Against dead time

ABSTRACT. This article connects Virilio’s critique of speed with Surrealist and Situationist writings attacking the homogeneous time of the commodity, which themselves echo Benjamin and Bergson. I suggest here that these authors can all be seen as taking a Romantic stance against the perceived reification and abstraction inherent in modernity and its dominant time. Further, they share a concern with interrupting modernity’s homogeneous time, to usher in more authentic forms of duration. I suggest, however, that the displace-ment of Newtonian time by other times, increasingly homogeneous and abstract, but constituted precisely by interruption, poses a problem for this strategy. KEY WORDS • accident • homogeneous time • moment • Romanticism • situation ‘Vivre sans temps mort... jouir sans entraves’ (To live without dead time and enjoy without restraint) Slogan, May ’68 (Viénet, 1968/1992: 119) Can one even imagine the loss of extension and duration... Can one seriously imagine a ‘forgetting ’ of place, of all places? Paul Virilio (1994a: 148) This article arose from what Walter Benjamin might call a ‘spark ’ of ‘specific recognizeability ’ – connecting those involved in May ’68 in France, including the avant-garde ‘Situationist International’, yearning to escape from the carcass of dehumanized ‘dead ’ time, and Virilio 20 years later, fearing that time is not only dead, but on the point of disappearing altogether. The Situationists them-selves drew on a tradition of radical French thought which rejected abstract time – from André Breton’s attack on ‘inexorable machines ’ to Lefebvre’s medita-tions on everyday life.1 It is the assault on ‘dead ’ time mounted by these con-trasting yet complementary authors that this article explores