The Politics of Speed

Capitalism, the State and War in an Accelerating World

Simon Glezos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415820547
• eBook ISBN: 9781136642623
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Everyone agrees that the world is accelerating. With advances in communication, transportation and information processing technologies, it is clear that the pace of events in global politics is speeding up at an alarming rate. The implications of this new speed however, continue to be a significant source of debate. Will acceleration lead to a more interconnected, productive, peaceful, and humane world; or a nightmarish descent into ecological devastation, economic exploitation and increasingly violent warfare?

The Politics of Speed attempts to map the contours of the new global space of speed, and investigates key issue areas – including democratic governance, warfare, capitalism, globalization and transnational activism – to uncover the ways in which acceleration is shaping the world. The book uses contemporary political theory (especially the works of Deleuze and Guattari) to develop an ontological account of speed, showing how its effects are frequently far more complex and surprising than we might expect. The result is an attempt to craft a way of engaging with global acceleration that might help avoid the dangers of speed, while embracing the possibilities it provides us with to produce a safer, more egalitarian, democratic and pluralistic world.

1 The ticking bomb

Speed, democracy and the politics of the future

The affair cries haste, and speed must answer it.

(Othello, Act 1, Scene 3)

The ticking bomb

It’s called ‘the ticking bomb scenario’: imagine a terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb somewhere in a major metropolitan centre. The terrorist has been captured, and knows where the bomb is, but the bomb is set to go off soon and torture is the only way to find out its location. Do you torture the terrorist?

What’s important about this particular thought experiment is not the extreme utilitarian calculus that it seems to call into being (the lives of many versus the pain of one) but rather its very explicit temporal element. It is not just that there is a bomb, but that it’s a ticking bomb. The imminence of the threat precludes any action other than torture (or at least so the scenario claims). Implicit in the narrative is the idea that the pace of events makes following traditional moral prohibitions – not to mention legal rights and due process – unfeasible and inefficient.¹

The scenario is, like most thought experiments, absurd in its premises. It assumes, first of all, that we know for a fact that a nuclear bomb has been planted, but we have absolutely no other information about its location (or, apparently, any other avenues for acquiring that information). It assumes absolutely certainty that we have arrested the culprit responsible for planting the bomb. It assumes that he will be unable to withstand torture for long enough to allow the ticking bomb to go off, or that he will not provide false information, sending the authorities on a wild goose chase. Furthermore, it assumes that by focusing on this potentially false information, the authorities are not being distracted from other, more concrete leads (which, of course, we’ve assumed don’t exist). However, as a philosophical exercise, it does lead to the interesting question of how urgency and speed might trump ethical commitments and legal regimes of rights and protection.²

Unfortunately, just because something is absurd doesn’t mean it will lack political efficacy (indeed, frequently it seems just the opposite). In recent years, there have been many invocations of the ticking bomb scenario as a way of justifying a legitimate – and most importantly executive-centred – right to torture. It has been brought up during senate subcommittee hearings on torture. It has also been advanced by well-known legal scholars such as Alan Dershowitz, in defence of his plan for ‘torture warrants’ in cases of pressing concerns (Dershowitz 2004, 2006). These arguments in favour of a right on behalf of either the executive or the judiciary to authorize torture (or, rather, the revocation of the right not to be tortured) necessarily take the temporal element as their justification. Torture is not to be used in most criminal cases because there is no urgent threat to disqualify the (apparently) inefficient requirements of due process. However, the ‘new era of terrorism’ inaugurated with the 9/11 attacks has placed a premium on rapid, flexible responses. In other words, we no longer have the time not to torture.

The ticking bomb scenario and the right to torture are simply the leading edge of a much broader move within politics to use an accelerating pace of events (and threats) as justification for an abandonment of traditional ethical constraints, legal structures of due process and political checks and balances, in the name of a more efficient and unitary capacity for executive action. For example, in a series of memos to the White House, members of the Department of Justice such as Alberto Gonzalez and John Yoo argued for an increased scope in executive powers (such as the ability to wage wars, abrogate foreign treaties and determine the status of foreign combatants) on the basis of, amongst other rationales, the new urgency of the pace of events and threats in the political world. While justifying the executive’s right to torture enemy combatants (and more broadly the executive’s right to withdraw from treaties which might constrain its ability to torture), Department of Justice lawyer Alberto Gonzalez argues for the mitigating circumstances of the need for speed and flexibility in response to terror threats:

As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war. It is not the traditional clash between nations adhering to the laws of war that formed the backdrop for GPW [the Geneva Convention]. The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians, and the need to try terrorists for war crimes such as wantonly killing civilians. In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitation on questioning of enemy prisoners.

(Gonzalez 2002)

Though these memos were circulated in secret, the claim to increased executive authority in the face of an accelerating pace of threat has become increasingly common, and public, in the last few years. John Yoo, author of an earlier Department of Justice memo claiming increased presidential powers, published a book arguing that there is constitutional support for expanded executive authority. At least part of his argument relies on the need for an increased ‘flexibility’ in executive decision-making (Yoo 2005: 8–9). The new, post-9/11 world requires a unitary, autonomous executive, he says, unchecked by standards of divided government or constitutional restrictions:

The cost of inaction, for example, by allowing the vetoes of multiple decisionmakers to block warmaking, could entail much higher costs than scholars in the 1990s had envisioned. At the time of the Cold War, the costs to American national security of refraining from the use of force in places like Haiti, Somalia, or Kosovo would have appeared negligible. The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, however, demonstrate that the costs of inaction can be extremely high – the possibility of a direct attack on the United States and the deaths of thousands of civilians.

(Yoo 2005: x)

In a world of proliferating and accelerating threats, the greatest danger is inaction, says Yoo. Decision-making processes must be streamlined, authority centralized, and the executive freed of legal, political or ethical encumbrances which might limit the flexibility of its response. The novelty of this threat is not just the magnitude of the danger, but the speed with which it materializes. Like the ticking bomb scenario, the problem is not the utilitarian calculus but the fact that we no longer have time to allow for democratic consultation and constitutional limitations. The executive must be able to respond quickly and authoritatively to whatever new threats the world might throw at America.

At this point, however, we might take yet another step backwards. We might notice that the logic of the ticking bomb and its attendant claim about the need for increased executive authority is, in fact, not a new one. Though its application has unquestionably intensified in the post-9/11 era, it has in fact justified a steady transition of authority to the executive for years now. This increase of executive authority has extended beyond issues of national security, although this has certainly been its strongest quarter. In the United States, the executive has lobbied for, and received, increased ability to negotiate trade treaties, conduct diplomacy and even influence domestic legislation. What is more, this is not a uniquely American experience. In democracies all over the world, there has been a steady empowering of the executive on the basis of, amongst other factors, the acceleration of the pace of events (Scheuerman 2004: 92–3, 108–9).

In this chapter, I will examine the threat that speed supposedly poses to democracy. I will begin by investigating William Scheuerman’s account of what I call the ‘liberal narrative of speed’, the tradition within liberal democratic thought which, I argue, accepts the logic of the ticking bomb, and believes that speed is a threat to democratic practice and requires an expansion of the power of the executive. However, I will then go on to argue that the liberal narrative is based on an inherently flawed account of acceleration; that it ignores the way in which technological acceleration can also provide important tools which foster democratic practice. Then, through an ontological analysis of speed, I argue that the move to expand the power of the executive in the face of acceleration is a result not of the functional threat which acceleration poses to a political community, but rather of the existential threat. I will argue that the push for increased executive authority is the result of a sense of ressentiment against speed, against the uncertainty and destabilization which acceleration brings to stable narratives of political community and identity. Finally, I will investigate how this fear of speed is manifested in the democratic thought of Sheldon Wolin. Note that the choice of liberalism, on the one hand, and the work of Sheldon Wolin, on the other, is deliberate, insofar as both are, to a greater or lesser degree, deeply attached to democratic practice and governance. It is useful, then, to investigate how, in even a strongly democratic character, a ressentiment against speed can foster anti-democratic sentiments. In (post)modern life, the spectre of the ticking bomb haunts democracy. It claims a kind of necessity for itself, arguing for the increasing impossibility of democracy in periods of acceleration. It will be the goal of this chapter to challenge this necessity, to argue that the anti-democratic impulse should be located not primarily in the ticking bomb, but in ourselves.

Speed and liberal democracy

According to the liberal narrative, the central threat that speed poses to democracy is that it enhances the power of the least democratic branch of government, the executive. Within the liberal tradition, it is argued that the executive is best adapted to deal with an accelerating pace of events, while the legislative branch is ill equipped for an environment of substantial instability and rapid change. The liberal narrative of speed argues that

the widely endorsed conception of the unitary executive as an ‘energetic’ entity best capable of acting with dispatch means that social acceleration often promotes executive-centered government and the proliferation of executive discretion while weakening broad-based representative legislatures as well as traditional models of constitutionalism and the rule of law.

(Scheuerman 2004: xiv)

The liberal democratic tradition has always assumed that the processes of democratic debate and decision-making are necessarily cumbersome and slow, making the legislative branch incapable of acting in the face of fast-moving events:

Legislative politics is typically conceived as resting on a process of free-wheeling deliberation involving a rich sample of public opinion, and liberal thinkers have repeatedly emphasized the necessarily measured and unhurried prerequisites of a legitimate process of reasonable debate in which participants possess a fair chance to express distinct political views and defend a multiplicity of interests.

(Scheuerman 2004: 38)

This is in contrast to the unitary, ‘energetic’ executive, which is able to make decisions in a rapid and efficient manner.

Now, within liberal democratic thought there was always an understanding that there would be some events that would be too rapid to be dealt with by the legislative branch, and hence the executive was to be assigned some power to act independently in response to unexpected occurrences.³ Because there always exists the potential for events which the legislative body cannot deal with in a timely manner, the liberal narrative of speed says that the executive must be legitimately able to act unilaterally. The narrative goes on, however, to argue that there has been a fundamental and general acceleration of the pace of modern life, and that this acceleration has increased the number of situations in which a rapid governmental response is required. This means that the legislative branch is becoming increasingly incapable of managing the political sphere, leading to more and more government action via independent executive order. Says Scheuerman about this shift,

Assumptions about the energetic executive potentially open the door to an executive-dominated system of constitutional adaptation, because appeals to the executive’s high-speed character typically justify its impressive power. The dictates of speed cry out for flexible, rapid-fire institutional responses and the classical temporal portrait of the executive will lead many political and legal actors to deem the executive best attuned to tackling the imperative of constitutional adaptation.

(Scheuerman 2004: 100–1)

And, says Scheuerman, this prediction is playing out. Increasingly, liberal democratic polities around the world are seeing a steady transfer of authority, either de jure or de facto, from legislative to executive bodies. Executives the world over (although this has been most easily seen in the American context) have been using the liberal narrative of speed and the volatility of world events as an argument for the increased transfer of power from legislative oversight to executive directive.⁴ This is sometimes lamented for the injury which it does to democratic process, but is frequently accepted as necessary to ensure the government’s continual effective responsiveness to crisis and catastrophe. Democracy – at least robust, ‘free-wheeling’ democracy – was a luxury of the past, which is impossible in today’s fast-paced, unpredictable world.⁵

What is remarkable, however, is that, after laying out this narrative, Scheuerman then goes on to argue that it is, potentially, a deeply flawed argument; saying, ‘perhaps the traditional contrast between slow-going deliberare and high-speed agere no longer makes sense (Scheuerman 2004: 101)?’ This is because the liberal narrative of speed assumes that the general acceleration of modern life has affected only the context in which the legislative and executive branches function, but has had no significant effect on the way in which they function. Scheuerman argues this is not true in the case of either branch.

First, the idea of the unitary executive, energetic and capable of acting quickly and efficiently, is, in many ways, a left-over from the early days of liberal democracy, when the executive was a much smaller administrative organization. In response to this image, Scheuerman argues:

the contemporary executive is a complicated institution, made up of a rich variety of (oftentimes conflicting) bureaucratic units: the emphasis on traditional reflections on the unitary and even solitary nature of the executive badly obscures the empirical executive decision making. Even when the executive branch acts unilaterally, seemingly straightforward undertakings can prove toilsome and time consuming, as anyone familiar with the less-than-efficient operations of the modern executive can attest.

(Scheuerman 2004: 101)

Ironically, as the executive appropriates more and more spheres of authority to itself on the basis of its perceived efficiency, it becomes more fragmented and inefficient.

The United States was given an unfortunate and chilling example of the potential slowness, ineptness and inefficiency of executive action in the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans and surrounding areas. And this was a natural disaster, second only, perhaps, to a surprise military attack in terms of the paradigmatic emergency situation which the executive is supposed to deal with, and not even part of that creeping sphere of influence which the executive has begun to procure for itself under the rubric of the liberal narrative of speed. (Indeed, the failures of the administration were all the more glaring to the extent that, unlike a surprise military attack, the threat of Katrina was known well in advance.) Now, of course, one instance of bureaucratic incompetence does not necessarily disprove the thesis. But it does bring to the fore the various complications which the increased speed and scope of a political community can bring to the supposedly unitary, energetic executive: overlapping jurisdictions, ineffective lines of communication, poor preparation and the lack of situational awareness. There are various efforts that can improve these problems, but it is unlikely, given the character of modern governance, that they will ever be completely eliminated. The image of the executive as custom made for the challenges of modern acceleration is therefore more present in the narrative than in real life.

Conversely, the image of the slow, inefficient legislative branch is also somewhat anachronistic, based as it is on the transportation and communication technologies of centuries past. Says Scheuerman:

early modern discussions of popular deliberation arguably presuppose underdeveloped forms of transportation and communication: well into the nineteenth century, elected representatives were forced to engage in time-consuming travel to meet their colleagues, and correspondence or news might require weeks or even months to reach its target. In an age of instantaneous communication and high-speed travel the temporal presuppositions of popular deliberation are dramatically different than in the days of Hamilton, or even Mill, as new technologies potentially allow huge numbers of people to exchange views at unparalleled speed. The association of popular deliberation with ‘slowness’ no longer deserves the self-evident character that it possessed for so many of our historical predecessors.

(Scheuerman 2004: 102)

Here we see how accelerative technologies can aid in the practice of democratic legislative politics in key ways. Scheuerman later invokes the example of the anthrax scare which shut down Congress and several other buildings in Washington, DC. Despite being physically dispersed, Congress continued to communicate and govern through the use of mobile and handheld communication technologies. Additionally, he discusses the way in which high-speed media c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• 1. The ticking bomb: speed, democracy and the politics of the future
• 2. The quick and the dead: state and nomad war-machines in Deleuze and Virilio
• 3. The acceleration of inertia: towards a political economy of speed
• 4. Regimes of (im)mobility: towards an international political economy of speed
• 5. A world in which many worlds fit’: on rhizomatic cosmopolitanism
• Conclusion: ‘We have never been territorial’: fear and hope in an accelerating world
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index