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David Beard and Joshua Gunn
Background: Themes in the Work of Paul Virilio John Armitage (“Beyond Postmodernism”) has given us a thorough chronology of Virilio’s writings, tracing broad developments and recurring themes. While this background shares some aspects of Armitage’s survey, it differs in that it identifies themes of interest to those pursuing research in rhetoric and media technology. Broadly described, Virilio's research interrogates the critical history of logics of perception molded or enabled by technology, from the printing press, the telescope, and the photograph, to film, television, and the internet, and more. Virilio's is a project that not only concerns a recognition of the internal logics and specificity of a given technology of representation, but also concerns the broadest implications of these technologies upon our collective perceptions of time and space, and the material and political consequences of these shifts. For example, the telescope does not merely let humans see farther, but also disciplines and alters our logics of perception (such as the concept of distance), and opens up new vistas for ideological colonization (e.g., the "space race"). This interest in the historical, the material, and the political aspects of media technologies places Virilio in a place unique in contemporary critical theory. Virilio has been compared to scholars as diverse as Deleuze, Foucault, Benjamin, Ong, McLuhan, and Baudrillard (Der Derian 3-6), although none of these comparisons are a comfortable fit. Virilio has claimed allegiances with his teacher, the existential thinker Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who authored the influential Phenomenology of Perception in 1945 (Politics 22). Like Merleau-Ponty, Virilio seeks to re-establish the roots of the mind in its body and its world, going against doctrines that treat perception as a simple result of the action of external things on our body as well as those that insist on the autonomy of consciousness. (Merleau-Ponty 3-4) Virilio develops his work beyond that defined by Merleau-Ponty, however, by emphasizing—if not obsessing on—the ways in which technology mediates our perceptions and brings into vision things beyond our reach. If, following Merleau-Ponty, Virilio believes that "everything I see is in principle within my reach, at least within reach of my sight, marked on the map of the 'I can'" (Vision Machine 7), then Virilio’s project interrogates the shifts in our cognition when “everything I see” includes television broadcasts from Eastern Europe and virtual reality video games. These things, prior to the introduction of these technologies, could not have existed within the realm of the “I-Can”; this tension energizes Virilio’s research. In the face of what could be seen as dehumanizing technologies, Virilio shares Merleau-Ponty's humanist impulse. While Virilio critiques modes of representation, his eye is always searching for a trace of the Real, a mark of the unmediated that (despite the technology) lies within reach and within the map of "I can." For Virilio, it is this belief in an indubitable agency—the "I can"—that marks his debt to phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty. As Virilio notes with optimism, "there is nothing beyond humanity. . . . Humanity cannot be improved" (Politics 88). [1] Perhaps it is this humanist impulse that should make Virilio most attractive to the community of scholars in rhetorical studies, who have not yet given up on the agency of the individual, even in the face of theoretical and technological forces which have long seemed to result in the decentering or the erasure of the subject (from Bitzer’s “rhetorical situation,” to Biesecker’s rethinking of Bitzer, from the perspective of deconstruction). Notes:
1. Much has been made of Virilio’s Christian impulses in framing his research:
"Virilio's is a deeply liberal critique, formed not only in his Christian faith but
in the centrality he affords to individuals (Cubitt 127). This aspect of Virilio’s
biography is most evident in his use of Christian thinkers and Christian tropes
(Bonhoeffer, etc.). At the moment, at least, it appears that the Christian strand in
Virilio’s thought is no stronger than other forces in his thought—the influences,
say, of teachers and colleagues. (back)
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