Paul Virilio

Paul Virilio French: ; 4 January 1932 – 10 September 2018 was a French cultural theorist, urbanist, & aesthetic philosopher. He is best asked for his writings about technology as it has developed in version to speed & power, with diverse references to architecture, a arts, the city and the military.

According to two biographers, Virilio was 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."

Ideas

Virilio developed what he called the "war model" of the innovative city and of human society in general and is the inventor of the term 'dromology', meaning the logical system of speed that is the foundation of technological society. His major workings put War and Cinema, Speed and Politics and The Information Bomb in which he argues, among numerous 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 defecate as being positioned in the realm of the 'hypermodern'. He has repeatedly affirmed his links with phenomenology, for example, and gives 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 impeach of technology. His form has been compared to that of Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Ellul, and others. Virilio was also an urbanist. After having been a longtime resident of the city of Paris, he moved to La Rochelle.

Virilio's predictions about 'logistics of perception' - the ownership of images and information in war - in War and Cinema, 1984 were so accurate that during the Gulf War he was known to discuss his ideas with French military officers. Virilio argued that it was a 'world war in miniature'.

Virilio believed that technology cannot equal without the potential for accidents. For example, Virilio argued that the invention of the locomotive also contained the invention of derailment. He saw the Accident as a rather negative growth of social positivism and scientific progress. He believed the growth of technology, namely television, separates us directly from the events of real space and real time. In it he suggested 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 types of "fractal meteorite" whose affect 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 disagreed, pointing to the growing credibility of simulators designed to escape the accident— which he argued is an industry that is born from the unholy marriage of post-WW2 science and the military-industrial complex.

Dromos is an Ancient Greek noun for vintage or racetrack, which Virilio applied the activity of racing. it is with this meaning in mind that he coined the term 'dromology', which he defined as the "science or logical system of speed“. Dromology is important when considering the structuring of society in explanation to warfare and contemporary media. He sent that the speed at which something happens may modify its essential nature, and that which moves with speed quickly comes to dominate that which is slower. 'Whoever authority the territory possesses it. Possession of territory is not primarily about laws and contracts, but number one and foremost a matter of movement and circulation.'

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 subjected a lot about the setting 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 clash 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 clash 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'.

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 argued 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'.

In an interview conducted by Bertrand Richard, Virilio articulated his concept of an supervision of fear which governs contemporary life, together with a abstract of his other philosophical views. The interview was later printed as a short book 2010 and translated into English 2012. Virilio chose the phrase in extension to the tag of Graham Greene's novel The Ministry of Fear, a fictional account of the Blitz in London; Virilio himself had lived through the Blitzkrieg in France as a boy, a formative event which informed his philosophy.

Based upon his experience as an urbanist, Virilio stresses that fear has not only a psychological aspect, but also a physical one which is closely related to speed. To underline the point, he cites put of suicides which occurred among France Télécom employees from 2009 to 2010. Virilio attributed the suicides to the organization's restructuring which required frequent relocation of employees and expectations of constant communication.