Culture of Speed and Slow Movement Culture

 

Culture of Speed and Slow Movement Culture

This blog is written in response to a task assigned by Dr. Dilip Barad Sir. This blog deals with our understanding of Paul Virilio's Dromology - the study of Speed and the talk by Honore on Slow Movement. For more information click Here

Who is Paul Virilio 

Paul Virilio is a contemporary French theorist who has amply discussed the significance of speed and technology in the postmodern era. Through a close reading of Cosmopolis and Virilio’s theories, the present paper aims to contribute to current criticism on DeLillo’s postmodernist fiction. While much of the criticism on Cosmopolis has focused on its premonitory quality concerning 9/11, and its relationship to American popular culture, there is no comprehensive discussion of the postmodern city in the light of Virilio’s ideas concerning speed and technology. The current paper offers the discussion. An attempt is made to read DeLillo’s representations of the postmodern city in terms of Virilio’s views on technology and dromology as well as the related concepts of telepresence and disappearance.

What is Dromology?

Dromology is derived from the Greek ‘dromos’: avenue or race course. The theory of dromology interprets the world and reality as a resultant of velocity. In Paul Virilio’s 1977 essay entitled “Speed and Politics”, the french philosopher makes a compelling case for an interpretation of history, politics and society in the context of speed. Extending the definition of “dromomaniacs”, Virilio argues that speed became the sole agent and measure of progress. He contends, that “there was no ‘industrial revolution’, only ‘dromocratic revolution’; there is no democracy, only dromocracy; there is no strategy, only dromology.” Learn more in: Navigation Becomes Travel Scouting: The Augmented Spaces of Car Navigation Systems.

According to Ian James, he is preoccupied with a wide range of issues: with questions of war and military strategy, with the history of cinema, the nature of modern media and telecommunications as well as the state of contemporary cultural and artistic production . Within this broad range of concerns, technology and speed seem to be two central and  determining themes in his work.

Virilio’s work Dromology is an exciting reading of late 20th century cyberculture. It talks that with the advent of more technology and media, our lives are under constant surveillance.

He argues that histories of socio- political institutions such as the military or even cultural movements

Although Virilio is often an astute observer of social and political life.Virilio steers clear of a detailed assessment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life (AL), and about carbon and silicon life in biology . preferring instead to speak broadly about the negative effects of cyborg culture. This limits the plausibility of his critique. Despite all this, Virilio, it has to be acknowledged, reminds us – often forcefully – that it is important not to become complacent with regard to the development and effects of new technologies, and that resistance and critique are key elements in any democratic politics worthy of the name.

Virilio suggests that with contemporary technology, the world is growing like this one day the local time will be changed to global time.

The counterculture of this culture of speed is culture of ‘Slow Movement.’

The Slow Movement comprises an eclectic gathering of people devoted to slow activism, the first and most prominent of these being the Slow Food movement. Slow activism calls for a deceleration of the pace of modern technological life, arguing that advanced capitalism is dominated by a logic that equates speed with efficiency.

In response to this culture

the movement raises awareness of the ecological and educational issues associated with the production and consumption  globally. While there is considerable diversity in the way slowness is embraced by grassroots movements around the world, what unites them is arguably a determination to experience the pleasure of engaging the basic needs of everyday life with a kind of artful slowness. Such movements seek a more substantial and sustained relation with the complexity of the world.

Ted talk by Carl Honoré on 

Journalist Carl Honore believes the Western world's emphasis on speed erodes health, productivity and quality of life. But there's a backlash brewing, as everyday people start putting the brakes on their all-too-modern lives.

In this, it is a particularly deep-felt and critically reflective form of slow activism. Just as the Slow Movement draws, in modern and contemporary ways, on non-dominant practices, so too does slow philosophy. Slow philosophy is the practice that challenges an instrumental relation to life; it is, above all, the cultivation of a heightened attentiveness. It provides intense encounters that open us to the beauty and strangeness of the world, and this intensity is what arguably lies at the heart of all slow activism.

We know, urbanization, consumerism, the workplace, and technology. But I think if you cut through those forces, you get to what might be the deeper driver, the nub of the question, which is how we think about time itself. In other cultures, time is cyclical. It's seen as moving in great, unhurried circles. It's always renewing and refreshing itself. Whereas in the West, time is linear. It's a finite resource; it's always draining away. You either use it, or lose it.

He gives several examples of Italy and their slow movement like slow food, slow city.He was telling about our nearer situations like work hours weekend and also children having to much speed in their fields like homework, tution, and other many activities they done and not only focused in study but they have many skills and they made their future with those skills also he was given great example of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard. 

He raises the question: why is it so hard to slow down?  Speed is fun, speed is sexy. It's all that adrenaline rush. It's hard to give it up. Why we find it hard to slow down is the cultural taboo that we've erected against slowing down. "Slow" is a dirty word in our culture.