According to Paul Virilio, real time is prevailing over real space, reducing the world to nothing.
__ Over the course of a diverse career as professor of architecture, film critic, urbanist, military historian, peace strategist, and intellectual provocateur, French author Paul Virilio has produced more than a dozen books. His writings move with a rare fluidity from the quotidian (train wrecks and city planning) to the exotic (stock market crashes and the ultramodern war machine). Since writing his first book, Bunker Archeology, a study of Hitler's "Atlantic Wall," Virilio has gone on to crisscross the circuitry of modern thinking with genre-busting studies of the impact of speed on politics ("the dromocratic revolution") and the co-evolution of war and cinema ("the logistics of perception"). Turning his corrosive intellect to the impact of technology on war, the body, and the media, Virilio pierces some of the darker veilings of the future. James Der Derian met with Virilio in Paris. __
Wired: Is the author dead?
Virilio
: Written work is threatened by the evocative power of the screen, and in particular the live screen. Though not by the image - there have always been images in books; there have always been images in architecture, like frescoes or stained-glass windows. It is real time that threatens writing. Writing is always, always, in deferred time - always delayed. Once the image is live, there is a conflict between deferred time and real time, and this is a serious threat to writing and the author.
Is that why you write about film?
Cinema interested me enormously for its kinematic roots - all my work is dromological, related to the study of speed. Inevitably, after having treated metabolic speed, the role of the cavalry in history, the speed of the human body, I became interested in technological speed. It goes without saying that after relative speed (the railroad, aviation) there was absolute speed - the transition to the limit of electromagnetic waves. Cinema interested me as a stage in between, the putting into movement of images.
Has this shift changed the nature of war?
Of course. It changes the logistics of perception. In war, the logistics of perception was from the start a geographic logistics of domination from an elevated site - the tower, the telescope, the fortified castle, or the level of perception of the bombardier. The development of the battlefield corresponds to the development of the field of perception made possible by technical advancements: the technologies of geometrical optics, the telescope, waveoptics, electro-optics, the electromagnetic transmission of a signal in video, and, of course, computer graphics, the new multimedia. The battlefield is no longer "worldwide," in the sense of the First or Second World War. It is global, in the sense of the planet.
Was the Gulf War the first global war?
The Gulf War was a fractal war: at once local and global. With regard to its battlefield, it was a local war - without many deaths, without many consequences - in comparison with the Second World War. But it was a worldwide war on the temporal level of representation, on the level of media. In fact, it was a war that took place in the artifice of television much more than in the reality of the field of battle. One can already say that real time prevailed over real space.
In your writing, wartime seems to prevail over all time.
I am a "war baby." As a child I lived through the horrors of the Second World War, through the reign of technology as absolute terror. I was in Nantes, which was destroyed by our allies - the Americans and the English. For a child, a city is like the Alps, it's eternal, like the mountains. Then one single bombardment and all is razed. War was my university.
What about the impact of technology on culture?
There have been three industrial revolutions. The first important revolution on the technical plane was that of transportation. The second, which was almost concomitant, was the transmissions revolution, including Marconi, Edison, radio, television. The third, which we are on the verge of, is the revolution of transplantations. All these technologies of telecommunications that had been employed in aviation and missiles favor nanotechnology - the possibility of miniaturizing technology to the point of introducing it into the human body. Just as the geographic world was colonized by means of transportation or communication, we have the possibility of the colonization of the body by technology - as if we had the city in the body and not the city around the body. We are on the verge of the biomachine.
When hardware and wetware merge are there any ethical choices left?
I believe that the three revolutions lead to a technical fundamentalism, a "cybercult." Just as there is religious fundamentalism, there is a technical fundamentalism. Modern man, who killed the Judeo-Christian God, the one of transcendence, invented a god machine, a deus ex machina. But it's necessary to be an atheist of technology! This is not simply antitechnology. My fetish image is that of the battle of Jacob and the angel. Jacob is a believer, he meets the angel of God; but to remain a free man, he is obliged
to do battle. It is necessary to obey
- but also to resist.
What comes next?
I think that the infosphere - the sphere of information - is going to impose itself on the geosphere. We are going to be living in a reduced world. The capacity of interactivity is going to reduce the world to nearly nothing. In fact, there is already a speed pollution, which reduces the world to nothing. In the near future, people will feel enclosed in a small environment. They will have a feeling of confinement in the world, which will certainly be at the limit of tolerability, by virtue of the speed of information. If I were to offer you a last thought - interactivity is to real space what radioactivity is to the atmosphere.
Translated by James Der Derian with Lauren Osepchuk and Michael Degener.
-James Der Derian(jderian@polsci.umass.edu) is editor of the forthcoming Paul Virilio Reader (Blackwell Press) and author of "Cyber-Deterrence," in Wired 2.09.
