Elgar on speed

Listening to snatches of a programme on Elgar on R3. The way you live and the way the programmes are made means that you only hear snippets, fragments-the very notion of a limited whole now sounding terribly provincial, old-fashioned and narrow-minded.

One thing that struck you was the different pace at which the same music was played and the setting of the pauses. Is a text, a score, infinitely flexible or is there a structure, a truth, that must remain invariable to be known over time? How much is up for interpretation and what weight does the individual have in the collective phenomenon of the playing/listening/reading of something over time? How much of what we consider to be valuable depends on continuity, the persistence of something over time?

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24/7 is a great little book on time and the extraordinary modern pressures placed on our sensory capacities-in order for capitalism to break down any further natural "barriers" to its progression. In some sense just an extension of E.P.'s wonderful 'time-work discipline'. 

The need to cram more and more experiences into a given time period means, ultimately, that the quality of experience is itself diminished. If time is linear then there's always the possibility newness, unchartered territory (and capitalism needs such 'spaces', thrives on discontinuities and the destruction of the past)but time is also always running out, slipping out of our hands,never to be regained or recovered. 

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Illich has to be one of the most original thinkers (as oppposed to an academic or 'intellectual'). Who else could write about deschooling society, the relation between university and text, medical ethics, a sort of history of needs, the energy crisis, the gaze in the age of show, the commons of silence? 

When did 'speed' become so important? Turner, Marinetti? What makes 'speed' possible? Firstly, the narrowing down of experience to one dimension. Secondly, the positing of a single, uniform and calculable and comparable notion of speed. Time-and not just labour time-becomes abstract, "standard" and universal. The notion that time can be uncoupled from lived experience, the belief that duration is orthogonal to the depth of one's experiences or the nature or quality of the 'objects' with which one engages in time results in a dry, mechanical and mathematical view of time. The rhythms of daily life, of the seasons, come to count for less and less.

One must rush through everything, tot up the counters as soon as possible, keep things flowing, in circulation.