Acceleration and Its Discontents
Or, How Industrial Modernity Makes Some Things Faster- But Not Everything
It is a dreary late winter day in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco as I set out from my temporary base of operations, a tiny hotel in the dusty foothills town of Midelt. I walk south towards the village of Tattiouine, my only real goal seeing how far up the slopes of Jbel Ayachi, the peak that looms above the town and the high desert plains around it, I can get before I have to turn back around. I have been in Morocco for two full days at this point, spending a week wandering around the mountains before heading back to Fez to start Arabic lessons. The year is 2008—almost two decades ago, which is hard to believe!—and I have neither laptop nor smartphone with me, no car, just my two feet and a couple of marginally useful guidebooks. As I reach the lower slopes of the mountain, walking up a gravel piste that I hope will take me to something interesting I meet three Berber kids also headed upon into the mountains. We talk in a mixture of English, Spanish, and the handful of Arabic words I knew at the time; they are coming back home early from school in Midelt and invite me to walk with them and visit with the rest of their family. Along the way they show off their skills with the sling and stone, spinning leather straps at a dizzying rate above their heads then pinging rocks off of the wires of a distant electrical line.
After a mile or two of walking we reach their family’s home, a mud brick modest affair with the fireplace in the center of the house, the smoke issuing up through a hole in the roof. Their mother makes me tea as she nurses a baby, someone brings some food out, and we converse as best we can in our polyglot of more or less mutual tongues. After a while I start to think about the walk back—it’s winter and the days are short—and so thank everyone for their lovely hospitality and head back down from the mountains. For whatever reason I take a different route returning, traversing a trail high above a stream that runs (I assume!) towards Midelt. Along the way I encounter a man walking along the trail, and somehow communicate my destination; wordlessly he beckons and I follow behind, he accompanying me most of the way, and then once I am in view of Midelt, waves goodbye.
Many things stood out to me about that really quite wonderful day in the Atlas Mountains, but the one that I want to develop here, and which will lead us into the main subject matter of this essay, was the experience of physical space and my movement through it, namely on foot and within, as I discovered, a social framework very different from anything I had experienced elsewhere. Wandering around the countryside on foot was not novel to me at the time: as a child growing up on the Cumberland Plateau in what I suppose was a more permissive time relative to now I would wander, alone or with my brother or friends, along creek valleys, over ridges, and deep into the woods and fields, sometimes for miles. During a summer in southwest China some twenty years ago I and my friends walked everywhere, including up into the mountains, no plan and no directions. What I discovered in rural Morocco was not just the possibility and the physical infrastructure for travel on foot (which included things like excellent and easy access to trains, buses, and long-distance taxis), but also cultural support, if you will, of travelers on foot, impromptu community on the road or the path. Among other things this sociability of the footway (whose ancient analogues we can see, perhaps most meaningfully and significantly, in the story of Jesus with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus) entailed a deepening of perception and knowledge, not only of the landscape itself but also of the people inhabiting that landscape and traversing through it.1
If in the everyday world of industrial modernity we prize above all speed and lack of friction in physical movement through space (though, as we will see below, with caveats and exceptions), the same is not true of the pre-modern or “other-than-modern,” recognizing that alternative forms of relationship to distance, movement, and space continue to exist and develop alongside, nestled within, and bound up with features “proper” to industrial modernity. Survey past societies it does not take long to find very different ways of movement through geographical space: we might look at the curious long and straight (to the point of simply scaling straight up cliffs instead of turning to ascend along contour lines) “roads” that once radiated out from the great houses of the Chaco Canyon cultural complex in the American Southwest. While these routes of movement also had practical uses—hauling wood for construction down from the distant forested mountain ranges, facilitating trade networks (which were however almost certainly integrated with religious practice and belief)—almost everything about them indicates some other significance and function beyond the simply quotidian. What exactly that was is no longer clear, though terms like “religious,” “ritual,” and “cosmological” no doubt aim in the right direction. Roads and paths in the pre-modern Americas served other functions and followed their own logics; here in the American South different linguistic groups, small polities, and so forth would often have their own parallel paths and routes, almost certainly also being guided by ritual and cosmological concerns. And across Afro-Eurasia we can find routes, great and small, designed with pilgrimage in mind, carrying travelers across the landscape in order to realize some sacred goal or practice. The pilgrims’ path that climbs the steep slopes of Ireland’s Croagh Padraig is not utilitarian or efficient, but it is effective as an instrument of a sort of ascetic communion with the saint and with fellow pilgrims, and the landscape itself.
Of course pre-modern people traveled across the landscape for utilitarian purposes, and sometimes put a premium on speed and on the reduction of friction. If social norms within a given place often encouraged care and traveling with the traveler, beyond the edges of settlement the danger of bandits often lurked, particularly during unsettled times. But regardless of the reason for travel, everyday movement through space was—and still is in many places—much slower than that with which we in the industrialized “core” nations are accustomed. What that speed looks like, what its constitutive opposite—restriction on movement, the erection of distance, and the creation of friction—take up the rest of this essay. What to do with this understanding will be the subject of a future essay.
It probably goes without saying by now that one of the most fundamental aspects of industrial, capitalist modernity is its centering of acceleration, of speed, of reduction of distance. This feature is so pervasive that we could pick almost any feature of everyday life at random to see its effects. Take my mode of writing at this very moment: short of a computer chip in my head translating thoughts into words (a no long inconceivable possibility), using a word processor is the fastest mode of putting words to the (digital) page humans have ever possessed. And once I hit “publish” on this essay it will be all but instantaneously transmitted around the entire planet for the perusal of readers anywhere possessed of an internet connection (and, to be sure, the requisite degree of literacy and attention span—more on that below!).
Ironically perhaps, of almost equal importance is the degree to which industrial modernity also creates distances and de-accelerates or completely suspends relationships and proximities that were the norm for not just some of but all of human existence prior to the twentieth century. Our material abundance is predicated upon vast engines of extraction and production that go on behind the scenes, carried on by human beings whose only point of contact with the consumers of the products to which they contribute is in the object of consumption. The greater part of our economic engine churns out products that, in relation to the knowledge and experience of the consumer, come from nowhere and are made by no one; a product that comes from somewhere and is made by someone is almost by definition a luxury or at the very least niche item. And it is not simply that the average “first world” consumer will never meet the specific farm hands who picked his tomatoes; he will never meet anyone picking any tomatoes, he has no contact with any of the points of prime production that—literally—feed him and sustain his economic life. This distance does many things, including making the exploitation of workers, of land, of non-human organisms, of entire countries and regions of the earth, much easier and frictionless.
Or take travel through physically, politically demarcated space: for the reasonably affluent passport-possessed citizen of a core country in the world economy travel is virtually instantaneous relative to all the rest of human history. Any traveler of means can visit, within the span of hours or at most a day or two, any major city on the planet, conveyed through the air at speeds unimaginable only a couple of generations back. At the same time, for vastly less privileged humans without passports or material means or powerful countries of residence, space is interminably wider and challenging than it was for any of their ancestors. Political boundary lines—in many places reinforced by concrete, barbed wire, and weaponry—have in some places made travel from one village to a neighboring one either utterly impossible, or intractably long. What were once zones of regular movement are split into competing nation-states, locking some humans on one side of the border and others opposite them. At a smaller but no less important level, the very instruments of physical speed that accelerate our bodies and our products across physical space—above all, roads and highways—create barriers and de-accelerate movement for humans and for non-humans alike.
One more example that is ultimately connected to the above: the production and flow of information is now essentially frictionless and immediate, or at least it is perceived and received that way. Of course in reality digital information and communication depend upon vast material structures and resource use as well as human workers, but like so much else, all of that is largely invisible to us in the day to day. Still, for as long as we have abundant electricity and the servers hold up, the accumulated wealth of human knowledge and data production will continue to flow with absolute ease upon and via the internet, physical repositories of information routed through digital means as much as any other product or object. And yet it is no small part thanks to the same digital infrastructure that the human ability to process information is slowing down, or coming to a stop entirely. It is now, I think, uncontroversial to say that reading abilities, attention spans, and other core components of high functioning literacy and intellectual activity are more or less in rapid collapse, and that the culprits are literally right in front of, indeed right at our fingertips. People may increasingly have every book ever written available on a tiny pocket computer, but those same pocket computers are making the prospect of reading any book ever more remote. The same technological regime that all but eliminates friction in the physical storage and transmission of texts (and other forms of information, data, and knowledge) has also, unintentionally but almost as effectively, introduced immense amounts of new friction into the actual human process of digesting information, of processing texts, of thinking.
Speed involves loss: movement through physical space is the most evident example. My experience of the world when on foot is inestimably richer than when transported by vehicle, from the humble bicycle on up. The reduction of the perception of space created by speed will tend to manifest in actual practices as well. The driver speeding down the road already sees the roadsides and margins as a homogeneous blur, and so the treatment of this space tends to follow suit, mowing down roadside life into a neat homogeneous blank slate, empty space that reduces visual and mental friction, with the exception of advertising—friction that is permitted because it feeds the economic engine, just like the proliferation of advertising devices within vehicles themselves. Sometimes the reduction of speed is not just permitted but encouraged in industrial capitalist regimes: sometimes for purposes of market optimization, at other times—as at national borders—for reasons of state order and control. There is an implicit understanding, I think, of the danger of speed, and hence we can really see what is most valued in the hegemonic order by looking at what is deliberately slowed down, and for who. Knowing the history of past societies and technological regimes can provide us with these vital keys of understanding (though as a historian I guess I would say that wouldn’t I!), as we see what has been transformed, what has been replaced, what has been sped up or slowed down.
It is also important to stress here as elsewhere that modernity is much more complicated than a story of (only) transformation, replacement, and so forth. ‘Modernity’ and ‘pre-modernity,’ or ‘modern’ and ‘pre-modern’ simply do not suffice, though they do point to real chronological relationships that do in fact manifest in deeply structured ways. Yet even as industrial modernity has on the whole, in hegemonic (which does not equal all-encompassing, it is worth remembering) fashion, reworked our relationship to speed, movement through space, and all of the iterations of acceleration and de-acceleration, the other-than-modern subsists, and sometimes more than subsists. There are new forms of being in the world that have emerged in reaction to the above trends: for instance, while there are certainly parallel practices in the pre-modern world to our practice of hiking,2 the infrastructure for hiking and a more or less coherent cultural discourse around it are all quite novel. We now need specifically marked out and preserved foot routes through the landscape for encountering nature and moving through rural or wild space, things that in the past simply existed as such (and still exist in some places and contexts). The hiking path responds to the speed of modernity—it allows the hiker to see the world up close and on foot—and it responds to the arresting of movement of modernity, with public land permitting the free movement that strict private property regimes tend to greatly restrict in our world, a kind of slowing down, indeed a coming to a stop.
Hiking paths are striking for another reason, in that they are meant for what we now call “recreation,” a word that has largely lost any force of meaning today but which retains a powerful valence: hiking and other similarly purposive outdoor activities are meant to re-create the practitioner, to replace something that is missing, perhaps even to re-order the person spiritually. Hiking is not an economically useful activity; it might be good for you physically but that is not its primary purpose. It has more in common with pre-modern pilgrimage routes or processionals, with paths and roads dotted with shrines, with the Chacoan straight arrow roads or the “white ways” of the Maya. It is “good for you,” but not in a way entirely reducible to the physical, the utilitarian. While the spiritual or mental effect that we expect from hiking is not the same as what a pre-modern pilgrim had in mind, it is not vastly different. And, crucially, the mode of movement and the speed of it have much in common. And unlike the unintentional slowing down effects of digital technology on reading comprehension and human thought, hiking and its infrastructure are quite deliberate, thought out responses that have so far survived even amid the constant churn of acceleration and de-acceleration as industrial modernity runs further forward.
I think the example of hiking serves as a good stopping point, precisely because it suggests alternative approaches that work through the effects of industrial modernity and build out from our existing regimes of speed and stoppage, none of which are going away anytime soon, but which can for now be modified and adjusted and creatively used at least. I’ll save further suggestions and examples for a future essay, which might be a little while in coming…
I am primarily interested in this essay at least in rural space, in part because the dynamics of movement through urban space in and out of modernity have been covered considerably more, to the point that some readers will no doubt have certain theorists, poets, etc in mind.
Certainly in the early modern world, in contexts as remote from one another as Western Europe, the Americas, the Ottoman world, and Qing China and neighboring Japan, travel/autobiographic writings reveal men and at least a few women who record themselves going out into nature simply to enjoy it and to walk about the mountains or valleys or what have you for the pleasure and spiritually re-creative benefits thereof. There is a whole other story here as to why this seems to be a specifically early modern thing, but that’s for another time!