Leo Singer “Time out of Joint”

Singer, Leo (2022, March 8). Time out of Joint: Capitalism takes a dysrhythmic toll on nature’s clocks and human lives [Online]. The Sociological Review Magazine. https://doi.org/10.51428/tsr.imat5896

There are two opposing concepts of desynchronisation. According to sociologist Michael Young, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas around rhythm as an eternal return prompted attempts by his followers to appropriate and defend the cyclical, natural rhythms, while emancipating or fleeing from the linear, mechanical ordering of time. On the other hand, Karl Marx saw capitalist production and nature as separate, but brought together and mediated by the labour process. Marx’s solution was a society of associated producers who would govern our rhythmic metabolism with nature in a rational way.

The concept of dysrhythmia (from the Greek, meaning bad or difficult rhythm) was proposed in 2020 by geographers Elspeth Oppermann, Gordon Walker and Matt Brearley to describe potentially disruptive rhythms acting within larger, polyrhythmic wholes. Dysrhythmia expresses latency and duration, which sets it apart from Lefebvre’s concept of arrhythmia, a sudden state of rhythmic break-up.

Automata never sleep, but workers do. The dysrhythmic tension inherent in this polyrhythmia (which today manifests itself in just-in-time production and the gig economy) arises out of the biological aspects of labour power. While the algorithmic chain of command carries capital’s tendency to push gig workers from the day over into the night and back again, the biological limits and responses of human bodies are well known. According to researchers such as Nor Amira Syahira Mohd Azmi, desynchronisation of our circadian rhythm can lead to a range of health problems, such as cancers, metabolic, cardio-vascular, psychological and inflammatory diseases.

It is the idea that since the birth of industrial capitalism, an invariant feature of modernity has been the contradictory coexistence of two major master clocks (or Zeitgebers, as they are known in chronobiology) – the Earth’s cycle around its axis on the one hand and the rhythm of the movement of capital on the other.

Hartmut Rosa “Social Acceleration”

Rosa, Hartmut 2003. Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronized High-Speed Society. Constellations 10(1): 3–33.

My claim here is that we cannot adequately understand the nature and character of modernity and the logic of its structural and cultural development unless we add the temporal perspective to our analysis. (4)

no analysis of social acceleration is complete unless it takes into account those strange corresponding phenomena of social deceleration and slowdown that have become particularly visible towards the turn of the twenty-first century, with the rise of theories of ‘hyper-acceleration,’ ‘turbo-capitalism,’ and the ‘digital speed-revolution’ on the one hand, and conceptions of ‘polar inertia,’ the ‘end of history,’ the ‘closing of the future,’ and the sclerotic inescapability of the ‘iron cage’ on the other. (5)

1) technological acceleration

The first, most obvious, and most measurable form of acceleration is the speeding up of intentional, goal-directed processes of transport, communication, and production that can be defined as technological acceleration. (6)

2) acceleration of social change

Whereas phenomena of the first category can be described as acceleration processes within society, the phenomena of this second category could be classified as accelerations of society itself. When novelists, scientists, and journalists since the eighteenth century have observed the dynamization of Western culture, society, or history – and sometimes of time itself14 – they were not so much concerned with the spectacular technological advancements as with the (often simultaneous) accelerated processes of social change that rendered social constellations and structures as well as patterns of action and orientation unstable and ephemeral. The underlying idea is that rates of change themselves are changing. (7)

German philosopher Hermann Lübbe claims that Western societies experience what he calls the “contraction of the present” (Gegenwartsschrumpfung) as a consequence of the accelerating rates of cultural and social innovation.17 His measure is as simple as it is instructive: for Lübbe, the past is defined as that which no longer holds/is no longer valid while the future denotes that which does not yet hold/is not yet valid. The present, then, is the time-span for which (to use an idea developed by Reinhart Koselleck) the horizons of experience and expectation coincide. (7)

In other words, social acceleration is defined by an increase in the decay-rates of the reliability of experiences and expectations and by the contraction of the time-spans definable as the ‘present.’ (7)

For the moment I want to suggest that change in these two realms – family and work – has accelerated from an inter-generational pace in early-modern society to a generational pace in ‘classical modernity’ to an intra-generational pace in late modernity. (8)

3) acceleration of the pace of life

But first we must be able to measure the pace of life. 23 In my view, attempts to do so could follow a ‘subjective’ or an ‘objective’ approach, with the most promising route probably being a combination of the two. On the ‘subjective’ side, an acceleration of the speed of life (as against the speed of life itself) is
likely to have effects on individuals’ experience of time: it will cause people to consider time as scarce, to feel hurried and under time pressure and stress. (9)

On the ‘objective’ side, an acceleration of the ‘speed of life’ can be measured in two ways. First, it should lead to a measurable contraction of the time spent on definable episodes or ‘units’ of action like eating, sleeping, going for a walk, playing, talking to one’s family, etc., since ‘acceleration’ implies that we do more things in less time. (9)

The second way to ‘objectively’ explore the acceleration of the pace of life consists in measuring the social tendency to ‘compress’ actions and experiences, i.e., to do and experience more within a given period of time by reducing the pauses and intervals and/or by doing more things simultaneously, like cooking, watching TV, and making a phone call at the same time. (9-10)

Hence, we should apply the term ‘acceleration society’ to a society if, and only if, technological acceleration and the growing scarcity of time (i.e., an acceleration of the ‘pace of life’) occur simultaneously, i.e., if growth rates outgrow acceleration rates. (10)

in a society with accelerated rates of social change in all spheres of life, individuals always feel that they stand on ‘slippery slopes’: taking a prolonged break means becoming old-fashioned, out-dated,  anachronistic in one’s experience and knowledge, in one’s equipment and clothing as well as in one’s orientations and even in one’s language. (11)

the external ‘key-accelerators’ behind the three dimensions of social acceleration:

1) the economic motor

the functioning of the capitalist system rests on the accelerating circulation of goods and capital in a growth-oriented society. Thus the logic of capitalism connects growth with acceleration in the need to increase production (growth) as well productivity (which can be defined in terms of time as output per unit time). (12)

2) the cultural motor

The idea of the fulfilled life no longer supposes a ‘higher life’ waiting for us after death, but rather consists in realizing as many options as possible from the vast possibilities the world has to offer. To taste life in all its heights and depths and in its full complexity becomes a central aspiration of modern man. (13)

Now, on this cultural logic, if we keep increasing the speed of life, we could eventually live a multiplicity of lives within a single lifetime by taking up all the options that would define them. Acceleration serves as a strategy to erase the difference between the time of the world and the time of our life. The eudaimonistic promise of modern acceleration thus appears to be a functional equivalent to religious ideas of eternity or ‘eternal life,’and the acceleration of ‘the pace of life’ represents the modern answer to the problem of finitude and death. (13)

our share of the world, the proportion of realized world options to potentially realizable ones, decreases (contrary to the original promise of acceleration) no matter how much we increase the ‘pace of life.’ And this is the cultural explanation for the paradoxical phenomenon of simultaneous technological acceleration and increasing time scarcity. (14)

3) the structural motor

in the context of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, social change is accelerated by modern society’s basic structural principle of functional differentiation. In a society that is not primarily segregated in hierarchical classes but rather structured along the lines of functional ‘systems,’ like politics, science, art, the economy, law, etc., complexity increases immensely. As a result, the future opens up to almost unlimited contingency and society experiences time in the form of perpetual change and acceleration.36 Now, increasing complexity and contingency create an abundance of options and possibilities. Since these cannot be handled simultaneously, Luhmann argues that complexity in modern societies is ‘temporalized’ in order to enable the sequential processing of a higher number of options and relations than could be processed simultaneously. The ensuing needs for synchronization and selection of increasing (future) options can in turn only be satisfied if the processing itself is accelerated. Thus, we find a surprising structural duplication or ‘reflection’ of the cultural dilemma outlined in the preceding paragraph (or vice versa). (14)

before we can adequately determine the sense in which we can speak of the acceleration of Western societies, we need to understand the status, function, and structure of those phenomena that escape dynamization or even represent forms of slow-down and deceleration. Analytically, we can distinguish five different forms of deceleration and inertia, which cut across the spheres of acceleration identified so far: (15)

1. First, there are natural and anthropological speed limits. Some things cannot be accelerated in principle. Among these are most physical processes, like the speed of perception and processing in our brains and bodies, or the time it takes for most natural resources to reproduce. (15)
2. Furthermore, there are territorial as well as social and cultural ‘niches’ that have not yet been touched by the dynamics of modernization and acceleration. They have simply been (totally or partially) exempted from acceleration processes, although they are accessible to them in principle. (15)
3. There are also phenomena of slow-down as an unintended consequence of acceleration and dynamization. This frequently entails dysfunctional and pathological forms of deceleration; the best known version of the former is the traffic jam, whereas recent scientific findings identify the latter in some forms of psycho-pathological depression that are understood as individual (deceleratory) reactions to overstretched pressures of acceleration. (15)
4. Contrary to the unintentional forms of slow-down there are intentional forms of (social) deceleration which include ideological movements against modern acceleration and its effects. (15)
   1. On the one hand, there are limited or temporary forms of deceleration which aim at preserving the capacity to function and further accelerate within acceleratory systems. On the individual level, we find such accelerating forms of deceleration where people take ‘time out’ in monasteries or take part in yoga courses which promise ‘a rest from the race’ – for the purpose of allowing a more successful participation in acceleratory social systems afterwards. Similarly, there is a huge self-help literature suggesting a deliberate slow-down in work or learning in order to increase the volume of overall work or learning in a given period of time, or recommending pauses in order to increase energy and creativity.40 On the social and political level, too, ‘moratoria’ are sometimes suggested to solve technological, political, legal, environmental, or social obstacles that stand in the way of modernization. (15-16)
   1. On the other hand, there are diverse, often fundamentalist, anti-modernist social movements for (radical) deceleration. This is hardly surprising given the fact that acceleration appears to be one of the fundamental principles of modernity. (16)
5. Finally, we find the perception that in late-modern society, despite widespread acceleration and flexibilization which create the appearance of total contingency, hyper-optionality, and unlimited openness, ‘real’ change is in fact no longer possible […] (16)

My claim rests on the supposition that none of these forms of deceleration amounts to a genuine and structurally equal counter-trend to modern acceleration. The phenomena listed under categories (1) and (2) merely denote the (retreating) limits of social acceleration; they are not counter-powers at all. The decelerations of category (3) are effects of acceleration and as such derivative of, and secondary to, it. Category (4a) identifies phenomena which, on closer examination, turn out to be either elements of acceleration processes or enabling conditions of (further) acceleration. The intentional resistance to the speeding up of life and the ideology of deceleration (4b) is clearly a reaction to pressures of and for acceleration; as was pointed out above, all of the main tendencies of modernity have met considerable resistance, but so far all forms of resistance have turned out to be rather short-lived and unsuccessful.
Thus, the only form of deceleration that seems not to be derivative or residual is category (5). This dimension seems to be an inherent, complementary feature of modern acceleration itself; it is the paradoxical flipside characteristic of all the defining forces of modernity (individualization, differentiation, rationalization, domestication, and acceleration). (17)

The acceleration of rates of social change to an intra– rather than intergenerational pace is mirrored in a language which avoids identity predicates and uses temporary markers instead. People speak of working (for the time being) as a baker rather than being a baker, living with Mary rather than being Mary’s husband, going to the Methodist Church rather than being a Methodist, voting Republican rather than being a Republican, and so on. This use of language indicates that the awareness of contingency has increased even where the actual rates of change have not yet done so: things (jobs, spouses, religious and political commitments, etc.) could be otherwise, they could change at any time because of either my own or other people’s decisions. (19)

‘Classical’ modern identities were consequently long-term projects supposed to evolve like a Bildungsroman. In late modernity, however, this pattern no longer holds: neither work- nor family-life can be foreseen or planned for a lifetime. (19)

Instead, people develop a new perspective that has been oddly termed the “temporalization of time”: time-spans and the sequence and duration of activities or commitments are no longer planned ahead but left to evolve.50 Such a ‘temporalization of time,’ however, is equivalent to the de-temporalization of life: life is no longer planned along a line that stretches from the past into the future; instead, decisions are taken from ‘time to time’ according to situational and contextual needs and desires. (19)

politics, too, has become ‘situationalist’: it confines itself to reacting to pressures instead of developing progressive visions of its own. Very often, political decisions no longer aspire to actively steer (acceleratory) social developments, but are defensive and deceleratory. It seems that just as it has become virtually impossible to individually plan one’s life in the sense of a ‘life-project,’ it has become politically impossible to plan and shape society over time; the time of political projects, it seems, is also over. (21-22)

For Armin Nassehi, a German author in the systems theoretic tradition, this loss of political autonomy (corresponding to the loss of individual autonomy discussed above) is an inevitable consequence of the temporal structures of modern society: “The present . . . loses its capacity for planning and shaping. As the present of action it is always oriented towards the future, but it cannot shape this future because of the dynamics, risks, and vast amount of simultaneity within the present, which it cannot control at all. Early modernity promised the capacity to shape and control world and time and to initiate and historically legitimate future progress. But in late modernity, time itself has come to destroy the potential for any form of social or substantial control, influence, or steering.” (22)

politics not only becomes ‘situationalist’ and loses its sense of direction; it also tends to shift the decision-making process towards other, faster arenas: the legal system (juridification), or the economy and individual responsibility (privatization and deregulation). Thus, precisely at a point in history where the human power to steer and control its own fate seems to reach an unprecedented technological zenith (foremost, of course, in the shape of genetic engineering), society’s political capacity to do so reaches its nadir. (24)

Hartmut Rosa “The Uncontrollability of the World”

Rosa, Hartmut 2020. The Uncontrollability of the World. Wagner, James C. (trans.). Cambridge; Medford, MA: Polity.

The driving cultural force of that form of life we call “ modern” is the idea， the hope and desire， that we can make the world controllable. Yet it is only in encountering the uncontrollable that we really experience the world* Only then do we feel touched, moved, alive. A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world.  (2)

Our lives unfold as the interplay between what we can control and that which remains outside our control, yet “concerns us” in some way. Life happens, as it were, on the borderline. (2)

My hypothesis is this: because we, as late modern human beings, aim to make the world controllable at every level—individual, cultural, institutional, and structural—we invariably encounter the world as a “point of aggressions” or as a series of points of aggression, in other words as a series of objects that we have to know, attain, conquer, master, or exploit. And precisely because of this, “life, the experience of feeling alive and of truly encountering the world—that which makes resonance possible—always seems to elude us. This in turn leads to anxiety, frustration, anger, and even despair, which then manifest themselves, among other things, in acts of impotent political aggression. (4)

From this original impression that “ something is present,” I have sought to develop a sociology of our relationship to the world that assumes that subject and world are not the precondition, but the result of our relatedness to this presence. (5)

My theory is that the normalization and naturalization of our aggressive relationship to the world is the result of a social formation, three centuries in the making, that is based on the structural principle of dynamic stabilization and on the cultural principle of relentlessly expanding humanity’s reach. (8)

A modern society, as I define it, is one that can stabilize itself only dynamically, in other words one that requires constant economic growth, technological acceleration, and cultural innovation in order to maintain its institutional status quo. (9)

Growth, acceleration, and innovation no longer seem to assure us that life will always get better; they have come instead to be seen as an apocalyptic, claustrophobic menace. If we fail to be better, faster, more creative, more efficient, and so on, we will lose our jobs, businesses will close, tax revenues will decline while expenditures increase, there will be budget crises, we won’t be able to maintain our healthcare system, our pension levels, and our cultural institutions, the scope of potential political action will grow even narrower, and in the end the entire political system will appear to have lost its legitimacy. (9)

[…] the categorical imperative of late modernity—Always act in such a way that your share of the world is increased—has become the dominant principle behind our decision-making in all areas of life and across all ages, from toddlers to the elderly. (11)

The idea, or rather the conviction correlated with these processes—that life comes down to bringing the world within reach—is inscribed in our bodies and in our psychological and emotional dispositions. (12-13)

four dimensions of controllability

1. Making the world controllable means, first, making it visible, that is, making it knowable, expanding our knowledge of what is there.
2. Making the world controllable means, furthermore, making it physically reachable or accessible.
3. Inextricably linked with this is the third dimension of bringing the world under control, namely by making it manageable. The history of colonialism offers an illustrative, tangible example of how the production of knowledge (e.g., in the form of cartography) often goes hand in hand with the expansion of technological and political-military control.
4. making it [the world] useful, pressing it into service. Here the point is not simply to bring the world under our control, but to make it into an instrument for our own purposes. (15-17)

my theory is that this institutionally enforced program, this cultural promise of making the world controllable， not only does not “ work” but in fact becomes distorted into its exact opposite. The scientifically, technologically, economically, and politically controllable world mysteriously seems to elude us or to close itself off from us. It withdraws from xis, becoming mute and unreadable. Even more, it proves to be threatened and threatening in equal measure, and thus ultimately constitutively uncontrollable. The fact that, in late modern culture, we encounter the c<worldw predominantly in terms of the environment or as the “global” of politicaleconomic globalization is a manifest symptom of this development. (19)

My hypothesis is that the fundamental fear of modernity is fear of the world’s falling mute, of which burnout and depression are only a timely (and perhaps heightened) expression. (28)

we can note that the individual and institutional efforts of modernity to make the world controllable, in all four dimensions and with an ever wider reach, have yielded paradoxical side effects, which can be described (in the language of Marx) as alienation as opposed to adaptive transformation, as reification rather than revivification (Adorno and Lukacs), as loss of world rather than gaining world (Arendt), as the world’s becoming unreadable as opposed to comprehensible (Blumenberg), and as disenchantment as opposed to ensoulment (Weber). (28)

The basic mode of vibrant human existence consists not in exerting control over things but in resonating with them, making them respond to us—thus experiencing self-efficacy—and responding to them in turn. (31)

[resonance] is a mode of relation that can be precisely defined by four exemplary characteristics:

1. Being affected. Resonating with another person, or even with a landscape, a melody, or an idea, means being “inwardly” reached, touched, or moved by them. This circumstance of being affected can well be described as “call” or “appeal”. (32)
2. Self–efficacy. At the same time, we can speak of true resonance only when this call is followed by our own active response. This always manifests itself in a physical reaction that we might describe in everyday language as “getting goosepumps”, “the hair on the back our neck standing on end”, or “a shiver running our spine” and that, in medical terms, may be measured as a change in our skin resistance, breathing rate, heart rate, or blood pressure. Resonance also involves our reacting to the impulse that calls us by reaching out toward that which moves us. The word emotion is well suited to describing this second characteristic, as, etymologically, it denotes a movement outward […], a response. (32-33)
3. Adaptive transformation. Whenever we resonate with another human being, a book, a song, a landscape, an idea, a piece of wood, we are transformed by the encounter, although of course in very different ways. […] a change in how we relate to the world is constitutive of resonant experience. When we resonate with the world, we are no longer the same afterwards. (34) […] resonant experiences also significantly change inanimate objects (if only for us). The mountain I have climbed is different (for me) from the one I only saw from a distance or on television, and in the same way books, music, languages, and ideas also change in the process of adaptive transformation. Indeed, they are not even available to as “things in themselves.” (35)
4. Uncontrollability. The fourth […] aspect of resonant relationships consists in the fact that the “pathological” (or simply unfortunate) conditions described above cannot be changed merely through the act of will, that resonance cannot be manufactured or engineered. I describe this as the uncontrollability of resonance, which means, first, that there is no method, no seven- or nine-step guide that can guarantee that we will be able to resonate with people or things. (36) Resonance is inherently uncontrollable. Just as with falling asleep, the harder we try to make it happen, the less we succeed. Conversely, however, uncontrollability also means that (again as with falling asleep) having a resonant experience can never be ruled out entirely. Resonance can emerge even under adverse or radically alienating conditions, even if this is, of course, unlikely. It is a peculiar characteristic of resonance that it can be neither forced nor prevented with absolute certainty. (37) Resonance is inherently uncontrollable also in a second, more important sense. Whenever it occurs, we are transformed; but it is impossible for us to predict how exactly we will be changed and what the end result of this transformation will be. (37)

Five theses on the controllability of things

THESIS 1. The inherent uncontrollability of resonance and the fundamental controllability of things do not constitute a contradiction per se. (41)

[…] resonance always implies bilateral movement. It is not enough that I have access to and can take hold of the world. Resonance demands that I allow myself to be called, that I be affected, that something reach me from the outside. (42)

THESIS 2. Things we can completely control in all four dimensions lose their resonant quality. Resonance thus implies semicontrollability. (44)

When we have completely mastered something, it no longer has anything to say to us. We are “done with it.” (45)

[…] the uncontrollability of our counterpart in a resonant relationship is a qualified form of uncontrollability, not a result of mere chance or contingency. We can only resonate with a counterpart that in a way “speaks with its own voice,” that has something like its own will or character, or at least its own inner logic that, as such, remains beyond our control. What is more, we must be able to understand this voice as speaking to us, and thus as being in some sense responsive. (47-48)

THESIS 3. Resonance demands a form of uncontrollability that “speaks”, that is more than just contingency.

THESIS 4. An attitude aimed at taking hold of a segment of world, mastering it, and making it controllable is incompatible with an orientation toward resonance. Such an attitude destroys any experience of resonance by paralyzing its intrinsic dynamism. (52)

[…] it is not enough to focus just on the subject side of experience or on the object side of things (or on both) in defining the relation between controllability and uncontrollability. The uncontrollability constitutive of resonant relationships in fact has a subject dimension, an object dimension, and a process dimension. (53)

Resonance requires giving up control over both what we encounter and the process of encountering it, and at the same time being able—and trusting in our ability—to reach out to this other side and establish responsive contact with it. (57)

The basic conflict of modernity […] consists in mistaking reachability for controllability. (57)

THESIS 5. Resonance requires a world that can be reached, not one that can be limitlessly controlled. The confusion between reachability and controllability lies at the root of the muting of the world in modernity. (58)

The Structural Dimension of the Basic Conflict of Modernity

The structural dimension of the basic conflict of modernity manifests itself in the fact that a society capable only of dynamic stabilization cannot accept uncontrollability, even though it requires it everywhere. The compulsion toward continual escalation inherent in the logics of growth, acceleration, and innovation implies that efficiency and output, or process and result, must constantly be optimized at every level. (87)

Optimization means achieving the best possible result in the shortest possible time, while maintaining constant control over the processes involved. (87)

Anyone who reads the news attentively knows that what comes out of any attempt to implement a political program truly is uncontrollable—even as political campaigns are waged almost exclusively with promises of enhancement and improvement, in other words with promises that the future can be engineered. Yet policies aimed at creating more jobs, higher pensions, better environmental conditions, more affordable housing, more efficient public transportation, more peaceful international relations, and so on not infrequently achieve the opposite of what they promise. The dynamism of sociopolitical life arises precisely from the fact that the latter is not engineerable. (90)

Today nearly all employees and professionals—not only, but particularly in what is called “social” professions—complain that they are scarcely able to get around to their actual work or no longer have time to do it well. This is by no means solely a result of the modern compulsion toward economic growth and acceleration; it is also precisely because of their or their employers’ futile efforts to make all processes and conditions in the workplace fully transparent (dimension 1 of controllability), attributable (dimension 2), manageable (dimension 3), and efficient (dimension 4). (94)

The commodification of nearly every aspect of our relationship to the world—the fact that nearly every object and process is on offer in late modern society as a service or as a commodity—implies a legal right to controllability. (95)

the uncontrollability of desire

This in fact seems to me to be inherent in the basic structure of desire: desire is driven by a longing to bring something as yet unreachable within our reach. And precisely this might provide us with a key to depriving modernity’s boundless game of escalation—its endeavor to make everything and everyone controllable—of the motivating energy it requires, and to doing so by somehow “unplugging” its connection to our libido. My contention is that the basic structure of human desire is a desire for relationships. (105)

Complete control in all four dimensions, however, extinguishes desire. Games become meaningless, music loses its appeal, love grows old. (106)

This confusion of reachability and controllability finds perhaps its most consequential expression in the translation of our fundamental human desire for relationships into a desire for objects. (106-107)

If we no longer saw the world as a point of aggression, but as a point of resonance that we approach, not with an aim of appropriating, dominating, and controlling it but with an attitude of listening and responding, an attitude oriented toward self-efficacious adaptive transformation, toward mutually responsive reachability, modernity’s escalatory game would become meaningless and, more importantly, would be deprived of the psychological energy that drives it. A different world would become possible. (108)

the monstrous return of the uncontrollable

It is not only technological complexity, but also the complexity and speed of social processes that generate uncontrollability, particularly in terms of the shape of the future. […] today it is practically impossible even to keep track of all the vocational training programs at our disposal, let alone predict how our professional life might turn out. A predictable career path that we could plan out and at least partly shape ourselves has become an erratic, uncontrollable ride. And, despite the unpredictability and uncontrollability of our circumstances, we are still held responsible for results that we are supposed to have been able to foresee, which gives rise to anxiety. (111-112)

Controllability in theory thus transforms uncontrollability in practice into a menacing “monster”, the kind of threat that lurks around every corner but that we can neither see nor control. (112)

Our own everyday lives and actions seem to be increasingly beyond our control, and not even the experts who appear to be the guardians of “theoretical” controllability are capable of creating even the impression of control through calculation. The expansion of our technological reach is not increasing our self-efficacy, but undermining it. We feel ourselves powerless or blameworthy in an unresponsive world. Information about our objective body tells us nothing about the state of our phenomenal body (which is categorically uncontrollable, although highly responsive). These are medical and technological parameters that confront us as external data, with which we have no “inner” perceptual relationship. Our own bodies have become practically inaccessible to us. (113)

The uncontrollability generated by processes intended to make the world controllable produces a radical alienation. Modernity’s program of expanding our reach into a world that it has transformed into an accumulation of points of aggression produces fear of a loss of world and of the world falling mute in a double sense. Where “everything is under control”, the world no longer has anything to say to us, and where it has become newly uncontrollable, we can no longer hear it, because we cannot reach it. (116)