Alternative Editorial: Speed Matters
Pablo Picasso, Buste de femme assise, 1963. Courtesy Sotheby's
A penny has been slowly dropping in this Week 44 of the Shift. Maybe because the range of conversations we have been having are beginning to show a new divide between those that want to move fast and those that want to move slow.
Not an antagonistic one, because it seems there is plenty of commonality in these discussions. Even so, there is tension if you try to bring people across this divide into agreements about what action to take. Frustration, irritation, impatience arises – or worse, a simple disconnect. As if we are not talking the same language and, like the caricature of the Brits abroad, are therefore tempted to shout to be heard or just leave the room.
In the very broad landscape of actors that we are engaged with at The Alternative UK there are, of course, many different points of entry. On the front page of our website we offer six that broadly describe different framings of our current problems:
1. Storytelling – creating new narratives
2. System building – working with new system actors, driving collaboration between them
3. Democracy – designing a new system that processes people power
4. Learning / Education
5. Next economies
6. Ontology / the feel of an Alternative political system
In addition, we offer two different territories to explore and co-create. Firstly, building Citizen Action Networks (CANs) in communities: seconds, the more personal arena of ‘equipping the self for the future’. While these two territories offer different foci, they can both can happen wherever you live. More than that, both are happening where you live but seem unaware of their boundaries - what keeps people in the group and what opens it up. As a result they rarely talk to each other.
The reason they have come to our attention more sharply, just recently, is in our work to connect CANs to each other. By a CAN we mean any group of people working together in a geographical space, committed to overcoming old political and cultural divides while acknowledging the interdependence of the personal, social and global. To do this successfully, CANs have to allow multiple forms of agency: historically, different people have different experiences of power and will want to express change accordingly.
For example, some want to protest against elites, some to be active in civil society, some want to do media differently, others simply want to change themselves to have a new impact on their environment. None of these are more correct than others – but to be effective they need to act in concert. In a geographically-defined community, that is possible without leaking too much energy – all kinds of progress is contained and builds shareable community wealth.
Despite such a big picture context for CANs, we find there is still a divide that few groups overcome. Crudely put – please forgive – it is between those who want to get on with taking action and those who want to listen to what is emerging.
A major caveat here would be that both would acknowledge the other as important and possibly deny there is a distinction. After all, they are engaging with A/UK which states the importance of both. Even so, the groups we engage with tend to fall into one or other of these categories – when meeting in a Zoom room for example - on a spectrum of division.
At one extreme end are the groups that spend all their energy in connecting, linking, sharing tools. They are a manifest bustle of collective action, but rarely talk about the individual’s capacity for action. For them, the We space is undifferentiated – we are all in this together.
At the other extreme, the time budget is entirely spent on talking, listening, sensing. Welcoming a plurality of voices – as long as they have the internal capacity for listening. Here, the We space is full of diversity – so we cannot ‘know’ what is really happening there or what sort of outcomes to expect. A call to action always seems like jumping the gun. Even so, there is a lot of common mind-set between those gathering here – far more so than in the action spaces.
When members of these two kinds of groups meet by chance in the same space, the difference is mostly felt as a clash of speed limits. The first group wil say “Can we get on with the agenda please!”. The second group will say “We need to slow down in order to go faster”.
If you’ve ever been caught in these extremities, you’ll know whether or not you have a clear preference. Yet most of us gathered around A/UK are closer to the middle of the divide, with an emphasis to one over the other but still seeing both as valid.
We are seeing a challenge here. The more we try to bring these different speeds into one location, allowing both fast and slow, the more we see we don’t yet have the tools - especially the tech - to do that well.
For example, before Covid (BC?) it was easy to contrast decision-making held online with decisions happening person-to-person, in communities. The first was efficient but unsatisfying, the second slow but mostly deeply satisfying. During Covid, these lines got very blurred: without the opportunity to meet face to face, we have come to rely more on virtual meetings, producing a mixture of results. Rather than assuming the tech is an experience of lesssr value, we assess it has shown us unexpected levels of engagement and quality of interaction. Indeed, it has often given us hope for the future. In particular, where we’ve found well-worked-out protocols of behaviour, we come close to crossing this divide.
However, so many participants in this small revolution now identify themselves as “Zoombies”– exhausted by the energy it takes to pay so much attention to the brightly-lit screen at such levels of intensity for so long each day. They can’t wait to get off, yearning ever more strongly for the physical connections we have been deprived of. This feeling is so strong that we have to acknowledge that even if Zoom is a good place to contribute your energy, it does not guarantee a return. Only those who are deeply nourished by listening make significant gains. Otherwise, the divide persists.
Detail of Picasso's The Charnel House. Photograph: © Succession Picasso/DACS 2010 MOMA, New York/Scala
When dwelling on the difficulty of shifting a community that operates at both these faster and slower paces, as a complex whole - instead of just one preferred speed – the art of Picasso came to mind. When he first burst onto the scene with his cubist paintings, Pablo was an acquired taste. Only some appreciated his portrayal of a single person with multiple perspectives showing on the surface. The art audience was used to the simple divide between the public face we all see and the private complexity that is hard to portray, hidden behind the skillful realism of the canvas.
We all know that we are - all of us - complicated people with personal strengths and weaknesses. But we have learnt to put on a flat face when we are out and about, confirming to norms. We introduce ourselves with a name, a job, our special interests, a place to live. Yet the truth we all know is that this ‘front’ says almost nothing about ourselves that matters to anyone, except while we are in action to build something along an agreed agenda.
What Picasso did was to reveal what was beyond that surface persona – the many other aspects of a person – but place them alongside the surface elements. It confused and often repelled people. But once you had some time to study his work, get a sense of his rationale and begin to look at things the way his paintings invited us to, you could not undo the shift he enacted – it felt more true. As beautiful as impressionism, post-impressionism, fauvism (see here for an easy progression) were, Picasso shocked art audiences into an unexpected new way of looking at reality. The waves of change rippled throughout society, deepening, but also accelerating change. Here he is on the relationship between art and politics.
It would take more than an editorial to compare this moment in time to that one. But the useful point might be to open us all up to the possibility that the old divides will fall away when a genuinely different way of looking at human beings arises. Without dropping any of these distinctions, it is not sufficient to categorise us according to resources, genders, cultures or ages. Within each of these groups, profound differences show up when they are given the space to express themselves. The feel of hearing (or meeting) new people for the first time can be exhilarating. Whole new worlds open up – as intensely for two people as for a hundred.
Maybe we should be looking less at spaces of activism as the training ground for a new politics and more of energetic social spaces where people participate with some expectation of both fast and slow interaction. Sports clubs have their shared goals and their social spaces. Festivals have their moments of talking and hanging out – as well as their moments of moving en masse. Craftivism is designed to produce gifts while deepening understanding of our systems of power.
To go both fast and slow comes naturally. Let’s make it the hallmark of a new politics.