The Great Accelerator

Paul Virilio
Translated by Julie Rose

Too Late for Private Life

Communism hasn't disappeared, it's been privatized. Marius Oprea

Mode de vie (lifestyle) and cardiac rhythms (heart beats), mode de 11itesse (speed mode) and technical
rhythmics (technical cycles) -that, in a nutshell, is the question posed by the TEMPO of our use of time and space in a vitality that was once run-of-the-mill but is now suffering from every day life's electrotechnical ARHYTHMIA which never stops rocking people's consciences. The old calendar-based systems of agrar ian societies, their seasonal rhythms, have long yielded to the systems and rhythms of
3!

polity

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

industrialization and the mass population shifts from the country to the towns. This process has, by the same token, abolished the remainder of the West's Christian rituals, with public holidays dwindling as the programmed end of lifetime employment - the practice of open-ended work contracts - spreads, along with structural unem ployment. It has reached the point of pure and simple elimination of the weekly cycle now that Sunday has been subverted as a day of rest and the much-toured seven-days-a-week (7/7) made imperative. Annual and seasonal not so long ago, weekly and daily after that, this truly historic rhythmics was to be given a fatal blow by the cybernetic information revolution. For, the acceleration of common reality swiftly makes practical life, everyday life and not just social or family life, impossible. 1his has recently resulted in the atom ization, the sudden 'fractalization' of social units which, beyond the risks of 'communitarianism', entails the incomparably more serious risks of an emotional SYNCHRONIZATION that will lead to a 'communism of affects' on the scale of a planet reduced to nothing, where the real time of 'cyber' instantaneity will, this time, finally
32

overtake the real space of the time differences and time distances involved in our indispensa ble relationship with the world. Desocialization will thereby extend people's current mental and emotional disorientation. Media pressure already notoriously ends up exposing the private lives of select individuals, politicians, celebrities, 'top-tier' sportsmen, even of that avant-garde of progressivism, the present ers of nightly newscasts. Here, we might note, the doping of television audiences is no longer chemical but electro-optical and it has reached the point where the usual simulation of the virtual world of screens is enhanced by the rhyth mical excess of a stimulation that mentally and emotionally shakes people once so attentive to the hours of the day and the months of the civil year that successfully replaced the new year of the historical calendar system and the h;ly year of the jubilees of yore. One particular presenter, a woman, put it this way: 'My objective is to feel that I'm always alive, to not become mummified. But I don't know if I can keep up the pace for much longer. I know that if I'd worked less, I'd have had a second child. That will always be my great
33

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

regret. But current affairs are forever wearing us down.'1 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 'journalists', who've suddenly segued into 'instantaneists'. Tomorrow, it will affect each and every one of us, transforming the ordinary life of sedentarized societies, here or there, into an 'infra-ordinary' life. For, the pho tosensitive inertia of viewers will shortly catch up with that of their favourite presenters, the inertia of the real instant of the newsflash standing in for the fixed-property inertia of their domiciliation. l11e delocalization of our use of space, lemploi de l'espace, will be doubled by disorientation in our use of time, l'emploi du temps, in a daily life once given rhythm by the alternation of days and nights, and now shattered by the breaks in rhythm caused by an entirely denatured acrobatic vitality. It's as if the end of lifetime employment, with
r

'Audrey Pulvar enfourche une nouvelle vie', in Paris Match,

22 July 2009.

its very long durations and its professional con straints, 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 of progress, but mere onlookers, consumers of the background noise of an INTERREACTIV1TY that takes the place of the INTERMEDIATION of the employees of the not so distant past. So, employment as a way of life, a mode de vie, is superseded by life as a user's manual, Ia vie mode d'emploi, as Georges Perec would say, for a new kind of provisional society, one exces sively instrumentalized and endlessly incited to overreact to this or that signal, all the diverse stimuli of a permanent state of alarm. In that state, the instantaneity of what crops up unex pectedly will doubtless condition the putting into a trance not of the citizen-soldier anymore but of a citizen-subject, within 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
35

34

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

inertia. The 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 panopti cal surveillance turns out to have been nothing more than a clinical symptom of the imminent obliteration of any private life. Here, a further comment is needed. In the past, with the rule of Saint Benedict of Nursia, the sequestration of the monastic order suc ceeded the roaming of the wanderers of the apostate, with the Roman Church distinguish ing 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 anony mous mass of 'contemplatives', these Francisan friars riveted to their screens the way monks were once riveted to their breviaries, with our secu lar but interconnected societies once and for all sorting the sheep from the goats. Here again, the (emotional) polar inertia that results from instantaneity and synchronization

tends to supplant domiciliary inertia and the geo graphic localization of a social body already in a state of advanced decay where mass individu alism wreaks its havoc. For, the photosensitive inertia of the mass of progress's contemplatives and the delocalization of their activities are noth ing more than fatal signs of the disorientation in what Perec would call the mode d'emploi of their daily life. Here, too, comparison with the religious orders is fruitful. The liturgy, 'the acts of the people', contemporary with the third millen nium, revives, as though in secret, the liturgies of the people of believers. But where the Church of Christendom managed to create an equality based on Faith within a wide diversity of living conditions and spiritual riches thanks to the stat ics 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 revolution in transport, and especially in com puter transmissions, has abolished this form of social unity - in favour of the synchronization of common sensations. In this INTERACTIVE COMMUNISM, the real instant of audiovisual telecommunications dominates the all-too-real
37

!.

. 1
l1 j) ,, lj
i]
:i 'i

if! ljl

" li

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

II
i!

space of social communications, and the stand ardization of religious beliefs and behaviours is erased thanks to the simultaneity of common feel ing, with the 'community of interests' shared by all now yielding its political primacy to this com munity of emotion based on an individualism that is fundamentally rranspolitical. This phenomenon is further aggravated by the evolution of a culture and, ;wiftly 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, la folie de voir. This entails having to see at all costs - to the detriment of hearing, as well as of handling, of touch, tactility, as well as of contact. On this score, it's time for an anecdote, the one about Richard Wagner putting his hands over his girlfriend, his lover, Mal vida's eyes, while they were listening to Tristan and shouting at her: 'Stop looking so hard and listen!' Ever since its Greco-Larin origins, in fact, Western philosophy has been primarily a phi losophy of vision, of the various kinds of light and the forms presented to searching eyes. That

has produced today's cult, this technocult of the speed of light and of the waves that convey infor mation that has now gone MEGALOSCOPIC. It is also what's behind the retinal persist ence 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, toget backtothe EuropeanPHILOFOLLY of seeing, Westerners, and especially Latin Europeans, like Latin-Americans, need public passions. After the great passion of triumphant Christianity, it seems they opted for the great passion of a Progress that was to end, last cen tury, in the very brief passion for speeding up the history of the twentieth centUiy. The 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 ter restrial gravity - first by Sputnik, then by the MIR station that signalled that cosmism's failure and disappearance. The TURBOCAPITALISM of the Single Market then took over in the age
39

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

of international economic integration thanks to the very latest 'escape velociry', 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. 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 star a star or, more precisely, a nightspot, that some would now like to see back on the agenda, despite President Obama's rejection of the idea. One thing's for sure and that is that it's now roo late to have a private life. Yesterday's 'solitary' crowds, who we're rold are now so 'smart', are nothing more than hordes primed for a long haul exodus, OUT-OF-THIS-WORLD exile beyond our 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.

Nowadays, unlike in the industrial 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 dry-dweller are now being over taken by the real instant's devastating inertia or, more precisely, its moment of inertia, in an INTERACTIVE simultaneity that shakes up all settling down, any deep-rootedness. On that score, note that the very first law of urbanism is: retention of the site. At this stage in the history of human, but also urban, settlement, 'territorial insecurity' is at an all-time high and the territo rial 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. The old politics of the droit du sol, the right to citizenship, gives way all of a sudden in the face of the exor bitant privileges of a sort of AEROPOLITICS, which is not only ecological but economic. This

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

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 sovereignty of nations gradually disappearing. What shoots to the fore instead is a META-GEOPHYSICAL politics for nations that are 'stateless', or as good as, now that the correligionists of humanity's SERVOMOTOR are joining forces with those of a computerized PANTHEISM. Gaia, the Earth Goddess of triumphant ecology, is already a symptom of this. With the revolution in the financial industry and its mathematical models leading to the sys temic chaos we're all only too familiar with and, in this age of an anthropocentrism that is wreak ing 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 of humanity in which territorial identity is in danger of shortly being lost altogether, now that
42

we're seeing the beginnings of a sort of instant traceability of the social body as well as of each of its members. If the aerostatic form of sedentary human settlement was once geographically indexed, the aerodynamic form of exclusion, and of the expelled 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 of both the 'internally displaced persons' of African states and the 'delo calized persons' of developed countries merits more than just a cartography now. It 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 values, to the point of extermination and genocide. Here, a further comment springs to mind. If the political engagement of the responsi ble individual not long ago joined forces with the brand of engagement promoted by Sartrian existentialism, we have to say that, in this era of
43

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

mass individualism of a COMMUNISM OF AFFECTS that are synchronized, what prevails is being carried away, l'emportement. This, in both the literal and metaphorical senses of the term: as in the mobile and the portable, and in loss of self control. The 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 radi ant future that Soviet cosmism would try to get off the ground again once the USSR collapsed. In this sense, the COSMOTHEISM that is once again rampant in the West, in tandem with ecology and the desperate quest for an exoplan etary refuge, takes us back to the astronautical hallucinations that so cleverly masked the evi dent failure of 'progress' in the era of the balance of atomic terror between the great Eastern and Western blocs. By way of confirmation, we might point out that, at the end of July 2009, the very first 'International Extraterrestrial Summit' took place in Barcelona. This was followed at the end of August that same year by a beefed-up edi tion of Operation Suricare, designed to track the
44

trajectories of UFOs all over Europe, thanks to hundreds of telescopes trained on the firmament, in a bid to correlate sighrings. Speaking of the contemplative nature of contem porary man, a journalist jokingly put 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 interactivity, this new PHOTOSENSITIVE being turns into a consent ing victim of a progress that amputates his private life, with electro-optical addiction to information more and more alienating him from his sense of self. Hence the denial of engagement per se (politi cal, syndicalist . . . ) in favour of an emportement getting carried away, rage - that only mass individualism has the knack of, where once col lectivism merely imposed engagement, the fact of having only one party facilitating the lack of any 'conscientious objection'!
-

1he inertia of the photosensitive onlooker thus corresponds to the mutation of the traveller and
45

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

the furtive gliding of a mode of private 'auto mobile' transport, that mode of public transport involved in the mass exodus of interconnected individualities. With naval or aeronautical BULK CARRIERS, GROS PORTEURS, or, better still, MERES PORTEUSES, surrogate mothers carrying out gestation for others, the constant expansion of the canying capacity of our 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 uncer tain destinations where speed becomes a kind of destiny. , Here, we might note a new type of highly manoeuvrable transport plane that is particularly revelatory of the coming revolution in haulage. The SKYLANDER, manufactured in France, is a veritable LANDROVER of the sky, capable of operating in difficult conditions and hostile envi ronments, with maximum payloads and flight ranges. Canada's TWIN OTTER, said to be a 'rustic aircraft', is also a versatile twin-engine tur boprop 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. But let's get back to the case of the 'surrogate mother', so brilliantly analysed by the French phi losopher 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 effect a sort of co-cartage for others'.1 These 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 'territorial' identity, in situ, by the biopolitical requirement of unending 'social' traceability. The imperatives of ecological secu rity in this latest LEBENSRAUM will also necessitate the same control over distribution to the detriment of stocks and of the historical accu mulation of civil law and the 'rights of man' that still, until recently, prevailed. This is why we're seeing the gradual disappearance of self-control and the medical evacuation, by airlift, of the old
1 Sylviane Agacinski, Corps en rniettes. Paris: Flammarion,
2009.

47

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

way of life, with its customary urbanity 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. 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 volumes, came with the hygienist myth of maxi mum sunlight and transparency for housing. The 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 life being accompanied by a disorientation in the rhythms of life. The lighting of towns, at night, was to be further rounded off by the elimina tion of load-bearing walls, with the 'curtain wall' and automatic blinds serving as shutters for the 'cameras lucidas' of an era in which the snapshot would shortly overcome the hold of long-term durations and the purely piomotional MEDIA BUILDING would even illuminate the public space of the city, as in Times Square.

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 different reasons, then, we are seeing the revival of the Soviet utopia of 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 is quite a different ambiance where joint tenants feel freer.' A woman who runs a similar association goes as far as telling journalists that: 'Joint tenancy is the world's best anti-depressant.' Other organizations go even further in this disorientation of the old way of life, offering 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 luxury cruises for tourists of desolation,
49

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

THE GREAT ACCELERA.TOR

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 difference in the world - the difference between the head long flight of the desperate and sheer ambulatory madness. In the same category of gyration as that per formed by the GYROWAYES 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 con sists in offering free accommodation in your own home to travellers met over the Internet. With these joint tenants 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 of an idealist initiative launched in 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 of the Net? With couch surfing, the blurring 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 . . . All this reproduces fairly faithfully the excesses of telesurveillance, initially limited to the space of streets and other places of transit, then intro duced 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 transap pearance of the intercom, or security phone, and its camera. Another example of this is the recent growth in the MEGALOSCOPY of Google Earth, with its research engine, Google Maps, aiming to visualize the entire world. Following the use of observation satellites, the firm is developing Google Street, using a specialized car in street by-street reconnaissance of cities - and setting off a whole debate on respect for private life in doing so. In the face of resistance at local coun cil level, Google decided to launch Street View, using bicycles that are each equipped with a GPS and cameras to film France and other countries. Their incredibly diverse landscapes will then be digitized to feed Google's giant mapping project.
5!

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

Why don't we take this deadly OVER EXPOSURE of private life that is now spreading as far as the eye can see just a little bit further? Imagine that, following on from the fixed cam eras set up at major intersections to ensure road traffic safety or at the entrances to buildings to ensure security, couch surfing is already taking us to the next, the ultimate, level of revelation. This 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 of the bathrooms on offer 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 routinely than in the past. [ ] The shifting present causes great anxiety. Our sense of the everyday is swept away by a feeling of inevitabil ity. That 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 accel eration of the reality of the moment prevails over
. . .

acceleration of the history of the famous 'shifting present', what is called into question, at every instant, is the real presence of 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 just used to not . seemg me anymore. ' With the exodus of societies that have once again become dispersed, travel is a form of widow hood 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, neigh bourhood, neighbours, family or spouse. This is also what the end of private life is, this endless translation of the intimacy of the sedentary home body into the extimacy of transportation whereby 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 of video clips in twenty languages. The clips are designed to make 'good manners' easier to achieve in foreign countries, with just a few key phrases ... As the woman
53

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

in charge of the project points out: 'It's funny, people are travelling more and more, but some of them behave exactly as they do at home. They're always in shorts and thongs and only speak their native language.'1 No one really travels; in fact, they flee, they escape a hated, stressful daily grind. The old HOME OF ONE'S OWN is now ON ONE, in the panoply of communicating objects, elec tronic trinkets, that you carry away with 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 sixry years and older has risen by close to 30% for women and 40% for men. Also according to France's Institut 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 with public transport: for some, it's a case of supersonic and shortly hypersupersonic flight; for others, express divorce. Since 45/o of marriages now end in divorce, we may as well simplifY
r

the usual procedure straight away and make the break of load between spouses even faster and cheaper with a law that specifically combats the inertia of husbands and wives, low-cost divorce trivializing the family saga of yore. That's why Rachida Dati's last project, as Keeper of the Seals and Minister of Justice, was to reform divorce so that a couple can now separate, subito presto, simply by coming before their notary. 1 All of this makes it feel as though, by end lessly shrinking - like the times involved in the 'turnover rate' from moving in to moving out - marriage is starting to last about as long as what occurs in 'play-acting', the 'edutainment' practice that is now nothing more than the stag ing 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 illusory 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.
I

Le Monde, r6 August

2009.

Liberation,

18

August

2009.

54

55

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

A striking example of this shift in commu nal sedentariness can be seen, right now, in the impact of the Internet on monastic life, particu larly in women's convents where, to date, only 25 of France's surviving 270 monasteries are still resistant to using the WEB - despite 'the under hand 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 discrimi nation of each monk: 'The material enclosure is not an absolute; it is a means. The main question is rather: how to experience the relationship to the world (to the whole world instantaneously). The Internet forces us to have another look at our borders and to internalize that enclosure.'2 The WEB, in fact, potentially opens all the doors and steps through all the gates of the monas tic enclosure. Which is why the Benedictines of Bec-Hellouin Abbey took the initiative of organ izing 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 culture of CONNECTION and EVERYTHING, NOW. There is no more space to wait in, no more space in which to desire the infinite. In this culture, waiting is always neg ative. . . . It 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 culture, but on monastic culture.'1 It's pointless to add here that the sedentariness of this spiritual culture matches, in all respects, the sedentariness behind the customary urbanity of the city and of the fixed settlement of popula tions that were once nomadi, like the monks of earlier orders - the rule of Saint Benedict. Those monks were also nomadic (gyrovague) and subject to unforeseen events in a meandering that was conducive to all kinds of deviant behaviour, con templation for them being just a solitary form of prayer. Lastly, we might mention that, once he was back from the concentration camps, Primo Levi would spend hours in from of his computer
I

La Croix) Ibid.

{bid.

57

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

screen without writing, or at his mother's bed side, waiting for night and the release of sleep, telling his friends and family over and over again, before throwing himself down the stairwell of his home and killing himself: "Ibis is worse than at Auschwitz.'1 The end of private life is a new kind of poverty in terms of 'living conditions' and not just 'the cost of living' anymore. The contemporary drop in social standing implied by the emergence of a community of synchronized emotions turns into a disaffiliation at once both familial and social that will eventually go 'national' and finally 'ter ritorial', with the undermining of the PIACE as well as the CONNECTION of common life. Right now we are seeing the first signs of a dis affiliation that is animal, with the blurring of MASCULINE and FEMININE genders inaugu rating an imminent DEMATERNALIZATION of women. No doubt that will end, tomorrow, in the disconnection of reproduction from the human race, a future 'post-sexuality' that will
ope. Paris: Ernesto Ferrero, Primo Levi. L Ccrivain au microsc Liana Levi, 2009.
I

supposedly be so liberating for women as well as for their incredibly cumbersome pregnancy. 1he industrialization of life will then take over where the industrialization of death left off, in the camps where one Dr Mengele reigned supreme, incredibly preoccupied as he was with twin births and cloning. In fact, the notion of a crime against humanity, elaborated nearly a century ago, no longer exclu sively 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, if we're not careful, this will lead ro 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 human kind is finally exhausted. To illustrate this probable DISLOCATION in daily life, we might cite a case brought before the industrial tribunal of Oyonnax, a town in the
59

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

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 Sundays, failure to observe working hours and insubordination. Their lawyer put 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 concludes, 'It will actually be particularly interesting to see if the industrial tribunal recognizes the RIGHT 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 direc tions for use, no mode d'emploi, other than the repetition of repetitive processes. After the forced localization of the age of de-industriali zation, forced dislocation is getting under way to the rhythm of a Progress now openly unnatu ral. Meanwhile, the case would seem tricky to
1

La Croix, 16 October 2009.

plead as the 'right to refuse', to 'civil conscien tious objection', has scarcely any reality as a legal entity. Being suicidal was once a psychological state, but it can consequently turn sociological, when we deregulate the way we regulate time and its rhythms, their mode demploi, to the point of causing anxiety, the permanent anguish of communities, as is already happening in telecom munications companies where the harm done by stress has become fatal. 'We must insist that the future does not belong to fear', President Obama told the United Nations in his address of September 2009. He was talking about the major risks of nuclear pro liferation. But, more intimately, this statement 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 bustling eagerness, not to say a collective rage, triggered by a sudden panic that's turned into a PANDEMIC. A pandemic that has everything
6r

6o

I
I
!

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

' 11'-

1!! '!

to do with the reality effect of 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. So, after the rise of MILITARY DETER RENCE and its fall at the end of the cold war, it would seem that the 'cold panic' of a world overexposed to major risks is beginning to be felt. These risks include 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. The 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 it is by the 'domestic terror' of each and every instant; the excess speed of the clashing 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'emp!oi, with the elimination of Sunday as a day-off followed by the elimination of the daily interruption of lunch. Imposition of the JUST-IN-TIME con tinuous day anticipates the inertia of the fatal instant and the unstoppable offensive of the NANOCHRONOLOGIES, along the lines of the 'lightning crash' of 6 May 2010, when rhe wall of Wall Street suddenly crashed into the wall of money, the MONEY BARRIER, at precisely 2.25 pm. After the continuum (of terrestrial spacetime), till now seen as the adjustment variable of our various activities, the dromospheric pressure of technical progress now affects individuality throughout the whole panoply of populations subject to the death throes of instantaneous inter activity. For, this latest tyranny suddenly becomes the ultimate variable in a demographic adjust ment of profit. The quantitative Malthusianism of the past is now coupled with a qualitative Malthusianism, whereby the usual ethnic racism

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

THE GREAT ACCELERATOR

will be rounded off 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. This is the reason for the successive disaffilia tions mentioned above, with the probable decline in politics and the geopolitics of place as well as of social connection, in situ and hie et nunc, in favour of simultaneity and its teleobjective ubiq uity. 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 demo cratic 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 of interactivity's global brain. 1he 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 Teilhard de Chardin, himself a victim of the great 'brainwashing' of the propaganda of Progress.