Rekha Rosha

Department of English and American Literature
Brandeis University
rosha@brandeis.edu

 

Paul Virilio, A Landscape of Events. Trans. Julie Rose. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.

 

Architect, political theorist, and cultural critic, Paul Virilio is best known for his phenomenological critique of technology and militarism. In this work, as in his other writings, Virilio contends that recent developments in technoculture can best be understood by studying changes in military and political transportation and information transmission. “Dromology,” his term for this study, emphasizes the impact of speed on the organization of territory and culture.

 

Originally published in French in 1996 under the title Un paysage d’événements, A Landscape of Events continues Virilio’s study of “dromocratic culture” and “the disastrous effects of speed on the interpretation of events” (31). Virilio’s major premise in this book is that space has been replaced by time; the Kantian argument for absolute space as the first principle of human experience is no longer applicable because space has imploded. In Kant’s discussions, the coherent visual field in which the multitude of appearances is organized is a consequence of spatiality, which is given a priori to our experience. Today, Virilio argues, what we see is not spatially organized: it is a swarm of fragmented images beamed at us at ever more furious speeds. Cyberspace is not a physical space–there are no coordinates of length, height, or depth; it exists only in time. The Internet is only one example of how space has drifted away from time. Virilio takes as his starting point mathematician Hermann Minkowski’s claim that only a union between space and time will preserve an independent reality and then works through various causes for the implosion of space.

 

Perhaps it is because Virilio so strenuously advocates for the redemption of space that his book begins in the least redeemed space of all–metropolitan cities. The sun never sets on the urban empires of New York, Paris, and London. Electric lights blaze 24/7; people move through the city at night as if it were daylight, and this gives him pause. In the book’s first chapter, “The Big Night,” Virilio argues that the constant flicker of urban light has prevented our bodies from producing melatonin, a chemical related in the body’s nocturnal phase. Melatonin tells our bodies that night has fallen and we should go to sleep. The increase in the number of prescriptions for melatonin suggests not only that our bodies’ ability to produce necessary chemicals and biological agents on its own is in jeopardy, but also that our bodies can no longer distinguish the difference between night and day. Our twenty-four-hour clock never winds down; we are speeding up, we are always on. The loss of this chemical, Virilio contends, indicates that our adaptation is no longer to our natural surroundings, but to our urban ones.

 

While our bodies are becoming synchronized with our man-made surroundings, these very spaces are undergoing similarly significant transformations. In Virilio’s view, space is dwindling into time not because of increased urbanization, but because of the increasing importance placed on information–the intangible data, facts, perceptions, interpretations, and propositions that obtain in different cases at different times. In an interview with Andreas Ruby (“Architecture,” 180), Virilio explains this process using the example of a mountain. In this case, the mass and energy of a mountain is linked to a fixed source or foundation: the density of the mountain. By contrast, information is not linked to a fixed source or foundation; it evolves constantly. The mountain’s name, its national location, climate, mineral composition, and topography are all relative to a particular point in time. In this sense the mountain is shaped and formed by technological advances in politics (the nation could change and thus the national location of the mountain could change, too), meteorology, geology, and cartography. Given the real impact of political events and technological developments, the information about the mountain matters more than the matter that composes the mountain.

 

One could easily insist that the density of a mountain matters less than its name, be it Mount Everest, Mont Blanc, or Kilimanjaro. Privileging the discourse produced about the mountain over its physical reality effectively removes matter from considerations about the mountain’s “meaning.” For Virilio, this demotion of matter signals its disappearance, which he in turn reads as a new mode of appearance. The fluidity of information releases the mountain from any fixed relationship to space. Its only relationship, or reality, is to information. The object (Mount Everest, Mont Blanc, Kilimanjaro) is perceived through information about its location, size, and so on. This dematerialization occurs in multiple ways: “In some way, you can read the importance given today to glass and transparency as a metaphor of the disappearance of matter” (“Architecture” 181). Just as information is used to turn mountains into bits of ephemeral data, and the military turns countries and the people who inhabit them into fly-over space, contemporary architects and artists use transparent materials to construct a world that appears as if it isn’t there. This transparency, what Virilio calls the “aesthetics of disappearance” (Landscape 35), is a mutation of a militarized mode of representation in which matter is untethered from its physical dimension.

 

This examination of multiple efforts to reduce perceived objects to information, or to seeming nothingness, reiterates Virilio’s long-held interests in war, speed, and perception, and remains at the forefront of his thinking throughout A Landscape of Events. He continues to add provocative examples to his argument regarding the catastrophic effects of technology. In the chapter “The Avant-Garde of Forgetting,” Virilio argues that the small size of the TV screen diminishes the enormity of events. Four-dimensional events are compressed into three–“the temptation of the West is the small format” (26). The TV image thus becomes the format of violence; television provides the formal design and structures the tragic images of military destruction it broadcasts. Television reduces human misery and trauma to a scale far out of proportion to its reality. Re-broadcast documentaries and newsreel footage of historic events such as D-Day transform seismic events into tightly edited, condensed versions of reality. And if this truncated version becomes the official document, tagged and archived, what will become of the war? Once the cinematic version of the event becomes the only trace, when all the participants, victims, agents, and witnesses are gone, what can we know of that event? Like the mountains and glass buildings in the earlier examples, wars and history are also subject to the aesthetics of disappearance. The image, particularly the television image, facilitates the forgetting of events; it does nothing, in Virilio’s terms, to promote the memory of events. This reductio ad absurdum is practiced at an even more insidious level in the military.

 

Virilio offers a fairly convincing argument that there is no qualitative difference between a beneficent application of technology and a sinister application; technological developments, as well as aesthetic ones, never remain contained or restricted to the purposes for which they were designed. Yet, in spite of such compelling claims, Virilio is really at his best making wildly provocative connections rather than offering persuasive arguments based on proof. While Virilio’s work connects various strands of thinking in a breathtaking intellectual performance, such an approach can sometimes backfire, particularly in his discussion of the triumph of Nietzschean man and the death of God in his chapter “The Near-Death Experience.”

 

He starts with the claim that in the absence of Judaic etiological stories, science posits its own account of the origins of species. Darwin’s theory of evolution, which assigned to the ape all materials that evolve into man, is similar to current attempts to create androids with artificial intelligence. Virilio argues that the ape, the Ur-human, is later replaced with machines, the über-human: “And so we went from the metempsychosis of the evolutionary monkey to the embodiment of a human mind in an android; why not move on after that to those evolving machines whose rituals could be jolted into action by their own energy potential” (35). The problem is not evolution or artificial intelligence, but that these concepts are routinely used to diminish human agency. So much so, in fact, that Raymond A. Moody’s book Life after Life, which encouraged people to simulate clinical death as a way of achieving spiritual insight, sold 10 million copies (99). Virilio, who cites this book as the reason for the near-death experience movement, takes this fact as an index of something much larger; the quickening of artificial life marks the slowing down and near immobilization of human life.

 

What is difficult to accept in this account of a comatose human agency is that it identifies the removal of a God-centered account of humankind as its cause:

 

If one eliminates God and if, soon after, it becomes fashionable to declare Him dead, it is only normal that through successive shifts, one ends up getting a little anxious about the origins of this ‘man’ who, once removed from the Judeo-Christian Genesis, suddenly finds himself robbed of his inheritance, deprived of identity. (34)

 

Though Virilio implicitly accepts that the biblical narrative provides a template for scientific narratives–he calls it “a substitute faith” (33)–he doesn’t explore the role the prior narrative plays in shaping the succeeding one. To call science a poor reflection of Christianity seems insufficient. (It is unclear why he links two vastly different religions together in the hybrid term Judeo-Christian that functionally dissolves that difference.) More to the point, Virilio doesn’t explain how the theory of evolution supports an agenda similar to that offered in Christianity’s version of human origins. So why does it appear to be the villain here? Perhaps Virilio wants to retain Christian rhetoric as a kind of counter-Enlightenment narrative, but he doesn’t delineate this idea clearly enough to succeed in the task.

 

Certainly Virilio’s harrowing visions of humans in suspended animation waiting out the end times, of mountains crumbling into data, of buildings without substance, and of wars without trace have apocalyptic overtones that urge the reader to question the influences on his argument. While technology requires sustained, careful critiques, if for no other reason than its mammoth presence in contemporary life, it is unclear what Virilio intends to gain by attaching this sort of millenialism to his critique. Which is also to say: things end badly in this book. Virilio offers no suggestions as to how we might intervene in the processes he describes, or how we might stave off the horrific end he sees for us. In the final sentences of A Landscape, he explains that in fact no intervention is possible: “The countdown has in fact begun. In a few months, a few years at most, there will no longer be time to intervene; real time will have imploded” (96). While the dire tone of this prediction might be meant to galvanize the reader into action, it unnecessarily closes down the efficacy of that action–for what kind of intervention can be accomplished in a few months, a few years? This prompts a second, more cynical question: If the world has become so hostile to humans to the extent that we are barely animate with only months to live, why bother sounding the alarm at all?

 

Indeed, there seem to be few, if any, means to re-appropriate, re-direct, sabotage, or poach the mechanisms of disappearance that Virilio critiques. Apparently, no subject, neither man nor woman, Westerner nor Easterner, rich nor poor, black nor white can find new ways to connect with one another under the given conditions. While other theorists–Deleuze and Guattari come immediately to mind–have suggested that possibilities for resistance remain even amidst the most limiting of circumstances, Virilio seems unconvinced. At times he seems so committed to his own apocalyptic vision that he does not pursue the possibilities his own arguments make available–that is, if information can dismantle matter, it might also be able reconstitute matter in perhaps radical and useful ways. With the increased, though exaggerated, emphasis on information, bodies disconnected from space might be free to renegotiate certain limitations. Yet in Virilio’s critique, there is apparently no exit.

 

Virilio’s strength is in identifying overlooked relationships and patterns among disparate domains of contemporary life, such as the military organization of space, human perception, and architecture. In spite of his bleak outlook, he draws important connections that need to be pursued. By jumping from one small consequence of technology (the loss of melatonin, for example) to vast claims (the growing inability to respond to our natural environments), Virilio uncovers unanticipated links between our current condition and its cause. Yet the way he switches from biology, to architecture, then to history, to pop culture and fashion, and back to technology is a little like channel surfing. As a result, the book is both fascinating and unfocused–as dizzying as the landscape he describes. Even so, Virilio demonstrates a fascinating mode of intellectual engagement with the contemporary moment; he places urgent injunctions alongside wordplay and puts serious content into a playful structure. And as for the book’s bleak conclusion: at worst, it is hopelessly discouraging; at best it is a call for a more rigorous explanation of–and intervention in–the relationship between speed and space.

 

Works Cited

 

• Virilio, Paul. A Landscape of Events. Trans. Julie Rose. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2000.
• —. “Architecture in the Age of Its Virtual Disappearance: An Interview with Paul Virilio by Andreas Ruby.” The Virtual Dimension: Architecture, Representation, and Crash Culture. Ed. John Beckmann. New York: Princeton Architectural P, 1998. 178-87.