Style and Content in Paul Virilio's Works

Quotes on Paul Virilio, the French Post- Modernist thinker, from the book: The Virilio Reader,  editor James Der Derian:

Preview: Reading Paul Virilio's writings is an oral reading. It is well understood only when read. This is because the word being heard has the ability, because of the time needed to be spoken, to pause on the visual image for the appropriate period of time to decipher it, while producing and creating the appropriate mental stimulus for deciphering, something which is impossible when the eye experiences constantly changing images in silent reading, or as in the everyday reality in general. In this respect, Virilio is like other Post Modern French thinkers, including Gaston Bacheler, who also create difficulties in understanding them without getting into their shoes. Thus, any reading of a summary or article of their writings is worthless. Read the source first to understand what it is all about, like reading a song.

Paul Virilio character impression was of  of a proud yet somewhat shy man, with none of  the character that marks many of the nouveaux philosophes. He was popular and received many invitations to speak, and accepted only few.  Born in 1932, as a child his first encounter with the speed of the war machine came at the outset of the Second World War, listening to the radio in his hometown of Nantes, hearing that the Germans had reached it, and then, almost simultaneously, hearing the sound of tanks outside his window. It was his first brush with Blitzkrieg. Aerial bombardments also left a deep impression, as they destroyed the city completely. He was drafted to fight in France's war with Algeria, before taking up a career practicing and teaching urban architecture. In between he learned the art of stained-glass making.  His official bios usually begin with his tenure as professor (1969), general director (1975), and president (1990) of the Ecole Spéciale d'Architecture.

Beside his contributions to the philosophy of technology and society he wrote numerous shorter pieces on film, art, architecture, and current diplomatic-military affairs.

Virilio represents the power of will, intellect, and belief over the technological predestinations of late modernity. Virilio believes that accidents play a double game, as both disaster and diagnostic of the human condition. They can serve as a powerful agnostic wrench in the works of the new techno-deities. 

Virilio's gift for original and often un anticipated transition from seemingly commonplace discussions to profound, at times transcendent, critical syntheses, requires a particular attentiveness to the interplay of the topical and rhetorical. He is able, in part, to accomplish these transitions - which might best be described as accidental syntheses – by virtue of the specific sensibilities of the French language and culture not easily reproduced in other lenguages. 

What is for some panache, others will consider indulgent. At times these unwieldy sentences appear to be nothing more than an expedient means for imparting raw information. In other instances the task of reading him involved recognizing moments in which a shift in registers occurs from what at first appears only to be informational, to what finally amounts, in a quasi haphazard fashion - by virtue of a sheer glut, a vertiginous welter of references - to one of those unique accidental syntheses. 

The task may then best be described as sensing, approximating, or even guessing in a manner which strives for a certain rapport.

Internet browsing, hypertext and other computer-related stuff, goes well with Paul Virilio's theories about the impact of speed on the western world as we know it. Climbing up across Searching in the Internet tree, one will find the complete collapse of distance accompanied by a radical attenuation of identity. Lost sight, as well as the original site of the "Person'' are characteristic to browsing. He - or she are thinned out, disappearing into the infosphere, seven degrees removed from everything. Something that one moment had been so close, seemingly so significant, had become nothing at all.

Virilio is not the first to discern this dark side to an Enlightenment which had, for the most part, contracted a new happy, progressive marriage of self, reason, and technology. Earlier warnings about the possible perils of technologies of reproduction have been powerfully and persuasively voiced. 

First on just about every list would be Walter Benjamin. Writing in Germany in the 1930s, he observed how mechanically reproduced art, especially film, would become useful for Fascism, for the rendering of politics into aesthetics, with the advantage of mobilizing the masses for war without endangering traditional property relations. In the essay, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he anticipates Virilio's linking of technologies of acceleration and war in citing an early analyst and advocate of speed, the Futurist, Filippo Marinetti.

Second is Guy Debord, leader of the Situationniste movement in France in the 1950s and 1960s, author of the short but highly influential, Society of the Spectacle. Surveying the spread of spectacle, the fetishization of the image, and the rise of a consumer society, he anticipated the failure of conventional, radical, spatial politics in May of 1968 in France. 

Third, there is Michel Foucault's extra-disciplinary genealogies of politiwas techniques of control arising from pan-opticism. Displaying no anxiety of influence, Virilio takes Foucault's pan-opticon model to an extraterrestrial level of discipline and control, offering a microanalysis of how new technologies of oversight and organizations of control, innovated by strategic alliances of the military, industrial, and scienti communities, have made the crossover into civilian and political sectors create a global administration of fear. 

All of these critical thinkers and others have provided key insights into the political and social implications of the advent of new technologies of reproduction. Yet they seem out of date, stuck in place, when compared to the restless yet, in all its timefullness, strangely rustless conceit of Virilio, that the proliferation of highspeed, realtime, cinematic, global, computer networked - in a word – virtual systems of how we see, has forever changed how we know. 

In an essay which originally appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique, Virilio maps the social consequences: What lies ahead is a disturbance in the perception of what reality is; it is a shock, a mental concussion. And this outcome ought to interest us. Why? Because never has any progress in a technique been achieved without addressing its specific negative aspects. The specific negative aspect of these information super highways is precisely this loss of orientation regarding the other and with the world. It is obvious that this loss of orientation, this nonsituation, is going to usher in a deep crisis which will affect society and hence, democracy. In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.

In short, virtuality destroys reality. On its own, perhaps not a great loss; but Virilio has his eye where others do not, on the collateral damage done to the ethos of reality, the highly vulnerable public space where individuals responsively interact. For Virilio, the interconnectivity of virtual systems is not ushering in a new day for democracy but a new order of telepresence; high-paced interconnectivity is becoming, technically and literally, a substitute for the slower-paced intersubjectivity of traditional political systems. He sees the self as a kind of virtually targeted ground-zero; once voided, concentric circles of political fallout spread, leaving in the vitrified rubble.

reading Virilio will, inevitably, leave one feeling mentally disturbed, usually compounded by a bad case of vertigo, since speed is not only the subject but also the style of Virilio. In a typical Virilio sentence, which often elongates a full paragraph, the concepts can spew out. Many get recycled in later books. Some, benefiting from a new empirical settings, stand out like polished gems. But almost all of them them provide radically different takes on the social implications of technological forces, liberating their analysis from the customary.

a very important and central claim of his books is ''Critical Space'': The exo-colonialism of the industrial, imperial period has become introverted – internally, by the de-industrialization and pauperization of the urban center, and externally by the rise of an intensive transnational capital and transpolitical megalopoles. Mega cities are in   a post-industrial endo-colonization. 

Virilio was arguing from the perspective of a post-Einsteinian relativity, that not only seemed to play fast and loose with analoging, but also seemed to violate some of the basic laws of physics. The inadequacy of language to describe results and the field of quantum mechanics in general, confirmed with Virilio's point of view. The reader might have to suffer some conceptual gymnastics to get it. Yet, for every one of Virilio's oblique concepts or extravagant theoretical claims, there are others which slice right through the sludge that is served up as political analysis.

By this quality alone, there is no question that he belongs in the company of Benjamin and Adorno, Debord and Baudrillard, Foucault and Deleuze, Barthes and Derrida, for taking our understanding of the discursive relationship of technology, society, and politics to a higher plane of political as well as critical consciousness. After the millennium turn he stands out from the critical crowd, as a conceptual innovator and intellectual provocateur, the one who goes to the edge and sees beyond the traditional maps of modernity. 

Reading Paul Virilio - ''Copy-Paste'' on Global Level

Quotes of Paul Virilio, the French Post  Modernist thinker, from the book: The Virilio Reader,  editor James Der Derian:

In our situations of televisual experience, we are living in nothing less than the sphere of Einstein's relativity, which wasn't at all the case at the time that he wrote it since that was a world of trolley cars, and at most, the rocket. But today we live in a space of relativity and non-separability. Our image of time is an image of instantaneity and ubiquity. And there's a stunning general lack of understanding of speed, a lack of awareness of the essence of speed ... And this passage from an extensive to an intensive time will have considerable impact on all the various aspects of the conditions of our society: it leads to a radical reorganization both of our social mores and of our image of the world. 

In his first book, The Insecurity of Territory, Virilio introduces concepts of deterritorialization, nomadism, and the suicidal state. Deleuze and Guatarri pick up and brilliantly elaborate in their mos cant work, ''A Thousand Plateaus." Virilio draws on Benjamin's fear aestheticized politics, but takes it further, showing how politics, no longer willing, no longer able to maintain representational distinctions betweeen the real, the visual, and the virtual, disappears into the aesthetic (The Aesthetics of Disappearance, 1980). This disappearance is facilitated by the melding of military, cinematic and techno-scientific “logistics of perception" (War and Cinema, 1984).

Virilio had already given notice of the data coup d'etat that had shifted the aim of battle from capturing to captivating the enemy through the media complex (The Art of the Motor, 1993). And while environmentalists try to arouse a world consciousness by warning of a possible ecological desertification of the planet, Virilio is one dimension beyond, prophesying the chronological desertification of world time, global time, by the negative synergy of the integral accident (Open Sky, 1995).

Cinema interested me enormously for its kinematic roots, the dromological... It goes without saying that after relative speed (the railroad, aviation) there was inevitably absolute speed, the transition to the limit of electromagnetic waves. In fact, cinema interested me as a stage, up to the point of the advent of electromagnetic speed. I was interested in cinema as “cinematisme,” that is the putting into movement of images. We are approaching the limit that is the speed of light. This is a significant historical event.

Of course. It changes with the logistics of perception. The logistics of perception began by encompassing immediate perception, which is to say that of elevated sites, of the tower, of the telescope. War is waged from high points. The logistics of perception was from the start the geographic logistics of domination from an elevated site. Thus the “field of battle” which is also a “field of perception” – a theater of operation – will develop on the level of perception of the tower, of the fortified castle or on the level of perception of the bombardier. Such is the Second World War and the bombings over Europe.

The battlefield is at first local, then it becomes worldwide and finally global; which is to say expanded to the level of orbit with the invention of video and with reconnaissance satellites. Thus we have a development of the battlefield corresponding to the development of the field of perception made possible by technical advancements, successively through the technologies of geometrical optics: that of the telescope, of wave-optics, of electro-optics; that of the electromagnetic transmission of a signal in video; and, of course, computer graphics, that is to say the new multimedia.

Henceforth the battlefield is global. It is no longer "worldwide” [mondialisée] in the sense of the First or Second World Wars. It is global in the sense of the planet. For every war implicates the “rotundity" [rotondité] of the earth, the sphere, the geosphere.

There have been three industrial revolutions. The first important revolution on the technical plane is that of transportation, which favors an equipping of the territory with railroads, airports, highways, electric lines, cables, etc. It has a geopolitical element. The second revolution which is almost concomitant, is the transmissions revolution, including Marconi, Edison, radio, television. From this point on, technology is set loose. The third revolution,  we are on the verge of, is the revolution of transplanting technologies of telecommunication in favor of nano-technology, the possibility of micro technology to the point of introducing it into the human body. the futurists wished for: to sustain the human body through and not just through "chemistry''. 

I think that the infosphere – the sphere of information - is going to impose itself on the geosphere. We are going to be living in a reduced world. The capacity of interactivity is going to reduce the world, real space to nearly nothing. Therefore, in the near future, people will have a feeling of being enclosed in a small, confined, environment. In fact, there is already a speed pollution which reduces the world to nothing. Just as Foucault spoke of this feeling among the imprisoned, I believe that there will be for future generations a feeling of confinement in the world, of incarceration which will certainly be at the limit of tolerability, by virtue of the speed of information. If I were to give a last image, interactivity is to real space what radioactivity is to the atmosphere.

Since the first takeoff of a bomber during the First World War, through the introduction of airborne troops, up to the first stratospheric rocket, the projectile and the vehicle have formed a coalescence that cybernetics will purify by getting rid of the human factor in weapon systems (through robotization).

The economy of war, which up to now has always tended to transform the human landscape into a “defensive redoubt” through the congruence of fortifications, tends now to reduce arms disparities by transforming military objects into projectiles.

In fact, in the modern arsenal, everything moves faster and faster; differences between one means and another fade away. A homogenizing process is under way in the contemporary military structure, even inside the three arms specifications: ground, sea, and air is diminishing in the wake of an aeronautical coalescence, which clearly reduces the specificity of the land forces. But this homogenizing movement of combat techniques and instruments of warfare is coupled to one last movement. This is, with the "weapon-vehicle” contraction and the cybernetization of the system, the volumetric reduction of military objects: miniaturization.

As can be seen, military space is today undergoing a radical transformation. The “conquest of space” by military and scientific personnel is no longer, as it once was, the conquest of the human habitat but the discovery of an original continuum that has only a distant link to geographical reality. From now on, the warrior moves at once in the infinitely small space of nuclear physics and in the infinitely huge outer space. The reduction of warring objects and the exponential increase in their performances bring to the military establishment that omniscience and that omnipresence it has from the beginning wished to acquire.

Speed has always been the advantage and the privilege of the hunter and the warrior. Racing and pursuit are the heart of all combat. There is thus a hierarchy of speeds to be found in the history of societies, for to possess the earth, to hold terrain, is also to possess the best means to scan it in order to protect and to defend it. Real-estate property is linked, directly or indirectly, to the faculty of its penetration and, just as something changes value in being taken from one region into another, a place changes quality according to the facility with which it can be crossed. 

The energy crisis develops in crisis energy, which means the split between reality - the materialness of the human habitat - and unreality - the immaterialness of a power that is founded only on the violence of energy and on the evercxpanding extension of its field. From now on the military establishment will defend not so much the “national” territory so much as that of energy, the area of violence. 

Busby Berkeley - Dance Until The Dawn - 1931

Busby Berkeley

Born in 1895 into a show business family, William Berkeley Enos entered the Mohegan Lake Military Academy when he was 12 and graduated in 1914. 

He volunteered to serve in the American Army during World War I and while there, in the role of Artillery Officer, he organised military parades in France and later, Germany.

Shortly before the armistice, he attended a course in aerial surveillance. 

After the war, he began a career as an actor, before moving towards musical show production on Broadway, where he earned his reputation as a choreographer. 

In 1930, the producer Samuel Goldwyn invited him to participate in Thornton Freedland’s Whoopee! Two years later, Berkeley signed a seven-year contract with Warner Bros., after which he worked at the frenetic production rate of five films a year, until he joined MGM in 1939. 

Berkeley’s meticulously planned rehearsals enabled him to film remarkably long and spectacular sequences of shots, mobilising a large group of anonymous dancers inside sumptuous settings. 

Berkeley mistrusted editing and filmed the sequences with one camera. 

Able to rise into the air and move about, Berkeley’s solitary and mechanical eye took pleasure in overturning conventional perspective: vertical images became his signature shot, assuming a particular symbolic and dialectic role in his film-work. 

In addition, these vertical views display in all their splendour the ‘ornaments’ that Berkeley carefully produced.

from: Mark Dorrian. Seeing from Above (p. 167). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition. 

 here’s a beginner’s guide to Busby Berkeley.

Airopaidia (1786) — the Narrative of a Balloon Excursion

Thomas Baldwin's Airopaidia (1786) is a remarkable insight into the early days of ballooning. Coming in at almost 400 pages the book is a wonderfully detailed account of Baldwin's one day in the air over Chester in 1785. Uniquely in this period, Baldwin attempts to describe his experience not only verbally but using images: three expensively produced plates depicting the view from the balloon, the balloon in the view, and the charted passage of the balloon over the landscape (see images below). Together these illustrative plates can be seen as the first ever "real" overhead aerial views.