Time at a Standstill

Abstract

From an experiential point of view, acceleration is a space-shrinking and a time-stressing phenomenon. Assuming that this phenomenon has reached a decisive pervasiveness in late modernity, so that it has become determinative of social relations in general, a question about its impact on the structure of experience and of the subject of experience bears a double signification: on the one hand, it concerns temporality, i.e., the structure of the experience of time, and, on the other hand, it concerns historicity, that is, the structure of the experience of historical time. I suppose that the development of this question requires examining the structure of the experience of the present, given that acceleration may be considered at first sight as an intensive experience of the present. But, then, an examination of the structure of the experience of the present is deeply rooted in the structure of the present itself. So, my argument relates three concepts: experience, present, and acceleration, the latter according to the double effect in which this phenomenon appears (space-shrinking and time-stressing).