Paul Virilio, Thinker of the "Science of Speed" and the Acceleration of the World

The French philosopher Paul Virilio, thinker of the "science of speed" and the acceleration of the world, the urban planner and essayist,  died on Tuesday September 18, of a heart attack at the age of 86.

See here :  Paul Virilio, premier sur la vitesse. By  Robert Maggiori. Liberation, September 18, 2018.

At the moment there is an exhibition in the  V&A Museum in London  called The Future Starts Here. The show begins with a quote by Paul Virilio :  “The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.”

A review of this show. The Future Starts Here review – an engaging vision. By Rowan Moore, The Guardian,  May 12, 2018.   

Strangely enough, Paul Virilio, who died on 10 September 2018 at the age of 86, breached the Anglophone world with a book he did not exactly write. Pure War came out in 1983 and is based on interviews he conducted with Sylvère Lotringer, the philosopher and founder of Semiotext(e), who put it together as a real act of friendship. That book burst like an incendiary shell in certain readers’s minds and highlighted his two consistent themes: war and speed.

Virilio’s first love had been architecture. But what is architecture in the age of total war? For centuries, the European city had defended itself against slings and arrows with ramparts and walls, but the city was no match for modern artillery and aerial bombardment. The balance between war and the city shifted decisively in the modern age. The vector trumps the location. This was the bittersweet theme of his first major book, Bunker Archaeology (1975), which, among other things, is a meditation on the German defenses that had failed to keep the Allies at bay when they stormed the beaches and ended the war.

But war doesn’t really end, as Virilio noted, it just accelerates, approximating ever more closely to its pure form. In an era infatuated with the ‘politics’ of everything, he thought instead in terms of war. Modernity is war on ever increasing scales: expanding from the tactical to the strategic to the logistic. World War II was won not by generals but by quartermasters, by the ones who kept the biggest flows of boots and bullets and bodies moving toward the front.

Modernity is also war on more and more kinds of terrain. Warfare not only took to the air but to the airwaves. The modern world is a condition of generalized information warfare. Not only is architecture vulnerable to bombs, it proves defenseless against information, passing through the doors and walls of our homes, rearranging the space and time we imagine we live within.

The information war reversed the power of architecture and communication. The home or the city is now exposed to its flows. The consequences may be even more far-reaching. The vectors of communication call into being a whole new geopolitics – not of territories and borders but of communication and computational infrastructure. Already in the late 20th century he saw coming the kinds of conflicts we experience now, where nameless hackers shut down power stations by remote control, and drone pilots in facilities in Nevada steer airborne killer robots on the other side of the world.

The tone in which Virilio writes of such things is a deft balance between melancholia and fascination. There’s no going back. The old, slow, local world is gone. At his best, he avoids the clichéd style of both kinds of writers on technology: Those nostalgic for an old world, and those who enthuse about everything novel. He pulls off a style that makes the currently fashionable writers on the subject simply redundant. A fine example would be his other famous work, Unknown Quantity (2002), where he invites us to think about how each new technology brings with it its own specific and novel kind of accident.

Virilio was not a moralist. He observed, he speculated, he forged concepts to explain on the fly what is happening to us. He was not an optimist. Technical speed had already overcome the deliberative time of politics. This is an era, he said, not of democracy but of ‘dromocracy,’ the reign of speed. But he did think a lot about tactics in and against the accelerating world. The general line of tactics he advocated paid attention to time, and the possibility of interrupting accelerating time. A city is already a mesh of slow and fast times, but perhaps sometimes a new pocket of stillness can be created.

It would have given him no pleasure to see the general direction of his speculations so spectacularly borne out in our time. He is one of those special (and in a way accursed) writers who was right about things we don’t really want to know.

How Philosopher Paul Virilio (1932–2018) Spoke to an Age of Acceleration and Total War. By  McKenzie Wark. Frieze , September  19, 2018.

Cultural theorist Paul Virilio has been repeating essentially the same thing, packed inside different specifics at different times, over and over for the past 30 years. Maybe it’s time for everybody—not just French people and college students—to start listening to him.

Virilio is into revelations. He’s like some kind of prophet of the apocalypse. There are no moral judgments in his work, even though he is a devout Catholic. He deals more in the observation and analysis of banalities, or “evidences,” as he calls them. His best-known statement is “The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.” It’s probably the most concise and eloquent explanation of causality we’ve ever read, and it can be applied to almost anything. Virilio expands this into what might be his main message, which is, to paraphrase, that every technological invention bears its specific defect in its DNA and that the cult of speed and acceleration that technology has engendered will be the death of us all.

Virilio worked, after World War II, as a stained-glass artist along with Matisse and Braque; in the 60s, with partner Claude Parent, his concept of oblique architecture revolutionized the field; and in the 70s, he came to know the then-bosses of French theory: Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. Virilio’s book Speed and Politics, published in 1977, marked the birth of his concept of dromology, or the logic of speed. He’s been the publisher of Georges Perec and Jean Baudrillard, he’s friends with Chris Marker and Peter Sloterdijk… and now he’s friends with us.

Vice: People know you as the theorist of disaster. Do you think you might be obsessed with it?

Paul Virilio: Not at all. Look at it this way: I used to be friends with Georges Perec, a child of the Holocaust. His parents died in a concentration camp. Once, when I was with him, I told myself: “I’m not a child of the Holocaust. My parents aren’t dead. I’m not Jewish. But I am a child of total war.” It lives in me in the same way that he can’t forget the Holocaust. We are children of the same war. We can’t be racist and say that he’s allowed to be haunted and I’m not.

V: You witnessed aerial bombings in Nantes…

P.V. : The bombings were a very complex and perverted phenomenon. You can’t understand the French collaboration and resistance movements if you don’t understand the occupation period. Being occupied is being in a situation of absolute perversity. You live next to your enemy, and your allies kill you. I was ten years old in 1942. I had to understand that the people who lived close by were my enemies, and the ones bombing me were my friends. I was a child of total warfare, of the lightning war, of the quick war: the blitzkrieg.

V. : Did you hide in basements during the bombings?

P.V.  : On the contrary, we used to go to the fields. We were scared of being buried alive in basements. We used to hear people screaming from the cellars, drowning because the water pipes had exploded. So my dad told us that we wouldn’t do that. We went to the fields and lay on the ground.

V: And yet you suffer from claustrophobia, right?

P.V. : Oh yes. Maybe it started back then, I don’t know. The bombs would fall close by and cover us in sand and dust, but we’d rather die in the sun than croak in a basement. Bombings are a cosmic phenomenon. You don’t feel like a concrete person is doing this to you, it’s more like the apocalypse or a huge storm or the eruption of Vesuvius. When I was young, I witnessed collective fear. Individual fear is easy to deal with as a young boy. Either you hit back or you run away. It just requires individual courage. But when your parents are terrified and grandmothers are crying and the people around you are screaming then, wow, you can’t be brave.

V : A lot of people see only the negative side of your theories. But I see much of it as positive, such as the fact that you are interested in accidents because they are the epitome of complete surprise.

P.V. :  Of course. There are happy accidents: love at first sight, winning the lottery… Aristotle said, “Time is the accident of accidents.” Time is what exists, and the accident is what happens. You have a substance that exists, like a mountain. And then you have the event: the earthquake. I didn’t study disasters, but accidents—rupture. Substance is necessary and absolute, accidents are relative and contingent. How could we manage to analyze today’s technical progress if we don’t analyze its accidents?

 V : Do you mean “accident” in the same way that some say “event” in modern-day philosophy?

P.V. : Yes, except that for me, an accident is the event of speed. Our accidents are linked to the acceleration of history and of reality. The French were occupied by the Nazis by surprise. They didn’t react well because they didn’t understand the speed of it all. They were taken by speed. Today’s events, like the stock-market crash, are speed accidents. I call these “integral accidents” because they trigger other accidents. There is an amplification of pure events in history. Today, history is entirely accidental. Look at 9/11. It’s not an event, it’s an accident. But we consider it to be as important as yesterday’s events. It’s like a declaration of war without a war.

V : Are you against progress?

P.V. : No. I’ve never thought we should go back to the past. But why did the positive aspect of progress get replaced by its propaganda? Propaganda was a tool used by Nazis but also by the Futurists. Look at the Italian Futurists. They were allies with the Fascists. Even Marinetti. I fight against the propaganda of progress, and this propaganda bears the name of never-ending acceleration.

V : I was kind of hoping you’d talk about your metaphor of the shipwreck…

P.V. : Oh yes, of course. It’s just that I’ve been repeating it forever.

V : It’s fairly simple, but so universal.

P.V. : Inventing a plane is not only inventing the crash but also inventing the breakdown. A jet engine is an amazing thing, but it’s also sensitive to birds, to volcanic ash… So you go from the plane that can go really fast to the plane that can’t fly at all. Whether it’s because of terrorism and being scared, or because of the volcano and it being too risky, or something new tomorrow, you can’t innovate without creating some damage. It’s so obvious that being obliged to repeat it shows the extent to which we are alienated by the propaganda of progress.

V : I’m guessing that you always hear, “Regardless, Mr. Virilio, progress is a good thing.” Does that annoy you?

P.V. : Yes, it’s very irritating. These people are victims of propaganda. Progress has replaced God. Nietzsche talked about the death of God—I think God was replaced by progress. I believe that you must appreciate technology just like art. You wouldn’t tell an art connoisseur that he can’t prefer abstractionism to expressionism. To love is to choose. And today, we’re losing this. Love has become an obligation. Progress has all the defects of totalitarianism.

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V : Let’s talk more about the danger that’s inherent in speed.

P.V . : “The faster the better” is completely false. The faster you go, the more risks you take. I used to have a Jaguar. I drove it at more than 200 kilometers per hour once with Claude Parent. He owned an E-Type, I had the S-Type. Physical speed freezes you. And the faster you go, the farther you have to look, and you lose lateral vision. You are fascinated.

V : You just made a gesture as if you were wearing blinders.

P.V.  : Why do animals have eyes on the side? There are very few that have eyes in the front like us. It’s because real danger comes from the side or from behind. Speed flattens the vision, like a screen.

V : You said once that “choosing resistance is not opposing yourself to new technologies, but refusing to collaborate.”

P.V. : Yes, that’s obvious.

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 V : Fifteen years ago, you said you wanted to write a book called The Integral Accident. You also said that everyone could write their own 1984. You still haven’t written it, but did you mean that the consequence of this integral accident would be totalitarianism?

P.V. : Yes, of course. The totalitarianism of totalitarianisms. The loss of liberty. Democracy is threatened everywhere.

V : As you’ve written, we face “the synchronizing of collective emotions that leads to the administration of fear.”

P.V.  : Exactly. The community of emotions that replaces the community of interests. We would get to a communism of affects. And that’s dreadful. This goes back to the panic phenomenon, in front of which we can’t have individual courage. No one talks about nuclear weapons. We are told about nuclear waste—which, by the way, is a huge problem because some of it can be harmful for 200,000 years. When we dig to bury it, we need to make sure this is remembered. Imagine placing nuclear waste in a hole. How do you tell people in 200,000 years that there are dangerous substances there? It’s not science fiction anymore. How do you communicate with those people? What language will they speak? The length of the threat isn’t considered here. And it’s the same for stocking nuclear weapons. They are everywhere. Anyone can get their hands on them. We don’t talk about this, but it’s so obvious. The propaganda of progress really exists. There is censorship here. Do you see the perversity we live in? It’s not a plot against humanity—it’s more complicated—but the result is the same.

Paul Virilio. Interview and Photo By Caroline Dumoucel.  Vice , September  3,  2010.

CTHEORY: What about early cinema as a primitive form of this, when people left the cinema in fright?

VIRILIO : Unlike Serge Daney or Deleuze, I think that cinema and television have nothing in common. There is a breaking point between photography and cinema on the one hand and television and virtual reality on the other hand. The simulator is the stage in-between television and virtual reality, a moment, a phase. The simulator is a moment that leads to cyberspace, that is to say, to the process because of which we now have two bottles instead of one. I might not see this virtual bottle, but I can feel it. It is settled within reality. This explains why the word virtual reality is more important than the word cyberspace, which is more poetic. As far as gender is concerned, there are now two men and two women, real and virtual. People make fun of cybersex, but it’s really something to take into account: it is a drama, a split of the human being! The human being can now be changed into some kind of spectrum or ghost who has sex at a distance. That is really scary because what used to be the most intimate and the most important relationship to reality is being split. This is no simulation but the coexistence of two separate worlds. One day the virtual world might win over the real world.

These new technologies try to make virtual reality more powerful than actual reality, which is the true accident. The day when virtual reality becomes more powerful than reality will be the day of the big accident. Mankind never experienced such an extraordinary accident.

CTHEORY: What is your own feeling about that?

VIRILIO : I’m not scared, just interested.

This is drama. Art is drama. Any relationship to art is also a relationship to death. Creation exists only in regard to destruction. Creation is against destruction. You cannot dissociate birth from death, creation from destruction, good from evil. Thus any art is a form of drama standing between the two extreme poles of birth and death, just like life is drama. This is not sad, because to be alive means to be mortal, to pass through. And art is alive because it is mortal. Except that now, art has become more than painting, sculpture or music: art is more than Van Gogh painting a landscape or Wagner composing an opera. The whole of reality itself has become the object of art. To someone like Zurbaran, who paints still lifes, lemons and pears are the objects of art. But to the electronics engineer who works on the technologies of virtual reality, the whole reality has become the object of art, with a possibility to substitute the virtual with the real.

CTHEORY: Is there a transcendence of the body?

VIRILIO : That is difficult to say. First, what is under consideration is not only the body itself, but the environment of the body as well. The notion of transcendence is a complex one, but it is true that there is something divine in this new technology. The research on cyberspace is a quest for God. To be God. To be here and there. For example, when I say: “I’m looking at you, I can see you”, that means: “I can see you because I can’t see what is behind you: I see you through the frame I am drawing. I can’t see inside you”. If I could see you from beneath or from behind, I would be God. I can see you because my back and my sides are blind. One can’t even imagine what it would be like to see inside people.

The technologies of virtual reality are attempting to make us see from beneath, from inside, from behind…as if we were God. I am a Christian, and even though I know we are talking about metaphysics and not about religion, I must say that cyberspace is acting like God and deals with the idea of God who is, sees and hears everything.

CTHEORY: What will happen when virtual reality takes the upper hand?

VIRILIO : It already has. If you look at the Gulf War or new military technologies, they are moving towards cyberwars. Most video-technologies and technologies of simulation have been used for war. For example, video was created after the Second World War in order to radio-control planes and aircraft carriers. Thus video came with the war. It took twenty years before it became a means of expression for artists. Similarly, television was first conceived to be used as some kind of telescope, not for broadcasting. Originally, Sworkin, the inventor of television, wanted to settle cameras on rockets so that it would be possible to watch the sky.

CTHEORY: So it was only by a matter of degrees that the Gulf War became the ‘virtual war’, it was live broadcasting that really effected this change?

VIRILIO :  The high level of the technologies used during the Gulf War makes this conflict quite unique, but the very process of de-realization of the war started in 1945. War occured in Kuwait, but it also occured on the screens of the entire world. The site of defeat or victory was not the ground, but the screen. (I wrote a book called Desert Screen on the Gulf War.) Thus it becomes obvious that television is a media of crisis, a museum of accidents.

CTHEORY: This must surely result in some psychic crisis?

VIRILIO : It is as if I was to take my eye, to throw it away, and still be able to see. Video is originally a de-corporation, a disqualification of the sensorial organs which are replaced by machines…The eye and the hand are replaced by the data glove, the body is replaced by a data suit, sex is replaced by cybersex. All the qualities of the body are transferred to the machine. This is a subject I discuss in my last book, The Art of The Engine.

We haven’t adjusted yet, we are forgetting our body, we are losing it. This is an accident of the body, a de-corporation. The body is torn and disintegrated.

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CTHEORY: How can we address this loss?

VIRILIO : The true problem with virtual reality is that orientation is no longer possible. We have lost our points of reference to orient ourselves. The de-realized man is a disoriented man. In my last book, The Art of The Engine, I conclude by pointing at a recent American discovery, the GPS (Global Positioning System) which is the second watch. The first watch tells you what time it is, the second one tells you where you are. If I had a GPS, I could know where this table stands in relation to the whole world, with an amazing precision, thanks to satellites. This is extraordinary: in the Fifteenth century, we invented the first watch, and now we have invented the GPS to know where we are.

When you find yourself in the middle of virtual reality, you don’t know where you are, but with this machine, you can know. This watch has been used for ships and not only can it tell you where you are, but also it can tell others where you are: it works in the two ways. The question you’re asking is really interesting. For one can’t even know what it means to be lost in reality. For instance, it is easy to know whether you are lost or not in the Sahara desert, but to be lost in reality! This is much more complex! Since there are two realities, how can we say where we are? We are far away from simulation, we have reached substitution! I believe this is, all in the same time, a fantastic, a very scary and an extraordinary world.

CTHEORY: But to return to this question of transcendance…

VIRILIO : All in all, I believe that this divine dimension raises the question of transcendance, that is to say the question of the Judeo-Christian God for instance. People agree to say that it is rationality and science which have eliminated what is called magic and religion. But ultimately, the ironic outcome of this techno-scientific development is a renewed need for the idea of God. Many people question their religious identity today, not necessarily by thinking of converting to Judaism or to Islam: it’s just that technologies seriously challenge the status of the human being. All technologies converge toward the same spot, they all lead to a Deus ex Machina, a machine-God. In a way, technologies have negated the transcendental God in order to invent the machine-God. However, these two gods raise similar questions.

As you can see, we are still within the museum of accidents. That’s a huge, cosmic accident, and television, which made reality explode, is part of it. I agree with what Einstein used to say about the three bombs: there are three bombs. The first one is the atomic bomb, which disintegrates reality, the second one is the digital or computer bomb, which destroys the principle of reality itself – not the actual object – and rebuilds it, and finally the third bomb is the demographic one. Some experts have found out that in five thousand years from now, the weight of the population will be heavier than the weight of the planet. That means that humanity will constitute a planet of its own!

CTHEORY: Do you always separate the body from technology?

VIRILIO : No. The body is extremely important to me, because it is a planet. For instance, if you compare Earth and an astronomer, you will see that the man is a planet. There is a very interesting Jewish proverb that says: “If you save one man, you save the world: That’s a reverse version of the idea of the Messiah: one man can save the world, but to save a man is to save the world. The world and man are identical. This is why racism is the most stupid thing in the world.

You are a universe, and so am I; we are four universes here. And there are millions of others around us. Thus the body is not simply the combination of dance, muscles, body-building, strength and sex: it is a universe. What brought me to Christianity is Incarnation, not Ressurection. Because Man is God, and God is Man, the world is nothing but the world of Man – or Woman. So, to separate mind from body doesn’t make any sense. To a materialist, matter is essential: a stone is a stone, a mountain is a mountain, water is water and earth is earth. As far as I am concerned, I am a materialist of the body, which means that the body is the basis of all my work.

To me, dance is an extraordinary thing, more extraordinary than most people usually think. Dance preceded writing, speaking and music. When mute people speak their body language, it is true speaking rather than handicap, this is the first word and the first writing. Thus to me, the body is fundamental. The body, and the territory of course, for there cannot be an animal body without a territorial body: three bodies are grafted over each other: the territorial body – the planet, the social body – the couple, and the animal body – you and me. And technology splits this unity, leaving us without a sense of where we are. This, too, is de-realization.

There is a buddhist proverb which I like a lot. It says: “Every body deserves mercy”. That means that every body is holy. This is to answer the body question.

Cyberwar, God And Television: Interview with Paul Virilio. By Louise Wilson. Ctheory.net ,  December 1, 1994.

English editions of his books :  MIT Press

I read  the Dutch translation of  L'horizon négatif : essai de dromoscopie.  It was published as

Het horizon-negatief : essay over dromoscopie.  Translated by  Arjen Mulder and Patrice Riemens. Published by Duizend & Een in 1989.

Paul Virilio, French philosopher, talking about the art, speed, perception, and cinematic. In the lecture Paul Virilio discusses the concepts of velocity, light, futurism, tele-objectivity, in relationship to Duchamp, Lacan, Bataille, systemic crisis, abstract art, focusing on direction, screens, and acceleration. European Graduate School Video Lectures

Biography & bibliography : The European Graduate School

Wikipedia