Social Acceleration in Late Modernity

Abstract

Social acceleration is not an accidental feature of contemporary societies but the organizing principle of a modernity that must continuously increase its rates of production, change, and innovation in order to sustain its own conditions of existence. This article examines whether qualitatively different temporalities can be produced within this structure, allowing for a relationship with time that is not reducible to the logic of optimization. The argument unfolds on three interconnected levels. First, acceleration is analyzed as a form of temporal domination that affects distinct social groups differently and colonizes the subjective experience of time in ways that go beyond mere scarcity. Second, the two most influential responses in contemporary theoretical debate, resonance theory and the theses of polar inertia and exhaustion, are examined with attention to both their specific contributions and the limitations they share. Third, religious and contemplative traditions are explored as systems of temporal organization that operate through mechanisms of decoupling from capitalist speed, and this dimension is articulated within the sociological perspective of plural temporalities. The article draws on the sociology of religion, Berger's concept of the sacred canopy, Taylor's account of secular modernity, Casanova's analysis of public religion, Hervieu-Leger's notion of religion as a chain of memory, and the phenomenology of religious experience developed by James and Otto, arguing that religious traditions do not persist in modernity despite acceleration but because they offer precisely what an accelerated society cannot produce from within its own logic: collective pause, structured silence, anxiety-free waiting, non-linear cycles, and transcendence as a horizon of meaning irreducible to utility. A critical account of religious formations compatible with or reinforcing acceleration, from prosperity theology to corporate mindfulness, is incorporated to qualify the argument and to specify the conditions under which temporal decoupling is genuine rather than compensatory.