Virilio’s Lost Dimensions: The Psychic and the Technical
The French philosopher, architect and historian of war Paul Virilio was famously against the ideology of "Towerism" as he believed the future of cities would not be in their skyward dimension. In fact, he worked with the architect Claude Parent in the 1960s on the "oblique function". A third order beyond the horizontal of rural dwellings or the vertical of the urban, the oblique function would make space completely accessible increasing the amount of usable surface according to the principle of "habitable circulation" (Violeau, 2012). They only ever completed two buildings, a cryptic church in Nevers and a missile design workshop in Vézily. Inside these two (sacred) spaces, what is at stake are the two dimensions of speed incommensurate in our contemporary condition, the time of contemplation and mortality and the time of acceleration and death. Today this dialectical relationship between psychic time and technical time has become ever more oblique. Virilio himself talks of this new time, "a new day has been added to the astronomer’s solar day" (p. 31), that is brought about by the "electronic false day":
"which has no relation what so ever to real time. Chronological and historical time, time that passes, is replaced by a time that exposes itself instantaneously. On the computer screen, a time period becomes the 'support surface' of inscription. Literally or better, cinematically, time surfaces" (ibid).
In Virilio’s (materialist) view, all technology aims towards the acceleration of forces, and all of these forces, even though they may appear consumer driven, are ultimately in the service of war. Virilio’s emblematic concept "Dromology", from his work Speed and Politics, derived from the Latin "dromos" (racetrack), is the "science and logic of speed" as a cultural and civilizational force. Speaking of revolutionary movements he says:
"The revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street, where for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a motor (machine of attack), in other words, a producer of speed" (2006, p. 29).
For Virilio, since the driving factor of civilization is war, all technologies are initially and essentially military strategy. Today this fact is easy to apprehend as we each carry a piece of redundant military technology in our pockets. Your auto-surveillance device or iPhone, which knows everywhere you have ever been and tells you exactly where your pizza delivery driver is, would have been originally designed to track snipers on enemy territory. In fact, looked at from Virilio’s perspective it is obvious that all technology is fundamentally bellicose. We civilians merely passively consume the out-of-date offcuts and deadstock of the military-industrial complex’s latest shiny new invention. Consumer territory after all is only an extension of war by other means:
"Whoever controls the territory possesses it. Possession of territory is not primarily about laws and contracts, but first and foremost a matter of movement and circulation" (Virilio cited in CTHEORY, 2000).[1]
Paradoxically and bathetically however, the acceleration of our technologies is not proportionate to the acceleration of our physical or mental capacities, nor for that matter the elongation of our lives. In the time it has taken to move from the invention of the telegram to the quantum computer, the human being has not changed at all. The maturation time of an infant is still the same as it was thousands of years ago, and with each passing generation we do not retain intellectual gains in any other form than inherited cultural capital and access to education. In fact, what thinkers like Adorno, Benjamin and Stiegler remind us, is that unless we take great pains to conserve the critical capacity and historical “progress” of the human cultural phenotype, there are only various forms of degeneration that await us as a species. This may be in the form of a loss of physical ability, aesthetic sensibility, cognitive capacity, cultural savoir faire, ethical sophistication or what Bernard Stiegler (1998) might warn us, calls for, the preservation of a "general organology" of mnemotechnological capabilities. In other words, the various components of the "civilized" human made up of cultural, physical, perceptual and critical dimensions. In this "computer time" that we live in, as Virilio puts it, we have constructed "a permanent present, an unbounded, timeless intensity that is destroying the tempo of a progressively degraded society" (p. 32).
How then do we begin to think about the temporal and spatial lifeworld of the human being in the context of the dromological pace of information and surveillance technology? The human who enters the obliquely designed cryptic church to contemplate their finite existence in the timeless presence of the infinite, is the same human who enters the missile workshop to design the fastest way to bring about the future oriented annihilation of his fellow man and ultimately himself.
There is no contradiction here of course. Humans have always held the space of the sacred in tandem with the sacrifice of life, as Bataille knew so well. But what is of significance is that at some point the technology in the service of war will become so efficient as to remove the time for contemplation altogether. At which point we have to wonder: what happens? Is it perhaps similar to the example Žižek (2020) recounts of Frederic Brown’s short story about a time travel "Experiment" in which, when a solid cube is sent back and forth in time using a physicist’s time machine, something quite astonishing happens. Surprisingly, when a past action is thwarted by human intervention what disappears is not the cube, but the whole universe surrounding it; the story ends mid-sentence. The reality which supported the brute matter is gone leaving only the cube as the intractable real element of the universe. This flipping over from the concrete time of human action to the abstract time of human thought places us on the threshold of a perpetually lost dimension.
In this oblique relation between these two times, the psychic and the technical or technological time, as Reza Negerastani (2018) might call it, we have the kernel of the mӧbius strip between the individual human psyche and the technical abstraction of its multiplicitous, intensive and larval capacities (Deleuze, 2014). In the attempt to model artificial intelligent technologies on the physiology of the brain, the dromological factor becomes pertinent. Due to the sheer complexity of the billions of neural connections, it would take so much data and time, that in terms of a spatio temporal problem it may be impossible in our species lifetime, given that we will most likely destroy our habitable environment before we ever come close to achieving such a feat. What we have instead is that various partial structures of the brain are modelled in order to replicate different processes. Thinking instead about intelligence as an expansive plane of potentiality from which it’s possible to augment various capacities, we may understand that AI is actually best thought of as a way of accentuating certain aspects of cognition as posed to replicating an entire gestalt of a human subject. And each of those aspects are in turn subject to all of the contingencies that the scientific episteme of the epoch (or power/knowledge nexus in a Foucauldian sense), produces. In terms of dromology, it's very easy to accentuate and augment certain aspects of human cognition (which would be difficult for the average human or indeed impossible) such as complex calculation and logic, processing and analysing enormous volumes of information at very high speed etc., whilst other things that human beings do with ease which concern the haptic, affective and perceptual embodied dimensions are much more difficult for the computer to simulate and some just not amenable to being sped up.
To put this into immediate contemporary context of Virilio’s critique of technology, perhaps this unspoken temporal dialectic may be equally perceived in the distinction in AI development and research between the analogy to the mind or to the brain. On one hand, the AI that deals with the question of the so-called "mind" is called Symbolic AI; algorithms, computer programmes and the domain of language and communication, replicating the symbolic interaction human beings engage in and the dead structures of meaning into which they are born. On the other hand, there is the branch of AI that attempts to approach the replication of human intelligence via the simulation of actual structures of the physical brain, what’s called Neural Networks. To replicate the whole human brain is currently still impossible. Though there are attempts to reproduce at least animal brains in silico. Clearly there is a discrepancy here between not just the age-old individual mind/brain problem within neuroscience, but the temporal dimension in which the space of thought takes place. The brain as an organism has a particular biological life span and spatial extension where as symbolic structures are immortal, immaterial, abstract and acephalic.
It is important to remember however, that just as our notions of mind, psyche and subjectivity have changed with each epoch, the metaphors for the brain have changed over history too and those metaphors in turn have shaped the way we think about the physical and spatial entity of the brain. In premodern times of course, before the brain was even conceived of as the seat of subjectivity, the "soul" or thought, it was merely one part of the body, an organ which produced different sorts of personality and disposition. We can think for example of the four classical humours (Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholic and Phlegmatic), corresponding to blood (liver), yellow bile (gallbladder), black bile (spleen) and phlegm (brain/lungs). Its only in the modern period that the brain becomes properly an object of study and is associated analogically with whichever science of the time was fashionable, hydraulics, electronics etc. In our postmodern digital age, it is naturally the computer that dominates as a metaphor for understanding the way the brain functions. But this, like all other previous metaphors will no doubt be dislodged at some point. And arguably we might say that the metaphor of the brain as computer is being supplanted by the metaphor of "the cloud" in the popular imagination. An immaterial substance that can upload and download information almost by osmosis. In some ways this perhaps indicates a return to a premodern cosmology of elements: earth, water, fire and air. Strangely then our technology has enabled a full circle return (imaginarily at least) to the so called "immateriality" of the human "soul". What we have then at the culmination of instrumental rationality is the inauguration of a new form of ineffability (albeit one ordained by a technological god).
Here we see clearly one of the fantasmatic forms in which the time of the psychic becomes transmuted into the time of the technical. As I have argued at length in The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence (2021), the psychoanalytic structure of subjectivity, both temporally and corporeally, is crucial for understanding the development, both real and phantasmatic of notions of AI and its significance for us as speaking, sexed subjects. “Humans” are stuck somewhere between formalization and contingency or, as Badiou (2017) would put it, between matheme and anxiety.
But it is the axiological –the capacity to make judgements, to be able to evaluate the significance of an image, to recognize the importance of a text, to judge beauty and so on –which is the dimension which dromology cannot penetrate. The axiological involves many complex philosophical temporalities and oblique forms of rationality and recursivity. And these forms of human thinking are just not best captured by the metaphor of the computer, nor the science and logic of speed. As Badiou says, the human subject is characterized by an imminent relation between haste and restraint:
"This relation entails a dialectical link between the formulas as products of the desire for the matheme (correct formalization) and the affect (anxiety) as the guarantee of the real. Thus, in their temporal dialectic, matheme and anxiety are the contrasting figures of the deferred access to the real, an access that, as a braid woven out of time always suspended between haste and stagnation, will in the end be decided, in the guise of the act, by the analysand him or herself" (p. 61).
At this point let’s refer to Negarestani’s Intelligence and Spirit (2018) and ask, as he does in relation to the generation of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), "[e]xactly what kind of creatures are able to conceive of making something better than themselves, and what capacities must they have in order to develop such a concept?" (p. 95). As Negarestani argues, AGI is a concept which reflects our species desire to render ourselves intelligible and to promote and cultivate our seemingly most noble and divine attributes to their upmost capacity even if it means leaving ourselves to perish in the wake of what comes after us. The question is what this "better" version of humans would look like. Veteran scientist and inventor of the Gaia Hypothesis, James Lovelock, has an idea about what these kind of "better" creatures might be. In Novacene (2019) he proposes that the age of the Anthropocene (the geological period in which humans acquired planetary scale technology) has already come to an end and we are entering a new age, the Novacene, in which technology will come to inherit the "consciousness" of the cosmos. In his vision, artificially intelligent beings who can think 10,000 times faster than humans will emerge as the inheritors of the earth and caretakers of the intelligent universe. For Lovelock, the hypothesis of the emergence of such intelligent beings makes it even more vital that we retain the environmental conditions conducive to their survival (Millar, 2021).
What Negerastani has in mind however is the salvation for the conditions of philosophy as opposed to any particular type of being capable of philosophizing. To save the project of AI from its humanist errors and open up its prehistory of a genuine posthumanist philosophy that it may be capable of. As he puts it:
"Philosophy begins with a universal thesis regarding the equality of all minds that whoever or whatever satisfies the basic conditions of its possibility should be seen as and treated as equal in the broadest possible sense. But as the discipline of philosophizing becomes more mature, it ought to realize that there is in fact a significant truth to these accusations of philosophy as a Western, self-entitled mode of thinking, however ill-judged they may seem. The equality of minds as a thesis about what is true and what is just, is a dictum universal and necessary in its truth and applicability. But this does not mean that it is concretely universal for us. It is something to be achieved and concretely instituted" (p. 409).
In other words, a dynamic process in perpetuity that engages in a constant struggle against complacency. In Negarestani’s thrilling book he concludes by offering a program for the emancipation of intelligence from the servitude of any god, whether that be the god of religion, nature, technology or economy. In imagining this perpetual breaking free from the shackles of the "totalization of history" we must ourselves become philosophical gods. As he puts it:
"The practical elaboration of the death of God is not a matter of a quibble between the jaded atheistic cult of humanism and the theistic crowd, but a precondition for voiding the conditions of injustice throughout history, a requirement that we become gods who, in their death, give rise to something better" (p. 506).
Better, stronger, faster, indeed, but for what? What Virilio’s phallic dromology captures is the paradoxical death drive at the heart of human subjectivity, the excessive unbounded force that ineluctably stives not toward the completion of a goal but the production of ever more ways of thwarting its own satisfaction. The oblique function as Virilio conceives it spatially is in a way the only route towards this "superior" dimension of the human, not upwards, not sideways but anamorphically, bending round in non-Euclidian space.
References:
Badiou, A.,& Cassin, B. (2017) There’s No Such Thing as A Sexual Relationship: Two Lessons on Lacan. New York: Columbia University Press.
CTHEORY (2000) Interview with Paul Virilio: The Kosovo War Took Place in Orbital Space. Available (22.08.22): https://cryptome.org/virilio-rma.htm
Deleuze, G. (2014) Difference and Repetition. London: Bloomsbury.
Negarestani, R. (2018) Intelligence and Spirit. Falmouth: Urbanomic.
Millar, I. (2021) The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Stiegler, B. (1998) Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford, University Press.
Violeau, J-L. (2012) ‘Critical Space under Nuclear Winter: The Critical Trajectory of a Child of the War. Paul Virilio, Surveyor of the Shoreline’. In: P. Virilio (2012) Lost Dimension. p. 7-23. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Virilio, P. (2006) Speed and Politics. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Virilio, P. (2012) Lost Dimension. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Žižek, S. (2020) Sex and the Failed Absolute. London: Bloomsbury.
Note:
[1] CTHEORY Interview with Paul Virilio:‘The Kosovo War Took Place In Orbital Space’. Available (22.08.22) at: https://cryptome.org/virilio-rma.htm
Dr Isabel Millar is a philosopher and psychoanalytic theorist from London. She holds a PhD in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis from Kingston University, School of Art. She is the author of The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence published in the Palgrave Lacan Series in 2021, and Patipolitics: On the Government of Sexual Suffering forthcoming with Bloomsbury in 2023. As well as extensive international academic speaking and publishing, her work can be found across a variety of media, including TV, podcasts, magazines and art institutes. She is currently research fellow and faculty at The Global Centre for Advanced Studies, Institute of Psychoanalysis, and Associate Researcher, Newcastle University, Department of Philosophy. isabel.millar@gmail.com / www.isabelmillar.com
Magnificent!