In Open Sky, Virilio sets us up for the trip with a question. "Critical mass, critical moment, critical temperature. You don't hear much about critical space, though. Why is this if not because we have not yet digested relativity, the very notion of space-time?" (9) An opening, a clearing; blowing at the clouds. It starts with the unheard-of. But it only proceeds with the visual, with the speed of light and its eventual inertia. Nothing, hereafter, about the space of sound, about the reception of critique by the ear. The travel of soundwaves remains invisible - under the cover-up of "chronoscopic" perspectivism.

In the dozen or so "dromology" books that Paul Virilio has published since 1976, he develops the thesis that if speed used to be the essence of war, today speed IS war. This war, however, is not led against an enemy, but against the materiality of the world. Thus, the incredible imperceptible mediatic speeds are apocalyptic, and Virilio draws three conclusions: a) whoever is seen has been killed; b) because media undermine time and space, flood the body and make it superfluous, they have lost credibility since information is not mediated any more, but immediate; c) no time for control, filtering or double checking remains. Information is disinformation, media are everywhere and nowhere at once and admit no resistance. But let me step on the brakes, almost too late, after the slips of the penultimate, and bring this apocalypse up short just before the last point. The suspension between the distinction dividing the mediatic fast-track and the slow, deliberate philosophical trekking through problems is one of the major problems of our modernity: thus with Paul Virilio's theory of speed comes the desire, or even need, to resist acceleration when thinking about it.

According to Virilio's La machine de vision, silent film makes the screen speak in retrospect, just as mnemotechnics activates the space they dwell in - and thus he sees Hitchcock in the tradition of visualising cinema and childhood in the mode of hindsight (Paris 1988, ch. 1) and all we have to do is wait for 'seeing machines' which can see and perceive in our stead. According to the motto to that book, "Memory content is a function of the rate of forgetting." Yet since Virilio dedicated a whole chapter full of anecdotes to topographical amnesia, maybe he cites this positivistic formula only ironically. According to Virilio, Napoleon III. claimed that for the warrior, memory is the science itself, but not in the sense of a collective memory as in a popular culture based on common experience, but as "a parallel memory, a paramnesia, that is to say an erroneous localisation in time and space, the illusion of déjà vu." Shell-shocked by the information implosion, the first victim of war is the concept of reality. According to Aesthetics of Disappearance, Einstein's theory fulfils and completes the destruction of a "pharaonic conception" of signs as immobile bodies which are erected as defense against time's passing in order to resurface in history, to re-emerge in the future. This culture, Virilio suggests, explains also the doctrinary relics and the cult of the mausoleum in Marxist countries, where the idea of a unified historical time is retained and defended. According Virilio's Open Sky, speed not only obliterates distance, it inevitably elides itself. Speed, then, covers itself in the collapse of two infinites, motion in space-time and the infinitesimal, ceaseless splitting, dividing, distinction. In taking off on, and with, escape velocity: "if we confine ourselves to the Hebrew register this time, to catch a glimpse of the shadow of the Tower of Babel." (London: Verso 1997, 145) That tower of power, then, will have programmed all thinking in ruins, and the quasi-originary shadow it casts is also that of a lapse into origins, into foundational myths of the fall.

All four points, arguably, enact a screen memory, a "fausse reconnaissance" in all the military and pathological connotations this phrase can take on. The repetitions and rehearsals in the course of video's irreversibility, which is to say in the course of a simulacrum of performance or presentation, would reveal that there is not and never has been a direct, live presentation, not even, as Virilio ventures, a presentation of an electro-optical milieu. To engage his problematic notions of telepresence in real time that supplants the reality of the presence of real space is to consider these concepts problematic with regard to video and his oculist, scopophilic, macroscopic discourse - and even more so with regard to the putting to work of art and architecture.

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