As someone occasionally reproached for my rather relaxed style of life, my ponderous reluctance to 'get a move on', I was delighted to discover a fully-fledged philosophical and political justification, here:
"Our world is marked by its speed: the speed of historical change; the speed of technical change; the speed of communications; of transmissions; and even the speed with which human beings establish connection with one another. This speed exposes us to the danger of a very great incoherency. It is because things, images and relations circulate so quickly that we do not even have time to measure the extent of this incoherency.... Philosophy must propose a retardation process. It must construct a time for thought, which, in the face of the injunction to speec, will constitute a time of its own. I consider this a singularity of philosophy; that its thinking is leisurely, becuase today revolt requires leisureliness and not speed. This thinking, slow and consequently rebellious, is alone capable of establishing the fixed point.. which we need in order to sustain the desire of philosophy."
Thus, the injunction of thought is to arrest, to interrupt. It is a matter of road blocks and dams, of side-stepping 'efficiency' and of refusing to metabolise or to salute the stream of ready-made ideas and images which speed up time and speed us on to a future we have not chosen. This reversal of temporal priorities is not a hundred miles away from Walter Benjamin and his belief that the state of emergency was that things just kept going on as they were, so that the truly revolutionary action was not a dizzy acceleration of time but its sudden cessation or arrest.
A related, rather cursory thought: how the 'purple finger' icon was so speedily set in motion, 'a transferable motif to be worn and marketed', meme-ing through blog-space, now appearing on cups and other paraphenalia, a ready-made ideogram carelessly metabolised by the willing before any real thought about the elections had chance to get to work.
n.b., Adorno and Horkheimer on 'speed':
Whether folk-songs were rightly or wrongly called upper-class culture in decay, their elements have only acquired their popular form through a long process of repeated transmission. The spread of popular songs, on the other hand, takes place at lightning speed. The American expression “fad,” used for fashions which appear like epidemics – that is, inflamed by highly-concentrated economic forces – designated this phenomenon long before totalitarian advertising bosses enforced the general lines of culture. When the German Fascists decide one day to launch a word – say, “intolerable” – over the loudspeakers the next day the whole nation is saying “intolerable.”