Time acceleration and post-democracy: violence and communication

Abstract

The aim of this research is to reflect about the acceleration of time in modernity with its incidence in contemporary culture in regard to the consequences of the rupture with the tradition that happened at the end of the First World War . According to Walter Benjamin, this is what we find at the base of violence in modern time. The time acceleration and the intensification of nervous stimuli associated with the "new spirit of capitalism" - that is no more grounded in values than in the beginning of the capitalistic accumulation --will be the conceptual axis to understand the question of the obsolescence of taste as a " total social phenomenon" that covers from ethics to politics, from science to aesthetics. Referring to this, Georges Balandier names it "over-modernity": " [The experience] leads by shuffled ways where space and time can´t be defined anymore by familiar references, becoming together generators of dépaysement; the here and now, the hic et nunc keep a sort of connection with discontinuity, whose cost is the fragmentation of life, the uncertainty concerning the definition of oneself"(définition de soi)." We will analyze the impact over the notion of identity in the terms of Benjamin, who considered that the " loss of the aura" and the " decline of the aura" go together with mass desire for proximity to things and an empathic socialization, which results in the passage from the polis --the city as political order-- to thiase, the fusional being together, what questions the notion of Democracy and Republic. (AU)