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Name :- Goswami Mahir Pari C.
Roll no :- 21
Topic name :- Paul Virilio and
Hypermodernsim
Submitted to :- Department of
English
Paper name :- Culture Studies
E-mail:-goswamimahirpari786@gmail.com
Enrollmentno:- 20691084201180021
Paul Virilio is one of the most signifi cant French cultural theor ists writing today Increas ingly hailed as the inventor of conce pts such as 'drom ology' the "science" of speed Virilio is renowned for his declara-tion that the logic of accel- eration lies at the hear t of the orga nization and transfor mation of the mode rn worldd However Virili o's tho ught rema ins much misunde rstood by many postm odern cultu ral theorists In this article l and supporting the ground-breaking work of Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
I shall evaluate the contribution of Virilio"s writ ings by suggggesting that they exist beyond the terms of postm odernism and that they shou ld be conc eived of as a contri bution to the emerging debate over
" hypermodernism " Conseq-uently the article deta ils Virilio''s biogr aphy and the theore tical context of his work be fore outli ning the essential contributions Virilio has made to contempo orary cultural theory. In later sections an appraisal of Virilio's "hypermodernism" tog -ether with a short evalu ation of the controversies surrounding Virilio's work, will be provided before the concl usion.
The World According To Paul Virilio
Born in Paris in 1932 to a Breton mother and an Italian Communist father, Virilio was evacuated in 1939 to the port of Nantes, where he was traumatised by the spectacle of Hitler's Blitzkrieg during World War II. After training at the Ecole des Metiers d' Art in Paris, Virilio became an artist in stained glass and worked alongside Matisse in various churches in the French capital. In 1950, he converted to Christianity in the company of 'worker-priests' and, following military conscription into the colonial army during the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962), Virilio studied phenomenology with Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne. Captivated by the military, spatial, and organizational features of urban territory, Virilio's early writings began to appear while he was acting as a self-styled 'urbanist', in Architecture Principe (Virilio and Parent, 1996), the group and review of the same name he established with the architect Claude Parent in 1963. Although Virilio produced numerous short pieces and architectural drawings in the 1960s, his first major work was a photographic and philosophical study of the architecture of war entitled Bunker Archeology (1994a [1975]). The creator of concepts such as 'military space', 'dromology', and the 'aesthetics of disappearance', Virilio's phenomenologically grounded and controversial cultural theory draws on the writings of Husserl, Heidegger, and, above all, Merleau Ponty. 2 After participating in the evenements of May 1968 in Paris, Virilio was nominated Professor by the students at the Ecole Speciale d' Architecture, and he later helped Jacques Derrida and others to found the International College of Philosophy. An untrained architect, Virilio has never felt compelled to restrict his concerns to the spatial arts. Indeed, like his philosopher companions, the late Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Jean-Francois Lyotard, Virilio, like his current sympathetic adversary, Jean Baudrillard, has written numerous texts on a variety of cultural topics. Commencing with Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology 1986 1977
before moving on to The Aesthetics of Disappearance 1991 - 1980
War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception 1989 - 1984
Politics of the Very Worst
1999a 1996 Polar Inertia 1999 1990 The Information Bomb 2000 1998 and most recently Strategy of Deception 2000b 1999 the power of Virilio's cultural theory has only recently begun to be felt in the Engl ish-speaking world This situation is probably due in no small part to the fact that despite rece iving several intern ational speaking invitations weekly he rarely lea ves Paris and seldom converses in public outside France. Virilio retired from teaching in 1998. He currently devotes himself to writing and working with private orga niza tions concer ned with housing the homeless in Paries.
The importance ofVirilio's theoretical work stems from his central claim that, in a culture dominated by war, the military-industrial complex is of crucial significance in debates over the creation of the city and the spatial organization of cultural life. In Speed & Politics , for example, Virilio offers a credible 'war model' of the growth of the modern city and the development of human society. Thus, according to Virilio, the fortified city of the feudal period was a stationary and generally unassailable 'war machine' coupled to an attempt to modulate the circulation and the momentum of the movements of the urban masses. Therefore, the fortified city was a political space of habitable inertia, the political configuration, and the physical underpinning of the feudal era. Nevertheless, for Virilio, the essential question is why did the fortified city disappear? His rather unconventional answer is that it did so due to the advent of ever increasingly transportable and accelerated weapons systems. For such innovations 'exposed' the fortified city and transformed siege warfare into a war of movement . Additionally, they undermined the efforts of the authorities to govern the flow of the urban citizenry and therefore heralded the arrival of what Virilio (Virilio and Parent, 1996: xv) calls the 'habitable circulation' of the masses. Unlike Marx, then, Virilio postulates that the transition from feudalism to capitalism was not an economic transformation but a military, spatial, political, and technological metamorphosis. Broadly speaking, where Marx wrote of the materialist conception of history, Virilio writes of the military conception of history.
Virilio's Contribution To Cultural Theory
Virilio's early work focused on the oblique function — a proposed new urban order based on 'the end of the vertical as an axis of elevation, the end of the horizontal as permanent plane, in favour of the oblique axis and the inclined plane' (Virilio and Parent, 1996: ). Such writings also foreshadowed Virilio's military and political critiques of deterritorialization and the revolution in information transmission that surfaced in Bunker Archeology , his as yet untranslated L'Insecurite du territoire (1976) and Speed & Politics . Moreover, it is these themes that make Virilio's current writings of interest to contemporary postmodern cultural theorists like Bauman (1999: 0) and 'global information culture' theorists such as Lash (1999: ).
Virilio's doubts about the political economy of wealth are primarily driven by his 'dromocratic' conception of power. Considering Von Clausewitz's On War (1997 [1832) to be outmoded, Virilio is decisively influenced by Sun Tzu's ancient Chinese text, The Art of War (1993). Debating with himself about war, the 'positive' (Fascist) and 'negative' (anti-Fascist) aspects of Marinetti's artistic theory of Futurism, Virilio suggests that political economy cannot be subsumed under the political economy of wealth, with a comprehension of the management of the economy of the state being its general aim. Indeed, for him, the histories of socio-political institutions such as the military and artistic movements like Futurism show that war and the need for speed, rather than commerce and the urge for wealth, were the foundations of human society. It is important to state that Virilio is not arguing that the political economy of wealth has been superseded by the political economy of speed, rather, he suggests that 'in addition to the political economy of wealth, there has to be a political economy of speed' (Zurbrugg, 2001: forthcoming.) Hence, in Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles (1990 [1978]) and Pure War (Virilio and Lotringer, 1997 [1983]), Virilio developed his dromological investigation to include considerations on pure power — the enforcement of surrender without engagement — and revolutionary resistance — Virilio's case against the militarization of urban space. The 'rationale' of pure war might be encapsulated as the logic of militarized technoscience in the epoch of 'Infowar'. For Virilio, the epoch of Infowar is an era in which unspecified civilian 'enemies' are invoked by the state in order to justify increased spending on the third age of military weaponry and, in particular, in the form of new information and communications technologies such as the Internet. Thus, for Virilio, in the post-Cold War age, the importance of the military-industrial complex — or what he calls the 'military- scientific complex' is not decreasing but increasing (Armitage, 2001a: forthcoming. Original emphasis.) For the weapons of the military-scientific complex are not merely responsible for integral accidents like the 1987 world stock market crash, accidents brought about by the failure of automated program trading, but also for the fact that, 'in the very near future' it ' will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be the integral accident that is the continuation of politics by other means ' (Armitage, 2001a: forthcoming. Original emphasis.)
In The Aesthetics of Disappearance and The Lost Dimension (1991b [1984]), Virilio, a devotee of Mandelbrot's (1977) geometry of fractals, argues that cultural theory must take account of interruptions in the rhythm of human consciousness and 'morphological irruptions' in the physical dimension. Using his concept of 'picnolepsy' (frequent interruption) and Einstein's General Relativity Theory, he suggests that modern vision and the contemporary city are both the products of military power and time-based cinematic technologies of disappearance. Furthermore, although there are political and cinematic aspects to our visual consciousness of the cityscape, what is indispensable to them is their ability to designate the technological disappearance of Lyotard's (1984) grand aesthetic and spatial narratives and the advent of micro narratives. In Virilio's terms, Mandelbrot's geometry of fractals reveals the appearance of the 'overexposed' city — as when the morphological irruption between space and time splinters into a countless number of visual interpretations, and 'the crisis of whole dimensions' (Virilio, 1991b [1984]: 9-28). Important here is that Virilio's concerns about the aesthetics of disappearance and the crises of the physical dimension are not exercised by the textual construction of totalizing intellectual 'explanations'. Rather, they are exercised by the strategic positioning of productive interruptions and the creative dynamics of what he, following Churchill, calls the 'tendency' (Virilio, 1989 [1984]: 80). As Virilio maintains in The Lost Dimension, the rule in the overexposed city is the disappearance of aesthetics and whole dimensions into a militarized and cinematographic field of retinal persistence, interruption, and 'technological space-time'. Speaking recently about the overexposed city within the context of the 'totally bogus' court cases surrounding O. J. Simpson and the death of Princess Diana, Virilio suggested that, today, "all cities are overexposed". London, for example, "was overexposed at the time of Diana's burial' while 'New York was overexposed at the time of Clinton's confessions concerning Monica Lewinsky". (Armitage, 2001a: forthcoming. Original emphasis.)
In War and Cinema ,Virilio applies the idea of 'substitution' when discussing the different kinds of reality that have appeared since the beginning of time. Bearing a remarkable similarity to Baudrillard's (1983) concept of 'simulation', Virilio's chief concern is with the connection between war, cinematic substitution and what he calls the 'logistics of perception' — the supplying of cinematic images and information on film to the front line. The importance of the concept of the logistics of perception can be seen in the context of 'post' and 'hyper' modern wars like the Persian Gulf War of 1991 and the Kosovo War of 1998-9. For in these kinds of conflicts not only do settled topographical features 'disappear' in the midst of battle but so too does the architecture of war. Indeed, the military high command has only two choices. It can entomb itself in subterranean bunkers with the aim of evading what one of Coppola's helicopters in the film Apocalypse Now announced as 'Death from Above'. Or, alternatively, it can take to the skies with the intention of invading what Virilio has dubbed in the CTHEORY interview, 'orbital space'. Conceptualising a logistics of perception where 'the world disappears in war, and war as a phenomenon disappears from the eyes of the world', Virilio has thus been analysing the relationship between war, substitution, human and synthetic perception since the 1980s, particularly in texts such as L'ecran du desert: chroniques de guerre (1989 [1984]: 66; 1991c). 5 Virilio's interests in war, cinema and the logistics of perception are primarily fuelled by his contention that military perception in warfare is comparable to civilian perception and, specifically, to the art of filmmaking. According to Virilio, therefore, cinematic substitution results in a 'war of images', or, Infowar. Infowar is not traditional war, where the images produced are images of actual battles. Rather, it is a war where the disparity between the images of battles and the actual battles is 'derealized'. To be sure, for Virilio, wars are 'no longer about confrontation' but about movement — the movement of 'electro-magnetic waves'. (Armitage, 2001a: forthcoming.) Similar to Baudrillard's (1995) infamous claim that the Gulf War did not take place, Virilio's assertion that war and cinema are virtually indistinguishable is open to dispute. Yet Virilio's stance on the appearance of Infowar is consistent with his view that the only way to monitor cultural developments in the war machine is to adopt a critical theoretical position with regard to the various parallels that exist between war, cinema, and the logistics of perception. It is a view he developed in his trenchant critique of The Vision Machine (1994b [1988]).
In Virilio's universe, therefore, people 'no longer believe their eyes'. For him, 'their faith in perception ' has become 'slave to the faith in the technical sightline ', a situation in which contemporary substitution has reduced the 'visual field' to the 'line of a sighting device' (1994b [1988]: 13. Original emphases.) Viewed from this angle, The Vision Machine is a survey of what I have called 'pure perception' (Armitage, 2000a: 3). For, today, the military-scientific complex has developed ominous technological substitutions and potentialities such as Virtual Reality and the Internet. In Virilio's terms, 'the main aim' of pure perception is ' to register the waning of reality '. The aesthetics of disappearance is a form of aesthetics that is derived from 'the unprecedented limits imposed on subjective vision by the instrumental splitting of modes of perception and representation' (1994b [1988]: 49. Original emphases.) Hence, Virilio conceives of vision machines as the accelerated products of what he calls 'sightless vision' — vision without looking — that 'is itself merely the reproduction of an intense blindness that will become the latest and last form of industrialisation: the industrialisation of the non-gaze (1994b [1988]: 73. Original emphasis.) Virilio further details the far-reaching cultural relationships between vision and remote-controlled technologies in Polar Inertia .
In Polar Inertia , Virilio examines pure perception, speed, and human stasis. In 'Indirect Light', for example, Virilio considers the difference between the video screens recently adopted by the Paris Metro system and 'real' perceptual objects such as mirrors from a theoretical perspective that broadly conforms to what Foucault (1977) called 'surveillance societies' and Deleuze (1995) labelled 'control societies'. In contrast, other articles note the discrepancy between technologically generated inertia and biologically induced human movement. Discussing the introduction of 'wave machines' in Japanese swimming pools, the effacement of a variety of 'local times' around the world and their gradual replacement by a single 'global time', Virilio notes the disparity between 'classical optical communication' and 'electro-optical commutation'. In the era of pure perception, though, Virilio argues that it is not the creation of acceleration and deceleration that becomes important but the creation of 'Polar Inertia'. Here, Virilio proposes that in the early modern era of mobility, in his terms the era of emancipation, inertia did not exist. The idea of polar inertia thus excludes what would have been alternate aspects of the speed equation — simple acceleration or deceleration — in the industrial age. Yet, as Virilio has been arguing since the 1980s, in the post-industrial age of the absolute speed of light, real time has now superseded real space. In such circumstances, the geographical difference between 'here' and 'there' is obliterated by the speed of light as history itself 'crashes into the wall of time'. (Armitage, 2001a: forthcoming.) Additionally, in its terminal mode, as exemplified by reclusive billionaires such as the late Howard Hughes, polar inertia becomes a kind of Foucauldian incarceration. Holed up in a single room in the Desert Inn hotel in Las Vegas for fifteen years, endlessly watching Sturges' Ice Station Zebra , Hughes, Virilio's 'technological monk', was not only polar inertia incarnate but, more importantly, the first inhabitant of a 'mass phenomenon'. Equally significantly, for Virilio, this phenomenon has stretched far beyond domestic cinema and TV audiences and on into the global war zone. In fact, according to him, in recent conflicts such as the one in Kosovo, the army now 'watches the battle from the barracks'. As he puts it, "today, the army only occupies the territory once the war is over ." (Armitage, 2001a: forthcoming.) At the broadest level, then, Virilio's writings on polar inertia seek to show that large tracts of civilian and military physical geographical spaces no longer have significant human content. Therefore, in The Art of the Motor (1995 [1993]), Virilio turned his attention to the relationship between the spaces of the human body and technology.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, then, Virilio's cultural theory is concerned with what he calls the third, or, the transplant revolution — the almost total collapse of the distinction between the human body and technology . Intimately linked to the technological enhancement and substitution of body-parts through the miniaturisation of technological objects, the third revolution is a revolution conducted by militarized technoscience against the human body through the promotion of what the Virilio calls 'neo-eugenics'. Such developments range across Virilio's (1995 [1993]: 109-112; Armitage, 2001a: forthcoming) criticisms of the work of Stelarc, the Australian cybernetic performance artist, to his concerns about the eventual fate of the jet-pilots in the Kosovo war. This is because, for Virilio, both Stelarc and the jet-pilot represent much the same thing: "the last man before automation takes command". (Armitage, 2001a: forthcoming.) Nevertheless, it should be stressed that Virilio's criticisms of automation are closely connected to the development of his concept of endo-colonization — what takes place when a political power like the state turns against its own people, or, as in the case of militarized technoscience, the human body.
As a result, in Open Sky (1997 [1995]), Politics of the Very Worst , and The Information Bomb, Virilio has elaborated a critique of cyberfeminism that Plant (1997), following Haraway's (1985) 'manifesto for cyborgs', describes as a revolution on the part of cybernetic technology and feminists against the rule of patriarchy. Nonetheless, Virilio has little time for cyberfeminism or 'cybersex'; notions that he criticises, likening cybersex, for example, to the technological replacement of the emotions (Armitage, 2000b: 5). For Virilio, it is imperative to reject cybernetic sexuality, refocus theoretical attention on the human subject, and resist the domination of both men and women by technology. According to Virilio, cyberfeminism is merely one more form of technological fundamentalism — the religion of all those who believe in the absolute power of technology (Virilio and Kittler, 1999.) Having departed from the religious sensibility required in order to understand the contemporary Gods of ubiquity, instantaneity, and immediacy of new information and communications technologies, cyberfeminists, along with numerous other cultural groups, have thus capitulated to the raptures of cyberspace.
Virilio's newest work, though, is Strategy of Deception . Focusing on the Kosovo War, Virilio argues that while war was a failure both for Europe and for NATO it was a success for the Unites States (US). In the world according to Virilio, this is because the US conducted an 'experiment' on Kosovo using the informational and cybernetic tools of the Pentagon's much-hyped 'Revolution in Military Affairs' (RMA). The RMA is thus a revolution that Virilio perceives to be analogous to his conception of 'the information bomb' and cyberwar as well as his contention that the present aim of the US is to seek what its military chiefs term Global Information Dominance (GID).
A Brief Critique Of Virilio
Virilio's cultural theory and numerous activities have courted controversy since the 1960s. When Virilio and Parent built their 'bunker church' — and which has to be seen to be believed — the bishop who consecrated it was, according to Virilio, muttering to himself the following words: 'what a ghastly thing! Amen! What a ghastly thing! Amen!' As Virilio tells the story: 'the priest turned towards the bishop and said: "Monsignor, this is not an exorcism! It is a consecration!"' (Armitage, 2001a: forthcoming.) Religious criticisms of Virilio and Parent's architecture aside, there have also been a number of recent academic critiques of Virilio's ideas concerning the state, technology, and speed. Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 351-423), for instance, attempted what Crogan (1999) calls a problematic effort to 'subsume' Virilio's thought into their own poststructuralist approach to cultural theory. But, as Crogan suggests, Deleuze and Guattari's 'static, ahistorical model' of the state and technology cannot easily be combined with Virilio's writings without undoing 'its own coherency in the process'. In turn, Virilio's The Aesthetics of Disappearance has outraged the neo-Marxian geographer Harvey (1989: 293, 299, and 351; 2000: 88). For Harvey, Virilio's 'response' to what the former recently called the 'theme of time-space compression' 'has been to try and ride the tiger of time-space compression through construction of a language and an imagery that can mirror and hopefully command it'. Harvey places the 'frenetic writings' of Virilio (and Baudrillard) in this category because 'they seem hell-bent on fusing with time-space compression and replicating it in their own flamboyant rhetoric'. Harvey, of course, has 'seen this response before, most specifically in Nietzsche's extraordinary evocations in The Will To Power '. Yet, in The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Virilio's unfolding and wholly intentional reactions to the emergence of the dromocratic condition are actually concerned with 'the importance of interruption, of accident, of things that are stopped as
productive ' (Virilio and Lotringer, 1997 [1983]: 44. Original emphasis.) As Virilio told Lotringer: 'It's entirely different from what Gilles Deleuze does in Milles Plateaux . He progresses by snatches, whereas I handle breaks and absences. The fact of stopping and saying, "let's go somewhere else" is very important for me' (Virilio and Lotringer, 1997 [1983]: 45.) What Virilio's 'frenetic writings' actually substantiate throughout the 1980s are the material and, crucially, the
immaterial consequences of dromological changes in aesthetics, military power, space, cinema, politics, and technology. In an era increasingly eclipsed by the technologically produced disappearance of cultural life, war, matter, and human perception, this is a very significant achievement. In the contemporary era, though, the limitations of Virilio's cultural theory are likely to rest not — as Harvey suggests — with his similarities but with his differences from Nietzsche. As Waite (1996: 381-2. Original emphases.), quoting the American performance artist Laurie Anderson, has argued:
Virilio still desperatelyholds on to a modicum of modernist critique of postmodern military tactics, strategies, and technologies, whereas Nietzsche basically would have been impatient with mere critique, moving quickly to appropriate them for his own use , at least conceptually and rhetorically, as metaphors and techniques of persuasion to preserve power for elites over corpses — 'now that the living outnumber the dead'.
Conclusion
Virilio is, therefore, one of the most important and thought-provoking cultural theorists on the contemporary intellectual battlefield. Just the same, unlike Lyotard's or Baudrillard's postmodernism, Virilio's hypermodernism does not articulate itself as a divergence from modernism and modernity but as a critical analysis of modernism and modernity through a catastrophic perception of technology. It is for these and other reasons that Virilio defines his general position as a critic of the art of technology. Virilio's theoretical position and cultural sensibilities concerning technology thus remain beyond the realm of even critical cultural theory. He does not depend on intellectual 'explanations' but on 'the obvious quality of the implicit' (Virilio and Lotringer, 1997 [1983] On the one hand, therefore, Virilio is a cultural theorist who movingly considers the tendencies of the present period. On the other, he is a cultural theorist who utterly rejects cultural theory.
Hence, it is debatable whether there is much to be gained from cultural theorists attempting to establish the 'truth' or otherwise of Virilio's thought. For Virilio's critical responses to the military, chronopolitics, cinema, art, and technology are actually ethical and emotional responses to the arrival of technological culture. However, it is crucial to remember that Virilio's responses are not the passive responses of the armchair critic. As he emphasises in the CTHEORY interview, '[r]esistance is always possible! But we must engage in resistance first of all by developing the idea of a
technological culture'. Virilio is of course also aware that his work is 'often dismissed in terms of scandalous charges!' As he has noted, in France '[t]here's no tolerance' for 'irony, for wordplay, for argument that takes things to the limit and to excess' (Zurbrugg, 2001: forthcoming.) Hence, to raise the question of Virilio's cultural theory is to raise the question of whether, outside France, his work should be dismissed in terms of scandalous charges, received in terms suffused with praise, or a mixture of both? In short, it is to raise the question of how much tolerance there is in the English-speaking world for irony, for wordplay, and for arguments that take things to excess? Attempting to answer such complex questions will ensure that Virilio's hypermodern cultural theory continues to elicit theoretical argument and social debate for many years to come.
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