Virilio Calling

"Time is a resource and we're running out of time. It is necessary to 
travel. It is not necessary and becoming increasingly difficult to live." 
- William Burroughs

To Paul Virilio, the Gulf War acted as a watershed. He had proved right 
before in some of his minor predictions. His conclusion that any state 
that submits to its inner urge towards total control will end up 
exterminating its own people came true in Pol Pot's Cambodia, much to his 
own horror. But it was not until the early 1990's that he was forced to 
admit to the global accuracy of his military/technological analyses. A 
few years before, the French intervention in Chad had already led to his 
observation that from now on, world wars could only be fought in the 
desert. As the espionage satellites were maneuvered over Iraq and the 
cruise missiles set to new coordinates, Virilio knew what was about to 
happen. Still, the renewed correctness of his thrilling tales on the 
development of state-of-the-art weapon systems was not what shocked him 
most about the events.

In his published books since 1976 (some ten in all), Virilio developed 
his position that if in the past speed was the essence of war (cf., Sun 
Tzu), today it equals war. The latter is no longer directed at the enemy 
however, but against the world's material existence. The greater the 
acceleration, the quicker does reality evaporate. Light has absolute 
speed; technologies that make use of it are absolute weapons. Therefore, 
too, instant communication technologies are apocalyptic by nature: "I spy 
with my little eye - who is seen will have to die." But if before, media 
merely unhinged space-time awareness and immaterialized the human body by 
transforming it into transmissible light waves, during the Gulf War, 
apart from the devastation of derealized land, information as such became 
incredible. 

In Virilio's chronology, Desert Shield and Desert Storm were followed up 
by Desert Screen. The same strategic developments that helped visualize 
the Gulf War in the Arabian Desert are also occurring in the public 
sector. Just as generals can direct field campaigns without ever leaving 
their bunkers, so the viewers can do their jobs without leaving their 
homes. All information converges on, and radiates from, the screen, the 
pole of inertia. Distant viewing - yesterday's television - has been 
replaced by distant action, today's and tomorrow's teleperformance; from 
teleshopping and home banking to telepresence and teletourism in virtual 
reality. Only, as Virilio adds in "L'écran du Désert" ("Desert Screen"), 
his war chronicle, we now know what the communication weapons are after. 
Who is seen will no longer have to die; rather, it is the observer who 
will be struck blind. Whereas, time and again, Virilio has described the 
history of control over the external world as an acceleration and 
refinement of observation techniques and their logistics, with data 
transmission acquiring the speed of light total fascination turns out to 
converge with absolute disbelief.

What's left of information when it reaches journalists and the public 
simultaneously, without there remaining a second for verification, 
analysis, or double-checks? The news that reaches us as information 
through the media communication weapons can always be disinformation. If 
information is a weapon, disinformation is the shield. The viewers can no 
longer believe their eyes. But if they cannot, the world as we know it 
will disappear, as Virilio has warned us for years. Distrust of the media 
means the end of the world. The central and final question in "L'écran du 
Désert" is thus: "Can omnipresence and instantaneity be democratized; 
that is to say, can inertia be democratized?" According to Virilio, 
democracy is impossible without the categories of truth and falsehood, 
which have currently been replaced by the "actual" and the "virtual." 

Paul Virilio represents a critical, antimedial stance. Live connections 
must be interrupted in order to restore democracy. To him, media coincide 
with observation technologies, all of which are the products of military 
intelligence. He sees the development of the logistics of observation - 
hilltop, watchtower, hot air balloon, reconaissance flight, satellite, 
field glass, photo camera, film camera, video - taking place analogously 
to the development of infrastructure - road, railway, freeway, cable 
television, air corridor, orbit. Now that the industrial traffic 
revolution has succeeded, Virilio finds it impossible to distinguish 
between the military and the civil. Both institutions are characterized 
by acceleration; both turn classical space-time inside out in their 
respective ways. Both culminate in the speed of light (laser) and both 
turn the world's natural environment into a desert ("glacis"). The media, 
viewed as a global network produced by observation machinery, are the 
greatest obstacle to our (re)cognizance of humanity and the world. 

Although the media remain the object of Virilio's concern, his absolute 
disaffection never results in a hostile attitude towards technology. 
Salvation may well come from within, and is impossible if we turn our 
backs to téchn. "There would be hope in our careful study of disaster." 
To Virilio, the unlocking of creation takes place through a sequence of 
shipwreck, collision, car crash, derailment, plane crash, explosion, 
short-circuit, malfunction, jam, breakdown. As with the computer hackers, 
his method combines resistance against the technological control 
strategies with a vast knowledge of, and open fascination with, 
apparatuses. Unlike the Foucauldians, his resistance does not necessarily 
reinforce the system, but is a necessary attitude to arrive at 
post-science. The latter understands "that it is developing a way of 
not-knowing, and that all development of understanding can only expand 
the unknown." The non-military science and technology envisioned by 
Virilio use the media as information vacuum cleaners that remove data 
from the world and emphasize how much non-knowledge there is actually 
circulating. Media show us that there is nothing to be seen; all else is 
disinformation. Cases of data void are like accidents that prompt 
reconsideration; they are revelations of relativity. 

Virilio, too, knew the antimedial dilemma that democracy must break all 
its ties with the media, but that it cannot exist without data 
transmission. If all information is distorted and the media can only 
communicate not-knowing, the inevitable question arises what democracy is 
to based on. Virilio answers that it must be based on physical 
perception. His vision is not confined to some Parisian study. Since the 
end of the Cold War the figure of the political observer appears in every 
area of conflict, where it has become synonymous to the concept of 
democracy. After a trial period attending dubious elections in Third 
World nations, the observer was sent to NATO/Warsaw Pact military 
exercises, arms depots, nuclear power plants, civil wars, nuclear 
laboratories, and chemical arms factories. If the observers are refused 
entrance, one is de facto at war with the world. The physical presence of 
independent experts guarantees the democratic quality of intentions and 
practices. Satellites can record everything except democracy and human 
rights. This technological limitation indicates where classical politics 
may yet be situated, now that the military perception has become 
transpolitical.

Virilio discards the notion that democracy owes its existence to 
political observers as naive. The world's visibility suffers less from 
camouflage and concealment than it does from problems of perception on 
the part of the subject. Humans, according to Virilio, are not lingual 
beings, but are controlled in their thoughts and actions by the force of 
implanted images. Mental images are "fragments of the public domain 
extended into ourselves." "It is unnecessary to visit the National 
Gallery or the Louvre to watch eighteenth-century scenes. We only have to 
open our eyes in the morning, and already we find ourselves in a museum 
of outlived modes and styles of observation." Perception is occupied 
territory. 

Negative perception discovers a space as yet uncolonized. If the image of 
material objects is necessarily predetermined, then new things can be 
made visible only by looking at the void inbetween things. To see nothing 
is to maintain sight. In the void we may yet observe the disappearance of 
our culture. The disappearance of the natural contours of landscape, 
city, national borders, political adversaries, bodies, time, the interval 
and the decision comprises a story that Virilio tries to come to terms 
with over and over again, and that takes up a considerable part of his 
works. By turning perception inside out it becomes possible to visualize 
disappearance, even if it is by definition invisible. 

Time and again, Virilio's paradox resurfaces: everything he warns against 
he simultaneously considers indispensable. With him, thinking in terms of 
and/or escalates both ways, clearing a field of unsuspected concourses of 
thought. At the same time he denounces disappearance as a political and 
social disaster, he praises it as a principle of knowledge and 
aesthetical method. Virilio sees both unbridled imagination and 
restrictive common sense created during those brief moments of mental 
absence which all of us experience daily. The disappearance of conscious 
presence stimulates the creative or prescribed interpretation of lacking 
fragments. Virilio himself uses this picoleptic faculty like no one else 
does. 

To read Virilio is to see the invisible, to interpret the unwritten. The 
voids, the interspaces, the black between the images - Virilio is the 
thinker of absence, of disappearance, of negativity, of the future. Only 
those who recognize the invisible, hidden from sight by the visible, are 
able to see the world. Virilio's is the gift of clairvoyance, in the age 
of total transparency. The invisible is the material he researches, the 
challenge he poses, the question he imposes on thought: find that world. 


If everything is visible, scientifically visible, permanently veri- or 
falsifiable, then it becomes impossible to form a coherent world view. 
Coherence becomes possible only through the absence of information, 
through the need to form one's own links beyond the absences, interspaces 
and intervals. Virilio is against disinformation, but is a supporter of 
temporary uninformed zones. Understanding can only derive from seeing 
nothing occasionally.

Negative thinking remains close to the body. It translates the prospect 
of death into the strategy of taking every social development to its 
logical conclusion. It is not a case of the extrapolation of the present 
into the future, but of the happy recognition that even what is to come 
is already past. Doom does not await us, and the signs of the apocalyps 
are all around. As a thinker of '77, radical negativism is Virilio's 
logical starting point. Back then, "no future" presented a way out of the 
Cold War, by stating that WW III had already come and gone and one should 
not be intimidated by the question of perspective. The physical condition 
became the new point of calibration: "the mysterious existence of living 
bodies who are curiously present in time." Negative thinking incorporates 
social processes in order to study their effect on personal well-being.

Since '89, the matter of whether the body will evaporate on the pole of 
inertia or rather backfire is once more completely out in the open. The 
astonishing conclusions in Virilio's books were suddenly surpassed by the 
chain reactions in military/political space. Current events went beyond 
dromology, forcing live theory to stop and reconsider. The old will never 
return, nor can the new be methodically implemented. Negativity's 
counterpoint has been set adrift. From the start, democracy has been the 
precondition for dubious thinking to vent its harsh criticism on the 
system. Now we find that democracy is impossible without screening and 
exclusion, revealing its moral bankruptcy. With this loss of a safe 
haven, negativism faces the task of finding a new point of calibration, 
without lapsing into positive proposals.
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