Twentieth-century telecommunications further compress duration to zero. However, once again Virilio notes the tendency for acceleration to produce new forms of deceleration, a recurring theme of mine. Chronoscopic time, the intensive (electronic) instant, leads to an overload of information so extensive that taking advantage of only the tiniest fraction of it not only blows apart “real-time” communication but also slows down operators to the point where they lose themselves in the eternity of electronically networked information, a “black hole of globalized interconnectivity.” The actual capacity for parallel absorption of knowledge is hugely disappointing. Ironically, the same electronic capacity to be both here and elsewhere in the time of nowhere has brought the body to a standstill. While Castells and Urry, for example, emphasize the mobility and fluidity of people in network society, Virilio recognizes that, at the level of everyday life, people are increasingly stationary—sitting in front of a screen. The chronoscopic time of the ICT revolution—a temporality of instantaneous and continuous connectivity—is, paradoxically, accompanied by new forms of inertia.
Finally, in terms of the twenty-first century, Virilio identifies the time compression aforded by transplantation primarily with prostheses provided by xenotransplantation and nanotechnology. Technological time has moved from the vastness of planetary and earthly space to the micro spaces of organs and cells to what he calls “the heart of the living.” In a speculative mood, he writes that artificial rhythms replace natural ones, to be speeded up at will and paced to the dictates of the prosthetic machine. Here again he is prescient in foreseeing that the genetic modification of humans and animals raises moral and ethical issues not anticipated and in advance of regulatory frameworks. Indeed, some have speculated that the point of these technologies is to transcend a biological sense of time, in other words, to arrest time.
Human history, then, can be understood in terms of a race with time, of ever-increasing speeds that transcend humans’ biological capacity. According to Virilio, the forces of technoscience are speeding up the world to such a degree that things, even reality, are starting to disappear. Technological time is no longer part of chronological time; we have to conceptualize it as chronoscopic time. This new time encompasses the dead time of travel, the intensive time of electronic connectivity, and scarce time—as immense acceleration leads everywhere to a shortening of time limits and time to think. For individuals as well as society, this transformation in the space-time structure has fundamentally disruptive consequences. The technologies of speed bring about a “derangement of the senses” whereby real space is replaced by decontextualized “real-time” processes and intensity takes over from extensity. As humans cannot possibly absorb this overload of parallel information sources, Virilio calls for a cultural slow-down to protect against the further invasion of technology into lived human experience.
Chapter One
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