Paul Virilio Research Articles

Neoliberal Temporality: Time-Sense and the Shift from Pensions to 401(k)s

The decline of traditional pensions and the rise of individualized retirement accounts such as 401(k)s can be read as a neoliberal program of transferring risk and responsibility for providing retirement income from employers to workers. Subsequent to this shift, American workers are facing a “retirement savings crisis.” While the stagnation of incomes in the United States has certainly contributed to this crisis, I argue that the specific temporality of 401(k) investing also plays a role. Drawing on the work of John Clarke, E. P. Thompson, and Paul Virilio, I argue that the neoliberal temporality of 401(k) investing conditions a new “time-sense” in workers-turned-employee-investors that privileges the present over the future. This present-focused time-sense contradicts the future orientation required for retirement investing.

Entre el aparecer y la desaparición: Umbrales estéticos en la obra de Oscar Muñoz

This article intends a reading of the artistic production of the Colombian artist Oscar Munoz (1951). For so doing, we start from his early works -and from a psychoanalytic perspective- to focus on the analysis of apparitionand vanishing, concepts which are undertaken chiefly from the viewpoint of Martin Seel (1954) and Paul Virilio (1932). In this way, an alternative reading of the aesthetic and significant processes found in the works of Munoz is proposed.

Sustainable and fast ICT: lessons from dromology

Purpose– This paper aims to suggest that ethical issues in information and communications technology (ICT) should be researched from a holistic perspective, including environmental values and other values inherent in ICT. This paper thoroughly discusses the value of speed by drawing on ICT advertisements and theories of speed, primarily Paul Virilio’s work.Design/methodology/approach– The methodology consists of a semiotic analysis of ICT-related advertisements primarily from Sweden. These empirical data are combined with a close reading of Paul Virilio’s work, and the analysis moves abductively between theory and empirical data.Findings– Speed is promoted in ICT-related advertisements and may be analyzed using concepts of dromology, dromocracy, dromoscopy, the dromosphere, instantaneity and grey ecology.Research limitations/implications– Most of the data are from the Swedish context.Social implications– To create a sustainable society, one must explicitly discuss how speed forms and shapes society.Originality/value– The paper combines philosophical theories with everyday commercials. It draws on the work of Paul Virilio, whose theories are seldom used in studies of information ethics, and redraws attention to the need for a holistic perspective to understand the values of ICT.

Media ecology and techno-ethics in Paul Virilio

Abstract This article places Paul Virilio in the company of McLuhan, Foucault and Deleuze. After sketching out his intellectual personality, the article presents a few speed-induced media ecological and ethical problematics as Virilio sees them. It ends with two of Virilio’s signature notions – antiform and divergence – with the addition of a few tetrads. Finally, it points to further explorations that need to be made to fully capture the significance of Virilio’s work for the media ecology community, and for the good life.

"I Want to Pump You Up!" Lance Armstrong, Alex Rodriguez, and the Biopolitics of Data- and Analogue-Flesh

"I Want to Pump You Up!" Lance Armstrong, Alex Rodriguez, and the Biopolitics of Data- and Analogue-Flesh

Accidentology

This article surveys the work of one of the most prominent theorists of accidents today, Paul Virilio. Particular focus is given to the May 6, 2010, Flash Crash. This event is used to measure the worth of Virilio's accidentology, as it is viewed as a harbinger of the integral accident, a catastrophic incident that is experienced simultaneously and universally. While Virilio is supported for drawing attention to the technologically mediated accidents that threaten hyperconnected societies, his method and focus are found wanting. His preference for suggestion over qualification means that he eschews empirical elaboration, and his fixation on the political economy of speed proceeds without reference to a political economy of wealth. This asymmetry results in grand theorizing about general conditions that do not exist, and it overlooks the ways in which accidents, crises, and disasters are endemic to the economic system.

In and Against Rhythms of the Neoliberal Public

In this article, we offer commentary on moving bodies and the spaces they simultaneously inhabit and produce, pointing specifically to dominant rhythmologies of the contemporary market society. We offer as the article’s core thrust the pedagogical, political, and performative exigencies of the street: its traversal and occupation, its flow and stasis. We utilize the theories of Jean-Luc Nancy, Roberto Esposito, Lieven de Cauter, Guy Debord, and Paul Virilio to build an argument against hermeneutic determinism(s). In so doing, we (temporarily) look past conceptualizations of the street as late modern discursive metonym, and instead turn toward public dimensions of time and space. In so doing, we encourage qualitative inquirers to look beyond the dynamic texts or fixed environs and toward the sensual and sensory, postulating a (re)location of the flesh and bones that has often been missing from the thinking(s) and doing(s) of qualitative research.

Televisão: da profusão de imagens à cegueira ética

Há um antigo debate acerca da função libertadora, ou não, das tecnologias de comunicação visual. Originalmente, a questão centrava-se no papel do cinema e da fotografia para as relações sociais e para cultura. Walter Benjamin e Theodor Adorno são os precursores dessas investigações, tendo, em certa medida, Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard e Paul Virilio como herdeiros. A partir do diálogo com estes autores construiremos uma reflexão em torno da cegueira ética, para o que retomaremos também as observações de Gabriel Marcel e de Martin Buber, buscando compreender os nexos entre televisão e agir ético na contemporaneidade.

La iglesia de Sainte-Bernadette en Nevers. ¿Conclusión expresiva o principio oblicuo?

<p>Claude Parent y Paul Virilo concibieron La Fonction Oblique entre 1963 y 1966. Su encargo edifi catorio más significativo fue la Iglesia de Sainte Bernadette en Nevers que se presentó como la materialización de la teoría. Sin embargo, más que un proyecto sobre la oblicuidad, Nevers es un ejercicio de traducción de una antigua obsesión de Virilio, los bunkers alemanes de la Guerra Mundial, y una conclusión plástica de Parent a su experimentación previa entorno al informalismo arquitectónico. Esta falta de concordancia ha provocado un cierto desconcierto tanto con respecto a La Fonctión Oblique como al proyecto de Nevers.</p>

On the "Ragged Margins" of History: Burdens of Truth and National Identity in Ana Menéndez's The Last War

On the "Ragged Margins" of History:Burdens of Truth and National Identity in Ana Menéndez's The Last War Susan Kollin (bio) In her 2009 novel, The Last War, Cuban American writer Ana Menéndez constructs an authorial stand-in who consistently lacks self-insight and who serves as narrator, protagonist, victim, and perpetrator in a story about the United States in the post-9/11 period. Throughout the novel, Menéndez chronicles the experiences of a freelance photographer living adrift in Istanbul during the early years of the U.S. invasion of Iraq as she debates whether to leave her marriage or join her husband who may or may not have been unfaithful to her while working in Baghdad, events that the author has revealed were based on her own life with and marriage to reporter and writer Dexter Filkins.1 While autobiographical novels often face criticism for a number of reasons—for exposing the author's artistic laziness, for foregrounding a certain poverty of the imagination, or even for betraying the author's supposed narcissism—and while Menéndez's novel in particular could have veered into solipsism or even self-pity, the author blurs the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction as a way of revealing the very forms of indulgence often found in such literature and as a way of laying bare various kinds of self-deception that have often shaped American identity in the early twenty-first century.2 The Last War is a story about the consequences of belated self-knowledge as the narrator resists understanding her own complicity in the demise of her ten-year marriage and in the unsettling political events unfolding around her. Reflecting on their early life together traveling abroad as "war junkies . . . endlessly drawn to the ragged margins where other people hated and died," the narrator recalls how the constant movements of war across the globe at first promise an escape "from the disappointments of an ordinary [End Page 131] life," but eventually result in a troubled marriage, a stalled-out career, and an uncertain future.3 The narrator retreats into the role of Penelope, faultless in her self-sacrifice and immobility, a figure whose long-suffering devotion to duty enables a disavowal of her own capacity for betrayal and brutality. Throughout the novel, Menéndez draws connections between the decline of the marriage and growing disillusionments about the United States in the post-9/11 era, and between the narrator's flawed self-knowledge and the nation's larger myths of innocence and exceptionalism. What is often perceived to be a self-indulgent literary device thus comes to have other critical possibilities for Menéndez, who examines how strategies of evasion and dishonesty have dire consequences as a multitude of repressed truths about privilege, power, and identity surface in the narrator's life and in the larger global conflicts unfolding around her. While Menéndez has acknowledged similarities between the plot of the novel and events in her own life, she also notes that the story soon departs from autobiography into what she calls "total invention."4 Like her fictional Latina counterpart whose parents moved to the United States from the Dominican Republic, Menéndez is the daughter of Cuban immigrants who settled in California in the 1960s. Like her narrator in The Last War, the author also lived and worked in Istanbul, during which time she received news about the alleged infidelity of her then-husband, Dexter Filkins. And like her novel's narrator, Menéndez once traveled the world with her husband, a reporter who covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for The New York Times and who wrote a critically acclaimed book based on his experiences, the title of which—The Forever War—connects meaningfully with the title of her novel, The Last War. While Filkins' title points to the ongoing tyranny of war across the ages, Menéndez's title is a bit more ambiguous. Like Filkins' text, the title may call to mind Paul Virilio's observations about the technologies of war as the driving force of modern culture. In that sense, it may refer merely to the end of just one...

Secure the volume: Vertical geopolitics and the depth of power

We all-too-often think of the spaces of geography as areas, not volumes. Territories are bordered, divided and demarcated, but not understood in terms of height and depth. ‘Secure the area’ is a common expression for the military and police, but what happens if another dimension is taken into account and we think what it means to ‘secure the volume’? This article draws on the emergent literature on vertical geopolitics and Peter Sloterdijk's work on spheres, but also looks at what happens below the surface, with a particular focus on tunnels. Using Paul Virilio's work, and some examples from the West Bank and Israel's border with Lebanon, it demonstrates how we need to think volume—think about volume, through volume, with volume—rather than simply the vertical to make sense of the complexities of territory today.

Ruins and Fragments: Air War's Mnemonic Architectures

Revolving around Arne Schmitt’s photo series "Bunkererfahrung/ Bunker Experience" (2013), the essay engages with two discourses: 1) theoretical and artistic positions treating the bunker as a mnemonic space of war and modernism, including works by Paul Virilio, Magdalena Jetelová, Jane and Louise Wilson, and Robert Kusmirowski; and 2) debates about the air war and the role it played within West German postwar culture, initiated by W.G. Sebald, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge. Schmitt’s bunker series ties into these debates, as it makes a visual argument for the return of the bunker in the concrete structures of postwar modernism. It is hence not focusing on the space of the bunker itself but on its afterimage. By doing so, Schmitt not only examines the experience of war through the lens of the postwar but also suggests that we can access the trauma of the air war through that which has taken its place.

Thinking Diverse Futures from a Carbon Present

Thinking Diverse Futures from a Carbon Present Karen Pinkus (bio) Our collective human ability to know what we mean by “the present” and “the future” has never been more vexed. To cite design critic Tony Fry, because of “defuturing,” that is, our unsustainable practices, “we are now at a point when it can no longer be assumed that we, en masse, have a future” (2009, 1). Many important thinkers have shown that our age is breaking the speed barrier. Under our current “dictatorship of speed,” as Paul Virilio might put it, we are “too dazed by the speed and the shock of the collapse to reflect properly upon the crisis and develop adequate political responses to it” (Hassan 2011, 399-400). Or, following Bernard Stiegler, we are unable to grasp that speed is prior to time and space and indeed, determines them. The implications of the “originariness” of speed are enormous: Recognizing the priority of speed allows us to move away from the conception of time as an overarching, stable, homogenous framework in which things happen and to acknowledge the complex heterogeneous forces of mobility, velocity and acceleration out of which it is composed. (Gere 2004, 54) Critical theory around speed and time has tended to focus on various forms of technology (Heidegger: atomic warfare; Blanchot: “disaster” as disorientation; Stiegler: biotechnology and real-time computing), but little has been written yet on how anthropogenic climate change in particular has radically altered perceptions of time, and indeed, the flow of time itself. Optimistic climate scientists and policy-makers in the present—let us say a carbon present—continue to develop decadal schemes for carbon reduction and mitigation as they refer to a diversified energy portfolio for the future, a future that they seem relatively confident in identifying and linking with market cycles.1 Yet in the most brutal sense, it is already too late to speak of, [End Page 195] or better, to write of a present as if this were distinct from something that is going to happen in the future, however far or near this might be. Climate change has already happened—indeed, strictly speaking it has never not happened—and the earth has already been radically changed from the way it was, in relatively stable terms for a long past, a past of at least ten thousand years.2 Our need to conceive of a present whose limits we can define—that is, perhaps, as a carbon present—is hard-wired into our neurons. Surely, then, we must interrogate what is meant by “the present” as well as what modalities of potential hybridity are to be thought in the future. This essay is a speculative attempt to open up this problem without a resolution. When does this carbon present begin and at what point might we say it has ended? Since the current “carbon economy” is, as Allan Stoekl, among others, has so eloquently explored, intrinsically tied to human energy, production and life itself—it is something like a total system. When energy is biopolitical, power is biopower, put otherwise. The gradual or abrupt replacement of this political economy with another one—whether singular as in the (failed) promise of a “hydrogen economy” or, more practically some would say, with a hybrid model (“no single silver bullet”)—must necessarily have profound causes and effects beyond the “inputs.” This seems a crucial area for critical thought, not because humanists should or could become futurologists (developing a predictive-technological discourse), but in a more basic sense: the very sense of how we think climate change. Here, then, are three possible presents that I will link with corresponding futures:3 Hypothesis One The present—let us say an anthropological present that will lead, perhaps inevitably, to the age that has been called the Anthropocene—begins around 992,000 years ago as Homo erectus rises in Olorgesailie in the African Rift Valley. This is a rough estimate, since very obviously we cannot point [End Page 196] to a single originary moment if we want to follow this hypothesis.4 Yet the temptation to represent origins is irresistible. Recall, here, the strange temporality of the opening sequence in the film 2001: A Space...

The War of Time: Occupation, Resistance, Communization

Contemporary theorizations of strategies of resistance and revolution often turn on affirming the concepts of speed and saturation. I want to critically consider these claims by returning to the work of Paul Virilio from the 1970s and contemporary “communization theory.” These theorizations stress the emptying-out of traditional worker’s identity and the need to re-invent forms of resistance and revolution that can address this challenge. My aim is to assess how both engage with the problem of acceleration, and particularly the relation of resistance to forms of contemporary military power. I will argue that strategies of acceleration find themselves in fraught convergence with both military and capitalist practice.
 Author(s): Benjamin Noys
 Title (English): The War of Time: Occupation, Resistance, Communization
 Journal Reference: Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 10, No. 1-2 (Summer-Winter 2013)
 Publisher: Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities – Skopje 
 Page Range: 83-92
 Page Count: 10
 Citation (English): Benjamin Noys, “The War of Time: Occupation, Resistance, Communization,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, Vol. 10, No. 1-2 (Summer-Winter 2013): 83-92.

Between War and Play

Between War and Play

Kafka for the Twenty-First Century (review)

Reviewed by: Kafka for the Twenty-First Century Glenn R. Cuomo Kafka for the Twenty-First Century. Edited by Stanley Corngold and Ruth V. Gross. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2011. Pp. xii + 286. Cloth $75.00. ISBN 978-1571134820. Essays based on Roland Reuß’s, Walter Sokel’s, Ritchie Robertson’s, and John Zilcosky’s keynote presentations from the “Kafka at 125” Conference held in April 2009 constitute this impressive anthology’s core component. Their pieces, together with the other ten contributions and the co-editors’ excellent introduction, not only offer fresh, international perspectives on more than a century of Kafka’s impact on modern literature and recent revelations about his biography, original manuscripts, [End Page 670] and the context of his literary production. They also affirm the author’s continued significance in the present millennium’s altered historical context, underscoring Ruth Gross’s optimistic assessment that “Franz Kafka is alive and well in the twenty-first century” (vii). Roland Reuß’s exegesis of manuscript facsimiles from Kafka’s octavo notebooks calls into question decades of scholarship that took the published versions of Kafka’s wording for granted with respect to the three novel fragments and the many other writings that remained unpublished in his lifetime. Designating these manuscripts as “draft on the way to becoming text” (25), Reuß delves into important nuances of Kafka’s switch from pen and ink to the more tenuous medium of pencil in the octavos, and his experimentation with such “material parameters” as page layout and line length. Through careful scrutiny of Kafka’s autobiographical writing and such fiction as The Castle, Mark Harman exposes the fundamental skepticism about language that underlies Kafka’s construction of metaphors that reflect on the “inherent deceitfulness of figurative language” (57). Walter Sokel opens with a succinct definition of Nietzsche’s concept of the Dionysian that enables one to view Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis positively, as an overcoming of Gregor’s ego and individuation, and to find significant Nietzschean analogies in “The Judgment” and “Josephine, the Singer, or the Mouse People.” Uta Denger presents another perspective on “The Judgment” in her treatment of the story’s father-son conflict as an allegory of conflict between the realist and aestheticist approaches to literature, and relates the work to Gustave Flaubert’s application of the poetic to the prosaic. Expanding upon Judith Butler’s concept of gender melancholy, Katja Garloff explores in considerable depth the erotic dimension of “A Report for an Academy” and relates the notion of “racial melancholy” to Kafka’s subversive treatment of dominant discourses on Jewish assimilation. Jacob Burnett’s provocative reading of Kafka’s The Castle introduces, among other things, Nietzsche on the death of God and Douglas Hofstader’s concept of the “strange loop,” to explain the protagonist K.’s futile striving to access the castle as the result of K.’s premodern insistence that the castle functions as a “transcendental signifier” in a modern world lacking a “grounding center.” Drawing upon Kafka’s office writings, Doreen Densky finds an intriguing affinity between the proxy roles played by Kafka’s literary figures such as The Trial’s Josef K. and the author’s own proxy function as senior legal secretary at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. Ritchie Robertson deftly uses the concept of the “total institution” from Erving Goffmann’s 1961 sociological study Asylums to elucidate Kafka’s “extraordinary insight into mechanisms of power, authority and violence” (137). Not surprisingly, Robertson’s prime example for such a total institution is The Trial. But in locating the origin of oppression in the family, he also touches on some of Kafka’s major stories. Rolf Goebel’s examination of Kafka’s references to real and imaginary recording machines and telecommunications [End Page 671] devices in the light of Paul Virilio’s theory of space, speed, and telecommunication demonstrates how Kafka’s writing anticipated “the age of television and virtual reality” (153). Peter Beicken’s scrutiny of the visual element in Kafka’s early short prose and passages from Amerika: The Missing Person and The Trial presents a persuasive case for the “cinematic quality” of Kafka’s fiction, which...

“Passing Everybody and Never Halting”:Dromosand Speed in Jack Kerouac'sOn the Road

My article explores the implications of rapid movement in Jack Kerouac's On the Road both on a literary and a political level, while drawing on Paul Virilio's work on speed and acceleration. The article examines the nature of the main characters' impetus for perpetual motion and discusses the ambiguity of their desire for speedy driving. Considering the significance of mobility within the cultural context of Cold War America, I investigate the influence of speed on identity formation in the novel. I subsequently look at the impact of both accelerated and decelerated movement on plot and narrative structure, and I explore the political implications of speed as reflected in the protagonists' interactions with agents of civilian power.

Nippon‘s nostalgic national narrative: Ishihara Shintarō‘s kamikaze film Ore

This paper explores the context and features of the national narrative as presented in Ishihara Shintarˉ’s 2007 film Ore wa, kimi no tame ni koso shini ni iku (‘I go to die for you’) about kamikaze pilots in World War II. Paul Virilio has argued that all battlefields are film sets. Most American war films, whether they take place in the Pacific, Normandy, Vietnam, or Iraq, bear out this statement. Clint Eastwood’s 2006 films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima follow the same pattern. Ishihara’s Ore, in contrast, comprises a set of stories intertwined around a woman, Torihama Tome, a mother figure for four young kamikaze pilots, and it takes place mainly in the private family space of her parlor. Ore replaces a masculine narrative of war, one that relies on written reports, with a feminine, oral history, one that hinges on relations to a maternal figure. In terms of genre, the film is a foundling: designed by Ishihara as a response to Eastwood’s films, Ore is in fact a television film, emulating numerous 1960s television serials on memories of war targeted at housewives. Using Yoshimi Shunya’s idea of television consumption to a “national timetable” in postwar Japan, this paper argues that rather than being purely nationalistic, Ore is largely autobiographical and nostalgic, and it feminizes the viewer. Ironically, this may also explain its surrender to Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima at the Japanese box offices.

Logistics, Death, and Virtual Media

Book Reviews Logistics, Death, and Virtual Media Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture by Patrick Crogan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. 222 pages. $75.00 hardcover, $25.00 paperback, $14.75 Kindle edition.Similar to animation and online networking media scholarship, critical analyses of video games and other interactive, real-time simulation-based media is relatively new. As such, new media scholars are still engaged in the process of legitimizing their objects, even as those objects become more diffuse and less observably material. In his recent publication Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture, Patrick Crogan seeks to define and explain the tremendous presence that interactive media, best represented by video games, occupies in contemporary life and the ways in which video games have contributed greatly to shifts in the experience of space and time. While his approach is largely ontological and media specific, based not only in the idiosyncrasies of gaming media but also in the technoscientific legacy from which they emerge, he effectively connects with a larger context of multimedia production and consumption, demonstrating that the reach of interactive new media extends beyond the limited realm of military training and online gaming (xiii). The greatest strength of this work is ultimately its scope, breadth of research, and knowledge that support the argument that the gameplay mode is one that is inherent to the postmodern condition.One of the most significant points that Crogan makes is that the experience of time has become increasingly future-oriented, which privileges contingencies and preemption over direct observation of the present itself. In particular, he connects gaming media's military logistics to the increased speed (dromoscopy) and futureoriented time endemic to contemporary modern life. According to Crogan, the contexts of war and defense are unavoidable. Relying heavily on Paul Virilio's work regarding war and culture in which war and peace cannot be easily separated by time or space, Gameplay Mode identifies logistics, or a nation's readiness for war and its ability to access and move resources, as the current dominant cultural paradigm. In a logistical model, all activity is geared toward anticipating rather than reacting to events, as preemption is the best and surest means to victory. Simulation, an integral element of gaming, lends itself to this forward-thinking preemptive model because it allows for the calculation of multiple contingencies, thereby enhancing the ability to predict what will happen next.Given the reliance of interactive media on technologies developed in a military context, war is an unavoidable context for video games, it is therefore not surprising that death is a recurring theme in much of Crogan's argument, both literally and conceptually. Much of the purpose of this book is to demonstrate the seriousness rather than the playfulness of gameplay, and Crogan labors to establish these vital stakes through each of his diverse examples. Many of the chapters begin with anecdotes that demonstrate instances where war and virtual reality meet, such as the role that flight simulation played in preparing the 9/11 terrorists and the abstract animation used to track the real-time in-the-air progress of Patriot smart bombs during the Persian Gulf War. To some extent, describing these real-life scenarios may simply be a legitimization tactic in response to those who continue to see video games as mindless fun, but it also becomes an interesting point of departure for some of Crogan's more compelling multimedia arguments.In chapter 3, Gameplay Mode briefly addresses the nature of animation in video games, a ubiquitous feature that has received little scholarly attention to date but is conventionally understood to be different from filmic animation. Citing Alan Cholodenko's introduction to The Illusion of Life, Crogan notes that as much as animation works to endow objects and media with the semblance of life, it simultaneously obscures death. …

Composition in the Dromosphere

Abstract Speed is one way to distinguish how we approach rhetorical situations within and outside of the academy. Texts and arguments move quickly in any rhetorical situation, and rhetoric and composition has begun to theorize ways to make sense of these speedy situations. Drawing on Paul Virilio's discussion of the dromosphere , our contemporary environment of speed, this essay continues that work by examining the work of two DJs: DJ Spooky and Girl Talk. The compositional methods of DJs have received a great deal of attention in computers and composition scholarship, and much of that work has focused on how DJs can help us rethink intellectual property. This essay examines DJs for a different purpose, in order to examine two approaches to the difficulties of speed: schole and dromos . I discuss DJ Spooky's remix of the film The Birth of a Nation , and I apply Girl Talk's methods to provide my own mashup of that same film. This essay argues that the mashup, in all of its various forms, is a particularly useful example of dromological writing, writing that is attuned to the problem of speed.