Looking at the pile (perhaps this definition is too formal) of books next to my bed, I realised today that I had not finished reading Virilio’s The Original Accident, 2007. So because it’s a nice size and relatively light I put it in my bag for reading during the interstitial moments of my day. And from page 100 (the perfect, complete number):
Everything, right now! Such is the crazy catch-cry of hypermodern times, of this hypercentre of temporal compression where everything crashes together, telescoping endlessly under the fearful pressure of telecommunications, into this ‘teleobjective’ proximity that has nothing concrete about it except its infectious hysteria.
Let’s not forget: too much light and you get blindness; too much justice and you get injustice; too much speed, the speed of light, and you get inertia, polar inertia.
Do we try and achieve so much that we achieve nothing? I think about politics, and the (non-core) promises of politicians: not that I have much knowledge about these things, but there is so much on their agenda to win votes that the percentage of things which actually are followed through is minimal.
Do we constitute ourselves now in terms not of who we want to be, in terms of our subjective relation to others, to spaces, to events, but in terms of what we can achieve? How much we get done, which becomes how much we don’t get done because we are not good enough to do it yet.
…to be continued…or, attemping too much on November 6th, maybe not…
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