Slow Living in Modern Times
It cannot go unremarked that, alongside the reverence accorded to a hyperkinetic, digitally fueled pace, the idea of a slower life is gaining appeal. Recent decades have spawned several slow-living initiatives, such as the Slow Food movement, Slow Cities (CittaSlow), the Society for the Deceleration of Time, the Simple Living Network, and various forms of meditation and mindfulness. Indeed, there has been considerable growth of the “mind business” within large corporations.15 There is even a manifesto for Slow Science, calling for scientists to proceed with less haste, taking time to think, to read, and to fail.16 Common practices associated with slow living include cooking and sharing a meal instead of buying fast food, growing fruit and vegetables locally, and cycling or walking instead of driving. These initiatives deliberately posit slowness or deceleration as a subversion of the cultural orthodoxy of speed.
Clearly, the resignification of slowness as a life-enhancing quality has to be understood as a response to the acceleration society. As we saw in chapter 2, the experience of slowness emerged as a positive value in response to the velocity of newly emerging machines from the midnineteenth century. The shock induced by the speed of railway travel, for instance, provoked a renewed perspective on earlier modes of travel, such that walking could be redefined as ofering leisure and heightened sensory pleasure. Slowness became recognized as a desirable or virtuous quality when it became a choice, rather than the only option, and when speed could be associated with negative characteristics such as alienation, stress, or desensitization. It is in this context that slowness could become the basis of formulating a critique of modernity: “speed created slowness, as it were.”17
Chapter seven
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