The Great Accelerator

In this sense, the COSMOTHEISM that is once again rampant in the West, in tandem with ecology and the desperate quest for an exoplanetary refuge, takes us back to the astronautical hallucinations that so cleverly masked the evident failure of 'progress' in the era of the balance o f atomic terror between the great Eastern and Western blocs.

By way of confirmation, we might point out that, at the end of J uly 2009, the very first ' I n ternational Extraterrestrial S ummit' took place in Barcelona. lhis was followed at the end of August that same year by a beefed-up edition of Operation Suricate, designed to track the trajectories of UFOs all over Europe, thanks to hundreds of telescopes trained on the firmament, in a bid to correlate sigh tings.

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Speaking of the contemplative nature of contemporary man , a j o urnalist j okingly p u t it this way: ' He's an exhibitionist who's been placed under observation in custody. '

Surrounded by his screens and subject to video control and the discipline of programs, as well as to the rules of in teractivi ty, this new PHOTOSENSITIVE being turns into a consenting victim of a progress that amp utates his private life, with electro-optical addiction to information more and more alienating him from his sense of sel f.

Hence the denial of engagement per se (political, syndicalist . . . ) in favour of an emportement - getting carried away, rage - that only mass individualism has the knack of, where once collectivism merely imposed engagement, the fact of having only one party facilitating the lack of any 'conscientious obj ection'!

lhe inertia of the photosensitive onlooker thus corresponds to the mutation of the traveller and the fi.1rtive gliding of a mode of private 'automobile' transport, that mode of public transport involved in the mass exodus of interconnected individual ities .

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With naval or aeronautical BULK CARIERS, GROS PORTEURS, or, better still, MERES PORTEUSES, surrogate mothers carrying out gestation for others, the constant expansion of the carrying capacity of o ur various vehicles does indeed flag the sudden shift in travel, which was solitary not so long ago but will soon be embarked on (embedded) communally as we head to uncertain destinations where speed becomes a kind of destiny.

Here, we might note a new type o f highly manoeuvrable transport plane that is particularly revelatory of the coming revol ution in haulage. lhe SKYLANDER, manufactured in France, is a veritable LAND ROVER of the sky, capable of operating in dificult conditions and hostile environments, with maximum payloads and flight ranges. Canada's TWIN OTTER, said to be a 'rustic aircraft', is also a versatile twin-engine turboprop that can take on freight or passengers as required in conditions of rudimentary comfort, where passengers travel standing up, like cattle in a cattle truck, while awaiting further, even more radical, developments.

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B ut let's get back to the case of the 'surrogate mother', so brilliantly analysed by the French philosopher Sylviane Agacinski. 'This living tool, this metabolical vehicle, 'trivializes pregnancy, which is reduced to simple foetal transport, certain women now even being seen as akin to chartered planes that can efect a sort of co-cartage for others'. 1

lhese are all so many panicky signs of the imminent end of a private life deprived of all 'filial ' identity, from birth on; and when we come of age, we can expect to see ourselves deprived also of any 'terri torial ' identi ty, in situ, by the biopolitical requirement of unending 'social ' traceability. lhe imperatives of ecological security in this latest LEBENSRA UM will also necessitate the same control over distribution to the detriment o f stocks and of the historical accumulation of civil law and the 'rights o f man' that still, until recen tly, prevailed. lhis is why we're seeing the gradual disappearance of self-control and the medical evacuation, by airlift, of the old way o f life, with its customary urbani ty following on from peasant life, that life lived from day to day, to the rhythm of the seasons, in a way the nanochronological acceleration of the interactive instant no longer allows.

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1 Sylviane Agacinski, Corps en miettes. Paris: Flammarion, 2.009 .

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Over the course of the 1920s, writer Joseph Roth sensed the deeper significance of the style of architecture known as 'the international style', in which the culling of ornament, as well as of vol umes, came with the hygienist myth of maxim um sunlight and transparency for housing. lhe SHOP WINDOW was poised to be raised into a GLASS BUILDING, causing all intimacy to be lost to inhabitants overexposed to the eyes of all, the loss of the temporal bearings of daily l i fe being accompanied by a disorientation in the rhythms of life. lhe lighting of towns, at nigh t, was to be further rounded of by the elimination of load-bearing wal ls, wi th the 'curtain wal l ' and automatic blinds serving as shutters for the 'cameras l ucidas' of an era in which the snapsho^t would shortly overcome the hold of long-term durations and the purely pi·omotional MED IA BU ILD ING would even illuminate the public space of the city, as in Times Square.

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Within this same order of ideas of a coming ' post-intimacy', we might note how joint tenancy is gradually turning into a mode of coexistence these days. For often quite diferent reasons, then, we are seeing the revival of the Soviet utopia o f the 'communal household' and the shared apartment - these so-called SOCIAL CONDENSERS for which the futurist architect, Melnikov, provided the theory.

Through economic necessity, given the costs of renting, people now boast on the Internet of the concept of a ' unit of collective life', as the Partage-Senior (Sharing for Seniors) Association indicates: 'A mixed nest of four or five people and what you get i� quite a diferent ambiance where j oint tenants feel freer.'

A woman who runs a similar association goes as far as tel ling j o urnalists that: 'Joint tenancy is the world's best anti-depressant .

Other organizations go even further in this disorientation of the old way of life, ofering a 'life plan aboard a sailing ship' tailored to seniors who might fancy an open-ended trip around the world . . . Between container ships, where illegal immigrants stow away at the risk of their lives, and these l uxury cruises for tourists of desolation, who fritter away the inheritance so they can live permanently on an ocean liner since that turns out to be less expensive in the end than a decent retirement home, there is all the diference in the world - the diference between the headlong Hight of the desperate and sheer ambulatory madness.

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I n the same category of gyration as that performed by the GYROW A YES of exodus, these new wandering monks of no fixed abode, we might cite an eccentric practice that typifies the new form of travel for people in endless transit. Couch surfing is a mode of hospitality that consists in ofering free accommodation in your own home to travellers met over the Internet. With these j oint tenan ts for a night, the guest room turns into a room in a guest house for strangers.

To travel, to comb the world without having to part with any cash thanks to hitch-hiking and some couch-surfer network - that was the aim o f an idealist initiative launched i n 1949, after the Second World War, by Gary Davis, that apostle of a globalized citizenship which has today been cunningly diverted from its peaceful objectives.

Hotelier or Hospitaller o f the Net? With couchsurfing, the bl urring of genres is clear. Intimacy, once sought out of a sense of propriety, seems to be mistaken for concealment, as though of some shameful disease . . .

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All this reproduces fairly faithfully the excesses of telesurveillance, initially limited to the space of streets and other places of transit, then introd uced into the common parts of buildings, car parks or entrance halls.

Here again, the transparency of public space followed by private spaces leads to the transappearance of the intercom, or security phone, and its camera.

Another example of this is the recent growth in the MEGALOSCOPY of Google Earth, with i ts research engine, Google Maps, aiming to visualize the entire world. Following the use o f observation satell i tes, the firm is developing Google Street, using a specialized car in streetby-street reconnaissance of cities - and setting of a whole debate on respect for private life in doing so. In the face of resistance at local council level, Google decided to launch Street View, using bicycles that are each equipped with a GPS and cameras to film France and other countries. lheir incredibly diverse landscapes will then be digitized to feed Google's giant mapping project.

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Why don't we take this deadly OVER-EXPOSURE of private life that �s now spreading as far as the eye can see j ust a li ttle bit further? Imagine that, following on from the fixed cameras set up at major in tersections to ensure road trafic safety or at the entrances to buildings to ensure security, couch surfi ng is already taking us to the next, the ul timate, level of revelation . lhis is where the Google Home inspector turns up on your doorstep, covered in portable cameras designed to reveal to all and sundry the level of comfort o f the bathrooms on ofer to low-budget tourists benefitting from the hospitality of the Internet's social networks!

'The acceleration of History is disturbing. We're forced to call ourselves into question much more ro utinely than i n the past. [ _{. . .} ] lhe shifting present causes great anxiety. O ur sense of the everyday is swept away by a feeling of inevitability. lhat feeling amounts to a kind of collective depression.' So said Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, France's then Secretary of State for Strategic Planning, in the summer of 2009 . But talking of 'depression' isn't saying much . Wherever acceleration of the reality of the moment prevails over acceleration of the history of the famous 'shiftip.g presen t', what is called into question, at every instant, is the real presence o f people and things that, only yesterday, seemed to lastingly surround us. As an elderly friend, whose young wife never stopped travelling, sadly confessed to me once: 'She doesn 't travel to forget she's j ust used to not seemg me anymore.

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With the exodus of societies tha t have once again become dispersed, travel is a form of widowhood or widowerhood that encourages each and every one of us to no longer see what once tied us to, rooted us in, a common past, country, neighbourhood, neighbours, family or spouse. lhis is also what the end of private life is, this endless translation of the intimacy of the sedentary homebody into the extimacy of transportation wh�reby. the traveller is not so much a new nomad as a pas:­ senger in the middle of getting a divorce, carried away by the inevitability of everyday exile . .. .

To try to facilitate reconciliation proceedings, a company in Brussels called Fasten Seat Belts airs on airport screens a series o f video clips in �enty languages. lhe clips are designed to make . 'good manners' easier to achieve in foreign couhtries, with j ust a few key phrases . . . As th e woinan in charge of the proj ect poi n ts out: ' I t's funny, people are travelling more and more, but some of them behave exactly as they do at home. 1hey' re always in shorts and thongs and only speak their native language.' 1

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