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.
