2.4.2. Paul Virilio: the Dissolution of Time

Virilio has the talent of a clairvoyant in the age of total transparency- Agentur Bilwet

Paul Virilio another eloquent postmodern French social theorist and mediatheorist focuses on the concept of time which becomes challenged. "Paul Virilio, a Christian, paints a nightmare scenario in which the post-human individuals in their wired-up 'habitacles' forget not just tradition but time itself as well as their own finitude: instead they begin to take on God-like powers of a vision machine whose atemporal omniscience can see everywhere simultaneously in global space, and whose universalism allows the displacement and (partial control) of the past and the future into the 'now time' of the present." (Lash 1997: 4) To many of Virilio's precise statements it is hard to add something at all. His dromological theory of evolution, speaks of an increasing acceleration, from 'transport' to 'transmission' to 'transplantation'.(Virilio 1993)

His concept of speed and acceleration is inseparable of a concept of time, which he takes from astrophysics and therefore time becomes only perceivable in space-time or even space-time-matter. He also makes a step similar to Maarten Dillinger's replacement of lightspeed through timespeed: "speed is the light of time, its only 'light', and the duration - each duration and each extension- can not be viewed anymore without the support of the absolute speed of the light, that changes the perception of time." (Virilio 1996: 12 - transl. S.J.) Virilio is kind of a futurologist predicting: "The big event looming upon the 21st century in connection with this absolute speed, is the invention of a perspective of real time, that will supersede the perspective of real space." (WWW: Speed and Information: 1) The terms real time and VR are according to Mark Poster very similar. (Poster 1995: 85) But in opposite to Baudrillard, Virilio comes to different conclusions: "I disagree with my friend Baudrillard on the subject of simulation. To the word simulation, I prefer the one substitution.[..] We are entering a world where there won't be one but two realities, just like we have two eyes or hear bass and treble tones, just like we now have stereoscopy and stereophony: there will be two realities: the actual and the virtual. Thus there is no simulation, but substitution. Reality has become symmetrical. The splitting of reality in two parts is a considerable event which goes far beyond simulation."(WWW: Cyberwar, God and Television: 3) So people will live in two kind of realities, in two kind of times: "Some people, those in the virtual community, will live in the real time of the world-city, but others will live in deferred time, in other words, in the actual city, in the streets." (Virilio quoted by Robins 1995: 154)

And it has all to do with the concept of time that becomes threatened, the possibility to become lost in time, like one could get lost in space.

"A stereo-reality of sorts threatens. A total loss of the bearings of the individual looms large. To exist, is to exist in situ, here and now, hic et nunc. This is precisely what is being threatened by cyberspace and instantaneous, globalized information flows." (WWW: Speed and Information: 2) "Real time now prevails above both real space and the geosphere. The primacy of real time, of immediacy, over and above space and surface is a fait accompli and has inaugural value (ushers a new epoch)." (WWW: Speed and Information: 1)

Similar to Baudrillard, Virilio had also his coming out as hip philosopher during the Gulfwar, where many of his predictions about the future of war became true. But the development goes on and so

"Since the Gulf War and the emergence of the information (super)highways, we have emerged into a world that has nothing anymore in common with the world of history as we knew it. This does not mean the end of history in the way Francis Fukuyama has postulated. Something other than history is now coming to the fore. In a sense we are standing at the foot of the wall of time. .. History is simply smashing into the wall of time. This is an extraordinary occurrence!" (WWW: Silence of the lambs: 2) "It is precisely this barrier of time which confronts history in the present day." (WWW: Speed and Information: 1)

"What is being effectively globalized by instantaneity is time. Everything now happens within the perspective of real time: henceforth we are deemed to live in a 'one-time-system'. For the first time, history is going to unfold within a one-time-system: global time. Up to now, history has taken place within local times, local frames, regions and nations. But now, in a certain way, globalization and virtualization are inaugurating a global time that prefigures a new form of tyranny. If history is so rich, it is because it was local, it was thanks to the existence of spatially bounded times which overrode something that up to now occurred only in astronomy: universal time. But in the very near future, our history will happen in universal time, itself the outcome of instantaneity - and there only."(WWW: Speed and Information: 2)