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Paul Virilio (1932- )
Paul Virilio was 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.' Under military conscription into the colonial army during the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962), he studied architecture in Paris.
In 1963 he became the president and the editor of the Architecture Principe group's magazine. He was teacher at the École Speciale de Architecture until 1968, becoming Director of Studies in 1973. That same year, he became the director of the magazine L'Espace Critique, published by Galilee, from Paris. In 1975 he co-organised the Bunker Archeologie exhibition at the Decorative Arts Museum of Paris. In 1975 he was the General Director of the ÉSA and in 1989 Chairman of the Board. In 1987 he won the Grand National Prize for Architecture Critique. In 1989 he became the director of the program of studies at the College International de Philosophie de Paris, under the direction of Jacques Derrida. Then in 1992, he became a member of the High Committee for the Housing of the Disadvantaged. Among other projects, he is presently working on metropolitan techniques of time organization and the building of the first Museum of the Accident. Virilio retired from teaching in 1998. He currently devotes himself to writing and working with private organizations concerned with housing the homeless in Paris.
'Velocity' is the key word of Virilio's thinking, the post-modernity treasure, and the modern society capital. Reality is no longer defined by time and space, but in a virtual world, in which technology allows the existence of the paradox of being everywhere at the same time while being nowhere at all. The loss of the site/city/nation in favor of globalization implies also the loss of rights and of democracy that is contrary to the immediate and instantaneous nature of information. In his view, McLuhan's global village is nothing but a 'World Ghetto'.
Virilio studied phenomenology with Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne. 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. Identified with the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, the futurism of Marinetti and techno-scientific writings of Einstein, Virilio's intellectual outlook can usefully be compared to contemporary architects, philosophers and cultural critics such as Bernard Tschumi, Gilles Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard.
The importance of Virilio'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 (1977) for example, Virilio offers a credible 'war model' of the growth of the modern city and the development of human society. 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 calls the 'habitable circulation' of the masses. Unlike Marx, then, Virilio postulates 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.
The Strategy of Deception (1999) is a collection of essays that discuss the various technological innovations on display during the war in Kosovo, as well as the shift in sensibilities that both flows from and brings about such innovations. By examining the role of information technologies and the goal of "global information dominance," Virilio asks the reader to consider the qualities of what was billed as a "humanitarian war". Rather than look at the media's image of the war as a heroic and tidy event, with few Allied casualties, Virilio digs into the ethical issues surrounding what he calls a "secular holy war":
"For want of being able to abolish the bomb, we have decided, then, to abolish the state, a nation state which is now charged with "sovereignist" vices and "nationalist" crimes, thereby exonerating a military-industrial and scientific complex which has spent a whole century innovating in horror and accumulating the most terrifying weapons, not to mention the future ravages of the information bomb or of a genetic bomb that will be capable not merely of abolishing the nation state, but the people, the population, by the 'genomic' modification of the human race" (Strategy of Deception, 57).
Virilio's critique looks beyond traditional weapons of war, to interrogate the way that new technologies are being implemented to the same effect. He moves from missile to satellite, charting the effects of the assault rather than the appearance, "In both cases, what one is seeking to eliminate is only life, the opponents energetic vitality" (Strategy of Deception, 52). He thus moves from nuclear war to information war. Virilio recontextualizes globalized warfare, which is now fought at the speed of light, through telecommunications, propaganda, and social controls, and perhaps, supplemented by traditional means. The ultimate triumph of such a war (of any war, really) is an immobilization of the populace and/or an annihilation of the government, with or without bombs.
An absolutely crucial but somewhat overlooked aspect of Virilio's work from the beginning is his continuing allegiance to a gestalt theory of perception based in psychology. Later, Virilio broadened his theoretical sweep, arguing in the 1970s, for example, that the relentless militarization of the contemporary cityscape was prompting what Deleuze and Guattari call the 'deterritorialization' of capitalist urban space and what Virilio terms the arrival of speed or chronopolitics.
Virilio's doubts about the political economy of wealth are primarily driven by his 'dromocratic' conception of power. Virilio suggests that political economy cannot be subsumed by 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, are the foundations of human society. 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.' 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. Virilio argues a revolutionary resistance against the militarization of urban space. 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. This is a view he develops in his trenchant critique of The Vision Machine(1994b [1988]).
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