Dead Heat
I cannot currently locate the citation, but once I recall Beat poet Allen Ginsberg (or was it Michael McClure?) had a vision that the entire world was so full of cars and people that it just stopped in a global traffic jam, frozen. It was a typical Blakean Beat sort of vision, a world of terror and beauty, innocence revealed, fraughtly, in experience, the failures of human sociality and technological innovation rendering a kind of spiritual opportunity to see something else possible from disaster. Most of all, though, 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.
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.
The world has sped up due to technologies of communication, transportation, computation, integration. Yet in speeding up, the phenomenological experience is, strangely, of a new kind of slowness. 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 produces not just the awesome sublimity of Henry Adams’ dynamo, a new kind of bigness, but also a feeling of torpor and inertia, a new sort of slowness. 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. 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. 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. As the world has sped up, it has quite oddly also slowed down. Scales of motion do not match anymore. Increasingly accessing the cloud, we find our feet stuck in the muck, decreasing in power and thrust. We are out of sync.
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.
