After Death by Francois J. Bonnet

Author:Francois J. Bonnet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

Peril

The networked anaesthesia of the postindustrial era is tied initially to the influence of the present, locked in the grip of an ever more condensed, ever more instantaneous experience of the current. This kind of condensation, the acceleration of the present through the runaway presentation of synchronous instants, contributes to the onset of a generalised paralysis of the current. Everywhere, it becomes viscous. It coagulates. It accelerates so much that it begins to seem static. And as a generalised stasis emerges, so also does an indifference to whatever may happen.

Because, to tell the truth, nothing happens anymore. Nothing any longer has the time to happen. There is no duration left for anything to unfold in. Nothing can anchor itself in the world long enough to make sense. While the present still has a duration, the hyperpresent no longer does. It is pure currency, pure instantaneity. In the age of the hyperpresent, nothing happens that is not already undone by the event that comes immediately after it. In this inexorable stream of aborted moments—of instants separated from one another, shattered into ever more tenuous fragments, we find ourselves submerged. But this submersion is not just suffered passively. It is also provoked, sustained, and even desired by an implicit adhesion to the amnesiac project of the hyperpresent. Self-forgetting occurs through surrender—willing abandonment to the immersive force of the flow of synchronisation. We happily allow ourselves to be taken over by a microfragmented temporality that paralyses us, that inscribes us and submerges us in an eternal present. And if it is a general feature of postindustrial societies, societies of triumphant information, that we ‘no longer have time’, it is not really because things are going faster and faster, but because time itself has been dissolved into a multitude of futureless instants deprived of becoming, autonomous and independent of one another, and connected by a single, tenuous thread—the thread of radical currency, of the static hyperpresent.

This acceleration of the fragmentation of time is not the same thing as an acceleration of time. On Earth, there are still twenty-four hours in a day. But these twenty-four hours are broken up into a profusion of instants, all of which demand our complete attention before disappearing into the limbo of forgetting. For the pulverisation of time, and the stuttering that results from it, generate a simulacra that wards off and consigns to desuetude the maddening flight of time that leads us inexorably to our limits—to our end.

The maintenance of such stasis, however, is far from painless. We have entered a new age of sacrifice—from the innumerable cases of those who ‘burn out’, unable to bear the ever-increasing pace of their fragmented lives, to the casualties of the internet café who offer themselves up to the Network, having forgotten their finite-being in favour of their projected-being. Each of us sacrifices some portion of our lifetimes qua finite-being to the communal time of projected-being—a frozen, instantaneous time in which becoming is abolished.

The stasis of the hyperpresent installs a time

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