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Speed is not time accelerated but time made ‘real’. When everything is observable at once, from wherever, for wherever, no-one needs to identify or remember, only watch. The example par excellence remains the Gulf War:


‘With paradoxical logic, what gets decisively resolved is the reality of the object’s real-time presence. In the previous age of dialectical logic, it was only the delayed-time presence, the presence of the past, that lastingly impressed plate and film. The paradoxical image thus acquires a status something like that of surprise, or more precisely, of an "accidental transfer"’ 4


It is the state of things that’s come upon us, and although Virilio writes here of images and the changing sites and meanings of the recording and transmission of their data, the logic (a ‘paradoxical logic’) extends to the voice, to the question of who speaks. Through the analyses of Blanchot, through the archaeology of Foucault, through Derrida’s early grammatologies, an autonomy of Literature and the act of writing has been established, determined by entries and exits, by disjunctions and connections, making a voice that speaks of itself. The model will no longer hold. When he speaks in your voice, America he is speaking in an uncountable number of places all at once, not in Literature or in some other Space, but in a time as real as ours. That’s the irony, he speaks in your voice because all time is becoming ‘real-time’, and the voice that speaks is now as real as us who hear it- speaking can no longer be distinguished from writing, under which, in contradistinction to Derrida’s assertions, it has now been subsumed in a time when the sign is becoming visual, not linguistic: and writing is visible where speaking is not. This is the quality of DeLillo’s recent works, forcing that situation’s reorientation of the world, changing the form of the experience.


This quality comes from a change of use in the notion of what crowds around us. In White Noise, DeLillo’s exemplary novel of the mid-eighties, it is an ‘airborne toxic disaster’, a death that swarms around anxious communities on the run through the mid-west night, that hovers; chemical particles seeping in insensible. Mao II begins the change – it is stated there that ‘the future belongs to crowds’ 5, and from then on a new mass composed of man and voice has taken precedence. Its type is extremely particular, which means that it can cross from the vast scope of years and figures of Underworld to the intimacy of The Body Artist, populated only by three and by just a few events.