The Great Accelerator

Presenter, male or female- this denomination is revelatory of the latest of ' futurisms' : that of the electrotechnical doping perpetrated by the OMNIPRESENT instant that so relentlessly tortures former 'j ournalists', who 've suddenly segued into 'instan taneists'. Tomorrow, it will afect each and every one of us, transforming the ordinary life of sedentarized societies, here or there, into an 'infra-ordinary' life. For, the photosensitive inertia of viewers will shortly cat<;:h up wi th that of their favouri te presenters, the inertia of the real instant of the newsflash standing in for the fixed-property inertia o f their domiciliation. 'TI1e delocalization of our use o f space, l'emploi de l'espace, will be doubled by disorientation in o ur use of time, l'emploi du temps, in a daily life once given rhythm by the alternation o f days and nights, and now shattered by the breaks in rhythm caused by an entirely denatured acrobatic vi tal i ty.

I t's as if the end of lifetime employmen t, wi th its very long durations and its professional constraints, had suddenly mutated in the face of the disciplinary demands of the unforeseen, the unexpected, of the 'just-in-time' nature of tight distribution, for the very people who are already no longer producers, actors o f progress, but mere onlookers, consumers of the background noise of an INTERREACTIVITY that takes the place of the INTERMED IATI ON of the employees of the not so distan t past.

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

1 'Audrey Pulvar en fourche une nouvelle vie', in Paris . \tlatch, 22 July 2009.

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So, employment as a way of life, a mode de vie, is superseded by life as a user's man ual , Ia vie mode d'emploi, as Georges Perec would say, for a new kind of provisional society, one excessively instrumentalized and endlessly incited to overreact to this or that signal , all the diverse stimuli o f a permanent state of alarm. In that state, the instantaneity of what crops up unexpectedly will doubtless condition the p_�tting into a trance not of the citizen-soldier anymore b ut of a ci tizen-subject, wi thin a 'social network' that will soon replace the network based on the physical proximity of actual people. People like our old neighbours, who we'd so often bump into in the PLACES behind the SOCIAL CONNECTIVITY of our past domiciliary inertia. lhe private life of each and every one of us will gradually yield to the overexposure of a semi-public life where the intimacy available to people generally will be like the intimacy enjoyed by detainees under observation in police custody. For, the old CAMERA OBSCURA of panoptical surveillance turns out to have been nothing more than a clinical symptom of the imminent obliteration of any private life.

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Here, a further comment is needed. I n the past, with the rule of Saint Benedict of N ursia, the sequestration of the monastic order succeeded the roaming of the wanderers of the apostate, with the Roman Church distinguishing between CONTEMPLATIVE and ACTIVE orders. Today, it would indeed seem that, for the CORELIGIONISTS of social networking, the same kind of line is being drawn between a few allegedly highly-skilled 'actives' and the anonymous mass of 'contemplatives', these Francisan friars riveted to their screens the way monks were once riveted to their breviaries, with our secular but interconnected societies once and for all sorting the sheep from the goats.

Here again, the (emotional) polar inertia that resul ts from instantaneity and synchronization tends to supplant domiciliary inertia and the geographic localization of a social body already in a state of advanced decay where mass individualism wreaks its havoc. For, the photosensitive inertia of the mass o f progress's contemplatives and the delocalization of their activities are nothing more than fatal signs of the disorientation in what Perec would call the mode d'emploi of their daily l i fe .

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Here, too, comparison with the religious orders is fruitful . lhe liturgy, ' the acts of the people', contemporary with the third millenn i um , revives, as though in secret, the liturgies of the people of believers. B ut where the Church of Christendom managed to create an equality based on Faith wi thin a wide diversity o f living conditions and spiritual riches thanks to the statics of deep-rootedness in fixed property (that of the monastery, a true laboratory of the future of our emploi du temps), the dynamics of the revol ution in transport, and especially in comp uter transmissions, has abolished this form of social unity - in favour o f the synchronization of common sensations. In this INTERACTIVE COMMUNISM, the real instant of audiovisual telecommunications dominates the all-too-real space of social communications, and the standardization of religious beliefs and behaviours is erased thanks to the simul taneity of common feeling, wi th the 'community of interests' shared by all now yielding i ts political primacy to this community of emotion based on an individualism that is fundamentally transpoli tical.

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lhis phenomenon is further aggravated by the evol ution of a culture and, �wift.ly afterwards, a true CULT OF EXCESS over the course of the nineteenth century and, especially, the twentieth, with the acceleration of reality itself ending in the dawn of a new form of madness, Ia folie de voir. lh is entails having to see at all costs - to the detriment of hearing, as well as of handling, of touch , tactil i ty, a s wel l as o f con tact.

On this score, it's time for an anecdote, the one about Richard Wagner putting his hands over his girl friend, his lover, Malvida's eyes, while they were listening to Tristan and shouting at her: 'Stop looking so hard and listen! '

Ever since i ts Greco-Latin origins, i n fact, Western philosophy has been primarily a philosophy of vision, of the vario us kinds of light and the forms presented to searching eyes. lhat has produced today' s cult, this technocult of the speed of ligh t and of the waves that convey information that has now gone MEGALOSCOPIC.

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I t is also what's behind the retinal persistence of an anachronistic futurism of which the NANOCHRONOLOGIES are the latest avatar. One writer has even gone so far as to claim that 'speed is the contemporary world's aristocracy' - in a nutshell , a 'racing nobility', following on from the court nobility of the Ancien Regime.

But, to get backtothe European PHILOFOLLY of seeing, Westerners, and especially Latin-Europeans, like Latin-Americans, need public passions. After the great passion of triumphant Christianity, i t seems they opted for the great passion of a Progress that was to end, last century, in the very brief passion for speeding up the history of the twentieth century. lhe limit speed of waves then stole a march on the wealth of nations, whose end, whose defeat, ' Communism' was supposed to mark, thanks to the cosmism of escape velocity that enabled escape from terrestrial gravity - first by Sp utnik, then by the M I R station that signalled that cosmism's fail ure and disappearance. lhe TURBO CAPITALISM of the Single Market then took over in the age o f international economic integration thanks to the very latest 'escape veloci ty', residing within the domain of cybernetics and anticipating the deliverance, this time in the name of ecology, of a humanity polluted by discovery of a habitable EXOPLANET, free-market COSMOTHEISM thereby following hot on the heels of the social COSMISM of the old Soviet Empire.

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In fact, it has only ever been one small step from the mass portable empire to the otherworld exodus of populations - 'one small step for man but a giant leap for mankind', as Neil Armstrong once said, as he disembarked on the night stara star or, more precisely, a nightspot, that some would now like to see back on the agenda, despite President Obama's rejection o f the idea.

One thing's for sure and that is that it's now too late to have a private life. Yesterday's 'soli tary' crowds, who we're told are now so 'smart', are nothing more than hordes primed for a longhaul exodus, OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD exile beyond o ur earthly homeland, for the liberated· and dispersed societies of the great diaspora, deportation having been merely a fatal sign of an EXTERNALIZATION that has no future, where movement is all and the goal is pointless.

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Nowadays, unlike in the ind us trial era of manufacturing plants and factories analysed by Marxism, we no longer explore - we expel . We also exterminate more and more frequently, the STOP EJECT of those damned to exodus thereby taking over from the STAND BY of yore!

Both the settling of the peasantry on the land where it all began and the fixed-property inertia of the city-dweller are now being overtaken by the real instan t's devastating inertia or, more precisely, its momen t of inertia, in an INTERACTIVE simultaneity that shakes up all settling down, any deep-rootedness. On that score, note that the very fi rst law of urbanism is: reten tion of the site. At this stage in the history of h uman, but also urban , settlemen t, ' territorial insecuri ty' is at an all-time high and the terri torial sovereignty of the legitimate national state is in danger of being lost forever in the face of the HYPERCOLONIALIST threat posed by sovereign wealth funds' grubby land-grabbing, monopolizing all lands and their resources. 1he old poli tics of the droit du sol, the righ t to ci tizenship, gives way all of a sudden in the face of the exorbitant privileges of a sort of AEROPOLITICS, which is not only ecological but economic. 1his is what lies behind the droit du ciel, the right to the sky, to heaven, to all the heavens and to the virtual space of interconnected financial markets, with the high-frequency traders who engage in flash trading here playing Russian roulette, every day, with the fate of the world in a lightning war whose weaponry is provided by high-flying (sic) cybernetic systems, the old sovereign ty of nations gradually disappearing. What shoots to the fore instead is a MET A-GEOPHYSICAL poli tics for nations that are 'stateless', or as good as, now that the correligionists of h umanity's SERVOMOTOR are joining forces with those of a computerized PANTHEISM . Gaia, the Earth Goddess of triumphant ecology, is already a symptom o f this.

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With the revol ution in the financial industry and its mathematical models leading to the systemic chaos we're all only too familiar with and, in this age of an anthropocentrism that is wreaking havoc with our climates and causing whole peoples to go into exodus, we actually have no choice but to look long and hard at the structural energy of an anthropodynamics of the history o f h umanity in which territorial identity is in danger of shortly being lost altogether, now that we're seeing the beginnings of a sort of instant traceability of the social body as well as of each of its members.

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I f the aerostatic form of sedentary human settlement was once geographically indexed, the aerodynamic form of excl usion, and of the expeled that now prevails over of the exploited of full employment, is not indexed at all.

Hidden behind freedom of movement and mass tourism, the HABITABLE CIRCULATION involved in the forced exile o f both the 'internally displaced persons' of African states and the 'delocalized persons' of developed countries merits more than j ust a cartography now. I t merits a constantly updated trajectography - a sort of PLANETARIUM of the flows of populations in permanent transit - if we are to attempt to trace this uncivilized choreography of the excluded, whose mortality rates never cease growing, beyond the chaos in moral val ues, to the point of extermination and genocide.

Here, a further comment springs to mind. If the political engagement of the responsible individual not long ago j oined forces with the brand of engagement promoted by Sartrian existentialism, we have to say that, in this era of mass individualism of a COMMUNISM OF AFFECTS that are synchronized, what prevails is being carried away, l'emportement. lhis, in both the literal and metaphorical senses of the term: as in the mobile and the portable, and in loss of selfcontrol. lhe acceleration of reality is now part and parcel of the loss of all self-control, when even the accelerating history of historical materialism still took its time - the time needed to get a sense of past history as well as the time involved in a radiant future that Soviet cosmism would try to get of the ground again once the USSR collapsed.

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