Virilio on Cyberspace
Having briefly mentioned Paul Virilio a couple of days ago, Ortho at Baudrillard’s Bastard drags something out of the archives that I’ve not seen before. This is the whole text from a 1995 article up at Radical Philosophy, Red Alert in Cyberspace!:
One of the major problems now facing political as well as military strategists is the phenomenon of immediacy, of instantaneity. For ‘real time’ now takes precedence over real space, now dominates the planet. The primacy of real time, of immediacy, over space is an accomplished fact, and it is an inaugural one. A recent advert for cell phones expressed it well enough: ‘The earth has never been so small.’ This development has the gravest consequences for our relation to the world, and for our vision of it.
There are three barriers: sound, heat and light. We have already crossed the first two - the sound barrier with supersonic and hypersonic aircraft, the heat barrier with rockets which can lift a man out of the earth’s atmosphere and land him on the moon. We do not cross the third barrier, the light barrier; we collide with it. And it is this barrier of time that history now faces. The fact of having reached the light barrier, the speed of light, is a historic event, one which disorients history and also disorients the relation of human beings to the world. If that point is not stressed, then people are being disinformed, they are being lied to. For it has enormous importance. It poses a threat to geopolitics and geostrategy. It also poses a very clear threat to democracy, because democracy was tied to cities, to places.
Having attained this absolute speed, we face the prospect in the twenty-first century of the invention of a perspective based on real time, replacing the spatial perspective, the perspective based on real space, discovered by Italian artists of the quattrocento. Perhaps we forget how much the cities, politics, wars and economies of the medieval world were transformed by the invention of perspective.
Cyberspace is a new form of perspective. It is not simply the visual and auditory perspective that we know. It is a new perspective without a single precedent or reference: a tactile perspective. Seeing at a distance, hearing at a distance - such was the basis of visual and acoustic perspective. But touching at a distance, feeling at a distance, this shifts perspective into a field where it had never before applied: contact, electronic contact, tele-contact.
The development of information superhighways confronts us with a new phenomenon: disorientation. A fundamental disorientation which completes and perfects the social and financial deregulation whose baleful consequences we already know. Perceived reality is being split into the real and the virtual, and we are getting a kind of stereo-reality, in which existence loses its reference points. To be is to be in situ, here and now, hic et nunc. But cyberspace and instantaneous, globalized information are throwing all that into total confusion. What is now underway is a disturbance of the perception of the real: a trauma. And we need to concentrate on this. Because no technology has ever been developed that has not had to struggle against its own specific negativity. The specific negativity of information superhighways is precisely this disorientation of alterity, of our relation to the other and to the world. It is quite clear that this disorientation, this ‘de-situation’, will bring about a profound disturbance with consequences for society and, in turn, for democracy.
It just goes to show that there’s nothing new under the sun. Me banging on about cyberspace, the convergence of the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’, the security implications … the traumatic disturbance of the perception of the real, to paraphrase Virilio. No wonder governments often prefer to turn a blind eye.
See related posts:
Unmanned Systems and the Accident
Interblog Dialogue: Ariadne’s Thread
I guess this is official proof that I’m 10 years behind guys like this. I’m sure this would have been gibberish to me in 1995, but now it reads like very level and coherent discussion. Perhaps that means guys like Zizek will be English for me around 2016?
This was a real gem, I appreciate the post, sir.
My pleasure, as always. It’s true that Virilio was some way ahead of the curve when he began exploring information spaces in the 1990s. I remember picking up a copy of ‘Lost Dimension’ about ten years ago and being simply blown away by it. A lot of water under the bridge since then and I think Virilio’s worth a critical re-examinaton. James Der Derian is, for me, technology’s current theorist of note, and has also written extensively on Virilio.
Your point re coherence is right on the money. It is remarkable that security discourse in particular is now happy with, and indeed contingent on, concepts like ‘narrative’ and ‘cognitive space’. As for Zizek, I couldn’t possibly comment. I often wish he would just break down his complex arguments into something us halflings can digest. You can swallow it, but sometimes it doesn’t provide the sustenance he intends.
[...] and Industry Posted in ubiwar by Tim Stevens on October 11th, 2008 Recent mentions of Paul Virilio reminded me of a book I found a couple of months ago in a Chinese youth hostel. Amongst the [...]
[...] close this linkfest with something a bit more esoteric from Tim, quoting Virilio regarding cyberspace: The development of information superhighways confronts us [...]