The Aesthetics of Disappearance Paul Virilio, 1980 · a full-quote brief on the argument, part by part

Virilio's wager is that consciousness has never been the continuous stream it takes itself to be. It is riddled with absences, tiny departures from the world that the mind stitches over so smoothly it never registers the seam, and the whole history of technique, arriving at its pitch in cinema and in speed, is the history of how those absences get produced, supplemented, and standardized from the outside until the world itself is what disappears. He names the absence picnolepsy and builds outward from it: the epileptic petit mal de-pathologized into the ordinary condition of everyone, then generalized until reason, cinema, the automobile, the aircraft, the war machine, and the electronic screen all turn out to be engines for redistributing absence and manufacturing a false day in which nothing passes. The book appeared in 1980 as Esthétique de la disparition, written out of the late-1970s balance-of-terror moment, and it enters against two settled assumptions at once: that perception is a continuous givenness of the world, and that reason and the technical image carry us closer to the real. Virilio's counter-claim is that they do the reverse, that speed and light are not neutral media but loaded weapons, and that the terminus of the tendency is the disappearance of the body into speed and of consciousness into the screen.

This brief reconstructs the argument along Virilio's own structure, an introduction supplied for this edition by Jonathan Crary followed by four numbered parts and the endnotes, and carries the load-bearing formulations whole at every locus, so that the concept, its stakes inside the argument, and the passages that prove it are all retrievable at speed without returning to the book. The through-line to follow is the single tendency Virilio tracks under a dozen names: picnolepsy becomes the technical production of paradoxical wakefulness, which becomes the law of movement, which becomes the aesthetics of disappearance, ending in a world where duration is measured in intensity and matter and our presence in it face a final oblivion beyond the barrier of sound and soon of light. The recurring epigraph, from Paul of Tarsus, is the compression of the whole: the world as we see it is passing.

Front matter · this editionJonathan Crary's Introduction

The 2009 edition opens with an introduction Crary writes nearly three decades after the French publication, and its work is corrective: it exists to unseat the labels that had attached to Virilio by then. Crary's first move is a denial. He refuses the two categories under which Virilio is usually filed, and the refusal is the frame for everything the book is about to do.

This text in particular makes plain what has been obvious to any careful reader of Virilio all along: he never was or is a critic/historian of media or a philosopher of technology in the way these labels might apply to figures as disparate as Ellul, McLuhan, Kittler or Stiegler. Of course his work has been uniquely valuable to anyone interested in these areas but Virilio's guiding preoccupations lie elsewhere. To use quasi-Kantian terms, it is more accurate to see his work as a relentless examination of the conditions which make experience possible.

Jonathan Crary, introduction to this edition.

The Kantian echo is raised only to be turned against Kant. Where for Kant time is the condition that unites perception and thought into coherent experience, Crary reads Virilio's subject as the opposite operation, time as what pulls perception and its objects apart, and he places this nearer to Nietzsche and to the Foucault of the 1970s than to any philosophy of time in the line of Bergson, Husserl, or Heidegger.

Virilio's project is to uncover the role of time in the multiple and abyssal de-linkages of perception and its possible objects.

Jonathan Crary, introduction to this edition.

The load-bearing declining, the one Crary is most concerned a reader not miss, is that no lost natural relation to time is being mourned here. Picnolepsy is not a fall from some prior continuity; the fracture is original. This is the hinge on which Crary's whole reading of the concept turns, and it is stated flatly.

It should be stressed that Virilio is hardly proposing that prior to the industrial revolution, humans had some more "natural" relation to temporality. At the heart of Aesthetics of Disappearance is the insistence that experience as duration has always been constituted as de-synchronized and fractured. This is the importance of his thematic of "picnolepsy," his de-pathologizing of the epileptic "petit mal."

Jonathan Crary, introduction to this edition.

Crary lifts Virilio's own formula for what reason does with those absences and makes it the pivot of the reading, quoting the line the brief carries whole from Virilio's Part 1 below: the goal of reason is to redistribute the eliminations of picnolepsy methodically and to deny particular absences any active value. From there he expands the cinematic well beyond film history, treats the components of the cinematic machine as centuries older than the cinematograph, and reads the late-1970s text as already describing a permanent day, the 24/7 present that no longer passes. He closes, as Virilio himself does in Part 4, on the Hughes passage about the internment of bodies in a cell outside of time, which is carried in full at its own locus below.

Part 1Picnolepsy

The world as we see it is passing.Paul of Tarsus · epigraph to Part 1, page 17

1.1The lapse, named

Part 1 begins with a scene and withholds the name until the scene has done its work. The dropped cup at breakfast is the everyday symptom of a gap in consciousness so brief and so seamlessly repaired that the person it happens to never knows it happened. Everything in the book is built on this passage, so it is carried whole; the decisive claim is the last sentence, that for the sufferer the missing time did not merely go unnoticed but never existed.

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: 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.

The child is named as the most frequent victim, and the move is the book's first reversal: made to accept events he did not perceive, the picnoleptic child learns to fabricate the continuity everyone else insists on, and ends by doubting that anything can be known or communicated at all.

Later, the young picnoleptic will himself be inclined to doubt the knowledge and concordant evidence of those around him; everything certain will become suspect. He'll be inclined to believe (like Sextus Empiricus) that nothing really exists; that even if there is existence, it cannot be described; and that even if it could be described, it could certainly not be communicated or explained to others.

The woman/child parallel is brought in as evidence rather than asserted, through two period sources Virilio quotes and lets stand.

Around 1913 Walter Benjamin noted: "We know nothing of woman's culture, just as we know nothing of the culture of the young." But the trivial parallel—woman/child—can find itself justified in the observation of Doctor Richet: "Hysterical women are more feminine than other women. They have transitory and vivid feelings, mobile and brilliant imaginations and, with it all, the inability to control, through reason and judgment, these feelings and imaginations."

1.2The game as the basic art

The argument turns from pathology to play: childhood games of vertigo and the games of hiding and freezing are read as deliberate inductions of the same seen/unseen structure. The transcribed Jacques-Henri Lartigue interview is the evidentiary center, the photographer recalling a technique he had as a child, before any camera, for trapping what he saw.

Q: You've talked to me just now of a trap for vision, something like that, is that your camera?

A: No, not at all. It's before, something I did when I was little. When I half-closed my eyes, there remained only a narrow slot through which I regarded intensely what I wanted to see. Then I turned around three times and thought, by so doing, I'd caught—trapped—what I was looking at, so as to be able to keep indefinitely not only what I had seen, but also the colors, the noises. Of course, in the long run, I realized that my invention wasn't working. It's then only that I turned to technical tools for facilitating it.

Virilio's gloss makes the prosthesis a late and inferior substitute for a capacity the child already had. The stakes here are the book's founding inversion of the usual order between the technical and the bodily: the camera imitates the child, not the reverse.

But the remarkable thing with the little Lartigue is that he's assimilated his own body to the camera, the room of his eye to a technical tool, the time of the exposure to turning himself around three times. He perceives a certain pattern there, and also sees that this pattern can be restored by a certain savoir faire. The child Lartigue has thereby stayed in the same place, and is, nevertheless, absent. Owing to an acceleration of speed, he's succeeded in modifying his actual duration; he's taken it off from his lived time.

The section converges on a formula that recurs across all four parts, and on the universalizing question that turns picnolepsy from a clinical rarity into the ordinary condition of everyone.

The game then becomes the basic art; the contract on the aleatory is only the formulation of an essential question on the relative perception of the moving; the pursuit of form is only a technical pursuit of time.

The more progress we make in the already ancient study of the petit mal, the more it appears to be widespread, diverse, and badly understood. In spite of lengthy polemics as to its kinship with epilepsy, with its uncertain diagnoses and with the crisis passing unperceived by those present as well as by the subject himself, it remains completely unknown by nearly everyone, and to the question: who is picnoleptic? we could possibly respond today: who isn't, or hasn't been? So-defined as a mass phenomenon, picnolepsy comes to complement in the waking order the notion of paradoxical sleep (rapid-eye-movement sleep), which corresponds to the phase of deepest dreaming. So our conscious life—which we already believe would be inconceivable without dreams—is just as difficult to imagine without a state of paradoxical waking (rapid waking).

1.3Méliès, Marey, and light as the shadow of time

Cinema enters through its origin story, and the specific mechanism is kept because it is the argument. The special-effects maxim is corrected: what does not exist is not the filmed thing but the speed. Méliès supplies the credo, and the jammed-camera anecdote supplies the birth of the stop trick as an accident of desynchronization, the machine breaking the series of instants exactly as the picnoleptic crisis does.

"Film what doesn't exist," the Anglo-Saxon special effects masters still say, which is basically inexact: what they are filming certainly does exist, in one manner or another. It's the speed at which they film that doesn't exist, and is the pure invention of the cinematographic motor. About these special effects—or "trick photography," hardly an academic phrase—Méliès liked to joke, "The trick, intelligently applied, today allows us to make visible the supernatural, the imaginary, even the impossible."

Against Méliès the illusionist Virilio sets Étienne-Jules Marey the scientist, inventor of chronophotography, and reads Marey's handling of light as the deeper discovery: light demoted from what illuminates stable volumes to a leading player, a function of speed. The compression is one sentence.

With him the effect of the real becomes that of the readiness of a luminous emission; what is given to see is due to the phenomena of acceleration and deceleration in every respect identifiable with intensities of light. He treats light like a shadow of time.

1.4Reason as the redistribution of absence

Here Part 1 makes its largest claim. Reason is not the opposite of picnolepsy but its administration: the methodical denial that the absences carry any active value. This is the formulation Crary lifts for the introduction, and it is the load-bearing sentence of the part, so it is carried whole from Virilio's own text.

Reason, compared to death, does nothing else but redistribute methodically the occasional eliminations of picnolepsy. The rational study of the real is just like the movies; the tabula rasa is only a trick whose purpose is to deny particular absences any active value.

The same move is made against the Cartesian and Bergsonian accounts of mind, which paradoxical waking is said to reconcile by putting speed, not substance, at the origin of thought.

To Descartes' sentence: "the mind is a thing that thinks" (that is, in stable and commonly visible forms), Bergson retorted: "The mind is a thing that lasts…" The paradoxical state of waking would finally make them both agree: it's our duration that thinks, the first product of consciousness would be its own speed in its distance of time, speed would be the causal idea, the idea before the idea.

1.5Hughes, the desert, and the visionary children

Howard Hughes is the sustained case of Part 1 and returns in Part 4, so he is the figure who carries the concept across the book's seams. Virilio takes him from James Phelan's biography and reads him as the man who wanted to be Master of Time by severing his own time from astronomical time.

Now it was notoriously well known that Hughes refused absolutely to wear a watch, all the while calling himself the Master of Time, which for him certainly had a precise meaning, close perhaps to Rilke's definition: to be all-powerful, to win in the game of life is to create 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.

The 1938 round-the-world flight that lands on the exact spot it left from yields the reversal that governs every later traveler in the book: the desire for movement turns out to be a desire for inertia. The stakes are that speed and stasis are not opposites here; maximal movement is a technique for arriving at total immobility.

For Hughes, on the other hand, to be is not to inhabit; polytropos, like Homer's Ulysses, not occupying only one place, he desires not to be identifiable, but especially to identify with nothing. "He is no one because he wants to be no one and to be no one you have to be everywhere and nowhere." This taste for ubiquitous absence he'll quench, first through his use of various technical media, in surpassing what was then the most prestigious speed record: the 14th of July, 1938, his Lockheed-Cyclone having flown around the world "in a great circular arc," lands at Floyd Bennett Field where he had taken off on July 10th. Then he guides his plane into the hangar to the exact point he left from. It isn't long before Hughes recognizes that his desire for movement is only desire of inertia, desire to see arrive what is left behind.

Part 1 closes on the visionary children, the apparitions of Bernadette Soubirous and of the children at La Salette read as repetitions of the moment before the epileptic absence, except that the senses stay awake and perceive an infra-ordinary reality. The recurrence of the epigraph inside the text marks the seam, and Virilio ties his own attention to the banal to the children's seeing of the world as illusion of the world, closing the part on Paul of Tarsus's road to Damascus.

To look at what you wouldn't look at, to hear what you wouldn't listen to, to be attentive to the banal, to the ordinary, to the infra-ordinary. To deny the ideal hierarchy of the crucial and the incidental, because there is no incidental, only dominant cultures that exile us from ourselves and others, a loss of meaning which is for us not only a siesta of consciousness but also a decline in existence.

… reminding us of the reflection of Paul of Tarsus (but he, also, on the road to Damascus, experienced a prolonged absence which effectively altered his notion of reality), all is calm, and yet: this world as we see it is passing away.