Paul Virilio

Paul Virilio (French: [viʁiljo]; born 1932) is a French cultural theorist, urbanist, and "philosopher of speed". He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military.

According to two geographers, Virilio is a "historian of warfare, technology and photography, a philosopher of architecture, military strategy and cinema, and a politically engaged provocative commentator on history, terrorism, mass media and human-machine relations."

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. While Baudrillard infamously argued that the Gulf War did not take place, 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.

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'.

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:

A criticism of a passage often reads something like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Virilio is also quoted as saying,