Isabelle Fortier

How Hypermodern and Accelerated Society is Challenging the Cultural Sector

Modernity was founded on a political project—that of a rationalized world where progress would march hand in hand with the promise of self-determination for individuals. However, even if individuals find some freedom at the end of the grand narratives in reference to which meaning was given, some authors argue that we are witnessing the failure of modernity’s great emancipatory project to find, on the contrary, the fragmentation of the social world, even its liquefaction into individuality without ties or commitment, forcing individuals to find individual solutions to systemic problems (Bauman 2000). According to Dardot and Laval (2009), neoliberalism is at stake in this respect. It is to be understood as the new global “way of the world” that institutes competition as an imperative in the political, economic and cultural spectrums. This world and its logic transform individuals, their conduct and their subjectivity to produce a new subject, the entrepreneur of the self, surrounded by generalized competition mechanisms stemming from the “multiplication and intensification of market mechanisms, relations and behaviours” (Dardot and Laval 2009, 403). In such a context where responsibility for making one’s life a success is internalized by individuals to the detriment of social determinisms and impacts of collective action, human relations are marked by contractualization, which has replaced alliances that hinge more on reciprocity and kinship. This world’s ideal is the efficient individual, focused on productivity and performance not only at work, but in all aspects of life. This analysis is congruent with other explanations to the effect that enlisting individuals in the race is no longer just a matter of coercion or discipline, but involves the inner register of desire, the illusion of freedom and self-realization (Aubert and de Gaulejac 1991). Far from being out of modernity, we may now live in the context of hypermodernity, characterized by an accentuation of modernity’s features. A hypermodern society (Aubert 2003, 2004, 2010) is marked by a constant sense of urgency, instantaneity, and even confinement to the present. Hypermodern individuals are in a “tense flux”, prisoners of “real time”, detached from the past and future, no longer able to distinguish what’s essential to build meaning. Technologies, media and communications are producing ever greater speed and the dynamics of hyperconnection imply that instantaneousness and immediacy now characterize many of our social interactions. This has striking effects on our modes of consumption, production and innovation in the cultural sector as well as on our democratic institutions, and places of convergence of social changes.