Paul Virilio [Reading Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, 1997] When I read Marshall McLuhan in 1967 I was horrified at the world he described coming into being, the eclipsing of print at the hands of electronic media. I could find no way to protest or deny what he was saying; the handwriting was on the walls for all to see. At the time it confirmed me in my sense of not truly belonging to the present, desiring instead what the world was discarding and drifting further from what I had preferred as reality. I could only see myself as an “old” leftist, but unlike them I was too young to take a stance opposing youth rebellion, which embraced the media-oriented new world.

What Virilio describes in the current world is much the same as the earlier McLuhan but I read him with a different response. Yet there is no real shift here. McLuhan apparently welcomed the transformation as a utopia coming into being, shifting from his critique of advertising in the fifties to an optimism regarding the new medium of television and its inevitability (he coined the phrase “the global village”). As an admirer of technological advance, what he saw as passé was anything resisting the dissolution of the “hot” linear media, which implied a subject standing apart from content rather than merging with it as with the cool tv-based media. As that resistant and anachronistic subject myself I could not see a means of resistance, felt disabled, speechless before the critique of speech itself. Virilio, on the other hand, (a committed Catholic like McLuhan, incidentally) did and still does speak and critique this development as of questionable value. His analysis tells us that the global village is not the boon to mankind but its destroyer, instead of expanding the universe for us it has been closing it off.

My receptiveness to this today is partly the difference of the sidedness of the two writers, my sense of being denied by McLuhan and emboldened, given my voice by Virilio. But it also rests on a real change over the last forty years. As with the shift in the appeal of Communism and the Soviet Union for the Left, an embarrassment from which it has not recovered, we have to look at how the sides themselves changed. In the sixties technological progressivism, faith in its juncture with science, was still alive and favored the electronic media as an ally, evident in “the whole world is watching” theme of marches and occupations of buildings by young radicals. It was as if television, with which the younger generation had grown up, could not help but be on the side of positive world change, at least if one were fed the right images, which was the function of those activists. The war-weary parental generation had stamped “children are the hope of the world” on their progeny; part of that hope was the medium that had entranced those children in the fifties. Short of nuclear weaponry, which did not fit the schema, only reactionaries would have denied that whatever new technology provides is for the good of mankind.

The assumption of civil rights and anti-war body-on-the-line fighters was also a childlike trust that adult culture could and should reflect “mankind”, a positive sign wherever it appears in the decade. If there is injustice and evil in the world it is only because a handful of people have hidden it from view, and so the work of freedom and anti-war fighters is to expose and publicize it, converting the innocent and ignorant (southern whites) into knowing opponents of evil. Once people are shown the truth of evil how could they not condemn it? (The unresisting population of Germany during the Nazi era was not taken into account in this illusion.) Exposure and publicity had been the traditional role of progressive muckrakers; however, print reaches only the rational mind whereas television impacts the emotional body which must be moved. The image alone—especially the moving image of television nightly news, practically immediate to the event and giving a sense of participation that was virtual—was essential to the conversion. “I was blind but now I see”—the Evangelical and Enlightenment "dare to know" embraced here. Conversion was the model of political change, by the direct means of a police nightstick for the radicals and by the tv image for the passive masses. The only recently discovered magic of the tube, its ability to create a trance-like gaze and credulousness beyond the imagining of religion, seemed to be on the same side as the mass political movements of the past. It was an apparent irony that the democratized culture-in-a-box which the liberal power elite sanctioned for the populace and could not itself resist, the box that true Americans were enshrined in their homes like a gift they were unworthy to deserve, was actually a secret weapon on the side of those who expected the overthrow of that elite. The new world of justice was one that not only included the revolutionary cool media but would rest upon it. Exposure would be the means, and if “now I can see for myself” was not convincing then post-hypnotic suggestion would do the trick. Any critic of television as a medium, it was assumed by young radicals, was not only curmudgeon but was opposed to the kind of political and social change required by and promised by history.

If there is little positive, utopian vision credible today it is not simply that the utopias of Communism and Revolution have collapsed. Any sense that there is a future for which we can organize and work towards has withered in the face of the all-present Now of instantaneous communication, which has swallowed up both past and present. This is Virilio’s argument applied to the Left, which shifted long ago from its critique of popular media to an embrace of it, that is, it critiques content, not the media itself. It waits in the wings to be called on as a talking head, competing for precious air time. If it is commonly said today that there is no longer a left and right of a political spectrum, such that the Left can only be self-styled and protesting too much, this is part of the explanation. The Left, with its Marxist/scientistic background is scared to be accused of anti-technologist Luddism, and can’t develop a critique of the present that might include themselves or end up divisive. So my question is, can we single out the technological advance of weaponry for opprobrium and yet uphold the rest of it as benevolent to humankind, and if we do find a way to critique the submergence of science under technology can we face the charge of clinging to the past?  ¶ 10:29 AM 0 comments