra without any experiential imprints. For the sociologist H. Rosa (2005; 2012) high-speed modernity has unhinged the prospect of maintaining meaningful relations between selves, others and their human habitats. This tendency was already anticipated in Koselleck’s famous definition of modern temporality in terms of an inexorable gap between the realm of experience (the past) and the horizon of expectation (the future). Rosa argues that while in classical modernity the notion of a rational subjectivity still incorporated elements of a romantic self that bridged the Cartesian gap between reason and feeling, in late modernity human creativity has been entirely subjugated to the systemic requirements of accelerated capitalism. In his view human actors in the 21^st century are reduced to building merely temporary identities from flexible elements that fragment subjectivity.

Regardless of whether the effects of the digital age are discussed in terms of a shrinking or burgeoning present, the sociological and philosophical debates sketched above diagnose a perplexing overturning of the modern experiences of linear time. While the transformation of the public and private sphere in the digital era is undeniable, we must be mindful of the fact that temporality remains an embodied and socially embedded mode of experience that is not only shaped by technology but also by cultural and social factors. Cyberspace and the culture of immediacy constitute genuinely new arenas of social interaction, but these do not inevitably signal the end of social relations, the flattening of time, the erosion of presence or the end of memory.

Workshop programme:

10-12 hours: presentation and discussion of select theoretical texts

· Reinhart Koselleck, Concepts of Historical Time and Social Time’. In: The practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts (Standford UP 2002), pp. 115-130.

· John Tomlinson: The Culture of Speed: The Coming of Immediacy (Sage Publications, 2007), chapter 4: The Condition of Immediacy, pp. 72-94

· Jose van Dijck, The Culture of connectivity (Oxford UP, 2013) Chapter 1: Engineering Sociality in a Culture of Connectivity, pp. 3-23.

· Carmen Leccardi, New Temporal Perspectives in the High-Speed Society. In: Robert Hassan, Ronald E Purser: 24/7: Time and Temporality in the Network Society (Stanford 2007), pp. 25-37.

13.30-16.00 Student presentations with discussion (15 minutes) on aspects of time in their own work:

Sarah Kay (NYU)