Srdjan Smajic

English Department
Tulane University
ssmajic@tulane.edu

 

Review of: Paul Virilio, A Landscape of Events.Trans. Julie Rose. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.

 

Those who are familiar with Paul Virilio’s work on dromology, or the logic and effects of speed, may have noticed by now a paradox in the manner in which he addresses this subject. While he maintains that speed is the essential modus vivendi of the latest devices of destruction, deterrence, and misinformation, Virilio himself writes and publishes at an impressive pace. The reviewer, who has just gotten his hands on A Landscape of Events (2000 [1996]), has not yet seen The Information Bomb (2000 [1998]), and probably will not get to it before the translation of Stratégie de la déception (1999) comes out to announce that, yet again, the technologies and texts of yesterday are already outdated.

 

On the one hand, this arrangement is perfectly logical, and the rationale behind it is self-explanatory: one cannot take forever to comment on events that are occurring at the speed of light–and only for the duration of their televised presentation. The Persian Gulf War, which according to Virilio was in 1992 already “receding into the vacuum of consciousness” at meteorite-speed, demonstrates how televised events operate (“now you see it, now you don’t“), and perfectly, if tragically, illustrates “the compression of history and finally the disappearance of the event!” (24).¹ If human memory has by now so thoroughly adapted itself to televisual programming that objects, events, and even persons can be said to exist only insofar as they are being televised in “real time,” then the speed at which Virilio makes his observations public appears to be not so much a matter of choice but of sheer necessity. Who wants to read about last year’s war when terrorist attacks are being televised by CNN as we speak or write?

In fact, it is no longer the Gulf War but the Kosovo War that provides the best example of what Virilio is talking about. “The automation of warfare,” he says in a recent conversation with John Armitage, “has… come a long way since the Persian Gulf War of 1991.” Speaking in technological, military, and strategic terms, the Kosovo War is so far ahead of the Gulf War that the latter may just as well have happened thirty or forty years ago. Some may already have forgotten the name Norman Schwarzkopf. History, Virilio states in the same text, “is now rushing headlong into the wall of time,” by which he means that we are in fact witnessing its end, the final and apocalyptic realization of the Hegelian prophecy. Under such extreme conditions one cannot afford to lose sight of speed, its doings and undoings, and to fall behind on what is latest, hippest, hottest, and most up-to-date. Virilio cautions us to keep in mind that “the speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalisation is the speed of light. And it is nothing else!” (“Kosovo War”). Timing is indeed everything.

 

On the other hand, such a perfectly logical strategy (speed vs. speed, a speedy response to light-speed events) makes itself vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy. Is Virilio not riding on the crest of the technological wave and enjoying the benefits? Do not his texts and interviews frequently appear on internet sites where, instantly accessible from any terminal on the globe and only a click away from your own homepage, the words and sentences faintly flicker in some ontologically ambiguous cyberspace that is the exact opposite of the geographic space and historical time in which Virilio would advise us to live? Are not the words I have just quoted–these very words I am writing now–already part of the landscape of events in which everything exists in the eternal, real-time now, and therefore never really and actually? Cyberspace and information superhighways, Virilio remarks in another cyberspace text, bring about a “fundamental loss of orientation.” If to exist, really and fully, “is to exist in situ, here and now, hic et nunc,” then this sort of existence and reality “is precisely what is being threatened by cyberspace and instantaneous, globalized information flows” (“Speed and Information”).²

 

A Landscape of Events rushes headlong into and around these questions of cultural velocity. All the key issues that have occupied Virilio’s attention in the past–miniaturization, disintegration, globalization, optics and information, war and cinema, the disappearance of history–are revisited here with characteristic rapidity. Indeed, the very importance of the book lies in its symptomatically Virilian temporality. Its thirteen short essays, which Virilio wrote over the last twenty years or so and then self-anthologized and published (as Un paysage d’événements) as “early” as 1996, in some sense come too late to their English-language reader–especially if he or she has come to rely on Virilio’s intimate connectedness with technoculture to learn about the latest generation of personal computers and video games, radars and smart bombs. Such a reader ought to know that there is nothing new to be learned from Virilio’s new book, nothing that he has not already told us many times over. But this may be to the book’s advantage–as is the fact, strange as it may sound, that the book is in print.

 

Virilio, more than anyone else I can think of, makes us feel that the printed word is a remnant of an earlier, slower, sleepier, and happier age: it is quaint, archaic–one would be tempted to say prehistoric, except that the relative slowness and linearity of print ought to remind us of the relative slowness and linearity of historic time, that is, of the fact of history itself. Print is therefore not prehistoric but precisely historical.

 

It is the logic of print technology–its relative slowness in the age of light-speed televisual information–that keeps open a path of resistance to the logic of chronostrategy and the seduction of speed. The speed at which one is informed (or even misinformed) through print will always be inferior to the speed at which one passively registers televisual images, but because of this the quality of reception, as it were, is substantially in favor of print. The book as a physical object becomes a site of resistance to speed. It transforms viewers back into readers. It slows down the transmission of information. It leaves time for active participation in communication and meaningful dialogue. Because print moves at the speed of cognition, because it is cognition and comprehension that make it move along, control its progress, and determine its durations, one can never be bombarded by print in the same way that one can be harassed and paralyzed by the blinding explosion of televised images.

 

Even though words on a computer terminal look very much like their hard-copy counterparts, they behave very differently–or we behave differently as readers, scrolling and clicking rather than skimming and page-turning. The fact that so many cannot see the difference or remember how things used to be, Virilio would insist, is indicative of the global loss of critical discernment and the degeneration of public and private memory. The twin activities of clicking and forgetting have become a way of life.³ We have internalized the process so thoroughly that the acme of artificiality seems now perfectly natural, even biologically preprogrammed. The hominoid has replaced the human (34). In comparison to cyberspatial texts and televised images, print appears more dignified and humane. Even if Virilio would surely agree that all types of media are always ideologically suspect, writing for print is perhaps one way to stand up against “the intermittent eclipse of the speaking beings that we are” (52).

 

As always, Virilio is unabashedly humanistic, albeit vague on his definition of “human.” This, however, does not make his message any less politically and ethically urgent. He openly laments the loss of all sense of proportion and propriety, and the disintegration of vital categories such as “human” and “real.” To ask for precise definitions of these categories might be to miss the point. To suspect their validity means already to suspect one’s own humanity and reality, to erase oneself as a subject in the traditional sense of the word, but without necessarily reemerging, at the other end of the tunnel, in some more up-to-date sense. Movement in postmodernity is always toward some kind of disappearance.

 

“For God,” Virilio writes, “history is a landscape of events. For Him, nothing really follows sequentially since everything is co-present” (x). But the view from Heaven, seen from Virilio’s point of view, is essentially antihumanistic and becomes available only after theology has been replaced by an anti-theological epistemology.

 

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)

 

Genesis, the prototypical story of beginnings and begettings, of the drawing of boundaries and construction of categories (day vs. night, human vs. animal, land vs. water, and so on) functions as a template for the writing of historical narratives in general. Thus it is not faith in God that Virilio wishes to salvage, but rather faith in history. Without history–without the consciousness of what one might call “the natural and proper slowness” of the passage of time–catastrophes of all kinds loom large on the horizon: “the recession of history entails the retreat of knowledge, the retirement of progress” (xii). The space opened up by the death of God is now occupied by the subject who declares (or is instructed, seduced into thinking) that he or she can see everything, everywhere, and everytime, who has been released from the shackles of corporeality and can therefore claim to exist in several places at the same time.

 

Elsewhere Virilio notes: “technologies of real time… kill ‘present’ time by isolating it from its presence here and now for the sake of another commutative space that is no longer composed of our ‘concrete presence’ in the world, but of a ‘discrete telepresence’ whose enigma remains forever intact” (“Third Interval” 4). Speed marks the death of the body. Or rather: bodies, but also human relationships, disintegrate at the speed at which technology reduces the need for corporeal presence, for human intervention and human interaction.

 

Here is a book, then, whose relative lateness may be considered a virtue and part of its argumentative strategy: a text that capitalizes on the fact that it is a text and not an image that flashes for an instant and is gone. Its physicality recalls our own corporeality. Whether we like it or not, a body is still needed to pick up a book, open it, turn the pages. The lessons that Virilio wishes to teach us–and most of his work is essentially ethical and didactic, a sort of code of conduct for the postmodern subject–are worth paying attention to only if they will be remembered, and they will be remembered only if they resist speed twice: through their form and their content.

 

If, as Virilio claims, his book reflects the “radical reversal in perspective” (xiii) that today replaces God with the omnipresent and all-seeing subject of postmodernity, it is to show the aberrant nature of this development rather than pay homage to it. In this one respect, at least, Virilio is not rushing to report on events that have not yet finished happening, but is staging a return to the past, and with a certain deliberateness of speed. It is perhaps the most “new” thing in the book, this insistence on what can only be learned from revisiting and reconsidering, at second glance, what has come before. What we have before us is a kind of back-tracking history that begins with Virilio’s 1996 thoughts on urban lighting and the “false day of technoculture” (2), and concludes with comments from the early 1980s on military cybernation and speed fetishism. By moving backwards in time, A Landscape of Events defamiliarizes temporality in order to refamiliarize us with it. In the manner of Russian Formalists, Virilio makes temporal progression strange by replacing it, for the moment at least, with temporal regression. To remind us that, beyond the TV screen, events still happen in time and not in some timeless landscape of the ever-present–that televised deaths and televised wars are real in the bloodiest sense of the word–Virilio winds the clock in the opposite direction.

 

Speed, he repeatedly insists, is dehumanizing. In the end, there is nothing to be gained and everything to be lost:

 

Imagine for a moment that the two vehicles about to pass each other here and now were sped up considerably; the encounter, the exchange of greetings, would simply not take place unless there was sufficient time for perception, the relative invisibility of the two motorists present having nothing to do with some ghostly absence of their bodies, but solely with the lack of duration required for their mutual apprehension. (45)

 

The anecdote involving two motorists who fail to perceive each other because they are moving too quickly, and who therefore do not really exist for each other in any meaningful way, sums up Virilio’s thoughts on the alienating effects of constant acceleration. Our horizon has shrunk to the size of the TV screen, he warns us, “the screen suddenly becoming a last ‘visible horizon,’ a horizon of accelerated particles that takes over from the geographic horizon of the expanse in which the televiewer’s body still moves” (47). Such limitation of vision–but really of conscience and consciousness–is for Virilio debilitating and abhorrent.

 

In strikingly similar fashion, Milan Kundera reflects in his novel Slowness on the logic of speed and the postmodern loss of sense and sensibility.

 

Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man. As opposed to a motorcyclist, the runner is always present in his body, forever required to think about his blisters, his exhaustion; when he runs he feels his weight, his age, more conscious than ever of himself and of his time of life. This all changes when man delegates the faculty of speed to a machine: from then on, his own body is outside the process, and he gives over to a speed that is noncorporeal, nonmaterial, pure speed, speed itself, ecstasy speed. (2)

 

“Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?” (3), the narrator asks. The man on a motorcycle who zips past him in the opposite direction represents the dromophile, the postmodern subject par excellence.Forgetful of his body, material reality, space and time, he can

 

focus only on the present instant of his flight; he is caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future; he is wrenched from the continuity of time; he is outside time; in other words, he is in a state of ecstasy; in that state he is unaware of his age, his wife, his children, his worries, and so he has no fear, because the source of his fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear. (1-2)

 

These questions and revelations come to Kundera’s narrator as he himself is speeding down a highway in a state of dromological ecstasy. Dare one say, then, that there is a dromophile behind every dromophobe?

 

As for Virilio, nowhere does he sound more like himself than when he proposes to “quickly review the history of military control and surveillance” (83), which indeed he does in only a couple of pages. This is not exactly history at the speed of light–instantaneous history being unimaginable, since history is defined by and exists only in duration–but comes as close to the CNN style of high-velocity info-bombardment as possible in print. The implicit argument for slowness in A Landscape of Events is thus always tempered, if not finally undone, by Virilio’s stylistic embrace of speed. We track carefully backwards through his engagements and provocations only to find ourselves, at the end, swept up in the headlong pitch, invited to indulge in the ecstasy of acceleration.

 

Notes

 

1. Unless otherwise indicated all quotes are from A Landscape of Events.

 

2. As far as I know, the two texts I refer to here are available only on Ctheory‘s website <http://www.ctheory.com>.

 

3. The “fire-and-forget” missile is one of Virilio’s favorite illustrative tropes. (Two sidenote speculations: [1] So quickly does forgetting follow firing that the eventual explosion comes as a surprise, a blast from the past. [2] The eradication of duration enhances military performance because it effectively razes the bothersome obstacle of conscience and eliminates the interval of deliberation and intelligent decision-making. Vital strategic and tactical decisions are left to machines, which are not yet being programmed to consult an “ethical microchip.”)

Works Cited

 

• Kundera, Milan. Slowness. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.
• Virilio, Paul. “The Kosovo War Took Place in Orbital Space.” Interview with John Armitage. Trans. Patrice Riemens. CTheory 89 (18 Oct. 2000) <http://www.ctheory.com/article/a089.html>.
• —. “Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!” Trans. Patrice Riemens. Ctheory 30 (27 Aug. 1995) <http://www.ctheory.com/article/a030.html>.
• —. “The Third Interval: A Critical Transition.” Trans. Tom Conley. Rethinking Technologies. Ed. Verena Andermatt Conley. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 3-12.