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David Beard and Joshua Gunn
Real time as the Dominant Logic of Perception The dominant logic or perception active today is one largely mediated by technology. In its most common-sense articulation, Virilio notes that, "in the past, if you wanted to know what temperature it was, you looked out the window and saw if it was nice out or not. Today, you turn on the television to get the news and the weather" (Politics 67). To turn to technology for guidance in our experience of weather no longer, for many, seems counterintuitive. Virilio sees that "the advanced audiovisual and automotive technologies have denatured direct observation and common sense" (Lost 111). If we return, briefly, to the words of Merleau-Ponty as quoted by Virilio, the basic human experience of space, unmediated by these technologies, can be described as an experience of the "I can" (Vision 7). Virilio argues that, in the era of broadcast and online or digital technologies, "the bulk of what I see is, in fact and in principle, no longer within my reach. And even if it lies within reach of my sight, it is no longer necessarily inscribed on the map of the ‘I can’" (Vision 7). In the age of broadcast media, Merleau-Ponty’s assertion is drawn into question. If, in fact, one can interact with that remote locale visible through new media (a possibility that technologies like the DataGlove make possible), it is in new ways that are distinct from our typical conception of the field of our perceptions and actions. It is that distinction that proves problematic, for Virilio. Virilio asks, in Open Sky: How can we rationally manage the split, not only between virtual and actual realities but, more to the point, between the apparent horizon and the transparent horizon of a screen that suddenly opens up a kind of temporal window for us to interact elsewhere, often a long way away. (Open Sky 37) This new means of viewing the world at a distance, and interacting with the world from a distance, Virilio calls "'teleobjective.' That is to say that television and multimedia are collapsing the close shots of time and space as a photograph collapses the horizon in the telephotographic lens" (Politics 21). The compression of our sense of space under the new media technologies entails an alteration in our conception of time. Our perception of space is subsumed by our perceptions of duration and length. In the past, transportation technologies enabled this shift in our perception of space: "mental mapping evolves with the transportation revolution and the communication revolution. The faster I travel to the end of the world, the faster I come back, and the emptier my mental-map becomes" (Vision 42). If it is possible to fly to Europe overnight, our mental map (our perception) of space separating Europe and the United States shrinks. If we can receive broadcasts of news events live from Europe, our mental map of both the space separating Europe from the US shrinks again. The term that Virilio develops for this phenomenon is "real time." Real time, as many online gaming fans would attest, refers to the notion that events are unfolding in one's immediate field of view irrelevant of spatial relationships. Real time is the word for the way that our perceptions are shaped by these technologies that place the not-here here, in the field of my present. Further: real time manifests when tele-objectivity allows one to witness an event at daybreak in England when it’s pitch black night in one's neighborhood. Real time means, in the most current of online videoconferencing, for example, "meeting at a distance, in other words, being telepresent, here and elsewhere, at the same time" (Open 10). Certainly we are conscious of differences in time zones while we watch a live broadcast or partake of a videoconference; certainly we can see that it is dark here but light there. But we are primarily conscious of our "presence" at the event. We are primarily conscious that "now" for us is "now" for them, despite differences in the sun's position. The real nuance to Virilio’s theory enters here: Real time is not, as one might suppose, the opposite of "delayed time." The difference between watching a real time broadcast of Princess Diana’s funeral and watching it on videotape at a later hour, for example, is not relevant to real time as a theoretical construct. Real time is, instead, opposed to "real presence"—a sense of local time and local place. While spectators or viewers partake of real time, a place of "here" gives way to the ever-present "now." Virilio argues that real time results in a loss of the spatial boundaries to which humans typically coordinate their bodies. But real time is also a result of a warped sense of what "present" can mean. Virilio points to Paul Klee for an articulation of the impact of real time on our sense of the present: 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 time are achieving. They kill "present" time by isolating it from its presence here and now for the sake of another commutative space that is no longer composed of our "concrete presence" in the world, but of a "discrete telepresence" whose enigma remains forever intact. ("Third" par. 5) This example appears in many places in Virilio’s work. Virilio argues that "Paul Klee hit the nail on the head" because murdering the now is precisely what Virilio says "teletechnologies of real time are doing: they are killing 'present' time by isolating it from its here and now, in favour of a commutative elsewhere that no longer has anything to do with our 'concrete presence' in the world" (Open 10). In a more consciously analytical approach, Virilio describes this phenomenon with some precision: Human beings exist in three dimensions of chronological time—past, present, and future. It is obvious that the liberation of the present—real time or world time—runs the risk of making us lose the past and future in favor of a presentification, which amounts to an amputation of the volume of time. Time is volume; it is not only space-time in the sense of relativity. It is volume and depth of meaning, and the emergence of one world time eliminating the multiplicity of local times is a considerable loss for both geography and history. (Politics 81) Real-time technologies (global broadcasting was a first step; interactive technologies only reinforces the effect) “eliminate the multiplicity of local times.” It remains for us to explicate what Virilio sees as this loss. Importantly, our entry into the mediascape of real time is described by Virilio as "pathological." In Open Sky, he laments: "I personally fear we are being confronted by a sort of pathology of immediate perception that owes everything, or very nearly everything, to the recent proliferation of photo-cinematic and video-infographic seeing machines" (Open 90). The primary effect of this psychosis is, in the end, neither a Nietzschean skepticism of these “seeing machines” nor radical doubt of the representations placed before us, but a disorientation. It is to the implications of this disorientation that we now turn. Phrased most baldly, Virilio claims that "the tyranny of real time is tantamount to a subjugation of the television viewer" (Politics 87). The disorientation which Virilio believes to be inherent in real time (as the common-sense orientation toward space described in Merleau-Ponty is eroded) becomes pervasive. As Virilio claims, "the conquest of panoptical ubiquity would lead to the conquest of passivity, with populations not so much going down in military defeat as in the past[,] but [by] succumbing to mental confusion" (Strategy 55). We are “mediatized” (in the Napoleonic sense) by the media technology, rather than by force. Virilio sees this disorientation and inevitable confusion as inherently dangerous for democracy: Specifically, there has been no analysis of the extraordinary revolution of long-distance control and destruction—a revolution whose historical importance is equal to that of the revolution in modes of production in the last century, but whose consequences for civil society and for democracy have not yet been fully acknowledged or evaluated. (Lost 129) It is not clear, of course, whether the proliferation of real-time technologies will lead to the “succumbing” of our population. It is clear that Virilio’s interest in the political implications of real-time media upon subjectivity and the political power of the individual are very much in tune with recent work in media studies. We turn, now, to placing Virilio more fully in the context of rhetorical studies and of media studies in the communication field.
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