Within this whole little world of figures, notebooks, drawings, displaced voices, and parrot-narrators, images and words are never simple decorative objects. They speak because they contain an enigma, a resistance to immediate assimilation. Igniatius’s drawings, for example, do not function like consumable cultural products. They suspend ordinary language. They compel Lucian, and then Félix, to remain within a zone of uncertainty. In other words, they slow interpretation. They prevent the immediate consumption of meaning.
The parrots, whose independence one might legitimately doubt, nevertheless engage in dialogue…
— Why do we appear in the form of drawings?
— Drawing naturally slows the gaze… and that is all we are… It forces one to return, to follow intersecting lines, invisible strata, or silent details. It resists the instant consumption of the visible.
— That is a point of view…
— …which can be violent…
— …but civilized…
— There are points of view from which the word “civilization” ceases to be reassuring. For the idea according to which civilization slows violence becomes insufficient as soon as one realizes that certain forms of violence no longer need to explode in order to act.
— How do they do so?
— They circulate under the guise of normality. And this is probably one of the great displacements of modern violence.
— In many ancient societies, violence was visible… torture… wars… direct domination… openly acknowledged slavery… and worse things besides…
— Modern civilization has indeed reduced certain immediate violences. Private murder is less frequent. Vendettas diminish. Law partially replaces personal vengeance. In this respect, the slowing truly exists.
— I can see a certain objection approaching from far away…
— Yet at the same time something else appears…
— Tell me!
— A diffuse violence… administrative… economic… psychic… symbolic… statistical.
— A violence acting less through explosion than through the continuous modulation of existence.
— Exactly… because a society may produce order while increasing certain forms of inner violence… permanent acceleration… diffuse surveillance… constant competition… normalization of behavior… pressure to perform… uniformity of desires… production of social anxiety.
— And in that case… civilization no longer simply slows violence.
— It transforms it.
— It sometimes replaces visible brutality with a more silent systemic pressure.
— That is why certain twentieth-century thinkers… without even entering into partisan debate… profoundly questioned the naïve idea of civilizational progress.
— The return of the Barbarians?
— No, not because they dreamed of a return to barbarism, but because they saw that modern societies could manufacture extremely sophisticated forms of constraint.
— In what forms?
— A civilization always produces mechanisms of regulation… but those mechanisms may protect just as much as they may crush.
— So that the same administrative apparatus guaranteeing rights may become an apparatus of control.
— The same common language allowing dialogue may become an obligatory language.
— The same public order preventing certain violences may suffocate certain singularities.
— Thus conformity becomes an immense question.
— Yes… because conformism often acts without needing visible police. It passes through the collective gaze, habits, models of success, implicit forms of “acceptable reality.”
— A reality that is not ours…
— And this form of violence possesses something particularly strange…
— You worry me…
— It frequently demands the active participation of those whom it shapes.
— Us… for example…
— It does not constrain solely from the outside.
— What do you mean?
— It penetrates desire itself.
— I ought to tremble… yet… this does not seem to correspond to our world… but rather somewhat to what little I may know of our master’s…
— Modern capitalism, especially in its most technologically advanced forms, often tends to accelerate… circulation… consumption… production… information…
— …whatever kind…
— emotional reaction… as you have just provided a good example…
— …competition… such as…
— Now continuous acceleration produces chronic psychic tension. Time itself becomes exploitable.
— Silence becomes unproductive.
— Waiting becomes unbearable and slowness appears anomalous. In such a world, certain dimensions become difficult to inhabit…
— Let me guess… contemplation!
— Among other things… inner maturation… mourning… reverie… deep thought… slow transmission… sustained attention…
— If I understand correctly, modern civilization contains, in a certain sense, two contradictory movements…
— Exactly… it reduces certain archaic violences while producing new forms of permanent pressure.
— Then what was said earlier should perhaps be reformulated more cautiously. Perhaps civilization is not simply a slowing of violence.
— It would rather be a historical transformation of its forms.
— And if certain violences diminish… others become invisible…
— …yet very much present…
— Some leave the body in order to reach directly the inner time of individuals.
And perhaps this is where art, literature, and certain marginal or displaced figures, such as our Moon Child, become important. Not as escapes from the world, but as revealers of different rhythms. They reintroduce zones of resistance to general acceleration. They reopen spaces where something may still appear otherwise than under the pressure of immediate usefulness.
For a civilization entirely absorbed by speed often ends by losing the capacity to see what requires slowness in order to become visible.
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