Hartmut Rosa

Biography

Hartmut Rosa is Professor of Sociology and Social Theory at Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany, and Director of the Max-Weber-Kolleg at the University of Erfurt. He is also Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 1997, he received his doctorate in political science from Berlin’s Humboldt University. He subsequently held several professorships at the Universities of Mannheim, Jena, Augsburg and Essen, and was Vice-Chairman and Secretary General of the COCTA (Commitee of Conceptual and Terminological Analysis) Research Committee 35 of the ISA (International Sociological Association) and one of the directors of the annual International Conference on Philosophy, Research and the Social Sciences in Prague. In 2016, he was a visiting professor at FMSH / EHESS (Fondation Maison des sciences de l’Homme / École des hautes études en sciences sociales) in Paris. He is editor-in-chief of the international journal Time and Society. His publications focus on social acceleration, the resonance and temporal structures of modernity, and the political theory of communitarianism.

Conference: Resonance and alienation. Two ways of experiencing time?

Modern societies are characterized by the fact that they can only function in a dynamic stabilization mode, i.e., they are obliged to constantly grow, accelerate and innovate to maintain their structure and institutional status quo. This mode of stabilization is linked to a particular way of using and experiencing time: it becomes the rarest commodity of all. However, this way of conceptualizing and using time brings with it the risk of a profound form of alienation: social actors lack the capacity to truly “take hold” of time and usefully link their lives to the past and the future. In short, in the age of acceleration, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to link the time of our daily lives to the time of our biographical lives and to the time of the historical epoch in which we live. On the other hand, if we operate in a mode of resonance, which has also become a central modern aspiration, the experience of time changes fundamentally in character: resonance is a mode of relationship to the world of things, people, self and life as a totality in which a transformative appropriation of time is possible. Its characteristic feature is a living “link” between past, present and future, an opening of the temporal horizon and an immersion in time that contrasts sharply with the mercantile stance. We might well ask, then, whether alienation and resonance have become two alternative ways of relating to and perceiving time?