Culture in the Age of Acceleration, Hypermodernity, and Globalized Temporalities

ABSTRACT

This article seeks to provide background reflections on key coordinates of leisure and culture in the context of dynamics pertaining to the contemporary global time regime. Time and culture are intertwined in many ways, but of specific interest here is the question of the articulation between leisure time, markets, and culture. This article is separated into three main areas of enquiry. First, I explore aspects of the contemporary time regime. I assess the rise of abstract time first in its clock-time form, and its later supplementation by network time forms. Second, I examine the exacerbated dominance of market time brought about and reproduced by key neoliberal processes which have led to a restructuring of the work time/leisure time binary that held for most of the modern period. Third, I critically engage with some aspects of the theory of social acceleration and examine how it can shed light on, and in turn be modified by, the general hypothesis of the commodification of leisure time. In conclusion, I present three ways in which the cultural sector in general is impacted by market pressures, late capitalist temporalities, and the reconfigurations of access to culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Culture
• hypermodernity
• temporality

Notes

1. To speak of a separate “economic” time in precapitalist society can be misleading in the sense of having us think of a time strictly dedicated to production or market activity. However, economic relations before the advent of capitalism were never completely emptied from social determinants, and it is only with the advent of modern capitalism that we see a distinctly economic sphere, formally disembedded from other social relations, and thoroughly tied to the market (Wood 1995). For sake of clarity, I here use “economic” in precapitalist societies to refer to activities meant at the (re)production of one's life necessities.

2. The separation of the day into eight hours of work, eight hours of leisure, and eight hours of sleep. This is meant as an ideal type, as the exact proportions of this separation vary across place and time.