... ephemeral, more evanescent, than any that preceded it. In this essay, we subject this assumption to some critical scrutiny, utilizing a range of empirical detail. In the face of this assay we find the assumption to be considerably wanting. We suggest that what we are actually witnessing is mere acceleration...

...Ingrid M. Hoofd This article suggests that the humanist aporia, which is productively at work in the Indymedia project, has become a main ingredient of technological acceleration under neoliberalism. The article draws out Indymedia's response and relation to what it will call “speed-elitism” by...

... politicians get elected not just because of what they say, or how they say it, but when they say it. Within the accelerated serial mix of public opinion, stories, commentary, and events, political support and momentum were articulated with the politicization of affect to shape the outcome. While preelection...

...John Beck Richard C. Sarafian's Vanishing Point (1971) is the apotheosis of the Vietnam-era exploitation/arthouse existentialist road movies produced in the wake of Easy Rider. Vanishing Point is about speed and technology, surveillance and control, acceleration and catastrophe, roads, deserts, and...

...Eftychia Mikelli My article explores the implications of rapid movement in Jack Kerouac's On the Road both on a literary and a political level, while drawing on Paul Virilio's work on speed and acceleration. The article examines the nature of the main characters' impetus for perpetual motion and...

... capital has also created immense “virtual” spatio-temporalities based on the Internet that are almost wholly commodified. Moreover, these spatio-temporalities, both virtual and real-world, function at accelerated speeds, a “network speed” to produce forms of culture-production and consumption that no...

... communicatively fluent societies. They represent the modernization of political culture guided by communicative rationality, paralleling the accelerated modernization of globalization. This view is elaborated and modified by an interpretation based on a philosophy of history as recurrence or “metempsychosis...

...Paul Crosthwaite Through an analysis of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement (2001) , this essay considers the potentialities and limitations of narrative, and of representation more generally, as means of capturing and conveying the accelerated and intensely traumatic character of mechanized warfare. I...

... today. This is so when one takes into account the technics of the global “War on Terror” as directed by the American political-economic-military complex. Through that, the world is seeing but the accelerated intensification and dissemination of military and civilian surveillance technologies. Everything...

...John Beck; Paul Crosthwaite © BERG 2007 PRINTED IN THE UK 2007 The fairground injunction to “scream if you want to go faster” has become one of the defining imperatives of advanced capitalism, the ambivalence of that scream both calling forth acceleration and announcing a terror at its...

..., it reframes the debate on the Left in terms of process (acceleration, deceleration), and second, it recasts a “fragmented” story of the last hundred years of the Left in Europe. I qualify it as “fragmented,” since it is Benjaminian in spirit and modernist in form ( montage ). Accelerationism is...

... Shakespeare. Simply put, since the nineteenth century and especially the twentieth, we have entered upon the acceleration of history. As everyone knows, Daniel Halévy revealed this in his book of 1947. 1 Celebrity itself is entering a process of acceleration with the acceleration of history, and so celebrity...

... between an unbridled American technological imperative and a nostalgic European lament for that which has been suppressed by the technological will to power, Kroker focuses his own research effort on rearticulating a Canadian critical theory of technology that takes full account of the accelerating pace...

... activists have a secret agenda to promote the capitalist system. Nevertheless, Hoofd attempts to deconstruct alter-globalist discourse to demonstrate that well-meaning alter-globalists are unwitting accomplices in the accelerating production and reproduction of the neoliberal order. For Hoofd, it is only by...

... and efficiency comes an evacuation of depth, of nuance, and of lingering, and of all the beauty that emerges only with patience, he says. Han contrasts the cadence of narration to the unimpeded acceleration of information. Where narration is ritualistic and ceremonial, information is additive and...

... chronicling what he perceives to be the demise of the planet under the impact of speed and technologies. Ville panique is delivered as one more item in an accelerating production of reflections on the deleterious effects of speed in contemporary life. Mimicking the acceleration of reality by the very pace...

.... Virilio (2003) affirms Marc Bloch's observation that modern society is distinguished from its predecessors by its increased speed. This distances us from past social formations. Consequently any attempt to reckon with our times must analyze acceleration “as a major political phenomenon” (quoted in...

... nature of humanity and philosophy, technology and everyday life. Thrift's reading of City of Panic accordingly critically evaluates Virilio's mania with catastrophic urbanism, with acceleration, sensation, and politics, and, by this means, reasons that, on the evidence of his latest book, Virilio is...

.... Vortextuality, though, while utilizing a scientific metaphor rooted in a natural effect, is a profoundly social concept, a phenomenon produced by the practical social activity of humans. It has its roots in the acceleration of social processes that began with industrialization. The industrial...

... technological acceleration of modernity dramatically increased with the development of the combustion engine and electric telegraphy, a condition that is now being radically intensified with the arrival of new information and communication technologies. 7 In relation to this it is widely claimed that...