A Landscape of Events (review)

In this series of essays written between 1984 and 1996 (presented chronologically in the book), Paul Virilio is a witness of the times, or the landscape of events, as they pass by in the electromagnetic spectrum of our collective telepresence. Paul Carter observed at about the same time these commentaries were written that "we build in order to stabilize the ground, to provide vide ourselves with a secure place where we can stand and watch." As professor of the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture in Paris, Virilio continues his description of the overtaking of space by time in the domain of the human environment, both built and natural. The secure place, however, dominates his attentions or, as he would have it, the attentions of the military-industrial complex trading today in the globalized industries of information.

In some ways, each essay reads less as an extended aphorism and more as an anguished "Letter to the Times" about the state of the world, relying a little too much on rhetoric and not enough on analysis. The essays most definitely are vivid statements "signaling through the flames" of contemporary turmoil and spectacle, commenting on war, terrorism, accidents, public disorder, the madhouse, mass murder and military history ("dematerialization, depersonalization and derealization"). This virtual diorama is "the great circus of Time, of this landscape of events that God alone can contemplate." Clearly, Virilio is right up there on the left hand of the almighty technology.

The section that deals with the anorthoscopic slit and the bankruptcy of "optical positivism," perception and belief takes its cue from the artist Marcel Odenbach's use of "total war" footage in Die Distanz, his video game based on anorthoscopic optics. Odenbach's installation plays with the persistence of visual phenomena and the ability of the mind to construct meaning from the scantiest of visual evidence, gathered in this case with a severely restricted field of view. Virilio's subjective responses are dutifully released— he enlarges the anorthoscopic slit into a metaphor aligned with the falling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, writing of "a commutation of existence between East and West." Such connections characteristically remind us that, whatever the field of research, an engagement with realpolitik connects the inner spaces of personal endeavor with the public space of the economies of human survival.

Virilio also discusses the discriminating gaze of kinematic optics (a recognized area of computer science, it seems, presumably to assist in dealing with junk e-mail), wherein information energy is seen as the ability to observe in a relativistic mode and thus distinguish between phenomena, setting apart the essential from the ephemeral flow and thus informing the more usual kinetic and potential energies.

Virilio reminds us that interactive processes, such as clicking on a mouse, were preceded by hand-to-hand combat. At least we do not lose a hand or a leg in the state of telepresence, although the more paranoid may be led to suspect that someone, somewhere is writing lines of code for a game that will exact that very outcome. It is all a matter of what is at stake, and how we can stake it. According to Virilio's clarion call, we are being truly lulled. These entertaining thoughts would be better delivered via the list-serv "dispatches from the front" style or, even better, as part of a dialogue, rather than up to 16 years later, via this elegantly designed book. On the one hand, this suggests that Virilio's writings are a precursor to the listserv, indeed that his observations need to be recorded in the "Age of Speed" he has helped describe—these writings will be the kinematic optics to students of media, enabling a wider comprehension of the telepresence of the everyday. On the other hand, publication of this collection invokes the bittersweet feeling that this is commentary that missed the engagé audience in flagrante, but has now found it again, resting...