Seminars!
Seminars!
“One of the most obvious facts about
speed is that, despite its being central
to the cultural experience of modern
societies, it is hardly ever directly and
independently addressed in the major
social scientific accounts of
modernity.” – John Tomlinson
“I stand rather alone in insisting that speed is clearly the
determining factor. In my capacity as a social analyst,
I do not wish to deliver monologues, but to partake in
a dialogue. For the past twenty-five years, my work
has never the less been solitary. To say that speed is a
determining factor in society requires proof, an effort
that is starting to exhaust me.” – Paul Virilio
What is speed?
Speed in a cultural sense, rather than a scientific
sense, can be understood as the rate at which
incidents or events happen.
Our direct experience of cultural speed is the rate at
which events happen within our own lives. Because of
this the concept of speed as a cultural experience within
its own right evades a lot of analysis as it is completely
subjective.
Speed as a cultural term usually means fast, but expands
to slower rates too. (let’s take things slow)
Speed is not generative, i.e. it does not produce culture
directly, but it changes culture by changing the speed at
which culture operates (usually by making it faster).
Paul Virilio
Philosopher of speed,
Inventor of Dromology,
“War was my university”
Career and Background
• Born 1932
• Went to art college and specialized in stained glass, worked along side
Matisse in Parisian churches
• Became a Catholic
• Conscripted in the Algerian war of independence (on the French side)
• Studied phenomenology under Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne
• 1958 carried out a phenomenological enquiry into military space
• 1963 collaborated with the architect Claude Parent and created the
Architecture Principe group
• Took part in the ‘68 riots in Paris
• Was nominated professor by students at the Ecole Speciale Architecture
• 1973 became the director of studies
• First renowned work was Speed and Politics published in 1977 by
Semiotext(e) (45 years old)
• His predictions about the use of images and information within warfare
were so accurate that he was invited to help the French army during the
Gulf War
• Involved in many architectural projects
• A friend of Giles Deluze
• A phenomenologist
Architectural Work
Key Concepts . . .
Dromology
The philosophy of speed, from the Greek
Dromos (to race).
The logic of speed is the foundation of
technological society.
War and technology drive history.
The Integral Accident
Technology cannot exist without creating the
potential for accidents - “To invent the ship is to
also invent the shipwreck”
Aristotle said there can be no science of the accident –
Virilio disagrees, accidents are integral to
technology and are scientifically tested with crash
dummies etc.
The Logistics of Perception
The movement of images and
information back and forth
(i.e. between warzones and
the national press.)
The facility for images and
information to be used as weapons
The War Model
War drives history,
society, technology,
cities etc.
Everything progresses at
the speed of its
weapons systems.
The transition from feudalism to
capitalism was due to the
mechanics of war (rather than
politics of wealth and production
techniques)
Paul’s big break . . .
Speed and Politics
(1977 Semiotext(e))
“The loss of material
space leads to the
government of nothing
but time… The violence
of speed has become
both the location and
the law, the world’s
destiny and its
destination”
1. From Street Fight to State Right
Locates the streets as the site of power within a
contemporary city (“Whoever can conquer the
streets also conquers the State!” – Joseph
Goebbels)
Starts with the citizens in relation to the roads and
highways, especially the unemployed, who he
classifies as a moving horde that are constantly in
motion around the city, not allowed to loiter or
linger.
“The revolutionary contingent (of the masses)
attains its ideal form not in the place of
production, but in the street” p3
“For the mass of unemployed, demobilized
workers without an occupation, Paris is a
tapestry of trajectories, a series of streets and
avenues in which they roam, for the most part,
with neither goal nor destination, subject to
police repression intended to control their
wanderings.”
“The masses are not a population, a society, but the
multitude of passers by”
Totalitarian regimes rely on controlling the circulation of the masses. Speed
limits on the roads and highway police and regulations are a way of
controlling the masses, denying them the ‘high of high speed’.
“revolution
is movement, but movement is not a
revolution”
The roads are the answer to the power of the city and the state. The state
controls its subjects through controlling their transport.
Movement is the best way to occupy a territory. Speed
and technologies of war brought about the transition
from feudalism to capitalism. Gunpowder made the
impregnable fortress pregnable.
2 Highway Right to State Right
Governments gain control over the proletariat by
giving them sport and transport, the modern
equivalent of bread and circuses.
Transport=Power
Modern power and control is about keeping people
out of the streets “the temptation of the streets”
“The stroke of genius will consist in doing away with
the direct repression of riots, and the political
discourse itself, by unveiling the essence of this
discourse: the transportation capacity created by
the mass production of automobiles can be a social
assault, a revolution sufficient and able to modify
the citizen’s way of life by transforming all the
consumers needs, by totally remodelling a territory
that . . . had no more than 400 kilometres of road”
p26-7
-De-politicising the population by completely changing their
needs and way of life through giving them all transport.
European forms of resistance (socialism, communism,
Marxism etc) get subsumed into the ‘American
revolution’ (globalisation) which is about wanting the
right to be a consumer, wanting the right to an
American automobile, wanting the right to travel,
wanting the right to high speed.
This lead to the politicisation of the highways and cars
as well as the streets, there are speed limits and cars
are bridled to stop them going too fast. The driver is
deprived of the right to high speed.
The mechanisation of the population through transport
and radios (technologies of speed) prepared the
unwitting masses for the mechanics of warfare, the
population became a reserve army.
Every corner garage and radio shack was like a training
centre for the millions of youths becoming highly
trained mechanics with skills that “could be readily
transformed in a short time, when the test came, into
the ability to operate the complex implements of
war” (account by V. Bush)
The SA used to train car owners how to drive over
different terrain and shoot while moving, the
mobilisation of the masses has an “extraordinary
power of assault”
With the mobilisation of the masses (cars and bikes) time itself became
political. Time became directly related to productivity as everything
became faster in terms of mobilising the workforce, transporting goods
etc. Time became an entity in itself to be fought over because everyone
and everything could get around much quicker.
The revolution of the three eights – a unifying theme
throughout all revolutionary movements (radical to
moderate)
(The ‘mysterious’ 8 hours leisure usually meant travel.)
The French revolution of 1789 was a revolt against constraint and immobility,
against having to stay in one place.
“One day of revolt – not rest! A day not ordained by the bragging
spokesmen of institutions holding the world of labor in bondage. A
day on which labor makes its own laws and has the power to execute
them! All without the consent or approval of those who oppress and
rule. A day on which in tremendous force the unity of the army of
toilers is arrayed against the powers that today hold sway over the
destinies of the people of all nations. A day of protest against
oppression and tyranny, against ignorance and war of any kind. A day
on which to begin to enjoy ‘eight hours for work, eight hours for rest,
eight hours for what we will.’”
Paradoxically the immateriality speed brings about a materiality of behaviour.
Belief is less important than acting in the correct way (making sure
everything runs smoothly)
Rehabilitation camps in Vietnam and China were where “materialism reaches
its absolute form . . . granting importance to an opposing thought, to a
different concept, is totally eliminated.”
“The dissident is a body, his dissidence a postural crime – his indolence, his
lavishness”
“There are hardly any more crimes of opinion, only crimes of gesture”
(This is similar to Zizek’s disavowal - it doesn’t matter if you don’t believe
in money as long as you act like its real)
Pt2 Ch1 From Space Right to State
Right
There are two types of humanity, populating the land and
populating the sea.
Within modern warfare the infantryman becomes increasingly
irrelevant with more bombing from air and sea.
“The permanent presence in the sea of an invisible fleet able to
strike no matter where and no matter when, annihilating the
enemies will to power by creating a global zone of insecurity
in which it will no longer be able to ‘decide’ with certainty.”
British and French nuclear submarines collide in the Atlantic despite infinitesimally
small chance of the accident happening
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7892294.stm
The cold war pushed the possibility of war until the point
where it is no longer possible, bringing about a strange
state of security on the basis of assured annihilation.
The point of nuclear weapons is not to actually using them,
but by having them they allow you to act and behave in a
certain way.
The bomb is political because it is the ultimate form of
military surveilance
Modern warfare is all about maintaining the enemy in a
state of desperation without actually engaging in battle.
Pt2 Ch2 Practical War
Once war wasn’t confined to specific territorial conflicts (‘theatres of war’)
“total war” emerges.
“we should be able to impose war on all the
inhabitable parts of the universe”
“The war of attrition marks a new threshold; bourgeois society had believed it
could endorse absolute violence in the ghetto of the army zone but,
deprived of space, war had spread into human time”
All the time the progression of war is the progression of history and society.
War technology creates a necessity to go to war.
Pt 3 Dromocratic society
Mechanics of war destroyed human bodies and brought about developments
in human prosthesis.
An exponential development of medical knowledge came about because of so
much trauma.
Extensive assault requires fast death (bombing), preparatory assault requires
slow death.
Hostages, abduction and genocide are the preferred medium of dromocratic
violence
“Dromological progress and what we conventionally call human and social
progress coincided but did not converge”
Dromological development as follows:
1 society without (effective) transport,
woman is ‘logistical spouse’ mother of war
and of the truck (?)
2 The use of the (soulless empty) proletariat
as vehicles
3 The vehicular revolution
4 Technology overtakes man
5 “The end of the dictatorship of the
proletariat and of history in the war of
time”
Now war is fought through economic penetration
rather than territorial penetration. Make sure
needs are created, use the economy to
deterritorialise and then reterritorialise a country
(Deleuze)
On to “the time when as Lenin says, the working
class suddenly found itself courted and solicited
even by the capitalists”
“possibilities for properly human political action will disappear in
a state of emergency”
With faster weapons systems, with less warning time, and more
automated defence technologies, the margin for human
intervention becomes increasingly small
“Linear time is eliminated”
The power to invade makes a right to invade
Privilege is access to speed
“The reduction of distances has become a strategic reality
bearing incalculable economic and political consequences,
since it corresponds to the negotiation of space”
“The strategic value of the non-place of speed has definitely
supplanted that of place”
“We have to face facts: today, speed is war, the last war”
“The war machine becomes the very decision for war”
“The more speed increases, the faster freedom decreases”