Daniel L Potter
Culture Industry Conference, Cornell University, 1987
I.
Reading Paul Virilio on an airplane: contagious process, invasion, virus, illuminating contours of the now, hurtling through the medium of the message. Contour though lacks the quality of motion that Virilio wants to give to spatial terms and categories. What he reveals is not precisely the contours of our world, but its tendencies, contours leaning or even taking off in a certain direction: contours in motion, as aerial vehicles are houses in motion. Tendencies are vectoral viruses probed by a new science — dromology. It is, literally, the study of the race (dromos referring to the Spartan race course); dromology produces readings of configurations of speed, it pinpoints a tightly enmeshed network of global problems related to velocity. Its space is also a time and vice versa, because speed always involves bizarre forms of intimacy between the two.
Tendencies are the prey of dromology because the method and the results involved in Virilio’s studies goes directly against the grain of a “scientific” language that would situate an object in a prone, defined, vivisected, cornered position. Virilio does not seek to situate or exhaust, but rather to set writing itself in motion, send it on a trajectory that itself lacks a precise itinerary. As he says in the interviews with Sylvère Lotringer entitled Pure War:
“I don’t believe in explanations. I believe in suggestion, in the obvious quality of the implicit. Being an urbanist and architect, I am too used to constructing clear systems, machines that work well. I don’t believe it’s writing’s job to do the same thing. . . . I work in staircases . . . .
Developments are the episodes. I try to reach the tendency. Tendency is the change of level.” [38–39].
Paul Virilio was born in Paris in 1932, directed the École Speciale d’Architecture in the early seventies, has been on the editorial boards of a number of French journals, was in the French army before becoming a gonzo philosopher, and considers himself an “urbanist.” His first major works, Bunker Archéologie and L’Insécurité du territoire, testify to his ability to make use of various disciplines, various ways of seeing — seeing by means of war and the military, seeing through the optic of the city, seeing as a citizen of an advanced capitalist nation in the twentieth century.
Responding to a question posed by Lotringer regarding misunderstandings of his work, Virilio sketches where he’s coming from:
To be interested in technology through war already makes people suspicious: war is generally considered a negative phenomenon, and technology a positive one. So to say that the positive phenomenon of technology came in large part from the arsenal and war economy is already hard for people to accept. They are forced to reject me. Thus I’m either grouped in with a mystifying, mystical logic — defrocked priest — or with a military logic — defrocked officer. They can’t recognize the situation as I present it.
This has to do with what I said at the beginning of the interview: if war is the source of the city, then, being an urban planner, I’m for war. If I say that war is the source of technology, I reinforce what I said for the city. I reinforce the idea that I’m a strategist, a man of the war-machine, and thus someone who shouldn’t be trusted. As people don’t accept that war, and not commerce, is the source of the city, as they don’t accept the negativity in technology (the negative tendency in technology), they push that negativity back onto the person who says it — me, as it turns out. And since, to boot, I don’t have a career in the social sciences — sociology of war, history of technology, etc. — to back me up, people have their doubts about me. They say: how did he get where he is? And I answer: by living. As a child, I was terrorized by war. As I say in my preface to L’Insécurité du territoire, war was my father and my mother. I didn’t do it on purpose; one doesn’t choose one’s parents. Later I fought in the Algerian War, as a draftee. I’m not bragging about it; quite the contrary, it’s tragic. But both these wars initiated me into a profound understanding of the military phenomenon. War was my University.” (Pure War, 24)
In Bunker Archeologie, his preoccupation was with reconstructing the spatial dimension of the second world war, what he calls the “European fortress.” Like Walter Benjamin, another urbanist both in his writings and his life, Virilio began writing from the perspective of catastrophe, by digging around in the remains of a type of city, the sedentary and imposing constructions left by the war machine.
L’Insécurité du territoire attempts a much more global project and comprehends a whole series of tendencies that mark the postwar world. This horizon, the twentieth century’s negative horizon, or to quote Alexander Kluge, “the assault of the present on the rest of time,” continued to inform his subsequent books — Vitesse et politique, L’Horizon négatif, L’Espace critique, and several others, as well as his frequent contributions to the journal Traverses. Gilles Deleuze has provided a summary of L’Insecurite du territoire in a piece called “Politics”:
Paul Virilio has sketched the outlines of the World State such as it appears today: a State of absolute peace more terrifying still than one of total war, having fully realized its identification with the abstract machine, where the equilibrium of spheres of influence and the great segments communicate with a ‘secret capillarity,’ where the illuminated and totally cross-sectioned city now provides shelter only for nocturnal troglodytes, each one buried in his black hole, the ‘social swamp.’ (“Politics,” On the Line, 99)
Or, following a formulation of Deleuze and Guattari’s: “The administration of a grand organized molar security has for its corollary a micro-management of small fears, a molecular and permanent insecurity. “ (Mille Plateaux: 263)
II.
What is required of thought in view of and inside the world exposed (or overexposed) by Virilio’s wakeful gaze? Paranoia, nearsightedness, the pressing of the issue, the pursuit of tendencies instead of happiness.
Virilio’s writing, his manner, and his topic display a resistance that systematically rejects the unconscious will-to-apocalypse that theory has tended at times to encourage, in favor of a detective’s eye view. The detective’s job, in this case, is to keep his eyes open and to wander around in the scenes of the crime, the crime being Pure War, which is to say the inconceivable, always deferred potentiality of nuclear exchange. Its scenes are our cities, our airports, our missile sites, and movie theaters,
and the victims are spread out all over the globe, in the first, second, third, and fourth worlds. Cognizant of the diffuse nature of an analysis that attempts to portray the present moment from a global perspective of emergency, Virilio makes of this very diffuseness a virtue.
Speed is found in information exchange, in the “world vision” of television and film, in travel, in every instance where humans hook up with and are saturated by technologies. Speed is also at the heart of the manipulation of wealth. Indeed, his idea is that speed precedes wealth, that power always grows out of the possession of the means of velocity. He describes this claim in his talk with Lotringer:
Speed is the unknown side of politics, and has been since the beginning: this is nothing new. The wealth aspect in politics was spotlighted a long time ago. it was a mistake . . . to forget that wealth is an aspect of speed. . . .
People forget the dromological dimension of power: its ability to inveigle, whether by taxes, conquest, etc. Every society is founded on a relation to speed. Every society is dromocratic. We have two sides of the regulation of speed and wealth. Up until the nineteenth century, society was founded on the brake. Means of furthering speed were very scant. You had ships, but sailing ships evolved very little between Antiquity and Napoleon’s time; the horse even less; and of course there were carrier pigeons. The only machine to use speed with any sophistication was the optical telegraph, then the electric telegraph. In general, up until the nineteenth century, there was no production of speed. They could produce brakes by means of ramparts, the law, rules, interdictions, etc. They could brake using all kinds of obstacles. [Pure War, 44–45]
The dromocratic revolution is Virilio’s name for the Industrial Revolution; the key to the steam engine and the combustion engine was the fabrication of speed. He goes on:
And so they can pass from the age of brakes to the age of the accelerator. In other words, power will be invested in acceleration itself. We know that the army has always been the place where pure speed is used, whether it be in the cavalry — the best horses, of course, were army horses — the artillery, etc. Still today, the army uses the most pertinent speeds — whether it be in missiles or planes. . . .
There is no political power that can regulate the multinationals or the armed forces, which have greater and greater autonomy. There is no power superior to theirs. Therefore, either we wait for the coming of a hypothetical universal State, with I don’t know what Primate at its head, or else we finally understand that what is at the center is no longer a monarch by divine right, an absolute monarch, but an absolute weapon . The center is no longer occupied by a political power, but by a capacity for absolute destruction.” (45–46)
Closely related to the notion of speed is that of the vector, the grid formation and formulation of the earth, of perception and power. Recalling Montaigne’s style of indirection, Virilio’s project tracks down within the mobile and resourceful form of the essay an immense number of grid formations. Recalling Deleuze and Guattari, the discourse here on territoriality considers space relations in the optic of power, in the panopticonflict. In the contemporary situation, there is no assurance of a “natural” space to which one might return. The nuclear horizon eliminates the possibility of noble savagery while giving rise to generalized savagery in all sorts of local conflicts. As Adorno knew, thought has no Archimedean detachment but must proceed nonetheless according to the logic of the end. The trapped subject becomes the most observant of the system of imprisonment. She or he or it, the replicant on the run, is ready to seize the juncture of escape not only by confrontation but also by disguise and mimicry.
In fact, the mode of escape by vigilance conveys something of the trajectory of Virilio’s writings, his incessant translation of the point into the line. The ligne de fuite becomes for him, without being overtly claimed as such, a kind of radical obverse to the dictatorship of speed.
Speed can function as a sixth sense, be turned into a defense mechanism as well as suffered as tyrannical. The goal of the meditation on technology is not to freeze, to extract a still from the film that is constantly running, to retreat into the slowness of writing, but rather to bring writing up to speed. In this aim, whose success or failure is indeterminate as yet, the analysis of tendencies is turned into the deployment of counter-strategies.
Is it possible that thought must take on for this task a more mimetic behavior toward the “new technologies” in order not to be hopelessly confined to the archive, to lapidarian existence in the era of telecommunications? If so, the seat of knowledge must give way to a pensée du dehors, a nomad thought. This externalization of thought recalls Nietzsche’s invective against the Sitzfleisch, which he called the “true sin against the holy ghost,” opting instead for thinking while walking outdoors, or thinking as dancing. What Virilio resists is the sedentary path of science, that seeks to exhaust its subject and succeeds often in exhausting itself. At the same time, he pays closer attention to what the “hard sciences” have meant in their incessant interventions in the social sphere, attempting for instance to comprehend the mentality of the military technocrat, and the logic of his products.
Virilio’s books are written in the form of essays. They are dense and circular, sometimes repetitive; arguments repeat themselves, but always to go off in unexpected directions, rather than repeat the same genealogy. The essay form allows him to pursue the interdisciplinary vocation of global detective, pursuing tendencies, taking evidence. But the note-taking is not primarily manifested as a textual operation. It involves sifting through books, but also and more notably the traversing of contemporary landscapes. Nor is it leisurely.
Lotringer puts it this way:
“What seduced me from the beginning is precisely that a book on speed should be so rapid. We’ve gotten too used to seeing ‘the end of the book’ proclaimed in books that are themselves interminable. Your work is not voluminous because it is itself ‘vehicular.’” (41).
III.
Call technology by its secret name, know its passwords: this perspective makes Virilio’s enterprise a perilous one. The stakes are increased, which means both the risks and the rewards are accelerated when writing treats itself to speed. One of the risks, as he notes in a passage quoted above, is not to be trusted, another is to desire the abstract machine. The rewards are tactical maps of the interpenetrations of various forms of technology, or more precisely human-machine
symbiosis slash metempsychosis. That inventions play on each other, that machines rely on certain previous machines while making others obsolete, is not exactly news, but certainly bears further examination in the light shed by this type of analysis. Four of the great blocks of activity where speed organizes itself are the military (the business of war), business (the manipulation of wealth), travel (the violence of projection), and entertainment (the culture industry).
These blocks cannot be seen apart from each other — they all preserve the division of labor even as speed preserves them, keeping them not merely running but accelerating.
Acceleration is the movement of movement and is essential in the current production and maintenance of power and knowledge in all these areas. Each builds on the knowledge forged by the others; they all enjoy both parasitical and hegemonic existences, and the postwar global situation witnesses various grotesque couplings of the spheres of work and play, confrontation, and leisure. A quick glance at new devices shows not how firm the commodity structure is but its reckless trajectory, which comes to look more and more like a death drive. England’s dream is a shopping scheme, as Johnny Rotten knew.
Pershing and MX missiles, CD players and dub decks, speed metal and hardcore, metros, walk things, moving sidewalks, microwaves, private helicopters, ready tellers, modems: all function by accelerating flows, and by creating multiple interfaces between hysterical bodies and hyperactive machines.
IV.
Dromology may not be a philosophy per se, but it is a return to philosophy’s beginnings. As a meditation on the formal constraints of life, it provides perhaps a further chapter in Adorno’s Minima Moralia, which was subtitled “Reflections from Damaged Life.” Damaged life is life spent under the negative horizon, in the confines first of the European fortress during WWII, then in the aftermath(s), which Virilio sees as the reign of Total Peace under nuclear dictatorship — war pursued by other means.
Subjectivity is not depth or interiority, but the “unable body” subjugated within the prosthesis, hurtling forward in time and space, circulating but never arriving.
Unlike Adorno, Virilio doesn’t seem to retain much old-world nostalgia. His — and ours even more extremely — is a quite different generation. He does, however, preserve an intimate connection between lived experience (reified or not, Erlebnis or Erfahrung ) and writing. He begins his books Bunker Archéologie, L’Insécurité du territoire and L’Horizon négatif with observations on his personal relationship to some external event, situation, or representational problem. In the first of these books, he remembers discovering after the postwar liberation of the coast of France the hugeness of the beach’s horizon, and the presence of a bunker, full of hidden signification. In the second, it is Nantes at the end of the war, the terror he experiences in relation to the sky, occupied by planes. In the third, he recalls his efforts to paint in a new
manner, concentrating on the spaces between objects, to combat fabricated objects with the study of “antiforms.” He writes: “The eclipse of anti-forms seemed to me like the consequence of a sort of imperialism of apprehension.” (22). In each case, a curiosity about space leads to reflections on its territorializations.
Subjectivity in these conditions necessitates a vigilant observation and creative appropriation of what he calls the “field of vision.” Its deformed character is a result of the violence of speed, of technologization and formalization, the narrowing of Borges’ bifurcating paths to rigid vectors of delivery. The price enacted from the body doesn’t have to be characterized in the language of hermeneutic depth or that of reification; although he doesn’t rule out these ways of gaining access to subjectivity, Virilio prefers to investigate concrete situations involving the harnessing of machines, where the subject becomes a “voyeur-voyageur.”
The term projection can be introduced here; it is apt due to its overlapping of the registers of television/film and transportation. The seat of subjectivity is henceforth a spectral one, a hurtling through space in the surroundings of immobility, otherwise known as comfort. Virilio’s discussion in L’Horizon négatif of the monture* focuses on the situation of immobility. He traces man’s self-harnessing to animals (the horse as the first machine of war). His analysis moves from a nomadic configuration in which women served as the means of transport for the man, to the later use of the horse as a seat of power and velocity which would dominate the exercise of war.
Later forms of monture become so many facts (or facticities) of daily existence; Virilio details the “violence of speed” in the development of vectors of transport, evaluating not simply the specifics of the comfort-immobility syndrome, but travel as a form of logistics.** Space and then time undergo transformations that turn them into grids. With the development of technologies of transport from the early chemin de fer to the Concorde, time itself becomes habitable. One takes up residence in speed when traveling. This residence, the Grand Hotel Abyss of our times, is characterized at its extreme by continual motion around the globe. One example offered is the case of the homeless PLO terrorist whose field of action is the airplane and the airport, places of speed and circulation, of continual transit. The violence of terrorism situates itself within and mimics in a complicated way the “violence of displacement” that constitutes air travel.
Integral to this way of pinpointing the violence in the machine are considerations relating to the inertia of the passenger.
For Virilio, the politics of travel must go beyond discussions of the need for increases of security via seat belts and surveillance and treat instead the whole procedure of harnessing, the problematic subject whose trajectory displays very little choice, whose choices have been made for her or him on a pervasive scale and yet give off the surface glow of normality, i.e. invisibility. This happens in relation to consciousness in the time frame of always- already, as what Adorno calls a “prehistorical surgical intervention.” The political unconscious is a militarized one.
The medium is a massage. Not only in the one- way communication of television is this true; travel and communications and world-vision technologies all share an origin in the deployment of an economy of war. For Virilio, the massage of entertainment forms the flipside of the state of emergency, although individual productions can help illustrate and work on the situation in crucial ways. The era of nuclear deterrence is also an era of the deterrence of the nomadic or meandering path in favor of the vector. The connections here are perhaps obvious, as grids have become a recurring fantasy in the cartesian-goyesque sleep of reason. But Virilio succeeds at lending a convincing background to their articulation. His book Guerre et cinéma: Logistique de la perception, tackles the utilization of filming techniques in conjunction with air missions in WWII. The crossbreeding of technologies appears to be the true terrain of Virilio’s new science (or anti-science) of observation. Bunker Archéologie used an archeological method to discuss the profound connection of the military and a specific architecture that would house its lookouts and strongholds; Logistique de la perception pursues another constellation of technical knowledges, that of war and cinema.
The thesis is that arms are a means of perception and that cinema is an armament. Cameras mounted on reconnaissance planes provide an exemplary chapter in the colonialization of space/time in the name of knowledge of and for destruction. This constellation of machines also hastens the connection between imperialism of the gaze and war as penetration, the production of information and territoriality. This is, of course, war in the old sense, or rather in a recent or previous sense. The end of the Second World War was also the inauguration of Pure War.
Virilio ascribes the term “state delinquencies” to the range of armed conflicts since Hiroshima. Global insecurity henceforth constitutes the planet’s atmosphere, while Pure War is conducted hypothetically from command centers staffed by immobile bodies. In Speed and Politics, Virilio details the strategies of tension that color every aspect of political economy but extend as well into the immense machine of culture exemplified but by no means exhausted by Hollywood.
Speed is the ground of current first-world culture, and this culture is still and always imperialistic, tending to spread its vectors around the globe, exporting and replicating itself in insidious, digestible bits. Speed is the form, content, and apotheosis of culture. It reaches its millenarian stage with music video, which deterritorializes perception by a flux of images and noise, but reterritorializes it without fail as commodity. “Overaccelerated speed renders us unconscious,” he says. Speed sells, speed can be packaged, but it also takes the senses over a certain apperceptive threshold, and points in the process to a sort of cannibalistic enterprise; speed eats the body because the senses start having a hard time “keeping up.” Perhaps we are entering a final stage in the cult of sensation, in which our bodies are unable to enjoy the extreme pleasures that have been prepared for them with frenetic excess.
Here are two quotes, the first from Adorno’s Minima Moralia, the second from Virilio. Adorno writes in 1946:
Human dignity insisted on the right to walk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror. The walk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage of the feudal promenade in the nineteenth century. . . .
Perhaps the cult of technical speed as of sport conceals an impulse to master the terror of running by deflecting it from one’s body and at the same time effortlessly surpassing it. The triumph of mounting mileage ritually appeases the fear of the fugitive. [162]
Virilio counters in 1983:
Movement is now only a handicap — a double handicap that we know only too well. A motor-handicap: a man in a car piloted by a driver (until such time as cars are completely automatic, which won’t take long) is motor- handicapped. In his own way, he is just as bed-ridden as Howard Hughes. The man sitting before his television watching the soccer championship live from Santiago in Chile is seeing-handicapped. For example, to be — as we are now — sitting in well-stuffed chairs is a postural comfort. Our muscles are relatively relaxed. They aren’t being called upon. It’s a postural comfort with respect to the body and to physiological materialness. Now, the prostheses of automotive-audio-visual movement create a subliminal comfort. Subliminal, meaning beyond consciousness. They allow a kind of visual — thus physical — hallucination, which tends to strip us of our consciousness. Subliminal comfort multiplies the speed of consciousness — the speed of the vivacity of reflection. This multiplication can be pleasant in relative acceleration, that is, within the boundaries of my consciousness; but these boundaries are very narrow, and if, as in certain cases of ‘invasion of privacy,’ someone should use speed to go beyond this, I am conditioned. This in fact what is called subliminal advertising and, of course, propaganda directed at entire populations. You see an image of which you are not at all conscious, it imposes itself on you without your being able to detect it because it goes too fast. The prosthesis is completely alienating. (74–5)
We have come a long way since Adorno’s memory of human dignity.
Without tackling here the full breadth of the connections made by both of these thinkers, or contemplating for too long the abyss that separates Adorno’s culture industry from ours, let me note that Virilio’s analyses of the war machine are fruitfully transplanted to the study of film, at least at what Lotringer calls the episto-technical level. But to pose the operation as one of transplantation is perhaps unfair to his vision. Culture itself in its massive form, its American form, its first-world form, its commodity form, its industrial form, grows out of war in innumerable ways. Just as Dada transposed the shock of the Great War onto language, the shock of Pure War is seen in current Hollywood productions, especially in their budgets. This type of cinema comes into its own as the most advanced dream machine in the era of war carried on by other means.
The clue that video offers the detective of these connections can be uncovered by drawing a parallel to the point of Virilio’s about the status of the body under what he calls “dromocracy.” He discusses the significance of air force pilots being equipped with whole head computers, visual mediators that process the raw data of trajectories, speed, horizon, target, etc., slowing down and simplifying the transmitted information. The body is outgrown by the technology it still fits into anachronistically. Examples of this type of operation can be multiplied and will no doubt continue to multiply. Donna Haraway has spoken of the cyborg (human body equipped with bits of machine) in a more positive light, that of feminist intervention, the possible freeing of the subjugated female body. In Virilio’s eyes, it remains at the services of a repressive regime of surveillance, engaged in the disciplining of territory, but also the further refinement of the obsolete body.
* Monture: animal for riding, mount; mounting, setting, frame, support, socket . . .
** Logistics: branch of military science involving the procuring, maintaining and transporting of materiel, personnel and facilities . . .
Daniel L Potter, Cornell University, 1987
