CHAPTER TEN McLuhan, Virilio and Speed BOB HANKE Rewind to 1964. Marshall McLuhan pronounces: Today it is the instant speed of electric information that, for the first time, permits easy recognition of the patterns and the formal contours of change and development. The entire world, past and present, now reveals itself as a growing plant in an enormously accelerated movie. Electric speed is synonymous with light and with the understand- ing of causes (McLuhan 1964: 305). Fast forward to 1979. In an article for MacLean's Magazine titled "Living at the Speed of Light," he begins: "In the '80s there is a general awareness that the tech- nology game is out of control, and that perhaps man was not intended to live at the speed of light." "Excessive speed of change," he continues, "isolates already- fragmented individuals and the accelerated process of adaption takes too much vital- ity out of communities" (McLuhan 1980: 32). Amid runaway networked computer technology and real time data transmission, "speed of light man has neither goals, objectives nor private identity. He is an item in the data bank—software only, eas- ily forgotten—and deeply resentful" (McLuhan 1980: 32). At the end of his life, McLuhan no longer believed that information flows at electric speed were synony- mous with enlightenment; rather, he was more concerned about the social side effects of living the fast life. 204 | TRANSFORMING McLUHAN The association of speed, modernization, and modernity has had a long, though until recently, little known or appreciated history. Jeremy Millar and Michiel Schwartz's Speed-Visions of an Accelerated Age is a major exploration of this unchart- ed area of our cultural history, highlighting some of the thinkers who have approached speed not only as a precept but as a concept, tool, or vehicle for cultur- al analysis. For speed is not merely a matter of overcoming distance or the rate of dissemination and retrieval of information; it is also a matter of mobility, the per- ception of the visual world, the construction of time, how we measure value, the syn- chronization of everyday life, and how people are disciplined within the political economic order. Ultimately, speed is also a question of desire and of how power is organized in society. "To possess speed," write Millar and Schwarz, "is to be mod- ern; to control speed rather than to be controlled by it is perhaps the most impor- tant form of contemporary power" (1998:17). I want to argue that McLuhan offered a critique of media that probed, among other social and psychic consequences, the shift from the experience of time to the experience of speed. Simultaneity, instantaneity and the uncertainty and unpre- dictability of living in the "global present" were among his concerns from early on, and accelerating speed becomes a minor, yet significant, theme in his later works. But where simultaneity refers to experience itself, instantaneity is a "technological reduction of simultaneity to an immediate, nonverbal world of affect, action, and power" (Wilmott 1996: 132). The new "global times," McLuhan knew, could not be understood by resorting to "classical theories based on separation of past, pre- sent and future, linear causality and positivist methodology" (Adam 1995:124). In these, and many other ways, McLuhan prefigures Paul Virilio's thoughts and Virilio may be more indebted to McLuhan than he recognizes. Virilio interprets imme- diacy at the absolute speed of light and electromagnetic waves in terms of the "information bomb." For both McLuhan and Virilio, the atomic bomb is a fore- shortened representation of time and a symbol of the "necessity of being in existence" (Willmott 1996: 192). For McLuhan, "media fall-out" described the "totalizing, unconscious, and invisible penetration of a technological world. .into human nature" (Wilmott 1996: 192). For Virilio, the "information bomb" means that media interactivity should be regarded in the same way as nuclear radioactivity. The annihilation of space and the increased effort to control the real-time environment of human relations and activities brings us to the brink of what Virilio calls a tem- poral accident-a mutation in the concept of time itself. McLuhan's focus is on the message of the medium—"the change of scale or face or pattern that it introduces into human affairs" (McLuhan 1964: 24, emphasis added). In the following pages, I also argue that Paul Virilio's writings on old and new media are extensions of and deviations from Marshall McLuhan's thesis on McLUHAN, VIRILIO AND SPEED | 205 acceleration. While McLuhan was concerned with visual and acoustic space, and Virilio with territorial and vectorial space, they both have addressed the varying speeds of modernity and its effects, especially after the West's will-to-speed is finally able to annihilate space once and for all. Just as McLuhan revised Innis on the relationship of media to sensory perception, Virilio has upgraded Innis's (1951) "plea for time" by arguing that a real-time temporal bias has superceded the bias of space (Deibert 1999). Space is annihilated and "timeless time"—the negation of time—becomes the dominant social form of time in an informational economy and network society (Castells 1996). As Innis has shown, within early civilization, "the use of armed force in conquest and defence emphasized the spatial concept" and the religious institution was a temporal expression of power (Innis 1951: 106). Emphasizing the mobility of the military proletariat and the instruments of war- fare that have made assault more convenient, as well as the new means of war at the speed of light, Virilio finds that the temporal expression of power resides in mili- tary institutions (Virilio 2002a). At the "moment of Sputnik" (October 17, 1957), McLuhan observed that matrix of television, satellite, and computers succeeded in conquering space; being '"on the air'," he said, you are simultaneously here and in many other places in a man- ner that is discarnate and angelic. ." (McLuhan 1974: 56). At the moment of Pioneer 10 (March 2,1972), Virilio noted that the '"real time' of the messages trans- mitted by Pioneer" became "practically the same as the time difference between Tokyo and Paris" (Virilio 1997b: 42). In 2000, two years after Switzerland's Swatch AG introduced Internet Time, various companies from cellphone makers to CNN.com to online game and chat enterprises were featuring Internet Time, whose central meridian runs through Swatch's headquarters in Biel, Switzerland. The same year, British Prime Minister Tony Blair launched Greenwich Electronic Time, a collaborative venture between the British government and an e-tailing industry group to network servers around the world to nuclear clocks based in London. As real-time communication technologies are coming to prevail over delayed-time communication technologies, a new digital age of speed, in which time is measured in nanoseconds, is upon us. If, as McLuhan put it, the medium is the message, and the medium in ques- tion for us is the assemblage of real-time, network media and computer-mediated communication, then the message is that technology is now on the verge of con- quering time, true velocity is being virtualized, and chronological local time is being superceded by universal world-time. Revising McLuhan, Virilio claims "the message is not exactly the medium ... but above all the ultimate SPEED of its prop- agation" (Virilio 1997c: 6). In his later writings, McLuhan came to focus on dis- covering the "laws of media" that describe patterns of interlocking effects, where 206 | TRANSFORMING McLUHAN speed plays an ambiguous role and produces paradoxical effects, whereas Virilio con- centrates his critical gaze upon the "coeval emergence of mass media an industrial army, where the capability to war without war manifests a parallel information mar- ket of propaganda, illusion, dissimulation (Der Derian in Virilio, 2002a: viii). Beginning with Speed and Politics (1986), Virilio's political economy of speed has traced the emergence of "dromocratic power—dromos comes from the Greek and means "race"—and every society is a "race society" (Virilio 1999:14). In his subse- quent writings, he examined the aesthetic, political and ethical implications of speed, and military, cinematic and televisual, and techno-scientific logistics of per- ception. For Virilio, speed effects are not at all ambiguous, nor are they merely para- doxical; contemporary "real time" interterritorial communication constructs a media ecology of social cybernetic control and a post-national state of emergency. With the publication of various interviews (Wilson 1994; Oliveria 1996; Der Derian 1997; Virilio 1988,1997a, 1998,1999,2001,2002b), The Virilio Reader(Der Derian 1998a), a special issue of Theory, Culture and Society (Armitage 1999), The Paul Virilio Reader (Redhead 2004a) and Paul Virilo: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture (Redhead (2004b), there are a surplus of signs that Virilio's interest in speed as a dominant element of social life has captured the attention of various scholars. Der Derian believes that Virilio's critique "represents the most sustained and significant effort since Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, and . Martin Heidegger" (1998b: 12). Virilio has also been claimed as a worthy successor to Michel Foucault for his "radicalization of the politics of time" (Douglas 1997) and to Walter Benjamin for his inductive, montage approach to history (Manovich 1996). Redhead (2004b) concludes that Virilio is a resolute high modernist who does not fit any poststructuralist, postmodernist, sociological, or critical social theory mold. Virilio's reception in Canada has been limited and mixed. Burnett (1995) nar- rows the scope of Virilio's theses to technology, human perception, and the indi- vidual body. On the other hand, Kroker (1992) has discussed Virilio in relation to technology and the French postmodernism of Baudrillard, Barthes, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, and Foucault.