Virilio wrote this book at the moment Live TV and the first talk of virtual reality had made the real-time image feel like an emancipation, and his wager is that the opposite is true: the same acceleration that was celebrated as freeing the media is the acceleration that dissolves the world. The argument runs two movements joined at a single hinge, and the hinge is the interval, the distance and delay and duration that let a body stand apart from its surroundings long enough to perceive them, judge them, and act.
The first movement, chapters one through five, works through the media as a public apparatus. The industrial media have passed the peak of a power that was never really the power to reveal but the power to withhold, and real-time technology strips that power by bringing everything to the surface at once. What was a shift in journalism becomes, across these chapters, a change in the standing of the real itself: the world shrinks to a single transmitted image, politics becomes a permanent poll, and the citizen becomes a spectator to a set. The second movement, chapters six and seven, follows the same speed-logic as it turns inward and stops treating the body as the thing that watches and starts treating it as the last territory to be equipped. The law that had always spared the body effort gives way to a law that revs it up; information arrives as a third kind of energy after the potential and the kinetic; and the colonization that once went outward, over land and peoples, goes inward, into the organs. This is the passage the title names, from the motor as the engine of transport to the motor as the model for the living being, the art of the motor becoming the art of running the human like a machine that must never be allowed to idle.
What is at stake, and what makes the book worth keeping whole, is Virilio's claim that the disappearing term in every register is the interval. When distance collapses to real-time proximity, the media lose the secret that gave information its value; when the body's inside and outside collapse, the subject loses the standing-apart that let it act rather than be acted upon; and when history's tempo hits the speed of light, the event yields to the information about it. The reconstruction below follows Virilio's own seven-chapter sequence, because the sequence is the argument: each chapter carries the same disappearance one register deeper, from the newsroom to the nervous system.
The chapter opens on a legal anomaly Virilio treats as constitutive rather than incidental. The media are barred from lying outright, but licensed to lie by leaving out, and that licence is what places them outside democratic control.
page 1
The industrial media benefit from a curious depravity in the laws of democracy. If television and, by osmosis, the press are not at liberty a priori to provide false information, our legislation on the other hand grants them the exorbitant power of lying by omission, by censuring or ruling out news that does not suit them or that might damage their interests.
From that premise the chapter makes its central move, which is to date the media's crisis to the loss of exactly this power. Their capacity to reveal has expanded past the point of usefulness, and in doing so it has eaten away the older and more valuable capacity to conceal. The problem is no longer what the media can show but what they can still keep off the screen.
page 3
Their power to denounce, to reveal, to flaunt has been growing endlessly to the detriment of the now precarious privilege of dissimulation—so much so that currently the real problem of the press and television no longer lies in what they are able to show as much as in what they can still manage to obliterate, to hide. Until now, this constituted the essential nature of their power.
Live TV is the turn of the screw. The unlimited image, far from freeing the media, undermines the credibility of the facts it shows, because without a certain blindness there is no tenable appearance. Virilio routes the point through Kafka's letter to Milena, where wanting the total image is figured as feeding the ghosts.
page 4
means to denude oneself before the ghosts. ... It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. . . . The ghosts won't starve, but we will perish,
Virilio quoting Kafka's 1922 letter to Milena, glossing the desire for the total image.
The industry knows what it is protecting. Virilio reads the press codes of the late 1980s not as a fit of conscience but as a defense of the one prerogative worth defending.
page 5
This was no sudden bout of puritanism. It was about dealing with what was most pressing while preserving the institution's principal prerogative at all costs: the power to dissimulate.
The chapter's sharpest formulation rewrites a maxim of the Terror. Where Saint-Just made subjugation a function of capacity, Virilio makes mediatization the same kind of automatic fact: what can be done to a people, is.
page 6
Theoretical force behind the Terror, Saint-Just once asserted that, "Whenever a people can be put down, they are." Today it would be no exaggeration to say that, "Whenever a people can be mediatized, they are!"
Underneath the media politics sits an optical claim that will govern the rest of the book: the cinematic apparatus abolishes the difference between one viewer and another. Virilio takes Marcel Pagnol's observation and pushes it to its limit, the thousand spectators reduced to one, the stereoscopic couple of theater collapsed into the single sightline of the camera.
page 8
In theater, each member of the audience scattered throughout the auditorium necessarily sees a different play. In the cinema, on the other hand, these same spectators see exactly what the camera has seen, wherever they happen to be sitting; that is, they see the same film. Pagnol goes so far as to conclude that in a room with a thousand spectators there is really only one.
Virilio glossing Marcel Pagnol, whom he notes he has quoted often elsewhere.
The chapter closes on the social residue of thirty years of broadcasting, and gives it the compressed formula the book will keep returning to. Mass communication ends by addressing the isolation it produced, a mass of solitudes rather than a public.
page 18
After thirty years of audiovisual activity, the communications network faces a new equation: a person – a ghetto. Radio and television now only address the anomic mass they have helped create, that great inextricable social morass whose protagonists survive as best they can in multiple solitude —marginals; divorced singles; the unemployed; members of ethnic, sexual, or health minorities; children of single parents left to their own devices.
This is the chapter that names the book. Virilio's thesis is that the communications industry is at bottom a motor, an engine for keeping appearances in perpetual movement, and that because movement makes the event, the real it produces is a staged, kinetic real.
page 23
Since movement creates the event, the real is kinedramatic. The communications industry would never have got where it is today had it not started out as an art of the motor capable of orchestrating the perpetual shift of appearances.
The chapter's method is to run the history of the press as a history of ballistics, the newspaper accelerating like ordnance, the item of news behaving like a charge. The vocabulary is deliberately explosive because Virilio wants the reader to hear information as a weapon system rather than a message.
page 24
News is dynamite, information explodes like a bomb, opinion polls or war propaganda are time bombs, we even have epidemics, for, as lawyer Gisele Halimi recently wrote, "Nothing is more contagious than the processes of liberation."
Behind the ballistics Virilio places an older figure, the messenger-god as vector, to make the point that the medium has never been neutral carriage. Thoth translated as Hermes is the mediator whose office is as much to mislead and redirect as to convey.
page 26
From time immemorial, the "gods" have always been cast as vectors: thus the Egyptians usually translated the name of the god Thoth (who invented language and writing) as Hermes. Hermes then becomes the mediator whose job it is to convey messages and negotiate changes and transitions, but also, equally, to guide, mislead, redirect,
The chapter's payoff is the term that renames the whole regime. What looks like the neutral management of statistics is in fact a coup, a takeover of the real by its representation, and Virilio marks the threshold precisely: the fusion of information and data processing produces a theater that has replaced the world it depicts.
page 33
We have thus, without realizing it, gone from simple statistical management to a new phenomenon of representation, the virtual theatricalization of the real world. We had to wait for the fusion/confusion of information and data processing to obtain the fusion/confusion of the secret of speed —initially, with the first military decoders to become operational during the Second World War.
The chapter's subject is the collapse of distance, and Virilio builds it as a history of transmission technologies that shrink the world by speeding it up. He begins from Merleau-Ponty's worry that without a single witness the same words cannot mean the same thing in different places, then gives the pre-broadcast world's unevenness its sharpest image through Adolf Loos.
page 36
Cultural evolution is like an army on the march. ... I may well be living in 1913, but one of my neighbors is living in 1900, the other in 1880. The peasant of the upper Tyrol is stuck in the seventh century. . . . How lucky countries like America are not to have stragglers and marauders!
Virilio quoting Adolf Loos.
The historical hinge is the optical telegraph, which Virilio reads as the founding of a regime rather than a convenience. Chappe sold it to the legislative assembly as a way of closing the gap between order and reply, and, tellingly, as a way of bringing the press to heel.
page 39
the physicist Claude Chappe had presented his optical telegraph project to the legislative assembly as "a reliable means of setting up a correspondence in such a way that the legislative body could send its orders to the front and receive a reply in a single sitting."
From the telegraph Virilio draws the chapter's governing law, which ties the value of information directly to its speed and therefore to its brevity. Duration is the enemy; what the media attack in every other institution is whatever lasts.
page 53
Speed guarantees the secret and thus the value of all information. Liberating the media therefore means not only annihilating the duration of information—of the image and its path—but with these all that endures or persists.
He anchors the point in Karl Kraus's pairing of the two inventions that let the deadly and the reproducible converge, and extends the pairing into his own series of couples, machine gun and camera, radar and video.
page 54
"We ought to acknowledge the significance for mankind of the simultaneous invention of gunpowder and printer's ink," says Karl Kraus, further. We might add that a similar connection exists between, say, the machine gun and the camera, nitrocellulose and film, radar and video—
The chapter's culminating term arrives when Virilio reads the televised revolutions of 1989 not as liberation footage but as the symptom of a takeover. This is where the phrase that titled the second chapter is actually cashed out, as a permanent, technological coup in which real presence loses to real time.
page 57
it was very much the birth pangs of a data coup d'etat that we were witnessing, with the revelation of the absolute incompatibility between old national, political, and economic territories and the contemporaneity of a universal dromos that has finally been achieved. With the telegraph, distances and territorial boundaries evaporate; with real-time technologies, real presence bites the dust.
Virilio closes the register with the Olivier Stirn affair of 1990, where a minister hired out-of-work actors to fill a conference hall, and turns the small scandal into a charge: to insist on a public space of flesh-and-blood citizens is now itself an offense against the media.
page 58
to try to prove at any cost, as Olivier Stirn did, that there still exists a public space peopled by flesh and blood citizens, is to be guilty of a crime of lese-media.
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