Time and Time Again

Paul Virilio’s book, Open Sky opens with a rather glum, though nonetheless true, quote that we discussed briefly in class last week: “Some day the day will come when the day will not come.” This quote, though seemingly bleak, is at the heart of Virilio’s discussion of the ways in which technology is changing—has been changing—our world. Writing in 1997, Virilio is somewhat disturbed by the changes he is witnessing with the advent of the internet, the cell phone, and other technologies that are ubiquitous to society only a decade later.

The similarities between Virilio and Ulmer are noticeable, particularly in the fact that they are both difficult reads. One of the overarching considerations of Open Sky is that current (current during his time and to an even greater degree, during present times) technologies actually have the ability to shape nature. He explains this notion by discussing our concept of time and the way that our understanding of time is changing based on these technologies. This doesn’t seem far-fetched to me at all, considering that “time” is a human construct anyway and that it was certainly changed based on technologies such as sundials and, to a greater extent, clocks. Of course, I don’t think Virilio is merely positing that our understanding of the notion of time is changing, but that time itself (if it exists outside of the human mind) is actually changing in some physical way. He discusses this change throughout the book and introduces it in the first chapter, “The Third Interval,” through a discussion of time, space, the speed of light, and through a discussion of a “’generalized arrival’ whereby everything arrives without having to leave” (16). This generalized arrival seems to be most perpetuated through video cameras, first by displaying pictures on a television (arriving in a metaphorical sense to the world on the screen) and now through webcams which allows a person to actually arrive without having ever left. Throughout his book his also talks about teleseminars, which, interestingly enough, most people in our class took part in over the summer during the Serious Games class… part of our class took place over Skype. We arrived in class without ever having to leave our houses. Virilio’s fear, it seems, is that the availability of this kind of technology will eventually eliminate the need to ever leave or arrive and, furthermore, to never have to move.

Our reading of Sherry Turkle was particularly interesting when considering a number of claims that Virilio makes throughout this book. One of the first, when he is discussing the transition of the human environment due to technology, he imagines “an urban environment whereby the image prevails over the thing it is an image of” (19). Though we haven’t exactly made it so far as to prefer the virtual over the real in terms of urban environments (at least in the sense that we’re not all Matrix characters, as far as I know), we’ve certainly moved that way in terms of people. It seems as though people have become taken over my their images, whether these images occur on Facebook or on webcam. Furthermore, images that we see, say, of celebrities are certainly privilidged and preferred over the celebrities themselves. First of all, most of us could never come in contact with them at all. Secondly, as Turkle’s book shows, we prefer this faraway interaction because we don’t have to see things we don’t want to see (for example, our favorite celebrity being rude, etc.). On that note, the people that we’ve come to love (celebrities) aren’t even the real people. Rather than seeing the real person, we’re seeing a Photoshopped image of that person—a particularly telling instance of the image prevailing over the thing it is an image of.

Virilio further discuss our love of the image over the thing it is an image of in his chapter called “From Sexual Perversion to Sexual Diversion” in which he discusses the ways that cybersex may eventually take over real sex (which he seems to equate with marriage and relationships—I’m not sure this is necessarily true anymore, but I think that most people would agree that they should all be lumped together). He writes that “To prefer the virtual being—at some remove—to the real being—close-up—is to take the shadow for the substance, to prefer the metaphor, the clone to the substantial being who gets in your way, who is literally on your hands, a flesh-and-blood being whose only fault is to be there, here and now, and not somewhere else” (104). I agree with Virilio that this is true in some aspects, but luckily I don’t think that technology is bringing us down quite as fast as he had expected. Though we certainly meet our lovers online, most people use online dating sites to find someone to meet in real life. Though I certainly believe that technology has the ability to negatively impact us (and it has in some ways) I don’t think we’re even close to the time when there will be no more time.

Questions:

Do you think that Virilo’s view of the world will ever exist?

Virilo speaks of an immediate memory. How do websites like Google and Wikipedia utilize this notion?

Do we only have generalized arrivals left?

Carmen Miranda Rights

If literacy, as Ulmer and others have said, gave us the ability to recognize a “self” then it seems that electracy has given us the ability to recognize the ways in which everything in the world can be related to the self and to each other. Electracy shows us that everything is interrelated. Ulmer best described this phenomenon in his discussion of the “Y” in previous chapters. Rather than asking “why” and thus separating events, we should find out “Y” by taking two seemingly unrelated events and bringing them together. This is, ultimately, the idea behind the MEmorial.

Though Ulmer discussed the Why/Y concept in previous chapters, one of the most interesting examples of this concept was discussed in part four (“Soft Justice”) and more specifically in the chapter titled “Justice Miranda (A Conceit).” In this chapter, Ulmer connects two seemingly unrelated things (as is his way) to show that electracy is, at least in part, a new way of thinking that can show these interconnections—this is aided primarily by the Internet which has become a civic sphere. Ulmer explains: “in the same way that alphabetic literacy made conceptual thinking possible, electracy requires another means for arranging diverse particulars into classes, sets, and categories. The new arrangement has to be invented out of the old one, involving a new form and a new style of reasoning” (185).

In chapter seven, Ulmer follows the “Y” path in order to connect Carmen Miranda and Miranda rights. He explains how Miranda rights came to be—a synthesization of four separate trials in which the accused needed a “shield” that protected “the ignorant or, more significantly, the ‘illiterate’” (197). Ulmer then gives the backstory of Carmen Miranda: a young Latina woman made famous by her dancing and appearance in what Ulmer describes as campy films. One of the interesting ways that these two things come together (though they seem to have little in common besides name) is that they are both, in a way, epitomes of American culture. They represent the values of our way of life. (Innocent until proven guilty, sexualized Others, etc.) Ulmer describes the way these two come together (Carmen Miranda Rights) and the ways literacy and electracy are related: “I have two metaphors now, two scenarios, two series producing a gap: In the scenario of literacy, finding out something, doing research, learning the truth, is like giving someone the third degree (putting him or her in the hot seat). In the electrate scenario, learning the truth is like dancing the samba during carnival” (191). Ulmer seems to be looking for an electrate truth—one that comes about through the Y. Further along, Ulmer notes that truth, according to the Greek idea of the concept, is something “hidden, buried, a secret, a secret at first associated with the slave’s body and then with a woman’s body” (191). Truth, in the instances of the Mirandas (Carmen and Rights) exists somewhere inside the person/concept in question. Truth, in regards to Carmen, is, as Ulmer explained, embodied by her actual body which is hiding a truth. Miranda rights are supposed to be a means for us to locate the truth when a question of crime comes up. Oddly enough, neither actually occurs. In terms of Carmen Miranda, the truth that is supposed to be hidden by the woman’s body cannot exist because her personality is so easily reproducible by cross-dressing men (because, Ulmer notes, she is so campy). Ulmer also points out that the Miranda Rights often lead to protection of the guilty party rather than the innocent (especially when the person in question isn’t “ignorant”).

I think that all this relates back to Ulmer’s understanding of ATH. He explained in the introduction that “The aspect of tragedy of most interest in our context is (in Greek) ATH . . . which means ‘blindness’ or ‘foolishness’ in an individual, and ‘calamity’ or ‘disaster’ in a collectivity” (xxiv). This directly relates to Carmen Miranda Rights—at the point where individuals believe that Miranda rights could uphold truth, we have foolishness, but when it becomes a part of our culture as a whole, this foolishness turns to tragedy. Ulmer writes “the basic insight of ATH—that a seemingly inconsequential detail of behavior may have unforeseen and immense consequences for the community—is echoed in chaos theory (the butterfly effect)” (xxv). Once again, we see that everything is interrelated, as chaos theory posits. It is through this notion that we can say “Carmen Miranda Rights” and have it become a meaningful concept rather than a string of similar words.

Questions:

In what ways are our notions of gender undermined throughout chapter 7?

Was Pappenheimer’s MEmorial useful in “the real world” or more so on the Internet/in the civic sphere?

How do tragedies explore the way individual foolishness or blindness produces collective catastrophe?