Paul Virilio

The Visual Crash

Developing today, alongside classical TELE­

VISION, is a global TELE-SURVEILLANCE

network that is fast outstripping the familiar

role of the pre-existi ng MASS MEDIA. It is

irnperative that we try to come to terms with

this development iml1l diately. One approach

is to take up and hoi forth the inflation of

stations and . n of "audio­

visua I services." It is more usefu I, however,

to consider this sudd~n rnultimedia OVER­

EXPOSURE in tile light of the globalization of

time, more precisely, the advent of universal,

REAL TI ME that has recently abol ished the

historical primacy of local time. The present

rneans of fragmentation, or televisual inter­

ference, is fi rst and foremost the prol iferation

of LIVE CAMERAS on the INTERNET, a pro­

Iiferation that has hard Iy been discussed th us

far. The new AUDIOVISUAL CONTINUUM is

no longer so much the 24/7 news channels,

108 I 02 SURVEILLANCE AND PUNISHMENT

which have become more or less standard, say so is certainly not to say enough. It used

as the multiplication of ONLINE CAM- to be that shows were transmitted only ERAS installed in more and more regions at such-and-such an hour and could be

ofthe world and available for consultation picked up ?nly by following the "program." and observation via home computer. Even Now this arrangement has been challen-

CNN is outmatched. In reality, these ged in favor of a previously unheard of "micro-cameras," whose capabilities will possibility, permanent direct access. This

soon be comparable to the CAMSCOPES arrangement cuts against the standard of professional camera operators, repre- practice of presenting the news at fixed sent the overcoming of the classical tele- intervals, such as CNN thoughtto do some

visual optic. twenty years ago with evident success.

As a matter of fact, we are moving, VIDEO_SURVEILLANCE and its regime whether we know it or not, toward a CRASH ojcontrol anticipated this situation, which

OF IMAGES. The multiplication of news we might call the ubiquity of the live. But

flashes and the growing disinterest of the the use of this tele-technology was limited

public in general-interest channels stand as to the control oflocal surroundings: public forewarnings of this trend.' It has become buildings or certain neighborhoods and

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more th~m evident that the competitiOn of places of circulation. In fact, but for mili­

icons is the order ofthe day. Like all things tary espionage with its first satellites, none

in the era of the planetary market, this could yet lay claim to perpetual OMNI-competition has become global. So doing, VOYANCE. Today, however, the banaliza­

it has proved destabilizing for the prevailing tion or popularization ofglobal surveillance, market oftelevised images, in other words, or to put it another way the DEMOCRA­

-------t---~---

the present iconography ofinformation. TIZATION OF VOYEURISM on a plane-According to Gaston Bachelard, "The tary scale, has overexposed even our most

destiny oj every image is magnification." If private activities. So doing, it has exposed us

this thesis is right, the ultimate point of to a major iconic risk. In the best case, only

growth of the internet's global optic will marketing specialists can gauge the ampli­deliver a fatal blow to the classical news tude of this risk; in the worst, the military,

networks' model of VISION AT A DI- investigators chargedwith tracking unlawful

STANCE. This blow will be fatal to the activities, political police, and automatized

extent that it realizes the essence of the systems of information collection. now-notorious movement of GLOBALI- For all of these reasons, the MULTI­

ZATION, namely, TIME. Political geography MEDIA represent the explosion ojthe tradi­has come to lose a great part of its geo- tional model oj the media - its undoing. It

strategic importance with the decline of has not yet been possible to measure the

the nation-state and the increase ofdecen- dimensions of this undoing, however, since

tralization and claims of autonomy. Yet it the different television networks (public or

is global time that is the unique authentic private) have all tried to infiltrate the com­innovation in the globalization ofcommer- puter screen in order to stay in business.

cial, cultural, and political exchanges. SCREEN AGAINST SCREEN, the home

The new market ofvision is characterized computer terminal and the television moni­by RENDERING TO SIGHT whatever is tor find themselves in a face-off for the

happening in the world in the present dominationofthemarketoJglobalperception. instant - the "tele-present." The panoptical This is a MARKET OF THE ICON rather

character of this "market of domestic than the IDOL; control ofit will open a new tele-surveillance" far exceeds that of the era whose novelty will be as much ethical television of the last fifty-plus years. Yet to as aesthetic.

I 10

Paul Virilio The Visual Crash

The transformation of the television

into a low-end computer monitor, or to

inverse the terms; the portable computer into a video monitor, effectively trans­

forms a personal, domestic device into an

apparatus ofbehavior control, a post allowing

us to see, in the very same moment, what­ever is happening around the globe. But

there is a price, which is to agree in

return (in a counter-image) to be ourselves

visually controlled, and now not only by institutions specializing in investigation,

whether police or military surveillance, but

by anybody and everybody. As several stars victimized by the papa­

razzi put it in reflecting on I'affaire Diana,

what is unbearable is not the unauthorized

photograph, but always to be under watch.

Is it really credible that the stores of

encyclopedic knowledge, textual and nume­rical, that presently make up the basis ofthe

CD ROM or Internet will be able to resist the power of animation? On the WEB as else­

where, "a picture is worth a thousand words." Once the craze for the net has run

its course, then, the image will naturally

take over. This will be, however, an altogether

different image, to be precise that of the ultimate perspective: THE PERSPEC­

TIVE OF REAL TIME, an event whose

political and historical importance will

be exactly analogous to the invention of one-point linear perspective in the Italian

Renaissance. To put it another way, should we

seriously believe that the innumerable mass of "information-poor" will take to

surfing the WEB and thereby become

INFO-RICH by a difficult passage of

apprenticeship into the means of master­

ing the net? By all evidence, no. Instead, the only way for such people to participate

in the global information economy will be

as it always has been: by the image! What was true in the Middles Ages for

the Gothic with its stained-glass windows, its frescos, its sculptures, its tapestries, its

110 I 02 SURVEILLANCE AND PUNISHMENT

illuminated prints, etc., will be likewise

true for the Gothic of the electronic icon in

the era of the great global optic.

Presently, the progress of LIVE CAM­

ERAS on the internet is such that it need

not even be promoted. But what they show

is not so much "the accidental" as the

accident of self-exposure. To put it the

other way around, they do not explicitly show overexposure, but show that it is

suffered. In this way, the very evidence for the coming great crash of electronic

imagery occults itself. In fact, overexposure is a necessity of

global competition. The many LIVE CAM­

ERAS serve as rearview mirrors to elimi­

nate the blind spots of classical television. Once the global market came to function in

real time and the importance of economic

geopolitics receded, OVEREXPOS URE became indispensable to the market's

operation. The competition of diverse sources ofvisual and audiovisual informa­

tion followed as a result. Hence also the crisis state of the television networks,

which have tried by all means possible to

invade the WEB. So doing, however, they

run a considerable risk to themselves. Once mass television gives way to self-

directed consultation, the networks will be

vulnerable to a visual crash at the hands of

"small shareholders" in the market of images, capable of withdrawing at will

from the screens ofthe televisual industry. Whereas classical television "focalized"

the attention ofthe mass oftele-spectators, the Internet's planetary optic allows us to

glimpse the unforeseen possibility of

actually being a "fly on the wall" and as

such in a position of control. The passive

tele-spectator suddenly becomes a tele­actor in determining his or her field ofper­

ception, kaleidoscoping in and out. The ef­

fect will be to allow us to escape from the MAJOR COMPANIES of the televisual

industry, and also to displace advertising, in this case from the television screen to

the web terminal, as it was once displaced

from the poster on village walls to an inset

in a newspaper, toward radio and beyond

to the audiovisual commerciaL The urgency to overcome the old "one­

point linear perspective" with its singular

vanishing point is to be explained by

all these factors. They favor, instead, the development at a global scale of a new

perspective, that of real time, where all points vanish at once, mere pixels of

digitized imagery. But this space-time is less an analogical RE-PRESENTATION

than a pure and simple numerical PRE­

SENTATION of the places, objects, or

persons in question. Such direct LIVE

COVERAGE does away with interpreter and commentator to bring the interlocutors

together face-to-face. Tele-surveillance is

accordingly analogous to the telephone ­as ifthe striking failure ofthe "visiophone"

had only dissimulated its coming genera­

lization on the internet!

to learn what is happening in the world, but can turn on the radio or the television,

we will be able to consult the WEB site of

the region in question as a security guard

monitors the surveillance cameras in a supermarket, or as the astronomer wise in

the ways of tele-astronomy no longer goes

to the Paris observatory, but thanks to

computers "tele-observes" the firmament from an observatory in Chile.

The GREAT OPTIC of domestic tele­surveillance is all that and more. What

was, and is still today, the prerogative of the military-industrial complex is now in

the course of becoming public domain.

Such a development has its advantages, to

be sure; but ubiquity and instantaneous­ness also bring risks.

"In a totally computerized market with

500,000 terminals around the world, the

Asian crash happened everywhere at once," a

French trader remarked. But imagine

what will happen when there will be -------t------~

At bottom, the net, developed by the

Pentagon in order to resist the electro­

magnetic effects of nuclear war, is no

more than a perfected TELE-VISIO­PHONE. It is useful, to be sure, to post

data; but it can also be used, by means of

electronic signals (electro-acoustic and

electro-optic), to transmit virtual imagery

in real time, thereby overthrowing the principle of VISION AT A DISTANCE of

the old telescone and television. 2

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Let us imagine, for example, the instal­lation of thousands, indeed millions of

LIVE micro-cameras around the world.

When something unexpected or important

happens in a distant country, the "inter­netter," weary of waiting for the next

news flash or the 8 o'clock news (6 o'clock

in the United States), will consult the site

of the WEBCAM in question in order to see what is happening right there, that very

instant. As for journalists - they will speak

of the event without having to turn to

reporters on the ground. Just as we no

longer have to wait for the daily newspaper

500,000 or even 5 million LIVE CAM­ERAS throughout the world and billions of

"internetters" capable of observing these

cameras via home computer. Then there will be a VISUAL CRASH the likes of

which we have never seen. From this

point, the so-called "tele-vision" will give

way to the general TELE-SURVEILLANCE of the world; and the much-discussed virtual bubbles ofthe financial markets will

be replaced by visual bubbles in the collec­

tive imagination. The upshot will be the risk foreseen by none other than Albert

Einstein in the 1950s, the explosion of an INFORMATION BOMB.

If today the irrational is becoming

more and more prevalent in the world's

various financial markets, it will spread yet further tomorrow via the globalization ofthe

collective imagination. The multiplying effect of the old television, responsible for

the Rodney King controversy, the Simpson circus, and l'affaire Diana, will be infinitely

expanded by the supersaturating character

of global tele-surveillance.

I 1

Paul Virilio The Visual Crash

"The generalization ofindividual perspec­tives bearing on one and the same object," wrote an analyst from the Centre National

des Recherches Scientifiques at the time of the Asian crash, "engenders on the whole a

situation of instability. The issue of many

rational actions is a generalized irration­

ality.,,3 The future of liNIVERSAL AD­0011'1/11,:, ') :'-~()\/erpn~', 1 :~}~1", (l';o ~eponeCf C:'j t: riC lJ::tiOUUk:,

VERTISING will unfold according to this same dynamic. At this hour of the sover­

eignty of GLOBAL TIME and the "direct"

over LOCAL TIME (whose former primacy extends beyond memory), the next stage

in the development of "interactive" adver­

tising between businesses and elients is already discernible; and the groundwork

for "comparative" advertising pitting brand

against brand, once so feared, is in place.

A civil war is upon us, a commercial guerilla war with capital as its weapon, such as the

European Council is about to authorize. In

this extreme moment ofGLOBALIZATION, the space ofadvertising is no longer limited

to product placement in the movies or spots

on television; its SPACE IS THE REAL SPACE-TIME OF ALL COMMUNICATION.

"Communication becomes a market whose commerce is the visible," writes Bernard

Noel, "since the image is its only product.

This market encompasses the entire econ­

omy, but in order that it work to perfection

the free circulation of images must not be

in t~e least hi~dered.,,4 We return here to th~"th~ir{e b"fthe deregulation of the icon.

"From this point, the merchandise ofcom­

munication will be no more than a mental merchandise," he goes on, "and the society

that will be established will be based upon

acquiescence to the evidence." Noel con-

eludes: "By the commerce of the image, the society of communication will have

realized what no authoritarian regime

had succeeded in creating by ideology: a

natural affiliation." In this event, the PAN0 PTIC optic will

have come to appear more comfortable than common reality. To make re-presenta-

Hon the ultimate presentation of the world

112 I 02 SURVEILLANCE AND PUNISHMENT

aims to make of appearance a substitute

reality. The implication is that the image coincides with its subject, that there is no

longer the least INTERVAL between the two - and that all meaning is visible. Thus,

since INTERFACE assumes the role, in

real time, of the SURFACE of things, hold­

ing themselves apart from one another in

the space of the world, "coincidence takes the place ofcommunication.,,5

In this way, the deregulation of the

commerce of appearances terminates in the DEREALIZATION of the very things

either able to be seen in the present instant

(landscapes, places, peoples) or acquired (the products of post-industrial society).

Such is the "accident of accidents" of real

time. After the acceleration of history de­

nounced fifty years ago by Daniel Hal€~vy,

we have to do today with the sudden

acceleration ofreality!

Today, virtual inflation concerns not only the economy of products, the "finan­

cial bubble," but the understanding of our

relation to the world. For this reason, systemic risk is no longer limited to the

failure ofbusinesses and banks (vulnerable to chain reactions, as we have witnessed in

Asia). It seems to me that what we have to

fear in addition is a collective loss of sight,

a blinding ofhumanity, the unprecedented

possibility of a defeat of the facts, and

accordingly a disorientation in our relation to the real.

The VISUAL CRASH is equivalent to

a failure of the phenomena, a failure from which only DISINFORMATION (econ­

omic or political) will be able to profit.

The analogical will cede its rights to the

numerical; the dawning power to transmit more and more by means ofless and less

will allow us to accelerate, or telescope, our

relation to reality. The condition of these

advances, however, will be to agree to the growing impoverishment of sensible

appearances. The progressive DIGITIZATION of

information (visual, auditory, tactile, and

olfactory) proceeds hand-in-hand with

the decline of immediate sensations.

Thus the analogical resemblance of the

NEAR-AT-HAND will eventually be over­

taken by the numerical verisimilitude of

distance, and of all distances....

98

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