...
Nevertheless, _Polar Inertia_ is an
important book for beginning to assess the revolutionary
cultural impact of digital *visionics* in media studies, for
affirming the crisis of representation and ambiguity
surrounding the factual in the visual domain, and for
anticipating the age of paradoxical logic and *telepresence*
(as the possibility of the 'actual' end of
modernity).
In this context, one also
has to wonder whether Virilio's acknowledgment of
*speed*
as the engine of the acceleration, breakdown, and parabolic
distortion of images (and imaging) redeems an
anti-ocularcentric turn in Western thought (particularly
French poststructuralist thought); or does it forewarn of an
active *hyperCartesianism* and extension of classical
optical communication by 'electro-optical' communication.
Species of anti-ocularcentric discourse resist the static
taxonomies of a rigid space- time in modernist vision,
whereby *knowing* was no longer an imitation of the world
based on similitude, but a self-contained universal science
whose function was to represent forms, magnitudes,
quantities, and relations of objects in a homogenous,
mechanical space. Virilio pays homage to Foucault and
Merleau-Ponty in this regard for shaking up the order of
things in the Western eye, disturbing the primacy of
perception, and questioning the 'electronic apartheid' of
the media world (although he perhaps deliberately neglects
Gilles Deleuze and Luce Irigaray when they criticize Western
thought for its reverence of mimetic representations, for
its rejection of phantasms, its consumption of women for
*specularization*, and its framed, visual reduplication of
male-dominated ideas).
The reader of _Polar Inertia_, then, is led to believe that the shift toward sightless, digital vision is a movement away from the modernist perception that emphasizes the movement of visual information in a mechanical, linear, segmented time, and toward a new perceptual revolution deriving from past and present breakthroughs in quantum theory. Virilio, however, is highly critical of the effects of the 'lensless', synthetic, point to point digitalization/manipulation of appearances, and the accelerated 'photonic' transmission of those appearances. He suggests that the effects of the new 'active' optics are a deepening of some of the negative aspects of Cartesian objectivism and conventional camera cinematography, particularly regarding the emergence of paradoxical forms of duration and space-time regimes.
http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol6-2002/n42kafala
Paul Virilio - War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception
ce399 notes:
There exists yet another layer to the automation of the interpretation of reality through technological means that Virilio hints at though does not make explicitly clear. A previous ce399 note was made here in this regard:
News items in corporate media communications can also trigger an accompanying message in a method similar to a midi sample in computer generated music in order to 'blanket' a target geographic area with spectral or psionic transmissions conveying Pentagon PSYOP deception and misinformation - this further strengthens the effect (a 'force multiplier') of the word-image communication broadcasts by 'traditional' media.
--
With the advent of remote brain scanning technology, a keyword read by the target individual or group in print media format, for example, can trigger silent audio (or voice-to-skull) transmissions. These transmissions can further automate anti-critical thinking programming via broadcast of pre-recorded positive or negative corporate-military propaganda messages which, again, function as psychological operations (PSYOP) 'force multipliers' via remote, automated and space-based action agents.