Parkins

Time & Society
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Out of Time: Fast Subjects and Slow Living

Wendy Parkins
Time Society 2004; 13; 363
DOI: 10.1177/0961463X04045662
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Out of Time
Fast subjects and slow living
Wendy Parkins
ABSTRACT. Slow living involves the conscious negotiation of the

different temporalities which make up our everyday lives, deriving
from a commitment to occupy time more attentively. This article
considers the significance of time in practices of slow living and the
imbrication of time and speed in notions of ‘slowness’ where slow-
ness is constructed as a deliberate subversion of the dominance of
speed. By purposely adopting slowness, subjects seek to generate
alternative practices of work and leisure, family and sociality. I will
focus on the Slow Food movement as a significant manifestation of
both the desire for and the implementation of slow living through a
reconceptualization of time in everyday life. KEY WORDS • every-
day life • Slow Food • slowness • temporality
Introduction
In a recent television advertisement for a hi-tech refrigerator which incorporates

a computer screen, a group of elegantly dressed young people are (somewhat
inexplicably) sipping cocktails grouped around the fridge. On the fridge’s
screen is the image of an absent friend who announces to the group: ‘Sorry, I
haven’t got time to talk right now.’ While the advertisement seems to promise a
sophisticated sociality based on technology, it illustrates (apparently unwitting-
ly) the problem of finding time, despite the invention of internet refrigerators.
As Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2001) notes in his book Tyranny of the Moment:
‘The density of time increases. The gaps are being filled . . . It has become
easier for a lot of people to identify with Jean-Paul Sartre, about whom it has
been said that he habitually wore mocassins to save the time he would otherwise
have used tying his shoelaces’ (p. 21).
Time & Society copyright © 2004 SAGE (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
VOL. 13 No. 2/3 (2004), pp. 363–382 0961-463X DOI: 10.1177/0961463X04045662
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364 TIME & SOCIETY 13(2/3)
If increasing pressure on time usage is a common experience, then so too is

the desire for more time, specifically more free time. Yet empirical research on
time and work has shown that respondents ‘did not just want to have “more free
time” but rather “enough time for meaningful things”’ (Reisch, 2001: 374; see
also Nowotny, 1994: 108–9).
Slow living is one response – or, rather, a set or responses in various mani-
festations – to this desire for ‘time for meaningful things’. It is not a slow-
motion version of postmodern life; nor does it offer a parallel temporality for
slow subjects to inhabit in isolation from the rest of the culture. Slow living
involves the conscious negotiation of the different temporalities which make up
our everyday lives, deriving from a commitment to occupy time more atten-
tively. Implicit in the practices of slow living is a particular conception of time
in which ‘having time’ for something means investing it with significance
through attention and deliberation. To live slowly in this sense, then, means
engaging in ‘mindful’ rather than ‘mindless’ practices which make us consider
the pleasure or at least the purpose of each task to which we give our time. Some
of the most obvious practices associated with slow living would include
cooking and sharing a meal instead of buying fast food; growing fruits and
vegetables rather than buying them from supermarkets; and cycling or walking
instead of driving. Mindful use of time through ‘slow’ practices such as these
construct ‘slow subjects’ who invest the everyday with meaning and value as
they seek to differentiate themselves from the dominant culture of speed.
To live slowly, to carry out our practices of everyday life at a slower pace,
would mean taking more time to complete tasks, and hence less would be done
in a day, creating the effect of slowing time as well as movement. (Of course,
this depends on how we might quantify what we ‘do’ in a day, something else
that a slow subject might want to re-evaluate). In this article I will consider the
significance of time in practices of slow living and the implication of time and
speed in notions of ‘slowness’ where slowness is constructed as a deliberate
subversion of the dominance of speed. By purposely adopting slowness, sub-
jects seek to generate alternative practices of work and leisure, family and
sociality. I will focus on the Slow Food movement as a significant manifestation
of both the desire for and the implementation of slow living through a recon-
ceptualization of time in everyday life, and my attention will be on the textual
articulation of slowness in this movement, rather than practical or empirically-
observed examples of slow living. That is, my emphasis will be on the evolving
discourse of slow living as developed and advocated by the Slow Food move-
ment through their many publications, especially the journal Slow.

PARKINS : FAST SUBJECTS AND SLOW LIVING 365
Resisting the Culture of Speed
Living slowly as a form of rejecting the cultural orthodoxy of speed is not a

recent phenomenon. Speed and slowness have in fact always coexisted in
modernity, although the meanings and values attached to them have shifted. As
new technologies emerged which speeded up certain processes – of production,
communication and transportation – so earlier forms of these processes came to
be seen as slow, or associated with the past. But alongside celebrations of speed
as a triumph of human power and ingenuity, slowness also begins to be seen as
a positive quality by writers and commentators from the end of the eighteenth
century who sought to critique their culture and its mechanistic, instrumental
values. Perhaps the best example of this was the impact of railway travel in the
nineteenth century, which became a symbol both of the wonders of technology
and the potential destruction and de-humanization it could bring. John Ruskin
wrote that ‘no one would travel in that manner [by train] who could help it . . . It
transmutes a man from a traveller into a living parcel’ (Schivelbusch, 1986:
121). In contrast to the railway, earlier forms of transport, like walking or horse-
riding, became romanticized and aestheticized. As John Urry (2000) notes: ‘The
diversity of modes of transport increasingly enabled people to compare and con-
trast different forms of mobility’ (p. 54) and to choose slowness to gain a
heightened aesthetic or sensory experience. Slowness is relational to speed: As
the railway was surpassed by the car and then the aeroplane, the slowness of rail
travel became a virtue. Nowadays, rail travel is often offered as ‘a contempla-
tive, quiet alternative to the hectic bustling of air travelling and the frustration of
driving’ (Eriksen, 2001: 54). So while acceleration became a defining experi-
ence of modernization, the experience and value of slowness was historically
derived from, and articulated through, notions of speed (in time and movement);
speed created slowness. As Helga Nowotny (1994) puts it: ‘Only against the
background of speed can slowness be determined and learnt’ (pp. 14–15). Just
as speed in movement could represent new forms of experience and identity –
the fast subject – so too could slow, or slower, movement be articulated with a
form of subjectivity which sought to resist the relentless spread of speed in
modern life.
Despite this resignification of slowness as a life-enhancing quality, the appeal
of speed has remained a dominant aspect of contemporary culture, seeping from
the domain of work into other aspects of life. It is seen in everything from our
desire for faster download times from the internet to the ‘best practice’ in the
business domain where, to quote the title of a recent best-selling business advice
book, It’s Not the Big that Eat the Small . . . But the Fast that Eat the Slow (sub-
titled How to Use Speed as a Competitive Tool in Business; Jennings and
Haughton, 2001). Speed is associated with decisiveness, slowness with weak-
ness, prevarication; a ‘slow thinker’ sounds too much like a ‘slow learner’.

Closely linked with the high value placed on speed in transport and com-
munication in modernity was the valuing of time-management and punctuality.
As early as 1912, the German historian Karl Lamprecht noted a new attention to
time, as evidenced by a significant rise in the production and importation of
pocket watches, as well as an instrumental attention to short intervals of time
deriving from forms of communication, such as timed telephone calls, which
was both a response to, and a cause of, a heightened sense of punctuality (Kern,
1983: 110–11). When the valuing of time-management and punctuality is
placed in the context of an ever-accelerating culture, the result is not only an
increase in anxiety and impatience but also the encroachment of work culture
onto the private sphere. Given technology such as mobile phones, pagers and
laptop computers, a worker is now technically always ‘available’ (i.e. able to be
contacted by the office or client). Free time – ‘a not-work time that exists only
in relation to the time of markets and employment’ (Adam, 1995: 96) – may
refer to a time when one is not physically in a work space but the potential for
one’s time to be invaded by work is almost limitless. As Eriksen (2001) puts it:
‘When fast and slow time meet, fast time wins’ (p. 150).
Despite the insidious spread of both speed and work culture, however, not
everyone experiences the same acceleration of temporality in late modernity.
The relationship between social inequalities and temporal inequalities is an
important one to explore in an analysis of slow living, in order to consider the
difference between choosing to live slowly – choosing nonsynchronicity, to
use Ernst Bloch’s term1 – and having slowness thrust upon one, through being
physically or economically unable to keep up with the speed of global culture
(see Nowotny, 1994). As Simon Gottschalk (1999) has argued, speed ‘signifi-
cantly distorts our engagement with and experience of those others who/which
cannot follow, who/which dare delay or resist speed’s compelling momentum,
or who/which frustrate our new (and regressive) sense of entitlement for
absolute immediacy’ (p. 315). The unemployed, children, the elderly and
women at home comprise a significant section of the population who are outside
‘fast time’ for much of the time and may hence be overlooked by the ‘fast’. The
result of such divisions, according to Nowotny, is that ‘society runs the risk of
moving at two speeds’ (p. 32) which may not only perpetuate social inequities
but exacerbate them.
The disparate time cultures which exist within global culture raise questions
about whether slow time as a positive quality of life can only ever be envisaged
as a private option for the privileged. As Jenny Shaw (2001) notes, while there
seems to be a growing tendency to equate the good life with the slow life, not
everyone wants to live slowly. Young people, for instance, often seek out places
to live, work and socialize where the pace is faster, assuming a link between
speed, vitality and excitement (pp. 120, 122). In a mass observation study in
which links between pace, place and quality of life were analysed, Shaw found

that ‘more women than men complained about the pace of life being too fast’
(p. 132) but, as Karen Davies (2001) has argued, women’s desire for a slower
life is often thwarted by the demands made on their time across different
domains of life – work, family, community – deriving from traditional gender
identities in which women bear more responsibility for care (p. 136). The
private sphere may offer women fewer opportunities to ‘slow down’ or take
‘time out’ because, as Davies puts it, it is the sphere where women are spatially
close to those they are responsible for (pp. 144–5). And do the activities of the
private sphere, for instance the care of children, count as fast or slow?
Characterizations of private life as ‘slow’ may derive from the fact that family
time is, as Shaw (2001) argues, still associated with a notion of more ‘natural’ or
‘pre-industrial’ time: ‘Like pre-industrial time, family time is widely believed to
be qualitatively different to work time . . . [it] is essentially anti-linear and
opposed to work time, which is linear and progressive’ (p. 12).2
Work, family and gender are significant factors in the constitution and per-
petuation of temporal disparities and inequities in contemporary culture which
problematize any simplistic notion of implementing ‘slower’ living across the
board, or a desire for ‘slower’ living being a universal one. While people may
frame their desires to live differently in temporal terms, endowing time itself
with a variety of significations to represent these desires, a politics of temporal-
ity needs to be based on the recognition of the multiplicity and unevennesses of
social time. Considering the relation between social and temporal inequities,
Nowotny (1994) frames the issue this way:
The small temporal difference, which becomes ever larger in its social reper-
cussions, driven forward by international economic and technological competi-
tion, leads to the danger that the juxtaposition of courses of time and different
speeds results in social divisions, and that large sections of the population are
temporally left behind. How much temporal drifting apart a society can bear, and
whether acceleration can be made controllable, consciously slowed down or
delayed, is an open question . . . (p. 42, emphasis added)
It is not, then, that advocates of slow living wish to impose slowness on

everyone, or turn back the clock, but rather they propose that an alternative to
speed be made possible, thinkable, do-able; that spaces for slowness be allowed,
to employ a spatial rather than temporal metaphor, in both personal and public
domains. The Victorian custom of the Sabbath in which social prescription
compelled people to do nothing, except sober religious reflection, is not a proto-
type for slow(er) living in the twenty-first century. As Eriksen (2001) contends,
there is a need to ‘re-learn to value a certain form of time’ (p. viii) because of the
possibilities for life-enhancement, social engagement and political participation
that slow time can create. As Christiane Muller-Wichman puts it: ‘We need time
for everyday culture. We need time for the chance to be a public person. And we

need time for leisure. We do not need leisure time instead of a job, instead of a
family, instead of politics. We need it as surplus time’ (in Nowotny, 1994: 102).
An Ethics of Time
Could deceleration to a different temporality improve the quality of (work and

private) life and the equity of society, prevent the slow being eaten by the fast?
Is there an ethics of time? Some might argue that contemporary ideas about
slow living could be considered a postmodern extension of ‘Happiness
Minutes’: A reconfiguring of time for the purpose of maximizing productivity
within a capitalist paradigm. In their 1916 book Fatigue Study, the Taylorists
Frank and Lilian Gilbreth proposed the importance of ‘Happiness Minutes’ for
workers: ‘Recognising that efficiency also required breaks from the work
routine, they proposed that “the good in your life consists of the quantity of
“Happiness Minutes” that you have created or caused”’(Kern, 1983: 117).3 But
slow living at its best envisages more than just a redistribution of time and an
increase in leisure. It points towards an alternative understanding of time itself,
similar to Barbara Adam’s (1995) ‘temporal’ form of time. This form of time is
‘neither finite nor usable as a quantitative measure’ where
the future is becoming in a way that can never be a mere repetition or rearrange-
ment of what has been. Here, time is created in ceaseless emergence; it is consti-
tutive. While this time-generating capacity is integral to all social existence, it
seems that the finite resource, the quantity which is running out, is a phenomenon
that belongs exclusively to societies that have created an objective machine time
and relate to their creation as being time per se. As such, clock time forms an
integral part of contemporary Western societies’ time-consciousness. (p. 52)
In positing ‘temporal’ time as an alternative to machine time, Adam is propos-

ing a more complex and nuanced understanding of time, advocating a need to
‘de-alienate’ time to see it as embodied and embedded in all our social practices
and to better understand the ‘multiple time dimensions of our lives’ (p. 54). To
do so, Adam argues ‘is no mere theoretical, academic exercise; rather, it is a
strategy for living’ (p. 54).
An ethics of time in which there exists the possibility to reconcile the desire
for more time for oneself with more time for others may be enacted through
practices of self-artistry and micropolitics which William Connolly (1999)
proposes as ethical strategies in a world where ‘the ethical dimension of politi-
cal life is both indispensable and fragile’ (p. 187). Drawing on Nietzsche and
Foucault, Connolly argues that arts of the self do not aim at ‘creating a self-
indulgent self’ (p. 145) or ‘simply expressing what you already are’ (p. 146):
‘Such artistry, rather, involves the selective desanctification of elements within

your own identity. . . The most admirable arts of the self cultivate the capacity
for critical responsiveness in a world in which the politics of becoming periodi-
cally poses surprises to the self-identifications of established constituencies’
(p. 146, emphasis in original).
Understood in this sense, the desire for self-time may be seen as part of this
process of cultivating the capacity for critical responsiveness which Connolly
seeks; it is time sought for (the pleasures of) reflection and restoration. Thinking
of specific practices of slow living in this context, then, raises ‘new possibilities
of being’ as Connolly puts it (p. 148). Arts of the (slow) self are means by which
people cultivate a subjectivity based on the affirmation of values such as atten-
tiveness and deliberation as pleasures, not duties. They are also opportunities
for shifts in broader articulations of social organization, public culture and
issues of justice and equity, because such slow arts of the self are always
situated and practised within social networks and time cultures. In short, ‘self-
artistry affects the ethical sensibility of individuals in their relations to others’
(p. 149).
So if an ethics of time may be bound up with practices of self-artistry, the
micropolitical dimension of these practices can lead to a wider recognition
and application of such practices.4 Like the car-free days in some cities, larger
movements can be generated which seek to ‘protect’ rather than impose slow-
ness as a consequence of the heightened awareness such campaigns, derived
from individual practices, promote. As Eriksen (2001) argues:
Slowness needs protection . . . It needs all the public support, social benefits,
subsidies and quotas it can get. Speed manages perfectly well on its own, there is
nothing more competitive than speed. Depending on one’s personal and pro-
fessional situation, one may on an individual level protect slowness in different
ways; but it must be chosen consciously in order not to be eaten alive by speed.
(p. 156)
This desire to re-learn how to value or cultivate a certain sense of time is at the
heart of movements which, since the late 1980s, have emerged to promote slow
living as a way to restore meaning, authenticity, security or identity to time-
deprived subjects. In Austria, there is a Society for the Deceleration of Time,
which urges the value of deceleration in order to foster a more contemplative
approach to life and to challenge the way speed has become the yardstick to
measure the value of all our activities. Members are urged to prolong the time
taken to perform an activity ‘whenever it makes sense to do so’. In October
2003, the ‘Take Back Your Time Day’ campaign was launched in the US, with
plans to make it an annual event. Originating in Seattle, and deriving from the
simplicity movement, ‘Take Back Your Time Day’ was intended to highlight
the increasing sense of ‘time-poverty’ and ‘over-scheduling’ many Americans
experience. Seeking to mobilize both individual actions (such as taking the day

off work) and sponsoring public events in many states (e.g. poetry readings,
street theatre, yoga workshops), the ‘Take Back Your Time’ movement ulti-
mately aims to lobby for increased vacation leave and a shorter working week
(Denn, 2003).
Probably the largest movement devoted to slow, time-full living, however, is
the Slow Food movement, based in Italy. Formed in 1986 by a small group of
leftists led by Carlo Petrini in the market town of Bra, Piemonte, Slow Food was
originally known as Arcigola.5 Among its first activities was the founding of the
now well-known Italian wine guide, the Gambero Rosso, and the opening of the
Osteria del Boccondivino, which Petrini (2001a) describes as ‘a novel attempt
to combine the atmosphere of a good restaurant with locally inspired cuisine,
quality wines, and modest prices’ (p. 5) and which remains at the heart of the
Slow Food headquarters in Bra. The fostering and preservation of local osterie
and trattorie, which traditionally serve local dishes at widely-accessible prices,
was an important part of Slow Food’s mission to strengthen the diversity of
regional cuisines. As Miele and Murdoch (2003) have argued: ‘Because, in the
Italian context, traditional eateries retain a close connection to local food pro-
duction systems, Slow Food argued that their protection required the general
promotion of local food cultures’ (p. 32).
But it was in 1989 that the movement was re-named Slow Food and became a
fully fledged international movement in response to the McDonald’s plans to
open a restaurant in Rome at the foot of the Spanish Steps. The movement was
officially launched with delegates from 15 countries at a meeting in Paris in
December 1989, where the Slow Food manifesto was endorsed and the move-
ment’s symbol, the snail, was unveiled. Today, Slow Food has over 78,000
members in 85 countries around the world; outside Italy, areas of current growth
for Slow Food are Japan, Australia and the US (which now has over 10,000
members). The main activities of Slow Food are a network of Presidia and
awards which financially support farmers and artisans around the world in
preserving and maintaining traditional foods; a developing programme of taste
education for schoolchildren; a biennial food fair in Turin, the Salone del Gusto,
said to be the world’s largest; and a publishing house which issues the quarterly
magazine, food and wine guides and other publications, as well as maintaining a
popular website. On a local level, Slow Food members meet in chapters known
as convivia, for a range of food-centred activities (preparation, consumption,
education) aimed at encouraging local and traditional foods and are often
involved in local projects such as supporting/starting growers’ markets and
school gardens. The head office in Bra now employs over 100 people and in
2004 the Slow Food university of gastronomy opened near Bra in magnificent
premises.

Slow Food: ‘Più Tempo a Tavola’ (More Time around the Table)
While the Slow Food movement has grown and diversified considerably since
the 1980s, it has always articulated a discourse of slowness as a critical response
to global postmodern culture through its many publications and pronounce-
ments. In the remainder of this article I will focus on this discourse of slowness
in the texts of Slow Food. In one of the early issues of the journal Slow, Folco
Portinari (1997) wrote: ‘There can be no slow-food without slow-life, meaning
that we cannot influence food culture without changing our culture as a whole
. . . Once we tackle the problem from this perspective, we realise that what we
are faced with is not a “taste” problem, but a “political” one’ (p. 23).
The ‘slow’ in Slow Food does not have a singular meaning but is an over-
determined signifier of value which is constantly interrogated and re-signified
within the movement. While this diverse and evolving discourse of slowness
within Slow Food makes it difficult to offer a definitive analysis of the efficacy
of a politics of temporality it also makes it a promising case study for the possi-
bilities for cultivating more time-enriched forms of everyday life.
The very name of the movement, of course, depends for its meaning on the
term ‘fast food’ to symbolize a way of life Slow Food opposes, and, according
to Silvio Barbero (Executive Director of Slow Food Italy) (2003), relies on the
currency of the term ‘fast food’, especially in the English-speaking world, to
help publicize the movement. The associations between fast food and the
negative effects of globalization are now so firmly linked that the term
‘McDonaldization’ has become a pejorative term and McDonald’s restaurants
are boarded up before summit meetings begin in major cities (see Ritzer (2002:
19–20), although he also argues there are some positive changes which have
resulted from the process of McDonaldization). It is no accident that
McDonald’s has become such a potent symbol for anti-globalization cam-
paigns, as some startling statistics indicate. For example, every month more
than 90 percent of children in the US eat at McDonald’s (Schlosser, 2001: 262);
in Brazil, McDonald’s is the nation’s largest private employer (p. 230); and in
France, McDonald’s is the largest purchaser of agricultural commodities
(p. 244). The ‘slow’ in Slow Food, then, signifies firstly an opposition to speed,
homogeneity, corporate greed and globalization associated with fast food, but it
also tries to convey positive values associated with pleasure, taste, authenticity,
connectedness, tranquillity and community.
At its inception, the Slow Food movement linked slowness with pleasure,
and therefore speed with the absence of pleasure. Initially launched as the
International Movement for the Defense of and the Right to Pleasure in Paris on
9 November 1989, Slow Food adopted a manifesto endorsed by delegates from
15 countries which defined the movement against ‘Fast Life’ in which speed
enslaves and infects humanity, and endangers the natural environment. The

manifesto, however, is a genre with a particular history, as both a product of and

a critical response to modernity. As Janet Lyon (1999) has argued, the mani-
festo was the genre of choice for political and aesthetic movements across the
spectrum, whether celebrating or denouncing the modern: From the French
Revolution to the suffragettes to the Futurists, the manifesto was the means by
which movements articulated their own identity by rhetorical denunciation of
their enemies. This task required a binarist conception of the world, in which the
manifesto writers positioned themselves as the vanguard of truth, justice, or art
against the might of the powerful, the ignorance of the many, or the compla-
cency of the establishment (pp. 2–3, 24). The Slow Food manifesto begins thus:
‘Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial
civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model. We are
enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast
Life.’
The pervasiveness of speed is like a virus, infecting the innermost recesses of
our lives: Our habits, our homes, our food, and hence even our bodies. Like a
viral epidemic, it spreads through the mass of the population, threatening the
human species itself with extinction. Such a condemnation of speed as the
product of the machine age is more usually associated with a critique of
modernity offered by conservatives who lament a lost organic community.6
What is unusual about this view in the case of Slow Food is that it was a move-
ment conceived and founded by a distinctly leftist coterie which marked it from
the outset as an unusual amalgam of pleasure and politics, launched by a mani-
festo couched in the language of guerrilla-gastronomes.7 Rather than a conserv-
ative yearning to return to the good old days of real food and conviviality, it was
an attempt to re-brand slow/traditional/local food as the true revolution, and
fast/faddish/global food as the passé, the outmoded, the failed. This view of fast
food was more recently re-stated by Alberto Capatti (2001) in a Slow editorial:
Fast food is foundering under its own weight, like a ship in shallow water, and
competition is hammering at its rusty bulkheads in a new way of interpreting and
cooking time. Old recipes are being recovered . . . The world of eating is moving
backwards: The past lies ahead and modern food fads have been left behind. (p. 6)
Such a re-invention, an inversion even, of temporality – where the ‘new’ is

dying and the old is re-born – allows Slow Food to present itself in the tradition
of a leftist vanguard as the authentic radicals, offering ‘true progress’ and
liberation through the Slow Food revolution which re-constructs temporality as
well as food. Fast food – a rusting hulk on the shores of history – is now ‘the old
fast food’ while slow food offers a new way of ‘interpreting and cooking time’
(Capatti, 1996: 6). Such a strategy has been effective in invigorating and inspir-
ing a movement, and perhaps accounts in part for its broader appeal than a
simply gastronomic association could inspire, as evidenced by the recent

growth of Slow Food membership and profile in countries such as the US and
Australia, where an interest in food culture has a ‘hipness’ (i.e. a ‘nowness’, a
newness) that traditional European cuisine alone would not foster.8
The binary of slow/fast in the launching manifesto of Slow Food constructs a
homonym of associated values in which fast life lines up with homogeneity,
infection and enslavement while slowness is associated with health, liberation
and taste. Given this Manichean vision, only the opposite of speed and ‘Fast
Life’, that is, slowness, can provide hope for a ‘better future’: ‘To be worthy of
the name, Homo Sapiens should rid himself [sic] of speed’ the manifesto
declaims, ‘a firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose
the universal folly of Fast Life . . . Our defense should begin at the table with
Slow Food’ (emphasis in original). The call to action here – a typical feature of
the manifesto genre (Lyon, 1999: 15) – is a call to the table rather than the
barricades, to sit down for slowness, rather than rush around for speed, and to
spend more time at the table – più tempo a tavola – as a sponsor’s slogan on the
website urges. In place of Fast Life, Slow Food offers the pleasures of the table:
Taste, flavours, regionalism, locatedness, but also ‘international exchange’. To
make this alternative future of slowness a possibility, an ‘international move-
ment’ is needed but, given that the multitude has already been seduced and
enslaved by speed, this becomes a somewhat problematic undertaking. By
positing the (implied) inviolate individual (able to resist the virus of speed)
against the ‘contagion of the multitude’, and the pleasures of the (private?) table
against the ‘universal folly of Fast Life’, the manifesto obscures how the inter-
subjectivity of Slow Food may be figured positively. If the enemy is a clear and
easy target – Fast Life, fast food – then the future constituency of Slow Food
remains ‘a provisional community whose power is located in a potentially infi-
nite constituency’ (Lyon, 1999: 26).
It could be argued that the manifesto is by its nature not only a genre lacking
in rhetorical subtlety but also anti-democratic, denouncing the status quo from
an implied position of truth/superiority to those who need to be exposed or
enlightened; it is not a dialogue or an exchange among equals. The vanguard
has always had an uneasy relationship with the cohort it seeks to inspire to
revolution. Sometimes, in movements like Vorticism or Futurism, the rhetorical
strategies of the manifesto genre neatly matched the anti-democratic orientation
or incipient fascism of the movements themselves; in other cases (like socialists
and suffragettes), the fit between the desire for social inclusion or equity and the
genre was not apparent. In the case of Slow Food, the adoption of the manifesto
form brought with it an ambiguous and ambivalent generic history. The leftist
discourse in which its founders were steeped may well account for the repeated
use of this form (there are a number of Slow Food manifestoes on a range of
topics, from hospitality and rest, to biotechnologies and raw-milk cheeses). The
problematic associations between slowness and the realm of the individual and

the private which are constructed here, however, raise from the outset the
question of how the pleasures of slowness are to be made available equitably,
through an international movement itself opposed to globalization. More
recently, criticism from within the movement of the potential contradiction
between the founding manifesto’s disdain for the ‘multitude’ and the need to
mobilize a larger membership base (Sonnenfeld, in Petrini, 2001a: xiv) have
been countered by Petrini’s insistence on the paradoxes of slow culture: It
‘creates an elite without excluding anyone’, just as it is heterogeneous but
cohesive, and defends tradition from a multicultural perspective (p. 19).
While the founding manifesto offers only a broadbrush defence of slowness,
‘In Praise of Slowness’, which appears in the manifesto section on the Slow
Food website (www.slowfood.com), expands further on the values and qualities
of slowness sought by the movement. This manifesto is a condensed version of
the editorial by Carlo Petrini (1996: 7–8) which appeared in the first issue of
Slow. As its title implies, it is more a meditation on slowness, which focuses on
the snail, the symbol of the Slow Food movement and the subject of seven
articles in the first issue of Slow, through drawing on a seventeenth-century
book devoted to snails. The snail, being ‘of slow motion . . . educate[s] us that
being fast makes man [sic] inconsiderate and foolish’. The snail is not only an
embodiment of slowness, in the sense of an absence of haste, but of the more
abstract qualities of slowness, or slow subjectivity, which are here enumerated
as ‘prudence and solemnity, the wit of the philosopher and the moderation of
the authoritative governor’. These anthropomorphic qualities of ‘a creature so
unaffected by the temptations of the modern world’ seem more those of the
ascetic than the pleasure-seeker but, the editorial maintains, the snail offers a
counter to ‘those who are too impatient to feel and taste, too greedy to remem-
ber what they had just devoured’. So it is a considered form of material pleasure
(especially through consumption) which slowness values and sees represented
in the snail. Against the snail’s considered engagement and consumption is con-
trasted the patterns of consumption associated with ‘fast food restaurants’ which
reduce ‘food to consumption . . . taste to hamburger . . . thought to meatball’. As
Jeremy MacClancy (1992) has argued, fast food has the capacity to ‘erase
differences between “this place” and “that” and between “now” and “then”’
(p. 193) and it is precisely its erasure of differences of place and temporality that
Slow Food takes issue with, not just with its homogenization of food and
flavours. If to eat fast food is in effect to ingest globalization, then the snail, by
contrast, consumes the world but does not become the world; mindful consump-
tion manages to preserve the boundaries amicably between the two, it seems.
It is not, however, only the pace with which the snail engages with the world,
or its consumption habits, which makes it a fitting symbol for the Slow Food
movement; it is also its ‘prehistoric’ appearance which enables the snail to
express the ‘desire to reverse the passing of time’, to represent an alternative to

the endless rush into the future which the obsession with speed activates. The
snail is an embodiment of ‘glacial time’ (Urry, 2000: 157–9), a reminder of
different temporalities which coexist alongside fast food restaurants, and so a
reminder also, as the manifesto expresses it, of the ‘contradiction’ between
temporalities which Slow Food seeks to address and reconcile. While this mani-
festo reiterates the negative consequences of speed expressed in the founding
manifesto, it also tentatively begins to expand on the possibilities of what this
‘new way of life’ represented by slowness might entail and the snail is now the
ubiquitous symbol of Slow Food, appearing on every publication, letterhead and
webpage of the movement, as well as Slow Food merchandise.
The snail, while semiotically rich, is not really a source of practical advice on
slow living, which is addressed more directly in subsequent editorials in praise
of rest and hospitality, now also located in the manifesto section of the Slow
Food website, signalling their continuing relevance as an articulation of the
values of the movement. In Capatti’s editorial (1996: 5–7), rest is carefully
distinguished from laziness and boredom:
Our praise of rest is not intended for the lazy or for sleepyheads, for the weary or
neurotic. They simply would not appreciate it. Instead we are aiming at those who
wish to listen to the rhythm of their own lives, and possibly adjust it. Such is the
second point of the Slow programme, which advises you to go slowly (No. 1),
take your time, have a break (No. 2) and find a friend who can provide food and
hospitality (No. 3). (p. 5)
The struggle between ‘the corrupt and the sanctified’ Lyon identified in the
binarist logic of the manifesto is expressed here as the difference between the
lazy (those who cannot grasp the ideals of slowness) and the slow (those who
seek to practise them). In a familiar rhetorical manoeuvre, Capatti first raises the
objections of the lazy/unenlightened in order to rebut them: ‘You Slow people,
you are trying to live on another planet, we are often told. You Slow people, you
have shaped an imaginary shell for yourselves so that you can withdraw into it
whenever necessary, retreating into the meanders of Utopia. Now this may well
be true’ (p. 5).
Furthermore, Capatti concedes that ‘lying on a sofa . . . is not enough to extri-
cate oneself from this maze of contradictions’ which any attempt to live slowly
may create: ‘Instead, we should reflect on the principles underlying our sup-
posedly utopian world’ (p. 5, emphasis added). So what may look like a with-
drawal from the world is in fact ‘a certain degree of detachment’, as Capatti puts
it, a stepping back from the fast world rather like Eriksen’s notion of ‘cottage
time’ (2001: 157) as a temporary respite from speed in order to evaluate and
re-consider the temporal practices of everyday life.

The Reflection of Slowness
What begins to emerge, then, alongside the Manichean logic which divides the
world into the lazy, unenlightened and (paradoxically) fast, and the restful, con-
templative and slow, is an emphasis on reflection and deliberation as the key to
slowness. The more time one has available to think, reflect, and evaluate, the
greater the possibility for either more fully committing to one’s tasks or, more
likely, changing one’s practices, habits and ideas. The repetition of words like
‘careful’, ‘reflective’, ‘mindful’, ‘considered’ and ‘attentive’ in Slow Food dis-
course underlines the centrality of these values, and distinguishes them from the
simple unconsciousness or inertia of sleep. Such reflection sounds a somewhat
sober occupation, not like the rowdier, messier pleasures of a shared table of
good food and wine one might imagine as the mainstay of Slow Food. But in
Slow Food discourse, pleasure reflected upon is pleasure enhanced. And if
reflection reveals that there is not sufficient pleasure in the activity under con-
sideration, it may well lead to the creation of pleasure, through choosing differ-
ent activities. Questions like ‘Why do I do this?’; ‘Why don’t I do it more
often?’; ‘Why don’t I do it less often?’; ‘How can I do it differently?’ would be
examples of the path this reflection might take.
Posing such questions may also provide an example of how, following
Connolly (1999), one might move from practices of self-artistry to micropoli-
tics. Capatti’s manifesto-editorial still has the implicit goal of ‘a better world’,
indeed it recognizes the practice of thinking/conceptualizing/planning a better
world as itself one of life’s pleasures. Neither simply a duty nor an ethical
obligation, developing a politics of transformation is pleasurable, an idea not
often expressed in the unimaginative domain of politics as we know it. In a
sense, ‘In Praise of Rest’ seeks to break down the distinction between utopian
literature and politics, theory and practice, private pleasure and public praxis,
insisting on the preservation of a ‘space outside’ these binaries where ‘the
imaginary projection of ethics’ might be fleshed out (Capatti, 1996: 6):
Nothing is more relaxing and pleasant than fantasising about a better world,
clearly outlining its customs and enjoying a feeling of togetherness, whether
drinking or playing, relaxing or reading. But to make this possible, a certain
degree of detachment is required, a moment of calm, better use of idle time . . .
even a bed in which to dream before arising and reaching out to other people.
(p. 7, ellipsis in original)
Through the apparently simple concept of rest, then, relations and tensions
between the individual and the social, the private and the political, can be
articulated and considered. If we begin with the question ‘What should we “do”
to rest well?’ Folco Portinari (1996) argues in an article in the same issue of
Slow, we are quickly led from the individual to the social, as the implications of

how I practise ‘rest time’ is bound up with work time and the complexities and
disparities of the time cultures in which I am situated (p. 8). In considering the
two main conceptions of rest, Portinari, like Capatti, posits the connection
between reflection and slowness: ‘One [view of rest] is social, activist and
mechanistic, with a physiological focus on economic effectiveness . . . : you rest
in order to work better afterwards. And there is the moral idea of rest, which
places the thinking, contemplative soul and pleasures of intellectual creation at
the centre of our sense of existence’ (p. 11). The drift of Portinari’s article is to
favour this latter view of rest: Just as rest is more than recovery from fatigue, so
slow living, it is implied, is more than moving slowly.
Even at this early stage of Slow Food discourse, however, the adjective
‘slow’ as the primary value of the movement was under interrogation. In a
section on fast food in the same issue of Slow, the historian Massimo Montanari
(1996) disputes the valency of the binary fast/slow to encapsulate the concerns
of the Slow Food movement:
In my opinion, the contrast between a ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ culture – which is the
raison d’être of this magazine and its underlying movement – has very little to do
with the concepts of slowness and haste. In some apparently ‘slow’ situations,
slowness means exhaustion, uneasiness and even suffering (surely you must
have been to at least one terribly boring wedding reception?). Vice versa, ‘fast’
situations are not always disagreeable . . . Contrasting ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ is not the
point. We badly need other adjectives. (p. 56)
Instead, Montanari proposes care as the central value which, as he goes on to

explain, carries the accompanying meaning of attention (caring for, as well as
caring about):
I think that the point is: Are we ready to prepare, serve and taste food with
great care? In my opinion, it is just a matter of care: Caring for the selection of
ingredients and the resulting taste, caring for food methods . . . caring for the
sensory messages conveyed by what we eat, for presentation, for the choice of
people sharing the food with us, etc. An endless series of caring for which, in my
opinion, can be applied to any circumstance with equal dignity: A meal at home or
at the restaurant, a drink at the pub or a sandwich in a snack bar . . . When assess-
ing the quality of these experiences, what makes the difference is not how long
they last: It all depends on whether we are willing and have the possibility of
experiencing these events with care. This requires a structurally ‘slow’ culture,
the capacity to understand and assess, a critical disposition which may – or may
not – be there at any one moment . . . (p. 56)
So again it is the capacity for reflection, the critical capacity for reflexivity,
which is insisted upon as central to slowness, so much so that Montanari
proposes that the opposition is not really between fast/slow food, but between
careless/careful food: ‘Our foe is not “fast food”, but “careless food”, the cul-
ture of careless food’ (p. 56). Montanari’s position, then, is close to Eriksen’s;

both writers urge the need to protect slowness – as a set of practices as well as a
philosophy of life – at a cultural, not just a personal level. For both writers,
‘slowness’ transcends the private domain of choices (about time usage, food
preparation and consumption) and requires institutional support for its con-
tinued existence, and for the improvement of society as a result.
What Montanari also articulates here, however, is a view of modern everyday
life characterized by habit and inattentiveness (supposedly epitomized by fast
food with its uniformity and ubiquity). This view is consistent with the charac-
terization of everyday life found in the work of Henri Lefebvre and the
Situationists. The links between this academic/aesthetic interest in the everyday
which emerged in the twentieth century and the view of contemporary life
found in Slow Food discourse warrants consideration briefly here because it
highlights an ambivalence about the value (and values) of everyday life which
threatens to disrupt Slow Food’s insistence on pleasure as a physical, material,
sensual and intellectual practice, and slow living as an everyday mode of life. Is
slowness – as a mode of attention, reflection and care in everyday practices – an
intellectual exercise in the aestheticization of everyday life? Or is it an ambi-
tious attempt to reconcile the aesthetic, the political, the corporeal and the
everyday, by its insistence on the centrality of pleasure and the body? Rita
Felski (2002) has argued that, beginning with modernists like Viktor Shklovsky
and continuing through into the work of Lefebvre and Guy Debord, a negative
view of mundane experience underpinned the insistence that we needed the
aesthetic to jolt us out of everyday inattentiveness through a heightened sense of
perception (p. 608). Through techniques like defamiliarization, the everyday
could be ‘rescued from oblivion by being transformed’ (p. 609). Later, in
Lefebvre and Debord’s work,
everyday life must be rescued, redeemed, saved from its own regressive tenden-
cies. And, like other avant-gardes, it draws on a future-oriented temporality to
authorise its own project . . . To redeem the quotidian is thus to transform the
temporality of everyday perception, unsettling sluggish and habit-bound modes of
thought through the revelatory force of the new. (p. 610)
Some parallels may be seen between this approach to everyday life and that
found in the examples of Slow Food discourse I have cited here which outline
an avant-gardist position, a mission even, for Slow Food, in its denunciations of
the life-denying habits of speed and the stultifying effects of fast-food con-
sumption. The attention given to time in the discourse and practices of slow
living could also be construed as attempts to ‘redeem the quotidian’ through
transforming the temporality of everyday perception. Such a redemption may
indeed be seen as a kind of aesthetic, not as ‘a pristine sanctum of high art, but a
loose ensemble of techniques, performances, and intensities of experience that
can revive and even revolutionise the everyday by registering its rich and mys-

terious particularities’ (p. 609). But it would also be true to say that ‘redeeming
the quotidian’ does not in this case mean the same as purging it; it is rather a
kind of re-making which seeks to restore pleasure, agency and history to every-
day life. In this latter aspect, the Slow Food approach to everyday life is at odds
with Debord’s idea that everyday life practices are resistant to history. Instead,
it is based on a recognition of the historicity – as opposed to the ‘timelessness’ –
of these practices and Slow Food assumes that embedded within time-honoured
practices – of food preparation, of rest, of hospitality – lies a knowledge of
mindful, time-full living, in which the present and past are linked but still dis-
tinguished.9 What has been called ‘Slow Food’s pleasure principle’ (Capatti,
2002: 5) – an aesthetic which imbricates the material, sensual, the intellectual
and the political – ultimately distinguishes the movement’s approach to every-
day life from that which Felski attributes to Lefebvre and Debord.
The politics of slowness and the ethics of time are varyingly addressed in the
Slow Food movement which currently remains a site of potential through which
members can negotiate their own practices of consumption, including the con-
sumption of time, to develop a ‘slow culture’ grounded in the pleasures of food.
The movement’s increasing attention to sustainability, bio-diversity, and what
Petrini (2001a) calls the ‘new agriculture’ (p. 97) means that notions of time
will continue to be important to the conceptualization and implementation of
Slow Food (e.g. through a perceived conflict between ‘environmental time’ and
the time frames of GM technology).10 While the imbrication of social and
temporal inequities in contemporary culture cannot easily be reversed or disen-
tangled by movements like Slow Food, attention to the elemental and everyday
practices associated with food may offer productive opportunities to re-think an
agency and ethics of time through arts of the self and micropolitics. Reviewing
recent scholarly work on ‘Timespace’, Jon May and Nigel Thrift (2001) con-
cluded that much of this work was motivated by a ‘quest’ to be ‘filled by and to
amplify the presence of the now, to make the present habitable and visible by
remaking what counts as past and future, here and there’ (p. 37). In a similar
vein, I have argued that the deployment of notions of ‘slowness’ in relation to
time and motion, especially in the domain of everyday life, mark significant
attempts to make the present not only habitable but pleasurable and ethical.
Notes
I would like to thank the audience at the Institute of Advanced Study, Bologna
University, for productive feedback to an earlier version of this article presented there on
9 June 2003. I am also grateful for the helpful comments and suggestions offered by the
Time & Society reviewers.
1. In the 1930s, Ernst Bloch (1932/1977) proposed the notion of ‘nonsynchronicity’ to

describe the experience of living ‘out of sync’ with one’s time due to economic
stagnation, personal disaffection, regional isolation, or a combination of these
factors, to which I would now also add differences of gender, sexuality, race and
age, to name a few.
2. While I agree with Shaw’s characterization of family time here, I find her character-
ization of work time a little optimistic: Much paid work may be at least as Sisyphean
as household labour (e.g. assembly-line production, paperwork, cleaning).
3. The Gilbreths were, however, not strict Taylorites, becoming increasingly disillu-
sioned with the methods they had learned as Lilian’s knowledge of applied psychol-
ogy increased (she wrote most of Fatigue Study; Graham, 1999: 639, 641). As a
result, Graham argues, the Gilbreths experienced much less labour resistance to the
implementation of their methods than did other Taylorites (p. 641).
4. ‘Arts of the self and micropolitics are two sides of the same coin. Micropolitics can
function to stabilize an existing set of identities. It can also usher a new identity or
right into being . . . (Connolly, 1999: 148–9).
5. Petrini notes that at the beginning of the movement members referred to themselves
as ‘golosi democratici e antifascisti’ (‘democratic and antifascist gluttons’, although
‘golosi’ does not have the strong negative connotations which ‘gluttons’ has in
English; see Counihan, 1999: 180).
6. F. R. Leavis’s denunciation in Culture and Environment in the 1930s may serve as a
good example of this view:
The great agent of change, and, from our point of view, destruction, has of
course been the machine – applied power. The machine has brought us many
advantages, but it has destroyed the old ways of life, the old forms, and by
reason of the continual rapid change it involves, prevented the growth of new.
(Leavis and Thompson, 1932/1942: 3)
7. The first signatories to the manifesto were: Folco Portinari (its author), Carlo Petrini,
Stefano Bonilli, Valentino Parlato, Gerardo Chiaromonte, Dario Fo, Francesco
Guccini, Gina Lagorio, Enrico Menduni, Antonio Porta, Ermete Realacci, Gianni
Sassi and Sergio Staino (Petrini, 2001a: 13; 2001b: 149).
8. This new appeal of Slow Food is also attributable to the movement’s increasing
emphasis on environmental issues and sustainability, presented by Petrini (2003) to
a specifically British audience in 2003 as a ‘natural’ progression of the movement’s
principles:
We started out as a movement whose main interests were to defend the right to
pleasure, to discuss food and wine topics and to promote the ‘slow life’. Since
then . . . we have progressively embraced the idea that in today’s world, gas-
tronomes of integrity, cannot sit back and ignore the global and local dynamics
that allow them to eat the food that they find at their table. (p. 1)
9. In this sense, the concept of time endorsed by Slow Food is also a critique of what
Castells (1996) has called ‘timeless time’ in network society: ‘Using technology to
escape the contexts of its existence’, to create an ‘ever-present’ (p. 433).
10. I am grateful to Jonathan Murdoch for drawing to my attention the emerging impor-
tance of an ‘environmental’ concept of time in the Slow Food movement.

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[email: W.Parkins@murdoch.edu.au]


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Time & Society

Out of Time: Fast Subjects and Slow Living

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Citations (this article cites 9 articles hosted on the

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ABSTRACT. Slow living involves the conscious negotiation of the

In a recent television advertisement for a hi-tech refrigerator which incorporates

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If increasing pressure on time usage is a common experience, then so too is

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Resisting the Culture of Speed

Living slowly as a form of rejecting the cultural orthodoxy of speed is not a

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It is not, then, that advocates of slow living wish to impose slowness on

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Could deceleration to a different temporality improve the quality of (work and

In positing ‘temporal’ time as an alternative to machine time, Adam is propos-

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manifesto, however, is a genre with a particular history, as both a product of and

Such a re-invention, an inversion even, of temporality – where the ‘new’ is

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The Reflection of Slowness

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Instead, Montanari proposes care as the central value which, as he goes on to

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WENDY PARKINS is the Programme Chair of Women’s Studies at

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