Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Mar 26, 2014 14:14:50 GMT 5.5
The Politics of Speed
Simon Glezos (Routledge, 2012)
Simon Glezos (Routledge, 2012)
[Reading part of Glezos's 2012 book, I found the following interesting. While it addresses pure political activities of states and of people in power, its relevance transcends the political but reaches every aspect of our life, where the pace of our "living" is threatened as slow or too slow, our outdated.]
The war in Afghanistan not even over1, the Bush administration had already started the push to invade Iraq, justifying the rush to action by the imminent threat they claimed Saddam Hussein posed. We were told that action had to be taken immediately, that we could not wait for inspectors to determine if the threat was real, that we could not allow ‘the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud’. Implicit in these statements was the exposition of the new temporal order of the political world: in this accelerated world, the pace with which new threats can materialize leaves no time for hesitation. Decisions must be made quickly and efficiently by a centralized and authoritative executive. Slow-moving processes of deliberation and debate (not to mention investigation) are no longer viable. Indeed, they potentially threaten our survival.
I, like many in both America and around world, was not convinced by the President’s claims of the imminent threat posed by Iraq, and joined the hundreds of thousands in the streets of Washington, DC (and millions in cities all over the world) in protest. However, as these protests were systematically ignored I was oriented to another worrisome aspect of speed. At the same time that the pace of events in the world encouraged the government to act in ways too fast for democratic deliberation, it also allowed them to act so quickly as to escape democratic censure. At this point, almost eight years into the war, it feels as if those in power have gone from one reckless action to another, always moving too fast to be held accountable for their destruction, lies and illegalities. A quote from an article in the New York Times Magazine in 2004, profiling the character of the Bush administration, seemed to get to the heart of this new freedom. In it, reporter Ron Suskind interviewed a high-level aide within the Bush administration:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality–judiciously, as you will–we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” (Suskind 2004)
In addition to informing us that, apparently, members of the Bush administration had been reading a lot of Baudrillard, this quotation provides insight into the new temporal order of politics. It tells us that the actions of those in positions of political power now move too fast for traditional mechanisms of oversight and accountability. And the news media which is supposed to exercise this accountability must itself move so fast that, in moving from scandal to scandal, those in power need only wait for the news cycle to move on. Thus, when a decision is made, by the time we figure out what has happened, and discuss whether or not it is a good thing, the decision-makers have ‘act[ed] again, creating other new realities’. The process of democratic deliberation and popular accountability becomes a never-ending game of catch-up, freeing the powerful of any real responsibility. This is because responsibility and accountability are necessarily backward looking, while, in a fast paced world, we are pressed to focus our eyes on the future (there is no time to play the ‘blame game’)(pp 1-2).
1. Here Glezos remembers the aftermath (especially during 2002 and 2003) of the 11 September 2001 attack.
1. Here Glezos remembers the aftermath (especially during 2002 and 2003) of the 11 September 2001 attack.