If today, as Virilio warns, speed threatens to overshadow the light of knowledge and interpretation altogether, then his metaphorical, 'tendential', accidental texts also allow us to glimpse the possibility of and for critical thinking. 

This possibility consists precisely in taking as one's point of departure the darkening of critical thought in the imminent end of the journey. For the end of the journey, the eradication of its duration is the 'accident' of the successive revolutions in transportation and communication technologies. 

'Loss of the story of the journey and thus of the possibility of any interpretation of it is doubled', says Virilio in his most recent book, Escape Velocity, 'by a sudden loss of memory, or rather, by the promise of a paradoxical immediate recall linked to the omnipotence of the image'. 

The paradox of this immediate recall arises from its im-mediacy. For this recall would be the function of the most intense mediation of the real, realtime mediatisation, yet it would eradicate the delay, the distance and the duration which allow and are constitutive of the interpretation and re-membering of events. 

If this is the danger of modern technical advance, the accident of its tendency, then it is also what mobilises Virilio to attempt what he calls trajectif analysis, in the wake of the crisis of the dialectics of the subject and the object. 

But analysis of the trajet could never be a return to conventional historical interpretative models or 'stories'; one must imagine the end of the trajet rushing closer, like our rollerblader as he passes the point of no return, trying desperately to calculate what his journey will have been.

Following the three phases of displacement - departure, journey, arrival - and after the demise of the "journey," suddenly it is "departure" that we have lost. From now on, everything arrives without our having to leave. But what "arrives" is already no longer a stopover or the end of the trip; it is merely information, information-world, no, information-universe! The reign of the generalized arrival from then on combines with the generalization of real-time information. And so everything rushes at man, man-the-target is assailed on all sides, and our only salvation now is to be found in illusion, in flight from the reality of the moment, from the loss of free will whose advent Pascal evoked when he wrote, "Our senses cannot perceive extremes. Too much noise deafens us, to much light dazzles.... Extreme qualities are our enemies. We no longer feel anything; we suffer."

- Paul Virilio -

... read next