Temporality and consumption in post-modern societies: ontologies, paradoxes

By Umberto Pagano and Alessia Mangiacasale

The individual floats in an almost alarming universe: every "sense", every "sign", owes its right to exist to an equivalence to the "value": the value of acceleration. This value, in some ways related to the gradual demolition of space-time barriers, characterizes the history of capitalism in the late modernity. We run toward a hypertrophy of the area of economics and consumption, enough to necessitate a reshaping of the ratio between social temporality and

consumption dynamics.

In this essay, through the isomorphic use of Physics' categories for a sociological discourse, we use the faster-than-light speed concept to explain the new social mechanisms of the contemporary consumer's (dis)satisfaction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Youcanprint
• Release date: Jan 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9788827803585

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(dis)satisfaction.

1. Rapidity: the needs outclass the thought

The trap that is capturing the modern spirit is the condition of hurry that makes the man feel like he lacks time. Johann Wolfgang Goethe was one of the first ones «to seize in the speeding up the important feature of the Neuzeit, understanding how the hurry, the rhythm of the acceleration of life and the anxiety of not being able to keep up with changing times, has a negative effect on living fully the fleeting moments of the present» (Fazio, 2005). Observing with critical eye the homo consumens it can be seen how the act of consumption gradually goes towards a loss of rationality and towards an unsustainable acceleration. We increasingly go through contradictory choices. The speed is the core value of post modernity. «What we have here is the new and different poetic mechanisms of the human experience dominated by risk and uncertainty: it is the time of Risikoleben, in which risk is definitely considered to be the ontological attribute of the modern-reflective society, it is no more a random prominency but its own substance» (Pagano, 2002, 97).

The experience of the lacking time, inevitably leads to an acceleration in each sector of our experience. Because of the information overload and the possibility overload¹, the individual is found in a condition of thought overload. The speed hinders the thought. There is no time to choose a direction, a path, all we have to do is keeping up with the pace, with a corresponding anomic configuration of the action. The accelerated society does nothing but generate a general human incapability of imagining the future, a sort of dystrophy of the thought, bringing to a «melancholy and sad view of these motionless runners (…), soldiers joined together, in order to realize the despicable fate of machineries raised and trained to produce their own consumption» (Fusaro, 2010, 17).

The Unsicherheit, that reigns undisputed, shows how «in the modern ambition to subdue, harness and colonize the future in order to replace chaos with order and contingency with a predictable (and so controllable) sequence of events» has disappeared (Bauman, 2000, 137).