Paul Virilio

Biography

Paul Virilio was born in Paris in 1932 to an Italian communist father and a catholic Breton mother. He grew up in the northern coastal French region of Brittany. The Second World War made a big impression on him as the city of Nantes fell victim to the German Blitzkrieg, became a port for the German navy and was bombarded by British and American planes. The "war was his university". After training at the École des métiers d'art, Virilio specialised in stained-glass artwork, and worked alongside Henri Matisse in churches in Paris. In 1950, he converted to Christianity. After being conscripted into the army during the Algerian war of independence, Virilio attended lectures in phenomenology by Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne.

In 1958, Virilio conducted a phenomenological inquiry into military space and the organization of territory, particularly concerning the Atlantic Wall—the 15,000 Nazi bunkers built during World War II along the coastline of France and designed to repel any Allied assault. In 1963 he began collaborating with the architect Claude Parent and formed the Architecture Principe group. (Among the small group of interns were the architects Francois Seigneur and Jean Nouvel.) After participating in the May 1968 uprising in Paris, Virilio was nominated Professor by the students at the École Spéciale d'Architecture. In 1973 he became Director of Studies. In the same year, Virilio became director of the magazine L'Espace Critique. In 1975 he co-organized the Bunker Archéologie exhibition at the Decorative Arts Museum in Paris, a collection of texts and images relating to the Atlantic Wall. Since then he has been widely published, translated and anthologised.

Since 1998, Virilio has taught intensive seminars at European Graduate School. His latest projects involve working with homeless groups in Paris and building the first Museum of the Accident.

The war model

Virilio developed what he calls the 'war model' of the modern city and of human society in general and is the inventor of the term 'dromology', meaning the logic of speed that is the foundation of technological society. His major works include War and Cinema, Speed and Politics and The Information Bomb in which he argues, among many other things, that military projects and technologies drive history. Like some other cultural theorists, he rejects labels - including 'cultural theorist' - yet he has been linked by others with post-structuralism and postmodernism. Some people describe Virilio's work as being positioned in the realm of the 'hypermodern'. He has repeatedly affirmed his links with phenomenology, for example, and offers humanist critiques of modernist art movements such as Futurism. Throughout his books the political and theological themes of anarchism, pacifism and Catholicism reappear as central influences to his self-proclaimed 'marginal' approach to the question of technology. His work has been compared to that of Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Ellul, and others. Virilio is also an urbanist. After having been a longtime resident of the city of Paris, he now lives in La Rochelle.

Virilio's predictions about 'logistics of perception' - the use of images and information in war - (in War and Cinema, 1984) were so accurate that during the Gulf War he was invited to discuss his ideas with French military officers. Virilio argued that it was a 'world war in miniature'.

The integral accident

Virilio believes that technology cannot exist without the potential for accidents. For example, Virilio argues that the invention of the locomotive also contained the invention of derailment. He sees the Accident as a rather negative growth of social positivism and scientific progress. He believes the growth of technology, namely television, separates us directly from the events of real space and real time. In it he suggests we lose wisdom and sight of our immediate horizon and resort to the indirect horizon of our dissimulated environment. From this angle, the Accident can be mentally pictured as a sort of "fractal meteorite" whose impact is prepared in the propitious darkness, a landscape of events concealing future collisions. Aristotle claimed that "there is no science of the accident", but Virilio disagrees, pointing to the growing credibility of simulators designed to escape the accident— which he argues is an industry that is born from the unholy marriage of post-WW2 science and the military-industrial complex.

The first deterrence, nuclear deterrence, is presently being superseded by the second deterrence: a type of deterrence based on what I call 'the information bomb' associated with the new weaponry of information and communications technologies. Thus, in the very near future, and I stress this important point, it will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be what I have dubbed 'the integral accident' that is the continuation of politics by other means.

Dromology

‘Dromos’ is an Ancient Greek noun for race or racetrack, which Virilio applies the activity of racing (Virilio 1977:47). It is with this meaning in mind that he coins the term 'dromology', which he defined as the "science (or logic) of speed“. Dromology is important when considering the structuring of society in relation to warfare and modern media. He notes that the speed at which something happens may change its essential nature, and that which moves with speed quickly comes to dominate that which is slower. 'Whoever controls the territory possesses it. Possession of territory is not primarily about laws and contracts, but first and foremost a matter of movement and circulation.'

Logistics of perception

In contemporary warfare, logistics does not just imply the movement of personnel, tanks, fuel and so on, but also the movement of images both to and from the battlefield. Virilio talks a lot about the creation of CNN and the concept of the newshound. The newshound will capture images which will then be sent to CNN, which may then be broadcast to the public. This movement of images can start a conflict (Virilio uses the example of the events following the broadcasting of the Rodney King footage). The logistics of perception relates also to the televising of military maneuvers and the images of conflict that are watched not only by people at home, but also by the military personnel involved in the conflict. The 'field of battle' also exists as a 'field of perception'.

War of movement

For Virilio, the transition from feudalism to capitalism was driven not primarily by the politics of wealth and production techniques but by the mechanics of war. Virilio argues that the traditional feudal fortified city disappeared because of the increasing sophistication of weapons and possibilities for warfare. For Virilio, the concept of siege warfare became rather a war of movement. In Speed and Politics, he argues that 'history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems'.

Reception

Virilio is one of the many cultural theorists (and other 'postmodernists') criticized by Sokal and Bricmont in 1997. Virilio's works are the subject of chapter 10 of Fashionable Nonsense. Their criticism consists of a series of quotes (often long) from Virilio's works, and then explanations of how Vilirio confuses basic physics concepts and abuses scientific terminology, to the point of absurdity. In the authors' words:

The writings of Paul Virilio revolve principally around the themes of technology, communication, and speed. They contain a plethora of references to physics, particularly the theory of relativity. Though Virilio’s sentences are slightly more meaningful than those of Deleuze-Guattari, what is presented as "science" is a mixture of monumental confusions and wild fantasies. Furthermore, his analogies between physics and social questions are the most arbitrary imaginable, when he does not simply become intoxicated with his own words. We confess our sympathy with many of Virilio’s political and social views; but the cause is not, alas, helped by his pseudo-physics.

A criticism of a passage often reads something like this:

Here Virilio mixes up velocity (vitesse) and acceleration, the two basic concepts of kinematics (the description of motion), which are introduced and carefully distinguished at the beginning of every introductory physics course.[221] Perhaps this confusion isn’t worth stressing; but for a purported specialist in the philosophy of speed, it is nonetheless a bit surprising.

They end their chapter with a long quote followed by this comment:

This paragraph — which in the French original is a single 193-word sentence, whose "poetry" is unfortunately not fully captured by the translation — is the most perfect example of diarrhea of the pen that we have ever encountered. And as far as we can see, it means precisely nothing.

A book-length cricism of Virilio’s work to 2004 was written by Steve Redhead. He observed:

His scattergun writing style is not always easy to follow, often provoking disorientation and dislocation at the very least. Insights, personal memories, detailed histories, major theoretical leaps and banalities sit side by side.

He also notes that Virilio does not pass the grade in academic studies:

Reading Virilio thoroughly does leave the reader with the feeling of many dislocated, undeveloped ideas swirling around often at the level of great generality. The content is often not particularly logical if viewed from a conventional academic perspective in the human or social sciences.

However, for Law and Popular Culture, Redhead concedes Virilio as a factor:

Paul Virilio’s writing have long had a major role in the theoretical socio-legal studies subdiscipline of law and popular culture which has operated at the intersection of critical legal studies and cultural studies for over two decades.

In 2014 an analyst of security, technology and global politics noted:

Virilio is unlikely to be read in the 'mainstream' of academia (although one might find his works on the reading lists of a military academy).

He credits Virilio with balancing the propaganda of progress against the management of fear at some cost:

Virilio draws on and develops points that are made by many critical thinkers from (predominantly) the twentieth century (most notably Walter Benjamin), assembling ideas in new contexts, creating a vision of the world through concepts and language that is often unsettling, a (re)description that makes the world feel strange and unfamiliar. Virilio’s often alien-sounding concepts attempt to enable us to see the world anew, to view a world that is presented to us in terms of fear and progress as something alien (and alienating), to give a form to feelings and suspicions that remain vague, unclear, uncertain, out of place.

Quotes

'War was my university. Everything has proceeded from there.''The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.'

Both the speed of light and globalization figure in Virilio's writing. At one point he wrote:

'The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light.'

Virilio is also quoted as saying,

'There is no such thing as globalization, there is only virtualization. What is being effectively globalized by instantaneity is time.'