Paul Virilio_ The third interval_artículo

8/22/2019 Paul Virilio_ The third interval_artculo

1/7

Paul Virilio"The Third Interval: A Critical Transition." In Re-thinking

Technologies, Chapter 1. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

We know about critical mass, critical instant, and critical climate: we hear less often aboutcritical space. There is no easy reason for this, unless perhaps it is because we have not yetassimilated relativity, the very notion of space-time. And yet space, or critical extension,has become ubiquitous, because of the acceleration of "means of communication" thatcollapse the Atlantic (the Concorde), reduce France to a square of an hour and a half oneach side (the airbus), or, yet again, tell us that the high-speed train (TGV) wins time overtime. These different slogans from the world of publicity indicate exactly how much weinherit old ideas of geophysical space; these advertisements also tell us, to be sure, that weare their innocent victims. Today we are beginning to realize that systems oftelecommunication do not merely confine extension, but that, in the transmission ofmessages and images, they also eradicate duration or delay.

In the shift from the revolution of modes of transportation in the nineteenth century to therevolution of electronic communication in the twentieth century, there emerge a mutationand a commutation that affect public and domestic space so strongly that we are hard put todetermine what its reality may be. When technologies of telemarketing replace those of theclassical era of television, we begin to witness how the premises of an urbanization of realtime follow on the heels of the premises of an urbanization of a real space. Because ofinteractive teletechnologies (the teleport), this abrupt transfer of technology moves from thearrangement of the infrastructures of real space (maritime ports, railway stations, airports)to the control of the environment in real time. Critical dimensions are also being renewed.

The question of the real moment of instantaneous telemarketing is effectively refashioningphilosophical and political issues that traditionally had been based on notions of Atopia andUtopia. The shift is being made for the advancement of what has already been calledTeletopia, which carries manifold paradoxes that take, for example, the following form:"Reach out and touch someone," or even "to be telepresent," meaning to be here andelsewhere at the same time. This so-called real time is essentially nothing other than a realspace-time, since different events surely take "place" even if, finally, this place constitutesthat of the no-place of teletopical technologies (such as the interface of human andmachine, a regime or nodal point of teletransmissions).

Immediate telesales, instant telepresence: thanks to new procedures of telediffusion or of

teletransmission, action, or the fabled "televised action at a distance" that thetelecommander effectuates, is now facilitated by the perfected use of electromagnetics andby the radio-electric views of what has lately been called electro-optics. One by one, theperceptive faculties of an individual's body are transferred to machines, or instruments thatrecord images and sound; more recently, the transfer is made to receivers, to sensors, and toother detectors that can replace absence of tactility over distance. A general use oftelecommands is on the verge of achieving permanent telesurveillance. What is becomingcritical here is no longer the concept of three spatial dimensions, but a fourth, temporal


2/7

dimension, in other words, that of the present itself. As we shall see below, "real time" isnot opposed, as many experts in electronics claim, to "deferred time," but only to presenttime.

The painter Paul Klee expressed the point exceptionally well when he noted, "Defining the

present in isolation is tantamount to murdering it."' This is what technologies of real timeare achieving. They kill "present" time by isolating it from its presence here and now forthe sake of another commutative space that is no longer composed of our "concretepresence" in the world, but of a "discrete telepresence" whose enigma remains foreverintact. How can we fail to understand to what degree these radio-technologies (based on thedigital signal, the video signal, and the radio signal) will soon overturn not only the natureof human environment and its territorial body, but also the individual environment and itsanimal body, since the development of territorial space by means of heavy materialmachinery (roads, railways, and so on) is now giving way to an almost immaterial controlof the environment (satellites, fiber-optic cables) that is connected to the terminal body ofthe men and women, interactive beings who are at once emitters and receivers?

Clearly the urbanization of real time entails first of all the urbanization of "one's ownbody," which is plugged into various interfaces (computer keyboards, cathode screens, andsoon gloves or cyberclothing), prostheses that turn the over-equipped, healthy (or "valid")individual into the virtual equivalent of the well-equipped invalid. If the revolution ofmodes of transportation of the last century had witnessed the emergence and progressivepopularization of the dynamic automotive vehicle (train, motorcycle, car, airplane), thecurrent electronic revolution is now, in its turn, blueprinting the plan for the innovation ofthe ultimate vehicle, the static audiovisual vehicle, in other words, the coming of abehavioral inertia of the receiver-sender, or the passage from this fabled "retinalsuspension" on which the optical illusion of cinematic projection was based, to the "bodilysuspension" of the "plugged-in human being." This becomes the condition of possibility ofa sudden mobilization of the illusion of the world, of an entire world, that is telepresent atevery moment. The very body of the connected witness happens to be the ultimate urbanterritory, a folding back over the animal body of social organization and of a conditioningpreviously limited to the core of the old city. In bodily terms, it resembles the core of theold familial "hearth. "

Thus we are better able to perceive the decline of the unity of a demography. After anexpanse of time the extended family turned into the nuclear family, which has now becomethe single-parent family. Individuality or individualism was thus not so much the fact of aliberation of social practice as the product of the evolution of techniques of thedevelopment of public or private space. If cities are growing and sprawling at unforeseenrates, so then the familial unit is shrinking and becoming a tributary force. Given that weare witnessing supersaturated conditions in the concentrations of megalopolitan populations(Mexico City, Tokyo, Los Angeles) that are the result of an increased economic speed, itnow seems appropriate to reconsider the notions of acceleration and deceleration (whatphysicists call positive and negative speeds) and, no less, what is less evident, in real speedand virtual speed (the rapidity of what happens unexpectedly, such as an urban crisis, or anaccident) to grasp better the importance of the "critical transition" of which we are now thepowerless witnesses.


3/7

We would do well to recall that speed is not a phenomenon but a relation amongphenomena, in other words, relativity itself, whence the importance of the constancy of thespeed of light not only in physics or in astrophysics, but also in our everyday lives. It isexperienced as soon as we move, beyond the paradigm of public transport, into that of theorganization and electromagnetic conditioning of territorial space. Such is what is implied

by revolutions in "transmission" or "automation" of environmental control in real time thathas since replaced traditional ways of living in territorial space. As a result, speed is notused solely to make travel more effective. It is used above all to see, to hear, to perceive,and, thus, to conceive more intensely the present world. In the future, speed will be usedmore and more to act over distance, beyond the sphere of influence of the human body andits behavioral biotechnology.

The Interval of Light

How can we account for this situation? It is necessary to introduce the specter of a newkind of interval, the interval of light (or zero-sign). In fact, in relativity the revolution ofthis third "interval" is in itself a sort of imperceptible cultural revolution. If the interval ofTime (a positive sign) and the interval of Space (a negative sign) have given impetus to thegeography and the history of the world through geometrical measurement of agrarian space(allotment into parcels of land) and urban areas (cadastral surveys), the organization of thecalendar and measurement of time (clocks and watches) have also presided over a vastpolitical and chronological regulation of human societies. The sudden emergence of aninterval of the third type thus signals that we are undergoing an abrupt qualitative shift, aprofound mutation of the relations that as humans we are keeping with our livingenvironment. Time (duration) and Space (extension) are now inconceivable without Light(absolute speed), the cosmological constant of the speed of light, an absolute philosophicalcontingency, according to Einstein, that follows the absolute character that until thenNewton and his predecessors had ascribed to space and time.

Since the beginning of this century, the absolute limit of the speed of light has, as it were,enlightened space and time together. We are therefore no longer dealing so much with lightthat illuminates things (the object, the subject, and travel) as with the constant character ofits absolute speed, which conditions the phenomenal apperception of the world's durationand extension.2 We do well to heed the physicist who speaks of the logic of particles: "Arepresentation is defined by a sum of observables that are flickering back and forth."3 Themacroscopic logic of the techniques of real time could not better describe the macroscopiclogic of this sudden "teletopical commutation" that perfects what until now had been thefundamentally "topical" quality of the old human city.

Thus both the urban geographer and the political scientist find themselves torn between thepermanent necessities of the organization and construction of real space, with all of itsbasic problems, including geometrical and geographical constrictions about what is centralversus what is peripheral, and new constraints of the management of this real time ofimmediacy and ubiquity, with its "protocol of access," its "transmission of bundles," its"viruses," and the chrono-geographical constraints of nodal and interconnected networks.An extended time works in the direction of the topical and architectonic interval (the high-rise building), and a short, ultrabrief, even inexistent time in the direction of the tele-topical


4/7

interface (the network). How can this dilemma be resolved? How can these fundamentallyspatio-temporal and relativistic problems be formulated?

When we now witness the aftershocks of international financial disasters in view of thedamages of instantaneous automation of stock futures and junk bonds, or this notorious

trading program that is responsible for the acceleration of economic disorder, such as theelectronic crash of October 1987 and the crash that was barely missed in October 1989, weput our finger on the difficulties of our current situation.

Critical transition is thus not a gratuitous expression: behind this vocable there lurks a realcrisis of the temporal dimension of immediate action. After the crisis of "integral" spatialdimensions, which give increased importance to "fractional" dimensions, we might bewitnessing, in short, the crisis of the temporal dimension of the present moment. If time-light (or, better, the time of the speed of light) now serves as an absolute standard for bothimmediate marketing and instantaneous telemarketing, then intensive duration of the "thereal moment" now replaces duration. Thus the extensive time of history is relatively subjectto control, and can include this long-term duration, what used to comprise at once the past,the present, and the future. In effect, what we might call a temporal commutation, an"alternation" or "flickering" that is also related to a sort of commotion of present duration,an accident of a so-called real instant, is suddenly disconnected from its site of origin orinscription, from its here and now, for the sake of an electronic dazzle (that is at onceelectro-optical, electro-acoustical, and electro-tactile) where telecommanding, the so-calledtact at a distance, would bring to completion the former technique of telesurveillance ofwhat is kept afar, or beyond our grasp.

If, as Epicurus says, time is the accident of accidents, with these teletechnologies ofgeneralized interactivity we begin to move toward the era of the accident of the present, thefabled telepresence over distance that amounts to nothing more than the sudden catastropheof the reality of this present instant that constitutes our only mode of entry into duration,but also, and everyone has been aware of the fact since Einstein, our only entry into theextension of the real world. Henceforth the "real" time of telecommunications will probablyrefer no longer solely to "deferred" time, to feedback, or to time lags, but also to an outerchronology. Whence my constantly reiterated point about replacing what is chronological(before, during, after) with what is chronological or, if another formula fits better, thechronoscopical (underexposed, exposed, and overexposed). In effect, the interval of light(the interface) supplanting henceforth those of Space and of Time, the notion of exposurereplaces, in its turn (whether we like it or not), that of succession in terms of presentduration and that of extension in immediate space.

Thus the speed of exposure of time-light should allow us to reinterpret the "present" or this"real instant" that is (lest we forget) the space-time of a very real action facilitated byelectronic machines. Soon it will be facilitated by photonic apparatus, that is, by theabsolute capacities of electromagnetic waves and of quanta of light, a limit and a milestonefor access to the reality of the perceptible world (here I am thinking of what astrophysicistscall the cone of light). is colliding head-on with the politics and administration of publicservice. Thus, if the classical interval gives way to interfacing, politics moves, in turn, intopresent time alone. The question no longer entails relations of what is global in respect to


5/7

what is local, or what is transnational and what is national, but above all concerns thissudden temporal commutation" in whose flickerings disappear not only the difference ofinside and outside and the expanse of political territories, but also the "before" and the"after" of duration and history, for the sake of a real instant over which, finally, no one hascontrol. To be convinced of this shift we need only observe today's inextricable problems of

geostrategy in view of the impossibility of clearly distinguishing offense from defense.Instantaneous and multipolar strategy has been deployed in what military experts call"preemptive" strikes!

Thus the archaic "tyranny of distances" between people who have been geographicallyscattered increasingly gives way to this "tyranny of real time" that is not merely a matter, asoptimists might claim, for travel agencies, but especially for employment agencies, becausethe more the speed of commerce grows, the more unemployment becomes globallymassive. Since the nineteenth century, the muscular force of the human being is literally"laid off" when automation of the "machine tool" is employed. Then, with the recentgrowth of computers, "transmission machines," comes the laying off or ultimate shutdownof human memory and conscience. Automation of postindustrial production is coupled withthe automation of perception and then with this attended conception favored by themarketplace of systems analysis while future developments are sought in cybernetics. Thus,the gain of real time over deferred time is equivalent to being placed in an efficientprocedure that physically eliminates the "object" and "subject" for the exclusive advantageof a journey, but the journey [trajet], because it lacks a trajectory, is fundamentally out ofcontrol. Thus the interface in real time definitely replaces the interval that had formerlyconstructed and organized the history and geography of our societies, leading to an obviousculture of paradox, in which everything arrives without there being any need either to travelor to leave in the slightest physical sense.

Behind this critical transition, how can we fail to wonder about the future conditioning ofthe human environment? If the revolution of transportation in the nineteenth century hadalready prompted a change in the surface urban territory on the whole of the Europeancontinent, the current revolution of interactive transmissions is, in its turn, promoting analteration of urban environment. "Images" win over the "things" they are said to represent:the city of the past slowly becomes a paradoxical agglomeration in which relations ofimmediate proximity give way to interrelations over distances. In fact, the paradoxes ofacceleration are frequent and disturbing. One, the first, of them runs thus: when things "far"are brought into immediate proximity, those that are proportionately "near", such as ourfriends, kin, neighbors, turn what is proximate, family, work, or neighborhood, into aforeign, if not inimical, space. This inversion of social practices can already be seen in theurban planning of modes of communication (maritime port, railway station, airport) and isunderscored and radicalized through new means of telecommunication (the teleport).

Once again we thus observe still another inversion of tendencies. Where motorizedtransportation and information had prompted a general mobilization of populations sweptup in the exodus of labor (and then of leisure), modes of instantaneous transmission promptthe inverse, that of a growing inertia. Television and, especially, teleaction, no longerrequire human mobility, but merely a local motility. Telemarketing, tele-employment, faxwork, bit-net, and e-mail transmissions at home, in apartments, or in cabled high rises,


6/7

these might be called cocooning: an urbanization of real time thus follows the urbanizationof real space. The shift is ultimately felt in the very body of every city dweller, as aterminal citizen who will soon be equipped with interactive prostheses whose pathologicalmodel is that of the "motorized handicapped," equipped so that he or she can control thedomestic environment without undergoing any physical displacement. We have before us

the catastrophic figure of an individual who has lost, along with his or her natural mobility,any immediate means of intervening in the environment. The fate of the individual ishanded over, for better or for worse, to the capacities of receivers, sensors, and other long-range detectors that turn the person into a being subjected to the machines with which, theysay, he or she is "in dialogue!"

To be a subject or to be subjected? That is the question. Former public services will in alllikelihood be replaced by a domestic enslavement for which "domotics" might be theperfect outcome. It would be equivalent to the achievement of a domiciliary inertia, where ageneralization of techniques of "environmental control" would end up with behavioralisolation and reinforce cities with the very insularities that have always threatened them,such that the distinction between the "island retreat" and the "ghetto" might becomeincreasingly precarious.

Furthermore, and for some unexplainable reason, the international colloquium on thehandicapped that recently took place at Dunkirk offers numerous parallels with the criticalsituation that I have sketched in the paragraphs above. It appears as if the recent technicaland economic imperatives insert continuities and networks in the place of discontinuities,where there existed an amalgam or mix of different types of urban mobilities. Whence theidea, described above, of a common public transit is replaced by that of a more pervasivechain of displacement. We can thus heed the generous conclusion Francois Mitterrandstated at the end of the Dunkirk symposium: "Cities will have to be adapted to their citizensand not the other way around. We must open the city to handicapped Citizens. I demandthat a global politics for the handicapped become a strong axis f Social Europe. "If everyone of us is obviously in agreement about the inalienable right that the handicapped personhas to live as others do and therefore with others, it is no less revealing to note thesimilarities that now exist between the reduced mobility of the equipped invalid and thegrowing inertia of the over-equipped, "valid" human population. As if the revolutions intransmission of information led to an identical conclusion, whatever may be the conditionof the patient's body, the terminal citizen of a teletopical city is on the way toward itsaccelerated formation.

The destruction of the Berlin Wall? That has been accomplished. The future of a unitedGermany? The answer is clear. The abolition of borders dividing nations in Western Europeis announced for 1993. What remains to be abolished, and urgently, can only be space andtime. As we have just seen, the task is being accomplished. At the end of our century notmuch will remain of this planet that is not only polluted and impoverished, but alsoshrunken and reduced to nothing by the teletechnologies of generalized interactivity.

Translated by Tom ConleyFirst Placed on the Net by Sara J. Shelton


7/7

Notes

1. Paul Klee. Theorie de l'art moderne (Paris: Gonthier, 1963).

2. The triad described in the parentheses reads "l'objet, le sujet, le trajet," such that

"travel"--or "journey," the third term, bears strong graphic and vocal resemblance to theobject and the subject. Trans.

3. G. Cohen Tannoudji and M. Spiro,La matiere-espace-temps (Paris: Fayard, 1986).

4. Klee, Theorie de l'art moderne.

5. Cited by Guiseppe Bufo, inNicolas de Cues (Paris: Seghers, 1964).

6. See Paul Virilio,L'inertie polaire (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1990).

Documents

Paul Virilio_ The third interval_artículo