The Aesthetics of Disappearance

Author: Paul Virilio
Year: 1991 (Semiotext(e) English edition; French original Esthétique de la disparition, 1980)
Source type: book
Raw file: raw/books/virilio-1991-aesthetics-of-disappearance.md

Summary

Virilio proposes "picnolepsy" — the frequent, brief absences of consciousness (named from the Greek picnos, "frequent") — as the model for understanding cinema, technology, and the modern condition. The "aesthetics of disappearance" names the way speed and technical prostheses produce absences, gaps, and the derealization of the lived world. Cinema is an "artificial condition of paradoxical wakefulness" that furnishes "an assistance-become-subliminal"; the city becomes "a cinema of city lights" where "architecture is only a movie." The child's game, the epileptic onset, the apparition at Lourdes, and the Hollywood star system are all instances of the same picnoleptic structure: the separation of the seen from the unseen.

Key Claims

• Picnolepsy as the structure of perception: "The lapse occurs frequently at breakfast and the cup dropped and overturned on the table is its well-known consequence... nothing really has happened, the missing time never existed. At each crisis, without realizing it, a little of his or her life simply escaped." Picnolepsy is the "paradoxical waking" (rapid waking) that complements paradoxical sleep (REM).
• The child Lartigue as camera: The young photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue "assimilated his own body to the camera, the room of his eye to a technical tool, the time of the exposure to turning himself around three times." Body-acceleration modifies duration — "he's succeeded in modifying his actual duration; he's taken it off from his lived time."
• The game as picnoleptic structure: "The basis of the game is the separation of the two extreme poles of the seen and the unseen, which is why its construction... brings us back to the picnoleptic experience." The game is "neither naive nor funny" — it is "the very austerity of its tools, its rules and its representations that paradoxically unleashes in the child pleasure and even passion."
• Marey's light as "shadow of time": Marey treats light not as the sun's "lighting up the stable masses" but as a phenomenon of acceleration and deceleration — "He treats light like a shadow of time." The aesthetics of disappearance "renews the enterprise of appearance."
• Méliès' stop trick as picnoleptic delegation: "Technical chance had created the desynchronizing circumstances of the picnoleptic crisis and Méliès — delegating to the motor the power of breaking the methodical series of filmed instants — acted like a child, regluing sequences and so suppressing all apparent breaks in duration."
• Techniques of disappearance = techniques of power: "All techniques meant to unleash forces are techniques of disappearance (the epileptic constitution of the great conquerors, Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal, etc., is well known)." "Any man that seeks power isolates himself and tends naturally to exclude himself from the dimensions of the others."
• Howard Hughes as the "technological monk": Hughes' retreat into total reclusion — the dark room, the projector, the refusal to be seen — is the paradigm of the aesthetics of disappearance. "To be is not to inhabit; polytropos, like Homer's Ulysses, not occupying only one place, he desires not to be identifiable, but especially to identify with nothing." Hughes' "only effort is to fake the speed of his destiny, to make his style of life a style of speed."
• The infra-ordinary: "To deny the ideal hierarchy of the crucial and the incidental, because there is no incidental, only dominant cultures that exile us from ourselves and others, a loss of meaning which is for us not only a siesta of consciousness but also a decline in existence." (Echoes georges perec's "infra-ordinary.")
• Apparitions as picnoleptic perception: The children at Lourdes and Salette experience "the particular instants that precede the passage from the familiar to the unfamiliar" — "the senses that stay awake succeed in perceiving an infra-ordinary reality." Bernadette Soubirous "looked characteristically pale at that moment, 'fine white muslin falling over her face', then she returned 'rubbing her eyes and her face was alive with color once more.'"
• Cinema as "paradoxical wakefulness": Technology "desires to become the metaphor of the world, while envisioning itself as a revolution of consciousness — finally replacing the pseudo-state of rational wakefulness with an artificial condition of paradoxical wakefulness, while furnishing people with an assistance-become-subliminal."
• The Promethean mirror: "Man, fascinated with himself, constructs his double, his intelligent specter, and entrusts the keeping of his knowledge to a reflection." The computer as "internal prosthesis" — "a miniscule pastille of silicon would give a person instantaneous knowledge."
• Electroshock as "electronic assumption": Electroshock therapy, "discovered in 1938, at the height of fascism," used on pigs at Roman slaughterhouses, then on "hundreds of thousands of patients" — "the confession by way of the political-military interrogation, extorted from the suspect by electroshock torture, is important also as a social or rather technico-social experience, a new effort towards transparency."
• The city as cinema: "Urbanism is in decline, architecture is in constant movement, while dwellings have become no more than anamorphoses of thresholds... the arts continue to disappear in the intense illumination of projection and diffusion... from now on architecture is only a movie; an un-habitual motility is successor to the habitudes of the city, become an immense darkroom for the fascination of the mobs."
• The voyeur-voyager: "Speed treats vision like its basic element; with acceleration, to travel is like filming." The driver "rediscovers the comportment of the votary of the giant screen" — "the locomotive illusion allows the voyeur-voyager to project beyond the screen of the windshield his own fantasies."
• Disneyland as Mélies' extension: "Disneyland, the first amusement park conceived in trompe-l'oeil... a city the way his predecessor faked his films." Disney's EPCOT as "an idea in action, capable, as Disney wished it to be, 'of making you forget present troubles and death... the real world.'"
• Loos's Ornament and Crime: "As culture develops ornament disappears from everyday objects" (Loos) — linked by Virilio to "the disappearance of the body's characteristics in the uniformity of civil or military dress" and "the disappearance of the body in the unidirectionality of speed."

Connections

Concepts: aesthetics of disappearance, dromology, logistics of perception, spectacle, everyday life, noopolitics, phantasmagoria
Authors: paul virilio, georges perec (the infra-ordinary), henri bergson (duration, chrono-tropisms), gaston bachelard (the "wealth of moments"), walter benjamin (the child's perception, the aura)
Debates: theory of the everyday (the picnoleptic and the infra-ordinary), spectacle vs function (the aesthetics of disappearance as the spectacle's logic)
Related source notes: virilio 1977 speed and politics, virilio 1989 war and cinema, proto 2023 spectacle and the screen

Direct Quotes

"The lapse occurs frequently at breakfast and the cup dropped and overturned on the table is its well-known consequence. The absence lasts a few seconds; its beginning and its end are sudden. The senses function, but are nevertheless closed to external impressions" (p. 9).

"Nothing really has happened, the missing time never existed. At each crisis, without realizing it, a little of his or her life simply escaped" (p. 9).

"All techniques meant to unleash forces are techniques of disappearance" (p. 19).

"To be is not to inhabit; polytropos, like Homer's Ulysses, not occupying only one place, he desires not to be identifiable, but especially to identify with nothing" (p. 24, on Howard Hughes).

"To deny the ideal hierarchy of the crucial and the incidental, because there is no incidental, only dominant cultures that exile us from ourselves and others, a loss of meaning which is for us not only a siesta of consciousness but also a decline in existence" (p. 28, the infra-ordinary).

"From now on architecture is only a movie; an un-habitual motility is successor to the habitudes of the city, become an immense darkroom for the fascination of the mobs" (p. 42).

"Speed treats vision like its basic element; with acceleration, to travel is like filming" (p. 39).

Open Questions

• How does picnolepsy relate to everyday life theory? Resolved in Picnolepsy and the Everyday — picnolepsy supplies a third phenomenology of the quotidian (absence/reassembled continuity) beside description (Perec, Clucas) and dwelling; the "infra-ordinary" is a shared refusal with a different method; and the picnoleptic gap is the site of technical power and prosthetics.
• Is the "aesthetics of disappearance" a critique of the spectacle or its fulfillment? If the spectacle makes everything visible, disappearance makes visibility itself the site of power. (See Picnolepsy and the Everyday for the everyday-life side.)
• How does the "technological monk" (Hughes) relate to the hermit tradition and to the phenomenology of dwelling? Virilio draws the parallel explicitly (the desert, the anchorite) but does not develop it.