Crepuscular Dawn
by Paul Virilio & Sylvère Lotringer
Semiotext(e) (Foreign Agents Series), 2002
185 pages, ISBN 9-781584-350132
Reviewed by Sean Cubitt,
Screen and Media Studies, University of Waikato,
Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand
seanc@waikato.ac.nz
Paul Virilio has long been admired and cited by
the theoretically inclined techno-savvy of <nettime>. Nowadays,
largely thanks to the efforts of John Armitage (2000, 2002), he is
becoming an obligatory citation for many social and media theorists
of more traditional kinds. This book forms an excellent career overview,
and contains plenty of surprises and new material for readers who
already know of his earlier work. Crepuscular Dawn is a book-length
interview with Sylvère Lotringer, himself a doughty figure
in anarcho-artistic New York as the eminence grise of Semiotext(e),
the notorious journal and publishing house. The title loses something
in translation — in French it probably has the paradoxical music
of Eliot's 'midwinter spring' - and the translating is at times a
tad slapdash (for example when an English film title is translated
back from the French), but these are niggling criticisms of a fluent,
likeable and invigorating portrait of an exceptional, even visionary
mind at the top of his bent, relaxing with an old friend in cafés
around Paris, sparking ideas, thinking aloud and on his feet. Dialogue
is more often praised than practised in contemporary theory: this
is less an interview than a conversation, and a particularly eloquent
and enjoyable one to eavesdrop on.
Lotringer provides a handy introduction, then leaps straight into
the dialogue. Virilio recounts his early days as a radical architect,
in some detail, culminating in the Oblique Function (you'll have to
read the book to figure this one out). Then on to Nanterre, epicentre
of May '68. Every French intellectual alive at the time, and many
active since, have placed themselves on the map of ideas in relation
to Le joli Mai. Already 'anarchist Christian', Virilio marched with
the black flags of the anarchists until he had the idea of making
himself a transparent one out of clear plastic. With Julian Beck of
the Living Theatre, who had been invited to play there but sided with
the students, Virilio and his colleagues took over the Odéon
Theatre, a major centre of the May events. Students who heard him
speak there invited him to teach at the Ecole Supérieure d'Architecture,
where he has remained, more a thinker - and activist – than a
builder of buildings.
The events of May also transformed Virilio's thinking. Initially inspired
by the architecture of the bunkers left by the German army along the
Normandy coast, subject of a remarkable early book, Virilio increasingly
turned his attention towards time, and specifically towards speed.
Of the major figures of the day, Virilio cites Henri Lefebvre and
Gilles Deleuze as colleagues with whom he had political disputes,
but who also took up, in their own ways and in their own good time,
the temporal problematic. Lefebvre is especially important, given
his active part in May '68 and his association with the Situationists,
especially Guy Debord. Lefebvre's Production of Space (1991)
is a landmark in the (post)modernisation of geography, but failed,
in Virilio's view, to understand the vector of time as it accelerates
in the post-war period. Virilio's basic discipline remains urbanism
and town planning, a field where transportation is a central concern.
His uniqueness comes from his understanding that media are also means
of transport (he has an eloquent description of the windscreen of
the car being a kind of TV screen), an apperçu that has become
more complex and richer as networks speed up, become more ubiquitous,
and lose their architectural anchorage to become portable and wearable.
Virilio, as is well known, shares with Friedrich Kittler a belief
traceable back to Nietzsche that war is the typical state of human
societies. Here that idea is extended towards genetic engineering,
whose roots Virilio traces back to eugenics and, most of all, to Menegele's
notorious experiments on the inmates of the death camps. This issue
is, to add a geo-politically particular note, extremely illuminating
for New Zealand, where this review is being typed. The last election
and key negotiations with the US will be fought on bio-security of
a fragile and unique environment and the supposed rights of Monsanto
and the others. At the same time the academic community is being rocked,
for the second time in a decade, by a scandal concerning holocaust
denial. For Virilio, the two are strictly intertwined. Mengele's experiments
and those of bio engineering are not only usurpations of God's role,
from a Catholic phenomenologica perspective. They unleash the prospect
of the Genetic Bomb.
To clarify this point, we need to bring in another of Virilio's major
arguments. The invention of the railway is also the invention of the
train wreck, the automobile of the car smash, the computer of data
crash, and genetic engineering of biological collapse. To the extent
that all our media and transportation systems are now networked in
real time, the accident stops being a purely local or personal event,
and becomes instead potentially global: the General Accident. Virilio
here puns on the philosophical term 'accidence', an actually existing
phenomenon which lacks the necessity of an absolute essence. Essential
matters have become inessential, simulacra and simulations, and at
the same time they have exploded. This is especially the case with
dimensions. Time has begun to vanish in the perpetual acceleration
of media, and space threatens to disappear as media and transport
systems become more and more integrated into what was once a wholly
human body.
It is easy enough to run a critique of these ideas. In these interviews,
Virilio is open and unapologetic about his Catholicism, and vocal
in his announcement of his phenomenological bearings (among information
theorists he reserves a good word for the phenomenologist Varela).
Yet he is not always accurate in his accounts: media are not 'instantaneous',
nor is there much mileage in trying to find an example of a society
without media, or a human body untouched by mediations, from gesture
to clothing, language to food. The materialism of contemporary science
and contemporary theory looks askance at the prospect of essences
transcending the accidence of physical reality. And though in some
ways Armageddon has been an option since the arrival of the A-bomb,
horror has a way of creeping through the world rather than blasting
it in some blockbuster finale.
But it would be wrong to treat Virilio as a systematic thinker, whatever
he thinks about the matter. His strength is as an aphorist. 'Apocalypse
is happening all the time, every day since Genesis. It never stops.
Man is the end of the world' he says, or, distinguishing carefully
that he is addressing the labs rather than the gas chambers, 'Auschwitz
was not only a crime against humanity: it is the beginning of the
accident of science'. For Virilio, there is a certainty, a destiny,
involved in human affairs. Fallen humanity sets out on broken paths,
all of which lead by crooked routes to the integral logic of their
conclusions. To the extent that the project of Western science has
been one of control, it has produced its opposite. To the extent that
it aims to secure a better life, it produces not just a worse one,
but death, and on a scale that beggars imagination.
On the other hand, in the closing section during a discussion of the
Unabomber, Virilio recalls another biblical episode that puts all
this predestination into perspective, as if fate were the product
of a scientific principle — the principle, presumably, of predictability.
'That's what our job is', he argues, 'to wrestle with the genetic
bomb as human beings — not as gods. To wrestle with the information
bomb so as to produce something other than cybernetics. To wrestle
with the atom bomb so as to avoid blowing everything to kingdom come.
So I don't believe the world is finished, either. I am not a nihilist.
I am simply saying that we have to fight like Jacob. Each person must
wrestle with the angel'.
Sadly this does not extend to many of the artists involved in Leonardo.
Stellarc ('futurist') and Eduardo Kac both get a pasting. And the
editor of these digital reviews is name checked as a 'sorcerer's apprentice'.
But the epigrammatist who asks us to reflect on whether reflection
has become reflex, and habitat a habit, has as his task to spur us
into thought - and action. Accuracy is a virtue for accountants. The
true visionaries will have to have it in abundance, but till they
arrive, it's good to have someone there to remind us how high the
stakes are that we are all playing for.
REFERENCES
Armitage, John (ed) (2000), Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism
and Beyond, Sage, London.
Lefebvre, Henri (1991), The Production of Space, trans Donald Nicholson-Smith,
Blackwell, Oxford.
