In what follows, I read Virilio aga

In what follows, I read Virilio against the grain of his own hyper- bole, taking his shrill rhetoric as an unveiling of media theory’s prerequisites. Virilio pushes media theory to extremes, dissolving media into flows of speed. In doing so, he displays the aesthetic that makes theorizing media so interesting in the first place. At the risk of overemphasis, I defend Virilio’s stubborn insistence that speed- media fulfill what aesthetics always promised: if not exactly a per- ception of what disappears, then at least an experience of its lack. Vanished perception leaves inert and apathetic bodies, which turn nonetheless into a source of experience. Our nonexperiences be- come the basis for subjectivity in new media environments.The panic aesthetics of real time, so persuasively dramatized by Virilio, in fact result from a deeply seated misunderstanding of the rhetorical structure of what we call speed. We only recognize the aes- thetic crux at the center of media through an overlay of rhetorical terminology, and only read the paradoxical transcription of percep- tion through a metaphorical teleology. Virilio foregrounds speed to extract the metaphoric potential of media technology, blurring ma- teriality into engines of appearance and delirium. In the words of James Der Derian, Virilio’s leading English-language commentator: “when Virilio’s dromology (the study of speed) crashes head-long into semiology (the study of signs) the order of things starts to look precarious.”27