What the book is doing, in one breath:
Virilio tracks a single mutation across five chapters: the century-long shift from the dynamic vehicle that carried the body through real space (car, train, plane, rocket) to the static vehicle that delivers the world to a seated body in real time (screen, monitor, terminal, interactive home). The transport revolution is being succeeded by a transmission revolution, kinetic energy by a third energy he calls kinematic, and the horizon of travel by the horizon of the live broadcast. The terminus is polar inertia: a sedentariness that is not original but terminal, in which the human body, satellized and weightless, becomes the last reference to be lost.
The argument runs through optics rather than sociology. Virilio’s hinges are the distinction between direct and indirect light, between active and passive optics, between transparency and trans-appearance; the three intervals of space, time and light; and a running quarrel with the physics of relativity, read as a covert theology of speed. The moon landing of 21 July 1969 is the pivot of the book; a 1986 non-stop flight around the earth is its closing image.
The opening chapter replaces one revolution with another. The crisis of the cinema is not a box-office story about people staying home; it is the surfacing of a new regime of light, in which the illumination of a place is overtaken by the transmission of that place, live, to a screen.
Virilio refuses the demographic explanation from the first page. The relevant loss is not the darkened hall but the very idea of holding an event at a distance in time. He states the substitution as a flat equivalence:
page 3
Video is no more the eighth art than cinema was the seventh.
What is arriving is not a better representation of an event but the live presentation of a place. The whole chapter turns on that swap of prefix, and he poses it as the thing one must not fail to see:
page 1
How can one fail to see here the essential characteristic of video technology: not a more or less up-to-the-minute ‘representation’ of an event, but live presentation of a place or an electro-optical environment – the result, it would seem, of putting reality on waves by means of electro-magnetic physics?
The monitor migrates out of the television set and into ordinary fittings, so that the apparatus of the household begins to see. The domestic entry system is his emblem for it:
page 2
So great is the difference between video observation, cinema and television that the TV set has itself been overtaken through the incorporation of monitors into the most ordinary domestic equipment – for example, the ‘electro-optical porter’ that makes people visible as the entry phone only made them audible.
Virilio recruits Schopenhauer to mark the epochal shift, then overturns him. Where the world had been representation, it is now presentation – the object made not merely visible but tele-present, present at a distance:
page 6
For the philosopher Schopenhauer, the world was its representation.
page 6
For the ‘video-maker’ or electronics expert, we may say, matter is becoming its presentation – direct and external ‘presentation’ and, at the same time, internal and indirect presentation, the object or instrument becoming not only present to the naked eye but remotely present or ‘tele-present’.
This is the birth of what he will call trans-appearance: a reality no longer merely apparent but transmitted, an indirect lighting that supplants direct lighting. The neologism is exact and deliberate:
page 7
There is a fusion/confusion of transmitted appearances and immediate appearances, with indirect lighting capable of soon supplanting direct lighting.
The municipal register makes the point civic rather than merely domestic. Virilio reports a plan he treats as a portent of the wired city, in which illuminating the town and broadcasting the town collapse into one function:
page 4
The city of Rennes, for example, has a plan for ‘electronic public lighting’ to boost the political and economic existence of the urban area – hence the requirement for a municipal tele-noticeboard and the inevitable telesales that will replace the local press with one huge cathode shop-window.
The same logic scales up to the news feed, where the audience is converted from spectators into a distributed camera crew. He quotes the CNN executive without comment, letting the sales pitch expose itself:
page 5
At a time when the major US television channels ABC, CBS and NBC are faring worse and worse, Ted Turner’s live news channel, CNN, is planning a ‘News Hound’ service for a million subscribers with video equipment.
pages 5–6
‘That’s a million opportunities for us,’ Earl Casey, the man in charge of this future interactive system, said recently, ‘a million witnesses able to provide us with pictures; all we’ll have to do is select.’
The chapter’s political core is the events of 1989 in China, read not through censorship but through timing. The giant stadium screen in Hong Kong makes the crowd contiguous with a square hundreds of miles away, and Virilio names the condition:
page 12
This was a kind of ‘teletopia’ in which real-time continuity made up for the absence of real-space contiguity.
The confrontation is recast as a temporal encirclement of the city, a siege conducted in the tense of the live feed:
page 13
The events may well be described as a ‘siege’, a new kind of ‘state of siege’: not so much an army encirclement of city-space as a temporal siege, a siege of the real time of public information.
Power now works less by preventing disclosure than by controlling the replay – the delayed re-ignition of an event whose live light has already been recorded:
page 13
The key element is no longer the familiar censorship preventing disclosure of things that the state wishes to keep secret; it is the replaying of recorded material, the retarded ignition of the living light of events.
He closes the passage with Céline, whose disillusion he reads as premonition of a world where even the fact has no half-life:
page 13
For the moment only the facts count, and not even they for very long.
The chapter ends by turning to the automobile’s eclipse, which Virilio reads through a manufacturer’s own slogan – an advertisement that, against its intention, announces the end of the thing it sells:
pages 13–14
‘The car will be the last of your worries’ – a slogan placed above the Ford stand at the Paris motor show in 1988 – was a wonderful illustration of this process.
Movement is becoming a symptom rather than a passage, a fever occupying a body that no longer dwells in the energy of any means of transport. Fellini supplies the figure:
page 14
I no longer travel, I only have fits of moving around.
And Hitchcock, in Virilio’s telling, had already defined cinema as the immobilized posture that the car and the screen now share:
page 14
The cinema, Alfred Hitchcock used to say, is armchairs with people inside.
The only way to save the private car, he argues, is to convert it into a viewing station – and the racing drivers testify to the conversion already under way:
page 15
For me, the ideal car is a mobile video-control.
Victor Hugo’s epigram about the book displacing the cathedral is turned toward the coming displacement of the road by the screen:
page 15
This will replace that.
The second chapter states the book’s master-thesis in full and gives it a genealogy. The dynamic vehicle that moved the body is being replaced by a static vehicle that moves images to the body; the seat, not the wheel, is the through-line; and the exercise machine, the flight simulator and the sealed biosphere are its rehearsals.
Virilio opens on the home trainer and the indoor pool, where effort is maximal and displacement is nil. The athlete becomes a fixed point around which energy is made to move:
page 17
Whoever exercises here, then, becomes less a moving body than an island, a pole of inertia.
This is the template for the century’s turn. The dynamic vehicle gives way to the static audiovisual vehicle, and the result is not mobility but a consummated stillness:
page 18
…it seems that the end of this century heralds a final shift with the advent of the static audiovisual vehicle, a substitute for bodily movement and an extension of domestic inertia which will mark the definitive triumph of sedentariness.
The hinge sentence of the whole book is here, and it is short. The general arrival of images has replaced the special arrival of vehicles; nothing needs to leave for everything to appear:
page 20
Now everything arrives without any need to depart.
page 21
Polar inertia is setting in.
Virilio grounds this in the history of physics itself, noting that relativity borrowed its intuitions from the transport revolution – the train, the tram, the lift – that was remaking the experience of arrival at the same moment:
page 20
As an aid to understanding, both often resorted to the metaphor of the train, tram or lift, vehicles of a physical theory which owes them almost everything, since, as we shall see, the transport revolution of the same period involved a characteristic change in the phenomenon of arrival with the gradual negation of the time interval and the accelerated retention of the time between departure and arrival.
The fighter cockpit is Virilio’s limit-case: the pilot survives only through his equipment, an over-equipped body that is functionally disabled. The paradox is stated as an identity:
page 26
The equipped invalid is thus paradoxically on a par with the overequipped able person.
The simulator’s seat is not a place of rest but a device that programs perception in advance; he coins it with the translator’s bracketed pun preserved:
page 24
This hallucinatory training device, whose effects resemble those of drugs, signals a tendency for any stage or screen to disappear in favour of the ‘seat’, but it will be a trap seat [siège/piège] where perception is programmed in advance according to the calculating power of the computer’s inference motor.
This demands a revision of physics itself. Beyond potential and kinetic energy, Virilio proposes a third form, the energy of the moving image acting on perception:
page 24
For if physicists still distinguish two kinds of energy – potential energy and the kinetic energy that causes movement – perhaps we should now, ninety years after the invention of the cinema travelling shot, add a third form, namely the kinematic energy which results from the effect of movement and its greater or lesser speed upon ocular, optical and opto-electronic perception.
Virilio traces the automobile not to the chariot but to the chair, placing the car in a lineage of furniture that rests the body. The line of descent is the argument:
page 25
In a line descending from the old sedan chair and the Asian palanquin or rickshaw, from the rocking chair, swivel chair and the first wheelchair (invented by Jacob for Louis XVIII in 1820), the motor car actually appeared as the inheritor of the seat that rests the lower limbs.
The wheelchair is the honest form of the destination, and Jean Renoir, at the end of his life, gives Virilio the image that fuses invalid, seat and camera into one:
pages 27–28
Give my wheelchair a push. I’m like a camera that’s just ticking over.
Every advance in transport, on this reading, only frees the seat to be developed further:
page 28
In the end, each advance in transport is hardly any more than a freeing of the seat for further rapid development.
End of the preview
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