Paul Virilio: The Politics of 'Real Time'
http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=360
David Cook
The one constant in the twentieth-century was the speed of light. Celebrated
quite naturally in physics in the only equation most of us know, light is
also, in some fashion, the point of the 'enlightenment'. Today, with the
various postmodern turns light is juxtaposed against the dark, the secret,
the invisible. Each of these melodramatic personae has now become an agent
of a counter to the enlightenment -- usually disguised in quite enlightened
arguments.
Paul Virilio offers one such argument that takes the visible and the
invisible to a 'virtual' conclusion. It is an argument that confronts a
social world that has been permanently altered. This, of course, is the
world of digital life where that subset of light in its electronic format
powers the New World. It may also power the older world of nature though
retrofitted as the environment or ecology.
It is to the character of this digital world that Virilio turns his
attention. While deeply immersed in its 'reality' as an individual, Virilio
is deeply repulsed by its fundamental attack on the basic propositions that
underlie human existence. This creates a tension in Virilio that is part of
the tension of digital culture. All too easily one can describe it as
seductive and corrupting. It is more difficult to catch the algorithm by
which this culture spreads and remakes the human social. That Virilio has an
insight into this there can be no doubt; that Virilio retreats into his own
bunkered world with his God there is also no doubt. Between these two
utopias, these two 'no places,' lies the politics of 'Real Time'.
Light
It is tempting to begin with fiat lux. However, before the lights come up,
so to speak, the conceptual scene will be set out. This will take us back
via way of Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry to the Greco-Roman period.
Here is the foundation, not only for Virilio's concepts of politics and
religion, but in a more fundamental way his concepts of space and time.
Epicurus will provide both the physics of the 'original' commonplace as well
as an insight into perception. These are precursors to both Virilio's vision
machine and his logistics of perception. This path will continue on into the
various geometries that culminate in the Einsteinian revolution, or, at
least for our purposes, Einstein's famous equation. Space/time becomes the
step towards the mutation that we live with today as 'real time'. Here light
may be all that remains in its digital waveform ushering in a globalization
of the 'virtual'.
In a way, fiat lux is the first word in a number of big productions
including Virilio's. It can be followed, as we all know, with lights,
camera, action. Not a bad summary of Virilio's philosophy -- a three
dimensional unfolding that establishes the politics of the vision machine
and with it Virilio's own dark vision of the digital age. It will turn out
to be a type of Cassandra production, or voyage, however, where Virilio
tries to reach 'escape velocity' into/from the 'real time' of the digital
culture. In the end, this will be, in a type of Leibnitzean fashion, the
universe of God or of Maxwell's demon. Take your pick.
Space
Let us begin though with an original geometry as appropriated by Virilio
from the phenomenological tradition. Virilio in many ways remains a
phenomenologist, as we shall see, mounting an unpopular attack on the
postmodern turn that followed Merleau-Ponty's death. In a late text, Open
Sky [1] ], Virilio makes reference to Edmund Husserl's The Origin of
Geometry that might stand as an indication of Virilio's early understanding
of space.
Virilio begins by agreeing with Husserl that geometry's origins are not to
be found in a search for first geometers. This is not a philological
question but rather, as Husserl states, a question of "reactivating the
original activities contained within its (geometry's) fundamental
concepts."[2] As Husserl goes on to point out we moderns, or postmoderns for
Virilio, have lost these 'origins' precisely because we can no longer have
access to the "human surrounding world". As Husserl suggests, this world
"... is the same today as always."[3] This 'sameness' is, however, put in
question by digital cultures but we will stick with Husserl a bit longer.
Hence, the problem for Husserl is that there is a 'turn' from this world
that 'surrounded' to a world that has given rise to the "idealizing,
spiritual act, one of 'pure' thinking ... (which) creates 'ideal
objects'".[4] Modernity though has cut itself off from the 'original' world
leaving only the 'idealized' objects, again in Husserl's words, "empty of
meaning".[5] This is, of course, the world that we now recognize in the
development of geometry whether at the time in Euclid, for example, or later
in non-Euclidean geometry. Geometry replaces the world experience with its
science of idealized objects. Virilio will follow along this path finding at
its end not only the 'idealized objects' but worse still 'virtualized
objects'.
There are a number of consequences that follow for Virilio in light of these
occluded 'origins.' In particular, Virilio is able to establish his theory
of space and time upon this reading of the classical past prior to the
cutting loose of geometry from its origins. Thus a type of 'nostalgia' for
the earlier world lurks behind Virilio's criticism that is often in his
writings hidden from view and explanation. This former world was open to all
and still, in some manner, fuels Virilio's 'grey ecology' as a possible
recuperation of the natural world recognizing the rather difficult task this
will pose. Virilio's thought, which will turn from these open spaces to open
skies, as detailed later, retains this first geometry.
This turning back to the 'origins of geometry' establishes the fundamentals
of Virilio's early thought. This 'original' world can be seen to underlie
three other related concepts. These will be central to Virilio's thought.
First, the critique of geometry establishes his conception of the State.
Second, it furnishes him with a reading of Christianity that proves to be
influential throughout his later work. Third, it allows for a basic
phenomenology of perception or, as Virilio notes, "... the phenomenology of
figures, the origin of geometry, this is my territory."[6] Each will be
developed in turn.
It would appear that for Virilio there is, similar to the thought of
Merleau-Ponty, a primacy given to the 'original' world as a 'common place',
or 'commonplace' as it will be expressed later. This world holds a touch of
Henri Bergson in that it primarily is a place where one endures and a place
that can be experienced intuitively. That is, Virilio seems to take the
primordial as a dwelling in a 'lived' time and space. Virilio's early
references to Martin Heidegger in Bunker Archaeology, his first major
publication, would suggest that he was influenced by the type of
'phenomenology' that was conveyed to France, making Martin Heidegger an
extension of Bergson.[7] Perhaps, to put it another way, there is a
similarity to Heidegger in Virilio's turn to the pre-Socratics and his
concern for the turn taken by what are at hand, the tools of geometry. That
is, the turn towards technology and science have both ontic and ontological
implications though Virilio, not being a philosopher, does not follow
Heidegger beyond the metaphysics of presence.
Thus, there is a place, as opposed to a no place, as we shall see, where one
experiences time as duration, long or short. The appreciation of this space
and time is the experience of the truly original 'geometers' who might very
well be more like architects than mathematicians. This is a reading that is
similar to Michel Serres' reflections on the origins of geometry where the
five senses form the basis of the early mathematics.[8] For Virilio, as for
Serres, this is an immensely creative period free from the type of
abstractions that will drive the history of the occidental 'civilization'.
That is, Virilio sets modern geometry against its experiential origins. We
will return later to a description of the early social for Virilio that
interweaves geometry as military architecture or, later, as logistics with
the phenomenological.
The primordial 'geometry' with its sense of space and time as a lived
experience or social practice did not last long for it gave rise to what we
normally take for geometry or to what Husserl refers in his reference to
'ideal objects'. Here is how Virilio describes it in L'insicuriti du
territoire.
        And, in effect, our civilization begins at the moment where the
Greeks exhumed geometry from their ethnological field, where they tear it
from social practice in distinguishing the properties of forms of dimensions
from their representations. They did not invent geometry, but the ecological
utopia (the no place of the science of place!) In making it independent of
the places and times of societies, they made of geometry a power in itself,
that which these societies would have to imagine for themselves in
recreating with their relations to space their relations to nature, and it
is this type of liberating conviction that animates all ancient thought
right up to their impossible mathematics.[9]
Here is a refrain that will appear countless times in Virilio's work that
the sense of time and space has been 'torn' from its field in what amounts
to a nihilating moment, a moment of 'no place', of utopia or, more
precisely, as a denial of time and space. The 'common' as the ground of the
social disappears, becomes invisible. We are then sent on our long history
of abstraction and negation that plays itself out, as we shall see later, in
the 'suicidal' state.
The turning-point appears to be with Archimedes who is depicted as the last
of the creative geometers for Virilio. After Archimedes there is the loss of
an "ideal of a world essentially common as a proto-foundation of the forming
of sense [sens]. *"[10] The asterisk on sens is Virilio's reference back to
Husserl's text The Origin of Geometry. However, one can see that Virilio
alters Husserl's depiction of the dynamic of forming the senses. The play in
French on sens captures both the five senses and the direction or movement
implicit in geometry, especially as it will later appears in physics. It
will be used, as well, in Virilio's phenomenology. This description
underlies how Virilio at heart retains a traditional metaphysics of a ground
while acknowledging, as is apparent in his later criticism, that this ground
is no longer experienced and may be threatened entirely in an ecological
disaster. This brings about Virilio's 'grey ecology'.
Nonetheless, the retention of Christianity in Virilio's ontological
considerations makes of this metaphysics more of a theo-ontology.
Thus, this 'foundation' turns out to be only 'proto'. It can give meaning to
the origin of geometry if we can 'think' in an original fashion. Yet the
prospect of such 'thinking' rapidly disappears after Archimedes. It then is
hidden by the very success of geometry itself that goes beyond the ethnicity
of the local practice in founding itself as a science. The overcoming of the
singular for the universal will be played out as the history of the Occident
that disorientates its own history by occluding the origins of events and
experiences. The evil deed, to continue the above quotation from Virilio's
L'insicuriti du territoire, is a military act of the Romans. "The sword of a
Roman soldier cuts the thread, as tradition says." Geometry, then, gives
rise not only to a science of 'no place', it sets the stage in Virilio's
mind for the rise of the state.
The switch from local practices to geometrical ideals underlies the growth
of the state. As Virilio puts it again in L'insicuriti du territoire, "The
problem of the permanence of morphological idealities is the key to our
civilization; rarely posed at the level of the State, it is this problem
that, nonetheless, directs indescribably its actions."[11] In fact, the
'ideals' that form part of the understanding in geometry soon leave the
realm of science for that of ideology. The Roman State, which for Virilio
has killed 'creative geometry', puts in its place an imperial geometry that
focuses on localizing and controlling space or, in other words, the state
focuses on securing its territory. The imperialism of language and
communications that follow eclipse the knowledge that is the foundation for
freedom and creativity. Ideals become idolatry with the figure of the State,
its geometry one might say, becoming an object of faith under which friends
and enemies can be detected. Security then turns into its double --
insecurity and politics is set on its course towards modernity as a control
function of the spatial.
There are a number of other consequences that flow from this movement of
phenomenological thought from 'lived experience' to idealities and finally
to idolatry. It affects not only the basic sense of space and time but if
one might express it this way, it sets the parameters of the City of man
against the City of God. Virilio expresses this succinctly in a phrase. "...
he (Christ) is dead under the blow of a single accusation, enemy of the
State..."[12] Another way of expressing this is that when space changes from
security of one's 'dwelling place' to political space, space becomes a
question of power and insecurity. The insecurity must come from a 'threat'.
Hence, the logic of the enemy of the state which continues rather unabated
to this day.
The setting of Christ in this 'historical' reenactment is critical for it
establishes the dynamic of Virilio's commitment to religion against that of
the idolatrous state. It also links the early geometers to Christ. "From
that time, one sees better what was the struggle of Christians against the
state idolatry [la statolbtrie] - the figure of the State - as object of
faith, the crime against the State as vandalism (crime against its
structure), the Greeks defenders of the young geometry find as well
themselves as martyrs ... and sometimes at the hand of the sectarian
christians."[13] ]
We might, undoubtedly in a rather exaggerated way, call Christ a type of
original geometer because for Virilio He shares with geometry the 'common
place' as the center of his 'Being' as host. That is, Christ dwells as well
in the place/space of human community as a double host. He elevates the
commonplace to the divine. By doing so He also fashions, if one will, the
essence of a transgressive and hence revolutionary act when taken in the
context of the Roman state.
Thus, bread and wine take on their divinity in part from their very
commonness and the very distribution of the commonplace makes the community.
The commonplace also stands as the essence of liberty in much the same way
that 'original' thinking is by its nature free. This is Christ as the first
host.
        Christ is twice the host. The day before his death, he defined the
object of sacrifice in taking and distributing bread and wine: this is I?
the common place, the everyday, I am the principal of one who is for all,
their liberty is common place, the most common is the most divine.[14]
Christ the second host shows that the State is against this freedom in the
very withdrawal of space and time that occurs with the imperial geometry.
One will note that not only is it a withdrawal, it is a withdrawal that
stands against creativity and 'secures', 'protects' itself in the very act
of destroying time. Again security demands that the chief source of
insecurity be eliminated, that time itself which is part of all change must
be eliminated.
        The next day, the second host shows that the everyday which is
Christ is incompatible in its principal of common liberty with the order
that, by its conservative and prophylactic construction, withdraws from
human time and space, from the everyday, one can think this today,
plausibly, to the end of time or to time's wasting away.[15]
The course of Virilio's thought will see this playing out of the wasting
away of time in the postmodern switch to 'real time'.
Finally, Christ shows how this withdrawal creates the transgressive act that
emerges from the blindness, the invisibility of the state and church bring
forth a demand for visibility.
        At Emma's, conversely, Christ reemerges from the shadow of the
commonplace, the blindness of the apostles ceases when he renews the gesture
of transgression, this gesture that the Church covers in gold, in mud and
innocent blood has, nevertheless, repeated over the course of centuries,
deformed, sophisticated, and however, always facing the Occidental State as
a sign that has become quasi unconscious and automatic of ultimate
resistance, to the invention of the colony, the ghetto, the camps, the
reserves, the proletarianization, the under-development, worse still, the
destruction of sociality, of the socialism of the poor, of their products,
of their inventions, of their cultures, of their knowledge, of their
techniques...[16]
The lengthy quote from Virilio's work gives the reader a sense of what is
rarely explicit in his understanding as to the nature of the Christianity.
It is also a text that has only appeared in partial translation in English
so that the sense of Virilio's early understanding of the relation of the
commonplace to space and time is not well developed in North America.
Virilio's belief also raises the question as to whether his historical
references would not be better taken as, not so much history, for after all
along with Husserl he denies that we ever really can know the 'original
situation'. Rather it is more useful to see Virilio's comments as
establishing a type of secularized theology giving at once an ontology based
on a 'plausible ontic' that can be used, as he says, as a proto ground for
later criticism. It is not without considerable irony that Virilio has
managed in this early text to flip the essence of Christianity away from the
timeless and the beyond of space, that is, the City of God has miraculously
turned into a City of man or, at least, a community of the commonplace.
However, the former Christianity comes along a bit later for Virilio in the
juxtaposition to digital culture.
It is also apparent why Virilio's commitment to Christianity is one that
puts him at odds with the state. He is in this sense closer to the left in
his support of political issues rather than holding the more conservative
views usually associated with the French religious tradition.
Time
There can be little doubt that the early Greco-Roman period provided in its
geometry one of the key elements for Virilio's treatment of space. The
classical Greeks also contributed to his understanding of time. This can be
seen, again retrospectively, by the rather brief and not too precise
references that Virilio makes in his later work Open Sky to the thought of
Epicurus, understood primarily as a physicist.
The method that Epicurus employs is similar in nature to that of the early
geometers. That is, Epicurus takes a 'common' sense view of how one
experiences or intuits the world. From this one is given the general
conception of objects and, more particularly, one is given a general
conception of time.
Below is a paragraph that comes from Epicurus' Letter to Herodotus that,
although Virilio does not quote it, the paragraph seems to capture much of
what Virilio will take to be the nature of time.
        Moreover, you must firmly grasp this point as well; we must look for
time, as we do for all other things when we look for in an object, by
referring them to the general conceptions which we perceive in or minds, but
we must take direct intuition, in accordance with which we speak of 'a long
time' or 'a short time', and examine it applying our intuition of time as we
do other things...[17]
One can readily see here the type of 'duration', the long and short time
that Virilio associates with local experiences of space and time. Time,
then, is not abstracted as it will become under 'scientific time' but
similar to Bergson and Virilio's understanding of Heidegger, as has been
remarked above, it forms part of existing itself. Epicurus continues in his
letter as follows.
        For indeed this requires no demonstration, but only reflection, to
show that it is with days and nights and their divisions that we associate
it, and likewise also with internal feelings or absence of feeling, and with
movements and states of rest; in connexion with these last again we think of
this very perception as a peculiar kind of accident, and in virtue of this
we call it time.[18]
Three observations may be made of this selection. First, one can see a type
of materialism rather similar to the one expounded later by Thomas Hobbes.
Virilio will take similar categories of movement and states of rest to be
fundamental to the dynamic of 'politics and war' captured in Virilio's early
work Speed and Politics.[19] This 'materialism' will be developed further in
reference to Epicurus' theory of perception.
Second, the alternation of day and night and our experience of it becomes a
sign of the change in the way we are 'human'. Once we lose the common sense
of the alternation of night and day we become less human. As Virilio shows
later, we also change our social and political environments.
This is precisely a threat come real for Virilio in the experiences of
twentieth-century astronauts. Once leaving the earth, as the astronauts
noted, one's 'time clock' was easily overturned necessitating the use of
'capsule time'. Night and day were, of course, directly effected by the
angle to the sun and the speed of the capsule. Even more disorienting was
the lunar orbit that transformed the length of nights turning into days by
significantly shortening the cycle. Even on the moon the boundary between
light and dark, night and day if you will, is sharp owing to the absence of
diffraction of light. One passes from one to the other merely at the limit
by putting out one's hand or, more in line with Virilio's later comments,
one's prosthesis.[20] The astronauts stand for the disorientation of
experience, of the loss of the commonplace. The tragedy of Buzz Aldren's
personal life seems to bear out for Virilio the effects of this interruption
in 'normal' life that we all live --- if only at second hand.
A more earthly example that illustrates a similar phenomenon is the gambling
casino where night and day, or for that matter clock time, no longer exists.
The litany of problems of casino addicts or in a similar fashion of addicted
Internet users is becoming well known.
The third observation has to do with the epistemological assumptions that
Virilio uses. Virilio is not a philosopher and does not have a concern for a
technical epistemology. In fact, his commitment to religious belief, as we
have seen, provides a critical backdrop against which many of the prevailing
epistemological statements are implicitly evaluated. The limitation of
secular theories of knowledge, in some sense, reveal the problems of the
degeneration of common life in the modern century though Virilio offers more
than his theological beliefs.
With Epicurus, nonetheless, the origins of a reversal of common sense can be
detected. What might 'normally', that is in the lived social practice
referred to earlier, be considered substantial, permanent, or the essence of
a 'thing' is reversed. The fundamental characteristics become relative and
contingent. That is, substance, which intuitively is the primary essence of
a 'thing', becomes less 'substantial' than its 'accidental' qualities. The
nature of a 'thing' is 'determined' then more by 'accidental' qualities than
by what, for lack of a better word, may be called 'primary' qualities. That
is, the 'changeable' aspect of a thing as it exists in space and time, its
'accidental' characteristics, is in some sense more fundamental for Western
thought.
The last sentence of the above quotation from Epicurus identifies 'time' as
a 'particular kind of accident' consequent on the perception of the duration
of movement and rest. Time is, then, the movement between accidental
characteristics of things. This movement is often referred to as an interval
by Virilio or, in his references to photography and film, as exposure. In
particular, in Western science the most important measure of the interval
will be that of the 'speed of light'. Virilio contrasts the classical
alternation of night and day, that is two 'accidental' states, to the
alternation in states consequent on the speed of light in binary circuits
that govern today's digital revolution. We will return to the nature of the
digital revolution later but the point is obvious that the world has a quite
different sense of time and space in digital reality - 'Real Time' - than in
classical times.
Virilio also understands 'accident' as meaning unpredictable and unknowable.
That is, taking the sense of unknowable, the beginning and end of time are
themselves 'uncaused' and hence, our cosmology is profoundly accidental. As
the quotation from Virilio's 1990 work L'inertie polaire suggests, the
'accidental' is central to our contemporary cosmology forming, as his ironic
comments point towards, a type of secular religiosity with its own miracles.

        However that might be [the debate over the 'reality' carried on by
Einstein and others such as Gamov and Lemantre], catastrophe becomes the
alpha and omega of contemporary cosmology: explosion of causality (BIG
BANG), implosion of finality (BIG CRUNCH), the physicists are caught in the
trap of their cosmological logic, constrained to accord to the accident the
first importance that they yesterday accorded to the substance. Henceforth,
whatever one may say, whatever one may do, the accident is absolute and
necessary and the substance relative and contingent. For the materialists,
convinced 'anti-creationists': the accident has become the lay form of the
miracle![21]
Beyond the undermining of 'causality' and 'finality' that Virilio asserts
follows from the 'accident' of time, is the sense of the 'catastrophe' that
is implicit in the accidental. While in L'inertie polaire Virilio identifies
catastrophe with two events outside of our experience, the beginning and end
of the universe, in his most recent works he returns to the catastrophes
that accompany the introduction of new 'technologies'. Again, in a rather
ironic manner, Virilio suggests we have need of museums of catastrophes to
accompany our museums of science. Thus, for every advance in transportation,
for example the train over the horse, the scale of damage increases from the
fall from the horse to the train wreck. Needless to say nuclear power has
escalated the degree of the catastrophic.
In some fundamental sense the essence of technological 'advance' couples
with Virilio's theory of war. The very nature of war is catastrophic. Speed
almost always implies a collision and increases in speed imply greater and
more devastating collisions. Virilio will pursue in his early works the
architecture or logistics of this 'science' until contemporary warfare makes
the question of catastrophe itself a threat to our very existence. Later we
will see that there is a 'meta' level of accidents, what might be called the
'accident of accidents', where time itself as 'Real Time' becomes the
catastrophe. In Epicurus' words: "time is the accident to end all
accidents."[22] ]
The sense of time as accidental may also be found in the work of Paul Klee
whose influence on Virilio is important as the many references to Klee
attest. In particular, Klee's 1939 drawing entitled Accident portrays a
world where, in Klee's words, there has been an "Exchange of the dimensions
that govern our natural sense of up and down".[23] Picture the usual Klee
stick figure flipped on its head, yet still in the inverted position forming
a type of figure after the reversal. The world is turned upside down
creating a 'mutant' product. Klee, like Virilio, makes the new figure appear
out of space.
Klee's theory of perception as a 'thinking eye' is close to the 'vision
machine' that the later Virilio will see as the revolution of contemporary
sight. As Klee suggested, all space has a temporal dimension to it. A line
is really a point in motion; it turns into movement, which takes time. The
link to war made be made, in admittedly a rather unsystematic manner, to
Klee's African spear collection. The spear serves both roles as a point in
motion, or line and as a weapon.
While Virilio's references to Epicurus are without specifics, as noted
earlier, one can speculate that a second important aspect of what Virilio
may have taken from his work lies in the physics of perception. Again,
Epicurus is better known for a materialism associated with the pleasure pain
calculus but there is another dimension to his materialism evident in Cyril
Bailey's comments on the Letter to Herodotus given below.
        Now the 'images' are mainly fine in texture: they are shot off from
the body by the impulses of atomic movement within it, which starts the
whole complex film in movement in one direction, they can move through space
without encountering any - or only a few - obstacles, and there is little or
no internal vibration. For these reasons the images are able to move almost
at atomic speed: they are imperceptible in their transit, and it is only
when they touch our eyes that we perceive them.[24]
There is a striking resemblance of this kinetic materialism to Thomas
Hobbes' psychology in the first part of the Leviathan that informs part of
the infamous Hobbesian state of war. It will serve a similar purpose for one
aspect of Virilio's thinking. The images that are 'shot off from the body'
are not far from the logistics of weapons that structure the very nature of
war, or speed and politics for Virilio. One can also see the parallel with
the 'accidental'.
Once the 'images' 'touch our eyes' one can be 'blinded by the light' so to
speak. Perhaps though of more importance, is the sense in which Epicurus may
also be read as describing a 'vision machine'. The whole perceptual
apparatus is in some way a film turning each individual into both a cineaste
and cinemagoer. Later concerns by Virilio with the cinema and war, as well
as the current fashion for 'home videos', are extensions of this filmic
imagery. In a rather uncanny fashion Bailey's language summarizing the speed
of the images - atomic speed - will also come to occupy Virilio as a central
problem of vision. What happens to the world when it is run in fast forward
at atomic speed?
In summary, while Virilio is by no means a classicist, his examination, in
admittedly a rather eclectic fashion, of the past provides him with the
ground for his later critiques. Here is at once an insight into his
religious beliefs through his understanding of Christ and the 'common
place'. As well, we are given the primary experiences governing space as it
is lived in the first geometry of dwelling and in architecture. Time is also
given in the contrast of the time of the gospels versus the 'accidental'
time of Epicurus.
Perception
It is not surprising that Virilio is critical of the way we now perceive the
world. His initial reflections on the Western tradition give one the strong
sense of a loss. This is not the loss of innocence but rather the reverse.
The contemporary world has lost its ability to experience substituting a
type of willful innocence. Virilio expresses this in his criticism that we
are no longer 'see-ers' having become only 'resee-ers'. That is, we no
longer 'construct' the world with our vision but rather are constantly
recycling what has been seen.
        Our contemporary situation is the inverse of that of the primitive.
It has to make its path in the midst of the proliferation of references,
rules and orders. That is why the process of organizing perception seems to
me so little suitable to the period. An actualization of perception ought to
be at work in the composition of the immediate image: to see should not be
constantly to re-see. Today we are no longer truly see-ers [voyants] but
already resee-ers [revoyants], the tautological repetition of the same, at
work in our mode of production (industrial) is at work equally in our mode
of perception.[25]
Needless to point out, that there is nothing Nietzschean about the
'repetition of the same'. Here is a vision the exact opposite of any
Nietzschean creativity. Gilles Deleuze in his Difference and Repetition [26]
makes a similar point about the loss of uniqueness, the loss of
'singularities' in an ontology of repeating rather than repetition. The
closure of the self in a world of repeated forms becomes linked to the
process of production that similarly drives the aesthetic vision from the
field for the standardized object.
Nor is Virilio advocating a return to the 'primitive' though his earlier
comments on geometry make clear that there is a more 'original', a rather
better translation of 'primitif' in this context than the 'primitive'
experience that we have lost by the organizing of perception. What is called
for in 'seeing' things is a re thinking of the process of actualizing the
image. Later Virilio will expand on his understanding of how the industrial
mode of production/perception can be understood as a 'motor' of history. For
the moment, we will look at how the image is actualized for Virilio himself
in referencing the few autobiographical comments that he makes in L'horizon
nigatif.
Like Merleau-Ponty in his last uncompleted work, Virilio is concerned about
the 'visible and the invisible'. He poses the question of how, given that we
are situated in the world that is no longer the world of original geometers,
do we perceive? It is evident that we are no longer capable of the form of
direct perception, of vision, that characterized both the original
commonplace and the spiritual realm. The opposite is now the case in that
'direct' perception is a version of the 're-seeing' mode of production --
the continual seeing of the 'same' by the 'same'. Hence, true vision is of
what is not 're-seen'. True vision is, in part, the invisible made visible.
"I then become a specialist in tropes as I had given myself the goal of
rendering visible the invisible...".[27] No doubt, in the end, the invisible
is the spiritual for Virilio that is made visible in Christ and in the
commonplace.
Unlike something that would be hidden by nature, things in Virilio's world
are only hidden because the visible occludes one's perception. Thus, like
the 'revolutionary' aspect of Christ's challenge to the Western state's way
of seeing, there is imbedded in perception a need for challenging, for
overthrowing or, in Virilio's words, 'unmasking'. This unmasking is,
nonetheless, rather far from a politics of revolution though Virilio's
support for certain environmental causes might fall into this politic.
Rather the unmasking is closer to a prophetic sense of vision. Virilio, in
the following quotation, compares this to a voluntary blindness that, in
many ways, facilitates the actual process of vision.
        This way of visually feeling the parametric limits of things was
comparable enough to a second Braille method, there was a part of voluntary
blindness in my way of seeing, I was suddenly persuaded that vision gave
less to see, that it was above all a process of occultation, a very ancient
process where the old custom of referencing fashioned the everyday image,
something chose for me the figure that I contemplated; "One sees well only
that which one has already in one's head...", this maxim confirmed for me
the clandestine will at work in the most ordinary vision, it made me
indignant as well, me for whom vision consisted precisely to discover, to
constantly unmask ..."[28]
One could read Virilio's 'voluntary blindness' as part of the long tradition
of the blind seeing wisdom where the sighted fail. However, it appears more
likely that Virilio intends not so much blindness itself but rather a
breaking of the visual act to release it from the hold of the vision
machine. That is to say, Virilio is probably closer to the artist who sees
differently rather than the wise person -- not a surprising fact given
Virilio's early association with Klee, Braque and Matisse. Of course,
Virilio will eventually turn on the artists as imposing a 'silence' on the
world that reinforces the 'vision machine'.[29]
There is also a tendency for Virilio to look to those whose experience of
the world has been disrupted. Notably, for example, in his The Aesthetics of
Disappearance [30] he begins with a discussion of 'picnolepsy' a medical
condition that, nonetheless, tells us about perception and time. The
picnoleptic experiences first hand the break up of space and time in the
vision process thereby having a quite different sense of the world.
Virilio's personal experience, as described below, seems to share some of
the picnoleptic's way of seeing.
Virilio provides in L'horizon nigatif one long passage that is quoted below
concerning how his perception of the world differs from ordinary vision. We
can see again how he contrasts the 'trivial geometries' of today against a
more creative geometry that, while he does not name it here, is clearly
linked back to the early geometers. It is also evident how the banal becomes
its opposite once the invisible becomes visible. This is the visibility of
the earlier commonplace.
        Suddenly, before me, new objects appeared, bizarre figures cut out,
notched, a set of articulations has become suddenly visible and these
observed objects were no longer banal, whatever, insignificant; they were on
the contrary, diversified in the extreme. They were everywhere, all space,
all the world was filled with new forms. They were nested in the hollows of
the least forms. It was like an unknown vegetation that grew around me.
Industrial objects without value provoked the appearance of objects
temporarily given a great complexity. The position of things triggered new
exotic forms, forms that escaped us despite their evidence. Accustomed as we
are to trivial geometries, we perceive perfectly the circle, the sphere, the
cube or the square, we perceive infinitely less well intervals, the
interstices between things, between people.[31]
The above passage highlights another of the central aspects of Virilio's
perceptual schema. The geometry that intrigues him is not that of the
completed forms, as he notes, but rather of the 'intervals, the interstices'
that spawned a plethora of new forms. It is the relationship of objects, and
especially objects in movement that, as we have seen with the references to
Epicurus, are the fundamentals of this physics or physical geometry. By
seeing the articulations of objects each object becomes unique forcing the
'viewer' to see and not just re-see. By seeing the intervals or the spaces
we create the commonplace where the objects may appear. That is, the
'intervals' are the duration that 'creates' time for dwelling.
Thus, Virilio's work will focus on an analysis not so much of the object but
of the intervals between and amongst objects. In the acceleration of
objects, as we shall see, the interval time, the time between people and
things decreases, and with the collapsing of the interval time objects lose
their creative, bizarre, exotic form and return to the world of industrial
production. As the interval time decreases, time as 'accident' increases.
Another way of expressing it is that real time and space goes 'Real Time'
for Virilio.
As a consequence, in Virilio's worldview, perception is a binary oscillator
that flips from form to anti-form and then back to form. Always the
creative, the anti-form takes the side of disappearance. Only the effort at
perception brings it into the visible but, as Virilio makes clear, only for
a short time. So the earlier voluntary blindness becomes a voluntary
focusing on the 'emptiness' between objects.
        Henceforth, there was for me two evidences: the evidence of the
explicit and the evidence of the implicit, this last irresistibly attracted
me but here, something intrigued me: the vision of the between-world was
fragile in the extreme, the image of transparence remained only by an effort
of perception, the anti-form persisted only for the time of this effort,
then the form retook its rights and occulted the empty field, the depth an
instant ago perceived. Vision became a phenomena of voluntary focusing,
similar to the camera, I must choose the object to aim at and to hold it
there in order to be able to observe it in all the sharpness of its
contours, as soon as I abandon this aiming at the depths, at the anti-form,
at the transparence, it is the form that becomes clear again, all natural,
to the detriment of the preceding seen emptiness.[32]
While Virilio expresses the mode of perception through the analogy to a
camera, the taking aim may equally well refer to the rifle or canon. And as
Virilio himself remarks the French translation for taking aim may as be
rendered as the 'line of faith'. Here is the trajectory of Virilio's thought
in the intertwining of God, war and culture that are each aspects of the
same phenomenology of perception that creates the modern and postmodern
concepts of time and space.
Virilio's later reflections on what might be called the phenomenology of
perception are taken from Irvin Rock's The Logic of Perception.[33] In
particular, his comments on the aesthetics of anorthoscopic vision tie in
with the 'slit' vision of the camera. The slit experiments by restricting
the visual field establish the limits of visibility and the manner in which
'objectification' becomes possible. The physical parameters of vision become
important for Virilio, as the technology of the vision machine is able to
exceed the 'natural' speeds at which vision may take place. For most of us
more than sixty images per second results in life as a blur. Similarly a
minimum of twenty milliseconds is required by our brain for image
recognition. Beyond either of these thresholds there is "nothing to
see."[34]
What happens at this "degree zero of the visible" or, what also may be
called the point of "perceptionless perception", provides a type of forking
path both for the see-er and for Virilio himself. A straightforward stimulus
response type of phenomenology is, of course, ruled out in this modified
Gestalt perspective. Perception is always mediated by its own blindness.
That is, as you move the 'slit' more of the object comes into view but at no
time is the complete object 'seized'. Virilio calls this "shifting your
blindness".
There are, though, two ways in which Virilio describes the process of image
formation at this point. The first harkens back to Bergson and his theory of
time that introduces a 'virtual' dimension into the composing of the
present. That is, for Bergson, the present as an event must be considered in
the context of the understanding given by past events that, by definition,
are completed. Hence, the event is, in part, knowable through
re-presentation and memory. This process is a virtual one or, at least,
contains a virtual dimension. Events are known 'virtually' as much as
'actually'. Here is Virilio's description following on from his reference to
the degree zero of vision.
        Numerous experiments have sought to analyze scientifically the
reasons why such occultation is ineffective, but they have never managed to
come to grips with the nature of such perceptionless perception. This degree
zero of the visible becomes an enigma, not only in terms of the space of the
image but especially of the time involved in its immediate perception, the
real time of contemplation, during which the 'actual' image glimpsed through
the slit is closely integrated with the 'virtual' image of the delayed
interpretation that completes and supplies what is missing in the form
perceived by eye movement, by the 'tracking' that is indispensable to
contemplation.[35]
Here the 'real' is an interpretative integration of the 'actual' and the
'virtual'. The 'virtual' at issue is not the demon that Virilio will make of
it when it runs rampant in 'Real Time'. In fact, this reference is not quite
what Virilio will be comfortable with, as we will see in a moment. The
'virtual' will be chased from the scene but at an expense, in the end, of
Virilio's understanding of the current landscape. If the virtual is, indeed,
part of the zero degree of perception one opens the postmodern as a
necessary part of an exploration of the logistics of perception. That has
been foreclosed for many by the assumption that the 'actual' is the 'real'.
However, this will not work in Virilio's case. If the 'virtual' is in fact
what is 'missing' to contemplation it will not do to dispense with it as a
form of 'missing in action' of the rush to condemn this worldly
contemplation.
For this is precisely the track that Virilio takes shortly after the
'virtual' makes its appearance - however briefly and spectrally. Back then
to belief and faith that take the place of the overly active virtual. That
is, in the composition of the 'real' the overcoming of blindness can occur
by a virtualizing of the interval between the 'actual' or by filling the
interval with 'faith' or belief' that creates the 'consistency' of vision.
On this fork in the perceptual road, a form of road to Damascus, the choices
are clear, or at least, simplified.
        If speed then serves to see, to conceive - that is, to seize
reality, and not just to get around - this is because it is part and parcel
of perceptual faith, that ocular belief that is inseparable from our
immediate awareness. 'Belief' or 'desire': the choice offered by the forking
path of perception is clear; the more readily you accede to the scenes that
unfold before you, the more consistency you give your existence. Your
existence suddenly becomes commutative with an environment to which you lend
credence ... Otherwise, you soon regress to a dogmatism of appearances not
far removed from autism.[36]
The path of desire has never been an easy one and will not be here. The
seizing of the object, all that glitters, whether dialectically ingested or
not, will leave one with, as Virilio suggests, the senses denied. The
polarity between the 'actual' and the 'virtual' is replicated between
'faith' and 'desire' with Virilio's thought playing on the tension though
with increasing virulence as 'faith' and the 'actual' become the sign of the
'good' while 'desire' and the 'virtual' taking the role of the evil mutant
twin. This is the dynamic that awaits the cyber world but to get there we
must 'see' what happens when speed is treated in the context of the
landscape of the events where events are part of the Einsteinian revolution.

E=mc2
The bringing together of ocular belief and speed in current times creates
what Virilio calls in The Information Bomb [37] ] 'Grand-Scale Transhorizon
Optics'. Hence, a theory of visualization that, in a similar fashion to the
theory of optics for Newton, defines a new science. In this case the science
is virtualization and the optics are Einsteinian.
Einstein, or perhaps more precisely, his famous equation, plays a
significant role in what is for Virilio an historical process that leads to
the prominence of time over space, the virtual over the actual and finally
the real. The root of it is in the equivalence of energy, mass and light.
One could envisage a short hand of the history as the translation of all
matter and energy into light.
In a reprise of the revolution in physics Virilio declares that, far from
eliminating absolutes, we still retain the absolute of the speed of light.
        Time (duration) and space (extension) are now inconceivable without
light (limit speed), the cosmological constant of the speed of light, an
absolute philosophical contingency that supercedes, in Einstein's wake, the
absolute character till then accorded to space and to time by Newton and
many others before him.[38]
Virilio works through the implication of this 'cosmological constant' on the
concepts of the past, present and future that we will examine below.
Afterwards we will return to the new relations of space as seen from the
perspective of the 'old' geometer, Virilio himself, and the landscape of
relief/accidents that emerges in the present.
Given the cosmological constant it is rather easy to find the 'fountain of
youth' or at least, those who have benefited by it. That is, of course, the
photon. The photon is a timeless 'piece of matter/energy'. At the subatomic
level there is no way to differentiate the past from the future. One could
say particles live only in the present though more accurately it might be
said that the concept of a time continuum breaks down at this point.
Nonetheless, the revolution in physics constitutes a profound shift, not
only in terms of origins but also in the nature of time as metaphysics of
'presence'.
The eclipsing of the time continuum is understood in a number of ways. At
times Virilio sees this in terms of the co existence of the past with the
present that equates to a paralysis of the present by the past. He expresses
it as "history has just crashed into the wall of time."[39] In this version,
culture recoils from its future taking shelter in the running of past ways
of life. It is not hard to speculate that this is, in part, Virilio's
personal solution to the 'real time' barrier as he looks fondly back on
periods where there is a history that influences the present. One could
speculate this is also typical of the reaction of the intellectual class
that tends to remain more comfortable with past discourses that retain
traditional value premises even if they remain critical of the sociocultural
world. As a perspective on 'real time' it is tied to the spatial continuum
that is the attractiveness for Virilio and we will return to it when
discussing the geographical concept of 'relief'.
However, the view that 'real time' creates a barrier to one part of the time
continuum by shutting out the future is a view that in the end cannot be
sustained. Its weakness stems from the nature of the physics underlining the
Einsteinian revolution. Here is how Virilio expresses it in a later essay in
his work Open Sky. Open Sky, or as the French title of 'Escape Velocity'
suggests, is a reflection on what happens outside the parameters of the
global perspective evidenced in the use of the 'wall' as a boundary or
horizon. It is precisely the absence of such horizons, as well as ground,
that is the essence of the perspective of 'Real Time'.
        For Einstein, the present is already 'the centre of time'; the past
of the original big bang is not, and scientifically cannot be, that old
centre. The true centre is always new, the centre is perpetual, or to put it
even more precisely, the 'present' is an eternal present.[40]
Translated into technological terms the 'eternal present', to use Virilio's
words, is "killing 'present' time isolating it from its here and now, in
favour of a commutative elsewhere that no longer has anything to do with our
'concrete presence' in the world..."[41] In this version, then, of
Einstein's revolution it is not so much that each clock is relative to each
other, though this is an important aspect in overcoming any 'concrete'
reference. The real challenge comes when this is coupled with the continual
restarting of the 'present' outside of the fixed reference points of
extension and duration.
In this analysis, Virilio may not have gone far enough. For example, recent
attempts at understanding the universe would appear to be premised on
eliminating the dependency on any given concept of time. In the passage
below from Stephen Hawking, we are given what is charmingly called the
'equation for the universe'. While acknowledging that Hawking does not claim
that this has a reality in the conventional sense it is still a startling
observation.
        The Wheeler-DeWitt equation corresponds to the independence of the
wave function O. One can think of it as the Schrvdinger equation for the
universe. But there is no time-derivative term because the wave function
does not depend on time explicitly.[42]
Hawking and Penrose are arguing over the issue of the open and closed
universe and whether there is a boundary or not. While acknowledging that
none of this can really be translated into anything understandable in
everyday terms, we can see the danger that these concepts hold for Virilio.
Once time is rendered as independent of the wave equation it makes, in the
world of the limit speed of light, the very nature of extension and duration
incalculable. The universe, as a consequence, becomes indifferent to its own
'lived experience' resting on a metric that becomes a function of the mass
and energy level. Here is another version of the above quotation where S
represents a surface, conceivably the universe itself as dependent on matter
in its field or, as Virilio will refer to it, in its 'relief'.
        % is called the wave function of the universe. If there are matter
fields x, the wave function will also depend on their values x on S. But it
will not depend explicitly on time because there is no preferred time
coordinate in a closed universe.[43]
Here again is the repetition that time itself is not a determinate variable
in the wave function. However, what is important are the 'matter fields'
that are clearly central in the theory of general relativity. In essence,
this is the unresolved question of the effects of matter on the nature of
the universe. Usually this is question of whether the so-called 'dark
matter' will result in the universe as expanding or contracting. This is
still an unresolved fact even given the recent 'neutrino' discoveries in the
mineshaft in Northern Ontario.
In the case here, the controversy is more over the question of the nature of
gravity that, as we know, is unresolved in cosmology. For Virilio, the
question of the gravitational pull is what defines the earth as opposed to
the 'open skies' where the gravitational pull is overcome in escape
velocity.
Virilio is faced with a number of issues emanating from this cosmology.
First, the nature of the 'present' would appear to be outside of the
everyday time continuum. It is not a question of a relative time frame but
more radically of a theory that has no determinate time variable at all.
However, replacing the time dependent equations are the equations that
depend on 'matter', which gives the universe its geometry. Thus, in a
strange turn of the screw, the fall from time in to 'real time' marks as
well the fall back into geometry and gravity.
Here, in summary form, is the history of the world, at least from the
geometric perspective. It begins for Virilio, as shown earlier, with the
original geometers who remain unknown but gave the sense of the
'commonplace'. They are displaced by the Euclidean revolution. Euclid and,
what amounts to his philosophical counterpart Reni Descartes, established
time and space, or extension, as the basis of the modern world. It
underscored the perspectives of science as well as the art world that later
appears as the Quattrocento for Virilio. This geometry, as is well known, is
itself displaced by the non-Euclidean geometries that prove essential to the
Einsteinian revolution.
Even these geometries will be under transition in contemporary cosmology.
This is precisely the center of the debate between Hawking and Penrose as
each cosmology raises the nature of the geometry that underlies the
universe. Consider the wave function S, expressed above by Hawking, as a
matter field. Part of the field, one aspect of its phase space, can be
understood in Euclidean terms. Basically the 'world' is comprehended in such
terms as a variant of normal everyday experience. But part of the field
takes the form of Lorentzian space. The Lorentzian-de Sitter metric captures
that part of space not covered by the asymptotic Euclidean metric.[44] This,
in a loose fashion, is the space outside of the light cone of the observer.
It may also be expressed as a form of the virtual in the vocabulary used
here. Again, the everyday meaning of these geometries is not readily
understandable but the decoupling of the Cartesian co ordinates in
non-boundary systems revolutionizes the concept of the universe and the
place of the world.
Penrose will object to Hawking's line of reason advancing solutions based on
so-called 'twister space'.[45] No matter which space is at issue, however,
each of the phase spaces share the same reduction, whether of the wave
equation or of the non-linear equations, to the wave form. Virilio is, of
course, not at all happy with this cosmology. In fact, Virilio shares the
long-standing skepticism over "cosmology-builders and flood makers" or
"world makers" evidenced in the seventeenth century by many supporters of
the church -- to reference one of the studies that Virilio draws upon.[46]
Nonetheless, he does postulates the second order effect of this cosmological
geometry on the social itself. The cosmological becomes the 'actual' as the
amalgam of the virtual and the real replacing the lived experience of the
actual of the commonplace. That is, contemporary cosmology replicates the
fundamental binary of the virtual and the real, which is sending the world
speedily to its binary death in the 'real-time perspective'.
        The conflict which rested on the geometric division between the
opposites of Right and Left gives way to the axis of stereoscopic symmetry
of that real-time perspective which revolutionizes historical time and the
culture of nations by converting all present reality into wave form.[47]
The polarity of Virilio's reaction to the Einsteinian revolution is stark
here. If the geometry of the commonplace, not to mention the older
revolutionary tradition of the left and right, is convertible into the
waveform then one is facing a 'revolution' to be sure. The waveform gives
rise to 'Real Time'.
The question of whether Virilio can jettison the whole of twentieth century
physics and perhaps the basis of the twenty first is implied in the unease
with which he understands the waveform. However, the damage done is not yet
complete for under its transforming powers 'all that is solid melts into the
air' or at least into light. This is the case with gravity and the material
world.
Einstein's equation is generally presented in terms of energy juxtaposed to
the speed of light and mass but, quite naturally, it can be expressed with
either mass or light on the left hand side. This is precisely the logic of
Virilio's case. Take the commutation M=e/c2. Here matter/mass is converted
in the waveform and the 'hard' world gives way to the virtual.
        The matter-time of the hard geophysical reality of places gives way
to this light-time of a virtual reality which modifies the very truth of all
durie, thereby provoking, with the time accident, the acceleration, the
acceleration of all reality: of things, living beings, social-cultural
phenomena.[48]
The Bergsonian durie itself is transformed into the light interval, into
'exposure' intervals, away from the experience of time in its past, present,
future modality. Along with the change in time goes the physical world. The
loss of mass/matter, the very stuff of the commonplace, is the fundamental
charge against the postmodern cybernetic world. The physical world gives way
to the digital life world on the screen. As always when things speed up the
time/accident is waiting.
The loss of mass to energy and light also means the loss of 'gravity'
whether, as Virilio suggests, "our weight" or "the pull of earth's
gravity".[49] As matter is turned into light a "double fall" occurs not only
in the traditional sense above but, as well, with the "absence of mass of
light" itself.[50] We are not far here from the revised theology of the
fall, not from Eden, but from the entire planet. It also represents for
Virilio the logical end of the Occident as all matter and mass implode into
an "evacuated" physical field that has become only surface-to-surface
interfaces.
One might imagine at this point a 'landscape' or 'field theory' that
replaces traditional geography. The field is constituted not by its
'physical' dimensions but rather by events that happen in 'accident time'.
That is, events are only the 'accidents' of the waveforms interactivity as
defined by the cosmological geometry. This 'surface' is that constituted by
the union of the 'actual' and the 'virtual' in the interval that registers
the 'relief' of the surface. More precisely, Virilio should have combined
the 'real' with the 'virtual' in determining the 'event' rather than the
'actual' that is the 'product' of the process. In either case, the bubble
chamber then takes over as the postmodern field where time invariant
interactions leave traces in a form of a Derridean leftover or, more in
accord with the cosmology here, the remainder is without trace. The event
happened, but it disappears from the register if it ever appeared there in
the first place.
Here is how Virilio expresses it, in a comparison to the perspectives of
what he refers to as the Quattrocento, in a musical variant of the waveform.

        At that point, far from setting the actual perspective of optical
presence of the Quattrocento against the virtual perspective of
electro-optic tele-presence, the real-time perspective of telecommunications
combines the two, thus creating a 'field effect' in which the actual and the
virtual together produce a new kind of relief, not unlike the 'soundscape'
of hi-fi with its treble and base notes.[51]
Whichever of the formulations one picks the consequence is the destruction
of the time continuum. By having space/time, the fourth dimension, invade
the materiality of the world all is turned into light and time into a
'tele-presence'.
        Past, present and future - that old tripartite division of the time
continuum - then cedes primacy to the immediacy of a tele-presence which is
akin to a new type of relief. This is a relief not of the material thing,
but of the event, in which the fourth dimension (that of time) suddenly
substitutes for the third: the material volume loses its geometrical value
as an 'effective presence' and yields to an audiovisual volume whose
self-evident 'tele-presence' easily wins out over the nature of the
facts.[52]
The geometry of the commonplace now has its time invariant future in the
"place of the no-place of a teleaction".[53] Teleaction takes over as the
perpetual presence of the digital world. Time is condensed into the zone of
the present much like a type of black hole that refuses to allow the future
or the past. The 'eternal' present replaces eternity. We all become photons
or, at least, are subject to a 'photon' effect. Our path interval becomes
that of the shinning light, the sun, the screen. Thus all theories of
'presencing' come down to the clichi of 'life in the fast lane' for the 'now
generation'.
        This is what the teletechnologies of real time are doing: they are
killing 'present' time isolating it from its here and now, in favor of a
commutative elsewhere that no longer has anything to do with our 'concrete
presence' in the world, but is the elsewhere of a 'discreet telepresence'
that remains a complete mystery.[54]
As Virilio suggests, the mystery remains. Of course, it must remain for the
tension throughout Virilio's work is over the 'mystery' that is part of the
religious vision. Virilio is an oscillator for the culture unwittingly
providing the bridge between the digital culture and the older Christian, in
his case, tradition of mystery. Here he is part of a long French tradition
that includes Jacques Ellul and Teillard de Chardin.
One can also sense the presence of Heidegger here. Take, as an example, the
striking parallel with Virilio's thought in this selection from the
Introduction to Metaphysics.
        At a time when the farthermost corner of the globe has been
conquered by technology and opened to economic exploitation; when any
incident whatever, regardless of where or when it occurs, can be
communicated to the rest of the world at any desired speed; when the
assassination of a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo can be
'experienced' simultaneously; when time has ceased to be anything other than
velocity, instantaneousness, and simultaneity, and time as history has
vanished from the lives of all people; when a boxer is regarded as a
nation's great man; when mass meetings attended by millions are looked on as
a triumph - then, yes then, through all this turmoil a question still haunts
us like a specter: What for? - Whither? - And what then?[55]
The 'specter' is no longer haunting Europe, as in Marx's day, but the globe.
It takes the form for Virilio of the 'paranoid American' Jane Houston who
lives through a panoptic surveillance fieldscape where life is optically
encoded into 'real time'.[56] The fieldscape is not the enframed horizon of
the reservoir but rather dissipation into the 'open sky' of electronic
surveillance. However, it does share Heideggerian boredom as time becomes
the 'eventless' enduring of passage. But here there is no event horizon,
hence no longer even the metaphysics of being. The 'question' does,
nonetheless, remain itself as a type of Derridean leftover. Or as Heidegger
responds: the specter leads to/through the godding of the gods to enowning.
For Virilio, the specter leads back to God.
Hence, the binary comes together over the question of the eternal presence.
The are two paths. The one, the path of the evil demon, or if one prefers
Maxwell's Demon or the less demonic Jane, or the boxer, that 'lives' through
the 'Real Time' teleaction. In this mode through perpetual surveillance one
sees the little sparrow fall. The other path, of course, that of God's
cosmology, equals the telepresence of digital culture in the 'co-presence'
of all events in the landscape as surveyed by the heavenly view. God becomes
the competitor for Virilio to 'Real Time' as its flipped other. Each is a
globalization of the eternal/co-presence.
        For God, history is a landscape of events. For Him, nothing really
follows sequentially since everything is co-present.[57]
The future is, then, either with the astronauts in their American version
where they see God from the capsule or, with the former Soviet cosmonauts
where God is not to be found. Each is a field theory. Each is an
otherworldly theory. Each is a variant of the tension that defines much of
French thought between the sacred and the secular. Each is defined in the
advance of real time technologies and in the advance of the technological
will.
Globalization
The return to earth will give rise to theories of globalization. Absent the
gravitational field of the commonplace, facing the 'open skies' and demise
of both the 'theological vision' and of 'actual perspectives', vision, the
light effect, becomes the fieldscape of 'real time'. This signals the full
advent of the vision machine or screenal vision. One then enters the space
of the Grand Scale Transhorizon Optics or what Virilio has referred to as
"the site of all (strategic, economic, political...) virtualization."[58]
Digital culture becomes a cyclopean eye; a type of gargantuan CBS eye that
has been inflated into the 'globe' itself. Or as Virilio says; "... the
latest globalization: the globalization of the gaze of the single eye."[59]
This is a type of super panopticon that has overcome the observer/observed
couplet. Not Michel Foucault's geometry of a center and periphery but rather
a surface that has its existence as an orbital life, a petrie dish of eye
balls/cells that create the visual field within itself.
Thus, the dominant code of globalization is not networking nor the economic
expansion of global corporations nor the global reach of terrorism. Rather
it lies in the virtualization of the vision machine. This virtualization
rests on the binary of the 'actual'/'virtual' which splits the 'real'
creating a 'reality effect'.
        ...it is essential today [for globalization] to effect a split in
primary reality by developing a stereo-reality, made up on the one hand of
the actual reality of immediate appearances and, on the other, of the
virtual reality of media trans-appearances.
        Not until this new 'reality effect' becomes generally accepted as
commonplace will it be possible really to speak of globalization.[60]
The 'reality effect' amplifies the optical densities into a trans-appearance
creating the bulging eye. While Virilio calls this the ushering in of the
'information bomb,' it is far more aptly a light vector that explodes to
escape the old vectors of the 'actual and the real'. Enter, then, the
virtual in the guise of the most prominent of the exploding orbs as in the
child's rhyme, back to Mr. Golden Sun.
We are back as well to the cosmology of William Blake giving us the stark
choice of John Locke's sun as the gold guinea coin and that of the sun as a
vision of Ezekiel's fiery chariot. Virilio's version of this fearful
symmetry is between the apocalypse of Real Time and of God's time. The
latter-day Newtons with their compasses scribing the globe in non-Cartesian
co-ordinates using Photoshop versus the Christ of the commomplace that has
long ago gone to its reward --- no marriage of heaven and hell here. Or so
it seems in the vision of Virilio's version of globalization.
However, the apocalyptic vision, the catastrophe theory of the attack and
capture culture where we live, does not fit entirely into the classical
binary end. The non-Euclidean field is still a long way from equilibrium.
Reni Thom's biology meets the metric of quantum geographies that resist the
headlong rush back to Newton and God.[61] The field does not disappear in
'escape velocity' but creates in its path a relief that stalls the
disappearance of the world. The path of least action, that route of light,
jumps outside of its conic dimension creating structures that detain the
fall, that turn it into geometric paths that return on themselves or
accelerate into new spaces.
It is still, of course, a world of movement and with little rest but it is a
world that resists the closing time of the certain. It spins beyond the
probable into the virtual if only to be yanked back again towards the
actual. Hence, we have the temporary (dis) equilibriums that sustain life.
Virilio is often enough right to see this world rushing headlong in its
static form, at the bottom of a sink to be defined by the co-ordinates of
heaven and hell. The problem though is that there is a bit of 'virtual' in
the best of us, not to mention the worst of us. This is the spider that
descends into Virilio's bunker to disturb his rest.
Notes:
----------
[1] Paul Virilio, Open Sky, translated by Julie Rose, N.Y.: Verso, 1997.
Where there are existing translations of Virilio's work I have used them.
Otherwise the translations are mine.
[2] Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl's The Origin of Geometry, translated by
John P. Leavey and edited by David B. Allison, Stony Brook, N.Y.: Nicolas
Hays, 1978, p. 169.
[3] Ibid., p. 169.
[4] Ibid., p. 179.
[5] Ibid., p. 169.
[6] Paul Virilio, L'horizon nigatif, Paris: Galiie, 1984, p. 16.
[7] Paul Virilio, Bunker Archiologie, Paris: Les editions du demi-cercle,
1991.
[8] Michel Serres, Les origins de la giomimtrie, Paris: Flammarion, 1993.
[9] Paul Virilio, L'insicuriti du territoire, Paris: Galiie, 1993, p. 118.
[10] Ibid., p. 118.
[11] Ibid., p. 120.
[12] Ibid., p. 114. The lower case 'he' is in the original text rather than
the standard use of 'He' as a reference to Christ.
[13] Ibid., p. 119. Again 'christians' is in lower case in the original
text.
[14] Ibid., p. 136.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Epicurus: the Extant Remains, translated by Cyril Bailey, N.Y.: Georg
Olms, 1975, 'Letter Epicurus to Herodotus', paragraph 72-73, p. 45 & 47.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, translated by Mark Polizzotti, N.Y.:
Semiotext(e), 1977.
[20] Buzz Aldren & Malcolm McConnell, Men from Earth, N.Y.: Bantam Books,
1989, p. 241.
[21] Paul Virilio, L'inertie polaire, Christian Bourgois, 1990, p.88.
[22] Open Sky, op. cit., p. 14.
[23] Paul Klee, Notebooks, Vol. 1, translated by Ralph Manheim, N.Y.: George
Wittenborn, 1969., p. 40.
[24] Cyril Bailey, 'Letter Epicurus to Herodotus', paragraph 46a - 47a.
[25] L' horizon nigatif, op. cit., p. 31.
[26] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
[27] L' horizon nigatif, op. Cit., p. 25.
[28] Ibid., p. 28-29.
[29] See Paul Virilio, La procidure silence, Paris: Galiie, 2000.
[30] Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, translated by Philip
Beitchman, N.Y.: Semiotext(e), 1991.
[31] L'horizon nigatif, op. cit., p. 18-19.
[32] Ibid., p. 21-22.
[33] Irwin Rock, The Logic of Perception, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983.
[34] Paul Virilio, Landscape of Events, translated by Julie Rose, Boston:
MIT Press, 2000, p. 40.
[35] Ibid., p. 38-39.
[36] Ibid., p. 41-42.
[37] Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, translated by Chris Turner, N.Y.:
Verso, 2000.
[38] Open Sky , op. cit., p. 13.
[39] Landscape, op. cit., p. xii.
[40] Open Sky, op. cit., p. 136.
[41] Ibid., p. 10-11.
[42] Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, p. 82.
[43] Ibid., p. 81.
[44] Ibid., p. 84-85.
[45] Ibid., p. 105.
[46] Pablo Rossi, The Abyss of Time, translated by G. Cochrane, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1984, p. 72.
[47] The Information Bomb, op. cit., p.120.
[48] Ibid., p. 115.
[49] Open Sky, op. cit., p.1.
[50] L'horizon negatif, op. cit., p. 170.
[51] The Information Bomb, op. cit., p. 117.
[52] Ibid., p.118.
[53] Open Sky, op. cit., p. 17.
[54] Ibid.,pp. 10-11.
[55] Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, translated by Ralph
Manheim, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974, pp., 37-38.
[56] The Information Bomb, op. cit., p. 67.
[57] Landscape of Events, op. cit., p. x.
[58] Open Sky, op. cit., p. 15.
[59] The Information Bomb, op. cit., p. 65.
[60] Ibid., p. 15.
[61] See Reni Thom, Paraboles et Castrophes, Paris: Flammarion, 1983., p.
23.
--------------------
David Cook is author of Northfrop Frye: A Vision of the New World and
co-author of The Postmodern Scene. He is a member of the Department of
Political Science, University of Toronto and Principal, Victoria College.

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