The Great Accelerator

ViRiLIO THEGREATACCELERATOR

TRANSLATED BY JULIE ROSE

The G reat Accelerator

We think the same way we collide in to each other.

Paul Valery

The Great Accelerator Paul Virilio

Translated by J ulie Rose

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Contents

Th e I nsecurity of H istory 1

Too Late for Private Life 31

The G reat Accelerator 66

Index 94

v

To the illuminists of ligh t-sp eed at CERN, Geneva, and to the Wall S treet traders who crashed into that o ther wall, the time barrier.

The Insecurity of History

To live every instant as though it were the last - that is the paradox of futurism, of a futurism of the instant that has no future. We might note that it also spells the decline in the propaganda of an endless Progress that, o nly yesterday, still fuelled the history of past centuries . That history is now so wired, so hysterical , that it even claims to foresee actions, the reality of events that have not yet occurred. You'd think that, tomorrow, we'll be able to construct an actual 'History of the Future' - thanks to long-term forecasting. Such micro-narratives would impose themselves on the historicity of the avowed facts, as if the perspective of the real time of instantaneity suddenly annulled all durability. F o r, thanks to certain software programs and the modelling they allow, the mythology of futurism is even gearing up to renew the myths of our origins and of Antiquity.

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A recent anecdote might serve to illustrate this 'phase transition' in H istory: at the beginn ing of the Year 2010, Bernard Accoyer, then president of F rance'sAssemblee Nationale, p rotested against the excessive use, by the F rench government, of a speeded-up p rocess that limits both parliamentary chambers' examination of proposed new laws to a si ngle reading.

'We can't go on working this way - not if we want decent laws and decent democratic debate' , Accoyer declared, adding that he would not hesitate, i f the need arose, to resort to the possibility of opposing the emergency p rocess in question by siding with his opposi te number in the Senate, Gerard Larcher. 'A good law', Accoyer concluded, 'requires an incompressible period of time for reflection . ' 1

The current legislative frenzy actually introduces the inertia of real time, a paradoxical inertia that results from the sudden acceleration of common reality.

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

1 Le Monde, n february 2010.

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I n these very early years of the third millenni urn, the polar inertia produced by the instantaneity of in teractive CONNECTIONS (LIENS) is actually poised to supplant the fixed-property inertia of PLACES (LIEUX) _- including the most representative places of legislation and the law. The whole of historicity will then find i tself shattered by this 'disto rtion of competition' between the p ast and the future that is so detrimental to the present, with the NANOTECHNOLOGIES of the infinitely short term already taking the place of the traditional chronologies of the medium and long term of past days, years and centuries .

All of this undermines the sovereignty of History - and the sovereignty of all an teriority, with i t . S o , following the age of terri to rial insecurity, 1 comes the age of the insecurity of H isto ry and i ts trip artite divisio n , PAST - PRESENT - FUTURE.

This reversal of values, we might note, has already afected space. At the close of the last century, geopoli tical strategists were, in fact, turning reality inside o ut like a glove and asserting that, forever after, the exterior was to prevail over the interior. Today, it is in the order of time that this turnaround is being accomplished, as posterity is primed to dominate all anteriority. Hence the sudden insecurity of History that now complements and co mpletes the i nsecuri ty of a terri torial sovereignty now threatened on all sides - from above, by its expansion, and from below, by its regional fragmentation. Hence the 'repeat delocalization' we are currently witnessing under the pretext of globalization, along with the impact of a process of externalization - outsourcing - that is increasingly untethered to any p ractical reali ty.

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

1 Paul Virilio, L 1nsecurite du territoire. Paris: Galilee, 1993.

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