A brief history of speed/evil speed.

Deer, Glenn

A brief history of speed would emphasize that the core existential problem is the limit of corporeal time: the need for speed would evaporate without memento mori and time's winged chariot hovering near. But think of how the amount of work would expand proportionately if mortality could be indefinitely postponed.

The ecological dystopian history of speed is the screaming ninny nanny on the Faustian roller coaster of modernity: you asked the engines of industry to accelerate the Steampunk Armada of glistening fetish objects from the colonies for near instant consumption: dark Satanic Mills, "The City of the End of Things" Ridley Walker, Modern Times, Paul (oh) Virilio.

The Faustian promise of speed now shackles us not with the escape from drudgery or more leisure time but with disordered rest.

We are sleep deprived by the demands of the speedy economy of the plugged in screen world. Speed is not the mechanical bride but the expectation that you will be on call 24/7, twittering, texting, or working on your game speed.

Speed as the Faustian promise was supposed to be the solution to the problem of human limits and the physical challenges of mastering the boundaries of space.

To vault over that space with the ICBM (Gravity's Rainbow) rather than the English longbow. To accelerate communication, to secure territories, mobilize consensus, to feed the world with the speed of growth, and accelerated farm production.

The holder of the profits of speed is advanced capitalism, the captains of industrial production, the speed profiteers who buy time with accumulated wealth.

The ecological dystopian history of speed would point out that the non-renewable energy resources, petro-based, are rapidly ruining the planet: that the economic engines of speed, continuing growth, are already out of control.

The language of speed as a value in the arena of narrative consumption is fraught with huckster snake oil promises: speed-reading can be taught, but what will you remember? (What will you remember? What will you remember?)

Brain neuroscientists at MIT have recently found that the brain can process visual information within thirteen milliseconds. (1) (But what will you remember?) That is, you can recognize an object distinctly in less than the blink of an eye. But what use is the rapid barrage of such images if you cannot remember them or act upon them? Too fast and too furious.

While the speed of thought is out-computed by the chess-programming computer, the winged foot is a metaphor that still outstrips the supercharged abacus. (But what will you remember?)

Allegories of speed tell us that haste makes waste: time-consuming waste management. Speed cannibalizes itself in the allegory of the problems that human speed creates: the sorcerer's apprentice makes a mess.

Speed in literary culture and language study still receives its privileged status: speedy learners, speedy readers, telegrammatic, truncated, Orwell-inspired, terse missives favoured over the indulgent and slowly meandering meditations that luxuriate copiously.

Yet the virtue of close reading is that it asks us to slow down and read the form, and not to rush the reading experience but to return, again and again. Not the speed of thought but the thoughtfulness of speed time as a human problem.

Critical narrative time reflects back on speed, puts that pulsing squeaking genie back into the bottle, watches that speed genie squirm.

Glenn Deer

University of British Columbia

(1) Anne Trafton, "In the blink of an eye." MIT News. MIT. 16 January 2014. Web. 26 June 2015.

Glenn Deer teaches Asian North American literature, Canadian literature, multi-ethnic and mixed race writing, cultural studies, and theory in the English Department at the University of British Columbia. His recent publications include an ebook on George Woodcock (co-edited with Matthew Gruman) and essays on the activist figure in the novels of Joy Kogawa and on allegories of national sacrifice in the novels of Mordecai Richler. In 2012 he was a recipient of a University Killam Teaching Prize, and he is currently an Associate Editor for Canadian Literature.