This essay will focus on one of the common themes shared by Walter Benjamin and Paul Virilio: the disruption caused by a cultural artifact, specifically, new communication technology (film in the case of Benjamin, telecommunication in the case of Virilio) in the familiar patterns of human perception; in short, intervention of technology into human nature. This theme features prominently in Benjamin's celebrated "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936) [2]; half a century later, Virilio returns to it in an essay which presents one of the most interesting critiques of cyberculture to date -- "Big Optics" (1992).[3]
What is human nature and what is technology? How does one draw the boundary between the two in the twentieth century? Both Benjamin and Virilio solve this problem in the same way. They equate nature with spatial distance between the observer and the observed; and they see technologies as destroying this distance. As we will see, these two assumptions lead them to interpret the prominent new technologies of their times in a very similar way.
Benjamin starts with his now famous concept of aura: the unique presence of a work of art, of a historical or of a natural object. We may think that an object has to be close by if we are to experience its aura but, paradoxically, Benjamin defines aura "as the unique phenomenon of a distance"(224). "If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch" (225). Similarly, writes Benjamin, "painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality" (235). This respect for distance common to both natural perception and painting is overturned by the new technologies of mass reproduction, particularly photography and film. The cameraman, whom Benjamin compares to a surgeon, "penetrates deeply into its [reality] web" (237); his camera zooms in in order to "pray an object from its shell" (225). With its new mobility, glorified in such films as Dziga Vertov's "A Man with the Movie Camera," the camera can be anywhere, and, with its superhuman vision, it can obtain a close-up of any object. These close-ups, writes Benjamin, satisfy the desires of the masses "to bring things 'closer' spatially and humanly," "to get hold of an object at very close range" (225). Along with disregarding the scale, the unique locations of the objects are discarded as well as their photographs brought together within a single picture magazine or a film newsreel, the forms which fit in with the demand of mass democratic society for "the universal equality of things."
Writing about telecommunication and telepresence, Virilio similarly uses the concept of distance to understand their effect. In Virilio's reading, these technologies collapse the physical distances, uprooting the familiar patterns of perception which grounded our culture and politics.
Virilio introduces the terms Small Optics and Big Optics to underline the dramatic nature of this change. Small Optics are based on geometric perspective and shared by human vision, painting and film. It involves the distinctions between near and far, between an object and a horizon against which the object stands out. Big Optics is real-time electronic transmission of information, "the active optics of time passing at the speed of light."
As Small Optics are being replaced by Big Optics, the distinctions characteristic of the former are erased. If information from any point can be transmitted with the same speed, the concepts of near and far, horizon, distance and space itself no longer have any meaning. (So, if for Benjamin the industrial age displaced every object from its original setting, for Virilio post-industrial age eliminates the dimension of space altogether.) At least in principle, every point on Earth is now instantly accessible from any other point on Earth. As a consequence, Big Optics locks us in a claustrophobic world without any depth or horizon; the Earth becomes our prison.
Virilio asks us to notice "the progressive derealization of the terrestrial horizon,...resulting in an impending primacy of real time perspective of undulatory optics over real space of the linear geometrical optics of the Quattrocento."[4] He mourns the destruction of distance, geographic grandeur, the vastness of natural space, the vastness which guaranteed time delay between events and our reactions, giving us time for critical reflection necessary to arrive at a correct decision. The regime of Big Optics inevitably leads to real time politics, the politics which requires instant reactions to the events transmitted with the speed of light, and which ultimately can only be efficiently handled by computers responding to each other.
Given the surprising similarity of Benjamin's and Virilio's accounts of new technologies, it is telling how differently they draw the boundaries between natural and cultural, between what is already assimilated within the human nature and what is still new and threatening. Writing in 1936, Benjamin uses the real landscape and a painting as examples of what is natural for human perception. This natural state is invaded by film which collapses distances, bringing everything equally close and destroys aura.
Virilio, writing half a century later, draws lines quite differently.
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