Exiting Speed Culture: Tiqqun Against Cybernetic Acceleration

From The Cybernetic Hypothesis:

Violence is the first rule of the game of encounters. And it polarizes the various wanderings of desire that Lyotard invokes the sovereign freedom of in his book Libidinal Economy. But because he refuses to admit that enjoyments agree together on a particular territory to precede them and where forms-of-life can mix and move together; because he refuses to understand that the neutralization of all intensities is itself a kind of intensification — that of the Empire, no less — because he can’t deduce from this that while they are inseparable, life impulses and death impulses are not neutral relative to a singular Other, Lyotard in the end cannot go beyond the most cybernetization-compatible hedonism: relax, let yourself go, let out your desires! Enjoy, enjoy; there’ll always be something left! There’s no doubt that conduction, abandon, and mobility in general can heighten the amplification of deviations from the norm as long as they acknowledge what interrupts flows within the very heart of circulation itself. In light of the acceleration that cybernetics gives rise to, speed and nomadism can only be secondary developments beside the primary slow-down policies.

Speed upholds institutions. Slowness cuts off flows. The kinetic problem, properly speaking, in politics, thus isn’t about choosing between two kinds of revolt but about abandoning oneself to a pulsation, of exploring other intensifications besides those that are commanded by the temporality of urgency. The cyberneticians’ power has been their ability to give rhythm to the social body, which tends to prevent all respiration. Canetti proposes that rhythm’s anthropological genesis is associated with racing: “Rhythm is at its origin a rhythm of feet; it produces, intentionally or not, a rhythmic noise.” But this racing is not predictable as a robot’s would be; “the two feet never land with the same force. The difference between them might be more or less vast, depending on personal dispositions and moods. But you can also go faster or more slowly, run, suddenly stop, jump…” This means that rhythm is the opposite of a program, that it depends on forms-of-life, and that speed problems can be dealt with by looking at rhythm issues. All bodies, insofar as they are wobbly, have a certain rhythm that shows that it is in their nature to hold untenable/unholdable positions. This rhythm, which comes from the limping/wobble of bodies, the movement of feet, Canetti adds, is — furthermore — at the origins of writing, in the sense that it started with the tracks left by animals in motion, that is, of History in motion. Events are the appearance of such traces and making History means improvising in search of a rhythm. Whatever credit we give to Canetti’s demonstrations, they do indicate — as true fictions do — that political kinetics can be better understood as the politics of rhythm. This means, a minima, that the binary techno-rhythm imposed by cybernetics must be opposed by other rhythms.

But it also means that these other rhythms, as manifestations of ontological wobbliness, have always had a creative political function. Canetti himself also discusses how on the one hand “the rapid repetition by which steps are added onto steps gives the illusion that there’s a larger number of beings present. They do not move from place to place, they carry on their dance always in the same location. The noise made by their steps does not die, it is repeated and echoes out for a long time, always with the same resonance and the same vivacity. They make up for their small size in number by their intensity.” On the other hand, “when their trampling is reinforced, it is as if they had called for backup. They exercise a force of attraction on everybody in the area, a force that doesn’t stop as long as they continue their dance.” Searching for good rhythm, then, opens things up for an intensification of experience as well as for numerical increase. It is an instrument of aggregation as well as an exemplary action to be imitated. On the individual scale as well as on the social scale, bodies themselves lose their sense of unity in order to grow as potential weapons: “the equivalence of the participants ramifies out into the equivalency of their members. Everything mobile about a human body takes on a life of its own, each leg, each arm lives as if for itself alone.” The politics of rhythm is thus the search for a reverberation, another state, comparable to trance on the part of the social body, through the ramification of each body. Because there are indeed two possible regimes of rhythm in the cybernetized Empire. The first, which Simondon refers to, is that of the technician-man, who “ensure the integrative function and prolong self-regulation outside of each monad of automatism,” technicians whose “lives are made up of the rhythm of the machines surrounding them, and that connect them to each other.” The second rhythm aims to undermine this interconnective function: it is profoundly dis-integrating, rather than merely noisy. It is a rhythm of disconnection. The collective conquest of this accurate dissonant tempo must come from a prior abandon to improvisation.