What the book is doing, in one breath:
Virilio tracks a single mutation across five chapters: the century-long shift from the dynamic vehicle that carried the body through real space (car, train, plane, rocket) to the static vehicle that delivers the world to a seated body in real time (screen, monitor, terminal, interactive home). The transport revolution is being succeeded by a transmission revolution, kinetic energy by a third energy he calls kinematic, and the horizon of travel by the horizon of the live broadcast. The terminus is polar inertia: a sedentariness that is not original but terminal, in which the human body, satellized and weightless, becomes the last reference to be lost.
The argument runs through optics rather than sociology. Virilio’s hinges are the distinction between direct and indirect light, between active and passive optics, between transparency and trans-appearance; the three intervals of space, time and light; and a running quarrel with the physics of relativity, read as a covert theology of speed. The moon landing of 21 July 1969 is the pivot of the book; a 1986 non-stop flight around the earth is its closing image.
The opening chapter replaces one revolution with another. The crisis of the cinema is not a box-office story about people staying home; it is the surfacing of a new regime of light, in which the illumination of a place is overtaken by the transmission of that place, live, to a screen.
Virilio refuses the demographic explanation from the first page. The relevant loss is not the darkened hall but the very idea of holding an event at a distance in time. He states the substitution as a flat equivalence:
page 3
Video is no more the eighth art than cinema was the seventh.
What is arriving is not a better representation of an event but the live presentation of a place. The whole chapter turns on that swap of prefix, and he poses it as the thing one must not fail to see:
page 1
How can one fail to see here the essential characteristic of video technology: not a more or less up-to-the-minute ‘representation’ of an event, but live presentation of a place or an electro-optical environment – the result, it would seem, of putting reality on waves by means of electro-magnetic physics?
The monitor migrates out of the television set and into ordinary fittings, so that the apparatus of the household begins to see. The domestic entry system is his emblem for it:
page 2
So great is the difference between video observation, cinema and television that the TV set has itself been overtaken through the incorporation of monitors into the most ordinary domestic equipment – for example, the ‘electro-optical porter’ that makes people visible as the entry phone only made them audible.
Virilio recruits Schopenhauer to mark the epochal shift, then overturns him. Where the world had been representation, it is now presentation – the object made not merely visible but tele-present, present at a distance:
page 6
For the philosopher Schopenhauer, the world was its representation.
page 6
For the ‘video-maker’ or electronics expert, we may say, matter is becoming its presentation – direct and external ‘presentation’ and, at the same time, internal and indirect presentation, the object or instrument becoming not only present to the naked eye but remotely present or ‘tele-present’.
This is the birth of what he will call trans-appearance: a reality no longer merely apparent but transmitted, an indirect lighting that supplants direct lighting. The neologism is exact and deliberate:
page 7
There is a fusion/confusion of transmitted appearances and immediate appearances, with indirect lighting capable of soon supplanting direct lighting.
The municipal register makes the point civic rather than merely domestic. Virilio reports a plan he treats as a portent of the wired city, in which illuminating the town and broadcasting the town collapse into one function:
page 4
The city of Rennes, for example, has a plan for ‘electronic public lighting’ to boost the political and economic existence of the urban area – hence the requirement for a municipal tele-noticeboard and the inevitable telesales that will replace the local press with one huge cathode shop-window.
The same logic scales up to the news feed, where the audience is converted from spectators into a distributed camera crew. He quotes the CNN executive without comment, letting the sales pitch expose itself:
page 5
At a time when the major US television channels ABC, CBS and NBC are faring worse and worse, Ted Turner’s live news channel, CNN, is planning a ‘News Hound’ service for a million subscribers with video equipment.
pages 5–6
‘That’s a million opportunities for us,’ Earl Casey, the man in charge of this future interactive system, said recently, ‘a million witnesses able to provide us with pictures; all we’ll have to do is select.’
The chapter’s political core is the events of 1989 in China, read not through censorship but through timing. The giant stadium screen in Hong Kong makes the crowd contiguous with a square hundreds of miles away, and Virilio names the condition:
page 12
This was a kind of ‘teletopia’ in which real-time continuity made up for the absence of real-space contiguity.
The confrontation is recast as a temporal encirclement of the city, a siege conducted in the tense of the live feed:
End of the preview
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