On Slowness

In Time and Free Will, Henri Bergson wrote in 1889 that feelings of joy accompany our orientation toward the future, whereas sadness and sorrow result from our failure to embrace movement and overcome physical and psychic passivity.1 Bergson’s notion of joy reads like a motto for what we have come to associate with European high modernism, its departure from the dominance of tradition as much as its stress on the exhilarating effects of velocity, acceleration, shock, and ongoing mobility. According to conventional understandings, industrial modernity, as it began to sweep across the European landscapes of the nineteenth century and introduced technologies such as the steam train, the telegraph, the telephone, the cinema, and the automobile, inaugurated an age of unprecedented time-space compression.² Modernity brought the thrill of speed and motion to the sluggishness of preindustrial life. It provided unknown physical sensations, perceptual pleasures, and psychic agitations and, in this way, it not only reworked the entire human sensorium, but promised a future joyfully different from the past. What, in turn, defined aesthetic modernism as modernist, following this prevailing understanding, was its relentless desire to tap into modernity’s valorization of speed. Modernism, it has been concluded, surfed the waves of modern haste and rupture. In all its different manifestations, it explored the nervousness and distraction of the modern mind as a source of artistic experimentation.³ Though not immune to the idea of a timeless masterwork, modernist artists intoxicated themselves with the thrills of accelerated movement in an effort to emancipate the work of art from static expectations, to jolt audiences away from habitual modes of perception and in so doing to situate recipients as active participants in the construction of art’s future meaning.

In 1931 Aldous Huxley famously pronounced: “Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.”4 Speed, for Huxley, became most palpable when using his automobile at maximum velocity. The automobile’s thrill, in Huxley’s perspective, was thereby at least threefold. First and foremost, a car’s speed allowed for an exhilarating shrinkage and annihilation of space, speed here being understood as the physical rate of movement across space, and space being understood, not as a sphere of factual relations and possible interactions, but as the mere measure of distance. Speed actively participated in how modernity reorganized everyday life and collapsed preindustrial differences between center and periphery, the near and the far. It enabled motorists to pursue nothing less than the pleasurable adventure of allowing temporality to triumph over and erase the rigidity of space. Second, unlike the primarily receptive experience of nineteenth-century train passengers, the car driver’s perception of velocity was one in which a quasi-Nietzschean assertion of transformative power went hand in hand with a peculiar decentering of the driver’s sense of self. In steering his car around rapidly approaching obstacles, the driver’s body seemed to conquer the world of modern machines as much as it authorized these machines to recalibrate the body’s perception of its own limits and extensions in space. Third, and finally, the pleasure of driving cars at high speed provided ample resources to question how nineteenth-century bourgeois culture had started to divide modern civilization into the seemingly exclusive realms of disembodied and intellectually demanding high art, on the one hand, and, on the other, of materialistic and consumer-driven mass culture. To maneuver a car at high speed, in the eyes of Huxley and others, unsettled these normative hierarchies. It allowed for a heightened sense of activity and a dramatic sharpening of sensory perception, while it also promised to emancipate the subject from the strictures of bourgeois culture and employed modern consumer culture to explode given templates of identity.

As we will see later in this chapter, Huxley’s praise of speed and car travel as modernity’s principal pleasures echoed the voices of many other artists and intellectuals during the heyday of European aesthetic modernism. For now, it shall simply serve us as a paradigmatic example of how various modernisms in the first decades of the twentieth century not only valorized accelerated rates of movement as sources of aesthetic thrill and experimentation, but in so doing also articulated profound misgivings about all those unwilling to hurl themselves down the road and straight into the future. In the wake of modernism’s joyful adoration of rapid motion, slowness became largely denigrated as both antiprogressive and antiaesthetic.⁵ It was seen as rooting the individual in the fixity of place and as taming the energies of temporal change, subjecting the individual to the burden of tradition and containing any desire to explode the confines of bourgeois identity. To go slow was to resist modernism’s categorical quest for newness, and it thus not only suspended the possibility of aesthetic experimentation, but obstructed the way in which various modernist projects sought to couple aesthetic innovation to political reform. In much of high modernist discourse, and in how later generations have come to think about it, slowness has been typecast as a sad remnant of preindustrial longings and sentiments—as something that combats the peculiarly modern sense of temporal contingency, flux, and indeterminacy; that blocks the progress of artistic and social affairs; and that quells the seeds of individual change and liberation.

Slowness, in the eyes of many a modernist in the early 1900s, not only invited space to triumph over time, but articulated a desire to turn one’s back on everything that defined modernity as truly modern, including its hope to emancipate the present from the normative burdens of the past. To slow down meant to contest the joys of movement and temporal passage. It was antiprogressive and anti-Enlightenment, privileging static over dynamic interrelations, binary oppositions over dialectical energies, mindless contemplation over critical engagement, escapist flight over nonsentimental commitments, nostalgia over activism. Whereas, for the fast and furious, velocity held the promise of unsettling traditional hierarchies and subject positions, slowness was perceived as the cultural elite’s last straw to hold on to their former privileges and resist the storms industrial culture had cast over the scenes of modern life. To advocate slowness, in Huxley’s modern age of speed, meant to shut out the metropolitan thrills and energizing stimulations that inspired true modernists to depart from the canon of the past. As a rhetorical figure of unbending conservatives and romantic fundamentalists, slowness wanted to recenter the subject’s sensory systems, reinstate the subject as an autonomous agent of her perception, and in this way reject how modernism in its most emphatic stances translated the adventures of temporal displacement into new artistic forms.

This book pursues a categorically different framing of slowness, one whose roots can be traced back to an alternate understanding of various modernist projects and one that is far from hostile to the main elements of aesthetic modernism: sensory experimentation, ongoing movement, change, and indeterminacy. Recent scholarship has urged us to complicate seasoned notions of modernism. As a result, we have rightly come to speak of multiple modernities, alternate modernisms, and vernacular modes of modernist experience, not only in order to extend the concept of modernism to aesthetic practices, institutions, and interventions formulated outside of or in opposition to its primarily Western European (and often colonialist) model but also to overcome dominant associations of modernism with a relatively narrow historical time frame (roughly the 1880s to 1930s) and a particular class of cultural producers and consumers.6 What this chapter, with no doubt rather bold strokes, will delineate as slow modernism participates in these recent conversations about the heterogeneity and plurality of aesthetic modernism. As I understand it here, slow modernism defined one of various folds within the fabric of high modernism. It challenged certain modernist credos of speed and ceaseless temporal displacement and it precisely thus prefigured some of the central aspects of what this book explores as today’s aesthetic of slowness. My point is not to argue that aesthetic modernism as a whole was much slower than it is, in spite of all its celebration of speed and flux, shock and rupture, believed to be. What is at stake instead is to show that the normative association of Western modernism with pleasurable speed and ceaseless movement often rested on rather lopsided definitions of the temporal as a sphere of dynamic change and of space as a dimension of static simultaneity. Such reductionist notions not only resulted in inadequate understandings of both velocity and slowness. They also had lasting effects on our ability to recognize the disruptive and transformative power of what this books identifies as a contemporary preoccupation with the slow and the durational and with space as a site of open-ended stories and vectors of change.

This introductory chapter recalls two critical moments of modernist aesthetic culture in order to develop a more nuanced understanding of modern velocity and aesthetic contemporaneity. I will first revisit the formative history of Italian Futurism between 1909 and 1913, often seen as the primary locus of modernist fantasies of speed. In an effort to complicate dominant accounts of modernist speed culture, I identify the seeds of a modernist aesthetic of slowness in the very center of some Futurist artistic practices. In a second step, I will then focus on the work of German literary critic Walter Benjamin and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, whose respective interventions of the 1930s urge us to distinguish between different articulations of modern slowness and thus warn us against seeing desires for slowness in modernist culture as one unified program. In discussing these two constellations of modernist culture, my aim is to reconstruct the possibility of recognizing important strains within aesthetic modernism that refused to consider slowness as antimodern, nostalgic, and antiaesthetic. Modernist slowness was far from inviting readers, viewers, and listeners to hang on to bygone traditions, rhythms, and identifications. Nor should we think of slowness simply as a corrective to the presumed modernist privileging of the temporal over the spatial, as an attempt to play out what might be homogeneous, stable, and tame about space against the rapid and discontinuous pace of modernity’s clocks, vehicles, and tools of telecommunication. Modernist slowness instead defined a peculiar mode of engaging with the various temporalities and trajectories that energized the spaces of modern life, and, in so doing, it emphasized the coeval, imbricated, and indeterminate relationships of the temporal and the spatial. Slowness is what allowed modernists to register, represent, and reflect on how modern culture not only accelerated the rhythms of preindustrial life but in this way also reconfigured material relationships and immaterial interactions across different geographies. Rather than first defining time and space as binary opposites and then presenting modernity as a period in which temporality came to triumph over the fixity of space, modernist slowness took heed of the mutual implications of the spatial and the temporal, with space being seen as a dynamic simultaneity of disparate trajectories and dissonant narratives, and time being understood as a dimension whose emphasis on change required open interactions between discrete elements and agents.7

Modernist slowness, then, does not figure merely as modernist speed’s repressed—a forgotten orphan of how cultural critics throughout the twentieth century have come to associate high modernism with rapid change and the intensity of shock. Nor do I understand modernist slowness simply as a reactive desire seeking to reverse Huxley’s velocity and hence as an attempt to reinforce the safe pleasures of distance. Instead, as it emerged within the force field of high modernism, aesthetic slowness brought into play a mode of experiencing and conceptualizing motion that was fundamentally at odds with the intoxicating visions of modernist speed addicts. Its principal aim was to emancipate the hype of modern mobility from narrow conceptions of movement as a mere traversal of space and elimination of distance and, in this way, it aspired to open the subject’s senses to a much wider and temporally multivalent landscape of present experience. What I call modernist slowness fully recognized the importance of movement—including movement at accelerating rates—for any process of perceiving objects in time and space. Yet its primary ambition was to experience mobility as a force allowing us, not merely to move effectively from A to B, but to establish unpredictable connections and correspondences, to come across lateral and nonintentional perceptions, and to engage in categorically open interactions with nonidentical particulars. The point of modernist slowness, in sum, was not to abandon the speed of modern life and to bond the future back to the past. Rather, it was to define mobility as a form of communication and interrelation able to sharpen the subject’s perception of the present—a present constituted by the contemporaneity of multiple pasts and futures, proximities and distances, movements and speeds.

The seminal modern theorist of the durational, Bergson saw joy in forms of movement that decidedly propelled the subject toward and into the future. As it reads modernism’s stress on movement against the grain of its speed theorists, the point of this chapter is to identify modernist experiments with slowness that prefigure—in spite of a number of fundamental historical differences—the various artistic practices discussed later in this book. In its final section, three brief theoretical readjustments become necessary to effectively set the stage for today’s practitioners of aesthetic slowness. The first has to do with Bergson’s work itself and its normative privileging of the temporal over the spatial. Though Bergson’s interest in extended structures of temporality is of considerable importance for this project, it helped shore up binary views of space as static and time as transformative that have obstructed our full understanding of expanded concepts of mobility present in both modernist and in more contemporary aesthetic practice. The second intervention serves the purpose of reconstructing modernist discourses on medium specificity in such a way that we can accommodate how aesthetic slowness today cannot do without actively recognizing and recalibrating the temporal logic of its respective media of expression. Though aesthetic slowness today is part and parcel of what Rosalind Krauss has termed our postmedium condition,8 it urges us to reflect on the extent to which the material bases of certain media profoundly matter in artistic strategies of meaning making. The third adjustment finally wants to reclaim the ground for a strong concept of aesthetic experience in which structures of absorption and the noninstrumental can go hand in hand with states of attentiveness and self-awareness. As an art of pursuing contemporaneity, aesthetic slowness today not only relies on the use of various technologies of reproduction; in doing so it also strives to settle the conflict modernists such as Benjamin saw between traditional art’s quest for contemplation and modern media’s emancipatory power of distraction.

The emergence of transportation technologies such as cars and airplanes figured as a decisive engine of how Italian Futurists shortly before the outbreak of World War I hoped to deliver artistic practice from the burdens of the past. The modern acceleration of visual, tactile, and aural stimulations caused Futurists painters such as Giacomo Balla to rally against the representational frameworks of traditional art and explore velocity as modernity’s site of the sublime.9 For Balla, the Renaissance’s perspectival system was of no more use to capture how modern speed seemed to make traversed topographies advance upon the moving subject and thus question the former role of the subject as a sovereign master of space. As a consequence, in paintings such as Racing Automobile (1913; figure 1.1), Balla transformed his canvas into a vortexlike structure whose frame appeared unable to contain the image’s dynamic orthogonals. For writers and poets such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the velocity of modern industrial culture required a new language of telegraphic immediacy that had no patience for long-winded sentences, syntactic complexities, conceptual nuances, let alone conventional punctuation.¹⁰ Futurist language was to shortcut linguistic signification and instead grasp its objects directly and physically—like a fist hitting its target, like a torpedo striking its aim. In the realm of music, finally, Futurist speed addicts such as Luigi Russolo encouraged composers to break away from the codes of classical music because, in an age of fast-paced machinery, technological recording, and earsplitting warfare, the modern ear had lost its ability to stay tuned to the conventional arcs of melodic progression and chromatic modulation.¹¹

In all of these examples, the speed of modern industrial society not only caused the artist to envision new aesthetic strategies representing what seemed to defy representation. As important, it led to calls for a radical break with how nineteenth-century society had placated the energies of aesthetic experience within the iron cage of the art museum, the reading room, and the concert hall. As embraced by Futurism, modernity’s culture of velocity was welcomed as generating its own normativity. Speed justified any attempt to shatter the vessels of the past, and it sanctioned all those who had no patience for lingering in a stagnant present. Though its primary objects of fascination might strike today’s historians as rather slow in motion, Western speed culture circa 1913 promoted visions of a future-oriented present as a space of Dionysian ecstasy—as a dynamic ground liberating the subject from the confines of individuation and granting the pleasures of pulsating collectivity. Or, alternatively, modern velocity demanded the advent of a new metallized body able not only to parry the shocks of accelerated movement, but in so doing to learn how to fortify the body against the unsettling vagaries of difference as they may trouble the subject either from outside or from within its sensory perimeters.

Nowhere, however, did the speed of modern transportation technologies play a more decisive role than in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s founding manifesto of Italian Futurism, first published in the French newspaper Le Figaro on February 20, 1909. As it praises the power of speed as a principal feature of modern life, Marinetti’s manifesto instructs the reader to revere danger, ceaseless energy, and fearlessness; to carry out a feverish revolt against anything old, traditional, and static; to destroy the fossilized institutions of nineteenth-century bourgeois life—museums, libraries, academies; to embrace the beauty of struggle and the rejuvenating force of modern technological warfare; and in this way to launch “multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution,”12 sweeping away whatever may block Futurism’s categorical imperative to produce futurity in each and every moment. So radical is Marinetti’s attack on the sluggishness of bourgeois culture, so violent his desire to accelerate the present, that at its most extreme his manifesto declares: “Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.”¹³

Much has been written about the precarious fusion of machismo, speed, and patriotic militarism in Marinetti’s work. What I therefore would like to focus on is simply the path that, in the text of his manifesto, leads him to proclaim the tenets of radical futurity: a car crash, triggered by two bicyclists whose slowness causes the intoxicated driver to spin his speedy car into a ditch. Contrary to expectation, Marinetti initially enjoys his brief sojourn in the muck. What exhilarates him even more, however, is a crowd of fishermen rigging his capsized vehicle back onto the road and allowing him finally to reimmerse himself, as if nothing could ever really thwart his route, in the pleasures of fast-forward motion. Seemingly unstoppable, Marinetti concludes: “We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.”¹⁴

Given the relentless pace of Marinetti’s diction, it is easy to overlook this sentence and fail to unpack how it addresses the physical and perceptual challenges of speed. “Marinetti,” writes Christine Poggi, “masters the trauma of the crash, not through a fixation on the past but through an active embrace of its destructive power, which as Jeffrey Schnapp has argued, releases new energies and drives. … [The text manifests] the fantasy of a metallized body resistant to threats and shocks, in the desire to dominate time and space by imagining oneself as a projectile, and in the assumption of a state of perpetual, combative ‘readiness’ to parry external blows.”15 Poggi’s point is well taken: Marinetti wards off the dangers of moving at high speed by considering his own body as a bullet, and hence, by experiencing the car as a prosthetic extension of his moving subjectivity. Enigmatic as it may be, the concluding image, however, has more to say than this and in fact indicates the extent to which Marinetti’s version of futurism, in the final analysis, tends to dodge rather than fully engage the potentiality of modern temporality, mobility, and contingency. For what is striking about Marinetti’s celebration of the man at the wheel is how this image consolidates apparent opposites into the unity of one single dynamic, suggesting effective continuities between seemingly disjunctive elements. Modern technologies of acceleration (the car) here open a window on primordial realities (the orbit); the vehicle’s directional motion produces a vision of temporal circularity; material conditions give birth to hallucinatory fantasy; transportation devices give way to fierce weaponry; and, last but not least, the driver’s sense of controlling the operations of motion and time yields to a galactic absence of choice, chance, and indeterminacy, namely the unbending orbit around the Earth. True to the manifesto’s overall tenor, the experience of speed here surely explodes traditional templates of time and space. It generates an aesthetics of intoxicating flow meant to overcome existing spatial distances and temporal durations. As important, however, in his effort to expand the space of the present toward a rapidly approaching future, Marinetti eagerly sacrifices what is unpredictable on the altar of what is unremitting about progress and velocity itself. The contingencies of operating a vehicle at high speed in Marinetti’s vision empower a mythic sense of ceaseless motion and futurity in which mechanical exigencies trump the vagaries of human will, manic repetition swallows any desire for difference. To choose modern mobility here means to forfeit our very ability to choose; to speed forward means to endorse both an eternal return of the new and a perpetual renewal of the old; to hurl oneself down the road ends up fusing the linear and the circular—planetary, technological, and subjective time—into one unified composition.

The work of Anton Giulio Bragaglia—Futurist pioneer of photography and future art administrator during the Mussolini era—effectively demonstrates the stakes of Marinetti’s vision of speed. Whereas Balla had previously tried to represent the exalting pleasures of speed within the conventional frame of a painting, Bragaglia aspired to do the same with the help of his photographic still camera. Bragaglia’s experiments with open shutter photography—or, as he called it, photodynamism—intended to correct the inherent dilemmas of late nineteenth-century chronophotographers such as Étienne-Jules Marey, whose analytic images—according to Bragaglia himself—had certainly been able to arrest individual aspects of specific movements, but had failed to display the true sensation of motion and speed, that is to say, the sensorial or psychic wake observers perceive when facing continuous actions across time and space. “Chronophotography,” Bragaglia argued, “could be compared with a clock on the face of which only the quarter-hours are marked, cinematography to one on which the minutes too are indicated, and Photodynamism to a third on which are marked not only the seconds, but also the intermovemental fractions existing in the passages between seconds. This becomes an almost infinitesimal calculation of movement.”16

Images such as Violinchelitsa and Dattilografa of 1913 (figure 1.2) exemplify Bragaglia’s quest for intensity rather than dissecting analysis, for transgressing the instantaneity of the conventional photographic image and replacing it with records tracing time itself. In these images, Bragaglia’s camera captures the cellist’s and the typist’s accelerated activities, the interaction of body and machine, as one extended trajectory in space, as a visible wake. Yet, due to both the nature of the actions and the technological exigencies of the photographic medium, trajectorial movements here meet the viewer’s eyes as strangely circular and almost illegible traces. In his effort to represent intermovemental fractions so as to achieve highest intensity, Bragaglia obliterates any sense of sequentiality whatsoever, of where individual movements may have started and when they may have come to some kind of end. It is impossible for the viewer to determine how many keys have been pressed by the typists; impossible to ascertain what kind of notes may have been played by the cellist. True to Marinetti’s vision, time and space here appear to die indeed, executed by the intensity of modern velocity.

A product of Marinetti’s age of modern speed, photodynamism wanted to map fleeting movements within the simultaneity of one photographic frame, but in doing so it expunged both the distinctness of the object and the actual movement itself. Similar to Marinetti’s vision of speedy cars orbiting the Earth, Bragaglia’s images level the difference between the directional and the iterative; they fuse body and machine into one ecstatic image, thus depicting accelerated motion as something that surpasses the will, determination, and control of the represented subject. Like Marinetti, Bragaglia collapses subjective and machinic temporality so as to radically erase the autonomy and intractability of the human body. The pleasures of modern velocity become the modern subject’s inevitable fate and destination; the Futurist rhetoric of dynamic speed invites the subject to go with the flow, to serve as a mere index of the passing of time, rather than to actively change and imprint his particular will onto the course of history. Similar to Marinetti’s man on the wheel, then, photodynamism in the end leaves chance no chance. In spite of all its emphasis on innovation and departure, the futurist praise of speed projects futures that know of no alternatives and have no space for that which may exceed the authoritative templates of necessity.

Marinetti’s and Bragaglia’s addictions to speed, and their hope to hardwire the modern body into the trajectories of fast-moving machines, have often served as symptomatic examples of how aesthetic modernism in general, when valorizing accelerated motion over contemplative distance, has paved the way for precarious social and political agendas. But to think of both Futurism and aesthetic modernism as one unified movement would mean to view history in terms of Marinetti’s own rhetoric of speed and hence deny the possibility of alternate visions of modern mobility within Futurism and aesthetic modernism. Compare, therefore, Bragaglia’s notion of the wake with what Umberto Boccioni, in his perhaps most famous 1913 sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (figure 1.3), set out to do in order to make the speed of modern culture representable. To be sure, a Futurist of the first hour, Boccioni’s interest in motion and speed has often been directly associated with Marinetti’s work, producing readings of Unique Forms of Continuity in Space as a cyborg avant la lettre: a racer whose skin has morphed into a metallic armor parrying the shocks of accelerated motion; a terminator fusing hot combustion and cold rigidity, the animate and the inanimate, into one unyielding dynamic.¹⁷ Boccioni’s work, critics have argued, is an integral part of a larger Futurist project that celebrated the infinitesimal and intermovemental aspects of accelerated motion. Like Marinetti and Bragaglia, Boccioni’s sculpture—it has been concluded—embraced velocity in order to annihilate gravity and contour; to collapse multiple instants and processes onto the space of one representation; and thus to advocate a notion of movement in which the dynamic principle of time gloriously wins over the presumed stasis of the spatial.

While it would be foolish to deny crucial similarities between Boccioni’s and his Futurist colleagues’ thrill about modern velocity, it would be equally thoughtless not to point out critical differences about how they reflect on the impact of speed onto the registers of perception and representation. “Sculpture,” Boccioni wrote in his “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture” (1912), must “make objects come to life by rendering their prolongation into space perceivable, systematic, and three-dimensional: No one can still doubt that one object leaves off where another begins and that there is nothing that surrounds our own body—bottle, automobile, house, river, tree, street—that does not cut through it and slice it into cross-sections with an arabesque of curves and straight lines.”18 Unique Forms of Continuity in Space is an exemplary manifestation of this program as it embraces modern velocity as a medium complicating existing notions of space and problematizing long-standing assumptions about the self-sufficiency of objects in their relatedness to other objects, including the body of the perceiver. What distinguishes Boccioni’s work from that of Marinetti and Bragaglia is the fact that Boccioni’s interest is neither in mapping the visible wake of accelerated motion, and thus in articulating a new myth—a determinist vision—of modern progress, nor in trying to do away with spatial and temporal extensions altogether. Rather, what drives Boccioni’s sculpture is the attempt to show how modern speed and motion allow us to perceive space as an inherently temporal and hence open and indeterminate dimension of experience. In contrast to his Futurist compatriots, Boccioni imagines movement—as Enda Duffy has put it—as “a force within a material figure,”¹⁹ urging him to depict modern mobility as a dynamic relay station of multiple trajectories from past to future, as a meeting ground of the actual and the virtual, of factual and possible extensions in space. Whereas other Futurists represented speed as mythically fusing the linear and the circular, Boccioni encounters modern velocity as a force field defining the present as a site of uncontained potentiality and multiplicity. His figures strides forward into a future full of options, choices, and possible interactions, a future in which both the durational and the spatial exist in the plural.

In contrast to conventional perspectives, I consider Boccioni’s subtle encounter with modern velocity—his reflexive distention of the spatial and the temporal—as a paradigmatic instance of modernist slowness. To go slow, in Boccioni, was to resist modernism’s myth of breakneck progress in the name of modernism’s own quest for expanded presence. To go slow meant to play out modernist desires for contingency and potentiality against how modernist speed addicts such as Marinetti and Bragaglia, in their efforts to eradicate space as a dimension of unpredictable connections and interactions, extinguished the very conditions of the contingent and temporally open. Later chapters will reveal the continued relevance of Boccioni’s peculiar conception of mobility for understanding how artists today, with the help of various time-based media, recalibrate the speed of our techno- and mediascapes. At this juncture, however, let me turn first to the work of yet another modernist, Walter Benjamin, whose thought has often been associated with the velocity of modern industrial culture, yet whose writing offers considerable resources to expand the range of what I understand here as slowness’s aesthetic pursuit of being contemporary to one’s present in all its potentiality.

And yet, in particular in the last years of his life, Benjamin’s work was quite concerned with figurations of slowness as well, part of a larger effort to counteract progressivist views of time as linear, homogeneous, circular, and thus ultimately static. While a peculiarly modern sense of velocity, shock, and fragmentation clearly structures the core of Benjamin’s epistemology and prose, it is impossible to overlook the extent to which a great deal of Benjamin’s later thought cannot do without deliberate gestures of deceleration, of situating the intellectual in relative distance to the velocities of the day and of endorsing memory and the durational as an antidote against modernity’s logic of amnesia and catastrophe. Think, for instance, of how Benjamin, in his monumental Arcades Project, recalls the Parisian mid-nineteenth-century practice of walking with a turtle on a leash in order to slow down one’s pace, to look intently at the urban landscape, and, of course, to transform oneself into a bohemian object of to-be-looked-at-ness. Or of how Benjamin, in the same work, reflects on boredom and waiting as existential states, not entirely ignorant of the dynamic of modern history, but situated at the doorstep of and in relation to pending transformations. To cultivate one’s boredom is to orchestrate a dramatic reduction of speed. It means to take a deep breath and turn matters inside out, and to view the present as an eternal repetition of the same, before some unknown future will suddenly displace the orders of the day: “We are bored when we don’t know what we are waiting for. That we do know, or think we know, is nearly always the expression of our superficiality or inattention. Boredom is the threshold to great deeds.”20 Slowness and deceleration, in both of these examples, turn out to be peculiar products of and responses to modern speed and acceleration. Slowness needs modern speed in order to define itself and become perceptible as a relevant structure of experience. Therefore to think of slowness as nature’s, spontaneity’s, or tradition’s outcry against the rhythms of industrial life misses the point. To live slowly requires as much deliberation and effort as a life of ceaseless tempo and ongoing dislocation. It turns speed against itself in the hope of multiplying the perceptual and experiential possibilities of modern life. Only he who is willing to face the pace of modern life, only he who dares encounter the restless flows and discontinuous shocks of urban modernity—only he will be able to recognize the true pleasures and provocations of slowness.

Nowhere does the figure of slowness in Benjamin’s work become more prominent than in his final contemplation on the philosophy of history, drafted shortly before his death in 1940 and articulating an at once apocalyptic and messianic perspective on the possibility of future historical change in a time seemingly void of liberatory political energies. The central image here is, of course, that of the angel of history, Benjamin’s famous reading of a painting by Paul Klee (figure 1.4). In this image, the modern conception of history as progress and rapid change is seen as a storm tossing everything at high speed into the future—a future whose principal feature is the perennial renewal and hence repetition of past and present catastrophes. In radical contradistinction to speed addicts such as Marinetti, Benjamin’s angel has his back turned toward this future. Unable to close his wings, he is caught up in the breakneck tempo of historical time. Speechless about the course of history, his eye remains directed at the wreckage piling up in front of his feet: “The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.”²¹

Benjamin’s angel is certainly a deeply melancholic figure. He refuses to face the future so as to prevent possible blind spots of historical memory, chiasmas that deny ubiquitous suffering. His eyes staring, he rejects any understanding of history as a progressive narrative organized according to a linear, forward-moving cause-and-effect chain. And yet rather than seeing this angel’s desire to slow down and halt the course of progress as a gesture renouncing modernity altogether, Benjamin’s hope for redemption is deeply structured not only by the promises of modernity itself—contingency, change, and openness—but also by the kind of perceptual technologies extended by modern media society. Consider the possibility of reading Klee’s angel of history as a curious embodiment of what Benjamin, beginning in his famous 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility,” discussed as slow-motion cinematography’s ability to pierce familiar surfaces and, like surrealism, reveal forgotten constellations and surprising correspondences—a medium ideally suited to return the “Blue Flower in the land of technology.”22 Slow-motion photography, in Benjamin’s understanding, represented the habitual world as one filled with wonders and the unexpected; it multiplied possible ways of reading the phenomenal world and disclosed unforeseen differences, gradations, and distinctions underneath the veneer of ordinary sights. As special effect, which, as I mentioned in the introduction to this book, relied on recording images at much higher speed than when shown during the process of projection, slow-motion photography in Benjamin’s view intensified perceptions of time and movement, not because it sought to freeze the flow of time, but because it at once facilitated and reversed a stepping up of temporality.

The gesture of Klee’s angel recalls what Benjamin’s artwork essay described as the duality of slow-motion photography. On the one hand, the angel wants to decelerate the speed and progression of modern time; to reveal and hang on to the minute details of life lived; to find moments of forgotten meaning and mystery amid the storm of catastrophic history and pointless progress; to capture images of past and present as they had never been seen before and precisely thus redeem physical reality for its moment of resurrection at some unidentified time in the future. On the other hand, what fuels the angel’s desire to slow down, what enables his strategies of deceleration, is the storm of rampant progress itself, arresting his wings such that movement and stasis become one and the same. Like a slow-motion photographer, Benjamin’s angel cannot do without the stepping up of speed typical for the modern era and its technological media. His desire for slowness is an effect of his very state of acceleration, of his inability to close his wings and step out of that storm blowing him into the future. He thus uses the one in order to produce impressions of the other. His gaze records the visible world with the help of an accelerated frame speed so as to preserve images of past and passing presents whose apparent slowness when shown at regular projection speeds express profound solidarity with the victims of history and their very state of dispersal.

Dedicated to the perceptual vortices and immersive thrills of speed, modernist writers and artists—according to Duffy—were often frustrated about possible prospects of slowness: Marlow’s horror at the end of Heart of Darkness in no small way vents the modernist subject’s dismay about thwarted or suspended movement, a profound impatience with no longer being able to venture into and traverse new dynamic spaces.23 Benjamin’s slow-motion angel has left this frustration behind. He no longer defines motion and mobility in terms of transgressing new geographies, but of revealing forgotten interactions between past and present and of illuminating hidden correspondences between dispersed elements in space. We would be gravely mistaken, however, to consider Benjamin’s alternate concept of mobility, his desire to slow down the storm of progress, as intrinsically conservative or reactionary. While the angel’s slow-motion photography wants to stay with the debris of history, reawaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed, his way of seeing is clearly not one seeking to preserve present and past in their painful states of fragmentation or to subject the individual, concrete, and particular to the vision of a homogeneous and self-enclosed collectivity.

We would be equally wrong to consider Benjamin’s thoughts on slow motion as a preview of what German philosopher Odo Marquard has called “compensatory slowness.”24 For Marquard, the velocity of modern society is out of step with the essential timetables dictated by our biological clocks and our inevitable human finitude. As mortal beings, we—according to Marquard—must come to realize that further acceleration cannot but lead to a fundamental denial of experience, an erasure of memory and identity, a flight from what makes humans human. Marquard’s advice for us is therefore to step out of the busy tempos of the present and readopt the measures of natural and biological rhythms. Neither Benjamin’s nineteenth-century flaneur nor his melancholic angel of history can be adequately described as practicing an art of compensatory deceleration. For, rather than flee from the fast-paced pulses of modern temporality, they flee into them so as to recalibrate their energies. Rather than turning their back on modern speed altogether, they engage it so as to open up alternative spaces of experience. Compensatory slowness, as envisioned by Marquard, aims at restoring the value of tradition; preserving temporal continuity; and warranting the harmonic integration of past, present, and future. Benjamin’s modernist slowness, by contrast, rests on the assumption that no future can recuperate the past without recollecting that which was never lived, seen, experienced, and actualized in the first place. Slowness here is the medium by which the present prepares itself for its discontinuous reinscription in some unknown future. It is the medium by which an accelerated present removes itself from its own closure, its vortex of vectorial movement, and exposes itself to the open vagaries of time, a heterogeneous temporality in which the future’s task is to reclaim the promises and transformative energies of past generations.

Modernist speed advocates embraced the present as a conduit propelling the subject into the future, yet in their very state of intoxication they ended up turning temporal mobility into modernity’s latest myth and fate. Modernist slowness wants to hang on to modernity’s promise of emancipating the subject from the mythic. It wants to open a space for unconditional and unapologetic contemporaneity, i.e., for recognizing what might be empowering and emancipatory about pursuing presentness. Let’s make sure, however, not to confuse the specificity of this project with other articulations of slowness during the peak years of aesthetic modernism, articulations in which aesthetic strategies of deceleration simply invert the ephemerality of the modern age, calm the nervousness of the modern mind, and contain emphatic contemporaneity. Recall the famous opening of Riefenstahl’s first Olympia film, Festival of the People (1938), effortlessly trying to transport us from the timeless image of antique Greek sculptures to the dynamic body of a modern athlete, shown in slow-motion photography as he hurls his discus into the Northern German sky (figure 1.5). Riefenstahl’s film starts out with images of ancient Greek ruins, bathed in soft morning light, the camera gently traveling along and across a field of crumbled stones, columns, temples, and statues. Extended dissolves endow these images with a sense of poetic otherworldliness. After a few minutes the camera comes to rest on a replica of Myron’s Discobulus, a sculpture created around 450 BC and displaying the body of a discus thrower as he is about to fling his sporting equipment. First the camera smoothly circles around the sculpture’s head and neck; next it slightly moves away from the statue so as to allow us a full view of how both artist and athlete manage to synthesize utter attentiveness and admirable repose; and then we witness how this image of controlled stillness dissolves into the image of a real discus thrower who will start his routine from where Myron broke off. Slow-motion images picture the athlete as he smoothly rotates his upper body twice around its vertical axis before we finally cut to a close-up of his arm as it tosses the discus forcefully into the sky.

As I have argued in greater detail elsewhere,25 Riefenstahl’s deliberate use of slow-motion photography in this scene (and most of the following 205 minutes of screen time), on the one hand, is to demonstrate the extraordinary power of the cinematic apparatus to animate the world and shape physical reality. The dissolve from statue to athlete, from no to slow motion, stresses the apparatus’s force to call things to life and control the velocity of profilmic events. By stretching time and physical movement, Riefenstahl’s aim certainly was to evidence the camera’s own athletic efforts of maintaining control over the athletes’ and the viewers’ temporal registers. On the other hand, slow-motion photography here and throughout the rest of the film celebrates profound moments of psychophysical transformation and transcendence: from a body willing to win to one whose will is to triumph over this body’s physical contingencies; from the banality of an unfocused and mundane existence to the ecstasy of utter concentration and dedication. Slow motion in Riefenstahl seeks to emancipate the human body from its own temporal existence, to showcase what is universal, paradigmatic, and therefore timeless about this body. She explores some of the most advanced techniques of cinematography not only to orchestrate universal types of bodily action but also to protect our bodily existence against its very intractability, against what is erratic, coincidental, and unfinished about any form of human embodiment. Slowness in Riefenstahl thus guards the body against its own fleetingness and fragility; it shields the viewer against the very logic of temporal contingency that Riefenstahl’s cinema puts to work in order to mirror an uncertain present in the stability of a timeless past.

The differences between Riefenstahl’s project of slow motion and Benjamin’s aesthetic of modernist slowness should be quite obvious at this juncture. Unlike Benjamin’s angel of history, Riefenstahl’s camera embraces slowness as a medium to map the present as a mere replay of archaic and seemingly immutable meanings. Rather than stressing the ruptures of memory and the fractured state of the durational in modernity, Riefenstahl’s slowness wants to visualize the continued presence of the mythical and the timeless as they persist right underneath the veneer of modern commotion. In doing so, slowness not only reduces the present to the status of being a mere iteration of the past, but frames the modern as something whose sense of mobility has no meaning unless it can be reflected in the static paradigms of the past. Which is just another way of saying that slowness in Riefenstahl’s work serves the purpose of deflating the memory of historical alternatives while providing triumphant sites of preemptive reconciliation. Slowness in Riefenstahl maps historical time as something that neither is in need of redemption nor can be imagined as being open to acts of intervention, reconsideration, and change. In stark contrast to Benjamin’s notion of slowness as a contemporaneous optic of upholding the claims of an unfulfilled past for a better future, Riefenstahl’s project of slowness bonds present and future to the unbroken memory of the past and thus denies history ever to produce something new or different.

Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, much as it helped us earlier to illuminate the ideological stances of Marinetti’s and Bragaglia’s theology of modern speed, is helpful also in identifying a compelling modernist alternative to Riefenstahl’s antimodernist conception of slowness. For, unlike Riefenstahl’s athlete, the body of Boccioni’s sculpture is one in which the past has its place in the present without reducing this present to the status of a mere afterimage of a timeless past. Though meant to capture the perceptual effects and thrills of modern speed, Boccioni’s work translates the full potential of slow-motion photography in Benjamin’s modernist sense into the medium of sculpture, namely to stretch temporal processes to such a degree that we become able to perceive a passing present in all its complexity and recognize it as a site at which multiple logics of movement may intersect without being fused into one unified form and meaning. Whereas Riefenstahl hoped to slow down the present so as to allow the modern subject to find its grounding in a static past, Boccioni’s work represents a modernist aesthetics of slowness whose primary aim is to invite reflection about the principal openness of time and space amid the very speed of modern life. Whereas, for Riefenstahl, to go slow meant to return the present to an unchanging past, Boccioni invites us to contemplate—attentively and hence slowly—the fundamental instability of the present as a site of various durations that are never fully determined by the pathways of the past nor by the goals set for the future.

It has become commonplace to resort either to Albert Einstein’s relativity theory or to Ernst Bloch’s notion of noncontemporaneity to account for modernist attempts of mapping the present as a site of temporal multiplicity. Modernist slowness at once echoes and transcends the implications of such references. As a medium of facing a passing present in all its relativity and obscurity, modernist slowness clearly recalls what was at the core of Einstein’s groundbreaking work: a stress on how observational positions define variable frames of knowledge, including our knowledge of an object’s motion in and through time. Yet in contrast to Einstein’s relativity theory, whose considerable level of abstraction prompted many modernist writers and artists to develop primarily metaphorical appropriations, my concept of modernist slowness wants to stress the phenomenological dimension of experiencing time in industrial modernity. While the theoretical revolution of modern physics indeed resulted in new theoretical conceptions of space-time, modernist slowness aspired to register certain material transformations and temporal contractions in modernity at the level of the senses. Similarly, Bloch’s notion of noncontemporaneity and asynchronicity, coined in the 1930s,26 was meant to refer to the coexistence of phenomena that belonged, properly speaking, to different historical areas or stages of social development. Yet whereas Bloch sought to conceptualize such states of cotemporality in terms of dialectics, as transformative oppositions between old and new, the utopian and the actual, modernist slowness—as suggested here—did not seek to force the present in all its multiplicity into the straightjacket of historical dialectics. To go slow and practice what Siegfried Kracauer, in the early 1920s, called “hesitant openness” instead meant nothing less than to encounter the present as a space charged with the virtuality of various possible futures and the durations of multiple pasts, remembered and forgotten.²⁷ Rather than seeing the present as a dialectical stage of asynchronous oppositions and negativity, modernist slowness approached the now—without necessarily abiding critical awareness—as an open meeting ground of various streams of time, a space too complex in its temporal layering simply to be negated as whole, a site at which neither past nor future existed in the singular and a traditional dialectician’s concept of totality no longer appeared quite applicable.

On Slowness rests on the assumption that recent artistic work in various time-based media such as photography, film, video, installation art, and writing remains deeply indebted to the legacy of modernist slowness. To be sure, little is left of what caused modernists of the early twentieth century to marvel or moan about the modern wonders of speed and acceleration. The velocity of a Ford T1 or a roaring steam train appears quaint from today’s perspective. More important, the political, economic, technological, and cultural transformations associated with recent processes of globalization have often been seen as changes toward a society, not of breakneck speed and acceleration, but of radical instantaneity and homogenized simultaneity—a society in which advances in telecommunication urge us to always be “on” and invite us to connect to different realities and temporalities with the proverbial click of the mouse. Under such conditions, it has been suggested by critics such as Paul Virilio and Fredric Jameson,28 neither speed nor acceleration is really an issue anymore because both, in order to be measurable or be experienced as intensities, require some sense of both spatial distance and temporal extension. Unlike the modernist imaginary, which hoped to accelerate time by shrinking space, postmodern technocultures of globalization have flattened both time and space into synchronic depthlessness, thus erasing whatever may allow us to identify speed as speedy to begin with, including its putative adversary, namely deliberate acts of slowness. Today, everything appears to be in frantic motion, it is concluded, yet space no longer offers room for any acts of traversal; time is on the fly, yet the present is at a standstill, expanding into the past and future without allowing for the possibility of future progress or regress. If speed today, according to these arguments, is literally suicidal because it devours its own resources, why—we must ask ourselves at the outset of this study—do we need to talk about slowness at all? If contemporary culture’s logic of compulsive connectivity wants to emancipate us from the materiality of space and the stickiness of place altogether, how can aesthetic slowness serve as a challenge to the perceived rush of time?

In Virilio’s and, in particular, in Jameson’s reading, our present is one that has lost its ability to sense true temporality and the durational, precisely because this present has erased the specificity of local meanings and historical nuances. We all now live in one single time, one that knows of no alternatives, of no holdovers from the past, of no disruptive memories or unsettling anticipations—so much so that the very notion of the contemporaneous has lost its traction and we find ourselves in an age of the postcontemporaneity. As Jameson writes, “We no longer are encumbered with the embarrassment of non-simultaneities and non-synchronicities. Everything has reached the same hour on the great clock of development or rationalization (at least from the perspective of the ‘West’).”29 This is not the place to discuss in detail Jameson’s notion of the present as a space of postcontemporaneity and of globalization as a triumph of homogenized instantaneity in theoretical terms. Doreen Massey has done so persuasively in her 2005 For Space, stressing the extent to which Jameson’s notion of the global present as a single integrated moment not only reiterates narrow concepts of space as a static slice through time, but in so doing, at a conceptual level, prevents us from the possibility of thinking temporality and history in the first place. According to Massey, Jameson’s notion of postcontemporaneity—his lament about the twentieth-century’s move from the modernist story of progress to the postmodern vision of synchronic superficiality—throws out the historical baby with the theoretical bathwater: “Any assumption of a closed instantaneity not only denies space the essential character of itself constantly becoming, it also denies time its own possibility of complexity/multiplicity. To read interconnectivity as the instantaneity of a closed surface (the prison house of synchrony) is precisely to ignore the possibility of a multiplicity of trajectories / temporalities.”³⁰ To think of the present as a fully integrated and horizontally homogenized moment, in Massey’s perspective, continues to rely on the same conceptual matrix that encouraged modernist speed addicts to play out the temporal as a dimension of progressive change against the spatial as a sphere of retardation. To understand the present as a space of postcontemporaneity is to underestimate one of the crucial insights of what I have earlier called modernist slowness: namely that space too is inherently dynamic, a realm of potentiality and unfulfilled memory, a sphere of difference and interaction that we can neither conceptually nor experientially reduce to one singular realm of motionless representation. Modernity’s arrow of time never follows merely along one unified axis or vector, nor can we reconstruct or predict its course with the help of one integrated story or in one image casting dynamic flux into stable spatial form. The reign of instantaneity, therefore, is never as closed a system as today’s theorists of postcontemporaneity and posttemporality want it to be. History happens, not only—as Jameson tends to argue—when in the name of a better future we mobilize what is nonsynchronic against the homogeneous space of the present but also—as slow modernists such as Boccioni and Benjamin have taught us—when we learn how to face the synchronicity of various durations and spatiotemporal dynamics that continue to define our present even under the conditions of advanced globalization and technological connectivity.

Aesthetic slowness today, as will be discussed in the chapters to come, may no longer serve as an artistic intervention to reflect on the mythologies of running athletes or Ford Ts as they move at their respective top speeds. In their efforts to engage with the frantic mobility of the present, however, the artists of this book remain dedicated to what also defined the heart of Boccioni’s and Benjamin’s enterprises: to express in sensory form that neither time nor space are ever as homogeneous as contemporary discourses of speed and instantaneity proclaim them to be. Aesthetic slowness today continues to pursue the art of being contemporaneous, of encountering the present in all its contingency and multiplicity, of gazing straight into the face of the present while nevertheless seeking to account for all that has never been and all that might never be lived. Slowness asks viewers, listeners, and readers to hesitate, not in order to step out of history, but to enable the possibility of simultaneously looking left and right, forward and backward, up and down; slowness diverts directional movement so as to reveal the different stories, durations, movements, and speeds that energize the present, including this present’s notions of discontinuity and rupture, of promise and loss.

A spatial as much as a temporal project, aesthetic slowness is much less about simply trying to decelerate the ticking of our clocks and exchange the exigencies of urban life for the sluggish paces of the rural than it is about holding our gaze at our own age and reflecting about competing visions of time, movement, progress, and change. We therefore should not be surprised to find instances of aesthetic slowness where today’s self-help manuals and new age sages might expect them the least: on speed trains and high-flying airplanes, vis-à-vis the nervous pace of action films and the beats of experimental music, in creative practices that employ today’s entire arsenal of advanced computing and image-sound manipulation. Neither pre- nor postcontemporary, aesthetic slowness today invites viewers, readers, and listeners to absorb themselves into their present while at the same time allowing them to maintain some kind of reflective distance. Aesthetic slowness is thus far from merely reactive, let alone reactionary; it wants us to belong to our time by exploring the now as a conduit of many different temporalities and durations that never join into the unity of one dynamic. In the following chapters we will thus find aesthetic slowness at work whenever photographers use their medium, not to present their viewers with seemingly static slices through time, but to reflect on the temporal diversity of modern space and the spatial substrates of temporal durations (chapters 2 and 3). We will encounter aesthetic strategies of slowness in the work of film directors who use their cameras to capture forms of mobility that exceed our desire merely to move from one point to another and thus to collapse or tame the tenacity and unpredictability of extended geographies (chapters 4 and 5). We will come across aesthetic slowness in contemporary video art as a powerful means to remember and rework traumatic residues and reanimate painful histories seemingly frozen in the past (chapter 6). We will face aesthetic slowness when sound and walking artists, with the help of advanced editing devices, layer multiple strata of visual and acoustic representations on top of each other and thus encourage the listening walker to get lost amid a plurality of different narratives and perceptions (chapter 7). And we will encounter what I call slowness here when writers use their privileged medium of the word to reflect on today’s meshing of technologically mediated and human time, at once pulling toward and pushing away from the way in which much of today’s slowness discourse edges toward new forms of religiosity that precariously collapse any remaining distinction between the particular and the universal, the passing and the eternal (chapter 8).

Only a generation or two ago, critics still sought to ban slowness from the repertoire of critical practice and analysis. In this study, by contrast, slowness is discussed as a critical intervention whenever it will go to the roots of how we perceive and misperceive the temporal regimes of our present and whenever it will urge us to resist the facile description of this present as a frantic realm of homogenized instantaneity, synchronic depthlessness, and undifferentiated closure. Boccioni’s use of the medium of sculpture or Benjamin’s praise of (silent) film-making may no longer suffice for today’s artists to hold their gaze—slowly, steadily, creatively, and imaginatively—on the commotion of our present. As we will see in a moment, newer and technologically more developed media are of critical importance in most of the projects under discussion here. However, similar to how Boccioni’s and Benjamin’s slowness ran counter to dominant conceptualizations of aesthetic modernism and its association with modern velocity and progress, so do the kind of projects discussed here problematize what it might mean to talk about artistic progress in the first place. True to and yet different from the interventions of Boccioni and Benjamin, aesthetic slowness today hopes to open a space within the very heart of our age’s obsession with the speed of electronic flows at which we can reflect about the meaning of memory and change, probe different ideas of progress, develop alternate visions of future mobility, and precisely thus can become and be contemporaries.

Secondly, as an aesthetic of radical contemporaneity, the art of slowness of this book simultaneously draws on and reframes modernist discourses on medium specificity. J. M. Bernstein has recently argued that the idea of the medium in various modernist accounts serves both as an embodiment and a corrective to the rule of modern disenchanting rationality. Modernity might result in a progressive dematerialization of nature and human experience. But no matter how much modernist aesthetic practice participates in this process of abstraction, it is by addressing the nature of their respective mediums—understood as an art form’s material-specific potential for sense making—that modernist art also sought to suspend, negate, or recalibrate what modernity is doing to nature. Mediums are part of the world of human consciousness: a set of practices, ideas, and institutions by which artists structure their material and subsume their expressive visions to larger conceptual or discursive schemata. But mediums are also part of the world of nature; they are matter themselves (think of the materiality of the brush stroke, the mechanics of the photographic camera, the scratches on the vinyl record), not only providing embodied forms of engaging with inner and outer nature but also offering counterfactual models of how to reconcile the discursive or conceptual demands of artistic technique with what is incommensurable and hence nondiscursive about human intuition, spontaneity, and sensory experience. Modernist art employed mediums as effigies holding up the claims of subjectivity and sensory experience in spite of their factual dematerialization; it is by reflecting on the materiality of the medium itself, in all its historical constitution, that modernism sought “to rescue from cognitive and rational oblivion our embodied experience and the standing of unique, particular things as the proper objects of such experience, albeit only in the form of a reminder or promise.”32

For most of the projects discussed in the following chapters, a particular medium’s materiality continues to matter as both a source of meaning making and as a conduit of exploring the viability of sensory perception and embodied experience. To formulate this more strongly, in its very effort to challenge dominant modes of movement and experiment with alternate modes of mobility, our contemporary aesthetic slowness considers artistic mediums as material means of encouraging subjects how to think, not only with their brains, but with their entire mobile bodies. This art explores certain mediums in all their materiality as models of how to relate to the world, experience the present’s multiplicity of durations, and produce knowledge through physical and sensory engagements. Contrary to many practitioners and theorists of high modernism, however, the projects of this book are no longer guided by the idea of a particular medium’s purity and autonomy. Time and again, we will encounter strategies pushing artistic representation toward or beyond the limits once associated with a specific medium: we witness photographers seeking to visualize the flow of time and filmmakers trying to emulate the photographic, we come across audio artists surreptitiously engaging the visual and video filmmakers relying on quasi-literary and cinematic narrative voice-overs. Slowness as an art of contemporaneity recognizes our inability today to resort to some idealized notion of medium specificity and autonomy. It runs up and rubs against the conventions historically associated with particular mediums, not in order to declare a medium’s materiality as irrelevant for artistic practice, but on the contrary to warrant the possibility of sensory encounters and the nonintentional within an age in which the convergence and crossover of electronic media has become the order of the day.

Third, and finally, the readings of On Slowness participate in what I perceive as the critical rediscovery of aesthetic experience over the last decade. Some of the most innovative contributions to these conversations have been made by scholars addressing the way in which digital screens and installation spaces today have a unique ability to produce new forms of embodiment, help us explore the mechanisms of sensory perception, and, in so doing, offer new types of aesthetic experience.33 This more recent writing on new media art and culture, on the one hand, refreshes certain phenomenological traditions, theorizing our encounter with digital interfaces as an incentive to experience our bodies as the primary medium and interface, as a mobile framing device enabling somatic interactions and mediating ever shifting perspectives on the world. While the days of more contemplative forms of viewership might be counted indeed, the interactive possibilities of digital media, it is argued, have the capacity to reveal how our seeing is grounded in our experiential modalities of kinesthesia (the sensation of body movement), of proprioception (the awareness of our body’s position and boundaries in space), and of touch (the sensation of physical contact with objects other than our body), all three of which comprise what some critics call “tactility,” and others the “haptic body.” On the other hand, in accord with the growing interest of image theorists in cognitive sciences and advanced brain research, new media critics now also seek to stress the unprecedented capabilities of digital media to map the viewer’s mental activities and thus render visible what makes aesthetic sensation neurologically possible in the first place.³⁴ Electronic media, they argue, play a privileged role in helping new media artists to reveal the material operations of the brain—the firing of neurons, the distinctive linkage of neurological patterns and networks, the peculiar binding of perception and consciousness—and in this way electronic media help these artists to simulate, playfully engage, and critically investigate what is key in our efforts to grapple with aesthetic objects and align certain impressions with prior associations. New media culture, recent phenomenologists and neuroaestheticians therefore tend to conclude, by no means results in the vanishing of materiality, the sensory, and hence the aesthetic. The mobile screens of digital culture may no longer allow for fully concentrated forms of looking. But, far from obliterating the aesthetic altogether, new media in this understanding teach the user how to play again as much as they urge us to consider the materiality of the body and the brain as irreducible engines of affect, attention, and nonintentionality.

On Slowness continues some of these arguments, but also responds to what I consider some of their limitations, in particular their tendency to reduce aesthetic experience either to mere sensory play or to cognitive observation. Aesthetic experience, I suggest, emerges in-between positions of immersive absorption and disembodied cognition; it transpires whenever we oscillate between states of ecstatic self-displacement and seemingly detached judgment. To experience objects aesthetically, in other words, involves our ability to actively register a partial loss or a rapturous expansion of sensory perception as much as to investigate the feel of pushing against the way in which works of art pull us into seeing the world through different eyes. Rather than to describe a state of harmonious equilibrium, then, aesthetic experience ensues from extended moments of rupture, indecision, and instability. It relies on how certain viewing arrangements allow the subject to probe different models of seeing the world and explore the tensions between sensing oneself as other and sensing the other as other, between diluting and validating our sense of self-awareness. In contrast to Benjamin, for whom modern culture purged contemplative forms of spectatorship and inaugurated an age of critical, albeit fundamentally distracted, modes of looking, aesthetic experience cannot do without certain structures of awe and absorption and a mimetic blurring of the boundaries between viewer and viewed. It cannot do without relinquishing the contours of modern sovereign subjectivity. Understood in this sense, aesthetic experience requires uncertainty and flux, and it calls for recipients who welcome a certain lack of control and clear orientation as an opportunity rather than a threat.