Empires of Speed: Time and the Acceleration of Politics and Society (Supplements to the Study of Time, 4)

263 Pages·2008·0.84 MB·English

by  Robert Hassan

Empires of Speed
Supplements to
Th e Study of Time
VOLUME 4
Empires of Speed
Time and the Acceleration of Politics and Society
By
Robert Hassan
LEIDEN • BOSTON
2009
Cover illustration: Photo by Éole—http://fl ickr.com/eole.
Th is book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hassan, Robert, 1959–
Empires of speed : time and the acceleration of politics and society / by Robert
Hassan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-17590-7 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Time—Sociological aspects.
2. Information society. 3. Information technology—Social aspects. 4. Computers and
civilization. I. Title.
HM656.H38 2009
303.48’3301—dc22
2009012416
ISSN 1873-7463
ISBN 978 90 04 17590 7
Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Th e Netherlands.
Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated,
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Danvers, MA 01923, USA.
Fees are subject to change.
printed in the netherlands
For Barbara Adam, Mentor and Friend, who inspired this book.
To my Family, Kate, Th eo and Camille without whose support it
could not have been written.
Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man,
speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world
irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid.
Henry James, Th e Education of Henry James, 1918
Time has been a most eff ective colonizing tool.
Barbara Adam, Time, 2004

CONTENTS
Introduction ........................................................................................ 1
Chapter One A New Empire ........................................................ 17
Chapter Two Th e First Empire of Speed: Clock Time
Modernity ....................................................................................... 41
Chapter Th ree Th e Second Empire of Speed:
Networked Society ......................................................................... 67
Chapter Four Pathologies of Speed ............................................. 97
Chapter Five Cyberculture: A Culture of Speed ........................ 123
Chapter Six Th e Speed of Liberal Democracy ........................... 151
Chapter Seven Time for Politics: A Temporalized
Democracy ...................................................................................... 187
References ........................................................................................... 237
Index .................................................................................................... 247

INTRODUCTION
End of Empire?
In one sense the word ‘empire’ has always had a singularly Victorian
ring to it. Related to the word ‘imperial’, in Britain it originally con-
noted (and was painstakingly intended to connote) the grand national
project of bringing civilization to the less fortunate peoples of India
or Africa or other non-European regions. And so when I survey the
literature of the time and think of what it must have conjured up in the
minds of the British of the 19th and early 20th centuries, I see Great
Exhibitions of stupendous machinery and their marvelous products;
I see earnest missionaries going about their good works in the face
of some oddly recalcitrant subjects; and I see the British middle-
and upper-classes bringing bureaucracy and administration to these
disordered regions in the shape of English Laws, English values and
Enlightenment Reason.
Of course this is idealization. Th e reality was much less spiritually
or culturally fulfi lling for most people. It was a model propagated in
the media of the time to spread a veneer over a project of plunder for
the factories and coff ers of industrial capitalism; the willed extinction
of peoples and cultures, and the physical subjugation of those within
these territories who would think to resist.
In the early 20th century there began to be critiques developed
from Marxist or anarchist or liberal traditions that would expose the
less-than-ideal reality. Gradually the word ‘empire’ began to be tinged
with other meanings. Th e term ‘colonialism’ like ‘imperialism’ became
synonymous not only with empire, but also with the perpetration of
robbery, repression and ruthlessness on an enormous scale. And as the
century went on, the contradictions became more pronounced. For
example, at the political level, arch-British Empire defender Winston
Churchill was able in the 1930s to warn against the ‘mortal danger’ of a
Nazi empire forming in Central Europe, whilst at the same time clinging
unselfconsciously to one that was being controlled, albeit with growing
diffi culty, from the Foreign Offi ce in Whitehall. By World War Two’s
end, and through to the 1960s the theory of empire had been upended
by successive United States governments who looked to support those