I found a word in the dictionary that I was not looking for: “Catachresis” (gr.
katáchrēsis
).
I'm at a loss for etymologies, so I decided to pull the strings and consult Chantraine's dictionary.
While I was reviewing its pages, other words assailed me in which I was stopping.
Call me eccentric, but how exciting it is when other routes open up in the process of what you're looking for.
The unexpected!
This must also be part of the wonder that Aristotle speaks of as the origin of knowledge.
They stay there like ports to dock at when the time is right, like an X on a map.
Sometimes the unexpected is just what you were looking for and other times what you found is not "useful" for what you have in hand, but they can take away the dance!
In Volume IV, page 1275, I found the term together with a reference to Cicero in
The Orator
in which Aristotle is quoted.
And I turn to Cicero:
catachresis
is the "abusive use" of a word with a meaning close to the one we want to use but which is not the same "either out of necessity, or out of delight, or because it is convenient".
And so these reflections were tied to a text he was working on.
More specifically this one you are reading.
I wanted to write about impoverishment, processes that we have stopped giving importance to because we want results now, now, as soon as possible, "if I don't remember, I look it up on the internet to take less time" and I see that I am going slowly... or am I going slowly?
Are we facing an "abusive use" of the word slowness?
Would Aristotle accuse me of catachresis?
The same could be said of slowness as David Lowenthal said of the past in
The Past Is a Strange Country
: that it is everywhere, or at least lately on everyone's lips.
Do we lack slowness in times of accelerationism?
Do a lot of things (
multitask
) is contrary to slowness?
What slowness exactly are we missing?
Is slowness an experience of time?
Lowenthal's book deals with the experience of time in modernity and focuses on a figure that surely sounds familiar to you from the past of opinion columns: nostalgia.
This is understood, since it was thus coined by Johannes Hofer, as the pain that emerges at the idea of an impossible return to a place that is perceived in the form of a lack.
If the past is "a strange country" it is not so much because "we miss it" but because even if we had the HG Wells machine and went back there, it is we who do not fit in that place: we have become "strangers".
You see what things: nostalgia does not have to do basically with a feeling for what I have lost, but with what I am no longer.
Our way of thinking, of living,
to reason, to look is another.
And so we miss the slowness.
It is what we lack.
Like the past for Lowenthal, slowness is our strange country that we associate with a slowing down of the rhythms that drag us along.
And we sigh for her and we make the firm resolution to recover her.
Now, can we be just as "slow" as before?
Is everything as easy as going slow?
Is the subjectivity of the 21st century the same as that of the 20th or is it “strange” to its forms?
Is speed an "evil" of our time?
Have we not “idealized” slowness and used it as a catachresis “out of necessity, delight, or because it is convenient”?
Are we unknowingly nostalgic for “slowness”?
And this is my thesis: we have turned “slowness” into a catachresis of going slowly, that is, of doing the same thing but “at a slower speed”,
as if the "evils" of our time were just a matter of speed.
The problem is, rather, the inertia of a way of doing things that ignores processes.
We cannot bring that "slowness" as we cannot return to the "past".
A few days ago, Sergio del Molino asked a question: "What if we discover that we don't know how to live in peace?"
His reflection focused on a substantial blind spot.
Supporters of slowness or champions of haste, both move at the extremes of the same preconception: that everything depends on the choice of a subject who can stand before a hyper-accelerated system, who chooses to enjoy the frenzy because "life is this” or who complains bitterly about not being able to stop because he lacks courage, will or money.
But if we don't “know” how to live calmly, there may be other factors.
To live in times of exacerbated materialism, it is still curious how we forget our organic dimension, which only appears when our teeth hurt, but when it comes to our way of thinking it makes the idea of a disembodied soul transparent.
We are beings of process, change and constant becoming, who are who and how we are because of the reality of the world that we experience, because of the experiences we incorporate, because of our interactions with other people, because of the devices we handle and even because of the objects we use.
It is not that we make the path by walking, as Machado writes, but rather that walking the path makes us, in the same way that the way in which we travel it configures us.
Disconnecting electronic devices or moving away from screens doesn't do much good: we carry the inertia of screens inside.
Indeed, if we do not know how to live calmly, if it is so difficult for us, if doing so requires an effort against the context or against ourselves, it is not only a matter of will, but also because our mental processes have changed.
Just as we are what we eat, we are what we know.
To know (
sapere
in Latin) is similar to “taste”: to know you have to assimilate so that there is an integration of what is known in what one is.
"And if we discover that we don't know how to live calmly?"
And this is the question: What if calm, as much as we like it, is indigestible to us because we don't know how to "process" it, because "we don't think the same anymore"?
Therefore, if we want something similar to slowness, we will have to think in other terms that do not reduce it to a question of speed, but of how we live in the things we do and how they inhabit us.
To build another slowness in accordance with our times, it is not enough to do fewer things or more slowly, but to be aware of our obsession with the rapid achievement of results, ignoring the importance of courage in the processes, after all, knowledge loses what has flavor when it becomes the simple and quick collection of completed tasks and at hand.
Slowness is not simply the opposite of acceleration, nor is it something “given” that is achieved by stopping doing, but rather a qualitative —and not quantitative— experience related to the way of doing within a process.
We are so obsessed with obtaining quick results that we despise the journey, as if an athlete were such only to reach the finish line.
However, we are not who we are because we “suddenly” achieve our goals,
but for all the steps we have taken to achieve it.
Whitehead argued that only in the process do meaning and relevance appear.
Perhaps that is why the problem lies not so much in going in a hurry, but in not perceiving other meanings that differ from the objectives that we set for ourselves as a starting point.
Ana Carrasco Conde
is a philosophy professor at the Complutense University.
Her latest book is
Say Evil
(Galaxia Gutenberg).
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