The Present

Jean Luc Godard:

The Present Doesn't Exist Here

"Real Time" vs. The Present

"If...the two interlocutors communicate with each other through (real-time)interactive technologies, it is the absolute speed of radiation that will facilitate their tete-a-tete, their face-to-face encounter, and this happens no matter what intervals of space and time effectively separate them. Here, the event does not take place,or, more precisely,it takes place twice,the topical aspect yielding to the teletopical aspect, the unity of time and place being split between the emission and reception of signals, here and there at the same time, thanks to the power of electromagnetic interactivity. ...In the case of televises copes in front of their screens, the horizon is not the background of the image, but its delimitation: the frame of the screen...the duration accorded to the interview before the cathode screen once again becomes silent and opaque.

The televisual horizon is thus uniquely that of the present of the real-time emission and reception of the televised interview, a present instant precisely defined by the framing of the two televiewers' viewpoints and, especially by the time limit placed on their face-to-face dialogue.

"To define the present in isolation is to kill it" Paul Klee once wrote. Isn't this the crime of the technologies of telecommunications commit in isolating the present from its "here and now" and promoting a commutative elsewhere that is no longer the location of our concrete presence in the world, but merely that of a discrete and intermittent telepresence?

The real time of telecommunications is thus opposed not just to the past, to delayed time but to the present, to its very actuality; an optical switching of the "real" and the "figurative" that refers back to the observer physically present here and now, sole persistence of an illusion in which the body of the witness becomes the unique element of stability in a virtualized environment."

Paul Virilio, "Light Time", The Landscape of Events.