Space-time Dialectics: Acceleration and the Politics of Space by Bart Zantvoort In Amsterdam, not far from the Central Station, there is a small shop on the ground floor with a glass façade. Walking by, one can spot a strange sight: people, unmoving, in comfortable chairs, not interacting, staring ahead into space. They are right behind the shop window, sitting there, like so many exhibits in a seventeenth-century ‘cabinet of curiosities’. The upper part of their faces is covered by a large pair of goggles, a device immersing them in virtual reality. The future, it seems, has finally arrived. The spectacle of immobilized bodies, each immersed in its own world, its own exciting adventure, is the realization of a prediction made by Paul Virilio over twenty- five years ago. The continuous acceleration of bodies and information – the trajectory of that which we call modernity – would lead to a state of ‘polar inertia’, where acceleration paradoxically collapses into a state of immobility: The more the speed of movement increases, the more control becomes absolute, omnipresent. The more speed grows, the more ‘control’ tends to supplant the environment itself, so that the real time of interactivity finally replaces the real space of bodily activity… What we are witnessing is the progressive disappearance of the space of anthropological- geographic reference in favor of a mere visual piloting… that will soon have created a new horizon of human experience… As a racing driver must first master acceleration, keep his car straight and pay no heed to the details of the surrounding space, so too will it doubtless be for every human activity, both at and away from home. We will no longer admire the landscape but only watch our screens and monitor our interactive trajectory – that is, a ‘journey’ with no distance, a ‘travelling time’ with no actual passing of time. Everything that has previously been involved in the arrangement of real urban and rural space will tomorrow simply be a matter of organizing the real-time conductivity of images and information. 1 We no longer admire the landscape but only watch our screens – an experience familiar to any commuter. The curious nature of polar inertia consists in the intersection of physical (as well as moral or political) immobility and the hyper-accelerated onslaught of virtual experiences and images. The terminal point of this development, which may not be far off, would be to live truly vicariously in virtual reality: your body stuck in a chair, fed by a nutritious intravenous drip, plugged into virtual space, living an uninterrupted ‘second life’ indistinguishable from a ‘first’ one. (The marketing, in 2014, of a type of instant meal called ‘Soylent’ also echoes this development. Soylent, a liquid shake that is supposed to contain all the nutrients the body requires, eliminates the need to stop and eat – intravenous administration would only be a next step.) Acceleration and virtualization progressively eliminate space, or at least a certain kind of space that has always been the condition and frame of reference of human experience. But how seriously should we take analyses such as the one described here? Does space not continue to shape and determine large parts of our existence, as we continue to inhabit bodies, houses and cities much as we always have, modified and 1 Paul Virilio, Polar Inertia, London, Sage, 2000, pp. 75-76.