So when Geoff,
my otherwise brilliant collaborator, says Victor is
only celebrating "speeeeeeeeed" and that speed is a rather macho non-value, a bullshit
value (did he say "bullshit" or "horseshit"?), and that he
much prefers, when he teaches, a steady, thoughtful slowness (and who doesn't?):
he misses the point. Victor is marking a temporality that takes place:
the time of absolute speed, the third interval, deadtime. He is not calling for
it, he is welcoming it. Big difference. For it is (always) already at our
door; or rather, it is always already in our house (of Being). It is there,
doing its thing, even when "we" put the breaks on—in or out of
the classroom—to engage in delicate thought operations, to make significant
distinctions ... and to write. If it were not always
already operating, quietly collapsing distinctions and challenging identities,
"we" wouldn't have the impulse to hit the breaks.
New teletechnologies didn't invent this fourth
temporal condition; they simply expose it, showing us dusk
and dawn in a single window. This temporality is taking place, whether you
choose to jack in or not. You may prefer
not to directly engage it, in other words, but there is no way to
just say no. -ddd
But don't miss this: there is no either/or
in operation here. Vitanza does not say print is dead, writing is dead,
"we" are dead. To hear him in this way is to remain trapped
in a dichotomy he does not accept: life/death. Pass-ing indicates a living
on, the death of death itself. The event of absolute speed is not the
end of print nor the end of us. But it does indicate that "we"
are end-ing. Because here's the thing: when one temporality demonstrates
a collapse of time and space, all temporalities are on the line—and
that means that all the abstractions based on those temporalities
are pass-ing, too.