Virilio wrote this book at the moment Live TV and the first talk of virtual reality had made the real-time image feel like an emancipation, and his wager is that the opposite is true: the same acceleration that was celebrated as freeing the media is the acceleration that dissolves the world. The argument runs two movements joined at a single hinge, and the hinge is the interval, the distance and delay and duration that let a body stand apart from its surroundings long enough to perceive them, judge them, and act.
The first movement, chapters one through five, works through the media as a public apparatus. The industrial media have passed the peak of a power that was never really the power to reveal but the power to withhold, and real-time technology strips that power by bringing everything to the surface at once. What was a shift in journalism becomes, across these chapters, a change in the standing of the real itself: the world shrinks to a single transmitted image, politics becomes a permanent poll, and the citizen becomes a spectator to a set. The second movement, chapters six and seven, follows the same speed-logic as it turns inward and stops treating the body as the thing that watches and starts treating it as the last territory to be equipped. The law that had always spared the body effort gives way to a law that revs it up; information arrives as a third kind of energy after the potential and the kinetic; and the colonization that once went outward, over land and peoples, goes inward, into the organs. This is the passage the title names, from the motor as the engine of transport to the motor as the model for the living being, the art of the motor becoming the art of running the human like a machine that must never be allowed to idle.
What is at stake, and what makes the book worth keeping whole, is Virilio's claim that the disappearing term in every register is the interval. When distance collapses to real-time proximity, the media lose the secret that gave information its value; when the body's inside and outside collapse, the subject loses the standing-apart that let it act rather than be acted upon; and when history's tempo hits the speed of light, the event yields to the information about it. The reconstruction below follows Virilio's own seven-chapter sequence, because the sequence is the argument: each chapter carries the same disappearance one register deeper, from the newsroom to the nervous system.
The chapter opens on a legal anomaly Virilio treats as constitutive rather than incidental. The media are barred from lying outright, but licensed to lie by leaving out, and that licence is what places them outside democratic control.
page 1
The industrial media benefit from a curious depravity in the laws of democracy. If television and, by osmosis, the press are not at liberty a priori to provide false information, our legislation on the other hand grants them the exorbitant power of lying by omission, by censuring or ruling out news that does not suit them or that might damage their interests.
From that premise the chapter makes its central move, which is to date the media's crisis to the loss of exactly this power. Their capacity to reveal has expanded past the point of usefulness, and in doing so it has eaten away the older and more valuable capacity to conceal. The problem is no longer what the media can show but what they can still keep off the screen.
page 3
Their power to denounce, to reveal, to flaunt has been growing endlessly to the detriment of the now precarious privilege of dissimulation—so much so that currently the real problem of the press and television no longer lies in what they are able to show as much as in what they can still manage to obliterate, to hide. Until now, this constituted the essential nature of their power.
Live TV is the turn of the screw. The unlimited image, far from freeing the media, undermines the credibility of the facts it shows, because without a certain blindness there is no tenable appearance. Virilio routes the point through Kafka's letter to Milena, where wanting the total image is figured as feeding the ghosts.
page 4
means to denude oneself before the ghosts. ... It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enormously. . . . The ghosts won't starve, but we will perish,
Virilio quoting Kafka's 1922 letter to Milena, glossing the desire for the total image.
The industry knows what it is protecting. Virilio reads the press codes of the late 1980s not as a fit of conscience but as a defense of the one prerogative worth defending.
page 5
This was no sudden bout of puritanism. It was about dealing with what was most pressing while preserving the institution's principal prerogative at all costs: the power to dissimulate.
The chapter's sharpest formulation rewrites a maxim of the Terror. Where Saint-Just made subjugation a function of capacity, Virilio makes mediatization the same kind of automatic fact: what can be done to a people, is.
page 6
Theoretical force behind the Terror, Saint-Just once asserted that, "Whenever a people can be put down, they are." Today it would be no exaggeration to say that, "Whenever a people can be mediatized, they are!"
Underneath the media politics sits an optical claim that will govern the rest of the book: the cinematic apparatus abolishes the difference between one viewer and another. Virilio takes Marcel Pagnol's observation and pushes it to its limit, the thousand spectators reduced to one, the stereoscopic couple of theater collapsed into the single sightline of the camera.
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