taking stock of the new tempos of the twenty-first century.
Allen Ginsberg (or was it Michael McClure?) once had a vision that the entire world was so full of cars that it just stopped in a global traffic jam, frozen, everyone united in their collective failure to get anywhere individually. It was a typical Blakean sort of Beat vision: a world of terror and beauty; innocence revealed, fraughtly, in experience; the flaws of technological innovation rendering a kind of spiritual opportunity; something else possible, maybe even utopian, revealed from disaster.
Most of all, however, this vision strikes me as presaging new dynamics of tempo and time in human living that was just beginning to emerge in the postwar era, when the Beats were at their most active. This sense of things speeding up until they clotted up would get picked up as a theme, of course, in many places, such as Don Delillo’s fiction or Mark Fisher’s social criticism or the remarkable Christian Marclay film The Clock.
We might say that the world has sped up due to technologies of communication, transportation, computation, integration; yet in speeding up, the phenomenological experience is, strangely, of slowing down. The cars are in a traffic jam, but the traffic jam is somehow a kind of slow-motion car crash as well. Rapidity, fastness, vastness of scale produce not merely the awesome sublimity of Henry Adams’ dynamo, a new kind of bigness, a new set of moral conditions and sensorial dimensions, but also a feeling of torpor and inertia, an unexpected languidness.
From climate change to computation, finance to governmental action, entropy and decay rule precisely because consolidation and concentration increase. We no longer have a clear sense of how centralization and decentralization relate to each other. Increasingly accessing the cloud, we find our feet stuck in the muck, decreasing in power and thrust. We are out of sync.
Acceleration, experienced in its current arrangement of intensified automation and connectedness, starts to feel like deceleration. The hare has become a tortoise, the sprinter a laggard. Momentum produces stillness. The more the pace quickens, the slower we perceive the motion.
Scales of motion do not match anymore. A sort of counterintuitive narcosis of speed has developed in contemporary culture, the feeling that things are moving so fast, circulating so quickly, that we have arrived at a stalemate, or worse yet we sink into a kind of slow rot. It is an experience of a kind of hurtling listlessness.
The challenge for humans in the twenty-first century, perhaps, is to find our legs in these new tempos of slow and fast combined into a new equation, when the dynamo, pumping harder than ever before, starts to seem like it is in a dead heat.