Virilio and the Media

John Armitage

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745661315
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In books such as The Aesthetics of Disappearance, War and Cinema, The Lost Dimension, and The Vision Machine, Paul Virilio has fundamentally changed how we think about contemporary media culture. Virilio's examinations of the connections between perception, logistics, the city, and new media technologies comprise some of the most powerful texts within his hypermodern philosophy. Virilio and the Media presents an introduction to Virilio's important media related ideas, from polar inertia and the accident to the landscape of events, cities of panic, and the instrumental image loop of television. John Armitage positions Virilio's essential media texts in their theoretical contexts whilst outlining their substantial influence on recent cultural thinking. Consequently, Armitage renders Virilio's media texts accessible, priming his readers to create individual critical evaluations of Virilio's writings. The book closes with an annotated and user-friendly Guide to Further Reading and a non-technical Glossary of Virilio's significant concepts. Virilio's texts on the media are vital for everyone concerned with contemporary media culture, and Virilio and the Media offers a comprehensive and up to date introduction to the ever expanding range of his critical media and cultural works.

1

THE AESTHETICS OF DISAPPEARANCE

INTRODUCTION

Media theorists generally associate Paul Virilio with his conception of the “aesthetics of disappearance.” This chapter examines his contribution to the debates over contemporary aesthetics by considering one of his most powerful texts, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (2009a). It explains the importance of the argument of this book in order to afford an entry point into it for uninitiated English-speaking readers. The chapter then surveys the ramifications of Virilio’s study for theorizing and practicing media in the present period.

The theme of the book is the development and modern-day condition of human perception in the world’s advanced cultures. Virilio’s text is therefore about how diverse ways of perceiving and coping with the realms of photography and technology, science, and cinema are appreciated and incorporated into postmodern culture.

The Aesthetics of Disappearance has gradually become one of Virilio’s most extensively read, culturally important, influential, and contentious books. Originally published in French in 1980, it has attracted comments from theorists in various subjects. Indeed, The Aesthetics of Disappearance has not only provided the setting for many contemporary explanations of the aesthetics of disappearance, but also provoked critical debates, arguments, and questions that are influencing the way in which subjects like cultural politics and philosophy carry out their research (Cubitt 2011: 68–91).

Arguably the principal claim of the text is its definition of the aesthetics of disappearance as an “irresistible project and projection toward a technical beyond” (Virilio 2009a: 103). Before presenting a definition as to what Virilio means when he employs concepts such as “aesthetics” or the “technical beyond,” it is vital to grasp how this assertion stems from The Aesthetics of Disappearance in its entirety. Consequently, the purpose of this chapter is to offer a foundation for an appreciation of what Virilio means by defining the aesthetics of disappearance in this way.

THE WORLD AS WE SEE IT IS PASSING: AN AESTHETIC APPROACH TO THE WORLD OF “PICNOLEPSY”

The most productive location for starting to uncover what The Aesthetics of Disappearance is about is its epigraph, “The world as we see it is passing. Paul of Tarsus” (Virilio 2009a: 17), which instantly offers vital signs about its form and subject matter.

Primarily the book can be portrayed as an aesthetic approach to the world. Typically, as we saw in the Introduction, the concepts “aesthetic” and “aesthetics” have both a restricted and an extended usage, and they can be employed to identify the formal or organizational facets of artworks in contrast to their apparent topics. The Aesthetics of Disappearance’s standing as an aesthetic creation is obvious from the way Virilio struggles to present it as a consistent philosophy of art, as a commentary on the artistic aspects of contemporary culture as a whole. His aesthetics, then, welcomes the examination of all of these subjects and objects. Put differently, The Aesthetics of Disappearance offers an explanation of the character of seeing, of our awareness and beliefs about it, and of its passage into disappearance. Its goal is to unearth fundamental tendencies and associations between different concepts and sensations and to outline as unambiguously as possible the growth of an aesthetics of disappearance in postmodern philosophy and culture.

Another important concept on the opening page is “picnolepsy,” which he describes and defines as follows (p. 19):

The lapse occurs frequently at breakfast and the cup dropped and overturned on the table is its well-known consequence. The absence lasts a few seconds; its beginning and its end are sudden. The senses function, but are nevertheless closed to external impressions. The return being just as sudden as the departure, the arrested word and action are picked up again where they have been interrupted. Conscious time comes together again automatically, forming a continuous time without apparent breaks. For these absences, which can be quite numerous, hundreds every day most often pass completely unnoticed by others around–we’ll be using the word “picnolepsy” (from the Greek picnos [sic]: frequent). However, for the picnoleptic, nothing really has happened, the missing time never existed. At each crisis, without realizing it, a little of his or her life simply escaped.

Virilio maintains that he is examining the state of picnolepsy throughout the historical development of human cultures. But what does he mean? The notion, for instance, of an aesthetic approach to the world of the awe-inspiring and eternal features of beauty, or of an approach to discriminating against what is dependent and thus not “art,” is comparatively simple. Both approaches rely on clues that can be observed if we want to verify our deductions: the aesthetic “genius” of Michelangelo’s statue of David, perhaps, or “taste” as the everyday manifestation of personal opinion across the popular arts, entertainment, fashion, and daily life. But what does it mean to adopt an aesthetic approach to the world, or to the state of picnolepsy? Obviously, this state is not a clear-cut case of chronic lack of visual sensation and functioning: The Aesthetics of Disappearance is not merely a catalog of the newer developments in human awareness, appearance, and visual disruption. What is in the balance is a great deal more significant.

The focal point for Virilio is the character and condition of picnolepsy. What is picnolepsy? How has it been produced, arranged, and used over the centuries in human cultures? The Aesthetics of Disappearance is thus a book about how ancient, modern, and postmodern human cultures behave toward perceptual stability and breaks, photography, technology, consciousness, and time. Virilio explores which kinds of picnolepsy function automatically and which we assimilate. He asks how picnolepsy is conveyed as uninterrupted time, devoid of perceptible interruptions, and who has access to these numerous everyday absences, which frequently occur while being totally ignored by others around us. What are they used for? Who decides on and manages the direction of picnolepsy? How does it form the “picnoleptic,” her existence or his encounters with the absent time of the world?

The key question of The Aesthetics of Disappearance as a book about “the world as we see it” and its “passing” is therefore: How are human existence and individuality created through historically conditioned configurations of picnolepsy? This is an important question for Virilio, because the condition of picnolepsy is such that, without being conscious of it, fractions of our lives are evading us, particularly as the advanced cultures some time ago crossed the threshold of the postindustrial and postmodern age of the aesthetics of disappearance. The chief premise and consequently the goal of Virilio’s book are to examine accurately the condition of picnolepsy and to explain its aesthetic repercussions.

THE AESTHETICS OF PICNOLEPSY

From the outset, Virilio contends that the improvements in photography and cinema that have occurred since the nineteenth century have influenced not only how picnolepsy is communicated, but also the condition of picnolepsy itself. It is not merely that we can catch more light in cameras and create technological instruments such as darkrooms, lenses, and, nowadays, digital imagery. It is also that these changes in entrapment, photography, and cinema are altering how we employ and assimilate picnolepsy. For the integration of our own bodies with the camera has by now changed the way vision is obtained, categorized, accessed, and used. Consequently, within what Virilio calls the aesthetics of disappearance, picnolepsy itself has altered.

Virilio shows that picnolepsy has become a series of technical prostheses, which are non-natural supplements or substitutes for our continually maturing yet ultimately waning eyes, and which is also increasingly the foundation of art in contemporary culture. Picnolepsy in the form of the light projected by technical prostheses is thus crucial to the production of postmodern artistic perception or aesthetic representations. Certainly, the severance of the two furthest extremities–of the visible and the invisible–of the picnoleptic occurrence, resembling an epileptic seizure unseen and unidentified by almost everybody, is, according to Virilio, already an important mass experience. This is because, for Virilio, in the global realm of contemporary art and aesthetics, picnolepsy has become a kind of waking dream or semiconscious existence, which he calls “a state of paradoxical waking (rapid waking)” (2009a: 24–5). The most cinematic of technologies are those that have the maximum picnoleptic means: those with the best technologies of disappearance, the most advanced photography, the most highly developed special effects, and the cinematically accelerated wherewithal to distribute the most intense light to those in a state of paradoxical waking. The worldwide state of paradoxical waking is today dominated by aesthetic questions of picnolepsy and disappearance, just as ancient cultures used to be dominated by aesthetic questions of duration and appearance. Virilio prophesies an era when the images of vision technologies will usurp human-centered picnolepsy, just as photography and the “cinematographic motor” have commandeered the wood, canvas, and marble, which were associated with the paintings and sculptures of former times (p. 25; see also Virilio and Armitage 2001: 33).

For Virilio, cinematic technologies have bolstered their status in the sphere of art and aesthetics. To be sure, they are the central technologies in our ever more picnoleptic-based culture. Special effects such as “trick photography,” which make visible what Virilio describes as the “supernatural” or the invisible, have supplanted paintings and sculptures as important artistic or aesthetic artifacts, as picnolepsy itself becomes a series of technical prostheses. These special effects produce huge quantities of supernatural images and employ the human imaginary to conjure up the impossible, to create picnolepsy, which is then used to assemble the "cheapest tricks"; and these, according to the early French film-maker Georges Méliès, “have the greatest impact,” such as the “stop trick” that transforms one image into another (Virilio 2009a: 25–6). Virilio’s contention here is exceptionally far-sighted regarding the changes that several theorists recognized as occurring in recent decades, particularly the impact of those technological special effects that fundamentally alter the appearance of reality. Without a doubt, the growing delegation of the human eye to cinematic technologies, and especially to the cinematographic motor’s “power of breaking the methodical series of filmed instants [. . .] [of] regluing sequences and so suppressing all apparent breaks in duration,” currently threatens to bring about a mass desynchronization and a mass picnoleptic disaster–or a kind of “black out” all over the world (p. 26). (For historical accounts of such developments, see Cubitt 2001 or Friedberg 2006.)

Virilio’s key example of these sorts of events, taken from the 1970s, is the billionaire American movie mogul Howard Hughes (1905–76). At the age of 47 Hughes went into hiding until his death, making what was once visible invisible, because, Virilio claims, quoting the journalist James Phelan, Hughes became “a man who couldn’t stand being seen” (2009a: 34). However, Hughes’s imaginary had no wish for more money or cinematic success. Instead, he used his riches to “purchase total reclusion in a dark room” filled only with a movie screen, a cine-projector, and remote controls (pp. 34–6). The price of creating such cinematic special effects was negligible, as they could be purchased inexpensively in America. Yet Hughes, in making what was once visible invisible, was defending the commitment he had made to the force of his supernatural image, to advertising, and to the development of himself as a kind of special effect. In this situation, therefore, it was the famous picnoleptic idol, Hughes himself–his continuous teasing of his public so that it maintained its belief in him–that was the technical prosthesis or special effect. Hughes, who renounced watches, described himself as the “Master of Time,” and he can thus be viewed as seeking an omnipotent picnolepsy, or as attempting to “win” in “the game of life” by creating a “dichotomy between the marks of his own personal time and those of astronomical time, so as to master whatever happens and fulfill immediately what is in the offing” (pp. 34–5). Hughes’s attempt to invoke the impossible was never successful, which meant that this “technological monk” (p. 37) died alone among his special effects, non-natural supplements, and cheap tricks. But the fact that cinematic technologies could drive Hughes into disappearance until his demise–that making what was once visible invisible could wreak havoc on the human imaginary–demonstrates how culturally dominant the conjuring up of the impossible, of picnolepsy, has become.

A further point this example reveals is that photography, cinematic technologies, and picnolepsy are not separate from cultures of disappearance. Hence the changes in the condition of picnolepsy that are now occurring indicate a shift in the character of human culture, cognition, and perception. It is exactly this cultural change that is at issue in Virilio’s essay on “the world as we see it” and its “passing” in The Aesthetics of Disappearance. The methodology he selects to examine the transformations in picnolepsy and cultural organization that shape the state of the postmodern age of the aesthetics of disappearance uses his concept of technical “prostheses of subliminal comfort.”

TECHNICAL PROSTHESES OF SUBLIMINAL COMFORT, IMAGES, AND MASS INDIVIDUALISM

Virilio claims that there are two main features of the growth of picnolepsy. First, improvements in photography and cinema have broader repercussions on culture, which is evident from the case of Howard Hughes. The supernatural image, the making visible of the invisible, are connected to issues regarding “cheap tricks,” aesthetics, and the human imaginary, and not only to issues of photographic or cinematic invention as such. Generally this signifies that improvements in the supernatural image have consequences for further regions of culture. The second feature of the growth of picnolepsy results from this condition, in that there are diverse kinds of picnolepsy operating within culture. These have different standards according to which they can be classified as helpful or accurate, and they have to be analyzed by diverse methods.

In The Aesthetics of Disappearance Virilio argues that photography and cinema do not embody the whole of picnolepsy; these two have always subsisted as a particular manifestation of the wider “fait accompli of technology” (2009a: 51). For Virilio, discourses concerning photography, cinema, and picnolepsy are actually discourses about the accomplished fact of technology, which, for him, is “detached from [. . .] cultural preconceptions” and “desires to become the metaphor of the world.” Consider how the concept of “technology” is increasingly linked to aesthetic studies, or how numerous theoretical discourses today are effectively colonized by technology. Media history, for example, considers the cinematic technologies of the past with growing interest; new media studies contemplates more and more the technologization of human vision; and, finally, cultural geography increasingly deliberates on diverse urban configurations and on the impact of technology on city cultures. Similarly, photographic and cinematic images are transmitted by or through types of technology that depict the human world. To exhibit and validate their photographs or movies, photographers and cinematographers are therefore compelled to transform their perhaps once imaginary images into technological forms that show the results of their labors. Technology, for Virilio, thus amounts to a “revolution” in human consciousness and culture: it desires to replace our individual human expressions, attitudes, and ambitions with an “artificial condition.”

Naturally, the different kinds of technology evoked by diverse discourses obey distinctive logics. The different discourses that comprise a culture’s picnolepsy (photography and cinema, aesthetics, science, and so on) all display a diverse series of logics concerning “assisted” or “subliminal” images. In The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Virilio alludes to these distinctive discourses as relating to technical “prostheses of subliminal comfort” (2009a: 71)–a concept hereafter abbreviated throughout the book to “technical prostheses.”

Virilio remarks that the logics of technical prostheses are associated with the “progress” of electronics and with an operative or “intelligent” neurosurgical tranquilization, which is effected through the implantation of spectators seeking subliminal comfort (p. 57). This signifies that the logics of specific technical prostheses such as computer or cinema screens are artificial and determined by our cultural preconceptions. Every synergy of human eye, computer screen, and cinematographic motor must therefore be considered as an effort to impose the annihilation of inborn human feelings through technical prostheses (p. 67). Consequently the logic of, for instance, computer screens is the logic of projection, of technical prostheses’ “accelerated voyages, of which we are no longer even conscious” (p. 71). For Virilio, any change in the logic of the technologies of the screen alters the character of the projections of technical prostheses. Accordingly, all technical prostheses seek to bring about the obliteration of natural human sensations–in other words, to follow their own logics. However, this also means that technical pros-theses are themselves susceptible to modification through other technical prostheses or as a result of the eradication of instinctive human feelings.

Virilio’s argument here is that cultural ties are mediated by technical prostheses or by the endeavor to travel, at an accelerated rate and in audiovisual “vehicles” such as cinema, within the realm of a “false day” (ibid.). The very structure of human culture is made up of the images produced within it and the logics it develops to decide whether particular inherent human sensations are to be eliminated or sublimated. While different kinds of technical prostheses have diverse logics, distinct cultures have different forms of art, science, and subliminal images. We live as so-called “individuals” within this culture founded on a never ending succession of technical prostheses, whose diverse logics mediate who we are and what we become. Yet, Virilio maintains, contemporary “individuals” do not add up to a great deal because they are “an effect of sensorial mass” (p. 53), of the mass-media culture their senses are provided with. In other words, from the outset, postmodern “individuals” are predestined to be targets of the fait accompli of technology–of the c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Aesthetics of Disappearance
• 2. Cinema, War, and the Logistics of Perception
• 3. New Media: Vision, Inertia, and the Mobile Phone
• 4. City of Panic: The Instrumental Image Loop of Television and Media Events
• 5. The Work of the Critic of the Art of Technology: The Museum of Accidents
• Conclusion
• Guide to Further Reading
• Glossary
• References
• Index