DOING DECELERATION
Doing more and more can result in a reality of less and less, the cultivation of superficial engagement overriding the possibility of deep and sustained attention, immersion or absorption. Refuse the impinging pressures of acceleration and of proliferation. Renege on the demands for more and more, for faster and faster, that mark a culture of immediacy and urgency, with its privileging of multitasking and ethos of just-in-time production. While an anything-is-possible attitude is no bad thing as such, much might be lost in the over-eagerness to achieve. What then for the maker of artworks, whose work is art? How to distinguish the debasing of life subsumed by work, from the critical politics of a lifework, from the ethico-aesthetics of life as a work of art? To give life back its time and duration, reclaim the capacity to linger and dwell. Yet doing deceleration is less a call to down tools or stop doing if this means to retreat from activity of all kinds. Rather it is an invitation to conceive new relations between acceleration and deceleration, between action and rest. Deceleration is not a solution nor an end in-and-of itself. Unhurriedness is not an endpoint or destination, but a precondition for becoming more available, indeed, to be freer for.
From Emma Cocker, How Do You Do? (Nottingham: Beam Editions, 2023)