Speed and the Problem of Real Time in Macbeth

Acceleration of Time, in Works of Nature, may well bee esteemed Inter Magnalia Naturae. And even in Divine Miracles, Accelerating of the Time, is next to the Creating of the Matter.

—Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarvm

Military science, like History, is but a persistent perception of the kinetics of vanished bodies.

—Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics¹

My motivation for writing this essay arises in part from the sense, likely shared by many readers, that we are living through a precarious economic, social, and cultural moment made increasingly—and with increasing rapidity—unstable by what might be called the globalization bubble. This bubble (like the tech bubble, the housing bubble, the banking bubble, and the Wall Street bubble, all of which have burst in the last few years) is enabled to a large degree by postindustrial world capitalism in which—as Marx and Engels long ago diagnosed of the fundamental form itself—“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”²

There are many critical and theoretical ways to study and understand how these bubbles form and burst and the often-catastrophic consequences when a presumably solid thing melts into air. The following pages will ultimately address the emergence and subsequent bursting of a temporal bubble in Shakespeare’s Macbeth—a task for which the work of Paul Virilio has been helpful to me: Virilio’s dromological work allows us to see extreme speed as fundamental, although hardly unique, to our own historic predicament. The acceleration of speed itself, we might say, traces the very outline of history:

In the nineteenth century, Progress meant the Great Commotion of the railways. In the twentieth century, still meant more the Great Speed of the bullet train and the supersonic jet. In the twenty-first century, it means the Instantaneity of the interactive telecommunications of cybernetics. So the anachronistic acceleration of present reality certainly does not spell the end of historicity. More importantly, it does spell the emergence of lying, not by omission any more, but by deterrence of the future as well as of the past.³

While Virilio is most interested in the contemporary moment and its cybernetically derived instantaneity as the most exalted form of speed yet realized, the history of history has always been about successive clashes between the slow and the accelerating, with the outcome invariably favoring the faster. At the same time, because it is only perceptible relative to time and its apparent “flow,” speed has forever been implicated in time and our experience of it. To speak of speed is always to invoke time. This stands (ironically) as an historical constant, although the speed of speed at any point in history is always a moving target: the foot soldier gives way to the militarized horse; the horse gives way to the armored tank; the tank to the tank-killing plane; the plane to the military jet; and today, the jet to computerized warfare waged at vast distances by way of computer screens and satellite hook-ups.

Virilio’s analysis of speed and the experience of accelerated culture aptly gains a great deal of forward momentum in his most recent work on that biggest expression of contemporary Big Science, the Large Hadron Collider.⁴ However, for all its forward movement, Virilio’s work enables a new engagement with the past, one undertaken under the sign of speed, that can provide a new understanding of history and its objects. Although I recognize that this response is conditioned by my own sensibilities and habits as a reader of literary texts (a more skeptical person might view the unprecedented power of the Large Hadron Collider and have grave concerns about its inadvertent production of errant black holes and the ensuing destruction of the world), I do not think that the analysis of speed (and temporality) in Macbeth is anachronistic. Instead, where before I may have been reading for the plot (as one literary critic describes...