EDITORIAL.

CHRONOPOLIS: URBANIZATION OF LIFE.

By Rubén Darío Zapata Yepes^*.

^* Economista, comunicador social, Magister En Filosofía. Docente Universidad de Antioquia. Medellín, Colombia, rumiantez@yahoo.esrzapaga@uda.edu.co

The modern city is the clearest expression of modern progress and this progress actually manifests itself as the result of any of the scientific and technological progress makes life comfortable, but also, and above all, in the daily rhythm of life. We could even venture that modern progress is first and foremost a question of rhythm, or the speed, much better, if we are more faithful to the modern ideal, which ultimately regulates a particular use of time. Everything is accelerated in the city, every action has a precise moment in which it shrugs.

Life in the city today is a constant test of speed. The streets, especially in the Latin American city, are floods of cars and people that run desperately, urged by the city rhythm; a car that stops in the middle of the thruway, or even if it decreases its speed, it creates a traffic jam, which unleashes a fury of whistles and insults that urge others the way, just like the pair of obese ladies stop in the middle of the sidewalk to greet or to ask for their families, in the midst of the boiling current that flows; or as the lord in the cane or the elderly couple that charged with the burden of their years and cannot hasten the steps in the street to follow the pace of large amounts of people and which are dragged by it.

As Paul Virilio denounces, in his works on dromology, he race is always a qualifying round, and not just for those who compete, but first and foremost for the environment in which it is run. In this regard, Virilio quotes Jacques-Yves Le Toumelin's idea by stating: "The world has shrunk, shrunk unbelievable; we no longer travel, we get around." (Virilio, 1997). But that same speed sets the pace of the modern city. "It is always getting late in the city." Fito Páez recognizes wisely in one of his songs, and this may just be a certainty with which each individual caries in the city and which pushes them to run more and more. Yet, the race does not lead anywhere, because it is precisely the acceleration which is consistently imposed on every race which seeks to annihilate the resistance of the distance, remove the space.

Virilio writes, opposing this idea to the traditional conception of metric distance as the dimension of the world, by stating: "For whoever exists distance is nothing more than knowledge, memory and analogy. With the different technologies of (supersonic) transport and (hypersonic). We find ourselves in the position of someone who has been warned by the weather report that it will rain the next day: that person's today, their lovely day is ruined, already mined, and they have quickly to make hay." (Virilio, 1997).

But, as Fito Páez announces, it is always getting late to take advantage of this today, even if we accelerate. That is what Virilio called the urgency of the present which is imposed and not only does it pollute the future and the present, but the very space right there, and it kills geography itself.

That is why Paul Virilio talks about a gray ecology, an urban ecology, as a recrimination to environmentalists who are concerned primarily about the contamination of the natural physical environment and leave aside the effects of the artificial environment of the city on the physical and spiritual proximity of the human beings and that of communities. Indeed, the proximity among men has been replaced by the proximity among the elevators, among automobiles, and today primarily by the electromagnetic proximity of instant telecommunications. There is already manifested a series of ruptures, that are at the same time, with the soil, the neighbor, the relative, the friend, the other. In fact -Virilio insists- "If being present really does mean being close, physically speaking, the microphysical proximity of interactive telecommunication will surely soon see us staying away in droves, not being there any more for anyone, locked up, as we shall be, in a geophysical environment reduced to less than nothing." (Virilio, 1997).

The futile dream of communion

The most worrying situation is that this dictatorship of the present is imposed precisely on the future, on the possibilities of building from the present another lifestyle; it destroys any possibility of dissatisfaction with the present, and therefore kills any hope in the possibilities of transformation. "... How can we claim to forecast the future, when history and geography themselves will soon cease to be what they once were: the necessary foundations of all futurology?" (Virilio, 1997). This perpetuation of the present already involves a sitting disease of the man no longer in space, but in time (history). "The contemporary achieve anything else."

Perhaps Cortázar is ahead of this awareness when in the Southern Thruway he rehearses the spontaneous building of a new community. In this sense, it does not seem to be casual that this experiment takes place effectively on a thruway where there is an extraordinary traffic jam that stops the desperate river of cars before reaching the city. Perhaps that is why his fiction begins by breaking the continuity of time, which urges travelers to come. "Anyone could look at their watch, but it was as if this Time strapped to one's wrist or the beep beep of the radio were a measure of something else entirely." (Cortázar, 1997).

When travelers completely forget of that time which runs over, they begin to establish links among them and it gradually emerges among those who have been trapped in a place out of time in the city. The owners of automobiles have the chance to get out and to visit with their neighbors and to share gossip, needs, and projects among them. As a particular data, among travelers yet there is no need to know their names, their addresses, etc., what is required of them is their proximity and develop it. Perhaps because some friendships are established with a different sense to those that appear in the city, there where it is necessary to fix those insignificant data as an attempt to protect the friendship of this hectic and fast dynamic that always throws individuals far away from one another.

But not any ordinary community is built here, but to a good extent, it is an opposite community that fills the streets in big cities. It is a supportive community. And so, in these circumstances, solidarity seems to emerge in a simple way: "It may already have been midnight when one of the nuns timidly offered him a ham sandwich, presuming he was hungry. He accepted it out of courtesy (he only really felt nauseous) and asked if he could share it with the girl in the Dauphine, who accepted and gobbled it up along with a bar of chocolate she had been passed by the driver of the DKW, her neighbour on the left-hand side." (Cortázar, 1997). Later, the girl of one of the cars felt thirsty and there were also men who come to fetch water for her; in one of the cars, there was no water, but, instead, they gave candy to the little girl.

And as a matter of fact, a couple of peasants gave away all their provisions so that no one in the group could have a hard time. That happened just as people began to lose hope of returning soon to the city and everybody understood, albeit some did it unwillingly, so that for them to survive, it was necessary their mutual assistance. The couple of peasants just set a condition in order to donate their provisions; it was that someone led the group so that the food and the other goods were distributed among those who most needed them, at the right time. That was how a kind of provisional and improvised government was established which based its actions on the principle of solidarity to distribute, initially only the provisions of the peasants and then those that they bartered with other neighboring groups, so that the prevailing view of distribution would not have to do with the contribution made by each one of them.

And however, solidarity in the community that as it is recreated by Cortázar is not specifically a spontaneous thing in every individual, but it is something that requires a learning process. But this learning is the one that possibly cannot be performed in the modern city, precisely because the less time there is in the modern city is the time to learn, the time to correct mistakes, to project the construction of a better future; at least there is no time for thinking, for thinking about life and its possibilities. Plato in the Theaetetus refers to a slave as anyone who cannot respect the time required for the development of a thought, given the fact that the thought has its own cycles, its own ways, its times, and its pace. (Zuleta, 2005). According to this criterion, we would have to call slaves the majority of the inhabitants of the modern city, intellectuals included.

Continuing with Cortázar's short story, curiously, despite the fact that the provisions that supported the team were more and more scarce and the manner of obtaining them on the black market, which had been established in the surroundings, were increasingly more burdensome and the funds were even meager, this was not exactly what dissolved the community that had been spontaneously in the traffic jam, it was the speed developed by the rivers of cars as they approached the city, when the thruway was finally cleared. All of them were impelled to get to the city as soon as they could, although most of them had already forgotten the reasons behind which forced them to get there, they just knew that the thruway was "a thick jungle of machines designed to run free."

At first, it appears the image of a city that awaits us, with all its amenities. The engineer, then, makes plans to meet with his beloved one -this romance was the fruit of such a traffic jam- and share many things with her, in the midst of all the comfort: eating, drinking, bathing; much kissing, lying down on the furniture... That was why it was logical to believe that everything would be fine whereas the speed would not be reduced, it was much better, instead if it could be accelerated: "With his bumper scraping against the Simca, 404 leaned back in his seat, feeling the acceleration, felt he could accelerate without danger of running into the back of the Simca, and that the Simca could accelerate without danger of running into the back of the Beaulieu, and that the Caravelle was coming up behind and they were all going faster and faster, and now they move into third gear without the motor stuttering, and incredibly the stick slid into third and the engine began to purr and they accelerated even more, and in tenderness and amazement 404 sought out Dauphine's eyes." (Cortázar, 1997).

Interestingly, that accelerated speed which peacefully pushed them towards their dream in the city, is the one that separates them. In the attempt to look for Dauphine, the 404 checks that rows have lost their organization, which had been established once the traffic jam formed, and that Dauphine has advanced nearly one meter. At the end, the group was broken up and then disappeared, being swallowed up by the river that was precipitated by the channel of the thruway.

The engineer of the 404 does a bitter verification as he enters the city, a verification that needed a dramatic break in time and space, though, a momentous event so that he were aware of something that effectively marks the daily life in the city, although it can only be clearly seen on the thruway. He verifies that "... Nothing else could be done other than get in step with the march, adapt oneself mechanically to the speed of the surrounding cars, avoid all thought." (Cortázar, 1997).

By extending this discovery -what it seems to be initially legitimate- it could be seen that in the city, people lead a perverse rhythm that is completely strange to each of its individuals. "And on the radio antenna the Red Cross flag was flapping wildly, and he was charging at eighty kilometres an hour towards the lights that were growing ever larger without anyone knowing for sure why such a rush, why this race in the night amongst so many unfamiliar cars where no-one knew anything about anyone else, where everyone was staring dead ahead, exclusively dead ahead." (Cortázar, 1997).

So he finally proves that the city, or at least the great modern metropolis, is not a place of encounters, but of failed meetings, instead. Perhaps that is why many people opt to choose the downtown of the large cities to hide, such as it happens with the couple of lovers, in one of Fito Paez' songs, who choose downtown Buenos Aires, or as it happens with the young hit men of the gangs in Medellin when they have a lot of enemies, in their neighborhoods, behind them. (Zapata Yepes, 2002); when being downtown, the constant factor is anonymity. There exists less and less chance to be recognized not only by the overcrowding, but because no one has the intentionality to recognize anyone, everyone is embedded with their own anxieties, urged.

The image built by Cortázar in the last paragraph of its story as for the desperate car race on the thruway where people are not recognized by others, leads Paul Virilio to the highest point when he refers to the city in the computing era: "The resistance of distances having ceased, the lost world will send us back to our solitude, a multiple solitude of some billions of individuals whom the multimedia are preparing to organize in quasi-cybernetic fashion." (Virilio, 1997).

Urbanization of time

Here the city cannot anymore be understood just as a geographical space of reference where the large masses of population meet and where the scientific and technological developments of the modern era take place. What Virilio denounces is precisely an urbanization process that goes beyond the space, which is the urbanization of time since the informatics processes, basically do not have the space as their scenario, but especially the time, but which is measured according to the light speed limit, the time of the transmission of information through the optic fiber, where the limit acceleration practically undermines the movement and imposes the rhythm of stillness and permanence.

The limit acceleration is also set up in man's vital processes, in the modern era, giving way to progeria, which is defined as premature senility, which nowadays affects 1 out of 250,000 children, and whose quiet progress, is still imperceptible. Nevertheless, the phenomenon is still more dramatic when we consider the manner how speed affects the social and vital processes nowadays. While the western culture has millennially used meditation, relaxation, and other similar techniques, and the search for expanding awareness and achieving communication with the being of the universe and life, us, the children of modernity, we discover a short-cut for the disturbance of consciousness found in hallucinogens and we devote to them. Also, natives from America and Africa have taken advantage of the hallucinogenic power of some plants in order to establish communication with the fundamental nature and with their gods; notwithstanding, it is not possible to talk about addiction to these substances in these cultures in so far as the use of those substances was mediated by their mystical and religious needs. Modern society constantly falls into addiction (and not only to the addiction of psychoactive substances) since their search is less definite, more frantic, and without time. Oddly, the contact with hallucinogens and the jump to addiction more and more takes place at an earlier age, accelerating this way, the vital deterioration to which it inevitably leads.

The speed explosion becomes more catastrophic in the underdeveloped suburbs in the world. There we find children who become adults forced by the social context which deprive them from their infancy: child labor in all its forms; underage prostitution included which push them traumatically into adulthood; all the force of early sex, promoted and exploited from all of the instances of the market which make of children premature mothers and fathers. And, to top it all off, hired killer boys and girls in the cities (Victor, 1991), (Zapata Yepes, 2002). All of this can be considered as non-biological variables of the progeria, expressing a distortion of the social and historical time, which marks a different manner of inhabiting the world (time), from which there is no full consciousness yet. Lastly, life then seems a fast trace spanning birth and death; progeria, described this way, it appears as a manner to substitute the experience of old age, that -social and biological-natural goal, thus increasingly a myth who few people can reach.

"Then, alongside the deep time of geology and of history, the superficial time of remote interaction will rise up and take over from the surface areas of a vanished expanse. The real time of transmission, once and for all outstripping the real space of transport, will fulfil the prophecy of Saint Jerome when he said: "The world is already full and no longer holds us."" (Virilio, 1997).

"Overcoming" distance as an obstacle to the instant movement, to man's ubiquity, talks less of a man who dwells every space, the one who inhabits the outer world, but who manages to give himself the reality to that "out of the world." It is here where the temptation or need appear to rebuild the human environment from the cybernetic point of view. The cyberspace is, then, the true place of the human interaction, of the instant tele-action. Information is no longer the third dimension of the matter, along with mass and energy, but the ultimate relief of reality.

With Virilio, we can remember an Armenian proverb which is quite thought-provoking, by the way: "If my heart is narrow, what is the good of the world being so wide?" Indeed the measurement of the distance is in the soul; the man; and the animal that take with them the measurements of the world in its movements, the same measurements that are dissolved for man with his sitting disease throughout time, with the instant displacement. "What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?" This is a question Jesus used to ask people in his times, which has a special relevance today, especially if is taken out of its Christian context. That is to say, not only is man losing his capacity as an animated being, but especially as a loving being. The soul is what lets it bringing itself towards the alter ego, the fellow creature, but also the setting, the proximity.

Inhuman Emergencies of Capitalism

Lastly, the urbanization of both space and time is necessarily translated in the urbanization of life in all its aspects. We could also take the risk of bringing up as an urbanization which has taken place long before the urbanization of the physical space itself. And to a great extent, the urbanization of life, driven by the ideal of the modern progress, was already implicit in the very same rationality that modernity developed. Perhaps, an implicit manner of expressing it is by means of the ideal of efficiency, which now involves the element of acceleration in all its processes, but especially in those production processes. And this is a race to nowhere, but which does destroy the natural and social environment completely. The very contradiction that covers the search for efficiency anchors society in the very same place.

When we realize that the value of goods is measured according to the working time, we come to understand that the efficiency and the productivity well then have to account for the race in favor of the reduction of that time, but this reduction does not aim to free the vital time of the human being, but the multiplication of the wealth produced as an end in itself. This is a simple manner to state the law of the value. Marx meant to demonstrate throughout his work of maturity that the law not only dominated the economic value of modern life, but it gradually spread to other fields. Of course, this dictatorship of the law of the value in our life is made more evident nowadays with the accelerated scientific and technological development in the last half century, without precedents in the world history, everything is at the service of the increase of efficiency and productivity.

To a great extent, the innovations in the organization of work, driven by the development of the informatics technology, let the consolidation of this ideal, while the technologies of telework break the spatial relationship between the worker and the entrepreneur. But above all, the work from home makes the limits between the periods of rest and the paid work blurred; so, on the one hand, the ideal of efficiency aims to reduce the work time to make goods, the stimulus to increase wealth multiplies the work done, extending it practically to all of spaces of the individual's everyday life, taking the free time that he used to think he had.

In the meantime, the work lets the individual feel useful in a society in which anonymity is the rule. It was imposed in this way, from the protestant ethics of Lock to all the Enlightenment. This has been then consolidated as a society that both demands and impedes the individual to work. And although the work is recognized as fatigue and wear and tear, is also an identifying element of men of good will, since in the middle of the urgency that impersonalizes the individual, in the large cities, he himself can be felt recognized as a good worker. And that is another race of competition.

In that way, it is not unusual to see in the cities -at least in those of the underdeveloped world- the flux of people who run desperately, short of free time. And it is paradoxical this kind of behavior in a society marked by the high levels of unemployment, and where, therefore these multitudes of unemployed people should feel less pressured by the time consumed by the work. Nevertheless, experience shows that if something takes time away, in our cities and makes people rush today, is the search for jobs; at least, half of the passers-by in the large Latin American cities looks for a job with eagerness. To make a living, the very fact of living, is the most urgent and hopeless race.

This is what Zarathustra and Nietzsche say about the eagerness to work in the devastating critique against modernity, "And ye also, to whom life is rough and labour is disquiet, are ye not very tired of life? Are ye not very ripe for the sermon of death? All ye whom rough labour is dear, and the rapid, new, and strange-ye put up with yourselves badly; your diligence is flight, and the will to self-forgetfulness." (Nietzsche, 1972).

For Nietzsche, the true vice of the modern world is its hurry to work without breath, to strive to get money. In one of his posthumous aphorisms, he states:"... Even now one is ashamed of resting, and prolonged reflection almost gives people a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in one's hand, even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market..."

The tendency to happiness now is called the need for recreation and it starts to be ashamed of itself. When someone is surprised on a country tour, he will find a justification saying that he does it for reasons of health. "Even soon he will come to a point of not being able to abandon himself, without being able to despise himself and with no regret ... to the contemplative life." (Lowith, 1974).

From another perspective, we can attend the development of biotechnology that today shows us how can the velocity of the technological development, set exclusively according to the productive processes, forgets man or is too much for him. Genetics has open the opportunities to cloning, even the human cloning, but the ethical discussion about its consequences has not advanced at the same rhythm, which, nevertheless, does not impede that in many countries, this technique is being carried out fully, unscrupulous. We should not be surprised by that, then, and we should not be surprised by the transgenic production techniques, either that multiply the efficiency in the productive processes, especially the agricultural ones. At the same time, the discussions about the unknown consequences of the application of these technologies are stuck or still deviant, which could affect the diversity of life and the human health, even without the social consequences that could sharpen inequalities. Ethics, then, is the greatest victim in modernity, as it cannot or does not want to run as fast as science and technology, but this velocity obstructs it, instead.

Ethics requires the evaluative capacity of man and as Zarathustra states, no nation can survive unless it learners how to value things. Nevertheless, the evaluative capacity is perhaps the most complex one in the human being and the one that can be subjected to the pressure of the modern city with its velocity. But the modern man has conferred efficiency its highest value, and while he has been imbued with velocity and acceleration, he has hampered any evaluative criterion.

To value is to create, but creation is a ludic activity that requires time without strictness, without pressure. That is why Nietzsche compares the creative man with a child, as for innocence and forgetfulness, as he possesses all his time to play, to explore, and to create, without any other interest that the taste for the game itself. It is not surprising that the most renowned world thinkers that during all their life they have devoted the force of thinking to defend the creative life, be it called contemplation as in Aristotle and Plato, or game as in Nietzsche and Heraclitus, or just idleness as in Marx: the life that precisely denies the modern society in its most urgent desires in the metropolis. Perhaps today, in order to recover the creative capacity of humanity, it would be to take up again and to measure the maxim of the Eastern wisdom that goes, "Time is useful when it is not being used."

Bibliographical References.

Cortázar, J. (1997). La Autopista del Sur, cuentos completos. Buenos Aires: Alfaguara.

Lowith, K. (1974). De Hegel a Nietzsche. Buenos Aires: Suramericana.

Nietzsche, F. (1972). Así Habló Zaratustra. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.

Victor, G. (1991). El Pelaito que no duró nada. Bogotá: Planeta.

Virilio, P. (1997). La Velocidad de la Liberación. Buenos Aires: Manantial.

Zapata Yepes, R. D. (2002). La Resiganada Paz de las Astromelias. Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura.

Zuleta, E. (2005). Diálogo de la Dificultad. Medellín: Hombre Nuevo.