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VIRILIO, DROMOLOGY AND VISUAL CULTURE
Abstract
This paper critically analyses the theory of a world-renowned French philosopher, urbanist, and cultural theorist Paul Virilio. In this text, the focal point for Virilio is the character and condition of picnolepsy. What is picnolepsy? How has it been produced, arranged, and used over the centuries in human cultures? Virilio's book The Aesthetics of Disappearance is thus a book about how ancient, modern, and postmodern human cultures behave toward perceptual stability and breaks, photography, technology, consciousness, and time. Virilio explores which kinds of picnolepsy function automatically and which we assimilate. He asks how picnolepsy is conveyed as uninterrupted time, devoid of perceptible interruptions, and who has access to these numerous everyday absences, which frequently occur while being totally ignored by others around us. What are they used for? Who decides on and manages the direction of picnolepsy? How does it form the “picnoleptic”, her existence or his encounters with the absent time of the world? The key question of The Aesthetics of Disappearance is therefore: How are human existence and individuality created through historically conditioned configurations of picnolepsy? The chief premise and consequently the goal of Virilio's books are to examine accurately the condition of picnolepsy and to explain its aesthetic repercussions. Virilio shows that picnolepsy has become a series of technical prostheses, which are non-natural supplements or substitutes for our continually maturing yet ultimately waning eyes, and which also increasingly form the foundation of art in contemporary culture. Picnolepsy in the form of the light projected by technical prostheses is thus crucial to the production of postmodern artistic perception or representations. The main goal of this text is the development and modern day condition of human perception in the world's advanced cultures. Virilio's text is therefore about how diverse ways of perceiving and coping with the realms of photography and technology, science, and cinema are appreciated and incorporated into postmodern visual culture.
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