slowness
by Michael Templeton
I’m no champion of the digital world and its relentless colonization of the entirety of life, but I will admit that I benefit from the way music apps can lead you to new music by some kind of magical algorithmic association. I have discovered some great music this way. Lately, this is how I have been following threads to discover new kinds of music I never knew existed. For most of my life, I was a straight-up rock-and-roller. Loved the Who and Led Zeppelin, and punk rock changed me forever. I still listen to The Damned with regularity, and Led Zeppelin’s “In My Time of Dying” will always been something otherworldly to me. In recent years, I have grown bored with rock-and-roll. It never seems to change or become anything genuinely new, and as a result, I turned to classical music. First the obvious things, Bach and all that junk, then Twentieth Century composers. Eventually, I hit upon atonal works. Bartok, of course, but I kept following this line until I started finding things that are contemporary—living composers, or composers who lived well into the Twentieth Century, and this is where I am now. I can clear a room with most of the things I listen to now. Music that consists almost entirely of a half dozen notes played in arrhythmic succession to the point of sounding like some kind of alarm in which the batteries are dying. I really do not know why I love this stuff so much, but one thing that seems common to all of it is that it moves with tremendous slowness. This is almost all slow music, for lack of any real musicological vocabulary.
I never studied music. I do not know the technicalities and intricacies of classical music of any type. I just listen to things I like. A composer like Morton Feldman is a great example of the kinds of things I love to listen to now. His long work Rothko Chapel is a long work situated in relation to the famous Rothko Chapel, an octagonal space lined with 14 large paintings by Mark Rothko. We could go on forever about this work and Mark Rothko and the chapel, but the thing I want to focus on is the way this musical work unfolds. It is so slow, so plodding, almost to the point of stoppage; there are points where I need earbuds to actually hear what is going on. I love it, and I love the slowness. This is the thing I am locking into, and I do not believe I am alone in our time in craving slowness. Rock and roll is the antithesis of slowness. It is all about moving fast. I am a guitar player, and I played in punk bands for years. We played things fast, we moved fast, and we loved it all. Rock and roll never changes because it just keeps replaying the same loop of speed. There is nothing else to it but speed, and if you slow it down, it turns into simple boredom. As a result, it has all become boring, at least to me. Slowness requires something different because slowness is an altogether different state of being.
For a very long time, let’s say about 250 years (it is longer, but we will focus on the most intense historical timeframe), there was an absolute obsession with speed. To make things go faster was the preoccupation of the Western world. We needed to get places faster, we needed faster ways to make things, we needed faster forms of entertainment. Even reading a book had to find a way to speed things up so that by about the 1960s people were boasting about “speed reading,” as if the point of reading a book was to accumulate nothing but books that have been read, like it is an industrial process. Industrial process is one of the things that made speed the paramount consideration of human existence. The other was war. War and capitalism demanded speed, and these two things convinced everyone that speed was what they also needed. First came more efficient horse-drawn vehicles, then the train (people thought a train moving at 25 miles per hour would make their brains explode), then, of course, the automobile. Then the airplane came along, then the jet, then the rocket, and before long people and things were whizzing around the world and into space at fantastic speeds that really did injure human brains and bodies. Along the way, the cotton gin sped up cotton production, the industrial weaving machine sped up textile production, Henry Ford figured out a way to make cars on a conveyor belt to speed up automobile production. Eventually computers automated it all, and now we have fast fashion, fast cars, and fast food. You can get your fast food in your fast car wearing your fast clothes, then go fast all the way to wherever it is you are going. I saw an old movie once where an old dude said, “If God intended man to get places fast, he would have a put us closer to where we were going!” Now, I am that old dude. Slowing down, and there are some things to slowing down that people are missing.
The estimates differ slightly but there are now about 48,000 miles of interstate highway in the United States. This is an astounding distance. Interstate speeds average between 65 and 80 miles per hour. We are conditioned all our lives to never notice these kinds of speeds. We are infants strapped into safety seats just snoozing away in an automobile going somewhere around 70 MPH without ever being aware of it. So it is we become climatized to speed from earliest infancy and never give it any thought. If you actually stop and think about what we are doing, it becomes terrifying. We think of driving a car as a solitary activity when in fact it is perhaps the most dangerous collective activity we are engage in. Moving at a deadly rate of speed in a machine that weighs two tons loaded with an explosive fuel and surrounded by other similar machines moving at the same rate of speed, and the only reason we ever reach a destination is because of our complete faith in the abilities (and sanity) of total strangers. It is an absolutely sociopathic thing to do, and we do it all the time. Almost 40,000 people died in vehicle crashes in 2025. If a disease killed 40,000 people in one year it would be a national emergency. But highway fatalities never rise beyond local news, and even then, they fade from consciousness within a single day. Highway fatalities from machines traveling at horrifying speeds are a normal part of life.
The American interstate system was developed after World War II by the military. It was not a municipal or civic project. The interstate system is an instrument of war, and the reason for this is that one of the key factors of war is the ability to move troops, weapons, and equipment quickly. Paul Virilio shows us that the essence of war is speed, and that any nation that wishes to prevail in the world must master speed (Speed and Politics. 84). At the same time, as I indicated above, the essence of capitalist success is also speed. We may say that one of the most crucial dimensions of capitalism is speed. We see in our own time how products seem to hit the market almost as fast as the events to which they respond. Let something happen, and you’ll find the fucking merch within seconds. It is all about speed.
In order to make these things happen, the world needed a people who are not only used to speed but also demand it. Consequently, the interstate system led to the production of a homogenous living environment that depended entirely on the interstate system for its existence. The sprawling American suburb built up after the war and now forms the mass of the American population. This is a process of “environmental standardization”—the same kind of standardization developed in the modern factory. In fact, the American subdivision originated in Levittown, New York where Levitt & Sons applied the same techniques developed by Henry Ford to the construction of homes. The very structures within which modern American life would come to exist were also predicated on speed. So it is that after about 80 years, speed has propelled all of us through the world in ways that resemble not so much the space-age heroes we imagined in the 1950s, but more like the drugged and addled opium addicts who allowed their lives to fall into dissipation around a single thing that initially gave pleasure and now drains us of our very lives. An addiction to speed was made possible due to the simultaneous addiction to comfort. The cars we live half our lives in are engineered for maximum comfort so that we are able to fly through the world without noticing. All of life has become “nothing more than a subtle trap into which we fall with all our weight, the addiction to the comfort of artificial assistance is comparable to that of a narcotic, it deprives us of the physical realities of an actual body” (Virilio. Negative Horizon. 52-53). And all this speed is ultimately to no end. Those 48,000 miles of interstate do not constitute an actual space. It is all space that exists simply to be overcome. It is pure void, and after 80 years of this it is making all of us deathly ill and it is making the very earth deathly ill. Our times demand slowness, it would seem.
If we take a minute and consider that our addiction to speed and a specific kind of comfort was designed to achieve two things: to mobilize us for war and to exploit us for all we are worth, it might occur to us to resist all this shit. And it would seem a war against war, at least a war against war that one is likely to win, would demand a strategy that is completely counter to the logic of war as it is known. If speed is the essence of war, then resistance to war, it logically follows, would depend on slowness. Bifo claims that “(t)he coming... insurrection will not be an insurrection of energy, but an insurrection of slowness, withdrawal, and exhaustion. It will be the autonomization of the collective body and soul from the exploitation of speed” (The Uprising. 68). This is to say that our liberation from war and the relentless processes of exploitation will come in the form of a detachment from speed. It is safe to say that most, if not all of us have got the exhaustion part down. We are all tired—sick and tired, to be exact, and withdrawal is really a simple process of stopping and saying no to speed and all that speed demands. None of us are duty bound to go places in a hurry, and using our time to move slowly in the world is a perfectly reasonable use of our own time. The idea that we need to have an agenda for our non-working hours is absurd, and employers who insist that there are no non-working hours need to be told to get fucked. The resistance to speed will be a real fight. The world will not allow this willingly, and in fact, we will be branded as lazy, pathological, and un-American simply by moving slowly.
Moving slowly will necessarily form what will be perceived as a clog in progress, the same progress that has driven the planet to a mass extinction in global climate change and the same progress that made the Twentieth Century into 100 years of non-stop war that culminated in a weapon capable to destroying the entire earth in a split second. This is also the same progress that claimed 40,000 lives in automobile crashes and has compelled all of us to live in a state of continuous anxiety as technology intrudes into virtually every dimension of our lives. It seems to me that one of the first and crucial steps of withdrawal from speed and all that speed entails involves a process by which the systems of speed are revealed to cohere as a kind of mythology, that there is no natural order that depends on speed, and the way we live can just as easily be ordered in new ways. As soon as something like this happens, people gain an opening to think and act differently. This is what Raoul Vaneigem means when he explains that “(a)s soon as a mythical system enters into contradiction with economic and social reality, a chasm opens between the way people live and the prevailing explanation of the world, which is suddenly inadequate, completely surpassed” (The Revolution of Everyday Life. 154). By opening a breach in the order of everyday life, that order is revealed to be illusory. To do this would introduce the possibility of not moving at the prescribed and customary pace, to withdraw into slowness.
Think of an unlikely set of ideas and images such as what we find in the poetry of Sean Bonney whose poetry is not some kind of “live, laugh, love” bullshit but a real assessment of the world. In Bonney’s poetry we find a moment in which the sky turns black and everything that had meaning suddenly does not. In such a moment, a moment of profound withdrawal and refusal, we encounter an opening in which, “There were a few of us there, standing outside them, inventing languages. We were wondering if that bastard the sun was ever going to return, and what it was planning on doing when it got here. We were talking about prophecy, about defeat and war, about how nobody knows what those words mean, and what they will come to mean” (“We are the Dead.” from Our Death. 89). The point is not to figure it out. The point is to experience the empty space in which everything that used to mean something no longer does, and it is now up to us, in this radical open space, to invent new meanings by moving profoundly slow in open defiance of speed. If it is a moment of prophecy, then we are the prophets. If it is a time to invent meanings for words, then we are the ones who are left to do that because it is prophets and poets who assign new meanings to new words. To cite Vaneigem again, poetry “springs up everywhere. It consecrates riots, embraces rebellions, and animates all great revolutionary carnivals” (The Revolution of Everyday Life. 178). As I said, nothing about this is going to go down without some kind of fight. To demand slowness will entail battles against speed, and in a world completely defined by speed, slowness might well be interpreted as a symptom of insanity.
It is not as if I think the world needs to abandon everything that came before the need for slowness. I still listen to The Damned, and “New Rose” moves at a breakneck clip. But I have also found that there is something like a melody in the works of someone like Morton Feldman. You will need to sit still for a long time, or go for a long walk—a dérive, as it were-- and listen closely because the harmonic play is not immediately apparent. A note drawn out over several minutes does begin to resonate with other notes, but not instantly. If you, or I, or anyone slow down, the harmonics begin to register. The process is not an emptying out of content. It is a process of not knowing and being okay with not knowing, of being okay without resolution. Speed needs resolution, and speed gets it, even if the resolution is smashing into something with explosive finality. Slowness remains open-ended. Speed is the mythology of the future. Slowness is what comes after the future. Slowness forms part of what Joris called a “nomad poetics” in which we are continuously “In & of the drift (dérive), a kind of drifting movement devoid of speed, “a between-ness as essential nomadic condition” (Nomad Poetics. 26/29). This between-ness and slowness demands and is characterized by “both tension & tenderness;” it is both fight and comfort (29). Such will be a resistance of slowness if it is to happen. We were compelled to speed up in order to produce for others. Slowness offers the space for us to create ourselves for ourselves.
Works Cited
Berardi, Franco “Bifo”. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e)
Intervention Series 14, 2012.
Bonney, Sean. Our Death. Oakland: Commune Editions, 2019.
Joris, Pierre. A Nomad Poetics: Essays. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.
Vaneigem, Raoul. The Revolution of Everyday Life. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith.
Oakland: PM Press, 2012.
Virilio, Paul. Negative Horizon: An Essay on Dromoscopy. Translated by Michael Degener. New
York: Continuum, 2008.
-Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. Translated by Mark Polizzoti. South Pasadena: Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 2006.
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