The Culture of Speed

The Coming of Immediacy

John Tomlinson

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781412912037, 9781412912020
• eBook ISBN: 9781446237854
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

"John Tomlinson?s book is an invitation to an adventure. It contains a precious key to unlock the doors into the unmapped and unexplored cultural and ethical condition of ?immediacy?. Without this key concept from now on it will not be possible to make sense of the social existence of our times and its ambivalences."
- Ulrich Beck, University of Munich

"A most welcome, stimulating and challenging exploration of the cultural impact and significance of speed in advanced modern societies. It successfully interweaves theoretical discourse, historical and contemporary analyses and imaginative use of literary sources, all of which are mobilised in order to provide an original, intellectually rewarding and critical account of the changing significance of speed in our everyday experience."
- David Frisby, London School of Economics and Political Science

Is the pace of life accelerating? If so, what are the cultural, social, personal and economic consequences?

This stimulating and accessible book examines how speed emerged as a cultural issue during industrial modernity. The rise of capitalist society and the shift to urban settings was rapid and tumultuous and was defined by the belief in ?progress?. The first obstacle faced by societies that were starting to ?speed up? was how to regulate and control the process. The attempt to regulate the acceleration of life created a new set of problems, namely the way in which speed escapes regulation and rebels against controls. This pattern of acceleration and control subsequently defined debates about the cultural effects of acceleration.

However, in the 21st century ?immediacy?, the combination of fast capitalism and the saturation of the everyday by media technologies, has emerged as the core feature of control. This coming of immediacy will inexorably change how we think about and experience media culture, consumption practices, and the core of our cultural and moral values.

Incisive and richly illustrated, this eye-opening account of speed and culture provides an original guide to one of the central features of contemporary culture and everyday life.

1

Introduction: The Cultural Significance of Speed

Sociological observations in the mouths of princes are events rare enough to attract notice. So when Charles, Prince of Wales, heir apparent to the British throne, spoke on the BBC of the need for, ‘a gentler, calmer approach to life in a world which has become frenetic’ he was widely reported. ‘[T]he aim seems to be to go ever faster, but’, mused Charles, ‘I often wonder, how much faster can we all go?’¹

This is a commonplace observation of people at a certain stage in the life course and so might be passed over as simply wistful retrospection; as the tendency for people to experience the world they live in as swifter paced, more pressured, than that of their youth, or of the world described to them by their parents. ‘Où sont les neiges d’antan?’ The Prince’s remarks are, of course, subjective and impressionistic and, no doubt, in part nostalgic – for as Richard Sennett wisely says, ‘what sensitive soul isn’t?’. But there is more to it. Charles is known for statements on a range of issues, from organic farming to architecture, which express a rather complicated – and by no means platitudinous – shade of cultural conservatism. His comments on the pace of life, then, inevitably constitute an intervention in cultural politics. They give the imprimatur to a current of thought that not only regrets the demise of a world we have lost, but wants to change the one we have.

This is a current of thought that has been present in modern industrial societies since their inception, and which gained perhaps its strongest organized form, in the shape of the ‘slow movement’, around the turn of the present century. But in all this time it has been a minority position. Though many people routinely complain about the pace of life, and though some try to organize against it, this has never, thus far, translated into a positive social philosophy potent enough to displace speed from its central position in the cultural imagination. Acceleration rather than deceleration has been the constant leitmotiv of cultural modernity.

This book explores the different ways in which speed has preoccupied the cultural imagination of modern societies, and the way in which this imagination has shifted decisively in recent years. In doing this it takes seriously the claim implicit in Charles’s intervention, that the sense of living ‘a faster life’ is not a sort of anthropological constant of generational succession, but a contingent state of affairs: a genuine and significant shift in temporality that occurs and accelerates specifically in modern societies. Why should this be? Speed is not a phenomenon unnoticed in its cultural aspects before the coming of modernity, so why should modern societies be so deeply pervaded by its experience? Everywhere gestured towards, but seldom rigorously theorized, the connection between speed and cultural modernity deserves careful analysis. And we can begin with some conceptual clarification.

What is speed?

First of all, speed is fast. The English term ‘speed’ has a double meaning, denoting both a general calculable, relative rate of movement or incident – low through to high speed – and then, specifically, rapidity. This is interesting: one might even say that the concept of speed points towards its increase. From the perspective of cultural analysis, then, it is rapid speed, speed thought of as remarkable in its increase, that is the dominant meaning. This is not to say, of course, that things which happen slowly are devoid of interest – take for instance the concept of ‘glacial time’ that has been adopted to express the slow rate of change of traditional cultural attitudes and values. But it is without doubt the increase of speed that has set the cultural agenda of modernity. Indeed the recent interest in slower paced lifestyles that we are currently witnessing in the ‘slow food’ and ‘slow cities’ movements is understandable only within the broader definition of speed as fast.

The next issue to clarify is the connection of speed with physical movement. This gives us the most common, intuitive understanding of speed – swift running, fast cars – as well as the most elegant mathematical definition: SPEED = DISTANCE Ù TIME. The relation to movement is clearly an important one, and it has its own distinct cultural implications for modernity – most notably in the application of mechanization to human mobility. However, for the purposes of cultural analysis, there is another useful definition which refers us not exclusively to movement, but to a rate of occurrence of events. When we speak of life getting faster, we are mostly thinking in terms of this broader definition. The experience of the ‘speed of life’ is of the rate at which things happen – or appear to happen – to us; the pace of change in our lives. ‘Life getting faster’ is therefore, most generally, the crowding of incident into our days and the demands this makes upon our resources of energy, time and the attribution of meaning.

Of course there are many ways in which speed as physical movement re-enters this broader definition. We may actually move our bodies faster – for example walk at a faster pace – in response to the feeling of having too much to do and not enough time in which to do it. Or the experience of the speed of mechanized transport, as it becomes integrated into our daily routines may contribute to the experience of an increasingly stressful pace of life. For example, routinely driving long distances between home and workplace generally involves the estimation of a journey time down to a precise number of minutes, typically with little margin left for error. Unforeseen traffic delays, road works, obstruction from other drivers or mechanical breakdowns may therefore produce disproportionate levels of stress for commuters as they imagine their schedules collapsing before the working day has even begun. To explain routine speeding, driving impatience and stress – or even the more extreme phenomenon of ‘road rage’ – we probably have to look beyond the immediate contexts of driver psychology and the human-machine interface and appreciate how these have become structurally integrated with a modern ‘high speed’ lifestyle.

Speed as physical movement, then, frequently interweaves with speed as rate of incident. However the latter has some analytic precedence. We can, of course, experience time pressure, haste, hurry and rush – all of these essentially cultural-phenomenological rather than physical descriptions – without ever stirring from our office desk. And what we might call ‘sedentary speed’ becomes increasingly significant when we try to account for the integration of media technologies into our everyday lives. So to understand the culture of modern speed in its broadest terms we need to approach it as a context in which, in various modes, events crowd into our daily lives. Some of these modes involve increasing physical mobility, but others might be better understood as an increase in the rate of ‘delivery’ of experience.

A third fundamental set of issues has to do with how cultural speed is regarded. An increasing pace of life has both its critics and its enthusiasts, but it is rarely regarded neutrally. Speed is always a matter of cultural value. But, like much else in modern societies, the attribution of value here is not a straightforward issue. Speed exhibits different aspects, it offers both pleasures and pains, exhilarations and stresses, emancipation and domination. And frequently these aspects appear to us so intertwined that it seems impossible, as individuals, to say whether an increasing pace of life is, in essence, a good or a bad thing. It is rather something to be shrugged at as, ‘just the way life is today’, or to be addressed in the market-derived social calculus of upsides and downsides.

This ambiguity over the value of speed is felt in the language we use to describe it. In English at least, there is a rich array of meanings, nuances, connotations and derived expressions attaching to the terminology of speed which seems to reflect our mixed feelings towards it.

On the one hand, there is a good deal of terminological evidence of cultural disapproval, or at least suspicion, of the life lived at too rapid a pace. A fast talker may be quick witted, but is suspected of deceitful intent – probably trying to pull a fast one; almost certainly out to make a fast buck. Similarly, work done at speed – a quick fix – is suspected of shoddiness and marked down compared to a methodical ‘slow but sure’ approach. To indulge in a ‘quickie’ – whether in terms of alcohol or sex – speaks of yielding to desires and temptations which one might feel shifty about admitting to publicly.

However this disapproval doesn’t always amount to a direct rejection of the value of speed. If Aesop’s tortoise enjoys moral approval it is, ultimately, because he won the race: it is the hare’s overconfidence and subsequent indolence, rather than its innate dynamism that is disapproved of. ‘More haste less speed’, in a similar way, warns against a certain type of ill-considered and counterproductive disposal of energy and effort rather than attacking the goal of speed itself.

Indeed, on the other hand, there is a wealth of positive associations which reach back to the archaic meaning of speed as success or prosperity – as in ‘God send you good speed’ – and of ‘quick’ as meaning ‘alive’ – as in ‘the quick and the dead’. This association with vitality and life energy is the one that has survived most into contemporary language. To be quick – quick witted, quick on the uptake – is to be lively, alert, intelligent. Such a person is liable to succeed in life – to have their career ‘fast-tracked’ and, perhaps, to end up living life in the fast lane. If we aspire to this sort of career success and prosperity we need to get up to speed with the latest developments in our field. Clearly the underlying cultural metaphor here is of life as a competition, as a race to achievement. We may, of course, disapprove of this sort of attitude to life, regarding it as part of the insidious ideology of western capitalist-consumerism, or more simply as a rather unreflective ‘heads down’ conformity to the modern rat-race. And, indeed, if this were all that was implied, a life lived at speed could scarcely be deemed a particularly rich or virtuous one. However, this would be to neglect the deeper existential associations – though frequently cashed, it has to be said, in the vulgar currency of material accumulation – of speed.

For example, to ‘quicken’ is also ‘to give life or vigour, to rouse, to animate, to stimulate’ (OED). In an archaic usage it is to kindle a flame, to make a fire burn brighter – in a sense, to bring light into the world. When the Virgin Mary ‘quickened in her womb’ she reached the stage in her mysterious pregnancy at which the first movements of the foetus – of a biological life which was to become a principle of spiritual life – could be felt. These associations are, to be sure, slightly remote from the contemporary discourse of speed, but they nonetheless point us towards a significant evaluative connection between speed, energy, dynamism, vitality and (pro)creativity.

There may be something rather particular to the Judeo-Christian tradition here. It is notable that sloth – ‘laziness, reluctance to make an effort’ – makes it into St Thomas Aquinas’s list of the seven deadly sins, while there is no specific censure of impatience or impetuosity. (Although to be quick tempered gets dangerously close to the sin of anger and certainly does not imitate the forbearance of God who, viewing things sub specie aeternitatis is, of course, ‘slow to anger’.)

Beyond these particularities, however, the association of speed with vigour and vitality seems to be quite general. Speed as a measure of physical prowess and sporting achievement has been common in most cultures. Running was originally the single event of the ancient Olympics. But more significantly, to maintain a certain brisk pace to life itself, in the sense of making the most of the enigmatic finite gift of existence, or of actualizing our human potential – at least of not squandering it in brutish indolence – has been widely considered a virtue.

Whilst it may be unwise – hasty, even – to draw any strong lessons from these commonly expressed cultural values, they do point us towards two other important questions. One of these is the question of how values and attitudes towards speed may be changing, of how older implicit senses of the appropriate pace of life may be losing ground to new sensibilities and even associated senses of social virtue. This is something we shall consider later in the book. But, more immediately, there is the question of how these diverse, ambivalent and frequently contradictory common attitudes and values have been shaped into more or less coherent, if generally implicit, narratives in the complex cultural discourse of modernity.

Speed in the record of modernity

It has to be said here that these narratives have not been significantly shaped as the result of direct social or cultural-theoretical analysis. One of the most curious facts about speed is that, despite its being central to the cultural experience of modern societies, it is hardly ever directly and independently addressed in the major social scientific accounts of modernity. In the writings of the classical sociologists – witnesses to the most profound historical step change in both physical and social velocity that occurred during the nineteenth century – the phenomenon of speed crops up, at best, as an adjunct to other debates and issues.

In Durkheim, unless vaguely inferred as a constituent part of the division of labour characteristic of advanced societies, speed is entirely invisible. In Marx, there is a good deal more attention, most notably in the various discussions throughout Capital and in the Grundrisse of the importance of the speed of ‘turnover time’ for the realization of profit in the overall theory of the circulation of capital. Thus, for example, Marx writes in the Grundrisse:

In as much as the circuits which capital travels in order to go from one of [its] forms into the other constitute sections of circulation, and these sections are travelled in specific amounts of time (even spatial distance reduces itself to time; the important thing e.g. is not the market’s distance in space but the speed – the amount of time – by which it can be reached), by that much the velocity of circulation, the time in which it is accomplished, is a determinant of . . . how often capital can be realized in a given time. (1973: 538)

Marx develops these ideas on the next page in a famous passage which has come to represent more generally the inherently accelerating and globalizing tendencies of capitalism:

Thus whilst capital must on the one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e. to exchange, and to conquer the whole earth for its market, it strives on the other side to annihilate this space with time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another. (1973: 539)

Clearly speed is important to Marx not only in terms of its place in theoretical political economy, but also in understanding developments in the order of modern spatiality (Harvey, 1999) and in the interpretation of the rise of new technologies – particularly communications and transportation systems. And, in a famous passage from The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels imply a context of cultural acceleration in their discussion of the turbulence and dynamism of the bourgeois era:

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations . . . are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air. (1969: 52)

But in all of these cases the references are oblique and the experience of speed is noticed primarily as the backdrop to other dramas: the dynamic but contradictory nature of capitalist economic development and the class antagonisms that are inherent in this.

Of the classical sociologists it is Max Weber who gives us perhaps the most explicit reference to speed as a dimension of modern life in his discussion of the nature of bureaucratic organizations. In Economy and Society he compares the social relations of this ‘ideal-type’ organizational form with the characteristics of machinery:

The fully developed bureaucratic apparatus compares with other organizations exactly as does the machine with the non-mechanical modes of production. Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs – these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration. (Weber, 1978: 973)

Weber goes on to observe that in modern bureaucracies which have eliminated the particularism and the interpersonal conflict and compromise inherent in traditional organizations like collegiate bodies, ‘official business is discharged precisely and with as much speed as possible’ (1978: 974). And it scarcely matters that this was not in fact empirically correct: that, as Frank Parkin points out, ‘Real bureaucracies, far from living up to Weber’s model of “precision, speed and unambiguity” are likely to be cumbersome, slow and full of muddle’ (Parkin, 1982: 36). For whatever the epistemological status of the construct of the ‘ideal type’ (Parkin, 1982: 30f.; Morrison, 1995: 270f.), Weber’s discussion of bureaucracies has a quite separate status as a reflexive constituent of the broad cultural imagination of modernity, in which, as we shall see, speed becomes deeply linked to ideas of reason, progress, order an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: The Cultural Significance of Speed
• 2 Machine Speed
• 3 Unruly Speed
• 4 The Condition of Immediacy
• 5 Media
• 6 Delivery
• 7 Deceleration?
• Bibliography
• Index