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Velocities of Power: An Introduction

2007; Duke University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2752/174321907780031034

1751-7435

John Beck, Paul Crosthwaite,

Posthumanist Ethics and Activism

The fairground injunction to “scream if you want to go faster” has become one of the defining imperatives of advanced capitalism, the ambivalence of that scream both calling forth acceleration and announcing a terror at its prospect. Commentators on the radical time–space compression achieved by the technological developments of recent decades are as conflicted in outlook as their predecessors have been in marking the utopian and apocalyptic promises of the heightened velocity of everyday life (see Bertman 1998; Gleick 1999; Scheuerman 2001, 2004). There is nothing new, of course, about the acceleration of processes and practices due to technological innovation and improvements in organizational efficiency, and there is a long history of both awestruck celebration and fearful criticism of the effects produced by the intensified speed of things. Yet speed itself – as an experience, a quality, a value, and a valence – is increasingly being identified as fundamental to an understanding of the distinctive forms of economic and political power, social and cultural life produced by the “developed” world (and threatened by the “developing” world – witness the anxiety provoked in the West by the rapidity of China's economic growth). As such, speed has become more than an observed fact of matter in motion and is increasingly becoming the condition within which the social operates.In an essay written in 1998, art critics Jeremy Millar and Michiel Schwarz suggest that, “perhaps we are approaching an understanding of speed as a tool for cultural analysis, alongside subjects such as race, class, or gender” (1998a: 17). As they acknowledge, certain scholars – most notably Paul Virilio – have for some time advanced interpretive models organized around concepts of speed, velocity, and acceleration. It is true, though, that only in the last ten to fifteen years has a core set of intellectual concerns of this kind begun to coalesce within the social sciences and humanities. The object of this special section of Cultural Politics is to critically engage with this emerging interdisciplinary field. The essays examine the matrices of velocity and power channeled by a range of contemporary representational and media forms: the road movie, the contemporary novel, electoral opinion polls, and managerial discourse, respectively. While they are very different in focus and subject matter, what these essays have in common is a concern with the ways in which these very representations, in a self-perpetuating logic, elicit responses akin to those produced by exposure to speed itself. That is, they all focus upon the complex interrelationships between the physical, empirical phenomenon of speed, and the ramifying disturbances in experience and signification emanating from it – disturbances we propose to term speed-effects. The material transformation of the world through accelerated actions and flows is seen to be accompanied and complicated by the experiential, phenomenological impact of acceleration in ways that suggest that forms of representation themselves must be reconsidered and resituated.Speed, of course, denotes the rate of motion of an object, while velocity – a vector quantity – is speed in a particular direction, and acceleration, the rate of change of velocity with respect to time. The speed-effect most palpably felt is the immediate impact of speed (and, in particular, of relatively high speed) upon the bodies and minds of individuals subjected to it. Any cultural or political response to speed must, therefore, take into account the somatic experiences it provokes. This is political theorist Mark Kingwell's view when he opens a discussion of speed and the twentieth century with these remarks:The indisputable fact that speed measures ground covered during periods of time fails to communicate why we yearn for acceleration, for the sudden enlarging of sensory volume that makes for the feeling of speed. This is a neuro-physiological condition, familiar to most of us, that we might agree to call velocitization: the adrenal throb of neurons that accompanies large increases in velocity, the electrochemical, brain-fluid high we miss only when it's gone. (1998: 141; emphasis in original)What is registered here is an ecstatic dimension to acceleration that can only be felt if experienced firsthand. Increased velocity only has meaning in the context of previously or subsequently experienced states of relative immobility or stasis. It is the direct experience of the “enlarging of sensory volume,” perhaps, that is most commonly thought to be characteristic of contemporary responses to accelerated modes of communication and movement. Kingwell's description of the ecstasy of high speed presupposes, however, the desirability of this kind of “high.” It might be argued that the premium placed on fastness, while trading on the private gratification of the individual who receives satisfaction “just in time,” to borrow the jargon of post-Fordism, is little more than a legitimation-effect. Here, then, we begin to confront the nexus of questions that must, it seems to us, be central to investigations of sociocultural speed-effects. Who administers the careering trajectories that seem increasingly to warp the very space-time of the late capitalist world system, and in the pursuit of what interests? How should notions of the subject incorporate an awareness of the worker or citizen as a subject of speed? Must the propulsive logic of technological acceleration be resisted? If so, by what means? Or can it, rather, be redirected in the interests of more progressive agendas? And, just as importantly, what are the roles of discourse, representation, rhetoric, and narrative in propagating, interrogating, or contesting a common perception of relentless projectile motion as constituting the pervasive and defining condition of contemporary society and culture?If, as we have already intimated, scholars are increasingly re formulating their problematics along such lines, then much of the credit must belong to Paul Virilio, who, as James Der Derian has observed, “has almost single-handedly brought the issue of speed back into political and social theory” (1992: 130).1 Virilio's insistence on the necessity of such an approach was unmistakably announced by the title of his first major work: Speed and Politics (1986) (Vitesse et Politique [1977]). Over the last thirty years, Virilio has developed his analysis, producing a steady stream of provocative texts that combine research in a wide array of fields with penetrating responses to emerging historical tendencies. Even now, though, Speed and Politics, which looks increasingly like the foundational text for a burgeoning transdisciplinary movement, continues to offer remarkably startling and suggestive insights. Consider, for example, this critique ofa capitalism that has become one of jet-sets and instant-information banks, actually a whole social illusion subord inated to the cold war. Let's make no mistake: whether it's the drop-outs, the beat generation, automobile drivers, migrant workers, tourists, olympic champions or travel agents, the military-industrial democracies have made every social category, without distinction, into unknown soldiers of the order of speeds – speeds whose hierarchy is controlled more and more each day by the State (headquarters), from the pedestrian to the rocket, from the metabolic to the technological. (1986: 119–20; emphases in original)The prevailing thrust of Speed and Politics is toward demon strating that in the power relations of Cold War geopolitics can be detected an intensification of a tendency essential to military history in general: namely that the primary condition of success in battle is the ability not simply to dominate spatial territory, but also to command the dimension of temporality itself – to be capable of deploying troops and weapons in less time, that is, faster, than the enemy. In the quotation excerpted above, however, the most radical implications of Virilio's position emerge into focus. Here, in a characteristically unsettling move, it is suggested that the logic of speed around which this global struggle is organized has grown so pervasive that every action that partakes of rates of motion (and what action, in fact, does not?) necessarily constitutes an act of engagement in this military confrontation (similarly, Virilio will later observe that, “All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it. And some of us know it. The great stroke of luck for the military class's terrorism is that no one recognizes it. People don't recognize the militarized part of their identity, of their consciousness” [Virilio and Lotringer 1997: 26]). Thus, for all its embeddedness in the culture of the Cold War, Virilio's text speaks powerfully to our contemporary moment, when – in the all-embracing rhetoric of the “War on Terror” – submission to the imperatives of total mobilization is once more revealed as a necessary existential condition of everyday life.Virilio's alignment of technological acceleration with a militarizing process that increasingly transgresses social, cultural, and even subjective boundaries has paved the way for a wealth of subsequent research, notably in the work of Tim Blackmore (2005), Manuel De Landa (1991), James Der Derian (1992, 2001), and Michael J. Shapiro (1997). Speed and Politics can also now be seen to have announced the emergence of speed and acceleration as essential categories for the study of more localized, class-based struggles. Just as, for Virilio, a state triumphs over its enemies through more rapid deployment of its military resources, so it heightens its internal security by equipping those to whom it delegates its authority with the vehicular and communicational speed necessary to quell any incipient outbreak of revolt or disorder. Conversely, what becomes clear in Virilio's more recent work – as in much recent social theory (see, for example, Agger 1989, 2004; Harvey 1989; Castells 1996, 1997, 1998; Armitage 1999; Erikson 2001) – is that the state, and a host of other coercive institutions (capital, the media, the advertising, marketing, and retail sectors), are also able, through their own relative dynamism, to extend the threat of dispossession or exclusion to those without the means of access to such fluid mobility. These latter groups (workers, the poor) thereby find themselves interpellated, for the sake of social prestige or even the simple maintenance of their livelihoods, into a continual struggle to “keep up” – a struggle that instils an insidious but powerful disciplinary effect.The relative social and economic velocity of some sectors of the population as compared to others measurably accelerates and expands divisions within and across societies. Hence the so-called “digital divide” that “leaves behind” those not networked into the circulations of global information and capital flows. It is clear that the acceleration of some must be measured by the deceleration and containment of others. While corporations move at the speed of the market, the labor force must move on or face the inertia of dead communities eviscerated by plant relocation. Manuel Castells writes in this regard of the ominous appearance of “black holes of informational capitalism” (1998: 161–5) – sites, located anywhere from Burkina Faso to the South Bronx (1996: 2), which, “from the perspective of dominant interests in global, informational capitalism, shift to a position of structural irrelevance” (1998: 162). Even the securely employed might have cause to question the value placed on high speed. For the somatic experience – Kingwell's “high” – of bodily acceleration is one of the first casualties of dematerialized, high-velocity information transfer. The “homeworker,” data-input functionary, call-center operative, and fast-food dispenser all serve an accelerated economy while remaining, to recall Herman Melville's alienated Wall Street clerk Bartleby, stationary – that is, fixed or frozen, but also beholden to the materials upon which the imperatives of institutions of power are written and circulated.Another intriguing effect of the increased prominence of Virilio's work has been to throw into sharp relief the importance of velocity for the political thought of other major continental theorists, including Jean Baudrillard (especially 1994; see Kroker 1992; Wilbur 1994; Gane 2000; Vasseleu 2003), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (especially 1987; see Crogan 1999), Jacques Derrida (especially 1984; see Crogan 2000; Featherstone 2000–2001), and Peter Sloterdijk (especially 1989, 2004, 2005).2 Arthur and Marilouise Kroker have made a convincing case for reading Virilio alongside Sloterdijk's great progenitor and antagonist Martin Heidegger, particularly his “The Thing” (1971[1950]), “The Question Concerning Technology” (1977[1953]), and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1995) (Kroker and Kroker 2004: 330–31; see also Kroker 2004a, 2004b).3 And, as David Harvey (1989) and John Armitage and Phil Graham (2001) have argued, Virilio's work demands to be resituated in relation to the “annihilation of space with time” that preoccupied the Marx of the Grundrisse (1973). Virilio himself, however, remains less convinced of his place within more programmatic models of social analysis and maintains, we might say, in keeping with the pressures of accelerated living, a shorter attention span. He has, indeed, remarked with some pride that:I don't believe in explanations. I believe in suggestion, in the obvious quality of the implicit. […] I work in staircases – some people have realized this. I begin a sentence, I work out an idea and when I consider it suggestive enough, I jump to another idea without bothering with the development. (Virilio and Lotringer 1997: 44)The contributors to this special section aim to perform the crucial task of bringing the brilliantly wide-ranging theoretical ex-curs ions of Virilio and others to bear on specific cultural forms in which intersections of velocity and power are manifest. The importance of speed within these highly charged sites of engagement – the cinema of the New Hollywood, contemporary fiction, media cover age of electoral politics, and writings in the burgeoning contemporary field of “change management” – demands greater scholarly attention.For all that the essays collected here are concerned with the experiential conditions spawned by the waves of acceleration that characterize technological modernity – in the nature, that is, of what Virilio calls “dromocratic” (from the Greek dromos: avenue or race-course) existence – they address themselves at least as keenly, then, to those forms of textual and visual representation in which attempts are made to register, reproduce, or in some cases resist or contain the onrush of speed and its direct phenomenological and societal consequences. It is here, at the level of representation, we would suggest, that the discursive meanings with which the objective phenomenon of speed is everywhere overcoded in our culture are most overtly manifested and contested. In other words, if there is indeed a “cultural politics of speed” – if there is cause to insist that “power” is inextricably bound up with “velocity” (and the essays collected here all affirm, in their different ways, that there is) – then in theorizing these tensions we might do well to attend, with particular vigilance, to the terms in which our culture represents its experiences of speed and acceleration to itself. As we have intimated, though, perhaps the most intriguing suggestion to arise from the four contributions featured here is the notion that the very different modes of representation they analyze are all distinguished by a capacity not simply to elicit affective responses in their viewers, audiences, or readers (as might be said of any representation), but also, more specifically, to replicate or evoke the subjective effects of the experience of speed itself. What they ultimately demonstrate, then, is the extent to which discursive renderings of speed are themselves embedded within the experiential texture of contemporary “dromocracy.”A further issue inevitably arises, then, from these contributions to the contemporary study of speed: within such an apparently all-inclusive regime, where might be a vantage point from which to measure the velocities of power? Perhaps the very notion of a vantage point is itself a redundant trace from the world of fixed-point perspective and commanding views. The authors of the following essays can all attest to the adrenalizing effects of the various representational and media forms they discuss. Their task, however, is a contrary one, demanding prolonged exploration, analysis, and reflection. Indeed, there is nothing less efficient than interpretation, which insists upon torque, reversal, and a generally delayed and deferred consummation. The delay caused by inquiry is precisely that which engenders anxiety among speed-merchants, as American President George W. Bush's impatience with United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq attests. It is here, perhaps, in unhurried deliberation, that we might start to understand and critically engage with the velocities of power.This special section begins with John Beck's essay “Resistance Becomes Ballistic: Vanishing Point and the End of the Road.” Beck shows how Richard C. Sarafian's 1971 film functions as a prism through which are refracted not simply the long-standing association between automotive travel and the cinema, but also the broader conditions of acceleration, militarization, alienation, incorporation, and resistance that attended the film's production. Arguing for a Cold War ambit of referentiality, Beck indicates how the “road warrior” figure embodied by the film's protagonist, Kowalski, is subtly and insidiously militarized under conditions of what Virilio terms “pure war.” Woven throughout Beck's analysis is an engagement with the film's speed-effects; that is, with the manner in which its formal characteristics (narrative structure, use of visual and sound editing, etc.) serve to transmit to the viewer something of the temporal disorientation and distortion experienced by its numbed protagonist as he undergoes abrupt shifts in velocity. Beck argues that Vanishing Point belongs in the company of recently recovered films of the 1970s – including Watkins's Punishment Park, Klein's Mr Freedom, and Hellman's Two Lane Blacktop – which resonate powerfully with current concerns over the limits of liberty in a militarized society.In his essay “Speed, War, and Traumatic Affect: Reading Ian McEwan's Atonement,” Paul Crosthwaite identifies in this contemporary novel a parallel concern with the relationship between speed and the “war machine,” and a similar convergence of form and content. He argues that the intensified militarization of consciousness imposed on civilian populations by the power structures of the Second World War continues to bear upon the production and reception of contemporary cultural texts. The object of McEwan's novel, Crosthwaite suggests, is to evoke a reading experience that, in its precipitous shifts and disjunctions, mirrors, as it unfolds, both the frenzied rhythms of mechanized warfare, and the temporal instabilities of war's traumatic aftermath. Locating this narrative of the Second World War within a cultural context still shadowed, to a significant if often intangible extent, by the conflict, Crosthwaite speculates about the capacity of this and comparable texts to work upon this legacy in potentially disturbing ways.While Crosthwaite makes use of what has been termed Virilio's “war model” (Armitage 2000a: 3; Virilio 2000: 44–5), Bob Hanke directs Virilio's recent meditations on new media and information technologies toward the highly revealing case of Canadian electoral politics. Hanke's “Media Poll-itics in Canadian Elections: A Report on Accelerated Public Opinion” focuses attention on the (anti-) democratic implications of the rapidity with which news, opinions, and other current affairs information are transmitted in our era of “interactive,” 24-hour “infotainment.” In particular, he shows how the relentlessly rolled out opinion polls and “news” reports that characterize media coverage of elections in the technologically advanced nations purport to collate, condense, and order a bewildering deluge of information that they are themselves in large part responsible for releasing. These ephemeral media discourses in turn, he argues, contribute to a sense both of heightened anxiety and of listlessness and disaffection on the part of the viewer-electors at whom they are targeted.The final contribution, “Running To Stand Still: Late Modernity's Acceleration Fixation,” by Donncha Kavanagh, Geoff Lightfoot, and Simon Lilley, opens up a suggestive new perspective on the whole question of speed in its relation to contemporary culture and society by convincingly casting into doubt the notion – often simply presented as a truism – that our world is inexorably “accelerating.” While they acknowledge a general tendency, over the last 150 years, toward greater speed and efficiency in the realm of technology, these scholars question the near-ubiquitous slippage between announcements of increases in the speed of machinic devices, on the one hand, and claims for an escalating rate of social and cultural “change,” on the other. They demonstrate how propagations of the gospel of accelerating change in management theory, the media, popular science and business writing, governmental and corporate discourse, and elsewhere impart an urgent craving for reorganization and restructuring that is in fact deeply reactionary – a cover for the almost complete absence of substantive, progressive change, and for the paralysis of the contemporary moment.What becomes clear from the contributions collected here is that a critical cultural politics must confront the rhetoric of acceleration as directly as it does the fact of the increasing speed of social and economic processes (if indeed, following Kavanagh et al., this is a fact at all). One of the undeniable speed-effects of advanced communications technologies is the bewildering efficiency with which in formation is produced and erased. Faced with the almost already obsolete objects of an accelerated realm of commodity forms, it is the representational structures of the culture that serve to hold in view, albeit momentarily, the networks of persuasion and contradiction that give meaning to the experience of speed. What the essays in this section offer, then, beyond the local analysis of specific cultural artifacts and events, is a possible means of apprehending – laying hold of – and examining that which appears to be propelled irrevocably beyond our grasp.This special section emerged from “The Dromocratic Condition: Contemporary Cultures of Acceleration” conference held at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in March 2005. We are grateful to all those who contributed to this diverse and stimulating forum, which enormously enriched our thinking about the question of speed. Particular thanks are due to John Armitage, without whose enthusiasm and support both the conference and the resulting special section would not have been possible.