Innis and Virilio, Reflection Paper (2010)

8/2/2019 Innis and Virilio, Reflection Paper (2010)

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While capital must on the one side strive to tear

down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e.to exchange, and conquer the whole earth for its

market, it strives on the other side to annihilate

this space with time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum

the time spent in motion from one place to another.

Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 539

Is an expansive, robust, and easily engaged-with conception of time possible at the dy-

ing shadowy days of the liberal-democratic telos? Under the sign of conquered-space

and the epoch of completed metaphysics? Wandering like last-men as we are, children

of the Obscure Disaster1

, it strikes as a very serious possibility that it is not possible.And the question, then, is whether the forerunners of such a discourse with their

guarded optimism were glimpsing the promise of a salvation that is still opened up to-

wards us today, or whether they were simply watching the sunset on an always-already

pre-ordained forclosure of possibility; whether the structures and geometries of political

modernity can still reign in temporality and spatiality into some sort of functional milieu,

or whether (precisely as a result of those structures and geometries), temporality and

spatiality have become catastrophically and irrevocably unglued, plunging us into eithera chest-thumping militaristic amnesia, never quite able to remember to remember, as

the case arguably is now, or into some form of disturbed and babbling Tithonus, always

forgetting to forget, as the situation arguably could be soon.

1 Alain Badiou. O an Obscure Disaster: On the End o the ruth o State. Lacanian Ink. 22:Fall(2003).

Why do you think its going to last

when everything youve ever done went to the past

just think about our bodies in this place

and imagine us shooting through space

Chad VanGaalen, Infniheart

Innis in the Age of Vectorial AccelerationOn the Possible Impossibility of Ontological Balance


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Indeed,perhapsKurtVonnegutJr.tobecrassandbeginwithctionsinthe

writing of his novel Slaughterhouse Five, might have been reading or had previously

read some potent words from the pages of Canadian theorist Harold Innis on exactly

this problem! so prescient as it was, back those now many decades ago. One could

note, that is, that the alien species that Vonnegut constructs evoke exactly the kind of

biases of communication to say: physical territorialisation and the breadth and play

of duration that Innis champions. And does so in order, it would seem, to rattle our

conceptions of how we are embodied, (or encaged if you take the Klee and Benjamin

slant on things), in a history that is almost entirely not of our own design. The Tralfama-

dorians2, as Vonnegut terms them, are constructed in such a manner as to be simply

beyond incredulous towards and fundamentally incapable of understandingour or, in

other words, humanitys relation to time.

Bolted to rails, forever hurtling forwardwithout truly understanding what forward

implies,thedescriptioninmetaphorthatVonnegutproffersaboutus,assuch,ndsus

mindlessly covering ground, so to speak, to the extent that space is consumed almost

asfuelinthefurnaceofamachinewhosefunctionitisspecicallytodestroytime.Itis

preciselythissituation,appliedrotelarge,thatwendourselvesinasacontemporary

westernculture;astheWestandasWesternersintheearlytwenty-rstcentury.Or

worse still! not even as Westerners, but simply ahistorical bodies under both the aegis

and codings of the digital-now. Though Vonnegut understood something which Innis

did not, that acceleration is not equivalent to material speed, it is relational; it is, rather,

vectorial; and it is this notion which may function in place of the cynical impossibility of

the kind of balance between space and time that Innis sought and conceptualized as a

normative ideal in the constitutive makeup of the state.

Innis penned his understanding of this situation, as it was, asA Plea for Time3,

a uniquely optimistic construction, to say a plea, though it seems far more likely today

some60yearslaterasthoughitwereawarningyelledfromtree-topstoanin-ight

2 Kurt Vonnegut Jr.. Slaughterhouse Five: Or, The Childrens Crusade, a Duty-Dance with Death.(New York: Dial Press). 85.3 Harold Innis. Bias of Communicaon. (oronto: University o oronto Press, 2008). 61 92.


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super-sonic jet: his words are there, of course, in time then as they are now avail-

able for anyone stillenough to hear them, but we may simply be going, by now, too fast.

To wit, large-scale political organizations such as empires must be considered

from the standpoint of two dimensions, those of space and time, and persist by over-

coming the bias of media which over-emphasize either dimension, Innis writes of the

axisandgeometriesdeninghisconceptionofempire,theyhavetendedtoourish

underconditionsinwhichcivilizationreectstheinuenceofmorethanonemedium

and in which the bias of one medium towards decentralization is offset by the bias of

another medium towards centralization.4 In other words some societies are temporally

present but materially absent and others the reverse; some embodied in space, others

ensconced in time. The most successful empires, organizations of power and the like,

are those for whom for Innis there exists something of a play between the mediums

in these structures that favour space and those that favour time. America, to be blunt,

seems to be again, in Inniss understanding very much of the former persuasion.

There exists little play, in this sense, that is, compromises between the demands of

a monopoly of space and of a monopoly of time,5 as it seems America, as such, has

always-alreadybeen covering ground while forgetting itself.

Even today the so-called Tea Partiers champion the very same constitution that

they unabashedly wish to alter, mutate, and re-craft to their own particularly yet unknow-

ingly historicized interests. That is, historically, as Innis argues, the rise of print media

facilitated the democratization of knowledge and the triumphs of humanistic culture

writes Jody Berland, yet the spread of space-biased communication technology has

led to the accelerating marginalization of oral culture, rationalization of knowledge, and

displacementofdifference,reexivity,andduration. 6 The entrenchment of the West in

spacereducesandmitigatesitsabilitytoreectitselfhistoricallythroughtimeasaco-

herent and self-instantiating identity, other than, of course, the societal identity of its own

4 Ibid, 27.5 Ibid, 100.6 Jody Berland. Space at the Margins: Critical Teory and Colonial Space afer Innis. in HaroldInnis in the New Century: Reecons and Refracons. Ed. William Buxton & Charles R. Acland.(Montreal: McGill/Queens Press, MQUP, 1999). 292.


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becoming-anonymous (see Georg Simmel, Andr Groz, mile Durkheim, and both the

early work of Marx and the entire works of Albert Camus). The question, then, is wheth-

er the teetering-top of the anonymous West has become too instant to save; whether

thetimethatInnissodesperatelywantstoseeowinyingtothespatial-westsyang

can indeed be brought out-from-concealment; whether or not weve reached the vecto-

rial acceleration of acceleration that exceeds the possibility of spatial or ontological

balance, marginalizing or obliterating media appropriate to memory, tradition, spirituality,

and dialogue all aspects of oral culture that have been appropriated and transformed

through the production of technological space.7

Profering the notion if albeit implicitly that Innis is, ultimately, out of his ele-

ment, a thinker of the 20th century without recourse to the 21stcenturyconagrations

that confront us, is oddly enough a near-contemporary of Inniss! One who was sim-

ply much more cynical, much earlier in his career, which is to say, Paul Virilio: A theorist

of pure speed, who saw the world in terms of its becoming-collapsed to the terminal

phase of technological society, that phase where technology actually comes alive in

the form of eating space, eating culture, eating time,8 Virilio and Innis cannot speak to

each other in the traditional sense. Rather we can, at least for our current purposes,

posit them as the arch priests of two orders: that which believes modernist political

orthodoxy can be curved and contoured into a functional balance of space and time, in

the case of Innis, and that which believes the acceleration of space under the sign of

digital culture. . . has been reduced to a specious present, and the social engineering

of time into a micro-managed prism of empty granularities9 in the case of Virilio. Nor is

it our place to decide in the traditional sense who is right or wrong, but should be our

purview simply to posit the historicized station of both in, perhaps, dialectical opposition

to one another; to ask the question of speed at the margins of our own acceleration.

According to Innis, bureaucracy in terms of the state implied an emphasis on

space and a neglect of the problems of time and in terms of religion an emphasis on

7 Ibid, 292.8 Arthur Kroker. The Possessed Individual. (Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1992). 13.9 Kroker. Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx . (oronto:University o oronto Press, 2004). 6.


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time and a neglect of the problems of space,10 though what can we read from this?

Innis was not without his own breed of cynicalism; not without his own disdain for

conscious effort-towards in terms of a knowing-subject and a will-towards-will. Inniss

thought is such that what saves in the Heideggerian sense is that which damages or

mitigates the knowing savingness of other agencies of salvation. Are we therefore to

ndrefugeintheedicesofpoliticalstructureanditsconcomitantstability,replicability,

andamenableformstohumanendeavour?Heavensno!Norarewetondrefugein

the dialogical spirituality and rememberance inherent to religion! Only, as Innis is wont

to assert, can we be saved by a particular kind and type of quagmire by their getting

in each others way, to phrase it thusly; by an ontological stalemate of the media and

mediumsthatfavouroneortheother,underwhichsocietymightourishindirections

unattainable and unthinkable whilst under the sway of exclusively one or the other (as it

could be contended we are now, i.e. the media and mediums of space).

To say, as Kroker does, that if we live in the era of the empire of space (and the

disappearance of time), it is because the western rationalist eschatology has inscribed

itself by means of a twofold political strategy: by the policing of the imminent codes of

perspective, and by the ideological constitution of the viewing subject, the bourgeois

ego, as the triangulation point of politics, culture and society.11 Weve replaced the

potential epistemologies of a lived-relation towards temporality with a world where the

loss of material space, through the dromoscopic Dromos, from the greek: to race

possibility of the instantaneous moment of arrival before having left, leads to the gov-

ernment of nothing but time.12 That is, as Adrian MacKenzie understands it today we

arebeginningtorealizethatsystemsoftelecommunicationdonotmerelyconne exten-

tion, but that, in the transmission of messages and images, they also eradicate duration

or delay, to wit, contemporary technological conditions, spatial exteriority and temporal

futurity are themselves under assault from instantaneity.13

10 Innis. Bias of Communicaon. 159.11 Kroker12 Paul Virilio. Speed and Polics. (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007). 174.13 Adrian MacKenzie. Transducons: Bodies and Machines at Speed. (New York: Continuum,2002). 120.


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For Innis then, this this assault from instantaneity, to the extent we can read it

into his textual body is a challenge to our ability to maintain as a society, as an iden-

tity,asaxedamalgamofprinciplesthatholdthroughhistoryinorderthattheymight

become-historical (as in the case of any of Inniss many historical archetypes the

Summerians, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Russians, ect.). For Virilio, conversely, it

is a challenge to escape our almost inevitable becoming-historical! Being trapped [at]

the end of the outside world where the whole world suddenly becomes endotic and

where such an end implies forgetting spatial exteriority as much as temporal exteriority

(no future) and opting exclusively for the present instant, the real instant of instanta-

neous telecommunications.14 This, again, then, contrasts with but does not contra-

dict, per se Inniss less dogmatic assertion that we are simply mired in a modern ob-

session with present-mindedness,15 as though this modern obsession were something

that we could opt-out of as nonchalantly as a gym-membership.

The truth, for our purposes seems to tend more towards something ontologically

inescapable, whether or not we subvert our relation or surpass our station, like a pollu-

tion, which is to say, the pollution of time distances that reduces to nothing, or almost

nothing, the extent and duration of our habitat; this human environment that, besides

matter, yet possesses geophysical dimensions that are unextendable.16 This is pos-

sibly, then, the truth in both: that the overarching and unbalanced focus on space in

Inniss understanding, which then results in the totalizing and unsustainable using-up-

of-space, in Virilios understanding, ultimately rests upon our coming to terms with the

realmsinwhichwearegiventohavebeing.Left,asweare,inthisshbowloftempo -

rality, the question dawns, who would want to remember more than having swam past

our plastic undersea castle, yet again. As Kroker writes, the more standing still the

time,themoreproofpositivethateventhedenialoftheemptinessthatboresconrmsthe fundamental reality of the metaphysicalcrisis of technological society.17 But maybe

this was the lesson the children of the obscure disaster were meant to learn: that the

14 Virilio. Open Sky. (New York: Verso, 1997). 24-2515 Innis. Bias of Communicaon. 76.16 Virilio. The Original Accident. (Cambridge: Polity, 2007). 40.17 Kroker. Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Marx . 62.


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inevitable crisis is not always quite so inevitable and that sometimes, in trying so ur-

gently and implacably to rescue our fate from spatiality (or indeed temporality! That is,

either in isolation, as has been mentioned) run amok, were called upon by something

beyond ourselves, though what is a different issue. . . ethics? Being? Political engage-

ment to get our hands dirty. To say, as Innis does, in other words, the limitations of

culture, in point of duration, are in part a result of the inability to muster the intellectual

resources of a people to the point that stagnation can be avoided and that boredom can

be evaded.18

Like Vonneguts protagonist we approach lived-time as though knowing only to

ndoutthatknowingoutsideoffostering,shapingandenactingthisthatortheother

narrative, doesnt achieve much, even if you have had the proverbial wool pulled off

from over your eyes. It is perhaps the gap between Innis and Virilio, then, to say that if

someone is to calm the waters of temporality and bring our lived-time into balance, har-

mony and sympathetic discourse that this is still, of course, within the realm of possibil-

ity, it just conforms to the same laws governing any mindless coverning of ground and

has, over the last 60 years, gotten a lot farther away. Haruki Murakamis timeless advice

from his novel After Dark seems pertinent: walk slowly, drink lots of water.

18 Innis. Industrialism and Cultural Values. The American Economic Review. 41:2. (May, 1951).203.

Dock Currie

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Innis and Virilio, Reflection Paper (2010)