Virilio’s critique of the real-time

Virilio’s critique of the real-time image conserves the priority of the phenomenology of nothing, but his focus on aesthetic effects forces the visibility of the invisible. While Merleau-Ponty insisted on the paradoxical inaccessibility of the punctum caecum, Virilio makes its ef- fects appear in the light of speed. If the aesthetics of disappearance inscribe a hidden point or disruption within appearances, reading the effects of speed reveals the transmission and translation of this crucial punctum. The result is a kind of transubstantiation of the medium, perhaps reflecting the religious faith that Virilio frequently alludes to as underlying his media theory. The inscribed point trembles.Virilio seeks a guarantee certifying that the language of speed in fact reports an underlying phenomenological situation; he finds the answer in light, the oldest and most secure of metaphors for the truth of appearances.53 The pixel of the computer screen supplies a new concept of a “light interval,” as opposed to measurements based in space or time. Illuminated pixels or “picture elements” compose the images of new media. The pixel projects. It is a literal instance of image energy. What is seen is light: real-time images are epiphanies of light. The revelation of this perception of light modifies “the very definition of the real and the figurative” and leads to the insight of a background “illumination” or “clearing” which enables every real- time technology ( VM 72, 74).54 The ecstasy of light is the presence of the world.But what could it possibly mean to discover a “paradox” in per- ception? Merleau-Ponty’s insistence on the paradoxical invisibility of the punctum caecum carefully forbids its discovery; Virilio’s thema- tization of picnolepsy as “paradoxical waking” is not so cautious.If consciousness is a result of the discursive cover-up of picnoleptic ab- sence, how can we distinguish, consciously, between this cover-up and the effects of absence? Picnoleptics—that is, all of us—invent our consciousness and experience nothing outside this invention. The paradox we are conscious of must be self-made, a “paradoxical- ization” of consciousness; or, at least, the paradox is supplied to guarantee the aesthetic effects of disappearance. Paradoxical waking is a kind of invented and projected beyond. Named paradoxical, the discourse on consciousness brings out traces of the reality perceived. It is necessary to induce the effect of a beyond, to make evident the aesthetics that produce what is already, anyhow, the case, and thus to supply sufficient evidence to guarantee the appearance of disap- pearance.