SAARUTU Source Brief · Critical Media Theory Library · Virilio Corpus
SAARUTU (Socioanalysis and Alien Anthropology Research Unit at Theory Underground)
David McKerracher Seminar · McKerracher Family Farm
This is the last of the short books Virilio wrote on the financial crisis, published in French in 2010 in the immediate wake of the 2007–8 crash and the May 2010 flash crash, and in English in 2012. It is three chapters and ninety-three pages, and it runs as a single sustained argument carried by the two events its dedication names together: the firing-up of the particle collider at CERN in Geneva, and the Wall Street traders who, in Virilio's phrasing, crashed into the time barrier. The wager of the whole book is that these are one event in two registers, the physics of light-speed and the finance of light-speed, both arriving at a wall made of time rather than space.
The governing thesis is an inversion of what inertia means. The inertia that organized human settlement for several thousand years was the fixed-property inertia of places, the deep-rootedness of the sedentary homebody in a located world. That inertia is being supplanted by a polar inertia of connections, the instant-and-everywhere stasis produced when interactive telecommunication collapses the intervals that used to separate events. Virilio's coinage for the state this produces is the paradox that maximum speed yields maximum paralysis: the legislative frenzy, the trading frenzy, and the accelerator's quest for the primordial particle all end in an inertia of the real instant. Where his earlier work diagnosed the insecurity of territory, this book diagnoses the insecurity of History, the shattering of the tripartite division of past, present, and future once posterity is primed to dominate all anteriority and the present is squeezed out.
What turns on the argument is a claim about confidence. The Single Market and the particle accelerator are the two cathedrals of the new order, both built to a cult of light speed, and the book's bet is that confidence, like the speed of light, has met a limit it cannot pass, because confidence is the one thing that can never be instantaneous. The reconstruction below follows the book's own three-part sequence, because that sequence is the argument: chapter one establishes the insecurity of History through the stock market and the physics of the instant; chapter two takes the same acceleration down into private life, the family, the body, and the rhythm of the day; chapter three returns to the two accelerators and reads them as a single quest for a primordial atom that ends in the integral accident. The formulations that carry the argument are preserved at full length at every locus, so the brief can be quoted from and footnoted without going back to the book.
The dedication sets the two collisions side by side and tells the reader in advance that the collider and the crash are to be read as one event.
Dedication
To the illuminists of light-speed at CERN, Geneva, and to the Wall Street traders who crashed into that other wall, the time barrier.
The book's epigraph supplies the collision motif the title literalizes. Virilio takes it from Valéry.
Epigraph
We think the same way we collide into each other.
Chapter two takes a second epigraph from the Romanian historian Marius Oprea, which supplies the thesis that turbocapitalism is the heir of Soviet cosmism rather than its victor.
page 31
Communism hasn't disappeared, it's been privatized.
Chapter three takes its epigraph from Rimbaud's "To a Reason," which supplies the circular exodus that the accelerator, the racetrack, and the orbiting satellite all trace.
page 66
Arrival of old, you will go everywhere.
The book opens on the paradox it will run to the end, that a life lived entirely in the instant is a life without a future.
page 1
To live every instant as though it were the last — that is the paradox of futurism, of a futurism of the instant that has no future.
The first case is not drawn from finance but from parliamentary procedure, and the choice is deliberate: the acceleration of lawmaking produces not speed but paralysis. Virilio takes the then-president of France's Assemblée Nationale, Bernard Accoyer, protesting in early 2010 the government's single-reading fast-track for new laws (Virilio's note: Le Monde, 11 February 2010).
page 2
"A good law," Accoyer concluded, "requires an incompressible period of time for reflection."
page 2
The current legislative frenzy actually introduces the inertia of real time, a paradoxical inertia that results from the sudden acceleration of common reality.
The central inversion is stated at once, and it is the hinge of the whole book: the inertia of located places is being replaced by the inertia of instant connections, and the casualty is History itself. This is framed explicitly as the sequel to his own L'Insécurité du territoire (1993).
page 3
In these very early years of the third millennium, the polar inertia produced by the instantaneity of interactive connections (liens) is actually poised to supplant the fixed-property inertia of places (lieux) — including the most representative places of legislation and the law.
page 3
So, following the age of territorial insecurity, comes the age of the insecurity of History and its tripartite division, past — present — future.
pages 3–4
This reversal of values, we might note, has already affected space. At the close of the last century, geopolitical strategists were, in fact, turning reality inside out like a glove and asserting that, forever after, the exterior was to prevail over the interior. Today, it is in the order of time that this turnaround is being accomplished, as posterity is primed to dominate all anteriority.
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