journal of visual cultureVirilio’s Screen: The Work of Metaphor in the Age ofTechnological ConvergenceAnne Friedbergjournal of visual cultureCopyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)Vol 3(2): 183-193 [1470-4129(200404)3:2]10.1177/1470412904045027AbstractThis brief essay traces the evolving role of the screen in the writing ofhigh-speed theorist Paul Virilio. In Virilio’s writing, the screen serves asthe locus of lost dimensions of space and technological transforma-tions of time; it modifies our relation to space, is a surface-mount for its ‘accelerated virtualization’. If Virilio does not theorize the technological differences between film, television and the computer, Iargue, it is because, for him, the screen remains in a metaphoric register, a virtual surface which overrides any specificities of its mediaformation.Keywordsarchitectonics ●convergence ●screen ●VirilioIn some way, you can read the importance given today to glass andtransparency as a metaphor of the disappearance of matter. It anticipatedthe media buildings in some Asian cities with facades entirely made ofscreens. In a certain sense, the screen became the last wall. No wall outof stone, but of screens showing images. The actual boundary is thescreen. (Paul Virilio, 1993 interview: ‘Architecture in the Age of its VirtualDisappearance’)Virilio’s screen: is it a cinema, television, or computer screen? Does Virilioparse the media specificity of these screens, or does he subtly elide their difference? More importantly, in an era of technological convergence, does itmatter? As buildings are adorned with screens as exterior walls, as sports stadiums add Jumbotrons to the proscenium space of spectacle, as screensshow games to sport-spectators in a time-loop of instant replay and a cross-cut to its fans, as fighter pilots and military strategists conduct maneuvers onscreens with global positioning, as televisions have gaming consoles and eye-toys, as computers interface with other screens and digital archives, as PDAsbrowse the web, as cell-phones take and transmit photos, have the ‘screens’of these media lost their apparatical distinctions?1In the following short essay, I wish to disentangle Virilio’s screens and sug-gest that if Virilio does not theorize the technological differences betweenfilm, television and the computer, it is because, for him, the screen remainsin a metaphoric register, a virtual surface which overrides any specificities ofits media formation. Known for his theorization of the logic of speed, thetechnologies of war, and for the ‘opto-electronic’ mutation in the ‘logistics’of human perception produced by both, Virilio posits a new metaphysics: thescreen is the locus of lost dimensions of space and technological transforma-tions of time. It modifies our relation to space, is a surface-mount for its‘accelerated virtualization’ (1998/2000: 16).2But first: in order to place Paul Virilio’s writing in its intellectual trajectory –as part of a cumulatively built missile of 20th-century cultural critique – I suggest we return to an earlier writer who also attempted to incisively pin-point the spatial and temporal consequences of modern technology. EquallyFrench, uncannily prescient, reducible to the same initials (the paraph PV),the writings of Paul Valéry form an augury of a V-2, Paul Virilio.In a 1928 essay, ‘The Conquest of Ubiquity’, Valéry (1964[1928]) imagines ajournal of visual culture 3(2)184Figure 1 Tokyo screen. Photo: Anne Friedberg, 2000.future moment when, in push-button ubiquity, ‘works of art’ will ‘appear anddisappear at the simple movement of the hand’:Works of art will acquire a kind of ubiquity ... They will not merely existin themselves but will exist wherever someone with a certain apparatushappens to be ... Just as water, gas, electricity are brought into ourhouses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort,so we shall be supplied with visual and auditory images, which willappear and disappear at the simple movement of the hand, hardlymore than a sign ... I don’t know if a philosopher has ever dreamed ofa company engaged in the home delivery of Sensory Reality. (p. 226,emphasis added)Walter Benjamin (1969[1936]) uses a lengthy quote from this essay as an epi-grammatic launch to his own essay on the changing epistemology of ‘worksof art’. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ opens withValéry’s proclamation: ‘For the last twenty years, neither matter nor spacenor time has been what it was from time immemorial’ (p. 217, emphasisadded). In Valéry’s loose historiography, the first two decades of the twentiethcentury foretold ‘profound changes’.3 While Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art’ essayhas acquired its own ubiquity, one that has exceeded Paul Valéry’s work,Virilio channels both authors, taking their forecasts of the ‘profound change’affecting works of art to a more quotidian exponent. Virilio (1984/1991b: 72)cites Valéry’s passage in which ‘visual and auditory images ... appear and disappear’ as an ‘augury of telecommunications’.4For Virilio, new vectors ofspace–time–speed are produced as a result of transport and transmissiontechnologies: ubiquity meets instantaneity. Both Benjamin and Valéry empha-size the apparatus of delivery more than the site of display; Virilio’s discourseof dematerialization and disappearance foretells a new logic to the visible,framed and virtual, on a screen.Virilio began to diagnosis the architectonic consequences of the immaterial‘interface’ of television screens, computer terminals and video monitors inthe early 1980s. His writing is full of neologisms (‘tele-topographical’, ‘opto-electronic’, ‘the optic foyer’, ‘the cathode window’), paradoxes (‘withoutnecessarily leaving, everything ‘arrives’;5‘one day the day will come when theday won’t come’6), and some of the irritating unevenness manifest inpolemics by Baudrillard or McLuhan. Phrases appear and disappear in a fugalweave of intermittent and episodic argumentation; words are placed in italicized and bolded fonts for emphasis. In a tone of fin-de-siècle hyperbolefraught with loss and disappearance, Virilio (2001a) casts the screen as thesite of ‘the passage from something material to something that is not’ (p. 116).Virilio (1980/1991a) initiates his account of these changes in The
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