The ticking bomb: Speed, liberalism and ressentiment against the future

Abstract

This article uses the ‘Ticking Bomb Scenario’ as a starting point for a broader discussion of what I term the ‘liberal narrative of speed’, the argument within liberal thought (laid out by William Scheuerman) that the accelerating pace of events (and threats) in the world requires a transition of authority from slow-moving, democratic legislative bodies, to energetic, efficient and unitary executives. However, this article argues that the source of this transfer of power is not because of any structural misfit between democracy and acceleration (indeed, accelerative technologies can help make democratic deliberation more efficient and effective). Instead, through an investigation of the ontology of speed (grounded in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and Henri Bergson) I argue that speed produces not a functional threat to democratic politics, but an existential one. Acceleration unsettles stable political identities, and produces a time of uncertainty, in which people are wary of engaging in democratic debate and compromise, preferring instead the certainty of unitary executive leadership. In this regards the anti-democratic tendency of acceleration is to be located in the way in which it inculcates a sense of ressentiment against a future that is contingent and uncertainty.