The Great Accelerator

S u rely we can't fai l to notice that th i s i s hap - pening! Th e very notion of a ki nd of capitalism fuelled by capital from somewhere else, out of sight of any true production and based on weightless speculation, is nothi ng more than a market lure, an economic aberration that leads straight to the dreaded system ic crisis - l ike those hedge fu nds whose accounts departments are exiled these days in ofshore h avens, fiscal p aradises, where they are managed by what often comes down to some minuscule team that can work in an apartment, the speculative fund having no real legal status.

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I nsecurity o f territory, with the importance of islands, of ofshore ven ues and the evidently wani ng importance of, say, Switzerland, alo ng with b anki ng secrecy . . . I n security of H istory, whereby the accounting standard of the market is on the point of replacing the historical standard of the listing of stocks on the S tock Exchange . . . Th ese are all so many cl in ical symptoms of the ' futurism of the instant' and o f its i mpact on economic intell igence in the age of an ecological disaster whose scope never stops sp reading in b road daylight.

I n a recent interview published in the Sunday Times, the chairman and C EO of G oldman Sachs, Lloyd B l ankfein, declared: ' I 'm j ust a b anker doing G od ' s work . ' Clearly, th is particular G o d is no lo nger hopi ng for much from his faithfu l profit-wo rshippers, the investo rs to whom the Messiah of finance could still say, on accou nt of the ab u ndance of thei r speculative faith: 'G o, your fai th has saved yo u! '

Actually, the credit crunch, the crisis o f confidence, that has hit the stock exchanges of the S i ngle M arke t, is j ust an early-warni ng sign of a true ACC IDENT IN KNOWLEDG E that is about to strike an 'exact' science wh ich has recently turned into a tech noscie nce of i nstrument al eficiency that bears no relatio nsh ip to the knowledge we've acquired over the course of the ages. Th at technoscience's sophisticated mathematical models and software don't dissimulate all that well the systemic catastrophe of a science that has no conscience, a science that no longer even sees the warning symptoms of its own decl ine and especi ally not the lim its it has now reached in its discoveries - at once atomic, i nformatic and genetic. M ore than anyth ing else, the 'digital civil ization' so often trumpeted marks a retu rn to numerological paganism and its cults of yo re .

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Actually, the world of the pharaohs of finance i s not flat as they clai m . I t is m i n i scul e , i nfinitesimal - j ust l ike the degree zero of a tech ni cal Progress that would no lo nge r fool anyone, without its p ropaganda . So, with the breaking and ent e ring i nto the insta n t , the fractal izat i o n o f h i storical TEMPO, the NANOTECHNOLOGIES beh ind the reality efect open up the u nheard of possibility of trumping the economic with the astronomic. When that happens, the science of the ecological habitat will really shake up the habitus of societies once settled in sedentary fash ion, with the routine nature of our daily timetables, our emploi du temps, being totally abolished. The ACCELERATION of flows of all kinds will the n supplant - this time for good - the historical ACC UMULATION of stocks of wealth, o f goods once housed in that reservo ir, the ci ty of men.

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I f this were efectively to happen, the current delocal ization of productio n would in no way lead to some fu ture relocal ization of activity, indust ri al o r oth e rwise . I t would lead to a de fi n i tive EXTERNALIZA TION - OUTSOURCING - o f t h e urban race, righ t here o n t h i s t i ny tell u ric planet - until salvation came in the form of some other 'promised land', thi s one EXO PLANETARY, the single-file exodus of the b ibl ical epic yieldi ng to the looped exodus of a circus prophesied, in a way, by the circular accelerato r in G eneva!

The vi rtual otherworld of cybernetics is, in fact, nothing more than the anachronism of an othertime, in wh ich the critical space of Mandelbrot' s ' fractal s' 1 merges with the critical i nstant of a fundamentally uninhabitable continuu m . That continuum is just the anamorphosis of the practical real ity of a fo rgotten to pography, since the repetition of all o u r movements, as well as of a natio n ' s actions (th e i r p o l i t ical l i t u rgy) , regi sters a lot more forcibly in the dom iciliary fixity of 'sedentary man' than in the headlong rush , the forced exile, of unbridled 'nomadism' . H ence the u rgency of a question that is now central or, more precisely, term inal : the question o f the nature of IN ERTIA, in the age o f the revolution in information and the apparently unremarked transference of the F IXED-PRO PERTY inertia associated with the real estate of PLACES - LIEUX- to the POLAR inertia of CONNECTIONS - LIENS. For, twenty-first-century interactivity now dominates the standardization of behaviours and activities that characterized both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And that domination e ntails an i ncreased ECO SYSTEMIC risk of paralysis or, rather, the sudden tetraplegia of a societal body whose perpetual motion is frozen in each of its limbs and whose structural unemployment is now a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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1 Paul Virilio, L 'EsptZce critique. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1984.

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This mass u nemployment is forced o n us partly by the au tomatio n of postindustrial production and partly by the auto matio n of reflex actions in our now outrageously speeded-up emploi du temps, our agenda. Th at is the impetus behind the much-touted threat of relaunching the world economy - except that, this time, such a relaunch would be without any emploi du temps whatsoever and would occur within the cybernetic space defined by the inertia of the p ropitious instant - the right moment - for supern umerary man, a man decidedly without qual ities . . .

I n the Un ited S tates, for i nstance, the drop in the wage bill in the last quarter of 2009, coupled with an unchanged level of activity, does indeed signify that American firms are imp roving productivity - b ut o nly to the detriment of employment. That fact dearly points to a future deindusrrialization o f nations, as a p relude to wh ich the cu rrent delocal ization of firms in favou r of low-cost employees is nothi ng more than an early-warning sign of the spread of automation . Tomorrow, the robotics of artificial intelligence and its ' enhanced reality' will take on the bulk of productivity i n a resolutely postmodern world.

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In the face of th is assessment of afairs and for want of a political economy o f speed and not just of the wealth of nati ons, the 'speed box' (gearbox) of tech nical progress will go into automatic mode and the stock market crash b rought on by speculation wi l l end, sooner o r l ater, i n the crash of all job production. The futurism of the i nstant requi res it and will fo rce i t to morrow on the generations to come.

H ERE is no more . Everyth ing is NOW, and the HIC ET NUNC of days gone by is about to disappear completely from the ho rizon of history. In his recent vade-mecum, French public i ntellectual , econom i st, banker and top-tier consultant, J acques Attali recommends 'living every moment to the h i l t as tho ugh i t was the l ast'. Attali even goes as far as declaring that, 'Si nce time is the only really rare co m mo d ity, it i s now the only one worth being saved.' That is why, he reckons, it is urgent 'to focus on every i nstant ' . 1

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I Jacques Attali, Survivre aux crises. Paris: rayard, 2009.

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A sym b o l o f a fatal i n ertia, this verbatim account illustrates perfectly the i nexorable nature o f th i s del i rious fu turism that deconstructs all chronology and , with it, the melody line of history as well as the great narrative of our co mmon memory. This is what really lies behind France's recent spate of memorial laws and the growi ng threat to territorial identity of a nation al i ty that is no more self-evident, in the end, than the geopolitical sovereignty o f the legitimate national state . And this, in a glo bal ized wo rld constantly traversed b y i n ternal exiles in a dosed-circuit exodus of j ust-in-time flows of people that so me are al ready referring to as the migratory ofensive of sustainable mobil ity in the twenty-first century - TRACEAB ILITY now being imposed on each and every one o f us. This is why 'magnetic po rtals' have been i nstal l ed i n p o rts and airpo rts, alo ng with 'smart co rri do rs' for passe nger identification that are endowed with full-body scan ners to st rip search all those bodies in endless transit . We all know that whe re there ' s a wall there has to be a door; b ut the o nly real diference between th is wall and the old fo rtified wall that surro unded a city is the virtual nature of the contemporary enclosure of postmodern times, as well as the clinical radiography deployed at the main entrances of our current borders.

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Th is may help us to u nderstand the reason behind the Sarkozy government's plan fo r a future ' M useum of the H istory of F rance ' , whi ch would b e a so rt of health cl i n i c fo r times past completi ng the one for times present, memory of which fades so quickly now, with a real danger of amnesia due to the fragile supports fo r the dead memories of our computers.

Th en again , let's not fo rget that the eternal p resent of Einstei nian relativity is not the same as the p rese nt that ruled the day, wh en l igh t was st i l l d i sti nct from darkness . It is th e real i n stant, confirming what D ietrich Bonhoefer claimed last century: 'Technology has declared war on the d ay . '

Contempo rary with the B litz, that verdict beauti fully defines the probable translation of the ' i l l u m i nism' of the Ancien ts' sun worship i nto the ' i nstantaneism' of the tech no-worsh ip of the postmodern people we've all become .

We'd actually do b etter to swi ftly abandon the grand ill usi o n of a future ' M use urn of H istory' and substitute, in its stead, a Mi nistry of the Times, a great m i n istry of the rel ativity of b o th the weather, Ie temps qu 'il fait, and o f p assi ng time, Ie temps qui passe, time now passing so quickly. AERO PO LITICS would then cleverly complete the C H RONO PO LITICS of the time behind the G EOPOLITICAL interactivity of our real-time com munications.

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Thanks to such admi nistration of duration and of t h e ri me needed, Ie temps q u 'i l faut, t o act consci entiously and no t j u st i nteract with telecommunication tools, the ecology of the weather, Ie temps qu 'il fait, wou l d take on a ' natu ral ' i ntell igence rhar' s currently in the process of being discrimi nated against , as though it were o urclassed by the fears of the ' artificial ' intell igence of computer programs and handy software that can do anyth ing, and soon, undo anything . . .

S uch a great mi nistry of Times M anagement would manage the vital rhythms of the weather and not j ust the environment; it would be a ministry o f Space Management, overseeing a space that is now exh au sted not o nly in irs b iodiversity b ur also i n irs ch rono-d iversi ty, with seaso nal sh i fts in cl i m ate being erased, as well as in i ts geo-diversity, with the diferences in and extent of co untry landscapes being similarly erased. For, the pollution of time distances now completes the pollution of substances, water, air, fauna and flora; and the current domination o f the real time of exchanges over the real space of the continents ends, as we see, in i n e rtia . M o re precisely, it ends in the 'moment of i nertia' o f the interactive CO N N ECTION (LIEN), an instant inertia that will shortly take over from the 'fixed-property i nertia' of PLAC ES (LIEUX) in a sedentariness that, all the same, goes b ack all the way to ancient t i mes.

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