(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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KARL IVAN SOLIBAKKE
As Virilio sees it, communication technology revolutionizes current
approaches to knowledge and memory, given that the “geodesic capacity
to define a unity of time and place for all actions now enters into direct
conflict with the structural capacities of means of mass communication”
(98). Abridged from three dimensions to two and stimulated by “infographic
technologies” (98), the grid-work of municipal topographies has
been reduced to the factor of time required for split-second conveyance
from one surface to the next. Thanks to an exponential increase in transmission
speeds, these dynamics develop into vectors of transitory and
incandescent revelations, even though the increased vulnerability of data
flow exposes it to easy manipulation as well as to being proved invalid.
The effects on intellectual and cognitive autonomy are vital, since “the
man/machine interface replaces the facades of buildings as the surfaces of
property allotments” (88). Much as Heine and Benjamin saw the impact
economic and demographic acceleration had on urban environments, Virilio
asserts that the instantaneity of postmodern communication deployment
has inaugurated “trans-historical temporality” (96), which is not
measured in units of “chronological and historical time, time that passes”
but in “time that exposes itself instantaneously” (86). People find themselves
in a time warp in which durable space and geometric patterns sustaining
direct mandates for sensory perceptions have all but evaporated.
Confronted with “transportation and transmission time” (88), sensory
perceptions yield to the user codes set up to access network links, at the
same time that data highways circumnavigate the globe and fictitious
identities are engineered for chat rooms and virtual games.
Conversely, urban inhabitants wrestle with a progressive suspension
of material surfaces. The multi-layered inscriptions that once connected
streets, buildings, and pedestrian walkways to grid-works and city blocks
and divided suburban and ethnic neighborhoods from city centers, at one
time podiums for representative edifices and monuments, indeed all of
these intramural and extramural effects in traditional cityscapes, have been
condensed to data interfaces that surface on screens almost as quickly as
they can be deleted by a mouse click. Virilio speculates that the rectangular
display at home, at work, and in Internet cafés has superseded the
city square as the hub of municipal activities. To the extent that E-mail
replaces traditional forms of communal discourse, monitors have been
instituted as “the crossroads of all mass media” (97). Exhibiting cognitive
and interactive dimensions, television, computer, and cellular screens
counterbalance the loss of physical and psychosocial human contact.
Besides the construction possibilities that today’s communication
networks provide, a variety of spatial and temporal mutations is constantly
redefining everyday experience and visual representations of contemporary
life. For Virilio these engender constructed space, which goes beyond
the question of how urban landscapes are perceived and also revise deep-