Virilio

And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound. The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.

The first anniversary of the beginning of the 'Gulf War' was a welcome occasion to once again take stock. And once more the entire paradoxical character of this undoubtedly drastic historical event came to light: its undecidability.Whereas, on the one hand, there seem to be only winners i.e. on either side of the newly marked Kuwaiti border there is only mention of victories, and the old balance of power triumphs, on the other hand, the economic and ecological consequences of the battles can only be seen as a global loss.

Ranking this time among the clear winners of the war are, along with the armaments industry, media theoreticians and, in first place, undoubtedly Paul Virilio.
For more than ten years he has repeatedly pointed out the intrinsic interconnection between media and military technology in his works on war and cinema, on the disappearing of the world in the state of its acceleration, on replacing seeing with machines and the levelling out of spatial and temporal differences. His predictions that the logistics realised by means of visual machines, corresponds to the spatio-temporal perception of modern or postmodern systems of arms, has now been confirmed: the Gulf War was - there is overall agreement on this point - the first totally electronic war waged at real time speed and settled at the 'fourth front', the orbital front next to those of earth, water and air, of satellite-backed communication systems. The conclusions Virilio draws for his predictions from this growth in authenticity (real time) in his latest diary-like commentary on the events of the Gulf War are, however, in no way determined by a feeling of satisfaction, but rather amount to the traumatic certainty that the apocalyptic end is closer than ever. As a fascinated observer, sitting spellbound in front of the CNN-cabled screen, he no longer knows whether the picture he is seeing is not being directly transmitted by video camera from the rocket which is approaching him and which, as in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, always strikes before it is perceived.

And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood.

According to Heidegger, fear is a basic state of being anticipating death in order to draw up life's possibilities. In the age of electronic data direct transmissions, this turns into the cynical insight that war is always seen too early, but the enemy's weapons too late. The heroism of existential temporality perishes on what Virilio unmasks as tyranny of real time. The decisive step - across the Rubicon between 'desert shield' and 'desert storm' - has made clear that the world-wide political balance of an order founded on deterrence has been declared null and void. The relative speed of the transport and
deployment of arms has given way to the absolute speed of telecommunicative surveillance and battle control. Whereas tactical wars proceeded from the defensive power of fixed places, and strategic wars relied on the mobility of the destructive forces, the logistical war has left behind all space orientation. It is no longer the physical strike power which is decisive, but solely the availability of information or the speed of its processing and transmission. Following the polar and dual clash of the territorial struggle, it is now the digital blitzkrieg which dominates for the calculability of data: the battle of the integrated switching circuits.

This meant, in the concrete case of Iraq, that in view of the reconnaissance superiority of the Allies i.e. of the minute time-span between enemy detection and reaction, Iraq was not even able to deploy the vast part of its arms systems. The pictures taken by invisible satellite cameras and transmitted by imperceptible waves and rays, provide the more superior ammunition of the electronic war. In this respect, Virilio sees in the military logistics of perception only a special case of total control by means of 'viewing machines' in the post-industrial teletopic 'metacity'.
Mass warfare is the teleactive accident by which, at the same time, those theological qualities are unleashed which are inherent in the global interlacing of the medial information system: the ubiquity, instantaneity, directness, allsight and omnipresence of the quasi-divine camera eye.
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And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters.''

The first victim of post modern warfare is not only truth but also reflection on truth. The decisive consequence for Virilio of the 'real time theatre' of permanent live transmission as staged by CNN boss Ted Turner, is sacrificing the essential time of reflection for the imperative necessity of topicality and proximity. The possibility of a deferring distancing, as exists in delayed and repeated transmission, is extinguished in the focus of the monochronistical presence of direct transmissions. The viewer at the screen may be present just as he is at the football stadium, and can satisfy his appetite, greedy for sensation, in a voyeuristic manner but, due to the topicality shock of the television emergency, there is no examination of the absorbed facts. Virilio talks here of a time filter melting down the temporal dimensions of the past and the future in the imaginary a topical focus of a fleeting present, a mutation of time to 'duration without duration'. The facts dissolve, as it were, in the directness of the electromagnetic presence, they cannot be distinguished from fictions, just as the video images of the current military actions are identical with the virtual realities of war-games simulations.

For Virilio, the main task of electronic real time war reporting is a 'contamination' of the awareness - in the dual sense of a detemporalizing compression of representation and presentation and an apocalyptic contamination by the nuclear fusion of tactical and informal images. This confusion between the television screen, which is meant to inform the public, and the monitor, directing the weapon, is consciously intended, for to the same extent at which the directly transmitted public image arouses the illusion of participation in the event, the differentiation of an experiencing public is made monopolistically impossible. In the isolation of his tele-existence, the individual viewer is immobilized or paralysed by the visual drug. The war of images is waged simultaneously at
the enemy and the home front: the contaminated eye of the viewer, tuned in to parallel channels, is dazzled by the explosion of the shots aimed at the enemy, the victim of which the eye itself becomes.
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And the fourth angel sounded, and the third part of the sun was smitten, and the third part of the moon, and the third part of the stars; so as the third part of them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part of it, and the night likewise.''

Virilio's Reflections on the Gulf War - and as such they are seen expressly against the repeatedly staged cnn tele-show - bury a further illusion: the repeated conviction of a democratization of information, such as is repeatedly connected to the new media. In contrast to the Vietnam war, which was waged, as it were, at the two incongruent fronts of state strategy and public reporting, the war against Iraq stood out due to simultaneous action concerning information policy, to which the freedom of the media compulsorily fell victim. There was literally nothing to add to the official statements or live transmissions of general Schwarzkopf.
Virilio does not however see a mere censorship problem in this general black out of the civil data flow: the dissimulation of facts is in itself part of the visual logistics at the front line. In the age of total visibility by mechanical 'monitoring' systems of an ubiquitous securing of evidence, there is nothing left to see or, strategically, everything depends on the virtual representation of a synthetic image being made to disappear, on screening being total.

The epitome of this new strategy of 'furtiveness' is the new F-117 bomber. Its ability to deceive the enemy radar system by far outweighs its destructive potential and even it mobility. It fulfills the old dream of being untraceable, with no image and in particular with no reflection in the enemy's mirror. The technical realisation of these aesthetics of disappearing thereby makes use of the principle of information itself. The old art of warfare of traps, cunning and deceptions is brought to the point of culmination so that information is not veiled or denied, but that an excess of information does not so much deceive as disappoint i.e. confuse by deception, the decision between topical presentation and virtual representation. In the chaos of probability, anything becomes possible and nothing is true. In the night of the electronic absolute, all missiles are grey and lies themselves are media-technical reality.

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And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.''

The disappearing of things behind their image reproductions and simulations suggests an appeal to the perceptive capacity of the eye. And yet no organ of perception is so hard done to in post modern warfare as this one. Don't trust your eyes is consequently the categorical imperative of Virilio's analyses. For it is precisely ocular optics, which played such a paramount role in the tactical and strategic management of war, which meets its limitations in communication-technical logistics. Taking aim, the basic function of belligerent aggression has doubled in the electronically armed 'seeing without looking', or has relinquished itself in a way to the detection and transmission mechanisms of viewing-machines so that the human eye, dazzled by the spectral ghosts of the flickering screens, is able to perceive only with the aid of remote-controlled video prostheses.

The decisive factor in modern warfare is taking indirect aim by the medial camera eye, the field of perception of which is built up by electromagnetic waves and with light velocity. The pilot's act of taking direct aim in the cockpit of the new fighter bombers, is consequently doubled by him lowering his glance to the monitor, on which the evaluation of the observation data appears in real time by means of the video and camera system on board. In view of the wealth and the speed of the data flow, the entire power of decision lies in the hands of the electronic information processing which can also respond on its own to the doubling of the enemy object as real presence and as virtual representation of a simulative, electromagnetic delusion.
Virilio sees in the teletopic doubling or coupling of active front events and receptive television, only a third equivalent of the replacing of direct perception by telematically transmitted video images.
The key to hyperreal reality lies in the hands of a hypermedial, artificial intelligence of machines, which the perceptive configuration of the present has to thank.
c3, Command, Communication, Control, plus Intelligence, reads the corresponding Pentagon formula which relies completely on the strike power of fully computerised calculation and decision. Just as the fighter pilot can no longer steer his plane and its arsenal of weapons by eye, but only controls at the monitor the automated piloting processes of the very high speed integrated circuits, war management at the highest level is also left to the silicon intelligence of microchips. And the last word is not spoken by a commander, in sovereign charge of the state of emergency, but by a doomsday machine evaluating satellite pictures.

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And the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar which is before God, saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet, Loose the four angels, which are bound in the great river Euphrates.''

In view of the 'clean' information wars of virtual images and simulated battles, the question remains as to the function of the 'dirty' thermodynamics of the gunsmoke, the pillars of smoke and the visible or invisible piles of corpses. There are many attempts at explanation, from the power-political confrontation between north and south to the economic necessity of emptying the arsenals.
Virilio attempts again in this context to provide an answer within the total framework of cybernetic functioning: if there is a message to this media war, it is not the information on the real battles, but the advertising for the virtuality of future wars.

It may sound cynical, but an electronic war also needs its experimental field, its test phase, something beyond mere laboratory conditions. The logistic coupling or cabling of the front screen with the home screen allows this to become at once a commercials show experienced simultaneously and world-wide for new media technologies, outweighing all political and economic aspects. Quite apart from their use for civil areas of application – in his works Friedrich Kittler analysed the long tradition of the control of civil technology by means of military technology – this means above all, demonstrating precision technology, which, as it were, allows a miniaturising of the world war to certain zones of combat. Virilio reminds us in this context of the much-used surgical imagery, of which the figurativeness of the 'clean incisions' itself threatened to annul the old logics of deterrence of preventing the use of atomic weapons. Spatial reduction and temporal intensification allow this 'promotion' campaign to become, at the same time, one for the feasibility of wars. In this respect Virilio plays on the double meaning of the word 'promotion', not only that of advertising, supply, but also that of advancing, causing. Similarly, the 'image capacity' transmitted is not only meant in the technical sense as 'high definition', but also in the linguistic use of the advertising clips as the ability of the image material to affect the viewer's emotional readiness to respond.

At the end of the Coppola film Apocalypse Now, Marlon Brando speaks of horror having a face and of it being a matter of making a friend of this face: the pictures transmitted by CNN have shown the friendly face of war.

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And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud; and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire; and he had in his hand a little book open; and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth, and cried with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth; and when he had cried, seven thunders uttered their voices.''

Virilio's chroniques de guerre differ from his earlier analyses of technological revolutions: more than ever they adopt a moral opposite standpoint. Whereas, up to now, he had ruthlessly provided the present with the catastrophic diagnosis of a fury of the disappearing of body, time and space, without showing a solution to the accelerating disaster, since the Gulf War Virilio has been asking for resistance to real time terror and the monochronical news filter of the live shows. What he is asking for is an Ecology of the Media, lining up against the fusion and confusion of actual reality and simulated figurativeness, of real presentation and virtual representation, revoking the fatal idolatry of acceleration, of weightlessness.

When wording a corresponding programme for the cleansing of the informationally polluted or contaminated news channels, Virilio, the professed Catholic, likes to revert to the apocalyptic tone known from former texts. The total electronic war flooding man's consciousness by the delusions of virtual cyberspace, paralysing man under the sign of absolute speed, and with its teletopic and teleactive sinking into meaninglessness and indifference, virtually depicts the perfect 'programming of the apocalypse'. As well as the urbane disaster scenario of a 'Lebanonizing' of the metropoles, Virilio does not forget to commemorate the disbandonment of all national borders and the devastations thereby arising by the invading 'hordes'. Except that the apocalyptic horsemen of the present time ride on the waves of light and laser rays, the dazzling over-intensity of which plunges everything into darkness.

Rhetorically Virilio exhausts all his powers to bring together cold media technology with Manichaean and Gnostic motifs - without forgetting the allusions to the Egyptian cult of the dead. Even speculations relating to number mysticism are technically substantiated, such as the historical turn of the palindromic year 1991 by the count down of the cinematographically reversed study of time. In the telematic obliteration of time, Virilio sees the millenary return to zero approaching, or he can say, based on Nestroy: ''In short, whether one looks up or down, one can see that we're heading straight for doom.

Angstlust, enjoyment and excitement combined with fear, and regression are the two values of the Virilioic double bind'', which, on the one hand, seen from a Gnostic point of view, cannot have the seven seals removed quickly enough as deliverance from sham, but, on the other hand, in the words of Bonhoeffer, so esteemed by Virilio, knows all directness to be delusion. The indirectness Virilio is asking for as a contrast to this, is the salvation of Jesus Christ: his kingdom does not, however, belong to this world.

translation ann thursfield