Addicted to Speed, or, Phatic Tweeting

Music: Eguana: Flashback (2018)

I have been re-reading Paul Virilio's work with a particular attention to his thoughts on speed, which he argued some decades ago was the logic of the political and global governance as a race ("dromology").  Finance capital had not quite emerged as the floating city of global signifiers-for-other-signifiers that create and destroy fortunes with a mouse-click; Virilio anticipated the transactions that are now made in (fractions of) nanoseconds.  Although he didn't quite see then our "digital revolution"---he certainly does now!---Virilio nevertheless anticipated the politics of speed nascent in the invention of the motor, which not only simultaneously created the accident, but also the amputation of limbs, which means space itself too (for speed, the glory of speed, we have compression).  So did Walter Benjamin, of course, with his thoughts about the camera, mechanical reproduction, and the ambling of the flâneur. 

Key to Virilio's thinking in the 1970s was the observation that the fetishization of acceleration—what Mark C. Taylor dubs the "cult of speed"—not only enables us to smash atoms but forever change the character of the observer and the observed in the process. Movement and circulation, by virtue of the inevitable bobbing of perspective for apprehending either, means that blur in the mirror is always closer or farther than it appears, but it is nevertheless all that we can see.  Acceleration changes the object of its force; the slower the competing vehicle, whether a Tesla or a nation-state, the more likely it is resigned to the ephemeral and obsolete.   

What I've been thinking is that the impossibility of reflection in a culture addicted to speed is how Trump can lead by the politics of a tweet.  Only in a context of continued acceleration does the power of serial scandal and the "on demand" streaming of offense make any sense.  Folk immersed in cultures of slower temporalities, consequently, cannot comprehend the rhythm of governance that Trump has pushed to the foreground (it was always there, just more in the background).  Virilio isolated the object of this focus in terms of the "phatic image," an object that arrests one's attention by virtue of its shocking or grandiloquent comforts and, often, irrelevant of meaning.  We might consequently characterize Trump's frequently outrageous tweets as something like "phatic posting" or "phatic trolling" in which the content is used in the service of its exhilarating blur, a sort of flashing. 

Such a characterization would be consistent with the argument that Trump: The Figure! is structurally perverse.  The hallmark of the perverse structure is the rhetoric of disavowal: affirming the reality or truth of something that one denies at the same time.  Phatic posting, trolling, or tweeting contorts content for social connection at the expense of considered meaning.  As with the tradition of Signifyin[g], to focus too pointedly on the syntagmatic axis ignores the social work of associative affectation.  In this respect, my critique of journalists' use of the term "double down" is the consequence of a perverse, phatic contagion of sorts, a parroting in speech form what they are forced to report about.  Our collective failure to contend with Trump's rhetoric as phundamentally phatic has been part of general sentiment that it is "unpredictable": it's not.