Acceleration and Cultural Change

Front matter

SpringerBriefs in Anthropology Thomas Hylland Eriksen - Martina Visentin

Acceleration and Cultural Change Dialogues from an Overheated World

OPEN ACCESS Z) Springer

Preface

How I Met THE

I met Thomas Hylland Eriksen during a brief research visit to Oslo in 2018. I was conducting interviews for a research project and, on the day of a terrible snowstorm, I was invited to his office. I had just read the Italian version of Overheating: An Anthropology of Accelerated Change (2016) and, although I was in Oslo for other reasons, I had thought about writing to him. I was unaware of who he was. I had simply loved the book so much that I wanted to meet him just to tell him I had finally found a synthesis, a pair of glasses that even today helps me to see where I am going with my fieldwork. In Overheating, Eriksen raises a number of questions not considered in the current debate on globalization in its many local articulations and its ecological and social implications. He seeks the connections between the complex environmental, economic, and sociocultural dynamics of the contemporary world, dominated by processes of climate change and globalization. His approach is already stated in his Small Places—Large Issues published in 1995, which has now reached several editions, and that is to study large issues in local contexts. We therefore need to take a close look, as anthropology has always done (though we should also remember the contributions of much qualitative sociology already in the early days of the social sciences). Eriksen argues that an “overview” is fundamental, but we still need to “get close” to the dimension of the everyday in order to understand how people live in practice (p.

XI). The two scales actually interpenetrate because the overview on a macro-scale overlooks the details of a micro-scale analysis. We could talk about a social anthropology, or an anthropological sociology, interested in the change that catastrophes bring about on the “human dimension” that still (perhaps briefly) characterizes the daily lives of social actors. The analytical focus then is not so much on the new social structure that generates incandescence, but on the simultaneous presence, the unbalanced co-presence of different, asymmetrical scales, times, and complexities that become indistinguishable. At the heart of the reflection is the simultaneous implementation of vi Preface contradictory, double bind processes: growth and degrowth; globalization and localization; rationalization and irrationality; seeking and abandoning identity; acceleration and deceleration; standardization and personalization; predictability and unpredictability; and so on. What struck me most about Eriksen’s book is that it provides an overview based not only on the contributions of social research in general but, more specifically, on a considerable body of qualitative and ethnographic data. I began to study his “overheating approach” starting from Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age of 2001. This overheating concept probably originates from three essays in which there is a continuous interplay between “a near moving away” and “a far moving closer” (Prandini 2019, in Visentin & Eriksen 2019).

In 1993, Eriksen wrote Being Norwegian in a Shrinking World. Reflections on Norwegian Identity. The Norway he describes was just before the new millennium, when the European Union was still called the EC. He sketches a country whose inhabitants probably eat more hamburgers than fish balls. Jackie Collins’s novels are more widely read than Bjrnson’s peasant tales, and more than half of the population can make themselves understood in slightly broken American English. The impact of globalization is becoming visible even in remote parts of Norway, where local stores may have American names and everyone wears jeans, though the climate might warrant a different kind of clothing. These processes of cultural change are a source of great concern, and the author begins to reflect on what links a nation’s identity to the processes of globalization. Some Norwegians fear the erosion of their cultural distinctiveness. Some lament the appearance of Anglicisms in the local dialect. Others worry about the standardizing and alienating effects of mass culture, of the American style. In the first part of the essay, a strong continuity emerges with the identity of the past, but the second part critically addresses the cultural construction of modern Norway and discusses some challenges to better-known perceptions of Norwegian identity. In another essay where we can find the seeds of Eriksen’s overheating approach—Stacking and Continuity. On Temporal Regimes (Eriksen 2007)—the author notes a fundamental change in our Western culture: the time register from slow and linear becomes fast and momentary; the distinction between desirable and undesirable information is increasingly difficult to understand. Setting the MP3 player against the CD and the Web against the book, along with some examples from the world of music, Eriksen argues that in its extreme form, the information society can be seen as an ecosystem consisting of randomly connected, decontextualized signs, changing and evolving too fast for humans to follow. In Eriksen (2007, 45) we can find a concrete example of this logic looking at the rising of MP3. Each individual user puts together his or her personal totality by extracting fragments. The MP3 is to the CD what the Web is to the book. The Internet fits perfectly, and contributes in at least two ways, to the predominant neoliberal ideology. The World Wide Web (and multichannel television, and MP3, and flexible work) offers a flood of choice. On the other hand, however, it causes us to lose, among other things, internal cohesion, meaningful content, and slowness. If we try to move from MP3 metaphor to the temporal dimension (2007, 47 and ff.), this means that since there is no more vacant time in

Preface Vii which to spread information, it is compressed and implied in time intervals that become shorter and shorter.

This acceleration, along with an exponential growth in the amount of information, leads to what he describes as vertical stacking (translated in Italian as “vertical crowding” to emphasize the lack of any rational, hierarchical idea of cumulability. Eriksen warns us that vertical stacking threatens internal development in postmodern culture because it becomes increasingly difficult to create narratives and sequences with a temporal continuity. This is a further step forward in which the author sees another overheating process. So, a process of shrinkage implicitly (or even explicitly) generates the idea that music (or art in general) is now a set of combinations, “a filling of boxes” (2007, 291). This essay also demonstrates Eriksen’s musical expertise (and passion for music). The third essay I want to mention is Creolization and Creativity, published in 2003. Eriksen had already presented the concept of Creolization in 1999 (in Tu Dimunn Pu Vini Kreol: The Mauritian Creole and the Concept of Creolization), but Creolization and Creativity contains another strong example of how the idea of overheating was emerging as a way of interpreting the world through Eriksen’s eyes. Starting from the assumption that cultural globalization is really happening (and this is easy to demonstrate, in the sense of an intensified and accelerated contact across geographical boundaries at least), mediated by information technology, we can begin by naively asking—as many do—whether these processes lead to an increase in creativity or have a general “flattening” effect. Eriksen compares three very different examples (postcolonial literature, information technology, and minority youth in Western Europe) and shows that the most important form of information society is a combination of cognitive nonlinearity and social openness: movement and openness. On the other hand, a society that has unwittingly relinquished its moorings—the kind of overheated society that we have become—tends to become incandescent, and only manageable in a state of emergency.

This brings us to this book of interviews, the outcome of a long dialogue that took place in the midst of life, in between cancer and a pregnancy, in a time of marked uncertainty, an unfinished pandemic, a war in Europe, and an unprecedented climate, cultural, and social crisis. I suggested to Thomas that we pool the emails we had exchanged through some focused conversations, and we began putting together a project for a book—and, with Springer’s support, here it is. As there were no strong time constraints, our long-distance Zoom exchanges were interspersed with pauses for reflection and requests for clarification. The Zoom conversations were recorded and reviewed and revised by both authors.

What I am keen to convey about Eriksen’s way of working is his ability as a scholar to cross the boundaries between disciplines. With this in mind, this brief introduction outlines the core concepts of the overheating approach, concluding with a small guide to help readers navigate among such diverse topics.

viii Preface

Can a Cloud Be Photographed? How We Worked on the Book

Eriksen’s reflections are obviously a work in progress, and trying to describe and analyze an approach is like trying to capture the shape of a cloud in a photograph— difficult at best, and sometimes impossible. Eriksen’s ethnography is a continuous interplay between the localization and the globalization of the word. Going along with Bourdieu in La misère du monde (1993), the social scientist’s methodological rigor, objectivity, and neutrality can only reside in an integral respect for and, at the same time, an “active” protection of the word they receive. Taking Eriksen’s theoretical and methodological approach, large- and small-scale phenomena can be interpreted across shared and different elements, which can be examined together. It is not a matter of relativity or omniscience, but of the feasibility of using this approach to better understand global and local interconnections through a new and original overview. The capacity of Eriksen’s approach to embrace and interpret complexity is undeniable, not only because he is one of the most often cited authors (in Google Scholar he is cited by 24,000 people; in Scopus he has an h-index of 18), but also and especially because he is one of the most highly regarded authors in the social sciences. Another factor to bear in mind is that Eriksen’s approach has often been appreciated by a wide audience of non-specialists. This certainly comes down to Eriksen’s strong conviction that anthropology can be a public issue and that an intellectual can have a public engagement (see Chap. 5). This book does not delve into how Eriksen’s personal and intellectual life are interlaced. At times, in some conversations, it is self-evident. His intellectual life remains strongly and clearly connected with his personal life, and from scrolling through his list of publications, this scholar’s commitment to sharing his approach with people of all backgrounds, origins, and social classes is evident.

A Guide for Readers

In Eriksen’s anthropology, there is a precise conceptual inventory represented by a few key terms that help readers understand his theoretical approach and locate the effects and paradoxes of accelerated change. They are (i) double bind; (ii) flexibility; (iii) out-of-control processes, or the “treadmill syndrome”; (iv) reproduction; and (v) the Anthropocene. First of all, we also present a small overview of what overheating approach is and then follow the conceptual inventory.

Overheating Approach Overheating is a metaphor, and it’s easily misunderstood, because when you say overheating, people will immediately think about climate change or about the warming planet. But overheating and such refers to accelerated change in general. Modernity has always been associated with change, with speed, with development, and so on and so forth. And there is a real sense in which only

Preface ix since the 1990s that this speed has sped up, so it’s become even faster. We see this in a number of fields (see Eriksen 2016). Eriksen could say that it is similar to what happens when you rub your hands together really quickly: they warm up. The problem, as Eriksen sees it in today’s world, is that we see all of these accelerated processes of change and various developments that are growing and accelerating without a thermostat, without a regulating mechanism which tells them it’s time to stop. Using the ethnographic and comparative methods of anthropology connecting macro and micro social processes, Eriksen goes through different processes (energy use, urbanization, deprivation, human (im)mobility, and the spread of technology) underlining how they are perceived and responded to a local level.

Double Bind The concept derives from Gregory Bateson’s ecological thinking. Double bind theory was coined and developed by that interdisciplinary thinker and a few people he worked with at Palo Alto (Steps to an Ecology of Mind [1972]7). Bateson’s thinking is relational, and the term refers to complementary situations in which contradictory messages are received. It concerns the compulsion to distinguish between two mutually inconsistent alternatives. The only thing that can save you from a double bind is the realization that the question was wrongly raised, or that there is a third alternative. A double bind differs from simply choosing between any two alternatives, from a dilemma where one option seems less disadvantageous than the other, or from situations in which we can avoid choosing by abandoning the game. In the double bind, the alternatives are equally good or bad, and we have to make a choice. Eriksen uses this concept to highlight the contradiction that links growth and sustainability (2016, 32), as nowadays it seems impossible to have both. Experiences of double binding can be found in our daily lives too. There is a strong drive to promote an environmentally responsible behavior. We are often encouraged to use public transport instead of our own car, or to buy organic or locally produced food, etc. At the same time, we can travel by air occasionally for business or pleasure, and our lives have become completely dependent on an economy reliant on fossil fuels. On a broader scale, and in many parts of the planet, politicians and businessmen have begun to talk about sustainability and climate policy, but also about fostering economic growth, which almost always involves increasing energy consumption. On a higher level of abstraction, the tension between economic development and human sustainability has become chronic, upping the cost of the most important double bind of twenty-first-century capitalism.

Flexibility This is another concept from Bateson that Eriksen draws on, which is found in Ecology and Flexibility in Urban Civilization (Bateson, 1970). The idea of flexibility is defined as a “potential, uncommitted, for change.” In analyzing this concept, Bateson warns of two fundamental dangers concerning the loss of flexibility: adopting behaviors that offer short-term benefits can lead to rigidities that are hard to remove, but also to the formation of attitudes that are also hard to remove. Habituation and repetition, for example, may be adaptive responses that serve an immediate purpose, but may in the long run become an obstacle to the survival and evolution of a system’s ecology. For Bateson, the flexibility used and exhausted by growing human populations has reduced the flexibility of the environment. To better x Preface clarify his use of Bateson’s concept, Eriksen cites (2016, 33) the metaphor used by Bateson himself of the acrobat on a tightrope. To keep his balance on the rope, the acrobat has to move from one position of instability to another. This demands great flexibility in the positioning of his arms and the speed of their movements (the variables involved) in order to maintain his stability during his performance. Similarly, according to Bateson, the flexibility of a system relies on its ability to keep many of its acceptable variables within certain limits. Eriksen applies this concept to a number of global scenarios (p.32ff.).

On a planetary scale, he considers the example of the fossil fuel revolution. The increase in flexibility deriving from the use of fossil fuels—enabling us to move easily, generate electricity, and so on—has tragically reduced the flexibility of the world’s natural system. According to Eriksen, with a steadily increasing global population, returning to a pre-fossil-fuel economy would be desirable and increasingly necessary, but difficult to achieve. When flexibility increases in one area it tends to decline in another. Eriksen looks to India, for instance. Its Green Revolution had enabled the country to leave famine and poverty behind. But today the country looks like it is stuck in a cul-de-sac. India will no longer be able to return to pre-industrial agricultural practices. There has been a loss of flexibility, but this might be restored by technological innovations capable of combining high food production levels with long-term ecological sustainability.

Treadmill Syndrome or Out-of-Control Processes To clarify the abovedescribed phenomena, Eriksen uses the concept of the “treadmill syndrome” (see, e.g., Eriksen 2017; 2016, 31). He cites the encounter between Alice and the Red Queen (in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland), when Alice is told to run as fast as she can. She does so but finds that—although she is running with all her might—she stays where she is. According to Eriksen, competition—be it in advertising or sports, in biological evolution or public activity in academia—demands that we continue to adapt just to keep our place in our ecosystem. The treadmill syndrome is just another sign of a vast process of intensification of the competition, which can sometimes become destructive, both environmentally and existentially.

Reproduction Eriksen believes that people everywhere today are constantly struggling to retain the right to define themselves, decide their own destiny, and protect their autonomy. This happens in every aspect of life, economically, culturally, and environmentally. Faced with their own fragility, they may want to lay the blame somewhere else; it has to be someone else’s fault. The data presented on the rising levels of resentment in our countries may be a good example of this situation. Chapter 4 in this book addresses the issue of ideological overheating and examines this issue in more depth.

Anthropocene This term popularized by the Nobel laureate in atmospheric chemistry, Paul Crutzen, is another way of describing the consequences of acceleration, but on a large scale. Everything human is so invasive and growing so constantly that it threatens to overpower other species (plants and animals). Eriksen reminds us that, in today’s world, humans are increasingly abundant on our planet, while the

Preface xi numbers of other species continue to decline. Our world seems to have accelerated in everything and everywhere, so that every phenomenon seems to be constantly on the verge of becoming unmanageable, because speed and overheating have acquired a momentum almost to the point of incandescence. It is a new world, one that needs to be continuously re-examined, from top to bottom, and from left to right. This book provides conceptual tools and stories, theoretical perspectives, and facts about the world as it is today, but first and foremost, it invites the reader to continue the conversation on their own. Survival will depend on diversity and local solutions. For this we shall need flexibility, intellectual imagination, and the recognition that slowing down, cooling down, and scaling down will only mean the end of the destructive, predatory growth economy and not the end of civilization as we know it.

1991: The Overheating Year

Dear reader, don’t forget 1991. It is the year, according to Eriksen’s analysis, from which it all starts. It is the “turning point” year in which we see a continuous acceleration of social processes (Eriksen 2016, p. 472 specifically):

1. It was the year in which the Cold War ended in its original form;

in the same year, the Indian economy was massively deregulated by Rajiv Gandhi’s government;

the Apartheid became a closed chapter (Mandela had been released from prison the year before);

countries in the Global South did not develop along the predicted lines, that is, roughly in the same way as the countries of the Global North;

different social scientists, many of them former supporters of deregulation, wrote scathing critiques of the emerging neoliberal global economy (e.g., Stiglitiz 2002);

the war in Yugoslavia and the Rwandan genocide were reminders that identities based on kinship remained crucial for millions, and identity crises could erupt in horrible ways at any time;

the borders of and in Europe became more permeable, negotiable, and fuzzy than before;

the spreading of mobile telephones and the Internet began to circulate epidemically in the global middle classes, eventually trickling down to the poor as well.

2. A certain kind of flexibility grew: you could soon work anywhere and anytime,

but these technologies contributed to fragmentation as well; what flexibility was gained with respect to space seemed to be lost regarding time.

As Eriksen wrote from 1991 onward, “Life began to stand still at a frightful speed” (2016, 474).

This book presents discussions in an interview-form approach that I have been studying for a few years, and I thought it might be an additional stepping stone for xii Preface further studies. The intention of this volume is to introduce academic and non-academic readers to a novel approach to globalization, capable of synthesizing and interpreting social change that has been happening at lightning speed, unequally and unevenly. The analytical focus then goes not so much to the new social structure that generates overheating and incandescence but to the simultaneous presence or to the unbalanced co-presence of different, asymmetrical scales, times, and complexities that appear so inextricable. In the future, I hope to further study the origin of this approach by showing how the intellectual field has given space to this conceptmetaphor.

Padova, Italy Martina Visentin Oslo, Norway Thomas Hylland Eriksen February 2023

Acknowledgements

Thomas Hylland Eriksen would, first of all, like to extend a warm grazie to his coauthor Martina Visentin for the initiative and for doing the lion’s share of the work. He is also grateful to the excellent Norwegian health service for keeping him in good shape for years now, and last but not least, to Kari for almost everything.

Martina Visentin would like to thank first and foremost Thomas for this incredible opportunity. Thank you Thomas for all the ideas, studies, suggestions, and recipes shared with me. It is a precious gift not to be taken for granted. And it will always be with me. My ‘muchness’ is grateful for it. Thanks to Samuele and our baby-Hulk who show me every day what is the meaning of everything. At the end a special thank you to an Avenger who definitely does not want to be named but he is always there, just around the corner, to remind me of the beauty and the ‘good struggle’ of becoming a scholar.

xiii

Introduction: Tensions of Overheated Globalization

“Tt was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” Thus begins Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, a historical novel by an author best known for his penetrating depictions of his contemporary England. Though the story is set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution, the above quotation could read as an acute and accurate description of the world in the early twenty-first century. We live in an era of great technological innovations and unparalleled economic growth on a global level. World trade has trebled in just thirty years (since 1991), and the rising demand for goods has meant that the size of container ships has also increased threefold in less than twenty years. Food production continues to increase, and in spite of a considerable rise in the world’s population, there is theoretically enough food for all eight billion of us. Life expectancy remains high in most parts of the world—the average longevity worldwide now twice as high as it was in the time of A Tale of Two Cities.

At the same time, we live on a period of anthropogenic climate change and large-scale environmental destruction, with the extinction of numerous species. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issues stern warnings in all of its reports, arguing ever more strongly for the need to leave behind the fossil fuel economy as it may cause immense suffering to humans and other species in the coming decades. It is also worth mentioning that social inequality has been increasing since the 1980s in many countries.

New communication and information technologies, and smartphones in particular, have enabled social networking without boundaries, and made a wealth of information available across the world. Since they were first introduced in 2007 (when the concept initially attracted little interest), the number of smartphone subscriptions around the world has reached the almost unbelievable figure of 6.8 billion at the time of writing, which means—even if some have two or more—that most earthlings now have one (Statista 2023). People everywhere now have the chance to

XV xvi Introduction: Tensions of Overheated Globalization be better informed and better connected with each other. They can gain some control over their lives through various services available on the Internet.

Over time, the rise in hate speech and polarization in social media, the spread of conspiracy theories, and the seductive lies proliferating across the Web have become a cause of serious anxiety, demanding the sustained attention of researchers studying political violence and the future of democracy. It has frequently been said, however, that the dissemination of the Internet in the 1990s did not generally lead to populations becoming better educated and more knowledgeable. The exponential growth in the amount of information available on the Internet and the speed with which it circulates do not seem to have led to the world’s citizens being better informed. A distinction between data, information, knowledge, and wisdom may shed light on the situation. The amount of data available to the online denizens of the world is unlimited. Some of it is turned into information about anything from the British royal family to football results or casualties in the Ukrainian war, but such fragments only become knowledge when contextualized and used by one or several conscious subjects to make sense of the world. Wisdom is achieved only at a higher logical level when several sources of knowledge have been digested and synthesized into a coherent worldview. Easy solutions which should not be mistaken with knowledge of a field consist in withdrawing into echo-chambers, choosing the path of least resistance—opting for infotainment rather than complex (but important) information, or sensationalist, and often misleading, information “proving that the experts are wrong” rather than cautious, complex, often ambiguous, scientifically founded knowledge. In these times, when everything seems to stand still at enormous speed (Eriksen 2001), it has become difficult to use the Internet sensibly, to distinguish between trustworthy information and vacuous gossip, and to concentrate on a subject for more than a few seconds.

It goes without saying that very different interpretations of globalization and its implications exist, but most researchers in the field would agree that the last few decades have seen an acceleration and proliferation of networks and connections, national as well as transnational. Whether we look at air travel (the number of plane tickets sold doubled between 2004 and 2019, from two billion to 4.5 billion), international trade, people active on social media, international meetings, academic events, transnational NGOs, and virtually any sphere involving enhanced transnational connectivity, the trend always points upward. As the COVID-19 pandemic has painfully reminded us, physical connections differ in quality from digital links. The latter have several advantages, the most obvious being that they enable fully deterritorialized communications. Online, you can talk with anybody anywhere. Their main disadvantage lies in the lack of physical proximity. Being together in the same room, seated around the same table, or walking along the same footpath, we can experience human warmth and acquire memories that we could never enjoy online. Leaving aside the exceptional situation engendered by the pandemic, far more transnational physical connections have been activated and nurtured (in addition to the digital ones) in the last few decades than ever before in history.

Intensified contact across boundaries through trade, leisure, business, and political activities, crisscrossing national and continental boundaries, might be expected

Introduction: Tensions of Overheated Globalization xvii to give the actors a more cosmopolitan less nationalist outlook. Many millions now have experience of foreign travel, as well as friends and colleagues from other countries. They are aware that we all take part in a dense network of communications, travel, and trade covering every continent and nearly every country. People’s sense of identity, which historically expanded from kin and tribe to cities, regions, and nation-states, could now perform a new qualitative jump to a higher level of human solidarity and care, comparable to the abstract communities created by the monotheistic religions of conversion. This did happen in some quarters, but reactions against the dissolution of borders and global flows often proved more visible, insistent, and consequential. The Brexit vote in the UK is often mentioned as a typical example, but there are many other signs of a tendency to re-establish borders, glorify cultural roots, build fences, and reject post-national identities. The popularity of the Hindu nationalist government in India expresses a profound pride in India’s great achievements, but to the detriment of the country’s minorities, the largest of which is the Muslim population of about 200 million. Viktor Orban’s considerable appeal in Hungary similarly draws on a proud celebration of everything Hungarian, but ethnic and other minorities (such as sexual ones) are not invited to the party. And we should not be allowed to forget how, in his victory speech in November 2016, Trump repeated two words over and over, namely “America first,” as he pranced back and forth on the stage.

Reactions against the perceived alienation resulting from disembedded modernity may also lead to other forms of withdrawal into smaller, clearly delineated groups, be they right-wing militants, Islamists, or others. It would be premature and facile to conclude that the world is moving toward a generalized neo-nationalism, becoming a place where outsiders are met first and foremost with suspicion. Rather, there is a structural tension between “roots” and “boots” detectable almost everywhere in the contemporary world, where the politics of identity have taken over from the class politics that characterized much of the last century. We are divided by a shared destiny.