GREY ECOLOGY, Paul Virilio.

Atropos Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-9827067-3-2

It is now no longer necessary to measure the distance to stars

by Mariela Yeregui
Myself, I await the revelation (Paul Virilio)

A world full of devices. A hyperbolic ecosystem of gadgets for maximum portability that reaches the paroxysm of the techno-self-erotization. The devices are carried embedded into the body, they are manipulated, they move, they are implanted subcutaneously. Body and device are merged together. It is the loss of distance stated by Virilio. The need for a step back of the body regarding the device, a step back that entails a metaphysical dimension and an inevitable gesture: to transcend the tyranny of real time, to take a leap that allows to overcome the trans-appearance the appearance transmitted remotely in the dimension of the instance. All grandeur is in the leap, Virilio quotes Heidegger. I think what we need today is to take a step back, a step back for the victory and not for the end (p. 71). In this reality that does not consider mediations, the obsessive, frenzied and uncontrolled use of technologies that rest upon and over the perspective of real space so as to pave the way to the perspective of real time, simulation not of reality in the words of Baudrillard-, but of communication -the illusion of being communicated gets to extremes never conceived just 20 years ago. And this is precisely the gist of virilian dromology, it is this acceleration of reality through cinematic energy, thanks to the progress of electromagnetic transmissions, in comparison to paradigmatic concepts of the 19th century, as was the idea of transport related to kinetism and mechanical energy. In this context, materiality and shapes are replaced by the virtual and its rhythmic power. Rythmology replaces morphology. And in the central and liminal point of the cinematic universe, the photographic camera shows its impulse towards apotheosis, its supreme incarnation: the sense of the instant thus perverts and pollutes the notion of distance. This is then one of the most important vectors in this eclosion of disaster raised by Virilio. Far from an apocalyptic position1, it seems that this university of disaster mentioned by the authoreasess the way for proxemic 2 categories to end up annihilating themselves under the influence of the instant. But it is the same destruction that inaugurates the sense of revelation. The disaster happens in terms of thought. It is the disaster of distance (distance of space, of time, critical distance, distance of agents and of collective agencies, distance of matters, of ideas). It is not about an end but about the emergence of the finitude; Virilio will try to unveil this concept in the first part of the book -that collects three sessions of the seminar organized by the European
1

Although we could not say either that it is an integrated perspective in terms of Umberto Eco ("Apocalyptic and Integrated". Barcelona: Lumen. 1965) as Virilios thought goes beyond the surface of mass culture theory going deep into the depths of the production of the categories of thought and cognition. 2 I refer to notions of personal distances as well as territorial ones.

Graduate School-. In this sense, and much in the same analogous way as the movement towards the infra-thin in The Large Glass by Duchamp, the idea of revelation (and yet no more of revolution) receives the irruption of the accident of distance. It is then about an epistemic turn that allows us to deal with the finitude: the limit far beyond the limit. The world of the end, of finitude, is an open world for science and for thought. This is the accident of science. The accident of knowledge is an unparalleled event, asserts the author, thus removing any sign of negativity in his horizon of grey ecology, as much as thwarting certain hegemonic technocentrism. When Copernicus, right before his death in 1543, sent his famous book De Revolutionibus to print, in which he expected not only to defend the heliocentric system but also to elaborate a model to calculate the positions of stars, he did not envisage that the temporal contradiction would reduce the vastness of the world, its grandeur, to so little. The pollution of distances designs a horizon (or a not-horizon), a resignificance of space, the establishment of a kind of informational ether in which the categories space-time are diluted. It is, according to Virilio, a matter of approaching the limits and not the edges. And these limits converge in the negative horizon, a spherical horizon as that of the celestial objects. If the burst of distance as a concept, as a phenomenon, and as an experience, is so strongly bound to the ideas of speed and tyranny of real time, should not we consider as well the logic of pressure? asks Sean Smith3 in his paper. In effect, if the acceleration of particles in a volumetric context were incremented, there would be more collissions, thus increasing the pressure of this closed system. This new variable in the notion of accident would allow us to study deeply this notion of global real-time, where the motif of the bomb starting from Einsteins hypothesis of the three bombs (nuclear, informational and population)-, that crosses through the thought of the French theorist, acquires unique relevance in the cinematic strength of the trans-appearance of 9/11. The absolute real-time reinstates the continuum of disaster, in its most crude, tactile and pregnant aspect, and not simply in the visuality of its effects, of its vestiges. In that sense, dromology not only sketches a framework from which to classify what is real, and understand the irruption of the contemporaneous accident, but according to Hirsch4, it can be a heuristic tool in scientific research. Even provided network models that organize the information appear to be simple, they are, nevertheless, extremely complex (non-linear, multi-connectional, non-decomposable). The paradox lies in the fact that complexity is slower by definition: the processing time of complex problems assumes a slowness in the answer or solution. However, the world seems to accelerate in spite of the high complexity of the technosphere of the real. This complexity is, for Hirsch, an unequaled heuristic opportunity to give this step backwards that allows the identification of the accident to come and so anticipate the disaster. So the question is to make the complex more complex still, as a procedure of excitation of the system for the irruption of the fault. The more we know about the accident, the better equipped we will be as society to respond to future disasters, states Hirsch (p. 129).

3 4

SMITH, Sean: La Bombe Philosophique, pp. 97-113 HIRSCH, Michael: Complexity in the Age of Simplicity, pp. 115-130.

In this paroxysm of speed dealt with by Daniel Brittain5, taken as a motif Ballards already emblematic novel - Crash-, acceleration also reintroduces the sense of paradox. It is not now a methodological paradox as in the case of the act of complexity as a heuristic resource, but as a paradox that acts upon reality itself. The repetition of the absurd of the accident, and the exacerbation of its occurrence, produces a point of non-possibility of occurrence. When Thrower6 asks himself (speaking of Quentin Compson, the character of The Sound and the Fury, by Faulkner) why the units of time are the hours, minutes and seconds, and the lifes remain outside this measurment of time, we can look backwards and go back to weave together and give sense to several of the ideas developed by Virilio in the first part of his Grey Ecology. The accident happens before we know it has happened, states Drew Burk in the introduction (p. 16). Maybe due to this it is impossible to take life as a measuring pattern. The accident=the final gesture=death, is the cause that appears a posteriori of effects, when the vital happening has already taken place. The causes follow the effects. Life is not a measurement pattern because it can only be seized through the effect (=death), as much as the bodies in the realm of speed cannot realize creative looks and artistic shapes because they are unable to survive in this frantic passage where the phenomenon is lost, suffocated by calculations and the accumulation of information. As Adams7 suggests, returning to Virilio, it is about trying aesthetics to intersect again in the political and social space. A space that favours proximity and communication, and one that rescues the body from the beating infringed by the dictatorship of real time. As such, the so-called pitiful arts are those that would reinscribe the body in the hic et nunc of its animal, social and territorial dimension. I close the book. Take down notes. I try do draw a possible image that accounts for the dromologic universe. Several ideas remain echoing, but above everything I cannot stop relating Virilios ideas with some kind of frustration produced by those projects that include portable and mobile technological devices (tablets, telephones, mobile phones, GPS, etc.), that strengthen mobility starting from spatial ubiquity and the dynamics in real-time, and strongly based on the concept of locativity. Thus, there arise several questions when facing discourses based evidently on the mobile characteristic of the devices, which update due to their own proper nature those concepts concerning geographies, places, the experience in space and the role of individuals and their bodies in the territories. Perhaps, as a way to affirm the field, and as an exploratory mode of languages, possibilities, discourses and technologies, locative art was centred in operations close to localization and mapping. In this sense, the territory is not questioned but traced. Localizing is not creating, geo-referencing is inscribing, setting up boundaries. The space is marked in the sense of deleuzian tracing-, but it does not become territory. The territory, as a site of diverse collective agencies that connect, produce and display critical thinking, escapes any glimpse of confinement. Transcending locativity and causing the territory to be the real framework for possible dialogues, far beyond the more or less sophisticated functions of the devices which are not always
5 6

BRITTAIN, Daniel: Crash: Ballard, Virilio, Bataille, pp. 131-144. THROWER, Jon: Apocalypse Forever Part 7: Paul Virilio and the Tale of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing, pp. 145-151. 7 ADAMS, Jason: The Aesthetics of Resistance, pp. 85-95.

accessible to a vast community level-, would eventually give way to a horizon in which the work of the bodies and the construction of territories can impose new zones of debate. Such an operation would certainly deconstruct, from the artistic practice, certain technoscientific discourses that are usually considered as fixed, breaking down the teological sense of the mobile tools and regaining the sense of distance. Distance as a possibility of constructing experience (rather than experiment), of constructing narratives, of integrating the other into my story. [] a practical consequence of the emergence of a third and final horizon of indirect visibility (after the apparent and deep horizon): a transapparent horizon spawned by telecommunications, that opens up the incredible possibility of a "civilization of forgetting," a live (live-coverage) society that has no future and no past, since it has no extension and no duration, a society intensely present here and there at oncein other words, telepresent to the whole world. (p.25)8

VIRILIO, Paul (1997). Open Sky (trans. Julie Rose). London: Verse