Before had anything to do with speed, it referred to quality of being firmly or securely fixed (OED). Somewhere in Middle English, its meaning shifted to refer to closeness or immediacy with idea of rapid movement only later being reflected in adjectival use. It is this last sense of quickness that is taken up most directly in current references to capitalism. Capitalism gains its momentum by reducing points of fastness, eroding points of security to increase rapid accrual of profit, or so story goes. In critical culture arising around capitalism, its speed is often posed as core of its evil, perhaps most famously by Paul Virilio, but also by Sunday magazine critics lamenting breakneck pace of modern living who advocate instead for slower choices. Slowness has also been taken up in more radical positions, from Bartleby, who prefers not to, to Franco Bifo Berardi, who argues for political potential in expanded notions of both psychic and social depression. What these accounts have in common is a binary sense of fast/slow: if one is slow, one resists capitalism; if one is fast, one cannot be radical. When individuals begin to become immobilized psychically, emotionally, or physically, rapid, exuberant flow of neoliberal capitalism has reached its limit--fast capitalism has fully eroded points of fastness, but, instead of an unrestricted, quick-flowing freedom, many of those who live here find themselves caught in eddies or whirlpools. From these situations--what Lauren Berlant calls impasses--one can neither move forward nor backward; instead, best that can be hoped is merely to keep up. For many affective experience of what Berardi calls the universe running too fast is one of inertia (180). In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari describe experience of psychic chaos in terms of infinite speeds that blend into immobility of colourless and silent nothingness they traverse (201); against this threat of blankness, brain grasps at any thread of order, they suggest. This description of brain and thought works as a metaphor for experience of capitalism: there are those who live in chronic vacancy and invisibility spawned by its chaotic speeds. Working on a just-in-time schedule, enduring long commutes, shouldering loads of debt, one can experience churn of capital as a kind of fast-paced slow violence from which there is no clear exit. This is not a fastness of security but a fastness of fixity, of impasse. …