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David Beard and Joshua Gunn
Political Implications Virilio looks to history not only to trace the evolving technology of perceptions, but also for an understanding of the political implications of these media technologies. His gaze extends back as far as ancient Rome, through the Enlightenment, to the present scene. He notes that, until recently, "to be mediatized meant literally being stripped of one’s immediate rights" (Art 6). Interestingly, Virilio points specifically to Napoleon's rhetoric for an illustration of mediatization. In his own ascension to power, Virilio argues, Napoleon mediatized certain princes, allowing them to keep their title without their power. Mediatization, as Virilio takes the term, is not only a characteristic of tyrants. Virilio finds that even in Greek antiquity: "the democrats always claim to be replacing brute physical force with a moral force allowed by a mass mediatization that flies in the face of the very concept of reality" (Art 30). Democracy, then, also depends on mediatization, or on the ascension to power of one group or individual, by virtue of the stripping away of another’s immediate rights. Those who rise to power in these conditions of mediatization can reshape the perceptions of those whom they have stripped from power. Perspective, or the structure of our perceptions through perspective, has been structured into power for centuries. Virilio looks to ancient civilizations for example, as he discusses the placing of military posts in clearings overlooking recently occupied land: Land clearing, the cultivation of the earth for subsistence, the receding of forest darkness, are in reality the creation of a military glacis as field of vision, of one of those frontier deserts spoken of by Julius Caesar, which, he says, represent the glory of the Empire because they are like a permanent invasion of the land by the dromocrat's look. (Speed 72-73) While this passage is complicated by Virilio’s use of “dromocrat” to refer to the figure of authority (a reference to Virilio’s thinking about “dromology;” see Kellner, who summarizes dromology as the study of “those instruments that accelerate and intensify speed and that augment the wealth and power of those groups who control them” [“Virilio, War, and Technology: Some Critical Reflections”]), the key insight we wish to draw from this passage is that the land is brought into line with the vision of the conqueror. Perspective becomes not merely a facet of the science of optics, nor an art technique, but instead an expression of power and a sign of dominance. Unsurprisingly,
Virilio takes these historical insights into "media" and
“perspective” and spins them into a heuristic for
contemporary
media studies. The media, far from serving a democratizing function,
benefits
from and so sustains the split between social groups. Virilio describes
the
trajectory of media and politics in American society as follows:
"American
democracy will make no real efforts to integrate its ethnic minorities,
its
factions, into a constant civilization, into a truly community-oriented
way of
life. For segregation is what sanctions the system's hegemony of the
media" (Speed 108). By perpetuating this division, by
dividing
those in power from those who have been "mediatized" and so
stripped
of their rights, the media "are able to control the social chaos
of
American panhumanity; they are the guarantors of a certain civic
cohesion, and
thus of civil security itself" (Speed 108).
One way to describe that civic cohesion is precisely as Caesar
did—but framing the land within a single perspective (the
perspective of
the conqueror). More than
any
other technology that enables the restructuring of perception and the
mediatizing of the individual, the current media technologies of
"real
time" have a tangible effect on our political power. [3]
Notes:
3. While Virilio contends that the majority of the media’s unrestricted power stems from
its ability to omit or distort the truth, he does acknowledge that certain groups can recraft
the media to their advantage. Virilio looks to the Palestinians for an example of this: "Whether
they horrify or become exemplary, the Palestinians are now the masters of an audio-visual empire,
of a State founded on roads, airways and images. They exist, somewhere, with a precarious and
phantasmal identity, deep in the memories of 400 to 500 million television viewers"
(Popular Defense 57). (back)
Background: Themes in the Work of Paul Virilio
Concluding Remarks: Cutting a New Path in Media
Studies and in Rhetorical Studies
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