|
David Beard and Joshua Gunn
Virilio and Computer Mediated Communication The field of “computer mediated communication” is heterogeneous. Research originates in departments of English and in departments of Communication Studies. Despite this heterogeneity of sources, however, we can identify three ways that Virilio’s work can improve upon extant scholarship:
We will look to each in turn. Virilio is not the first to look to changes in technology to study changes in the way we perceive. Most recently, Bolter & Grusin, in Remediation: Understanding New Media, take pains to explore the ways that their idea of hypermedia is visible, in history, at the points where different media intersect. So, they discuss the “hypermediacy of the baroque” (36). But they look to this history of media the way that traditional art historians have looked (for example) at the history of the development of perspective and of photorealism in the history of art—a history of techniques, rather than a history of political and ideological changes, enabled by and manifest in those techniques. (Without doubt, they make claims to sociological and political significance to their findings, but they do not set out with that aim in mind.) In contrast, in Virilio as discussed in this essay, every change in media can be tied to a change in the relations and manifestations of power. Virilio addresses
a problem, too, in the way scholars in computer mediated communication
engage
critical practice. Larry
Gross
describes the dominant mode of such criticism as "impoverished
translation" (62): Any dominant mode of communication is, prima
facie, impossible to reckon in another. For example, musical meaning,
which
resides in a musical mode, is not reducible to the adjectives that we
use to
discuss musical meaning in the linguistic mode. Analogously, the combination of the linguistic,
iconic,
musical, socio-gestural, and logico-mathematical modes that comprise
Internet
experience is not reducible to the linguistic mode that dominates media
scholarship. Unlike the two lead
articles on the topic of internet discourse that open the December 2000
issue
of Critical Studies in Media Communication (Cali; Flanagin, Farinola, and Metzer), a
Virilian
approach to internet discourse forgoes the analysis of text in favor of
technological and perceptive form.
The internet is not only a medium of communication through which
verbal
and iconic messages move, as these articles seem presume, but a
extension of
human modes of perception and a rearrangement of spatial and temporal
forms
that enable, extend, and determine
a particular kind of experience.
A Virilian approach to the Internet would answer McLuhan's
bumper
sticker, "the medium is the message," with a virtual ticker
or banner
that reads, "the medium is the orientation." A focus on the relationship
between
content and form—a bias borne of a long tradition of
textualism—is
replaced by a focus on form and perceptual transformation as the moment
of
ideological insertion. Third and finally, this shift to a focus on form and perception has already been discussed in media studies, but in a way that has been compromised because of the deliberate, politically informed hyperbole of the figure/character/caricature that is Jean Baudrillard (Baudrillard has already earned some cache in contemporary rhetorical scholarship; see Chen 666-683; Mickey 271-284). We believe that Virilio's penchant for empirical evidence and more moderate tone is a better grounding for interrogating the dialectic of perception and technology and a significant improvement over the wildly apocalyptic speculations of Baudrillard. Of course, we would be remiss not to note that Baudrillard and Virilio are colleagues: They have commented on each other's work, and they collaborated on the journal Traverses in 1976 (Gane 85-102). We suggest, however, that the theoretical languages that Virilio and Baudrillard offer critical media studies differ at a significant and fundamental level. Where Baudrillard speaks of "simulacra" and "simulation" (see Simulations), Virilio speaks of technologies of representation. Where Baudrillard speaks of a rupture in progressive history and the impossibility of human agency after this rupture (see Illusion), in Virilio we find technologies of representation existing in articulable relationships with each other and with the "real" world of human agency. David Gunkel’s work is an excellent representative of the introduction of Baudrillardian thought to address the dialectic of perception and technology (see "Rethinking"; "Hacking"). Gunkel uses Baudrillard to advance a research project in media studies which takes deconstruction as its guiding light and "simulation" as its enabling term. Gunkel argues that virtual reality can rupture the split in classical metaphysics which divides "original" from "copy" (otherwise known as "mimesis"). In his review of the literature, he finds the beginnings of this position in critics who argue that there is a difference between simulation and imitation, a difference which is "difficult and not altogether clear" while being "vitally important" and "at the heart of virtual reality" ("Rethinking" 51). Baudrillard provides the richer theoretical articulation of these impulses, arguing that simulation is nether identical to nor the dialectical opposite of imitation. Following from Baudrillard’s claims, Gunkel argues that simulation "deconstructs" the metaphysical split which supports the sharp line dividing imitation from the Real; it "displaces the relationship between these two terms" ("Rethinking" 55; Gunkel further explicates the deconstructive power of these new technologies in "Hacking"). Across his research, Gunkel imagines that virtual reality has the power to undermine the Western philosophical tradition. We find Gunkel’s claims striking and fruitfully productive in its posing new avenues of research into computer media. We also believe, however, that Gunkel’s claims for the power of new media to effect a rupture in metaphysics to be tenable only if one supports Baudrillardian claims about a past-tense, apocalyptic rupture in history and a sudden shift away from previous modes of representation in the present age of Spectacle and Simulation. From a Virilian vantage, Baudrillard’s claims that a rupture has occurred, that "the orgy is over" and the Real has been forever lost in a sea of simulacra, is untenable. Virilio parts from Baudrillard in that he does not believe that technologies of representation or simulation represent a rupture from the "real." As Cubitt notes, "Virilio's theory of representation appears to rest rather specifically on a concept of truth as total and complete, and completely identified with the existence of a pre-existing world, a unity only ruptured by its communication" (Cubitt 134). This claim that the real persists stands contrary to the Baudrillardian position, and closer to the ground upon which much media criticism is built. Rather than assert a rupture in the era of simulation, a Virilian approach to understanding the new media technologies (Gunkel’s virtual reality, the world wide web, and so on) in terms of their continuity with previous modes or technologies of representation seems better. Fundamentally, new media exist in relationship to (not in rupture from) old media, and if we are to understand one media technology, we must understand it (and its logics of perception) in terms of its relationship to the technologies it replaces. We believe that it is very important to continue thinking about and theorizing the relationships between perception, technology, and politics in ways that are not reducible to the old rhetorical nutshell, the tension between form and content. The writings of Paul Virilio offer us the theoretical engine to advance this project.
|