Speed

Abstract

Sitting in near darkness about eighteen inches from the screen, he turned the channel selector every half minute or so, sometimes much more frequently. He wasn't looking for something that might sustain his interest. Hardly that. He simply enjoyed jerking the dial into fresh image-burns. He explored content to a point. The tactile visual delight of switching channels took precedence, however, transforming even random moments of content into pleasing territorial abstractions. -- Don DeLillo (16) DeLillo captures in a few lines key aspects of a cultural narrative concerning how technology has sped up human lives. The speeds at which forms are transmitted and affect the ways we apprehend the world. Speed is enjoyable. Speed abstracts. Speed is visceral. Speed fragments. We are both agents of its processes and subject to its force. Like DeLillo's channel surfer then you may explore the content of this 'speed' issue of M/C with a certain mobility, and yet you are constrained to pass through at some speed. If you're interested please hang around for a while... This issue acknowledges the reification of speed, its elevation into a mysterious quality continuous with general cultural conditions. It has ceased to be a variable among and equal to others, or one that gains its value from local happenings. It is a cultural dominant. And in this usage speed has, of course, come to stand for high speed, not slow or any speed. Virilio, the founder of dromology, is perhaps the outstanding contemporary theorist of inherent speed culture. He urges that political analysis must start from a recognition of speed, viewing it as intertwined with current conditions of technology and capitalism. The force of speed needs thinking through though. Is it Virilio's generalised tyranny, a global accident? What is at stake? One possible answer to this question can be drawn from the very definition of 'speed': as anyone who has ever rushed to make a date they were late to would know, speed expresses a relationship between space and time, between a distance covered and a time elapsed. As the noted Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes, "'distance' is a social product; its length varies depending upon the speed with which it may be overcome (and, in a monetary economy, on the cost involved in the attainment of that speed" (12). The higher the speed, the greater the distance covered in any given time period -- and the secret to attaining the speed is the ability to pay the price. For those who can meet the price, space is dematerialised: communication, movement, the satisfaction of desires, is instantaneous. The residents of the first world who are empowered by the new economic processes, who can pay for the speed, "live in a perpetual present, ... are constantly busy and perpetually 'short of time'". For those who -- for whatever reason -- cannot afford the speed, time is decomposed by space, trapped by and in space. As Bauman argues, those without the access to speed are "marooned in the opposite world ... crushed under the burden of abundant, redundant and useless time they have nothing to fill with" (88). As Bauman succinctly and pithily puts it: "rather than homogenising the human condition, the technological annulment of temporal/spatial distances tends to polarise it" (18). Speed is a cultural dominant because its possession -- or the lack thereof -- defines people's social and economic future: it marks one's cards, determines one's destiny, more precisely, more forcefully and more thoroughly than any genetic sequence identified by the Human Genome Project ever could. In this light, our contributors take us through an excursus of the range, limits and functions of speed. Our feature writer, Esther Milne, takes a historical perspective on the perceptual reconfigurations of space and time that come with changes in communications and transport technologies. She observes how twentieth-century commentators including Marinetti, Harvey and Castells have heralded the arrivals of new temporal regimes on the basis of technological and economic changes. However, by examining eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English reactions to the use of the mail coach, train and telegraph to relay messages, she identifies a longer tradition of commentary on communication technologies, which sets up themes -- such as the possible alienation of messages from physical bodies -- that are still applied today. Claudia Mesch, in her contribution "Racing Berlin: the Games of Run Lola Run", takes us into the Berlin of Tom Tykwer's recent movie Run Lola Run. Playfully using the multiple narrative style of the movie, Mesch alternately discusses the film's narrative and visual form to comment upon its characterisations; its physical and spatial location to comment upon its intra- and extra-diagetic textualities; and its filmic tropes and conventions to comment upon the historical, geo-political and mythic existence of Berlin as a lived space. In a timely review article of Virilio's latest book The Information Bomb, John Armitage reflects upon Virilio's current thinking about speed, digital technologies and the state of the world. He outlines the metaphors of the militarisation of information that Virilio is using to describe the social and political effects of an explosively fast technoculture, and contrasts Virilio's thinking with that of Negroponte and Baudrillard. Sadeq Rahimi explores the shrinking of time and the virtualisation of space to question how identity is redefined in the postmodern condition. Utilising the work of Helga Nowotny, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, amongst others, Rahimi argues that the self-identity constructed by these changing social conditions can no longer be described as human -- bound as this is by both space and time -- and calls for the theoretical and philosophical development of a new, posthuman theory of identity. Writing at the time of millennium fever McKenzie Wark takes a 'detour' away from the incessant media multiplication of a single moment by contemplating the enduring architectural media of ancient Egypt. Wark is thereafter able to put into relief how the twentieth century mummified change itself and in doing so has created new media empires designed to extend their dominion through momentary saturations of space. The tour stops by Valery, Innis, Microsoft, Time-Warner and the London Millennium Dome. Brian Ward draws our attention to the social and cultural experience of speed, and the ways to which speed is the result of an obsession, under capitalist rationalities, with notions of progress, advancement and unique sensation. Discussing the function of speed within the proto-Fascist philosophy of the Italian Futurist movement, Ward points to the way its overt fascination with speed foregrounds a more latent, yet no less obsessive, preoccupation with speed and progress within contemporary Western metaphysics. In "Fleshing Out the Maelstrom" Paul Taylor shows how the recent Biopunk fiction of Jeff Noon and Michael Marshall Smith plays out a contemporary ontological confusion between the physical and the informational. Going beyond Cyberpunk's exaggeration of digital abstractions, Biopunk metaphorises information's colonisation of the physical world as a "an alarming maelstrom of biological uncertainty" in which a fecund capitalism breeds mergers, images, and a smorgasbord of private products that overrun social life. In "Waiting for Instantaneity" Maya Drozdz reflects upon the temporal paradoxes of cyberspace. She questions Virilio's and Baudrillard's suppositions of realtime mediation arguing that movement in cyberspace is "subordinate to connection speed and loadtime", which means all online content is mediated by the temporalities of its transmission. She outlines online narratives that have arisen to accommodate and investigate the discrepancy between transmission time 'as it happens' and its perception and draws parallels with filmic techniques for creating temporal continuity. Kate Eichhorn also examines speed of the Net applying it to arguments about the effectivity of hate speech. She shows how the "speed and subsequent loss of orientation" that Virilio associates with virtual environments may actually prove the grounds for its recuperation. While cyberhate may still injure, the speed at which it may be recontextualised by parody, critique and the mobility of the reader disrupt its perlocutionary effects. In contrast to Ward, Gwendolyn Stansbury argues against the speed of contemporary life. Extrapolating the Slow Food movement's critique of fast food, she posits the negative effect that the modern pace of life has on the communal experience of preparing and eating food together. Finally, as a special feature this issue, we bring you a recording of a seminar recently presented by the noted Dutch media activist and theorist Geert Lovink at the Media and Cultural Studies Centre at the University of Queensland. Entitled "Directions for Cyberculture in the New Economy", it reprises a paper he presented at the "Tulipomania" conference held not long ago in Amsterdam, exploring the changes and potential of online activism and culture as it speeds headlong towards complete commercialisation. Greg Hearn and David Marshall respond to Lovink's views, and a lively audience discussion, ranging from AOL users to cyberwarriors, follows. Geert Lovink visited Brisbane as a participant in Alchemy, an International Masterclass for New Media Artists and Curators, which was organised by the Australian Network for Art and Technology in association with the Brisbane Powerhouse -- Centre for the Live Arts from 8 May to 9 June 2000. M/C and the Media and Cultural Studies Centre are highly grateful to ANAT and Geert Lovink as well as the Australian Key Centre for Cultural and Media Policy for making this event possible. Guy Redden & Sean Aylward Smith -- 'Speed' Issue Editors References Baudrillard, Jean. "The Ecstasy of Communication." The Anti-Aesthetic. Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Washington: Bay Press, 1983. Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization: The Human Consequences. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. DeLillo, Don. Players. New York: Random House, 1989. Jameson, Frederic. "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism." New Left Review 146 (1984). Citation reference for this article MLA style: Guy Redden, Sean Aylward Smith. "Editorial: 'Speed'." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.3 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/edit.php>. Chicago style: Guy Redden, Sean Aylward Smith, "Editorial: 'Speed'," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 3 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/edit.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Guy Redden, Sean Aylward Smith. (2000) Editorial: 'speed'. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(3). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/edit.php> ([your date of access]).