No one has yet learned how fast a body can go: Speed and Technology after Spinoza

Simon Glezos (bio)
University of Victoria

Abstract

As new technologies accelerate the pace of the world, the human body is exposed to hitherto unexperienced velocities. Will the body acquire new powers and opportunities in consequence, or will we find it torn apart by this new speed? This article considers three possible types of encounter—destructive, diminishing, and augmenting—between speed, technology, and the body. It then turns to the work of Spinoza to explain the interrelation between them and to provide a political and ethical guide to promoting positive encounters.

This article considers the relation between theories of speed, theories of the body, and the work of Baruch Spinoza. While the topic of speed has not been absent from the history of political, social, and cultural thought,¹ there has been renewed theoretical investigation of it in the last two decades.² This investigation of speed has gone beyond the discussion of macro sites such as warfare and globalizing capitalism, turning instead to the micro terrain of the body and applying the results of the extensive work done in the realm of corporeal theory over the last few decades.³ Curiously, this discussion has not by and large considered Spinoza.⁴ This seems like a missed opportunity, as the work of Spinoza is an ideal hinge between theories of the body and theories of speed. Spinoza’s Ethics explicitly conceives of the body in terms of “relation[s] of motion-and-rest” (73, Part II, Proposition 13, Lemma 3, Proof), making speed and the body inherently related. My goal in this paper is not primarily to contribute to the rich vein of recent theoretical work on Spinoza,⁵ although I hope that putting Spinoza in conversation with work on speed and the body will help to bring out important aspects of all three. Rather, my belief is that the philosophy of Spinoza can play an important role in helping us to better understand the relationship between our accelerating world and the human body, and to develop an ethical framework to help us navigate this relationship.

I begin by articulating three different types of “encounters” (to use Spinoza’s vocabulary) between the human body and an accelerating world. The first is exemplified by the experience of jet lag; the second by the technological apparatus of the flight suit; and the third by the Acheulean axe, one of the earliest human tools. Each highlights a different possible outcome of the encounter between speed and the body, and crystallizes a set of assumptions and understandings about how they relate. Each also expresses a different vision of life in an accelerating world: in the first, speed is destructive to the human body; in the second, speed is a prosthetic for – and possibly parasitic on – the human body; and in the third, speed is constitutive of the human body. These three examples are not, of course, exhaustive of all possible encounters between speed and the body. Following Spinoza, I will argue that there is no way of knowing all the ways in which such encounters can take place. However, it is useful to focus on these three because they address influential accounts of speed, technology, and the body. I show how the assumptions, implications, and ontologies involved in each cut across multiple philosophical traditions, and show up in widely divergent social contexts. I draw from diverse sources (including literature, philosophy, history and anthropology) and time periods (from the contemporary to the pre-historic). My goal is not to argue that these accounts are novel or unique, but rather that they are consistently recurring perspectives, as likely to be articulated in high philosophy as in common sense. What is more, as we will see, these different accounts of the relationship between speed and the body can give rise to important political effects and affects.

Having laid out these visions of what speed does to bodies, I go on to show that the work of Spinoza can provide an overarching theory for all three. I turn to his monistic ontology, showing that differences are never metaphysically “substantial” but the result of interacting patterns of “motion-and-rest.” I then introduce his concept of conatus, arguing that each of the three encounters affects the conatus of the human body differently. The result is a rubric that allows us to understand encounters between the body and speed; it asks not whether they are natural but rather what their ethical effects might be. Spinoza, I argue, offers us an important set of tools for understanding the status of the body in an accelerating world.⁶

Three Encounters Between Speed and the Body

First Encounter: Jet Lag

Five hours’ New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.

It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above…

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise of London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage. (1)

William Gibson has a knack for identifying the ways in which life has changed in the digital age. In the passage above – from his novel Pattern Recognition – Gibson points out the extent to which jet lag marks a fundamental shift in the human condition. However minor an irritation, jet lag speaks to a much greater rift in the world. To say that souls can’t move as quickly as bodies is to argue for a fundamental disjuncture between the natural pace of the body and the velocities at which technologies now allow us to travel. Jet lag results when the human body is exposed to something for which evolution could not have prepared it: a situation in which the body’s internal clock doesn’t sync up with external light cues. Gibson presents us with the image of a reptilian brainstem desperately trying to make sense of a world that seems to outstrip the body’s ability to adapt. Gibson’s description carries with it an account of the relationship between the body and speed that is neither new nor uncommon. In its simplest form, it says two things: 1) that the body has a natural speed, an essential velocity, rhythm, or pace layered into its “soul,” enacted by its nervous system, and encoded in its DNA; and 2) that as the world has accelerated, a disjuncture has formed between the natural pace of the body and the world in which it lives. This disjuncture produces a kind of friction where the body rubs up against the speed of the world and is worn down. Cayce Pollard lies in her bed, trying to immobilize her body for at least a little while, allowing its natural rhythms to reassert themselves and waiting for her “soul” to catch up with her body.

We should not view this story as unique to our modern, hyper-accelerated world, for it tends to emerge regularly in times of social or technological change. For example, a similar account of bodily anxiety over acceleration developed in the 19^th century. John Tomlinson’s The Culture of Speed charts the rise of this anxiety, driven by advances in railroad and telegraphy:

there was, from at least the 1880s, a string of extravagantly alarmist prognoses of the effects of the pace of modern life on the human nervous system. In one of the earliest and most influential, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (1881), George M. Beard introduced the concept of ‘neurasthenia’ into psychotherapeutic discourse: “Beard argued that the telegraph, railroads, and steam power have enabled businessmen to make ‘a hundred times’ more transactions in a given period than had been possible in the eighteenth century; they intensified competition and tempo, causing an increase in the incidence of a host of problems including neurasthenia, nervousness, dyspepsia, early tooth decay and even premature baldness.” (Kern 125, qtd. in Tomlinson 36)

Here we see jet lag avant la lettre: an image of bodies crumbling, decaying, and dying from the pressures of high velocity society. Though not always articulated in such extreme ways, wherever we hear of the unnatural or inhuman acceleration of the world, this perspective lurks in the background.⁷

Second Encounter: The G-Suit

Even as our anxiety about the pace of the world increases, technological acceleration continues relentlessly onward and humans travel at ever-faster velocities. As our bodies are buffeted by the accelerating pace of technology, we turn to technology in order to protect them. Take the example of the G-Suit. The gravitational force (or g-force) created by jet travel at supersonic speeds puts so much pressure on the human body that blood pools in the lower extremities, causing pilots to black out. The G-suit was developed in response to this risk. A G-suit contains a set of bladders around the legs and abdomen that inflate during high g-force acceleration, compressing the body and maintaining blood pressure. It therefore allows pilots to experience higher g-forces for longer stretches without passing out. The G-suit thus augments the human body, allowing it to withstand the rigors of supersonic travel; it acts as an intermittent exoskeleton, periodically becoming rigid to protect its soft human interior from the effects of the disjuncture between the “natural” pace of the body and the “artificial” pace of technology. In fact, the G-suit is only the most visible aspect of a much wider technological assemblage augmenting the human body in flight. Maintaining flight at supersonic speeds requires constant adjustments at a pace faster than human reflexes allow. Fighter jets are full of computers and sensors that produce these micro-adjustments without human intervention, augmenting the “natural” speed of the human body and allowing it to engage with technological acceleration. In this encounter, rather than the simple opposition between the velocity of the body and that of the world (as experienced in jet lag), the same technological velocity can be grafted onto the body, with the G-suit serving as a kind of prosthetic accelerator.

How, more precisely, is the relationship between speed and the body being imagined here? To conceive of technology as prosthesis is to reject the claim that technological velocity can only destroy the body and its velocity. Nevertheless, this conception shares with the first story the idea that a disjuncture exists between natural and technological speeds. The body must be shielded and augmented, wrapped in a carapace of technology before it can be subjected to the violent pace of the future. The internal pace of the body and the external pace of the world are still opposed, though they can be harmonized through technical artifice. By maintaining the distinction between natural and technological velocities, between the pace of the “inside” and the “outside,” both accounts oppose that which is essentially human to that which is essentially technological. Thus, implicitly, the more human you are, the less technological you are. And conversely, the faster you are, the less human you are.

This position is emphatically expressed in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau begins his investigation into politics by positing a state of nature; where others found human life in this state incomplete and inadequate, Rousseau sees it as happy, robust, and complete. Every increase in civilization only takes the human further from perfection and self-sufficiency, and every technological advancement distances us from our essence. As Bernard Stiegler puts it in his account of Rousseau, “[t]he man of nature, without prostheses, is robust, as robust as a man can be – and it is civilization that will weaken him” (115). In Rousseau’s own words:

Accustomed from childhood to inclement weather and the rigors of the seasons, acclimated to fatigue, and forced, naked and without arms, to defend their lives and their prey against other ferocious beasts, or to escape them by taking flight, men develop a robust and nearly unalterable temperament . . . thus acquiring all the vigor that the human race is capable of having. (40)

In this account, the second skin of technology that we wear – the exoskeleton, the G-suit – only muffles and weakens the vitality of the body. By accelerating the human body technologically, we rob it of its natural liveliness, and the dichotomy between the natural and the technological persists. Both jet lag and G-suit present a strongly humanist reading of the encounter between speed and the body, but with a crucial difference: in the second account, the inside of the body is no longer destroyed by the velocity of the outside, but is instead hollowed out by it. The fear is that this hollowing out of the body will lead to the full prostheticization of the human, where the body becomes an extension of technologies, rather than the other way around.

Paul Virilio, writing two hundred years after Rousseau, shares this prosthetic image of accelerative technologies. For Virilio, the speed of modern life requires a fundamental letting go of our power, a surrender to automatic systems of moving, seeing, and thinking. If we consider not just the G-suit but the entire technological assemblage that enables supersonic flight, we see how much of this apparent augmentation of the body is actually a handing over of power to the automatic systems that plan flight paths and make course corrections without our input. This surrender becomes more complete as technologies reduce even the need for physical movement, instead allowing us to project our “influence” through virtual and telematic prostheses. The speed of human action in late modernity thus paradoxically immobilizes the body. As Virilio says,

the interactive being transfers his natural capacities for movement and displacement to probes and scanners which instantaneously inform him about a remote reality, to the detriment of his own faculties of apprehension of the real, after the example of the para- or quadriplegic who can guide by remote control – teleguide – his environment . . . Having been first mobile, then motorized, man will thus become motile, deliberately limiting his body’s area of influence to a few gestures, a few impulses, like channel-surfing. (Open Sky 16–17)⁸

Here, the supposedly accelerated, autonomous, and “interactive” being (the late modern counterpart of Rousseau’s “civilized man”) is really the barely motile actor whose range of motion and freedom of thought has been vastly curtailed. The real action and decision happen in the prosthesis, not in the body. This essentially pessimistic conception of technological acceleration again has its roots in a conceptual separation of the natural from the artificial, of a healthy human speed from a pathological technological speed. As Virilio says, “[t]here is a struggle . . . between metabolic speed, the speed of the living, and technological speed, the speed of death which already exists in cars, telephones, the media, missiles” (Pure War 136). Virilio offers an extreme version of this account of the relationship between the body and speed, but the image reappears in a host of different narratives. Wherever commentators worry about dehumanizing technologies, wherever we feel that the accelerating pace of life leaves us merely an automaton or a cog in the machine, we see a variation on this image.⁹ We become servants of this new velocity and no longer know whether we wear the G-suit or whether it wears us.¹⁰

Third Encounter: The Acheulean Axe

The Acheulean axe is the oldest human tool found. Archeological investigation shows evidence of its existence as far back as 1.5 million years ago, from the time of early hominids such as Homo Erectus up to modern Homo Sapiens. The human and the axe are therefore coeval in their emergence. Though we can only speculate on the ways in which this tool was used, one theory posits that the Acheulean axe was a throwing weapon. Adrian Mackenzie lays out the immense complexities involved in the seemingly simple act of throwing:

A throw depends on timing. For the hand-axe, the window of control ranges between one and several tens of milliseconds depending on the length of its trajectory. That is, assuming that the hand-axe is thrown, it must be released at the right moment +/− 10 ms (milliseconds) from the hand during the throw if the device is to hit a small target five metres away (Calvin, 1993). The problem here is that the neurones twitch. They can’t modulate movement with any great accuracy. The timing jitter for spine-motor neurones is approximately 11 ms (Calvin, 1993, 246). On average they vary that much in their activation time. Neural feedback from arm to spinal cord and back at its fastest still requires approximately 110 ms. A problem of control develops because the window of control is less than the average variation in activation time, let alone the time of neural feedback. (61)

The result is that “[t]echnical performance, if it is to have efficacy, must be much faster than certain raw facts of our own physiology seem to permit” (61). And yet axes are thrown. As Mackenzie recounts, the seemingly insurmountable gap between inside and outside velocities is bridged through practice. By practicing, internal processes are harmonized with external ones, not speeding up internal response times so much as training and distributing the process to sync it up with external paces. Thus, as Mackenzie describes, the difficulty

involved in throwing or hitting is overcome because action is mapped out in a network of cortical zones associated with hand movements. Action is repeated both synchronically and diachronically: first, there are multiple circuits of control in parallel which together average out the activation times, thereby improving accuracy; second, the control paths are trained and adjusted by earlier repetitions; third, and most important, the sequence of neuronal firing is ‘buffered’ or stored up in advance and then released at one go. (82)

This disjuncture between internal and external velocities isn’t resolved solely through a technological prosthesis (the axe); such an account would leave itself open to the creeping prostheticization of the body by technology. Instead, this account posits not an emptying out of the inside, but the creation of a new relationship between outside and inside. Velocities that couldn’t be achieved by the human body in the thick of things can be “‘buffered’ or stored up in advance.” Rather than the inside of the body being emptied out, the outside is invited in. As the body brings speed into itself, it changes its internal rhythms.

This third encounter challenges the fears and anxieties of Rousseau and Virilio, for whom technology marks the decline of the human, initiating and accelerating its fall from completeness and self-sufficiency. By contrast, even in this early moment of axe-use, we see that speed and technology can be imagined to be coeval with the emergence of the human. Indeed, axe-use might have contributed to that emergence. Some paleo-anthropologists conjecture that the corticalization (the expansion of the neocortex in the brain) that marks the emergence of what we think of as Homo Sapien was spurred by just this kind of expanded tool use. In other words, the first human moment might indeed have been a moment of opening up the body to speed. Rather than opposing a slow internal velocity to a fast external one – a jet-lagged body to techno-acceleration – here speed lies in the heart of the human. The process of “humanization” was therefore also the movement of acceleration – of making stone axes (and neurons) accelerate. The Rousseauian ideal of the self-sufficient human body – perverted, enslaved, and eventually nullified by technology – misses the central role that technology played in shaping and developing that body. Gibson’s image of a slow-moving soul in a fast-moving world also misses the way in which velocity can be generative of the human. In this third encounter, we see how a human body hurled out into the world develops new rhythms and velocities. Inside and outside learn to adjust to and modulate one another. The human was born in speed, outside and in.

Taken in its simplest articulation – that there is an inherent interpenetration of the human and the technological – this perspective emerges in several contemporary theoretical approaches, from Marshall McLuhan’s theory of extension (1964) to Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory (1987) to Bernard Stiegler’s technogenesis (1998) and Donna Haraway’s discussion of the cyborg (1997). This story of a mutually-constitutive relation is itself accelerated in the work of Ray Kurzweil and other transhumanist thinkers, for whom the first moment of modifying and accelerating the human body from within becomes the starting point of a long teleological arc of bodily enhancement. Kurzweil’s techno-utopian analysis depicts a future in which a coming technological “Singularity” will allow humans to “transcend biology” (2005). For Kurzweil, this process of accelerating the human body to interact more effectively with the surrounding world is a natural, and inevitable, process. As he puts it (mimicking Mackenzie’s account of the neurology of throwing an axe),

[a]lthough impressive in many respects, the brain suffers from severe limitations . . . our thinking is extremely slow: the basic neural transactions are several million times slower than contemporary electronic circuits. That makes our physiological bandwidth for processing new information extremely limited compared to the exponential growth of the overall human knowledge base. (8–9)

According to Kurzweil, it is only a matter of time until this physiological lag is solved not through practice, but by the direct introduction of the technological into the biological. In the future:

Billions of nanobots in the capillaries of the brain will . . . vastly extend human intelligence. Once non-biological intelligence gets a foothold in the human brain (this has already started with computerized neural implants), the machine intelligence in our brains will grow exponentially (as it has been doing all along), at least doubling in power each year. (28)

While Kurzweil too envisions an increasing reliance on technology by the human body, he rejects Virilio’s pessimism and sees this as an inherently empowering process: “The Singularity will allow us to transcend [the] limitations of our biological bodies and brains. We will gain power over our fates” (9). For Kurzweil, the increasing introduction of accelerative technology into the body is simply the continuation of the profoundly natural and human process that started hundreds of thousands of years ago with the throwing of an axe (9).¹¹

Acceleration

I have presented three different images of the relationship between speed, technology, and the body. The first conceives of the body as opposed to and harmed by speed, the second focuses on the useful but dangerous application of accelerative prostheses to the body, and the third presents the relationship between speed and the body as mutually constitutive. These accounts overlap, suggesting the need for a mode of cultural analysis that can think through their differences and explain why an encounter is destructive, exteriorizing, or interiorizing. Such an analysis would seek to discern the most productive modes of interaction for any given encounter between bodies and speeds. Here the work of Spinoza is helpful, because the relationship between speed and the body is at the heart of his philosophy. Bodies are defined not by their material substance but by particular patterns of motion-and-rest, of quickness and slowness. Moreover, these patterns of motion-and-rest can interact in diverse ways, as different bodies encounter one another. Spinoza conceives of encounters that can increase the power of the body, and encounters that can diminish them. He seeks to learn which patterns of motion-and-rest can be harmonized, and which are best avoided as destructive of vitality. In what follows, I investigate how Spinoza’s philosophy can help us to understand bodily encounters with speed, and how we can begin to think these encounters in a productive, and ethical, manner.

Speed, the Body, and Spinoza

Motion-and-rest

I begin with Spinoza’s idea that all bodies can be distinguished by relations of motion-and-rest: “All bodies are either in motion or at rest . . . Each single body can move at varying speeds (Ethics, 72, Part II; Prop. 13, Axioms 1 and 2) . . . Bodies are distinguished from one another in respect of motion and rest, quickness and slowness, and not in respect of substance” (Ethics, 72 Part II, Prop. 13, Lemma 1). This follows from Spinoza’s argument in Ethics Part 1 that “in Nature there exists only one substance, absolutely infinite” (36, Prop. 10, Scholium). Differences between bodies result not from differences of substance but from differences in the vectors, velocities, and positions that organize the singular substance modally expressed as matter. Spinoza’s monism, though not unproblematic, disrupts many of the oppositions central to philosophical thought in the West (between thought and matter, the natural and the artificial, the human and the inhuman, etc.). Instead of these substantial differences, he introduces a continuum of difference based on patterns of motion-and-rest. While Spinoza does certainly speak of the “essence” of a body, this essence does not play the role of defining a class, form, or substance. Rather, essence is always a singular thing, describing the particular relations of motion-and-rest that inhere in a particular body (109, Part III, Prop. 7, Proof). Thus, as Hasana Sharp puts it, for Spinoza, “[s]trictly speaking, there is no human essence; there are only singular essences of similar beings that are called ‘human’” (86).¹² Contrary to the first two conceptions of speed presented above, Spinoza’s philosophy does not posit an essential distinction between stable, self-sufficient human bodies and the uncertain spaces of flow and flux that oppose these bodies or sap their energy. Instead, all bodies are marked by a certain motion (and a certain rest), a certain quickness (and a certain slowness). This is not to say that relations of motion-and-rest can’t be opposed to one another or destroy the other’s energy. But Spinoza leaves us with a more complex and open image of the body.

Simple and Composite Bodies

Through this lens of “motion-and-rest,” Spinoza develops a complex analytical toolkit for understanding the composition of bodies and describing their relationships to one another and to different speeds.

All the ways in which a body is affected by another body follow from the nature of the affected body together with the nature of the body affecting it, so that one and the same body may move in various ways in accordance with the various natures of the bodies causing its motion; and, on the other hand, different bodies may be caused to move in different ways by one and the same body. (73, Part II, Prop. 13, Lemma 3, Axiom 1)

In addition to explaining how to differentiate between bodies, Spinoza’s theory also shows how those bodies can interact. Here again, the outcome of encounters between bodies is determined not by substance, but by how their different patterns of motion-and-rest relate. These relations can, for example, link up to form what Spinoza terms a “composite” body:

When a number of bodies of the same or different magnitude form close contact with one another through the pressure of other bodies upon them, or if they are moving at the same or different rates of speed so as to preserve an unvarying relation of movement among themselves, these bodies are said to be united with one another and all together to form one body or individual thing, which is distinguished from other things through this union of bodies. (74, Part II, Prop. 13, Lemma 3, Axiom 2 Definition)

For Spinoza, composite bodies are characterized by a distinctive movement-style, which is the particular choreography of the simple bodies it contains. To understand Spinoza’s conception of composite bodies, two points are crucial. First, the idea of “unvarying relations of movement” does not mean that composite bodies are unchanging. Indeed, Spinoza immediately notes the ways in which these composite bodies can change while still “preserving their nature”:

If the parts of an individual thing become greater or smaller, but so proportionately that they all preserve the same mutual relation of motion-and-rest as before, the individual thing will likewise retain its own nature as before without any change in its form. . . .

Furthermore, the individual thing so composed retains its own nature . . . provided that each constituent part retains its own motion and continues to communicate this motion to the other parts. (75, Part II, Prop. 13, Lemma 5 and Lemma 7)

Says Spinoza, “[w]e thus see how a composite individual can be affected in many ways and yet preserve its nature” (75, Part II, Prop. 13, Scholium). This gives us a way to begin thinking about relations of speed without automatically thinking about oppositions between essential velocities (as in Gibson’s story, between the speeds of the “soul” and “technology”). Interactions can speed up or slow down a body, speed up or slow down its parts, and change their direction, without thereby decomposing that body. Second, the distinction between composite bodies and simple bodies is not as straightforward as it may appear, because all composite bodies are themselves the simple bodies from which other, larger composites are formed. As Spinoza says, “[i]f several individual things concur in one act in such a way as to be all together the simultaneous cause of one effect, I consider them all, in that respect, as one individual” (63, Part II, Definition 7). In this respect, for Spinoza, “individual” bodies are always multiple. This holds true for the human body itself, which – though it might be treated as an individual, and might have an essence – is always already a layered and multiple thing. As Moira Gatens puts it,

The human body is understood by Spinoza to be a relatively complex individual, made up of a number of other bodies. Its identity can never be viewed as a final or finished product . . . since it is a body that is in constant interchange with its environment. The human body is radically open to its surroundings and can be composed, recomposed and decomposed by other bodies. Its openness is a condition of … its life, that is, its continuance in nature as the same individual. (110)¹³

All of this follows naturally from Spinoza’s monism. Because all being is one, there are ultimately no ontological differences between bodies, and thus the universe can be conceived as a nested set of composite bodies (atoms make molecules, molecules make cells, etc.). An infinite chain stretches from the most infinitesimally singular body up to the most fully composite body, which is the totality of being that Spinoza terms deus sive natura, God or Nature (75–76, Part II, Prop. 13, Scholium). However, this unity of being is only present when we perceive the world sub quadam specie aeternitatis (92, Part II, Prop. 44, Corollary 2): from the perspective of deus sive natura. When viewed from the perspective of individual bodies, we see a world replete with opposition, conflict, and destruction. Interactions between bodies can therefore lead not only to the formation of composites, but also to the decomposition of one of the bodies through the destruction or diminution of its relations of motion-and-rest. Indeed, decomposition is inherent in the idea of composite bodies, because simple bodies must at times be absorbed into a larger aggregate, while previously existing composites must be decomposed and stripped for parts, as it were. Interactions between bodies, then, are frequently struggles between different relations of motion-and-rest. As Deleuze puts it in his reading of Spinoza,

The bodies that meet are either mutually indifferent, or one, through its relation, decomposes the relation in the other, and so destroys the other body. This is the case with a toxin or poison, which destroys a man by decomposing his blood. And this is the case with nutrition, but in a converse sense: a man forces the parts of the body by which he nourishes himself to enter into a new relation that conforms with his own, but which involves the destruction of the relation in which that body existed previously. (Expressionism 211)

The factor that drives these encounters and “judges” their outcomes is the Conatus Essendi (in Latin, the drive to exist).¹⁴ All bodies are possessed of a fundamental conatus, Spinoza claims:

Each thing, in so far as it is in itself, endeavors to persist in its own being.

The conatus with which each thing endeavors to persist in its own being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing.

Therefore, the power of any thing, or the conatus with which it acts or endeavors to act, alone or in conjunction with other things, that is . . . the power or conatus by which it endeavors to persist in its own being, is nothing but the given . . . essence of the thing. (109, Part III, Prop. 6; Prop. 7; Prop. 7 Proof)

Thus, in any contest between two bodies, each will struggle to persist in its own being, and the winner of any encounter is the body whose ability to persist – whose conatus – increases as a result. From Deleuze’s examples, poison persists in decomposing the patterns of relation in the blood, and the body persists over the patterns of relation in the food (and its own organs).

Bodies and speed

This onto-vision of different bodies attempting to maintain their particular patterns of motion-and-rest by subordinating others can help to frame the three encounters with which I began. In the case of jet lag, an encounter between the human body and a particular set of relations of motion-and-rest in the world (airplanes, time zones, light cues) overpowers and decomposes the internal relations of the bodies “of” the composite called the human body, and – like a toxin – diminishes that composite’s power of action. In the case of the G-suit, a technological body increases the human body’s power of action (it can now travel faster than the speed of sound), but does so in a way that potentially endangers that particular body’s power of action; the human body becomes a component of a larger technological assemblage, and finds its capacity to enact its conatus heavily restricted or even disabled. Finally, the Acheulean axe not only increases the body’s power of action, but introduces fundamental changes that increase that body’s power more broadly through reflex training and corticalization.

This last point introduces what appears to be a contradiction in Spinoza’s thinking. He describes bodies as gripped by the drive (conatus) to maintain their relations of motion-and-rest, and yet any encounter with another will produce some change in ourselves. This tension is lessened by the fact that one’s parts may change in any number of ways without signalling the functional destruction of the body, so long as its relations of motion-and-rest are able to adjust and retain their shape. Thus, in the case of food mentioned above, individual organs are changed (nourished, healed), but their overall relation remains the same. The problem is somewhat greater when it comes to corticalization. It would be something of a stretch to argue that a human before and after corticalization “retained the same pattern of motion-and-rest”; we’d probably say that the human only emerges with corticalization. And yet, from Spinoza’s perspective, would it have been a proper expression of conatus for homo erectus to avoid corticalization in order to maintain its essence? By this account, all evolution – any change of whatever type, biological or technological – would be against nature, because it would go against our drive to “persist in [our own] being” (an idea that hews rather closely to Rousseau’s narrative).

But this interpretation would be a misunderstanding of conatus. Although conatus is the drive by which “[e]ach thing . . . endeavors to persist in its own being” (109, Part III, Prop. 7), it does not endeavour to persist solely as it is at any given moment. A being that only ever sought to exist as it was in the present wouldn’t last very long. For instance, the baby antelope that didn’t learn to walk or grow to be an adult wouldn’t last against predators. Conatus is not merely the drive to persist, but the drive to persist as long and as much as possible. Spinoza describes this conception of conatus as a body’s drive to increase the number of ways in which it can affect, and be affected by, other bodies:

That which so disposes the human body that it can be affected in more ways, or which renders it capable of affecting external bodies in more ways, is advantageous to man, and proportionately more advantageous as the body is thereby rendered more capable of being affected in more ways and of affecting other bodies in more ways. On the other hand, that which renders the body less capable in these respects is harmful. (177, Part IV, Prop. 38)

Thus, for example, prior to the acquisition a G-suit, the body was severely limited in its ability to affect external bodies in ways that required high-g acceleration. In such contexts, the body literally could not “persist in its being” and would pass out. The G-suit thus increases the body’s conatus by introducing a wider array of encounters while still “persisting in its being.” In so doing, it changes the nature of that being, and the human body transforms from a thing that can’t sustain high-g acceleration to a thing that can.¹⁵

The acquisition of new powers to affect and be affected necessarily changes the relations of motion-and-rest within a composite body. Spinoza acknowledges that the changes in a human body while growing from a child into an adult are so great that it’s safe to say the body is a different “thing” in the end (177, Part IV, Prop. 38, Scholium). However, it doesn’t follow that growing is against conatus (or nature); what matters is what a thing can do. One could say that the nature of the body of a baby is to self-alter through encounters, and to increase its ability to be affected. This idea of the body places movement – slowness and speed – at the center. As Deleuze puts it in his commentary on Spinoza,

the kinetic proposition tells us that a body is defined by relations of motion and rest, of slowness and speed between particles. That is, it is not defined by a form or by functions. Global form, specific form, and organic functions depend on relations of speed and slowness. . . . The important thing is to understand life, each living individuality, not as a form, or as a development of form, but as a complex relation between differential velocities, between deceleration and acceleration of particles. (Spinoza 123)

Even if it changes a composite body’s relations of motion-and-rest, increasing the ways in which a body can affect and be affected still expresses its conatus, because existence for Spinoza is a process of affecting and being affected. The body that can affect and be affected by more encounters is one that exists more. Moreover, not only are bodies inherently composite or multiple; so too is conatus. It is not enough to speak of “the” conatus of the body without acknowledging a conatus of the organ within the body, and the cell within the organ, and the mitochondria within the cell. For the body – for any body – to survive, its conatus must cooperate with the conati of other bodies at different scales, and, most importantly, at different velocities.¹⁶ As in Mackenzie’s discussion of the Acheulean axe, the human composes different velocities at many levels, incorporating the conati of different bodies to increase “a” body’s conatus.

This vision of bodies as always already inherently multiple helps to challenge a vision of the human body as an essential or hermetically-sealed unit, set in opposition to the non-human world. Instead, the human body is a composite, always intertwined with and determined by non-human bodies. As Bruno Latour puts it, “Humans, for millions of years, have extended their social relations to other actants with which, with whom, they have swapped many properties, and with which, with whom, they form collectives” (Pandora 198). This extension of social relations to non-human actants doesn’t hold only for biological lifeforms (such as, for example, the foreign bacteria that makes up much of the human microbiome, and upon which our health and survival depends), but also for the technological artifacts and processes that extend and determine the capacities of human bodies. Again, as Latour says, “There is no sense in which humans may be said to exist as humans without entering into commerce with what authorizes and enables them to exist (that is, to act)” (Pandora 192). This approach therefore begins to erode the basic framework with which my paper started, one based on a supposed opposition between the human and the technological. Instead, Spinoza’s horizontal ontology guides us towards the vision, familiar in McLuhan and Stiegler, among others, in which the human is always already technological.

Speed, Politics, and Ethics

What we are left with is a profoundly multiple, layered, open, and creative vision of the body that rejects the idea of a universal, transhistorical human essence – or an essential human pace – posited in the first two accounts of speed above. This shift in perspective goes beyond simply changing our descriptions of the relationship between speed and the body. It also has important political and ethical implications, because different accounts of speed and the body can produce different assemblages of affects and effects. Invested as they are in an essentialist vision of human nature and pace, the encounters with jet lag and the G-suit can give rise to a variety of fears and anxieties in the face of growing technological transformation and social acceleration, and these can crystallize into reactionary political affects.¹⁷ Against these affects, Spinoza leads us to consider not what a human body is, but what it can do (Montag xvii–xviii). Deleuze describes this as the shift to an ethological perspective. Ethology, a mode of analysis in zoology, bases its investigation on behaviours-in-response-to-habitats rather than on natural qualities:

Such studies as this, which define bodies, animals, or humans by the affects they are capable of, founded what is today called ethology. The approach is no less valid for us, for human beings, than for animals, because no one knows ahead of time the affects one is capable of; it is a long affair of experimentation, requiring a lasting prudence, a Spinozian wisdom. . . . (Spinoza 125)

In contrast to the extremes of the first two images of speed, ethology pushes us to accept a more open, pluralistic vision of human life, refusing to allow our fears or frustrations with an accelerating world to calcify into a violent or reactionary politics and culture.¹⁸

At the same time, Deleuze also cautions prudence. The experimentalism of the ethological approach does not require the uncritical acceptance of all technological acceleration. As noted, the third account of speed discussed above carries with it the danger that its particular worldview can manifest in a reckless embrace of technological innovation, a libertarian technoutopianism, or even fascistic desires for a transcendence over human frailty. A Spinozian framework can moderate these excesses, attuning us to the ways in which the human is always bound up in broader assemblages of composite bodies that necessarily limit both our knowledge of – and our ability to intervene unilaterally in – the chain of causal connections that envelop us (Macherey 156–157). A mode of analysis that asks broadly what a particular formation lets us do – that is, how it allows us to affect and be affected – can also lead bodies away from particular technologies or accelerations. For instance, the acquisition of an automobile increases a body’s ability to affect and be affected by radically increasing its velocities of travel. But if the emissions that automobile produces contribute to global warming, then it might very well decrease our conatus through the destruction of our ecosystem. Michael Mack argues that we must understand Spinoza’s conception of conatus “not in terms of teleology but in terms of sustainability on both an individual and a social scale” (“Toward” 102–103). In order for one’s conatus to increase, the ability to affect and be affected must be sustainable (Braidotti 148). I can run faster by taking steroids, but if they ravage my health in other ways, am I able to sustain existence at these higher speeds?

Mack’s attention to “sustainability on both an individual and a social scale” means that conatus links the fate of individual bodies to the fate of bodies politic. For Spinoza, the thing that most increases our power is the cultivation of the broadest possible community of alliances; the principle of conatus leads him to argue that “[i]t is of the first importance to men to establish close relationships and to bind themselves together with such ties as may more effectively unite them into one body, and, as an absolute rule, to act in such a way as serves to strengthen friendship” (198, Part IV, Appendix 12). A community will always be stronger than an individual, and thus an individual able to draw on the strength and capabilities of a community is capable of being “affected in more ways [and] . . . capable of affecting external bodies in more ways.”¹⁹ A strong community of friends plays a central role in the expression of conatus, so when it comes to decisions about how a community wishes to engage with speed and technology, the question of sustainability applies not just to people’s own bodies, but to the bodies of others as well. Such questions are therefore a proper subject for Spinoza’s multitude, the self-governing body politic of his political works. In this regard, we might reject the individualism of techno-libertarianism and explicitly politicize questions of speed and technology, subjecting them to democratic deliberation rather than leaving them up to the wisdom of corporate capitalism or the military-industrial state.²⁰ What is more, given the necessarily multiple and layered nature of conatus, and given the interdependence of individual human bodies (and bodies politic) with a vast assemblage of non-human bodies, adopting such as an approach implies a concern for the conati of those non-human bodies. Thus, we might start thinking in terms of a multitude that cuts across the human/non-human divide, sharpening our concern for the well-being of non-human others and seeking ways to represent their interests in our political deliberations.

This approach to the multitude enters usefully into conversation with several contemporary theories of technology – for example, Bruno Latour’s account of a Parliament of Things. We have already seen that Latour has a comparable approach, arguing that human beings are always already bound up in collectives with non-human actants in a world of proliferating hybrids. Latour argues that refusing to acknowledge these hybrids is one of the central problems with dominant accounts of science and technology in the modern world (We Have 112). As he says, “So long as the human is constructed through contrast with the [nonhuman] object … neither the human nor the nonhuman can be understood” (We Have 136). Rejecting an essentialist account of the human and recognizing the deep symbiosis between the human and the nonhuman (both ecological and ontological) opens the way for a political and ethical discussion that includes non-human actants as members of human collectives, whose interests and well-being need to be considered. Thus, Latour argues, “it is time, perhaps to speak of democracy again, but of a democracy extended to things themselves” (We Have 142). Latour’s Parliament of Things might itself benefit from the inclusion of both Spinoza’s metaphysics and his ethical theory, while Spinoza’s work would benefit immensely from Latour’s contemporary scientific knowledge and perspective. As Latour says, “the more nonhumans share existence with humans, the more humane a collective is” (Pandora 18). Sharp has a similar insight in her Spinoza and the Politics of Renaturalization, arguing that a Spinozian orientation to politics leads us to understand that “our agency, perseverance, and pleasure depend upon affirming and nourishing the nonhuman in and outside of ourselves. The relations that matter to our intellectual and our corporeal well-being are far from exclusively human” (10).²¹

Conclusion

A mode of analysis (and political practice) inspired by Spinoza offers an alternative to a techno-utopian (or dystopian) position that argues for a transcendent (and frequently individualized) escape from the body through speed. This alternative inherits a wariness of speed shared by Gibson, Rousseau, and Virilio, as it seeks to understand the impact of accelerating velocities on bodies individual and political, human and non-human. This mode encourages us to subject these issues to the deliberation of the multitude, as it would with any other policy or phenomenon that potentially affects the conatus of others. And yet it urges this prudential relationship to technology without recourse to a conception of human essence or to the natural speeds and rhythms of the body. Spinoza is more interested in the possibilities of new formations, in the struggle for more and greater affects. Scholars return to Spinoza’s injunction that “nobody as yet has learned from experience what the body can and cannot do” (106, Part III, Prop. 2, Scholium) because it proposes a space of experimentation and openness.

That is why Spinoza calls out to us in the way he does: you do not know beforehand what good or bad you are capable of; you do not know beforehand what a body or a mind can do, in a given encounter, a given arrangement a given combination. Ethology is first of all the study of relations of speed and slowness, of the capacities for affecting and being affected that characterize each thing. (Deleuze, Spinoza 125)

Spinoza encourages political, social, and cultural theory to be less concerned with the essence of the human than with what people can do, how they can live, and what they can do for each other.²² This framework gives people a way to engage productively and ethically with technologies of speed without losing sight of the destructive effects (and affects) that can result. It avoids the uncritical nature of techno-utopian accounts of the body and technology without lapsing into humanist accounts. It leaves us aware that we do not yet know how fast a body can go.

Notes

My thanks to Smita Rahman, Jairus Grove, Daniel Levine, Jane Bennett, Bill Connolly, Morton Schoolman, and several anonymous reviewers for their comments on this article.

1. A not at all exhaustive account would include Machiavelli on fortuna (1998), Locke on prerogative power (1988), Kant on cosmopolitanism (1998), Henry Adams on acceleration (1931), and Marx on capitalist dynamism (2000), as well as twentieth-century discussions such as Heidegger’s (1971), Derrida’s (1984), Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987), Baudrillard’s (1994), Simmel’s (1997), and Schmitt’s (2007).

2. A partial list includes Wolin (1997), Der Derian (2001), Rosa (2013), Scheuerman (2004), Agamben (2005), Tomlinson (2007), Duffy (2009), Glezos (2012), Mackay and Avanessian (2014), Noys (2014), Sharma (2014), and Wajcman (2016).

3. See Connolly (2002), Mackenzie (2002), Massumi (2002), Grosz (2005), and Bell (2010).

4. It should be noted that, while Connolly’s Neuropolitics includes discussions of all three, his discussion of Spinoza is separate from his account of speed. The same is true of Deleuze, who deals extensively with speed in A Thousand Plateaus, but does not explicitly integrate this with his work elsewhere on Spinoza. For a discussion of Deleuze’s account of speed, see Glezos (2012).

5. See Braidotti (2006), Gatens (1996), Vardoulakis (2011), Montag (1999), Williams (2007), Sharp (2011), and Skeaff (2013).

6. This article will therefore focus on the first of Spinoza’s attributes – extension – and leave aside his discussion of the attribute of thought. Doing so means leaving out crucial elements of Spinoza’s account of the body, including affect, memory and imagination. Several texts work through this dimension of Spinoza’s thought, including Gatens (1996), Braidotti (2006), and Sharp (2011).

7. This particular vision of speed and the body can give rise to social and political efforts to slow down the pace of life in an accelerating world. In its more innocuous forms, these manifest through movements based around “slow-food” and “slow-living” (but see Sharma, chapter 4). However, several theorists have also noted that these efforts can give rise to reactionary political affects and movements. As Connolly argues, “reactive drives to retard the pace of life” have a tendency to manifest “in locating vulnerable constituencies to hold politically accountable for the fast pace of life” (142). See also Glezos (2014) for a discussion about the ways resentment over speed can translate into anti-immigration and xenophobic political movements.

8. It is worth noting the stark ableism of Virilio’s perspective in his valorization of a natural, normal, able body, and his reciprocal denigration of the apparently pathological disabled body. This necessarily suppresses the wide variety of different bodies and abilities, a point raised by Mitchell and Snyder in their introduction to The Body and Physical Difference (1997).

9. A review of just the titles of contemporary books on technology provides a wealth of examples of this sort of discourse, from Simon Head’s Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans (2014), to Jaron Lanier’s bestselling You Are Not a Gadget (2011).

10. And as in the previous encounter, these humanist anxieties about an accelerating world can crystallize into conservative and reactionary political movements. In addition to the ableism of Virilio’s position, we can also look to Donna Haraway’s discussion of ways in which humanist anxieties over technology can resonate with anxieties about race, difference, boundaries, purity, and normalcy (61–62).

11. Furthermore, while Kurzweil does reflect up to a point about technology, such a worldview has frequently translated into an uncritical embrace of technological innovation, in which any “enhancement” or acceleration of the body is viewed as part of humanity’s technological destiny. This techno-utopian worldview, and the dream of human transcendence, is by no means tied to our contemporary digital age. For example, the Futurist Manifesto of 1907 embraces the “beauty of speed” and aims “to sing the man at the wheel” (Marinetti). The Futurists’ fascist sympathies have been connected with the fantasies of transcending the human body through technology in Nazi ideology (see Nussbaum 346–347). My point is not that the post-humanist outlook is somehow necessarily fascistic, but rather to note that this view of the relation between speed and the body, when taken to its most extreme articulation, can have dangerous political and ethical implications (just as the other two encounters do).

12. Or, as Stuart Hampshire puts it, for Spinoza “such phrases as ‘the essential nature of man’ and ‘the purpose of human existence’ are phrases that survive in popular philosophy and language only as the ghosts of Aristotelianism, and can have no place in a scientific language” (115).

13. See also Macherey 177.

14. Note that “judgement” should not be understood as a moral or transcendent category. Rather, conatus “judges” in the same way that evolution does, through the resolution of immanent, ateleological struggle of bodies to persist.

15. Jane Bennett provides an excellent account of the creative character of conatus, saying it “is not a process of mere repetition of the same, for it entails continual invention: because each mode suffers the actions on it by other modes, actions that disrupt the relation of movement and rest characterizing each mode, every mode, if it is to persist, must seek new encounters to creatively compensate for the alterations or affections it suffers” (22). Sharp makes a similar point when she states that “Nature, for Spinoza, names the necessity of ongoing mutation” (8).

16. For a discussion of the multiplicity of the body in Spinoza, see Sharp (38) and Macherey (156–177). For a discussion of the multiple velocities of the body, see Connolly (chapter1).

17. Once again, we can look to Connolly’s description of how, in the American context, “Resentment against the acceleration of pace becomes projected upon religious and nationalist drives to identify a series of vulnerable constituencies as paradigmatic enemies of territorial culture, traditional morality, unified politics, and Christian nationalism” (147).

18. Such an approach would also help to immunize our thought against the ableism of Virilio’s approach, or the obsession with purity that concerns Haraway. Expanding this account of affect is the crucial next step in developing a Spinozian politics of speed, which I seek to pursue in future writing. In the meantime, for engagements on speed and affect, see Connolly (2002), Massumi (2002), Glezos (2014), and Sharma (2014).

19. We should not assume that the formation of such friendships and communities is easy or inevitable. Books III and IV of the Ethics are devoted to identifying obstacles that make forming communities difficult, and the Politico-Theological Treatise and the Political Treatise both point to ways in which the set of issues raised in The Ethics can lead not to community and friendship, but to conflict and the “war of all against all.” This, indeed, is one of the central projects of The Ethics – to provide a moral argument for community, to note affective and social obstacles to the formation of community, and to suggest both tactics and strategies for overcoming these obstacles. Here I merely wish to point out the way in which Spinoza’s philosophy points toward such ethical and political practices.

20. For examples of attempts at such a politicization of speed, see Der Derian (2001), Wolin (1997), Rosa (2013), Scheuerman (2004), and Glezos (2012).

21. See also Williams 354.

22. Mack comes to a similar conclusion in How Literature Changes the Way We Think: “Spinoza implicitly conceives of the human as an open-ended and not to be fully defined entity. From this perspective he is a post-humanist” (37). See also Skeaff (154) and Macherey (52–3, 75).

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