The Law of Proximity
Essay by philosopher Paul Virilio, published in "Book for the Unstable Media," 1992.
Book for the Unstable Media
"You see this mosquito? It is a remarkable mechanism,
with its minuscule receptor for detecting the blood vessels.
It makes an incision in the skin with a microscope saw and
sucks out the blood with remarkable precision. If one constructed
such a machine, one could take blood samples for analyzes,
and one would not even feel the prick. We will soon
be building micro-robots, and sending them off to explore
the human organism," declared the Vice-President
of the Toyota-Motor research laboratory. Tomorrow, we are
promised, the human body will become the exercise ground
for micro-machines which will travel through it in every
direction apparently without causing any pain ... Here,
then, are the latest prostheses, the new automata: these
ANIMATA which will populate our organism,
just as we ourselves have populated and developed the expanse
of the earth"s body. Now that 99% of the micro electronic
productions are receptors or sensors and the automotive
vehicles of the future will have at their disposal some
50 detectors of all kinds for monitoring pressure, vibration
and shocks now also smart pills are being prepared for the
human organism, pills capable of remote transmission of
information about nervous functions and blood flow; while
soon to come are micro-robots capable of moving through
our arteries in order to treat sick tissue "Industry
has already produced the necessary microprocessors and receptors
- all we have to do is add arms and legs,"
explains Professor Fujita of the University of
Tokyo. At this stage in the development of the post-industrial
machine, the question of the miniaturization of components
becomes essential to the analysis of the topography of technologies.
Indeed, while technological history had accustomed us to
valuing the growing importance, both volumetric and geographic,
of industrial machinery - whether railways, cables, high
tension lines or motorway networks - now we are suddenly
witnessing the opposite process: technological reductionism
is gradually affecting all the disciplines of communication
and telecommunication. The law of mechanical proximity which
had served to arrange human space - the "exogenous"
environment of the race - is being overtaken by
a law of electro-magnetic proximity, which still
remains to be discovered and apprehended before we more
or less passively witness the forthcoming invasion of our
bodies and the monitoring of an "endogenous" environment
- that of our guts, our viscera, through the interactive
capabilities of a bio-technological miniaturization, which
will bring to completion the rise of the great means of
mass communication already governing our society. Thus
the genealogy of techniques has progressively led us from
the monitoring of the geophysical environment -
thanks to the development of hydraulic networks and of works
connected with the cadastral organization of the world -
to the monitoring of the physical environment,
with the mechanics and the physico-chemistry of those energies
necessary to the vectors of transport and communication,
before finally arriving at the monitoring of the microphysical
environment - that is, not merely of the climate, but
of human physiology, no longer by means of the traditional
pharmacopoeia, but through the interactive capacities of
those means of transmission which man might soon be able
to ingest, even digest ... In fact, we are witnessing
the beginnings of a third revolution: after the transport
revolution of the 19th Century, which saw the rise of the
railway system, of the car and aviation, the 20th Century
has witnessed the second revolution, a revolution of transmissions,
through the implementation of the instantaneous diffusion
of electromagnetic waves in radio and video. Now,
in the secrecy of laboratories, the revolution of transplants
is being prepared - not just the grafting of liver, kidneys,
heart and lungs, but the transplanting of new stimulators,
much more effective than the pacemaker. Micro-motor grafts
will soon be able to replace defectively functioning natural
organs, or even to improve the vital capacities of a physiological
system in a perfectly healthy person, by means of detectors
with instantaneous remote interpretation. Here a
question arises which precisely concerns the topography
of technologies: that is, the mutation of the well-known
"law of proximity", or
if one prefers, the law of least effort, or least action.
Reducing or suppressing the distance of action, to the point
of introducing the machine, the means of instantaneous communication,
into the very interior of the human body - this poses considerable
questions about the new technical milieu, the post-industrial
"technosphere". Indeed,
this action-at-a-distance once again raises the
crucial question of the nature of the interval which makes
up that distance: an interval of SPACE (sign negative)
for the geometric organization and the monitoring of the
"geophysical" environment; an interval
of TIME (sign positive) for the organization of the
monitoring of the "physical" environment,
and the invention of means of communication; and
finally, an interval of LIGHT (sign zero), the
third and final interval (interface), for the instantaneous
monitoring of the "microphysical" environment,
through new methods of telecommunication. Before
returning to the necessity of redefining the law of proximity,
due to the very instantaneity of interactive teletechnologies,
we should note that if the monitoring of the preceding environments,
geophysical and physical, was rigorously contemporary with
the absolute nature of space and time in the Newtonian era,
then that of the microphysical environment is contemporary
with the absolute nature of the speed of light in the Einsteinian
era. Today, if the action-at-a-distance
of teletechnologies is resulting in the transplantation
of information sources in the living body itself, it is
because the law of "electromagnetic" proximity
is definitively supplanting the law of "mechanical"
proximity, with teleaction becoming dominant over
immediate action. Let us finally return to the last
law of proximity in relation to the principle of least action.
If one believes the recent evolution of post-industrial
machinery, LESS IS MORE, not
only on the level of volume, of the physical bulk of the
object, but also on the level of material and the internal
constitution of the microscopic device. The question which
then remains to be asked is: if less is more, to what extent?
To the extent of the virtual? To the extent of that image,
that virtual reality, which is finally more determining
that the thing of which it is, after all, only
the image? As the miniaturization now in progress entails
a concomitant dematerialization of the machine, it is as
well to ask whether there is a limit, quantum or otherwise,
to the processes of reduction and virtualization of the
technical object today. In fact, present - or more
accurately, TELEPRESENT - man no longer
inhabits the energy of some machinery or other. Rather,
energy instantaneously inhabits and governs him, whether
he likes it or not. A radical inversion of the principle
of least action which up until that point had moulded the
history of societies. Moreover, the aim of this revolution
in transplantation is quite clear: it is a question of MINIATURIZING
THE WORLD, after reducing and
miniaturizing the components and the technical objects which
it had contained since the rise of industry.
