Peripherence
Tuesday 1 April 2025
The Remainder
article
PERIPHERENCE. J is sitting on a train out west, thinking of imaginative ways he might describe the window. The scene outside is one thing – the golden waste of sunset, the strips of swan-white styrofoam littering the lakes – but the window itself is another. The window is flecked with grey scratches and bears a worn BSI Kitemark. The mark of British Standards. J imagines whether the window ‘wants’, and what that might be, if it could: to frame the dish-soap vistas of the Adriatic? The bone-white spine of the trans-siberian tundra? Maybe this is just what J wants, maybe this is transference: anything but sheep and the endless, ancient hills of England.
These are not useful thoughts J is having. Useful thoughts would take the shape of answers to simple questions, like when to get off the train and what to eat that evening. Useful thoughts have measurable qualities. Useful thoughts are portrait. A4. Landscape thoughts are useful to artists, engineers and military personnel. They are rolled out from tightly wound spools of history, power and ideology, folded up in the form of artworks, maps, circuit diagrams and illustrations of artillery targets.
The window is just a window, it doesn’t want anything but instead provides a frame of reference, an abstract coordinate system. British Standards dictate that the landscape present itself as a lumpy green patchwork – feudal parking spaces for the shadows of clouds, metered out by flint fences and punctuated with livestock bollards. A space for dark pools and financial speculation and the avoidance of inheritance tax. This is what the window reproduces through the characteristic clack of the train’s movements, the speed of the industrial revolution, the speed by which everything becomes subject to transportation and information technology.
This is what Marxist’s call the ‘annihilation of space by time’.
The train slows as red kites circle the speed-space of a national rail station. J watches them, imagining domesticated animals cowering in their shoebox gardens. At the start of the 20th century there were only 5 breeding pairs of Red Kites, now there are thought to be over 4,000 – between 1995 and 2022 the population increased 2,232%. J imagines chihuahuas trembling beneath the glass of poorly built extensions; hamsters buried in piss-soaked newspaper scraps. These are the successes of environmental conservation.
And with these thoughts the question comes naturally: “What have red kites done for property prices?” J searches online and finds the description of a 3 bed semi-detached house in Hampshire:
This is the ultimate retreat from the hustle and bustle of urban life. You can walk out your door on a Sunday afternoon, breathe in the country air with the 'red kites' circling overhead and enjoy a scenic walk which is then followed by a stop off at the ‘Chequers’ or the ‘Frog and Wicket’ pub.1
The 3-bed house was last sold in June 1995 for £72,000 and is on the market at an increase of 768%, for £625,000. For that you can have walks and pubs and Sunday afternoons with clouds parked overhead and kites circling beneath them. For that there are leases and exchange rates and chains of ownership which go back to The War or Victoria or William the Conqueror and his Domesday Book. These vellum things mark both a kind of retreat and a form of revenge. The revenge of ‘space’? The retreat into it? The kites are flying off on dreamy pockets of reddening air, or the train is starting up again, or their movements occur independently of one another. The window provides few clues.
These are portrait thoughts – statistics, forms, leases, percentages – turned on their side. Portrait thoughts made landscape.
It’s 1977 and Paul Virilio, the Italian architect-turned-philosopher, has given a name to the study of speed: ‘dromology’. Here ‘Dromos-’ (δρόμος), the Ancient Greek term for racing or a racetrack*,* meets ‘-logos’ (λόγος), an account, explanation, or narrative. In this collision the idea of ‘speed’ overtakes ‘time’ – seasonal rhythms, circadian patterns give way to differentials, gears and informatic movements. It’s 1986 and Virilio is speaking to Impulse magazine:
I think the old image, the old reality, was a reality that can be presented as a space-time reality. Man lived in a time system of his actual presence: when he wasn’t there, he wasn’t there. Today we are entering a space which is speed-space. Contrary to popular belief, the space we live in is a speed-space.2
Speed-space, for Virilio, marks the transition from an ‘extensive’ relationship toward time (“a space where duration of time was valued”) to an ‘intensive’ one (where “new technologies lead us to discover the equivalent of the infinitely small in time”). Here speed is not a means, but a “milieu” – an orientation to a world which increasingly seeks to ‘escape us’ – which disappears into the ‘billionth of a second’ and generates for its bewildered inhabitants a ‘program of absence’.
This is modernity after all. A modernity born out of war machines, steam engines, mining towns, slavery, timetables, newspapers, stocks and shares, where the hallmark of one’s participation is a record – a train ticket, a QR code, a price, a mark, a photograph, a list – made obsolete. In 1986 Virilio replies:
“No human being can be present in the intensive time that belongs to machines; […] a milieu in which we participate only indirectly through the videotape machine after recording, through information science and ‘robotized’ systems.”
The sociologist Harmut Rosa describes this ‘operational mode’ of modernity – which characterises its fundamental break with previous societies – as ‘dynamic stabilisation’. Dynamic stabilisation is the name given to a sociological necessity for permanent growth, innovation, optimization and acceleration; where only through speed can things remain stable. This is the milieu through which J himself now moves. Through suburban sprawl, electricity substations, telephonic wavelengths, Wikipedia pages and Google ‘docs’. What is the price of speed? In a 2017 interview Harmut Rosa continues:
“And there is a complementary mode of cultural orientation which goes with this structural mode of dynamic stabilization. As subjects, we try to bring the world within our reach or range, within our horizon of control and calculability. I call this the ‘Triple A Approach’ to the good life. [...] Collectively, we try to make more and more parts and segments of the world available, attainable, and accessible. [Individually,] we strive for the same through money, through education, through increased health and fitness, through social networks and so on.”3
This is an orientation to the world – a horizon – which, Rosa writes, implies and enforces an instrumental, “mute” relationship towards things, earth, people and information. It is a cultural system of (capitalist) appropriation in which everything rushes into focus, where nothing cannot be accessed, explained and summarised instantly; an orientation to knowledge, perhaps, which “confuses ‘looking things up’ for erudition.” Such is the manner in which Brandon Taylor defines a trend within contemporary ‘literary fiction’, one that others have termed ‘Wikipedia Realism’.
Wikipedia Realism is a symptom of speed-space; a way of dealing with a peculiar absence from the world, from history. It is a Benjaminian form of fragmentation that cannot call to attention the conditions of its own production, intensification or disintegration. It is, as Taylor writes, “[the] effect of ploughing through paragraph after paragraph about Neanderthals and geography and economics and evolutionary psychology” and finding no structural diagnosis, no means of representing or interrogating the world. For Virilio, every new technology gives rise to a new kind of accident—the collision of the car, the derailment of the train—and the acceleration of knowledge-production is no different: here arises an epistemological explosion, where information proliferates but understanding collapses, what in 2004 he named ‘La bombe informatique’ (the ‘Information Bomb’).
It seems therefore that to understand the world, one must remain ignorant of it – ignorant from it? Edouard Glissant called this ‘the right to opacity’, the right to resist assimilation into the “false clarity of universal models.”4 For Glissant, one does not “have to ‘understand’ anyone, individual, community, people [...] in order to agree to live with them, to build with them, to take risks with them” – for Rosa, this program is given the name ‘resonance’: “...a way of relating to some other, who or which is important for us, but does not speak in the same tone, voice or frequency.” Resonance is a framework for opposing the alienation inherent within capitalist modes of production, of resisting the cultural orientations of dynamic stabilization.
J wants to call this a program of ‘peripherence’: to provide ‘frames of peripherence’; to identify the ‘peripherent’ object of language; to produce reams and reams of ‘periphera’. If the referent is the “thing” denoted (or instrumentalised) by the sign, the ‘peripherent’ is that which manages to evade it – what Lecercle might call ‘the remainder’ – and which might make possible a cultural orientation of ‘everyday destabilization’. For postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha, “the universal is not a fundamental assumption, it's an interrogation and a repetition [...] things become universal because we ask these questions again and again at different times.” There is, as Glissant writes, a ‘false clarity’ to universalism, but how then but how then might we cultivate a relationship with the world that neither demands its immediate transparency nor settles for the fragmented ‘realism’ of collected facts? Perhaps all that is worth keeping are the questions which ‘resonate’ – questions of chance and accidents, of ‘the good life’, of nature, of space and speed, of perspective?
This article was written for a monthly column – The Remainder – in the Sticky Fingers monthly mailout.