The Great Accelerator

lhis is the reason for the successive disafiliations mentioned above, with the probable decline in poli tics and the geopoli tics of place as wel l as of social connection, in situ and hie et nunc, in favour of simultaneity and its teleobjective ubiquity. It is also the reason for the 'progressive externalization of connections of all kinds and the repetitive delocalization of common space and public services - in other words of the democratic city, as we learned about it through the history of settlement.

And so, after the disintegration of matter through nuclear fission, we are now looking on, powerless or as good as, at the early stages of the disintegration of the historical transition of past time and at the fusion/ confusion of the shareholder in this COMMUNION OF THE SAINTS ofinteractivity's global brain . lhe social body suddenly metamorphoses into a sort of mystical body of humanity perfected, with the DROMOSPHERE of acceleration standing in, in extremis, for the NOOSPHERE, the sphere of human thought of God's elect, according to T eilhard de Chardin, himself a victim of the great 'brainwashing' of the propaganda of Progress.

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

64

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

6;

The G reat Accelerator

Arrival of o l d , you will go eve rywhere. Rimbaud , 'To a Reaso n

C i rcu it, sho rt-ci rcu i t - there i s n o circus without a ci rcle, the kukloJ of Ancient G reece and the O lympic cyclades of the acceleratio n of old! In 2009, a year after the launch , in the m iddle of the economic crisis, of the G reat Accelerator, that CATHEDRAL built by C ERN in Geneva, a circular TEM PLE b uilt for the last lap of the Formula 1 world championship opened in Abu D h a b i - that is, i n the m i ddle o f the desert .

Speed of light for the fans of physi cs and of the HAD RON , the particle known as ' G od's panicle' and sought i n vai n even then, C ERN' s collider having b roken down . . . Light of speed for the designers of the Abu Dhabi racetrack according to who m ' th i s circu it is the o nly one in the wo rld designed so spectato rs have a full view' , the D RO M O LOG ICAL prowess so vainly sought by the physicists o f the infi nitely small was coupled here - o ne year later - with a p rowess that is D ROMOSCO PIC, by supporters of the infinitely big o f the spectacle of acceleratio n . Th is, at a time when the automob ile was being 'scrapped', in F rance, i n a bid t o restart an i ndust ry that ' s in the dold ru m s . . .

66

' I f t i m e is money, you might as well gai n both!' Th is slogan o f a low-bu dget airline co mpany couldn 't better describe the current state of mind for addicts of a great financial casino, wh ich is itself in crisis . O n II J une 2 0 1 0 , i t imposed on Wall S treet a C I RCUIT-BREAKER system for the markets of high-frequency flash trading, in a bid to avoid a repeti tion of the lightning crash that th rew the stock exchange into a sp in on 6 M ay 201 0, at precisely 2 . 2 5 pm.

After G eneral Moto rs went bankrupt, Toyota M otors was so b adly shaken by the crisis th at it announced its immediate withdrawal from Formula 1 racing and gave up hosting J apan's

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

67

2010 G rand Prix, at i ts Mo unt F uj i circui t , i n o rder to co m m i t itself t o fi n di ng fresh solutions to the problems of do mestic mob ility.

This is what a special correspondent from the newspaper, Le Figaro, had to say about the 'Tokyo M otor Show' :

' I'd never tested a new model on a showroom carpet before . Yet it was on the eighth Boor of an ofice block that I was initiated i nto the future of d riving in an i REAL; this single-seater veh icle certainly makes do with very little room [sic] , the equivalent of a comfortable armchair mounted on th ree wheels . ' 1

I f the Japanese motor company is having trouble attracting younger generations to the car, it is now efectively lau nching itself into the more restrained mobility of adults and especially seniors. Being longstanding consumers of domestic automobility already, why wouldn't seniors turn out to b e tomorrow's great fans of ' these electric single-seaters that can go on the footpath , if not inside an apartment bu ild ing and even take the l i ft ' ? 2

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

1 L e Figttro, 30 October 2009.

2 Ibid.

68

H ence the invention of this orthopaedic prosthesis ai med at the senio rs m arket, a m arket that wil l , tomo rrow, explode throughout the industrial ized wo rl d . That prospect fo r growth wil l be part and parcel of a vogue in stacks of very h igh buildings, these TOWERS that are al ready poking up in the tens of thousands in J apanese and Chinese cities, such as Chongqing, with i ts thirty million inhabitants. N icknamed FOG CITY, Chongqing is one of the most polluted cities on the planet. These days its ce ntre is cluttered with hundreds of wrecks of abandoned taxis.

D readed by men in perfect health , with the so aptly named i Real , the wheelchai r for cripples t u rn s into a som ewhat fatal sol ution to the wreck of the city to come and to the failure of tomo rrow's concentration camp-like world city.

With the recent p ro motion of th i s m isidentified travelling object, the fundamentally INCAPACITATING nature of the technical progress behind this 'p iece of furn iture on wheels' is o bvious and echoes the biblical fables of the blind man and the paralytic.

The i Real engi ne is actually driven by hand, thanks to two buttons like the ones used in video games: 'No reverse, you J USt turn hard left or righ t and swivel round o n the sp o t . I t ' s as simple as a video-game console and requires only small movements of the right o r left wrist . As fo r speed, that's lim ited to 6 km an hour, but a rap id-speed setting o f up to 3 0 km an hour i s available ! ' 1

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

69

We are, obviously, far here from the straight line of the Abu D habi speedway on which si ngleseaters travel at over 300 km an h o ur. B ut we're every b it as far , i t wo uld seem , from the r oo m world record of Usain Bolt who , with his own two legs, ran at over 37 km an hour on average aro und the Berlin stadium track during the wo rld athletic championships o n 1 5 August 2009 - the ' feast of the Assu mptio n ' !

I f not exactly rising up i nto the sky, t h e stadium god here is like the H ermes of myth , that god of travellers b u t also of thieves, cheats, the issue of doping remaining today u nresolved for the whole array of sports feats i n these days of the paralympic exploits o f genetic engi neering of GMOs.

Wh ere And re Gorz once condem ned INCAPAC ITATING occupations as being likely to lead to auto mation and a structu ral unemployment that would be final and no longer cyclical, we note that it's now the ' p rogressives' o f all stri pes that are accusing galloping auto mation of cri mes agai nst humanity. Such widespread automatio n no longer leads to anything but inenia, the paralysis b rought on by a so-called improvement in productivity whereby the human body tends to lose, o ne by one, the characteristics of the AN I MAL realm that once distinguished man from plant and mi neral !

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

1 L e Figaro, 30 October 2009 .

70

' It's our souls we need to change, not the climate' , prescribed Seneca, that apostle of an ecology of the movi ng being, this living bei ng whose anima is obviously not a 'genus', as sex is fo r some people, but a real m - the realm of a species endowed with the movement o f bei ng, whe re ' m arriage is when you espo use travel' 1 • • especially when the latter is circular!

In fact, the historic expansion of the accelerating sphere of our physical activities - once so rich in experiences, with the language of dance and the choreography of voyages of in itiation in which we set out to discover the vastness of our own world - today leads to the law of least action of cybernetic interactivity. I n other words, to the 'moment of i nertia' of instantaneous i n teractio n and, so, to postu ral d isab i l i ty , the u nsee n loss of the first o f our freedoms, the freedom of movement that characterized the h uman race.

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

1 A Canadian proverb .

71

So, anticipating the development of the NANOTECHNOLOG IES of the infinitely small of 'p rogress' , b ut also the development of the NANOCH RONOLOG I ES of the infinitely short-term of cybernetic instantaneity - in o ther words, the definitive powerlessness of our awareness of the facts and of our judgement of values in the face of the sudden metamo rphosis of our environment - we still have to figu re out the actual nature of our responsib il ity regarding the 'polluti on' caused by technological progress, as well as by the exhaustion of the chrono-diversity of the i nstant, an instant from now on not so much present as absent fro m our awareness of our behaviours.

Just after attempting to commit suicide, Catherine Kokoszka, the head of the Paris department of legal p rotection of mi nors, wrote:

'Anything that goes too fast drives you insane, destroys you . I almost died because I spent my life at my j o b , quite convinced I was upholdi ng the ed ucational val u es o f the insti tuti o n . I alm o st died of the deafness of an i nstitution that didn't understand that everyth ing was goi ng roo fast, so fast we could no longer keep up [ . . . ] and that the acceleration of change was undermining the institution's educational mission and producing abuse . The infernal machine presses on, alas, without worrying about h uman beings.' 1

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

72

I ncapacitating occupation yesterday, abusive administration today. To morrow, what will happen when the CYBERWO RLD has once and for all subverted the space and time, the cont i nuum, o f our fate? Yet no one is worrying about that particular tsunami , or about the dro mospheric p ressure already overwhelming pop ulations i n distress. People are merely being sensitized to the dangers of atmospheric pressure, of climate change, of a thoroughly contaminated world. No one is ever concerned about being locked up behind the dosed doors of the cyclotron of cybernetics.

In an important report on stress at wo rk handed to the F rench government in the autumn of

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

I L e Monde, � Novem ber 2009 .

73