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| In 1913, Charles
Péguy, then forty and an unlikely combination of poet, journalist, Socialist, and Roman
Catholic, made the famous and often-repeated statement that the world had changed less
since the death of Jesus than it had in the last thirty years. He described, for his
millions of contemporaries, the concurrent horror and excitement of geometrically
accelerating culture. Hidden in Péguy’s formulation is the idea that each tool, each measurement, each casual observation of the nature of things—even Péguy’s— accelerates and automates the acquisition of the next tool. The first rock-chipping rock logically extends itself, along a series of ever-shorter steps, into the assembly line and the self-replicating machine. This increasingly steeping curve applies to every endeavor where the product of growth contributes to growth’s progress. As with free falling bodies, it seems apparent that such quickening changes, whether evolutionary, cultural, or technical, cannot accelerate indefinitely but must reach some terminal velocity. Call that terminal velocity a trigger point, where the rate of change of the system reaches such a level that the system’s underpinning, its ability to change is changed. Trigger points come about when the progress of a system becomes so accelerated, its tools become so adept at self-replicating and self-modifying, that it thrusts an awareness of itself onto itself and reaches the terminal velocity of self-reflection. Trigger points represent those times when the way a process develops loops back on the process and applies itself to its own source. A billion years of evolution eventually, along an increasingly steep curve, produces a species capable of comprehending evolution. After Darwin (or, as increasingly metaself-conscious scientific historians argue, Alfred Wallace, or even the previous generation of anonymous naturalists), evolution cannot ever follow the old path again. Having reached a trigger point, natural selection re-forms itself as conscious selection. Even if we, the product of but now the proxy agent for evolution, choose not to directly help or hinder the cause of a particular species, the result still becomes primarily a product of mental rather than environmental choice. If one buys nothing else from Marx, whose ideas may be the trigger point of economics applied to itself, he is at least untouchable on quantitative changes becoming qualitative ones. In the process of psychological adaptation, the trigger came with depth psychology and Freud. Now that our culture is glibly aware of defense mechanisms, the self can never again defend itself in the old ways. Art that was once a product of psychological mechanisms is now about those mechanisms and—the ultimate trigger point—about being about them. The Industrial Revolution cusped in the computer, a machine capable of designing its own replacement. Gödel pulled the trigger point on mathematics, using a formal system to demonstrate the incompleteness of itself as well as any system strong enough to prove its own incompleteness. Plank, Bohr, Heisenberg, and other co-conspirators similarly turned physics back on itself, bringing a new reflexive element into the limits of the discipline. (A by-product of physics’ trigger, Los Alamos represents a trigger point in the history of warfare.) Change in these fields does not stop at the trigger point. Only the curve of progress reaches a critical moment, the second derivative goes to zero, and a new curve begins, pushed forward into a new country. So what of Péguy’s—and hundreds of others’ concurrent with him—trigger observation that culture and its tools had changed more in thirty years than in the previous 1900? Culture had finally created people who were not the passive product but also the active operators and commentators on their own culture’s acceleration. Culture had replaced its own by-products more and more quickly until it arrived at a trigger frame, one whose members knew of and were synonymous with the fact of their own replaceability. No longer just a changing culture, but a culture of change. The artifacts of societal behavior came down the turnpike of years, a decade doing the work of the previous century, two years overturning a decade, adding new combinations of content and epiphenomena, threatening, in the years before 1913, a Malthusian catastrophe of population. Then, as when the velocity particle in a cyclotron slams into a waiting plate and transmutes it, the accelerated cultural change, released by the Péguy pronouncement, slammed into and transmuted the old societal iron into a new metal. And all about, people breathed the air of a new planet, the new qualities of concurrency and self-reflexiveness. Cultural change had achieved the old joke of the runner so fast that she passes herself on the road. By 1913, changing tastes, doctrines, isms, theories—which once obeyed the old model of sequential cultural progress—now replaced one another so rapidly that they overran each other, collapsing into the spontaneous. The avant grew so far ahead of the garde that they lapped and began running side by side. The Futurist Manifesto of "faster," having reached terminal velocity, could only become a doctrine of "all-at-the-same-time." And this simultaneity still holds true today, with Third World militarism, bank-by-mail, television games shows, the rebirth of orthodox religion, conceptual art, punk rock, and neo-romanticism thriving side by side. Hyper progress transmutes, paradoxically, into stillness. It is still true that things have changed more in the last thirty years than in all the time since Christ. Since it is still true, then nothing has changed since Péguy. Social culture has taken tail in mouth and rolled a benzene ring. Art takes itself as both subject and content: post-modernism about painting, serialism about musical composition, constructivist novels about fiction. At that, the century has become about itself, history about history: a still, eclectic, universally reflexive, uniformly diverse, closed circle, the homogeneous debris in space following a nova. Nothing can take place in this century without some coincident event linking it into a conspiratorial whole.
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