The Aesthetics of Disappearance, New Edition

by Paul Virilio; trans. by Philip Beitchman; Introduction by Jonathan Crary
Semiotexte(e) Foreign Agents/MIT Press, Los Angeles CA USA, 2009
128 pp. Trade, $14.95 US / £11.95   UK
ISBN: 1-58435-074-1.
 
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University

mosher@svsu.edu

About five years ago I returned to philosopher Paul Virilio's 1975 book Speed and Politics , pulling it off the shelf in search of insights applicable to "Detroit 9000", a movie about police department's racial tensions and possible corruption in that troubled city.   Virilio's conceptual framework of "dromology", for the motions of surveillance and control, offered up fewer clues than I had hoped.   The book that Virilio published in France right after that one now appears in English as The Aesthetics of Disappearance .    Maybe I'm charmed by the elegance of Philip Beitchman's smooth translation, but in this book some of Virilio's decades-old insights on automobiles glow with an odd relevance to the ongoing disappearance--or at least recent major bankruptcies--of the car industry in America's rustbelt.

Virilio organizes a variety of phenomena that he relates to "picnolepsy", epileptic state of consciousness, or something like it, discontinuous with fugues of disappearance.   This is the experience of a child...or perhaps the world of interiors at rest that the Cubists in Paris about 1910-1915, were trying to depict.   Or of the city in motion, as painted by Futurists in Milan about 1915-20.   Or of New York Harlem streets about 1960 in Romare Bearden's collages.   Virilio ponders photography and fragmentation, the seen and unseen in the manufacture of appearances, and cites the childhood recollections of photographers Lartique and Marey. There is something left out between fragments of time, and it may be analogous to children's games, for picnolepsy ends for most with the end of childhood, and the dawning sensations of adulthood. The religious visions experienced by the two children at Lourdes dissolved with the passage out of childhood.

This book is so peppered with interesting details, and left-field yet apropos quotes, that the reader soon suspects Paul Virilio, like Walter Benjamin, is the keeper of richly-stuffed volutes of archived material for each of his books.   We are reminded how epilepsy was once considered a "sacred malady", and was a burden to ancient conquerors Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Hannibal.   Twice the author casually reaches for singer Amanda Lear, for she had replaced all the mirrors in her house with surveillance cameras and video screens.   If Roxy Music didn't have a song about that very evocative 1970s image, they should've.   There is a relation between picnolepsy and chance, and ways it is both like and unlike information, computers and their screens.   The illusion of verity, and what exactly a camera can capture, weighs heavily upon Col. Edward Steichen's WWI aerial surveillance photography over France, and by implication, his subsequent work.

The prevalent picnoleptic experience of travel was the reason for the supposed passivity of many travelers on Titanic and Hindenburg in the face of impending death, as if the experience was either preordained or simply not happening to them.   But is this really true, Paul, or just a good story?

Virilio posits the cinema as an armchair, and fasten-your-seatbelts travel as the new cinema or site of totalizing entertainment:

"Minimum transit space, maximum of armchair on the smallest possible surface, the era of the great monuments of the spectacle seems to be   over, the new Opéra is the Boeing 747, a projection room where they try to compensate for the monotony of the trip by the attraction of the image, festival of aerial crossings, transitory dis-urbanization where nomadic micropoles replace the sedentary metropoles, and where the world-flown-over offers nothing further of interest, to the point where the Supersonic's subliminal comfort demands the world's total occlusion, in anticipation probably of the next phase--flight-in-darkness and narcosis of the passengers."   [p. 74

The reader then recalls this was written in the era of a stewardess' exposé-perfumed memoirs Coffee, Tea or Me?, and "the Mile-High Club" to designate people who had sexual congress in an airplane in flight.

There follows reflections on relations between the sexes, and some discussion of feminism and politics.   Then on classical tales of zoophilism, and the hybrid monsters it engendered as metaphors of speed.   Virilio shifts quickly from feminism to male teenage car and motorcycle enthusiasts, and male holders of speed records, in history (Craig Breedlove) and fiction (Jules Verne's Captain Hatteras).   Virilio is convinced that erotic films had been replaced by horror films, and the cinema is as over-determined a place as Disneyland or Disney World.   He approves of the Hollywood movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", questions UFOs, and science fiction itself.   Yet this talk of science breeds melancholy, in the resonant image of the shutting down of the telemetric instruments left on the Moon on the Apollo landings.   Finally, Albert Einstein laments that, by alerting Franklin Roosevelt to Nazi atomic bomb development, he ultimately set in motion the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We are served up automobili-philic fetishism worthy of J.G. Ballard's Crash , or Bruce Springsteen and Bob Seger songs about driving all night or backseat boogie. "In his car the voyeur-voyager rediscovers the comportment of the votary of the giant screen..."   "The solitary movement of seducere or sexual coupling necessitating solidarity in movement...a kind of two-seater vehicle...",   and a comparison between wheelchairs and early cars.   Virilio probes the subject of the automobile most thoroughly on pages 77-78:

"If in 1978 American television lost five to six million watchers who stopped turning on their screens at a certain hour, the old automobile industry meanwhile had no trouble overcoming the effects of the energy crisis that certain experts had forecast was to be fatal.   The frantic use of automobiles or motorcycles is not, contrary to public transportation, for the purpose of going somewhere in particular; here it not a priori a question of distances to cross, which creates inevitably a deserted quarter or on a crowded freeway, now seems natural for the voyeur-voyager in his car. On the contrary, to stop, to park, are unpleasant operations and the driver even resents going somewhere or toward someone; to visit a person or to go see a show seems to require superhuman effort.

Able to reach the farthest extremities, he's not happy except in the narrow cell of his vehicle, strapped into his seat.   Like the moviegoer he knows in advance what he's going to see, the script; the lack of variation of landscapes scoured by speed favors the driver's attempts to identify with the vector.   If most drivers are still not yet capable of utilizing a complex electronic language, of commingling the transportation of bodies and of information, at least the headlights and parking lights seems already a means of primary emission, a sort of formulation of desire and of a new presence that drivers are happy to abuse.   They mimic the increasingly powerful lights on official vehicles and enjoy blinding with their light-signals the passengers of other cars.   Likewise drivers that are alone keep the radio on constantly, to hear voices and not to listen to any particular show."

Virilio compares Howard Hughes' daring four-day aeronautical circumnavigation of the world, at the public height of his life in 1938 to the adventurer's last decade "everywhere and nowhere", in identical hotel rooms.   He lay naked in front of a flickering movie screen like some weird "technological monk" entranced by the shadows on the walls of Plato's Cave.   To maintain the illusion that unavoidable travel to cities where he had business to conduct was not really geographic movement, Hughes' owned identical Chevrolets, the most mundane model he could find, and they were left waiting for him in several airport parking lots around the United States, exposed to the elements.   Millionaire Hughes--like General Motors Corporation itself a third of a century (Christ's age) later--no longer politicized speed, but aestheticized disappearance.