The Great Accelerator

N o one really travels; in fact, they flee, they escape a hated, stressful daily grind. lhe old HOME OF ONE'S OWN is now ON ONE, in the panoply of communicating objects, electronic trinkets, that yo u carry away wi th you, in this amicable divorce of repeat delocalization.

Is this due to the increase in life expectancy? We might note, whatever the case may be, that the divorce rate for people sixty years and older has risen by close to 30% for women and 40% for men . Also according to France's lnstitut nationale detudes demographiques (INED), it's worse for people in their fifties, as the rates have practically doubled.

Here again, we notice the same acceleration as wi th p ublic transport: for some, it's a case o� supersonic and shortly hypersupersonic flight; for others, express divorce. Since 45% o f marriages now end in divorce, we may as well simplify the usual procedure straight away and make the break of load between spouses even faster and cheaper with a l aw that specifically combats the inertia of husbands and wives, low-cost divorce trivializing the family saga of yore. lhat's why Rachida Dati's last proj ect, as Keeper of the Seals and Minister of J ustice, was to reform divorce so that a couple can now separate, subito presto, simply by coming before their notary. 1

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1 Le Monde, 16 August 2009.

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All of this makes i t feel as though, by endlessly shrinking - like the times involved in the ' turnover rate' from moving in to moving out - marriage is starting to last abo ut as long as what occurs i n 'play-acting', the 'edutainment' practice that is now nothing more than the staging of the contemporary loss of all sense of reality in this age of telecommunications and the instant delocalization they trigger.

Addiction to constant travel, like addiction to changing partners, is now part of the ill usory nature of the autonomy of the old way of life, the fashion for coaches taking over from the fashion for the spiritual advisers of religious orders or the master thinkers of totalitarian militantism.

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_I Libb·ation, 18 August 2009 .

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A striking example of this shift in communal sedentariness can be seen, right now, in the impact of the Internet on monastic life, particularly in women's convents where, to date, only 25 of France's surviving 270 monasteries are still resistant to using the WEB- despite 'the underhand imposition of a new pace of communication that is slipping into the spirit of monastic time', as a Cistercian monk from Hauterive points out.1

Yet everyone insists on the essential discrimination of each monk: '1he material enclosure is not an absolute; it is a means. 1he main question is rather: how to experience the relationship to the world (to the whole world instantaneously). 1he Internet forces us to have another look at our borders and to internalize that enclosure.'2

1he WEB, in fact, potentially opens all the doors and steps through all the gates of the monastic enclosure. Which is why the Benedictines of Bec-Hellouin Abbey took the initiative of organizing a session on the subject in the autumn of 2009.

As Dom Notker Wolf, primate of the order, noted: 'Detachment, silence and solitude, or else: the cul ture of CONNECTION and EVERYfHING, NOW. lhere is no more space to wait in, no more space in which to desire the infinite. In this cul ture, waiting is always negative. . . . I t means waiting for the end of an operation and not for an encounter.' Apropos the contemplative life of the convent, he concludes: 'We shouldn't so much regulate things based on virtual cul ture, but on monastic cul ture . ' 1

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1 ^La ^Croix, 7 ^October 2009.

₂ Ibid.

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I t's pointless t o add here that t h e sedentariness o f this spiritual cul ture matches, in all respects, the sedentariness behind the customary urbanity of the city and o f the fixed settlement of populations that were once nomadi, like the monks of earlier orders - the rule of Saint Benedict. lhose monks were also nomadic (gyrovague) and subject to unforeseen events in a meandering that was conducive to all kinds of deviant behaviour, contemplation for them being j ust a solitary form of prayer.

Lastly, we might mention that, once he was back fr<;>m the concentration camps, Primo Levi would spend hours in front of his computer

I lbid.

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screen without writing, or at his mother's bedside, waiting for night and the release of sleep, telling his friends and family over and over again, before throwing himself down the stairwell o f his home and killing himself: 'This is worse than at Auschwitz.'1

lhe end of private life is a new kind of poverty in terms of 'living conditions' and not j ust ' the cost of living' anymore. lhe contemporary drop in social standing implied by the emergence of a community of synchronized emotions turns into a disafiliation at once both familial and social that will eventually go 'national' and finally 'territorial', with the undermining o f the PlACE as well as the CONNECTION of common life. Right now we are seeing the first signs of a disafiliation that is animat with the blurring of MASCULINE and FEMININE genders inaugurating an imminent DEMATERNALIZATION o f women. No doubt that will end, tomorrow, in the disconnection o f reproduction from the. h uman race, a future 'post-sexuality' that will supposedly be so liberating for women as well as for their incredibly cumbersome pregnancy. lhe industrialization of life will then take over where the industrialization of death left of, in the camps where one Dr Mengele reigned supreme, incredibly preoccupied as he was with twin births and cloning.

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I Ernesto Ferrero, Primo Levi. L ecrivain au microscope. Paris: Liana Levi, 2009.

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In fact, the notion of a crime against humanity, elaborated nearly a century ago, no longer exclusively concerns the extermination of all or part of the human race - along the lines of the clinical genocide perpetrated by the Nazis, or even the atomic geocide of the Cold War period, with its balance of terror. It more simply concerns the ultimate endangering of our daily routines, of a 'way of life' that was, in the end, quite ordinary. In the near future, i f we're not careful, this will lead to a vitality made fundamentally uninhabitable by the excessiveness of an oppressive eagerness, a life without a ' user's manual', in the words of Georges Perec, an INFRA-ORDINARY vivacity - until biodiversity of the h uman kind is fi nally exhausted.

To illustrate this probable DISLOCATION in daily life, we might cite a case brought before the ind ustrial tribunal of Oyonnax, a town in the

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Ain region of France. In 2009, the tribunal had to examine a complaint ' for a violation of the right to a family life' brought by the employees of the ED supermarket, fired for refusing to work on S undays, failure to observe working ho urs and insubordination . lheir lawyer p u t it this way: 'Since there is no case law dealing with working on Sundays, we'll base our case on a ruling of the final Court of Appeal which says that, for night work, the salaried employee needs to have signed an agreement.' She concl udes, ' I t will actually be particularly in teresting to see if the industrial tribunal recognizes the RIG HT TO A FAMILY LIFE as a higher principle than the right to paid work. ' 1

Day and night, all through the week and on Sundays, twenty-four hours a day, seven. days a week . . . that's a way of life that has no directions for use, no mode d'emploi, other than the repetition of repetitive processes. After the forced localization of the age of de-industrialization, forced dislocation is getting under way to the rhythm of a Progress now openly unnatural . Meanwhile, the case would seem tricky to plead as the 'right to refuse', to ' civil conscientious objection' , has scarcely any reality as a legal entity.

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1 La Croix, 16 October 2009.

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Being suicidal was once a psychological state, b ut it can consequently turn sociological, when we deregulate the way we regulate time and its rhythms, their mode d'emploi, to the point of causing anxiety, the permanent anguish of communities, as is already happening in telecommunications companies where the harm done by stress has become fatal .

'We m ust insist that the future does not belong to fear', President Obama told the United Nations in his address o f September 2009 . He was talking about the maj or risks o f n uclear proliferation . B ut, more intimately, this statemen t should also apply to the issue of our mode de vie, our way of life, the everyday life of a period marked by precariousness and the instability of the TEMPO driving local communities in the grip of the fear caused by the devastating progress in interactive technology. That progress is nothing more than the progress of a deliriously b ustling eagerness, not to say a collective rage, triggered by a sudden panic that's turned into a PANDEMIC. A pandemic that has everything to do wi th the real ity efect o f acceleration of information and its sudden demands. For, the INSTANTANEITY of the disarray of each one of us will soon contaminate the way of life of all .

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So, after the rise o f MILITARY DETER-RENCE and its fall at the end o f the cold war, it would seem that the 'cold panic' of a world overexposed to maj or risks is beginning to be felt. These risks incl ude not only blind terrorism but also ecology and, especially, a tyrannical political economics, with the temptation, for certain fans of 'personal space', of launching what would this time amount to CIVIL DETERRENCE. lhe governance of public fear would then shift from the battlefield of the past to the marketplace. In other words, to an everyday life that will soon be made impossible, ravaged as i t is by the 'domestic terror' of each and every instant; the excess speed of the dashing tasks to be performed taking over from the crashes once involved in road accidents.

Isn't there already talk, here and there, of the future requirements for a SUSTAINABLE MOBILITY that will best ensure sustainable development? Big fans of management through stress, certain CEOs even claim that 'we can no longer let immobility set in', suggesting that the 'TIME TO MOVE' doctrine should be imposed throughout the globalized business firm. Everywhere you look, the 'broadband' of telecommunications is contaminating the use to which we put the week, its mode d'emploi, with the elimination of Sunday as a day-of followed by the elimination of the daily interruption of l unch. Imposition of the JUST-IN-TIME continuous day anticipates the inertia of the fatal instant and the unstoppable ofensive of the NANOCHRONOLOGIES, along the lines of the 'lightning crash' of 6 May 2010, when the wall ofW all Street suddenly crashed into the wall of money, the MONEY BARRIER, at precisely 2 . 2 5 pm.

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After the contin uum (of terrestrial spacetime), till now seen as the adjustment variable of our various activities, the dromospheric pressu re of technical progress now afects individuality throughout the whole panoply of populations subj ect to the death throes of instantaneous interactivity. For, this latest tyranny suddenly becomes the ultimate variable in a demographic adj ustment of profit. The quantitative Malthusianism of the past is now coupled with a qualitative Malthusianism, whereby the usuaJ ethnic racism will be rounded of by an 'Olympic' racism. Sports competitions and the feats of the latest 'stadium gods' will then abandon the podium for an on-the-spot race, opting for the inertia of those that telecommunications have locked up alive - in other words, the victims of electronic doping: the doping carried out by the cybernetic futurism of the global governance of humanity.

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