ABSTRACT
Virilio’s incredulity is directed at a new meta-narrative: that which underwrites cyberspace as the final frontier, bringing the very concept of frontier or boundary into obsolescence. With ‘the loss of the terrestrial horizon of our world proper’, and thereby ‘the loss of all measure’, postmodernity has left behind all vestiges of the Cartesian matrix: now extension and information (mind) are coterminous. Spatio-temporal co-ordinates no longer sketch out the contours of a topography wherein one can read the ‘story’ of a trip from point a to point b, from here to there, from subject to object, from fort to da. A postmodern Little Ernst does not use a reel attached to a length of string in order to manufacture an identity. There is, as Virilio states here, no more terminus (no fort, no other side of Ernst’s cot-curtain), which leads him to claim that the ‘pathology of movement’ characteristic of ‘the art of the motor’ currently being perfected in the guise of ‘absolute speed’, takes place ‘no longer between here and there, but between being there and no longer being there’ (p. 85). Real time supersedes real space.
