Conclusión

This chapter returns to Oksun's story, which opened the book in the prologue. It conveys the ethnographic challenge of analyzing the problem of speed: inasmuch as our critique of labor targets the abstracting force of speed, it is also hard to translate people's experiences and feelings without using the language of abstracting, alienating speed. The chapter then highlights narrative moments that exist within, are produced by, and respond to the problem of speed. It reiterates the author's argument that human practices to relate with and build attachment to others, commodities, and to work itself constitute the very dynamic of speed and accelerated, unceasing productivity. In doing so, the practices inevitably create a flow of life that is dense and messy and that simultaneously sustains and contradicts the speed of the market and the city.