Speed is not time accelerated but time made ‘real’. When everything
is observable at once, from wherever, for wherever, no-one needs to identify
or remember, only watch. The example par excellence
remains the Gulf War:
‘With paradoxical logic, what gets decisively
resolved is the reality of the object’s real-time presence. In
the previous age of dialectical logic, it was only the delayed-time
presence, the presence of the past, that lastingly impressed plate and
film. The paradoxical image thus acquires a status something like that
of surprise, or more precisely, of an "accidental transfer"’
4
It is the state of things that’s come upon us, and although Virilio
writes here of images and the changing sites and meanings of the recording
and transmission of their data, the logic (a ‘paradoxical logic’)
extends to the voice, to the question of who speaks. Through the analyses
of Blanchot, through the archaeology of Foucault, through Derrida’s
early grammatologies, an autonomy of Literature and the act of writing
has been established, determined by entries and exits, by disjunctions
and connections, making a voice that speaks of itself. The model will
no longer hold. When he speaks in your voice, America he is speaking in
an uncountable number of places all at once, not in Literature or in some
other Space, but in a time as real as ours. That’s the irony, he
speaks in your voice because all time is becoming ‘real-time’,
and the voice that speaks is now as real as us who hear it- speaking can
no longer be distinguished from writing, under which, in contradistinction
to Derrida’s assertions, it has now been subsumed in a time when
the sign is becoming visual, not linguistic: and writing is visible where
speaking is not. This is the quality of DeLillo’s recent works,
forcing that situation’s reorientation of the world, changing the
form of the experience.
This quality comes from a change of use in the notion of what crowds around
us. In White Noise, DeLillo’s exemplary
novel of the mid-eighties, it is an ‘airborne toxic disaster’,
a death that swarms around anxious communities on the run through the
mid-west night, that hovers; chemical particles seeping in insensible.
Mao II begins the change – it is stated
there that ‘the future belongs to crowds’ 5,
and from then on a new mass composed of man and voice has taken precedence.
Its type is extremely particular, which means that it can cross from the
vast scope of years and figures of Underworld to the intimacy of The
Body Artist, populated only by three and by just a few events.
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