On Technological Time: Cruising Virilio's Over-Exposed City Published in Arena No. 83, 1988 (c) McKenzie Wark Mass Communication Macquarie University 2109 AUSTRALIA mwark@laurel.ocs.mq.oz.au 1. The Tragedy of Architecture. 'A city made for speed is made for success.'1 For that archetype of the 'modern architect', Le Corbusier this meant principally a city made according to a rational use of space. He was also acutely aware of the changes wrought in the city by the motor vehicle: 'In the early evening twilight on the Champ-Elysees it was as though the world had suddenly gone mad .... Day after day the fury of traffic grew. To leave your house meant that once you had crossed the threshold you were a possible sacrifice to death in the shape of innumerable motors. I think back 20 years, when I was a student, the road belonged to us then...' Poor Corbu! Walking his straight lines around Paris like an accident waiting to happen. One can imagine him being run over by a laundry van or a truckload of marble. Corbusier's 'city of tomorrow' was very much a project for reorganising space under the conditions of modern industrialism and transport. From a rational organisation of space would flow an economy of time: 'a model city for commerce!' Yet even in this there is at least a hint of the possibility of something working against such a rational space, from within it. Concentrated within Corbusier's skyscrapers are not only workers but 'apparatus for abolishing time and space' - telephones, cables and wireless. Where Corbusier projects an optimism about the future of the modern city, based on a new spatial order, Paul Virilio will turn this dream on its head, and see the modern city in our time as being disorganised by technologies 'for abolishing time and space', technologies which produce a new and more elaborate temporal order, but which irrupt within the spatial order of the old city. From a new economy of time comes a break in urban space. This is Virilio's 'overexposed city'2 and in what follows, I would like to elaborate certain Virilian themes about the temporal order within it. This is not, strictly speaking, an exposition of Virilio, but Virilio set to work, set in motion if you will, if perhaps at a few tangents. It is perhaps best to see Virilio the man, the individual subject, as something of an accidental mouthpiece for certain observations, observations about the city which are themselves the product of being exposed to just such a city. Certainly Virilio's style is a consequence of his relation to the city, this city; the city of speed. Virilian writing pursues a tendency only so far, to the point at which its vector becomes evident, then disappears, off on another peregrination. The vector is a key term for Virilio. It describes the aspect of technology which interests him most and also the style of writing he employs to capture that aspect. It is a term from geometry meaning a line of fixed length and direction but no fixed position. Virilio employs it to mean any trajectory along which bodies, information or warheads can potentially pass. Vectors are potential trajectories. The gift of technology to strategy is ever faster, ever longer vectors, with greater and greater acceleration. Unlike Deleuze and Guattari's 'line of flight', escaping from static power, the vector in Virilio is power, a power beyond metaphors of structure, with which writing must find ways to keep pace. If it is typical of post-structuralism to question the model of the subject as an enclosure of interiority, of consciousness, then it is left to Virilio to question the parallel notion of the architectural structure as an enclosure of interiority, of bounded space. He does this by questioning the very notion of 'boundary'. He points to the way 'the boundary surface has been continually transformed,' particularly by information technologies which pass through physical boundaries: 'the urban wall has given way to an infinity of openings and ruptured enclosures ...' and '... the surface- boundary becomes an osmotic membrane, a blotter'.3 When considered from the point of view of enclosure, of structure, the city presents itself as something static, monumental. One thinks of the most familiar forms of representation of the city: the map, the plan, the elevation. One thinks of a syncronic combination of architectural elements, arranged in space. When considered from the point of view of openings, the city takes on a different aspect. One thinks not of discrete entities in space, but of relational pathways, circuits, freqencies, 'interruptions'.4 The beauty of Virilio's writings is that it restores the temporal aspect of urbanism - with a vengeance! The architect Manuel de Sola Morales has compared urbanism to the dance, in that both are concerned with the relationship of the spatial to the temporal, ideally coming together in an Aristotelian unity.5 He sees certain modern tendencies in architecture as having a spatial bias when applied to urban planning (Corbusier, Gropius). Far from recifying the imbalance, as Morales would wish, Virilio shows how 'technological time'6 has destroyed the 'dance' of urban space and the whole aesthetic of urbanism. Architectural space has been invaded by technological time. The tragedy of architecture for Virilio is that its geometric 'capacity of defining a unity of time and place for activities now enters into open conflict with the structural capacities of mass communication.'7 In the place of a discrete boundary in space, demarcating distinct spaces, one sees spaces co-joined by semi-permeable membranes, exposed to flows of information in particular ways. Virilio sees the spatial difference of the boundary as having been partly superceded by the temporal differences of the frequencies with which information passes through a city permeated by networks. Superimposed on the wall, the building, the street, are those other differences: a phone call begins or ends, two databases swap information from opposite ends of the city, an edit in the evening news switches the viewer from Angola to Afganistan. A '... montage of temporalities which are the product not only of the powers that be but of the technologies that organise time.'8 Passing through the surfaces of architecture is 'architexture'. The architectonic technologies of space are intersecected by an 'architectronics' of information time. That the edit or montage of information in time supercedes the boundary or form in space is a radical critique not only of modern architecture, but of 'postmodernism' as well. Virilio sees the recourse to history in postmodernism as a sham: a last resort to a false sense of time instead of coming to grips with the effects of technological time upon the city. 'Where the polis once inaugurated a political theatre, with the agora and the forum, today there remains nothing but the cathode ray screen, with its shadows and spectres of a community in the process of disappearing.'9 Which sounds like Robert Venturi's remark that American's don't need piazzas (public space) -- they should be home watching TV.10 Venturi still manages to conjure up a sense of optimism: 'The most urgent technological problem facing us is the humane meshing of advanced scientific and technical systems with our imperfect and exploited human systems.'11 Virilio's critique of modernism goes beyond 'learning from Las Vegas'. Virilio would have us see Coppola's film about Vegas, not Vegas itself as the 'place', or rather the time to learn from: 'Hollywood, much more than Venturi's Las Vegas merits a study of urbanism' for 'here, more than anywhere, advanced technologies have converged to create a synthetic space-time. The Babylon of film 'derealisation', the industrial zone of pretense ...'12 The city, says Virilio, is a gearbox full of speeds,13 a hierarchy of speeds. Some are all but extinct, like the speed of democracy. Some are alive and well and producing something quite other than the space of urbanism, like the speeds of dromocracy: technical vectors used as a power over and against the social. Here are some things within the city and between cities which have temporalities peculiar to them; six sign posts along the road to a Virilian theory of technological time: 1. architecture 2. technology 3. war 4. capital 5. data 6. theory.14 I have already indicated the tendency of Virilian thought on architecture, and the Big Questions I shall leave aside to the last post - theory. En route I will pick up each of the others in turn, and try to start - and stop - in a very summary way, a sort of Virilian 'street directory' of urban speeds. As the reader may have noticed, this is not an exposition, nor exactly a critique. That would not be the way to keep track of this writing. Nor does it pretend to find the sort of coherence which Virilio scrupulously avoids. For in the end one of the key questions he poses is this: given that the practice of critical writing itself takes place as part of the 'overexposed city', what are the forms of writing appropriate to it? A question which perhaps we can for the moment defer. 'There comes a time when new questions are more useful than ready-made answers.'15 2. Technology, or Why We Keep Crashing in the Same Car Marinetti attributed his baptism in the spirit of futurist technology to overturning his motorcar in a drainage ditch. He and his pals had interrupted their decadent, bourgeois, old world, European boredom and languor to race motor cars in the street in the dead of night. Marinetti didn't quite see J. G. Ballard's 'nightmare marriage of sex and technology'16 when he rolled his beautiful motor in the mire, but he came damned close. 'Time and space died yesterday,' he emerged saying. 'We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.'17 This motif of the accident goes double for Virilio, who generalizes Marinetti's 'political vision of speed': his championing of the transient at the level of philosophical critique; his hostility to discourses with moral alibis for not confronting the realities of power - while at the same time turning these things back against Marinetti himself. 'Every technology produces, provokes, programs a specific accident.'18 Ironically Virilio's stress on the accident as the unintended effect of applied rationality undermines the rationality of 'technology studies' itself. The latter tends to project backwards (in the name of 'history') from the materialized technological hardware to a conscious political or commercial interest. For Virilio, the irony of technology lies rather in its irrationality: its practical accidents and its mythology. Hence his intervention into museology: 'Every technology, every science should choose its specific accident, and reveal it as a product ... as a product to be 'epistemo- technically' questioned.'19 Tell that to The Powerhouse Museum! This is an epistemological question for Virilio because he insists that 'In classic Aristotelian philosophy, substance is necessary and the accident is relative and contingent.'20 For Virilio, as for Machiavelli, there is nothing accidental about the accident, and both necessity and substance are necessarily and substantially accidental. That is to say, products of 'fortune'. Virilio's conception of the politics of technology is based in the classic antitradition which sees the polis not in the utopian terms of 'what ought', but in the pragmatic terms of 'what is'. This is not a discourse of ethics, but of power, specifically of power caught in the fabric of three terms: chance, necessity and will. Technology occupies a similiar place in Virilio's work to that occupied by capital in Marx's. The subtitle of Marx's magnum opus was after all 'critique of political economy'. It was a critique on a number of levels: a critique of method, of fundamental concepts and their omissions, and above all a political critique, which latched onto the master discourse of its time and attempted to develop its radical implications from a place outside it, particularly outside its institutions. Virilio's project is at least comparable to this in scope. This is why i think Virilio's project can be entitled a critique of the inhumanities and asocial sciences. It is a critique of those 'practical', impure discourses, outside the accepted cannon, which are the inheritors of Machiavelli and Clauswitz, discourses which attempt to put the power inherent in technology at the service of the state. A critique of the consequences of technological logic. A critique in the name of 'popular defense' and the slow, consultative tempo of democracy. A critique in the name of 'stopping', of interrupting technological time and its discourse at the point where it will 'e-race' the right of citizenry. According to Virilio, it is an old Roman adage that 'only the vigilant have rights.'21 The most apparently benign of these discourses are urbanism, town planning, sociology. Virilio treats the techniques of the city in the same way as the techniques of war. Both are discourses of 'dromocracy', techniques for employing vectors of power over the social. 'I don't believe in sociology,' he says, 'Its a mask'.22 Or even a mythology, in the Barthesian sense. Virilio treats the discourse of technology in the same way that Marx treats the discourse of capital - with suspicion. As Marx looks for the hidden secrets of the capitalist market-place in its 'underside', the process of production, so Virilio looks for the hidden side of technological speed in the point at which it becomes its opposite - the accident, or more generally, the interruption. Knowledge is not a continuum for Virilio, nor a pure form. It is structured by interruptions, and these appear to be of two sorts. One is rhythmical, be it night and day and the seasons, or the forms of constant technological time which take its place. Knowledge accumulates and disperses according to such rhythms. Then there are accidental interruptions, irruptions, changes of pace or sudden syncopations ... death. Technology generates a knowledge-effect by suddenly changing the tempo of lived experience. Seen from this aspect, technology could be defined as that which interrupts differently. Technology is an accident waiting to happen. As such it poses problems for knowledge, for criticism, for art, which appear to have the option of resisting or adapting to the interruption of their tempo - or of blithely ignoring it. For Virilio, the strategic question for our time is not Juvenal's 'who guards the guards?', but 'what interrupts the interruptions?' 3. War : the Race of Champions 'Violence is the midwife of history' according to Marx and Engels. In the light of Virilio's account of organized violence since the days of blood and iron, that might be ammended to read: 'irony is the wetnurse of history' ... In the tradition of Livy and Machiavelli, Virilio equates the founding of the city with the military imperative (and the militiary with the political). The city does not grow out of any economic logic for Virilio, contrary to Marx,23 but like Marx, Virilio equates the city with the polis - politics. Virilio is far from sharing the futurists' love of war as the 'world's only hygene'.24 He declares himself the 'first to enlist' in the opposition to any kind of militarist coup, and the first to oppose the 'perversion' of knowledge by the military imperative.25 Nevertheless, his view of history is an ironic one to the extent that it sees the war against fascism as having installed the 'military class' in power - permanently. This is a double irony, for while the civilian economy may be subordinated to the military class, the military themselves are slaves to the war machine - a power of far greater proportions - and one pursuing its own fatal logic at the expense of the political territories it was conceived of as serving and policing. The narratives Virilio constructs around war are based on the interaction of two concepts: territory and vector. Territory, in essence, is space that is defended, enclosed, and which consequently acts as a 'brake': space as obstacle to hostile movement. Vector could be defined as the potential to traverse space (territory). A vector need not be any particular trajectory across space. It is not the where that matters, but the how. Vectors have particular qualities of velocity, acceleration, accuracy, timing and may be more or less flexible in terms of the trajectories they may map out. Three aspects of territory and vector are important to remember. Firstly, the terms are relational. Secondly, they both refer to techniques, regimes or economies of power, always in a rhythmic but unstable relationship to each other. Thirdly, as a matter of interpretation, the idea of a vector connects speed to violence, interruption while the idea of territory connects space to safety, retreat, disengagement, politics, resistance. Virilio uses the relation of war to the city as an allegory for the relation of technology to politics. A key opposition in this allegory is that of vector to territory. Vector and territory are ways of grasping the technologization of time and space respectively. This is a conceptual schema which tries to emphasis conflict and avoid teleology, which is why the concept of the accident figures so prominently. Historically, war has passed through three phases, says Virilio: tactics, strategy, logistics. In each case, there has been a growth in complexity of the relation of war to territory and vector, and consequently a new relationship of war to the city. The ancient society so fondly studied by Machiavelli is founded on a relationship between war as movement and the city as a brake upon that movement. The city is originally defensive, a way of slowing down an assault. War stands at the beginnings of not only the city, but also the state, which organizes mere tactical violence into a set of strategic techniques for maintaining a territorial economy. Virilio reinterprets Clauswitz's relation of war to politics on this model of vector and territory. The city organizes the speed and violence of war and subordinates it to reasons of state - that complicated dance of chance, necessity and will. Strategy is war organized for and by the state as a technique for stabilising the relationship of power to space. The modern society is something different. In the words of the post-war strategist Bernard Brodie, 'static defenses are defenses no longer'26 In modern times, war has developed beyond strategy to logistics, and this has shifted the balance of forces between territory to vector from the former to the latter. The speed of war has accelerated so much that the city is no longer an effective brake upon its power. This increase in speed, or 'vectoral capacity' of war is the result of the growing technological sophistication of the engines of war, and the deepening of the infrastructure which conceives, manufactures and deploys it - this is Virilio's permanent, peaceful war of logistics. By utilizing the vector against the territory, war gains power over the city. This is a victory of technology and its applied rationality of efficiency over politics and its strategic calculations of chance, necessity and will. This is the subordination of the historical time of the political event to the technical time of the conception, manufacture and deployment of engines of war; 'the end of the economic rationale of political economy'; and the victory of the military caste over the bourgeoisie. Yet the victory of the military caste is a phyrric one. The vector of military technology itself will lead to the disappearance of the territory and the time the military 'brass' require for decision and manoeuvre. At the limit, 'the decision for war or peace will belong to the answering machine!'27 ... Fred Kaplan's The Wizards of Armageddon, a history of the US Air Force think-tank the RAND corporation, can be read in explicity Virilian terms as a clash between a form of knowledge rooted in the political practice of statecraft and a form of knowledge based on technocratic calculation. Bernard Brodie represents the first strand. The latter is typified by Albert Wohlstetter, but demonified by the notorious Herman Kahn - 'Dr Strangelove' himself.28 The difference between Brodie and Kahn is the difference between the inhumanities and the asocial sciences as discourses which develop fundamentally different concepts of the relationship between military vectors and politics. Brodie and the political 'realists' who developed the inhumanities saw that nuclear war was fundamentally about the combination of a vastly increased destructive power with rapid and flexible vectors of delivery. The implications of this were threefold. Firstly that the only defence would be 'retaliation in kind', or in other words raising the price of victory so high that no political objective would justify it. Secondly that there would no longer be a clear distinction between the frontline and the home front, between a military target and a civilian one, so that the obligation of the civilian to war would no longer be intermittent (conscription and national service) but constant. The civilian is now a hostage to peace. The city as a fortress against war has finally and totally been overcome. Thirdly, post-war weapons technology will 'concentrate the violence in time.'29 War must be fought with the resources available at its outset, so the onus is on the state to furnish the military with the resourses to retaliate in kind, should the threat of mutual destruction of each others' hostage populations fail as a political deterrent. Hence the permanent state of readiness, hence the 'collusion' of the nuclear powers in sustaining deterrence, 'the last ideology.'30 For the inhumanites as a discipline, these theoretically esatablished 'facts' mean that once a certain destructive power is marshalled deterrence is assured and the politics of international relations must be adjusted accordingly. American polity must 'adjust its politics to its physics'31 For the asocial sciences, on the other hand, things are not so simple. They refused to stop thinking at the brink of the alternatives of deterrent peace and the 'final interuption' and explored every technical vector in between (limited war, escalation) and every tool of calculation. They went looking for 'more reasonable forms of using violence'.32 For these technicians of war a new regime of the conception, production and deployment of more and more sophisticated vectors becomes the central arena of war, and a dynamic in its own right. A technological competition and collusion with and against the 'enemy'. The race of champions. In Speed and Politics Virilio sees this logistical war as a double negation, or disappearance: the disappearance of space and time. Space is the first to go, obliterated by the potential destructive power of the atom. He sees the doctine of peaceful co-existence (Brodie's hostages to deterrence scenario) as the necessary outcome of this potential to abolish territory once and for all. Time, on the other hand, is subject to a permanent escalation and proliferation in the speed and vectoral potential of the delivery systems of war and surveillance. Between them, they amount to a 'geostrategic homogenisation of the globe' The competition between the superpowers for faster and more flexible vectors now becomes the scene of war, and not subject to any treaty (which invariably regulate things like 'throw weight', not speed). 'In fact, war now rests entirely on the deregulation of time and space. This is why the technical manoeuvre that consists of complexifying the vector by constantly improving its performance has now totally supplanted tactical manoeuvres on the terrain...'33 The relationship of the technical rationality of war and the strategic calculation of politics has been reversed. War is no longer merely 'the continuation of politics by other means', a la Clauswitz. Politics is now 'the continuation of war, to the end, by all means'.34 4. Capital: Time is Money 'Time moves very fast these days' says Venturi & Co. But even on the bullet train of post-modernity we're in for a bumpy ride ... James O'Connor speaks of a crisis which affects the city as an economic space, produced by 'an interruption in the accumulation of capital'35 Virilio, too, speaks of interruptions such as factory closures, unemploy- ment; interruptions produced by the combination of 'advanced technology and industrial redeployment'.36 The 'fordist' deal,37 by which workers got a living wage in line with the speed at which productivity rose, a living wage which in turn meant demand for consumer products - that deal is all but over. In its place, cities now compete to attract any sort of investment they can get, including deregulated, low-wage industries often using migrant labour. Capital, labour, production, trade have all become more mobile, shifting from city to city, exploiting tax and wage advantages, or simply diversifying operations around the globe as a hedge against volatile currency and credit flows.38 Meanwhile, in the gleaming post-modern towers, speculative and rentier capital now dominate entrepreneurial, productive capital. The city becomes the site for property investment, for constructing 'completely new ruins', in honour of capital's faustian bargain with speed.39 Downtown architecture no longer pays hommage to the modernist machine ethic of fordism, but revels in its own stylishness - while concealing elaborate security precautions under the veneer. The cities of the old world (including New York!) grow pessimistic. They give up on regulating themselves and call out the police. They shift from the welfare state to the warfare state,40 giving up on the tri-partite, corporate regulation of economic time and urban space, in favour of a blitzkrieg against organised labour and urban communities. Hegemonic power shifts gears from a war of position to a war of movement, assault. Here begins the agonizing business Virilio calls 'endo-colonisation',41 wherein the modern state responds to the crisis by colonising its own urban population. Welfare, for the disenfranchised, becomes 'a monumental wait'42 'No wonder,' says Mike Davis 'that the contemporary American inner city resembles nothing so much as the classical colonial city, with the towers of the white rulers and colons militarily set off from the casbah or indigenous city.'43 The material functions of the city are exiled from it, only to relocate themselves in newly industrializing countries, as what Lipietz calls 'peripheral fordism', or in 'enterprise zones', which constitute a Third World colonate within the old city itself.44 The old world city has learnt something from Las Vegas - and it has nothing to do with architecture. It now concentrates on the movements of money and style: the quantitative and qualitative hussle of the immaterial.45 Money and information (the two essential commodities of speculative inflation) circulate with ever increasing speed down the ever more efficient channels of 'casino capitalism', dancing and fiddling before the fall. Fashion and finance are the two legs on which the city makes its last stand - and if it put its best foot foreward it wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Immaterial flows of data have the potential to undermine the physical space of the city. The overaccumulation of 'electromoney' is intimately connected to the underinvestment in productive enterprise. The uncertainties generated by rapid mobility of liquidity around the globe are certainly a factor in the reluctance of big corporations to reinvest their surpluses in production. This particularly applies to Japanese corporations, caught between the rising yen and the setting dollar. Using zaiteku or 'zaitech' methods of exploiting finance programming technologies to switch cashflow from reinvestment to speculation, they have managed to keep in the black at home while aquiring large chunks of architectural real estate and government war-debt in America.46 Alongside the electronic economy, a sweatshop economy flourishes, even in the most affluent of the old world cities. Manuel Castells calls this 'polarised growth' Mobility and flexibility are the key features of both: the mobility of overaccumulated, speculative liquidity chasing the movements of credit and currency prices; labour migrations chasing footloose capital and trade flows, 'speed is the key to duress' indeed. Yet perhaps there are two sorts of speed operating here, the mechanical, analog speed of the productive economy, ticking loudly away like a trusty old alarm clock; the 'digitime' speed of the speculative economy, with its silent, inertia-less, ineffable workings, like that of a digital watch. Here is a new geography and chronography of flows, where factor inputs become transitive elements in an almost global combinatory 'whose meaning is largely determined by their position in a network of exchanges.'47 Business now calculates the comparative advantage of this urban site over the other. (In much the same way as the military pick missile targets ...) 'We are living increasingly in a space of variable geo- metry where the meaning of each locale escapes its history, culture or institutions, to be constantly redefined by an abstract network of information strategies and decisions,' according to Castells48 and we are '... no longer a society of sedentarization but one of passage' for Virilio. It is left to Virilio to draw the final conclusion from this: 'If in the 19th century the lure of the city emptied agrarian space of its substance (cultural, social), at the end of the 20th century it is urban space which loses its geographic reality' - and disappears. This is the end of the 'political and economic illusion of the permanence of sites'49 and the arrival of 'the last postindustrial resource: acceleration exceeds accumulation ...'50 Or to parapharase-parody Venturi: 'space moves very fast these days' ... 5. Data : 'no-one's far from anyone, anymore' 'THE END OF THE WORLD IS NOT NIGH' read the Sydney Morning Herald's banner headline, 21st October, 1987, as if casually announcing that the apocalypse was over, and we could all go back to business as usual. The October stock market crash has given us lay people a whole new appreciation of what has been going on in the money business, of how intangible are the workings of this digital watch which forms the surface effects of the economy. Take, for example, this epistemological reflection: 'Much of the time the world beyond our immediate experience seems like a vague intrusion, a series of flickering images we can turn off at will. Then there are times when the outside world is too much with us ... not only because of what they are but also of what they might portend. Last week was one of those times.' So said Time itself, 26th October, 1987. And what prompted this reverie? 'One after another, like a series of timed charges, major events detonated through the week. Each seemed to end with a disquieting question mark, because each suggested powers beyond personal control: unhinged economic forces, irrational foreign crises, undetectable illness ...' As Virilio says, the immediacy of information itself can create crises. In his book Speed and Politics his example is the Cuban missile crisis,51 but Black Monday would serve as an equally pertinent example. It shows that the logic of speed Virilio finds in the war economy also operates in the immaterial economy. In this particular case, the proximate cause of the stock market slide (as opposed to long-standing political-economic tendencies) can be found in a three-layered sandwich of digital information systems which form a net over the globe. This trinity of information systems is: the defense information network; the business information network; the public news data network. (And that is perhaps also the hierarchy of their speeds.) An Iranian missile, an off the cuff remark by the US Treasurer, the news that the President's wife has cancer ... each of these bits of information flies by each of the nets, affecting each in turn, each in turn affecting the trinity, each net then producing its meta-comment - like a negative feedback loop in the shape of a three-leaf clover. Although the density of the nets varies from place to place - and there is of course a politics of what does and does not circulate within it - it still in principle covers the surface of the globe and connects all points (from the point of view of information) at practically the same speed. Moreover, it is at points intensive in its saturation of space: when Reagan had his operation for cancer, the news-data net even brought us pictures of the inside of the old man's colon. The 'prosthetic'52 arm of news-data even reaches that far ... Each net speaks to the others in its own particular language. 'conditions do not warrant Apocalypse Now worries or scenarios' says Treasury Secretary James Baker to the media net. The business net's response to this, and other concurrent signals is to drop 57.61 points on the Dow. Its response to the Iranian missile (and one can send messages with missiles as easily as with anything else) is to push crude oil prices above $20 per bbl. As for the defense net, we have no idea how it responded. This is the only distinguishing feature of the the defence net: we have no idea what it does with what it knows. Who does know? Probably the Russians ... And what does this portend? Simply this: that there is a world. That there is a city. Not one of the cities we live in, where we can turn off the flickering images at will. Another world, another city, one which can turn us off at will, and go on flickering, speed illumed.53 A landscape which is everywhere yet which occupies practically no space. Fundamentalist Marxists will tell you it was prophesied in Capital. Fundamentalist Christians will tell you it was prophesised in the Bible. So to paraphrase Revelations 21: 'The people of the world will work by its light, and the rulers of the earth will bring their wealth into it. The interface of the city will stand open all day; they will never be closed, because there will be no night there.' No-ones' far from anyone in the city of the trinity, of defence, commerce and news-data that flies by the nets on the lone and level sands of digital communication. Yet it requires precious little by way of human agency in the process: 'the market's going down because its going down' says analyst Newton Zinder to Time, as if speaking about the weather. Perhaps thats exactly what he is speaking about: technological weather. Certainly most pundits agreed that computerised trading was a subsidiary cause of the October crash. The scenario Virilio fears with nuclear war - that the speed of the vectors of war technology will become so fast that decisions are taken out of the hands of statesmen and put into the cold embrace of computers - is the scenario which has already arrived within the immaterial economy. Computer stock trading programmes were acknowledged to be a contributing factor in the crash. Computerization means that the flows of capital directly interface with flows of information, via a programme which supposedly picks optimum 'bets' on the basis of the data available to it. In other words, a kind of 'automation of capital', not completely unlike the automation of labour. On the day after 'Black Monday', Wall st banned computerized programme trading, on the grounds of restoring 'some human common sense' to the market, according to The Australian (22nd Oct.). Chairman of the New York exchange, John J. Phelan had warned in December '86 that the 'portfolio insurance' techniques could lead to a 'financial meltdown' observes the International Herald Tribune (21st Oct). Portfolio insurance means techniques such as linking the purchase of stocks to related stock futures in an attempt to offset potential losses. In other words the current prices of stocks are offset against future prices. This gives some indication of the complexity of the 'casino' and the amount of information necessary to play in it. Not only is there a variety of equities for sale, but also bonds and currencies. Which can be swapped or linked to each other. Which can in some cases be traded at other places. Some of which even have a variety of points in time, present and future, upon which one can 'bet'. And of course one can borrow to do it ... 'It was internationalisation, not computerisation which caused simul- taneous collapses,' says the Far Eastern Economic Review with hindsight (5 Nov). Perhaps one could speak here of the threat of a geoeconomic homogenization of the globe, paralleling the geostrategic homogenization Virilio fears in his book Speed and Politics. Both would be made possible by the growth of vectors of information which follow the sun through the time zones. The speed of the stock market plummet was limited only by the one absolute measure of time: the speed at which the globe turns. It followed the light of dawn around the horizon. The rhythm involved here seems like that of a two-stroke motor. During daylight hours capital 'works', pumping the pistons of profit and loss. During the night, it 'cogitates'; it draws in the data on the activities of other cylinders which at that moment are in action. A variable cycle of flows of data and flows of capital, which has just decelerated from bullishness to bearishness, almost everywhere ... Of course there are also those business nets that are not located anywhere in particular at all. The NASDAQ securities system exists only as a bunch of telephone lines and screens and has no 'floor' at all.54 It is the third largest stock exchange in the world, after New York and Tokyo, and is bigger than the City of London, Zurich, Bonn, Toronto and Paris put together. NASDAQ points to the defeat of national economic territory by the vectors of business information, in much the same way as architectural space and strategic defence fall victim to their respective vectors. (Which leaves us with a lot of technologically obsolete architecture. After fifty-six years the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange building in Los Angeles has been shut down, and subsequently turned into a disco called, appropriately enough, Stock Exchange. The opening night party was called 'Small Change'. Guests danced and drank on a floor littered with fake money - real fake money this time! The trading floor is now a dance floor and the trading stations have been turned into bars. This stately old building has moved from one side of the immaterial economy (pure money) to the other (pure style) with hardly a missed beat in between. Which is perhaps the architectural equivalent of poetic justice!)55 The disappearance of territory as an obstacle to the movement of information and capital can only have profound consequences - including many accidental ones. There is coming in to existence 'a new order, a global marketplace for ideas, money, goods and services that knows no national boundaries.' says Walter Wriston. It will be next to impossible to police and regulate, because its lingua franqua is not so much the national currencies, controlled and territorialised by the central banks, as the data itself, controlled by the big business data firms like Reuters. (Who only incidentally are also a news and picture wire service.) 'The information standard has replaced the gold standard as the basis of world finance.' says Wriston -- and as CEO at Citicorp, he should know ... 56 6. Theory : the Aesthetics of Disappearance Sylvere Lotringer : 'Speed and Politics is a theoretical accident.' Paul Virilio : 'Yes, that is why it doesn't last very long'57 [footnotes] 1. Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, London, The Architectural Press, 1978, p179-190 2. Paul Virilio, 'The Overexposed City' , in Zone No 1/2, 1987 (hereafter OC). Also in Third Degree No. 1, 1985. 3. OC p17, pp20-21 4. Paul Virilio & Sylvere Lotringer, Pure War, New York, Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1983 (hereafter PW), pp34-35. Extracts from this interview are also published in Semiotext(e): The German Issue, No. 11, 1982. 5. 'Space, Time & the City' in Lotus International: the european city -- science of division, No. 51, 1987 6. PW p34, cf OC p19 7. OC p25 8. PW p34 , cf OC p23 and Scott McQuire's excellent paper, 'Television: Presenting the Memory Machine', Arena, No 80, 1987: "The meaning of television as enframing is now largely to be found in its framing of time." (p88) 9. OC p23 10. quoted in Hal Foster, '(Post)Modern Polemics', in New German Critique, No. 33, Fall 1984, p68 11. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown & Steven Izenour, Learning From Las Vegas (revised edition), Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1986, p151 12. OC p29 13. PW p64 14. A penultimate section on fashion appears in Photofile, Summer 87/88, as 'Asleep at the Wheel' 15. in Impulse, Vol 12, No 4, Summer 1986 16. from J. G. Ballard's famous 1974 preface to his novel Crash!, London, Triad/Panther books, 1985; also in the special issue of Re/Search on Ballard, No 8/9, 1984 17. Umbro Apollonio (ed), Futurist Manifestos, London, Thames & Hudson, 1973, p22. 18. PW p40, cf Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, New York, Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series, 1986 (hereafter SP), p45, p62, p32 19. PW p33 20. PW p32 21. interview with Virilio, 'Spirit of Defense', in the 'Death' issue of the Canadian journal Impulse, Vol 11, No 4, 1985, p35. cf Paul Virilio, 'Popular Defense and Popular Assault', in Semiotext(e): Italy -- Autonomia, No 9, 1980. which sharply distinquishes the 'ecological struggles' of the people from terrorism. 22. PW p10 cf p13 23. Marx & Engels, The German Ideology, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1976, p172ff 24. Futurist Manifestos, op cit, p22 25. PW p20 26. Bernard Brodie (ed), The Absolute Weapon, Yale Institute of International Studies 1946, p29 27. PW p9, p72 28. Fred Kaplan, The Wizards of Armageddon, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1984, p231 29. Brodie, op cit, p71, p90 30. PW p121, p56, p96 31. Brodie, p23 32. Herman Kahn quoted in Kaplan, p231 33. SP p134-138 34. PW p25. Carl von Clauswitz, On War, Harmondsworth, Penuin, 1985 (abridged), p119 35. James O'Connor, 'The meaning of crisis' in the International Journal of Urban & Regional Research, Vol 5, No 3, 1981, p301ff 36. OC p17 37. The locus classicus for theories of fordism is Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation, London, New Left Books, 1979. cf 'Capialism in the 80s', in New Left Review, No 136, 1982; Alain Lipietz, Miracles & Mirages, London, Verso, 1987; Eric Alliez & Michel Feher, 'The Lustre of Capital', in Zone, No 1/2, 1987. 38. Susan Strange, Casino Capitalism, Oxford, Blackwell, 1986, p13. cf Nigel Thrift, 'The Fixers: the Urban Geography of International Commercial Capital', in Jeffrey Henderson & Manuel Castells (eds), Global Restructuring & Territorial Development, London, Sage, 1987. 39. Paul Virilio, 'Moving Girl', in Semiotext(e): Polysexuality, No 10, 1981, p246 40. The terms are from Manuel Castells, op cit, pp24-27 41. PW p95, p122 42. OC p19 43. Mike Davis,' The Postmodern City' in New Left Review No. 151, 1985 p111. 44. cf Alain Lipietz, op cit, on "peripheral fordism", and Michael Peter Smith, 'Global Capital Restructuring and Local Political Crises in US Cities' in Henderson & Castells op cit, on "enterprise zones" 45. OC p26; 'An Interview with Paul Virilio' in Impulse, Vol 12, No 4, 1986, p38 46. Mike Davis, 'The Streets of Los Angeles' in New Left Review No 164, 1987, p72. cf Asiaweek, 6th November, 1987, p19. 47. Manuel Castells, 'High Technology, Economic Restructuring and the Urban Regional Process in the US' in Castells, (ed), High Technology, Space & Society, London, Sage, 1985, p23, p33 48. ibid p15 49. OC p19-21 50. Paul Virilio, 'Negative Horizons', in Semiotext(e): USA, No 13, 1987, p180 51. SP p143 52. On public space, private space and television cf Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place, New York, Oxford University Press, 1985; PW p77. 53. PW p83 and 'Negative Horizons', op cit 54. quoted in Adrian Hamilton, The Financial Revolution, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986, p43 55. The Face magazine, No 91, November 1987, p37; Details magazine, October 1987, p52, p148. For more on the technology of fashion and magazine culture see my articles in Photofile, Winter 1987 and Summer 87/88. 56. Hamilton, ibid, pp30-32 57. PW p40