Armitage - Virilio and the Media

VIRILIO AND THE MEDIA

Theory and Media

John Armitage, Virilio and the Media

Paul Taylor, iek and the Media

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, Kittler and the Media

VIRILIO AND THE MEDIA

JOHN ARMITAGE

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Copyright John Armitage 2012

The right of John Armitage to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2012 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6131-5

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For Jonnne

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to several people for their supportive contributions to Virilio and the Media: Sean Cubitt, who initially suggested the book; Paul Virilio, who will by now be as astonished as I am that this is the fourth volume that I have produced on his work; Andrea Drugan and Lauren Mulholland, who have been consummate editors, tendering assistance, encouragement, and sensitive guidance during my editorship of Virilio Now: Current Perspectives in Virilio Studies and the writing of Virilio and the Media; and, finally, my good friends at Cultural Politics, above all Ryan Bishop and Douglas Kellner, Mark Featherstone, and the artist Joy Garnett, whose bravura painting adorns the cover of this book. Discussing with me almost daily Virilios ideas concerning the media and much else besides, such splendid companions not only help one to understand the contradictory nature of the world, but also how to cut loose from long-established responses to it.

INTRODUCTION

Paul Virilio (1932) is one of the leading media theorists of the twenty-first century. He is well known for his innovative studies of the aesthetics of disappearance, which will establish the chief focal point of Virilio and the Media and will be explained in detail shortly. The aesthetics of disappearance is the core of his 1980 book of the same title (Virilio 2009a), which is increasingly debated by media theorists and is widely regarded as an important text for undergraduate and postgraduate programs in the visual arts, cinema and new media, cultural and political geography, and museum studies. It is the primary text of his aesthetic theory and has become progressively more influential since its first edition. In a virtuoso sequence of four concise parts, he examines perception and speed, politics, society, the convulsive state of human consciousness, subjectivity, and absence.

This book will be the topic of concern with war, vision, and urban terrorism and provoke stimulating questions for anyone studying the contemporary arts and humanities, social sciences, and philosophy. The aim of Virilio and the Media is to familiarize readers with a range of Virilios decisive critical investigations into todays media world and to clarify his aesthetics and philosophy of disappearance.

Important questions about art and technology, aesthetics, and disappearance are situated at the heart of Virilios work on the media. And, whether he is writing about a masterpiece of cinema, a military text, logistics, or human perception, he constantly focuses upon the significant artistic and technological concerns that his subject calls to mind. Virilio is, first and foremost, a critic of art and a philosopher of technology involved with how our ways of life are arranged and managed by the cultures we live in, and his examination of everythingfrom new media and vision to inertia, the mobile phone, and accidentsplays a part in this critical appreciation. His persistent contestation of traditional ideas about the city and about panic, violence, territory, and televised media events makes his work frequently worrying and complex, but simultaneously exhilarating and affecting.

While Virilio does not continually employ his own concept, a great deal of his writing on the media concentrates on questions emerging from what he terms the aesthetics of disappearance. The idea of an aesthetics of disappearance has attained a somewhat fashionableif fatalisticreputation lately. It is regularly associated with the work of the late French media theorist Jean Baudrillard (19292007)for example with a contemporary cultural world from which human beings have disappeared and with the dismissal of arguments for their natural exhaustion, extinction, or even extermination (2009: 910). Commentators on the aesthetics of disappearance who focus on the exhaustion of natural resources or on the extinction of species are often criticized for their conviction that in current media theory the question of the aesthetics of disappearance has to do with physical processes or natural phenomena. Thus the argument that Baudrillard (2009: 10) produces is based on the notion that the human species is the only one to have invented a specific mode of disappearance that has nothing to do with Natures law, and that the aim of media theory is merely to explore and take pleasure in an emergent art of disappearance. Baudrillards account of the aesthetics of disappearance is very different from Virilios philosophical perspective. Similarly, Baudrillards suggestion that, in the era of the aesthetics of disappearance, the human species has been appropriated by the disappearance of the real and by the murder of reality in the age of the media, virtual reality, and networks is a proposal that Virilio acknowledges but resists throughout his work. For, even if he concedes that the human species has created forms of disappearance beyond the laws of nature, his writings on the media continuously take up the issue of what it might mean to theorize and act ethically without the existence of the human species, its art, or even reality itself. Virilio does not simply recoil in misery at humanitys decision to transform the real world in the modern age through technoscience; nor does he rejoice at the defeat of pre-technoscientific analysis or knowledge, notwithstanding the relentless implementation of technoscientific inventions. Instead he steadfastly looks for novel ways of examining the aesthetic realms of technoscientific devices and their cultures in order to determine alternative trajectories for media theory and practice, which will transform these and our own worlds into something more human and caring. Hence, for Virilio, the most important work of a philosopher of aesthetics is to challenge, with equal force, both the sliding of human beings into a phase of technologically induced disappearance and the overwhelming strength of those modes of disappearance that lie outside of Natures law. These are all difficult conceptions, but each and every one will be presented straightforwardly and in depth in subsequent chapters.