virilio expect the unexpected

8/6/2019 Virilio Expect the Unexpected

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Art as Far as theEye Can SeePaul VirilioTranslated by Julie Rose

~BERGOxford New York


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This work is published with the support of the French Ministry of Culture- Centre National du Livre.n ins titu t fr anca isThis book is supported by the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs as part of theBurgess Programme headed for the French Embassy in London by the InstitutFrancais du Royaume-UniFirst published in France, 2005, by Editions Galilee Galilee, 2005, L'art a perte de vueEnglish Translation BergPublishers, 2007English editionFirst published in 2007 byBergEditorial offices:First Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford OX4 lAW, UK175 Fifth Avenue, New York,NY lOOlO, USAAll rights reserved.No part of this publication may be reproduced in any formor by any means without the written permission ofBerg.Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication dataVirilio, Paul.

[Art a perte de vue. English]Art as far as the eye can see / Paul Virilio ; translated byJulie Rose. - English ed.

p.cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN-13:978-1-84520-611-6 (cloth)ISBN-10:1-84520-611-8 (cloth)

1.Art, Modern-21st century-Philosophy. 2. Visual communication inart. 3. Art and popular culture. I.Title.N6497.V5713 2007701'.03-dc22

2007016322

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication dataAcatalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.ISBN 978 1 84520611 6Typeset by JSTypesetting Limited, Porthcawl, Mid Glamorgan.Printed by the MPG Books Group in the UKwww.bergpublishers.com
http://www.bergpublishers.com/http://www.bergpublishers.com/


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1Expect the Unexpected

The seventeenth century was the century ofmathematics, the eighteenth, of the physicalsciences, and the nineteenth, of biology. T h e~ _ c e ' ! ! ! : ! _ r y i s t h e c e n tU : . ' l . . C } f [ c : _ a r .You'll tellme that fear is not a science. But science hashad a hand in it from the outset, since its latesttheoretical advances have lead it to cancel itselfout and since its practical improvements threatenthe entire Earth with destruction. What's more,if fear in itself cannot be considered a science,there can be no doubt whatsoever that it is atechnique.'

So wrote Albert Camus in 1948. I would add that,since that date, fear has become a dominant

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ART AS FAR AS THE EYE CAN SEE

culture, if not an art - an art contemporary withmutually assured destruction.Since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,

history has seen a mounting extremism (whichClausewitz studied in relation to war) but thisescalation, which was to end in the balance ofterror between East and West over the course ofthe twentieth century, has not been appreciatedat its just value in relation to peace - to the peacecreated by deterrence that today subtends allmass media culture.In fact, the postmodern period has seen a- " . . . . . . . .gradual drift away from ~g_~.!!_once substantial,

marked by' architech1r~~-music~-7c~lpt~~~-a-hdpainting, and towards a purely accidental artthat the crisis in i~e;;;;tionaC~~chitectlirFflag-ged at practically the same time as the crisis insymphonic music.This drift away from substantial art has been

part and parcel of the boom in film and radio and,in particular/ television, the ~~ediu~-tnat has.----_ended up finally fl?tt~ning_a.X~l_?r~.s_


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EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED

whereby real time def?n.JteJ_Y._9u.!_~~~ss.~~_.b.~__.~space of major artworks, whether of literature or

~.~ . . -.- .......- ~ , ~~~


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ARTASFARASTHEEYECANSEE

nature clearly indicates its propensity to turn,"--'--'--"'_virtually any day, into a total socialevent.- - - - - - - - - _ . _ - . _ . _ - - - - - - - _ . . . ._-_.-_. __ . - ...-~~.. .Indeed, through their (often programmed)repetition, a population's disturbing panic attacksare associated with a depression often masked

_._....--:>by the routines of everYGaY life. What I call'cold panic' is thereby linked to this expectationhorizon of collective anguish, in which vye_striyeto expect ! !?:~une~~ in astate.ofneurosistfi'af"saps-' all intersubjective , , ! ! _ C l J H y and leadsiO-acre~fdryslateof-CIVIL J)ETERRENC~ thatistTie-l~~~~t~ble"co~~terri~~t~~~t~-MiLiTARY

. . . . . . .----.--"-- ..-.-.'--..._~-,-.-.. -- ,~-.~,,--""-"~~.-~,-' .. -~.-.,--. ~..--...- ._--- - " - - - ~ - . - - -, - , . -- - ,.~--DETERRENCEbetween nations .. 'To-obey ""lih your eyes shut is the onset ofpanic--':-Maurice 'Merfeau-P~~eady~b-

~......- ...._~,.,..-,....~-~-~'__---'-"'''''''',_o~",,,,_. ___~ ~_-----served in 1953. 'In this world where denial andmorose passions take the place of certainties,people seek above all not to see."

Coming from the phenomenologist of percep-tion, this observation took on significance as awarning in a period of history that deliberatelye,"ngage~~ntion which


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With 'teleobjectivity', our eyes are thus not-- ,._'_~:,"""d .. _----'shut by the cathode screen alone; more than any-

thing else we now no!s>nger seek to see, to lookaro~Q_dus,_not even in front of us, but exclusively

.__ -.- ... -- -~ --~ .--- --,-"" .. -= ,.- ,_ ._ "beyond the horizon of objective appearances. It_-- -- .~-~~-.---. '~'--~-~--'~-~"-"---=-.,----~ .......-_._----_...--_------"'-----_ ...._-is this fatal inattention that provokesexpectation

. . . . - _ . _ - _ . _ . _ _ ..._ . : . - _ . _ - - _ . _ - - - - - - - _ - - - - - - - - - -~ - - -.- . - ~ . - . - -of the unexpected - a paradoxical expectation,-'...;--.~--- .. ----".~--.---.~--.--composed at once of covetousness and anxiety,which our philosopher of the visible and theinvisible called PANIC.

But this comp;-sTteword covers another termcontemporary with the historic period of Merleau-Ponty's inaugural discourse: DETERRENCE.If the twentieth century is the century of fear,it is also the century of atomic deterrence, which,during the years from 1950 to 1960, establishedthe technique of (the balance of terror' and-----,----moved Albert Camus further to say: (The longdialogue between men has just ceased. A manwho can't be persuaded is a frightened man."

Extending this obvious fact, the man whowas to receive the Nobel Prize for literaturecontinued:

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This is how an immense __s_Q nspiracy of silence_,_'"_ ....----- --- .. -c-"__,_, ~ .__ "_' ..spread among people who already did not talkbecause they found it pointless, and it continuesto spread, accepted by those who tremble in fearbut find good reasons to hide this trembling fromthemselves, and encouraged by those who standto gain from it. 'You must no t ta lk about the purgeof artists in Russia because tha t would benefit thereactionaries ' ... I said fear was a technique.'And this is how, midway through a pitiless

century, the technique of panic lead to the art- ..._ _ .-----< ---- ~ -.~_~ n_._. . . , . . . . .of deterrence - not only strategic deterrence

---etween East and West in a world threatenedwith extinction, but also political and culturaldeterrence. This 'world in which denial andmorose passions take the place of certainties',which certain self-righteous conformists, chim-ing in with Sartre, were to call 'engagement' or'commitment'. The world of contemporary art,which was soon to drift, in turn, from 'socialrealism' towards 'pop culture' and the realismof an art market that still dominates these earlyyears of the twenty-first century.

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Basically, it all began when painters re-linquished the study of the subject and wentback inside their studios in a re-run of the age ofacademic classicism.With Impressionism or, more exactly, after

the Great War, modern art was dragged downinto the panic that struck Expressionist Europeand saw the emergence of Surrealism, hot on theheels of Dadaism. We can extend this foretasteof disaster, furthermore, to European philosophy,with the discrediting of phenomenology, thedisappearance of Husserl and the resoundingsuccess of Existentialism, in that period of tran-sition that kicked off between the two worldwars and found its consecration in the 1950s justevoked, with the end of the clialo~between

~ --= . '-~ _ _ _ _ ._ _men and, especially, with forgetting: that los-sof- - - - - - - - . - ...- - . - - - - -~- . . . . . - - - - - . .~ ..... - , - , - - _ ' - _ - -_emp~!11ylE._E~~tion to others, but inrelation to a human environmerir-Eurned into a-------.---.....____ ~-.:.......-...",.."'-~-~.~."-,- - - _ ' . __ ' .. .- . - - ~ - - - - . '. -- .. .desert through. the annihilatlon broughtaboutby-th-~-~if--raid~t'h~t,~~~Guerriica-t'b-Hi;oshima,

-. .. ., .-" '". _-~~ . .~= . .,--~=-~-=-


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with our own eyes - which subtended the wholeof Western culture for 2,000 years.But, apart from the 'aeropolitics' of a mass

extermination of cities, which was to put paid tocontinental geopolitics - the retinal detachmentof a culture that already anticipated the economicdeterritorialization of internationalization - weshould also note how, from the nineteenthcentury on, the progress in popular astronomyso dear to Camille Flammarion ushered in thesudden multiplication of the telescopes that wereto foreshadow the shift in viewpoint occasionedby the boom in domestic television, itselffavoured, over the twentieth century, by thelaunch of telecommunication satellites.To see without going there to see. To perceive_ = - - - - - - - - . . . . " - . . . . .-.= ;._~~O~. ,--- ... , .... - - '--"~~ill!Qut~2'_~


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public opinion as a prelude to landing us int.~~~IDocr~!_J~~lic e~~_:~onthat was to ruin. the. fragile balance .of societiess~ii;~a~~~te~Cf~2~-.i_~:~1_i~~-;~~~~e'~~~~-

.._ - - - . _ . , , _ ~ '~~In a world'based on denial and general de-terrence, where one now seeks less to see than_---------------------to be seen by all at the same instant, whenever~ __ ........~ ...~~.".,..,_ -.--~".-. T- """~-- "-- " " -


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is I_!ot the~ v~11t~~~ng_2


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so-called myth of the Rote Armee Fraktion, theRed Army Faction (RAF) on the works of three-~-.,.----~---- - _ -- _ ~generations of artists, including Joseph Beuys,Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Martin KlippenBerger and Hans Peter Feldman, whose dansemacabre aligns thenames, faces and bodies of

'< ~ .-. _ - -terrorists, but also .Qf their victims, in a strangeprocess that singularly recalls the looping oftelevised sequences.In fact, the 'redemptive suffering' of con-

temporary art arises from profanation not ofthe sacred art of our origins anymore but ofthe profane art ot~_rnodernity, that (critical).. - - - - -~"----.-.,moment when re-presentation gives way to thelyrical illusion of presentation, pure and simple.When 'art for art's sake' bows down before theTOTAL__A_~t_lJJ:Ylti-media teleobjectivity that~ . . " " . ' - ~ ' - - - - . " " _ -. . .. ~ . - - " " ~ ~ , . . . . _ _ _ _ _ _ _ . ' Y . . . . .takes over from the artifices of the seventh(cinematographic) art, which already claimed tocontain all six others.This is it, t~Qbsce!lity of ubi~ whereby

'postmodern' academicism outdoes all the avant-gardes put together, with the exception of the

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particular avant-garde of mass terrorism, whoseadvent the television series brings to the lightof day, in the place and space of the action ofantique tragedy.Here a parallel suggests itself between the

atheism of postmodernity that sets out 'to re-_ . , , _ . , -..-place what it destroys and b~ by destroyingwhat it replaces', 7 ina s~rt-of lay deicide''-allirfhe'~thcismof tIie profanation of modern art to theexclusive advantage of a cult of replacement thathas all the characteristics of illuminism - notthe illuminism of the encyclopaedic revolutionof the Enlightenment now, but the illuminism--f a multi-media revelation that exterminates__.. . . .----c. ._~.. , . --c.--- .--------___.. . . . . . .___. '---"---."


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the first place', 8 critics of contemporary art tossaround the notion of an '_anthro_oth~S~ thatwould even do away with the origins 0 modernart, of its free expression, which is no longerfigurative now as once upon a time but graphicand pictorial (whence the iconoclastic ban onpaintings in a number of art galleries).At the end of the last century, Karol Wojtyla,

better known as Pope John Paul II, declared: 'Theproblem for the Universal Church i~.knowip.ghow to make itself visible.' At the start of the'-fhirarn1l1rnnlum-,-' thi~~=i~-he problem of g I Lr~.~e:r2 tati~~n.'We are everywhere you look. All the time andeverywhere in the world.' This advertising sloganof Corbis, the agency founded in 1989 by BillGates with the avowed aim of monopolizing thephotographic image, illustrates the large-scalepanic that has beset representation in the age of-----_~c012.!s:x~iop..

If, for some, the aim is thus to see everythingand also to have everything, for the anonymoushordes it is solely to be seen.

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When you know that the Internet image pro-vider brings together the photographic archivesof the world's most prestigious museums, youcan get some idea how important their real-time presentation now is and how much theydiscreetly discredit the works themselves - thereal ones!What was still only on the drawing board with

the industrial reproduction of images analysedby Walter Benjamin, literally explodes with the'Large-Scale Optics' of cameras on the Internet,

- . . . - - - - - - - - - - - - - -since telesurveillance extends to telesurveillanceof art.Faced with this acceleration of reality, the

new telescope no lo~ger so much obs~'ry-~~heexpansion of the universe - the Big Bang and itsdistant nebulae - as the down-to-earth break-upof the sphere of perceptibi~~ppe-;~'~~;-tllat' are-dis-~losed~IiiJll~~yery-msfaiiroflookiri"g.--:----~This is it, the I11liitimedi~'REVELATIONthatsurpasses the encyclopaedic REVOLUTION of

the Enlightenment; this is it, the 'illuminism' of- - - - . ' . ~ - - - - . -...-~.-'--~telecommunications that suppresses the pictorialr ,- ....___

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Icon - but also the crucial importance of theglimpse de visu and in situ, to the exclusiveadvantage of live coverage of the perceptivefield.'In a digitized world, we offer creative visual

solutions. The objective for us is to give a mes-~~- . . - -- -- - ~ -..~,s.agethe strongest im~ct',9 says Steve Davis, the

president and CEO of Corbis.From this, we can more easily see through the

recourse of visual/audiovisual creation to the' - - - _ . _ _ ...---looping of panic-inducing segments of terrorism_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ . . . . . - - - . - r , . _ . . . . . _ . , ~ _ ~ ~ __. . . __ . . '. "~ . _ " " " _ . - ..or of natural or industrial disasters - this replaythaifefevisions-taflons no~~~t;~ati~ally abuse,,_ ---_ .. ----_-_this combat sport that does battle ~lihlh~_'!2.athy- _ - _ . _ .. _ - - - . -of televiewers w~Q~l2_ect the unexpected alone

'_"__~-~.-~~---=. -' . -----,.,.--~--.,~ . ;~--- ... = - - . - - -to wake them out of their lethargy a little, out of- - - - - - -~, - -~ .. _ . - . ..,.,._ ..-----.......___-------_:._,_,"""'.,-, .. .the a~c!efi~~~s replac~_~.~~g!l~sein them and, especially, _all practical interest__ --_-----. .. _ -- - - ..___ . _ - - ~ - --_ - - - _ . _ -in whatever crops up in their immediate prox-~. How can we beastoni~hed -;;--WHmat"~iyeven scandalized by aggressiveness, by a violence-----,..- .------".~~~-. _ , . _ -that has now become customary _atevery ..Ievel_ - - - - - - - - - . - "~. . --------".-~----"-. -_ --.-------of society, when empathy, the twin sister of

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~mpa!_hy for oth~!~L_~~~_Qt?'~QI?~~reg_gg~ly~e_w-" ' ' ' ' ' ' '~- . , - . . . - - ---- '~-at the same time as the phenomenology of which-'~'--'.-__'-,-.---". - - - - ~.- ,- ..~. -.~.-. - .. .~it was the heavy crux?Too impressionist, no doubt, not actionist

enough, perhaps? Once empathy goes, the 'real-ity show' replaces dance and theatre.In the beginning, the term 'empathy' had

the primary sense of 'touching' artcfre'ierred tophysical contact with tangible objects. WithEdmund Husserl, it would come to denote theeffort to perceive and seize the reality that sur-rounds us in all its phenomena, in all the formsin which that reality manifests itself. Whence theimportance, at the beginning of the twentiethcentury, of Wilhelm Worringer's key work:Abstraktion und Einfiihling (1907), translated asAbstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to thePsychology of Style.We can apprehend to what extent tele-

objectivity_ has today made us ose our grip,.-~.---- ----*--------.... _------_.--------...---""the immediate tact and contact that not onlypromoted the customary civility but also all actual'civilization', thereby enhancing the impact of

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a growing terror - this terror that can strike usdumb every bit as much as blind. A survivor ofthe 1943 bombing of Hamburg acknowledged itseffects: 'It was my initiation into the knowledgethat looking means suffering; so after that, Icould no more stand looking than being lookedat. 110This is it, this eyes-wide-shut QaI}.lcsignalled~---~-~---~--------by Merleau-Ponty at the start of the age of Large-Scale Deterrence!But at the very start of the new millennium

where the performance of instantaneous com-munication outclasses the substance of theoeuvre, of each and every oeuvre - pictorial,theatrical, musical - and where the analogydisappears in the face of the feats of digitiza-tion, ~a~ge-ScalePanic is panis}nduc~rt- - - - - - .. . -__,~~o_~e!!l'p_orary~ith. t~~~~!_~_~ny-er[~~_~ap_ " . - ~ . ~ ~_~ ~ _ ~_ _ . _ _

instrll_!Il~nt~~imagednves away our last mental-, _---- .-----...=",_,_.-,--~ --_ .. , --.. _-,._"..._...._... ------.--.-...- ..~..-- .._ - . - - - - - - = -images, oI).e__fter.the other.

' ; ' ,.,.,._-.-.-.' ", - - , - "~, , , ", , '~- - - - - - - - - - - - - . . . -Merleau-Ponty further wrote: 'Nature is anenigmatic object, an object that is not absolutely

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an object; it is not absolutely in front of us. It isour ground, not what is in front of us, but whatbears US.'l1By dint of looking in front of us, at eye level,

we have ended up inventing the accident of thetelescope, of all the telescopes, from Galileo'sglass to the widespread telesurveillance thatnow exiles us beyond appearances in the trans-appearance of a far away that eliminates thenear - whether it be the nearby tangible objector a nearby painting, even a self-portrait of one'sfellow, one's like, favouring instead the plausible,the likely, and its virtuality.Today we have no option, not to shut oureyes, but to lower them - not out of timidity

but, on the contrary, out of courage in orderto look steadily, not at the End of History, butat this 'support-surface' whose down-to-earthlimit is visibly below us, in the HUMUS of astatics that has borne us from the beginning oftime.'The Earth does not move', warned Edmund,--..-..--'_." ".,.,,-,,~,~.-.-,- ._ _ _Husserl at the end of his life. This is it, this reversal

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.91viewpo.!.~!()f Galilean space: this ground, thisfloor of the great vehicle formed by a star that canno longer bear the acceleration of the real andso pits its fixity and its telluric resistance againstthe vanishing point of a horizon from now ondoubly buckled.This phenomenological paradox partly ex-plains the recent geopolitical and strategic

upheavals, but every bit as much, it wouldseem, those involved in the 'reality show' of anart contemporary with the foreclosure of theplanet. There is a sort of return here of what wastrampled and buried underfoot! Not the returnto the Mother Earth of our pantheist origins butthe return of an earthling's empathy with the-. -enigmatic object our philo sop er of perceptions~tly-1a1ked about in relation to a Naturethat not only surrounds us on all siq.e,sbut has sol ?~g. - i '~habi t~~(u;~- - - ~--~ - - "- , , , ,". .. .. ... .. . - - .,,-.'I am not moving around. Whether I am sitting

still or walking, my flesh is the centre and I amgrounded on ground that does not move', wroteHusserl. He concluded: 'For as long as the Earth

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itself is actually a grouJ?-dand not_"a_bogy", theoriginal ark, EARTH, does notmoVe.'12However, the question of its (spatio-ternporal)

finiteness changes the nature of the originalground, since the end of extension poses inreturn the question of its fixity, of its inertiain relation to the world of the living who aremoving around on the spot.Not long ago my flesh as an earthling seemed,

indeed, to be the unique centre of the livingpresent Husserl is talking about, but since theacceleration of reality in the age of temporalcompression, this carnal centre of presence ex-tends to the TELEPRESENCEin the real-timeworld delivered by the instantaneity of a ubiquitythat has now gone global.Here, the 'dromoscopy' - the optical illusion

experienced by the motorist whereby whatstays still appears to recede while the in~~r!QIQf

-_-,...__--_--" . < ~~ -.---.~ .. ..

the moving vehicle appears stationary - taintsrel?E~~~it,~~_!Q_~~'?t_!_~_~._~hQl~..~o_rlgJ -;ot just theroadside.

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We suddenly jump from real-space object-ivity de visu and in situ to the real-time tele-objectivity of an acceleration whereby the spacesof perception, the optical space and the hapticspace of the tangible, undergo a disturbance - atopological or, more precisely, a TOPOSCOPICALdisaster.~.- .....-.,-~,-What illusion are we actually talking aboutwhen one's body proper is identified with theworld proper? And, in particular, what is theimpact on the egocentricity involved in thisMEGALOMANIAthat has struck not just a few

~ ._ . .. . < .. .. .. .. --'--"----~-_n.........._.~.,..

disturbed individuals but the whole of the livinggathered in front of their screens?Within this logic of the great lockdown, where

inside and outside merge, the world is not onlythe gigantic phantom limb of humanity, butalso means hypertrophy of the ego, a sort ofINTROPATHYhat then takes over from mutual' ----~ '-,~., ..~-~--.., .. --'--'- "~ --."~--~~-~" . . ~.~-----.SYMPATHY.- - - - - - - - - - . . . . . . _ - - _ .We might recall what Maurice Blanchot hadto say on the carceral policy of the eighteenth

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century: 'To shut up the outside, to set it up asan expected or exceptional interiority, such isthe requirement that needs to be in place formadness to be made to exist - meaning, for it tobe made vtsible.:"What can we say of INTROPATHY,at this

early stage of the twenty-first century, exceptthat it makes visible the general spread of themegalomania involved in real time along with itsinertia?'Is there a__rivilegedHere? Yes, absolute zero

energy', Husserl announced in 1934.___..'Seeing that it is the most comfortable, ther~_P_Q_~j:!QIl_~1.l_g1~~o be the ze~~E?~_i.!io!!',the German phenomenonologist concluded,thereby introducing, after the seated woman, the.-,.~ .-. . . . .age of reclining mall'. . - - - . - - . - ~ . - ~ . - . ~ ~ , ~ . . . . . _ . . . . - ~ . . . . - ~ _ _ . , < - ~ . ~. . ~ ~So this is it, this finiteness of the 'actionquantum' whereby the inertia of the star thatbears us becomes the inertia of the animatedbeing - that political animal wh~ vitality, once

~----- __ 'H ~--" ----~-~_ __ ._ , .-- --~celebrated by the Greeks, today buckles beforeth~omfort-o~fzeroe-ne-rgyi~ .aman who is not

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even a true spectator any more, but the author ofa domestic virtuality on a life-size scale.Paraphrasing Karl Kraus on the subject of

PSYCHOANALYSIS,only this time apropos theTOPO-ANALYSISof globalization, we could saythat it is the symptom of a disease that claims tobe its own therapy!'I, the horizon, will fight for victory for I amthe invisible that cannot disappear. I am theocean wave. Open the sluice gates so I can rushin and overrun everything! 114 For those of uswho live in the twenty-first century, Apollinaire'sprophecy came to pass a long time ago already.Since the wave of electromagnetic fieldsflooded the earth with audiovisuality, not onlyhas the skyline been locked down in the rectangleof the screen, of all the screens, but the spectatorhas now morphed into a televiewer who stretchesout or, rather, lies down in front of it.In bygone days, they used to describe p~Jn_t-. d 'In ow ...- - - -etaphor?ing and the picture that resulted as an 'open-~,~What remains of this optical

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For instance, what is the teletopology of a.- ~ -"--building_\L11geI_!elesurveillance in which, from~-~---- - - - . . . . . . _ - - - - - , . - - _ _ . . . . . ~ . _. . . . .--~----- ,- - , - , . _ - -each abode, you canwatch.all __he others; in

'Wilich,---more precis~iy, each of the rooms ofthe sundry apartments functions like a videocontrol unit, monitoring the whole set of theothers?Even more crucially, what teleobjective world-

liness are we dealing with when the same thinggoes for each of the five continents, for the townsthat people them and for their innumerablebuildings covered in antennae?

If, according to Plato, the sophism of thepainter consisted in only showing his 'mirage'at a distance, what mirage are we dealing withtoday, with the real-time televising of theworld?Having worked in the past with a number

of painters and stained glass makers, Ialwaysfelt that the Gothic opening of t~~ ~r~~J:Ys of cathedrals was less an opening on thesky than an_QPenigg onthelight of the beyond

. . . . . . -.--~-.~-.--.- " _ . - . - _ - .~.. '. - _ - _ _ -up above. With the trans-appearance produced

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by electromagnetism, teleobjective illuminism,on the other hand, no 'longer op-ens on anythingbut the here below.

_."---.,-_._-, ~._--_.-.- -;- "- . ----Miserable miracle of a MEGALOSCOPY where-by the latest telescopes are no longer turned onthe night sky now but on the satellite belt, the- " - - " - . - - - - - ' - . - ' ~ . ~.. -- .. . _, .. ,, . . . .endless day of 'real time',Here, the EGOCENTRICITY of the humanbeing's body proper is transferred to the inertiaof the earthling's world proper - in other words,to peripheral EXOCENTRICITY - for this man ofthe Last Day who is now no more than a fullyfledgedsedentary being, a lounge lizard, drIVen. " . . . - . - - - - ' _ - . . . - - - < - - - - - - - - , - - - - _ - - . ~ - ~ . 'by hi~_megalomania to revise more than to revisithis cramped domain, in an ambulatory dementiain which accelerated displacement doesn'teven mean a journey any more, but a vibrationanalogous to that of the waves that convey histelescopic sensations ...

To wrap up these comments, we might nowobserve that if the discovery of the (animated)cinematographic image was indeed contempor-ary with the first great wave of transatlantic

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ARTASFARASTHEEYECANSEE

migration, since that time the transport revolu-tion has gone supersonic and the (televisual)videographic image has reached its peak shortlyafter aeronautics reached and broke the soundbarrier.

Once that happened, thanks to supersonicrocket propulsion, it was no longer the heat bar-rier that was broken. The light barrier had becomethe ultimate objective of our view of the world.

In this sudden transmutation of aesthetics, wecan better glimpse the reasons for iconoclasm, theprogrammed demise of the fixed image offered bypaintings now banned from being hung, and theinfatuation of art for art's sake with performance,along with all the installations of every stripethat systematically clutter gallery and museumspaces. Similarly, we can better understand thepersistence of a kind of sculpture whose inertia-- .,_.".--.-.-.~-----'-'- -_ .. - - - - - .. .and statics have become emblematic of thissedentary being, a lounge lizard, this universal- .. ~---~ -.---.----~----, ~- - - - . _bedridden invalid, contemporary with theMEGALOSCOPIC age. We can also understandthe historical importance of land art when, in

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the twentieth century, landscape is displayedon film, in the freeze frame - a photo-finish inwhich the photographic shot is now scarcelymore than the proximity of a frozen sequence:that of instantaneity.As in the panic evoked above, with the photo-

graphic sequence looking means suffering theirremediable, the dread involved in a fixationwhose inertia is illustrated even more clearly bythe looping of televised sequences. This is notjust the inertia of the fixed image of bygonedays, but that of the animated image, loopedback on itself, as was the revolving stage of thepanoramas of yore, as is the MEGALOSCOPYof the parabolic antennae of tod;y~ho~dupas they are to the e!lgJ~~lY..E_ev~i!?:g_!?!g_~c.!!=astsatellites of 'world vision' ...--~.-.-.. ---"-. _ -- .~-.-~.." -.,~Strangely, cutting-edge aeronautics has takenthe same turn, since certain prototypes, likeVoyager not so long ago or Global Flyer today,seem bent on turning into low-orbit satellites,performing round-the-world flights with no stopsand with no refuelling.

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Figures of a tourist itineracy in the end asderisory as that involved in the postural inertiaof reclining man, riveted to his screens, or thatof those traders in quest of surplus values whosesupplies of capital whiz round the Earth severaltimes in the one day before filling the coffers ofthe stock-exchange casino.Fatal signs of a planetary foreclosure, these

new fairground merry-go-rounds could wellbring out a boredom of the third kind, thatclose encounter involving contact, following theboredom induced by close encounter with thetelevision series: no longer the boredom onceproduced by uniformity but the boredom thatwill be produced tomorrow by circularity (circumterrestre).'Escape for thy life, look not behind thee,

neither stay thou in all the plain!' warned theemissary from Heaven. But Lot's wife 'lookedback from behind him and she became a pillarof salt' .ISABiblical symbol, the tale of the annihilation

of Sodom emphasizes, at one and the same

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time, the' turning away from morals and theturning back of the observer of the disaster.Something analogous is at work today, it wouldseem, before our very eyes, in this turning toice whereby accelerated cathode reality resultsin a trans-appearance that not only penetratesthe horizon of perceptible appearances but theflesh of denuded bodies or, further still, thosematerials whose opacity once obstructed theeyes' cupidity.Whether the philosopher of the eternal re-

turn, Nietzsche, likes it or not, it is no longerthe growth of the desert that awaits us, but itsimpassability, its turning into a closed circuit.Characteristic of this celestial closure is the landart of James Turrell, pilot emeritus whose touristplane became a studio, a flying studio, not unlikethe folding easel Van Gogh took with him onthe road to Aries, and which has served him 'toreturn to the subject', in Desert Paints, exploringa habitable crater ...But, to conclude, let's get back to that specific

panic evoked by our philosopher of perception

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in 1953. At the Poitiers Futuroscope theme park,in 200S, a new attraction was launched. Itwascalled: 'EyesWide Shut' ... - - _ .... _ ... - - - ._- - - - -_ ._- - - -_ ..-- _ .. _ - - -And so, half a century after ~~.!!eau-Ponty'scaution, futurism .h(l.~_Al:>I1!I2t!y transformeditself, for, at the~P~itiers site, th-;'~~p~'rience.--.- ..~proposed is no longer bound up with newimage technologies, as in the recent past. It is anexperience of voluntary blindness.In a light-proof building, visitors gather in

groups of ten for a guided tour led by one of thesightless; as in Breughel's painting, The Blindmanand the Paralytic, everyone has to hang on tothe shoulder of the person in front. During thisinitiatory trip into the heart of darkness thevisitor passes through three different ambiencesin succession: swamp, city, beach. As for theguide's message, it goes like this: 'Don't hesitateto touch!' ... thereby indicating to all and sundrythat for them, from now on, sight and touch arethe same thing. As one of the officials in chargeof the Poitiers image park puts it: 'By cominghere, people give themselves a challenge, for in

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this course roles are reversed, social barriers dropand you get a better understanding of what blindpeople feel.Il6TELESCOPE,MICROSCOPE, FUTUROSCOPE,

Galileo's long sight results in the blindnessinvolved in a bout of role-playing in whicheveryone carries a handicap.~hey don't want to ~~to ~n,

we wrote previously. By way of confirmation ofthis reversal of perspective provoked by cathodicteleobjectivity, note that the FUTUROSCOPEwillalso open a second 'flagship attraction', called'Stars of the Future', with the aim of showing theambience on the set during a television shootto visitors suddenly transformed into actors,alongside real actors, people working in theperforming arts, who will help give them a tasteof the joys and the sensations of telereality.

Notes1. Albert Camus, Actuelles. Ecrits politiques(Paris: Gallimard, 1950). English edition

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Camus at Combat: Writing 1944-1947 (Prince-ton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005),ed. Jacqueline Levi-Valensi, tr. Arthur Gold-hammer (translation modified).

2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eloge de laphilosophie(Paris: Gallimard, 1953).

3. Camus, op. cit. Camus actually says 'afrightening man' (translator's note).

4. Camus, op. cit.5. Courrier international, February 2005.6. Cf. Patrick Vauday, La Peinture de l'image(Pleins Feux, 2002).

7. Merleau-Ponty, op. cit.8. Ibid.9. Advertising copy, 2005.10. Hans Erich Nossack, Nekyia, Recit d'un

survivant (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), French tr.D. Naville.

11. Merleau-Ponty, op. cit.12. Edmund Husserl, La terre ne se meurt pas(Paris: Minuit, 1989).13. Maurice Blanchot, I/Entretien in fin i (Paris:

Gallimard, 1969).

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14. Guillaume Apollinaire, Tendre comme lesouvenir (Paris: Gallimard, 2005).

15. Genesis XIX, 17:26.16. 'La vue par le toucher' in Sud ouest, 24 April

2005.

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virilio expect the unexpected

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