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.
He reads the contemporary fights over memorial laws as a symptom of the same damage to historical anteriority, the great narratives giving way to a manufactured substitute.
page 4
What is rising to the fore in their stead is what certain people are already calling the "great national novel."
pages 4–5
fractalization of physical expanse is coupled with fractalization of durations relative to the continuum of a general History that's in the process of being instantaneously obliterated.
The historical exhibit is Churchill's address to the House of Commons of 13 May 1940, which Virilio reads as a warning about the tempo of events, not their space.
page 5
If a battle between past and present is allowed to break out, Churchill said, there will be "no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal."
page 5
Great Britain as a space did not suffer the insult of occupation, but only because the British leaders avoided a chronopolitical battle over the tempo of the Battle of Britain.
This is set against the fascist origins of futurism, Marinetti's celebration of war as "the world's hygiene," a cult of accelerated history that ended in the Blitz. The contemporary heir of the revolutionary is the forecaster.
page 6
The revolutionary of bygone days is now about to be eliminated by the revelationary forecaster, the revealer of postmodern times.
The chapter's most sustained engagement is with high-frequency trading as the financial form of the futurism of the instant. Virilio insists on one term for the temporality of the instant, the distorting curvature through which the market is now seen.
pages 6–7
it's happening right where the dromologist would insist on the term anamorphosis for the temporality of the instant, as most clearly describing this financial façade that can no longer be seen except by watching images on stock exchange screens, and, then, only from a particular angle: that of the curved distorting mirror of the roundness of the terrestrial globe.
He gives the crash sequence with its dates, from the deregulatory "Big Bang" to the flash trading the SEC now polices.
page 7
In the last quarter of last century, the City of London launched market interconnection, the big bang of program trading, so aptly named. That was to lead, as early as 1987, to an inaugural crash implicating the real-time computerization of trading. Twenty years later, with the bursting of the subprime real-estate bubble in the United States in 2007, it is the flash trading involved in high-frequency exchanges that has been stigmatized by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Wall Street watchdog.
pages 7–8
distortion of competition now resides in the instantaneity of milliseconds in a stock market nanochronology that escapes market control.
page 8
The capacity of a few big banks to engage in flash orders, using computing power analogous to the power of nuclear deterrence in the hands of the top brass of the military, calls into question the very basis of free competition in a turbocapitalism clearly nearing its end.
The theological register, which recurs across the book, is introduced here as a crash of confidence with the force of a clash of civilizations.
page 9
Hence the major risk of a choc de la confiance, a "crash of confidence," as devastating as the choc des civilisations, the clash of civilizations, with the atheism of the free thinker suddenly turning into an atheism of free trade, in the age of banks that are too big to fail, but, especially, too swift to be honest!
page 10
This would be a monopoly of disbelief and of an "atheism" in which the loss of speculative faith would most likely end in a sort of mono-atheism of the Single Market that would be analogous in its evocative power to the monotheism of religions, of the single God of justice and truth.
Against the claim that communications have flattened the world, Virilio cites a French Air Force general and turns Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat (2005) into the object of the critique.
page 12
Last century, French Air Force general Lionel Max Chassin declared: "The fact that the Earth is round has not yet been taken into account by the military."
page 12
the speculators of the moment are so mesmerized by stock exchange screens, they apparently don't notice the deformation of values caused by the curved mirror of stock trades in the age of globalization ... But only at the cost of more and more fragile "bubbles" that will soon produce the systemic crash of turbocapitalism and, more than anything else, the securalism of speculators who will no longer be able to have confidence in the future of the illusion of progress.
He separates the fixed inertia of a geostationary satellite from the polar inertia of the financial casino, which is synchronous with every place at once.
page 13
the polar inertia of the financial casino is chronosynchronous with every place on the globe thanks to its instantaneous interactive connections.
pages 13–14
So, though it may be single in the real space of geography, the globalized market is no longer single in the real time of trades ... traders who are fans of flash orders will, this time, trigger the accident to end all accidents of a stock market tempo that is now automatic.
The theological figure returns through the banker's self-description and the Gospel formula turned ironic.
page 15
the chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, declared: "I'm just a banker doing God's work."
The crash is diagnosed not as an economic event but as an epistemic one, a science that has lost its conscience.
page 16
the credit crunch, the crisis of confidence, that has hit the stock exchanges of the Single Market, is just an early-warning sign of a true accident in knowledge that is about to strike an "exact" science which has recently turned into a technoscience of instrumental efficiency that bears no relationship to the knowledge we've acquired over the course of the ages.
page 16
the "digital civilization" so often trumpeted marks a return to numerological paganism and its cults of yore.
The economic diagnosis is stated as a substitution of flows for stocks, ending in a definitive externalization whose horizon is literally off-world.
page 17
The acceleration of flows of all kinds will then supplant — this time for good — the historical accumulation of stocks of wealth, of goods once housed in that reservoir, the city of men.
page 17
It would lead to a definitive externalization — outsourcing — of the urban race, right here on this tiny telluric planet, until salvation came in the form of some other "promised land," this one exoplanetary, the single-file exodus of the biblical epic yielding to the looped exodus of a circus prophesied, in a way, by the circular accelerator in Geneva!
Mandelbrot enters here for the first time, folded in through the phrase "critical space," which Virilio footnotes to his own L'Espace critique (1984). The question of inertia is then raised to the status of the book's central and terminal problem.
page 18
Hence the urgency of a question that is now central or, more precisely, terminal: the question of the nature of inertia, in the age of the revolution in information and the apparently unremarked transference of the fixed-property inertia associated with the real estate of places — lieux — to the polar inertia of connections — liens.
pages 18–19
that domination entails an increased ecosystemic risk of paralysis or, rather, the sudden tetraplegia of a societal body whose perpetual motion is frozen in each of its limbs and whose structural unemployment is now a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The evidence for the paralysis is a productivity gain won at the expense of employment, read as the leading edge of a general automation.
page 19
In the United States, for instance, the drop in the wage bill in the last quarter of 2009, coupled with an unchanged level of activity, does indeed signify that American firms are improving productivity — but only to the detriment of employment.
pages 19–20
Tomorrow, the robotics of artificial intelligence and its "enhanced reality" will take on the bulk of productivity in a resolutely postmodern world.
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