Paul Virilio (1932–2018)

"I am the warrior Lord of the Forties: the Eighties cower before me, & are abased." CCXX III:46

Pure War is a book-length interview -- arbitrarily broken into chapters -- of Paul Virilio by Sylvère Lotringer. Urbanist intellectual Virilio is a theorist of the mechanisms by which war drives technology (and vice versa), and the inventor of dromology as the study of how "speed" transforms social relations. His authorities on military theory include J.F.C. Fuller (57, 69). Virilio posits an show more essential conflict between military and civil society, or more hypostatically, between war and politics. Although the Pure War interview took place in 1983, during what the participants did not know was the twilight of the Cold War, the trends which Virilio describes have only intensified in the following decades. He sees war with the upper hand, and politics teetering on the edge of an exterminating abyss.

As I reflect on the relevant changes since the publication of Pure War, I observe that the ongoing militarization of society has meant that some technologies of speed (e.g. SST) have been withdrawn from the civil sphere while being advanced in the military one. Virilio contemplated the dromological potential of the orbital laser, but the Internet and the predator drone both suit his model without being instanced by it. Also, the advancing commercialization of the US military (Halliburton food service, Blackwater/XE mercenaries, etc.) vindicates Virilio's observations, as war further frees itself from politics. The spasm of US militarism during which the President was almost universally referenced as the "Commander in Chief" has subsided somewhat, but not due to any reduction in the dedication of US resources to the military. Virilio's notions about endocolonization could hardly be more apt to the current American scene, in which the massive military expenditures of the first decade of the century are being exacted from the civil society of the second.

As an interviewer, Lotringer asks few actual questions. His contributions often seem to be attempts to condense Virilio's theses more pithily, for instance: "The peak of speed is the extermination of space. The end of time is absolute deterritorialization." (74) These remarks then goad Virilio into clarifications and enlargements.

Virilio offers a genealogy in which civil society (originally the city) was actually twin-born with military society from pre-civilized "tumults" of all-against-all violence. He posits this in contradistinction to the model of trade as the basis for civilization. According to him, war has evolved from tactics (pre-martial violence), through strategy (control of space), to logistics (control of time). The global fruition of logistics is the "pure war" in which humanity is increasingly subject to a non-human technological agenda predicated on abstract, hyperreal conflict.

The fascination with and prioritization of war does not mean that Virilio sides with it against politics -- quite the reverse. Virilio himself is a Christian who opposes theocracy in favor of civil liberty, and in fact he declares, "Pure War is the absolute idol." (171) All of his prescience is somewhat gloomy in that respect, even if I don't share his values. He does credit the regime of nuclear deterrence positively with reawakening a religious sense in the secular world; he even calls Nietzschean atheism "the abomination of desolation." For someone who doesn't worship the Crowned and Conquering Child, he seems nevertheless to have the number of the Lord of the Aeon. show less

Virilio's now classic book on approximately 1,500 WWII bunkers on the Atlantic Wall was first published in 1975. More than thirty years later his photographs are still powerful, celebrating the form and desolation of the concrete objects, but is is his writings on war that make this book highly recommended. A mix of research, historical interpretation, and philosophizing, the essays are brilliant but highly readable, not esoteric. It makes me want to pick up more by Virilio, an important show more voice when the militarization of cities is more and more a reality. show less

This is one of those books you’d expect to salvage out of the wreck of one of J.G. Ballard’s car crashes. There’s a lot of cool shit in here, but I’d be lying if I said I comprehended it in its entirety.

War-time is spreading into ‘peace’-time via the medium of speed, in this work Virilio attempts to map out this phenomena in a dromological analysis that spans centuries. From the immobile fortress to the mobile, implosive fortresses of tanks, jeeps etc. every technological show more advancement seems to be based entirely around the acceleration of speed. This tendency isn’t restricted to the military realm either, as athletes (what Virilio takes to be a kind of peace-time simulation of warfare) push records so far that the speeds recorded require technology to measure them. The advances seem meagre when they come down to milliseconds, there are no longer great leaps. Same goes for fast cars and many other commodities held by the gaze of society. It’s funny to think that Hitler curbed revolutionary fervour in the early 1930’s by promising the population Volkswagen cars that had not yet been manufactured, every citizen becomes their own projectile that must be restricted via speed limits, road signs etc. (a curbing and tunnelling of libido via these networks of roads).

This phenomena is being ratcheted up to such an extent on the global, geopolitical scale that the principle of deterrence that was brought about with the inception of nuclear weaponry has been twisted into a principle of automaton. There is no longer time to deliberate over political action as the earth’s vectors become entirely fluid and deterritorialised (a situation that was borne out of the naval warfare of bygone eras) and the ability to react to impending attacks (peace talks of USSR-US at SALT I based around staving off a warning time of just one minute in regard to nuclear attack). The only way to stop this is to curb the enemies’ movement by making them piss their little panties.

This was a big ramble. There’s some more stuff about calling ancient general’s homosexuals and the motive behind the creation of prosthetics as maintaining speeds in the World Wars, as well as stuff on proletariat soldiers. The book’s pretty tight though, don’t let my incoherence dissuade you from checking it out. show less

The cover of Speed and Politics says that Paul Virilio is a cultural theorist, which is a kind of job invented in France (just as ‘marketing consultant’ is a job invented in the US). The best of the cultural theorists can put a wobble in your mental orbits, suggesting ways to see politics, history or culture that would not have occurred to you before. Virilio does this. The worst of the cultural theorists write nonsense, substituting loopy metaphors and neologisms for clear, creative show more thinking (an amusing take-down of the latter types can be found in Alan Sokal’s Fashionable Nonsense).

Virilio concocts a surprisingly entertaining discussion of architectural infrastructure theory (?!) and military logistics (what?), as only a French cultural theorist could. He traces his key concept—Dromology (from the Greek for ‘race track’): “the study and analysis of the increasing speed of transport and communications on the development of land use”—from medieval towns (“immobile machines”) to the “motorization of the masses.” The best bits read like eccentric, sci-fi prose poems, whimsical aphorisms, and stray bits of J.G. Ballard:

The city is a collective prosthesis of its inhabitants.
Gordon Pym and Moby Dick are only the anticipated narratives of the nuclear cruise.
Good conduct is no longer morals taught in public school, but driver’s education.

Speed and Politics was first published in 1977 (the English translation in 2006), which makes Virilio’s prescience all the more uncanny. He predicts flash mobs and Twitter-Face revolutions (“overtrained militants armed with audio-visual machines”), Al Qaeda (the fleet in being, “able to strike no matter where and no matter when, annihilating the enemy’s will to power by creating a global zone of insecurity in which the enemy will no longer be able to decide with certainty how to win”), survival seeds and the Department of Homeland Security (“We will see the creation of a common feeling of insecurity that will lead to a new kind of consumption, the consumption of protection”)—all back when Fortran ruled and DARPA was cooking with centibytes.

Virilio’s historical scope ranges from the expansion of Roman frontiers to the civil war in Lebanon to Peru’s military-led revolution, but the immediate context for Speed and Politics was the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the 1968 protests in capitals throughout Europe. The western democracies were passing through their legitimation crises, and the efficiency that once made western governance superior and dominant (“the motility of government,” in Virilio’s phrase) was devolving into deadlock and stasis. We may now be learning that the prosperity and rising expectations that flowed from such dynamism were only temporary. Things seem to be moving faster everywhere but where they used to. Paul Virilio hath said sooth. show less