Slowing Down Society? Theoretical Reflections on Social Deceleration in Pandemic Times (and Beyond)

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a major change in everyday life and also reinvigorated the theoretical and political discussion on the temporal rhythms of social existence. Taking the situation of the coronavirus crisis as a starting point, the present paper attempts to provide the outlines of a theoretical account of social deceleration, a topic that has been hitherto barely explored in the field of social studies of time. In view of the complexity of the phenomenon, a distinction is made between two ways of theoretically approaching it, namely, a descriptive and a normative perspective. The paper proceeds in three steps: First, upon adopting a descriptive perspective, it advances a definition of social deceleration and proposes a typology of its different manifestations. The second step analyzes the coronavirus crisis as a process of partial deceleration of social life. The final step gives an overview of the current normative, i.e., ethical-political, disputes over social speed.