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Virilio K
Virilio K ......................................................................................................................................... 1
Disorder 1NC ................................................................................................................................. 3
Disorder 1NC ................................................................................................................................. 7
Disorder 1NC ................................................................................................................................. 9
Disorder ROB .............................................................................................................................. 11
Link: Deterrence ......................................................................................................................... 12
Link: Modifying Perception ....................................................................................................... 13
Link: Satellites............................................................................................................................. 14
Link: Satellites............................................................................................................................. 15
Link: Satellites............................................................................................................................. 16
Link: Satellites............................................................................................................................. 17
Link: Technology=Progress ....................................................................................................... 19
Link: Transmittin’ for the win .................................................................................................. 20
Link: Immediate Telepresence .................................................................................................. 24
Link: Overstretch........................................................................................................................ 26
Link: Accidents ........................................................................................................................... 27
Link: Presence of absence .......................................................................................................... 28
Alt: Political Economy of Time .................................................................................................. 30
Alt: Reject Pure War .................................................................................................................. 31
Solvency: Street Corner Work .................................................................................................. 34
Solvency: Techno-Fundamentalism .......................................................................................... 35
Solvency: Techno-Fundamentalism .......................................................................................... 36
Solvency: Policymaking .............................................................................................................. 37
Solvency: The Political ............................................................................................................... 39
Solvency: Democracy .................................................................................................................. 40
Solvency: Technological Colonization....................................................................................... 42
Solvency: Revolutionary Change............................................................................................... 43
D&G Alt Solvency ....................................................................................................................... 45
Solvency Turn.............................................................................................................................. 46
A2: Perm ...................................................................................................................................... 47
Impact: Pure War ....................................................................................................................... 48
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Impact: Pure War ....................................................................................................................... 50
Impact: Ocular Dominance ........................................................................................................ 51
Impact: Vision Machine ............................................................................................................. 52
Impact: Information Bomb ........................................................................................................ 53
Turns Case: Accidents ................................................................................................................ 55
Accidents Inevitable/Turns case ................................................................................................ 56
Pure War: Turns Case................................................................................................................ 57
FW: Dromology ........................................................................................................................... 58
FW: Analogical Reasoning ......................................................................................................... 59
FW: Analogical Reasoning ......................................................................................................... 60
A2: Realism.................................................................................................................................. 63
A2: Virilio is pessimistic ............................................................................................................. 64
A2: Pomo Bad/Virilio hates science........................................................................................... 65
**Aff Castle** ............................................................................................................................. 67
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Disorder 1NC
The aff’s attempt to have a constant interactive view of events in a non local scene is an
example of “the pathology of immediate perception” that stands to overload our
informational capacity leading to a mentally confused population prone to the “tyranny of
real time”.
Beard and Gunn 02 (David Beard and Joshua Gunn. “Paul Virilio and the Mediation of Perception and
Technology”. Enculturation, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 2002. http://enculturation.gmu.edu/drupal/4_2/beardgunn/logic.html)
The term that Virilio develops for this phenomenon is "real time." Real time, as many online
gaming fans would attest, refers to the notion that events are unfolding in one's immediate
field of view irrelevant of spatial relationships. Real time is the word for the way that our
perceptions are shaped by these technologies that place the not-here here, in the field of my
present. Further: real time manifests when tele-objectivity allows one to witness an event at
daybreak in England when it’s pitch black night in one's neighborhood. Real time means, in
the most current of online videoconferencing, for example, "meeting at a distance, in other words,
being telepresent, here and elsewhere, at the same time" (Open 10). Certainly we are conscious
of differences in time zones while we watch a live broadcast or partake of a videoconference;
certainly we can see that it is dark here but light there. But we are primarily conscious of our
"presence" at the event. We are primarily conscious that "now" for us is "now" for them,
despite differences in the sun's position. The real nuance to Virilio’s theory enters here: Real time
is not, as one might suppose, the opposite of "delayed time." The difference between watching a
real time broadcast of Princess Diana’s funeral and watching it on videotape at a later hour, for
example, is not relevant to real time as a theoretical construct. Real time is, instead, opposed to
"real presence"—a sense of local time and local place. While spectators or viewers partake of
real time, a place of "here" gives way to the ever-present "now." Virilio argues that real time
results in a loss of the spatial boundaries to which humans typically coordinate their bodies.
But real time is also a result of a warped sense of what "present" can mean. Virilio points to
Paul Klee for an articulation of the impact of real time on our sense of the present: The painter
Paul Klee expressed the point exceptionally well when he noted, "Defining the present in
isolation is tantamount to murdering it." This is what technologies of real time are achieving.
They kill "present" time by isolating it from its presence here and now for the sake of
another commutative space that is no longer composed of our "concrete presence" in the
world, but of a "discrete telepresence" whose enigma remains forever intact. ("Third" par. 5)
This example appears in many places in Virilio’s work. Virilio argues that "Paul Klee hit the
nail on the head" because murdering the now is precisely what Virilio says "teletechnologies
of real time are doing: they are killing 'present' time by isolating it from its here and now, in
favour of a commutative elsewhere that no longer has anything to do with our 'concrete presence' in
the world" (Open 10). In a more consciously analytical approach, Virilio describes this
phenomenon with some precision: Human beings exist in three dimensions of chronological
time—past, present, and future. It is obvious that the liberation of the present—real time or
world time—runs the risk of making us lose the past and future in favor of a presentification,
which amounts to an amputation of the volume of time. Time is volume; it is not only space-time
in the sense of relativity. It is volume and depth of meaning, and the emergence of one world
time eliminating the multiplicity of local times is a considerable loss for both geography and
history. (Politics 81) Real-time technologies (global broadcasting was a first step; interactive
technologies only reinforces the effect) “eliminate the multiplicity of local times.” It remains for
us to explicate what Virilio sees as this loss. Importantly, our entry into the mediascape of real
time is described by Virilio as "pathological." In Open Sky, he laments: "I personally fear we
are being confronted by a sort of pathology of immediate perception that owes everything, or
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very nearly everything, to the recent proliferation of photo-cinematic and video-infographic
seeing machines" (Open 90). The primary effect of this psychosis is, in the end, neither a
Nietzschean skepticism of these “seeing machines” nor radical doubt of the representations placed
before us, but a disorientation. It is to the implications of this disorientation that we now turn.
Phrased most baldly, Virilio claims that "the tyranny of real time is tantamount to a
subjugation of the television viewer" (Politics 87). The disorientation which Virilio believes to
be inherent in real time (as the common-sense orientation toward space described in MerleauPonty is eroded) becomes pervasive. As Virilio claims, "the conquest of panoptical ubiquity
would lead to the conquest of passivity, with populations not so much going down in military
defeat as in the past[,] but [by] succumbing to mental confusion" (Strategy 55). We are
“mediatized” (in the Napoleonic sense) by the media technology, rather than by force.
Virilio sees this disorientation and inevitable confusion as inherently dangerous for
democracy:
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Disorder 1NC
We must reject the affirmative’s attempt to order information in an entropic fashion. The
aff exemplifies the logic of the characters in Pynchon and Lefebvre’s fiction because of
their inability to embrace the disorderly nature of the world. We should embrace the vision
of Oedipa Mass by coming to the realization that a monologic order of information
destroys both the meaning and intent to communicate.
Snart 01 (Snart, Jason A., "Disorder and Entropy in Pynchon's "Entropy" and Lefebvre's 'The Production of
Space'" (2001). English Scholarship. Paper 46. http://dc.cod.edu/englishpub/46)
The point of the present essay is to engage Pynchon's story in a critical reading somewhat on
its own terms. In drawing from information and thermodynamic theory, I am trying to show how
Pynchon's story can show us disorder functioning in daily life (although, as Christian Moraru
writes of Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon's text does not "illustrate" anything … [it] delineates
[themes] fictionally" [265]). The differences being one of thematic control and limitation versus
thematic extension.) Pynchon's characters, I argue, are unsuccessful in their personal
endeavors to combat the existential malaise that has settled over them, owing to their
misreading (or mis-use) of disorder. Chambers notes that the reactions that Pynchon's
characters have to "fear, primarily fear of death" are in some ways "antithetical," yet are in
other ways "the same, ineffectual response: withdrawal and escape" (25). However, where
Pynchon's characters fail, I show how we might learn a valuable lesson in recognizing disorder
and conceptualizing it in a productive and energizing manner. From Pynchon's "Entropy" I
read to the critical work of Henri Lefebvre, specifically The Production of Space. Within that
very difficult work is the implicit (and often explicit) call for critical mobility and openness.
The Production of Space is, itself, an example of "disorder" as it can inform a critical text. In
his book, Lefebvre suggests that capitalism's weakness, its potential openness to critical readings,
might be the spatial chaos that unintentionally develops (or can be made to appear through critical
work), even while capitalism tries to compose and contain itself as a controlled (controllable) and
ordered (ordering) mode of production and reproduction. Spatial chaos (or spatial chaoses, for
they are often micro in scale) occurs, for Lefebvre, in the seams between centres. If Deleuze and
Guattari are correct in describing the power of capitalism's overcoding machine (its selfpresentation) as the "organization of a resonance among centers" (211), then we can perhaps
imagine Lefebvre's spatial chaos as breakdowns in those resonances. Paul Virilio describes
the same kind of flattening of difference. In A Landscape of Events, Virilio notes that "hyperspeed" renders impossible the "time necessary for reflection" (96). And in The Information
Bomb, Virilio argues for the role of "speed and concentration" in the emergence of
"centralized," yet "globalized," capital and culture (11, 13). "Grand-Scale Transhorizon
Optics," Virilio writes, make "globalitarianism" possible, which in turn makes possible
"totalitarianisms" of the future, just as it allowed for those of the past (15, 18). In many ways,
Virilio is extending Horkheimer and Adorno's argument for the power of culture (the dominating
culture industry) to impress "the same stamp on everything" (Dialectic of Enlightenment 120).
Virilio, working in and towards a different era, locates cultural power very differently than do
Adorno and Horkheimer, yet each identifies the cultural drive toward "total accomplishment"
which flattens difference (Information Bomb 18) In the face of flattened difference, or the stamp
of sameness, it is up to critical readers and writers to find chaos, or disorder. Thus we must
be aware of disorder as a potentially productive concept, even when its so-called "common
sense" valence would suggest otherwise (that is, would suggest disorder as a negative condition,
one connoting break-down, loss of control, and inefficiency). I cast Lefebvre's fairly general
use of "chaos" as a concept rooted in more strictly scientific terms, allowing us to explore
more concretely what chaos can actually mean in critical thinking. I read Pynchon's
"Entropy" as a lesson in how disorder can exist, but also as a warning against its mis-use, for
Pynchon's short story elaborates the entropy concept (deeply connected to chaos theory through
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order and disorder as states in a system) without straying very far from the scientific bounds of
the term. Pynchon's short story also offers a more manageable presentation of the general entropy
theme which appears in many of his other, much more difficult and lengthy works. For example,
Alan W. Brownlie argues that The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow "present the possibility
that power [in the form of social control] can be redistributed" (1). Entropy figures more or
less explicitly in these works as the condition which prevents such redistribution, since there is
no energy available to initiate change. Oedipa Maas, in The Crying of Lot 49, arrives to San
Narciso, in southern California, to find a scene of entropic stasis: "Nothing was happening."
She looks down onto "The ordered swirl of houses and streets" and remembers the first time
she saw a "printed circuit" (24). Oedipa senses something meaningful, some "intent to
communicate"; however, meaning seems to be suppressed by the outward hyper-orderliness
of her surroundings (24). As many of Pynchon's characters must, Oedipa attempts to
navigate the space between meaningful communication and entropic, monologic, order.
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Disorder 1NC
The concept of disorder should be interpreted in the context of information studies and
thermodynamics to mean a seemingly destructive force that has a self-regulating quality.
This state of equilibrium evokes a reactionary state of mobility in the receiver, avoiding the
stale constant stream of knowledge that the aff produces.
Snart 01 (Snart, Jason A., "Disorder and Entropy in Pynchon's "Entropy" and Lefebvre's 'The Production of
Space'" (2001). English Scholarship. Paper 46. http://dc.cod.edu/englishpub/46)
The notion of disorder -- although more generally understood in its colloquial sense of
disorganization or even chaos (Webster's offers "want of order; confusion" 116) -- is borrowed
here from information studies and from thermodynamic theory. I engage thermodynamics as
a conceptual system with cultural relevance, following in the work by such pioneers in systems
science as Ludwig von Bertalanffy, who formulated the theory that general systems, including
thermodynamic systems just as much as cultural systems, can be self-regulating; that is, the
energy flow of an open system tends towards a steady state, corresponding to a minimum of
entropy production, and thus stabilizing the system (see Bertalanffy 1968). It is my purpose to
examine Thomas Pynchon's short story "Entropy" for the ways in which it deals with the kinds
of disorder(s) involved in entropy as a thermodynamic and informational concept, and to
suggest an application of those concepts to critical activity such that disorder need not be seen as
a state of confusion, but rather as a state of potential energy and productivity. It is this latter
extension that dislodges the present work from the growing body of scholarship that treats entropy
in work by Pynchon. I analyze Henri Lefebvre's The Production of Space as an example of
how disorder can inform critical work, for Lefebvre's work invites and manages a certain
level of disorder for specific purposes. Disorder in Lefebvre's thought is to work against the
political and ideological effects of ordering in systemic projects, not least of those being late
capitalism as Lefebvre identifies it. Rather than practice a traditional sort of reading of Pynchon
through chaos theory, or Pynchon through Lefebvre, or even Lefebvre through Pynchon, I hope to
bring each of these matters together such that they all gloss each other but none takes a
central, final, controlling place. In response to an assertion by Bernard-Henri Lévy that at certain
points during the critical process one would experience "the time to stop, the moment of
reflection and regaining equilibrium" (120), Michel Foucault invoked what he called "the
moment of new mobility and new displacement" (120). As is clear from Foucault's assertion and
from others in the same interview, he is not interested in a resting point for critical work and
inquiry to gather and order itself. The mobility he calls for is to be part of any critical project,
for it keeps such projects from falling into dogmatic kinds of closure (at which point they
operate to flatten difference, not to explore it). What seems to characterize many of the most
persistent critical projects (in both broad and specific terms) is what Peter Hitchcock has called
"restless inquiry" (3). Both Foucault and Hitchcock point to a recurrent theme in many
critical formulations, although it is defined in various ways: mobility, movement,
displacement, or, as I call it here, "disorder." I introduce the notion of disorder in the very
specific terms laid out by information and thermodynamic theory, wherein it connotes a state
of potential or choice (in information) and movement or energy (in thermodynamics). As the
working term in this essay, disorder is meant to evoke that recurrent theme of mobility or
restlessness. And it is meant to reflect a potentially positive force, not, as is too often the case,
a state of confusion or breakdown. To bring terms from chaos theory into play is not simply to
replace one set of terms (like mobility or restlessness) with another; rather, it is to suggest that
through such a recasting we can see similarities in otherwise nominally distinct subjects (like
Pynchon and Lefebvre) and also expand the conceptual framework itself by suggesting and/or
pursuing further implications. For example, if the concept of immobility is cast as heat death
(a term I engage below), and we know that order and disorder are deeply connected (in the
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scientific sense) with heat death, then we might expand the conceptual framework to consider
how order and disorder can also speak beyond their scientific roots.
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Disorder 1NC
The impact is pure war resulting in the end of the human race.
Kellner 08 (Douglas Kellner, professor of philosophy at UCLA, "Preface The Ideology of HIgh-Tech/Postmodern
War vs. the Reality of Messy Wars."
http://gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/2008_Kellner_MessyWarPreface_ver29052008FINAL.pdf)
Hence, phenomenal new military technologies are being produced in the Third Millennium,
described as the instruments of an emergent postmodern warfare, and envisaged earlier by
Philip K. Dick and other SF writers. These military technologies, described in Messy Wars, are
changing the nature of warfare and are part of a turbulent technological revolution with
wide-ranging effects. They are helping to engender a novel type of highly intense "hyperwar,"
cyberwar, or technowar, where technical systems make military decisions and humans are
put out of the loop, or are forced to make instant judgments based on technical data. As
computer programs displace military planners and computer simulations supplant charts
and maps of the territory, technology supersedes humans in terms of planning, decision
making and execution. On the level of the battlefield itself, human power is replaced by
machines, reducing the soldier to a cog in a servomechanism. These developments are alarming
and led French theorist Paul Virilio (1989, 84) to comment in War and Cinema: The disintegration
of the warrior's personality is at a very advanced stage. Looking up, he sees the digital display
(optoelectronic or holographic) of the windscreen collimator; looking down, the radar screen, the
onboard computer, the radio and the video screen, which enables him to follow the terrain with its
four or five simultaneous targets; and to monitor his self navigating Sidewinder missiles fitted with
a camera of infra-red guidance system. The autonomization of warfare and ongoing
displacement of humans by technology creates the specter of technology taking over and the
possibility of military accidents, leading to, Virilio warns us, the specter of global catastrophe.
There is a fierce argument raging in military circles between those who want to delegate more
power and fighting to the new "brilliant" weapons opposed to those who want to keep human
operators in charge of technical systems. Critics of cyberwar worry that as technology supplants
human beings, taking humans out of decision-making loops, the possibility of accidental
firing of arms at inappropriate targets and even nuclear war increases. Since the 1980s,
Virilio criticized the accelerating speed of modern technology and indicated how it was
producing developments that were spinning out of control, and that, in the case of military
technology, could lead to the end of the human race (see Virilio and Lotringer’s Pure War
1983). For Virilio, the acceleration of events, technological development, and speed in the
current era unfolds such that "the new war machine combines a double disappearance: the
disappearance of matter in nuclear disintegration and the disappearance of places in
vehicular extermination" (Virilio 1986: 134). The increased pace of destruction in military
technology is moving toward the speed of light with laser weapons and computer-governed
networks constituting a novelty in warfare in which there are no longer geostrategic strongpoints
since from any given spot we can now reach any other, creating "a strategy of Brownian
movement through geostrategic homogenization of the globe" (Virilio 1986: 135). Thus,
"strategic spatial miniaturization is now the order of the day," with microtechnologies
transforming production and communication, shrinking the planet, and preparing the way
for what Virilio calls "pure war," a situation where military technologies and an
accompanying technocratic system come to dominate every aspect of life. In Virilio's view, the
war machine is the demiurge of technological growth and an ultimate threat to humanity,
producing "a state of emergency" where nuclear holocaust threatens the very survival of the
human species. This consists of a shift from a "geo-politics" to a "chrono-politics," from a
politics of space to a politics of time, in which whoever commands the means of instant
information, communication, and destruction is a dominant sociopolitical force. For Virilio,
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every technological system contains its specific form of accident and a nuclear accident would
be catastrophic. Hence, in the contemporary era, in which weapons of mass destruction could
create an instant world holocaust, we are thrust into a permanent state of emergency with
hightech networks that enables military state to impose its imperatives on ever more domains
of political and social life, as shown in Messy Wars’ chapter 3 about war environment.
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Disorder ROB
Their concept of the political is confined to a game of meaning in which the opinion is more
important than the work behind that advocacy. You should come to the conclusion for
yourself while not giving ammunition for others to “make war” in the name of an absolute
proclamation.
Brugger and Virilio 01 (Niels Brugger & Paul Virilio. Researcher at the Institute for Information and Media
Studies & Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, respectively. Virilio Live:
Selected Interviews. Accessed via Library.nu)
NB: But hasn’t the intellectual always had a certain affinity with politics?
PV: But the work is political! Galileo’s work is political. Copernicus’s work is political.
Einstein’s work is political. Politics is not voting for, being against, giving moral lessons, no, it
is the work. A true philosophical work is political. In this, we recognize the decline of politics:
it is merely a game of meanings, a humanism in the most elementary sense. This is the true
question. In my view, Galileo is a true politician; Copernicus is a true politician. They weren’t just
astronomers. To change our view of the world is to change politics. This is also why I often
avoid participating in various actions. I have participated, but I often avoid them by saying ‘no,
it is what I do that is political’. Reread Speed and Politics, it is more political than signing a
petition. I hate those professors of crowds like Sartre, who position themselves on street
corners and start speaking. I can give you a recent example of what I do. At the start of the
hostilities between the Slovenians and the federal troops in Yugoslavia, a Slovenian student doing
a research project on my work asked me if I would sign a petition. I said I wouldn’t, after
which he asked me if I would do an interview, which I didn’t mind doing. So I was interviewed
on the war, and the interview was published in a Slovenian newspaper in July 1991. I told him ‘I’m
not going to tell you what’s right or wrong; first I’m going to talk about war and then about
the civil war, and then you can do as you please. I’m not going to make any moral lessons, do as
you please. If you want to destroy one another – do as in Beirut, Lebanon, and Ireland – that’s your
problem. I’m going to say something about war. I’m going to explain that the kind of war you
make serves no political end, it has no real political objective; we are no longer in the epoch
of Clausewitz, war is no longer the prolongation of politics by other means. That chapter is over,
as the means surpass politics, invalidating it in a certain sense!’ That is all I said, which is not
political activism but part of my work. In other words, this is my kind of political activism, which
is often misunderstood. Of course, I have an opinion, but I consider my work on war to be of
primary importance. If, however, one signs a petition, certain people are going to make use of it
to kill others. I believe this is one of the issues on which I have the most difficulty with my
contemporaries; in our world opinions prevail over the work, over the interpretation; an
interpretation is far more productive than an opinion. An interpretation based on consistent
work, not something decided in five minutes and under the influence of one’s emotions.
NB: So there are two kinds of political activism: street activism and conceptual activism?
PV: To be a conceptual activist means to produce concepts. This is true political activism.
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Link: Deterrence
Nuclear deterrence constructs an ever-present potentiality of destruction—resistance to
this problematic form of technology is resistance against pure war itself.
Armitage and Virilio 01 (John Armitage and Paul Virilio. Dromology scholar and Professor of Philosophy at
the European Graduate School in Switzerland respectively. Virilio Live: Selected Interviews. Accessed via
Library.nu)
JA: Your concerns about what might be called ‘the dromocratic condition’ led, in the late 1970s, to
the publication of your Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles (1990 [1978]). This seems to me
to be one of the few books of yours which, while discussing the theoretical concept of ‘pure
war’, also makes a practical political case for ‘revolutionary resistance’ against the tyranny
of speed politics and, in particular, the military– industrial complex. Could you elaborate
upon these concepts? Are they still relevant today?
PV: Here, one must state that the book might also have been titled Pure War (Virilio and Lotringer,
1997 [1983]) since that is the heading of the Introduction.14 That was the time when we were
living with the unadulterated balance of terror. What I mean is that one cannot understand
the concept of pure war outside of the atomic bomb, the weapon of the apocalypse. At that
time, and this has been somewhat forgotten, we were living with the potentiality of a pure war,
which, nevertheless, failed to materialize. What is pure war? It is a war of a single utterance:
Fear! Fear! Fear! Nuclear deterrence can be conceived of as pure war for the simple reason
that nuclear war never took place. However, such deterrence did spawn a technoscientific
explosion, inclusive of the Internet, and other satellite technologies. And so one saw that the
history of warfare, of siege war, of the war of movement, of total war, of world war, all somehow
merged into pure war. That is, into a blockade, into nuclear deterrence. What had been
reached was the dimension of the integral accident, the moment of the total destruction of the
world. And there it stopped. Thus, at that stage, the whole concept of resistance to war became
a new phenomenon. It was no longer about resisting an invader, German or other, but about
resisting the military–scientific and industrial complex. Take my generation: during the
Second World War you had resistance, combat against the Germans who invaded France.
During the 1960s and 1970s there was resistance, among others by me, not against an invader, but
against the military–industrial complex, that is against the invention of ever crazier sorts of
weapons, like the neutron bomb, and ‘Doomsday machines’, something that we saw, for instance,
in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove. Thus resistance to pure war is of another nature than
resistance to an oppressor, to an invader. It is resistance against science: that is
extraordinary, unheard of!
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Link: Modifying Perception
The affirmative’s technologically reconstituted modes of perception construct a new real in
which militarist ideology is materialized in the form of new technologies.
Cooper 02 (Simon Cooper. Technoculture and Critical Theory: In the service of the machine?. 2002. Accessed
via Library.nu)
The militarist ideology, the collusion of technological development with militarised terror,
extends across the social realm as Virilio traces the passage from ‘wartime to the war of
peacetime’ (Virilio and Lotringer 1983: 142). The reconstituting ability of the war machine has
disseminated across the social field itself. This is what Virilio means when he talks of society as
in a perpetual state of war, ‘all of us are already civilian soldiers, we don’t recognise the
militarised part of [our] identity’. This aspect of our identity is constructed through
technologically reconstituted modes of perception and engagement, modes first developed in
the military. In War and Cinema (1989a), Virilio makes the now familiar claim that, in the
twentieth century, seeing is the dominant means of gaining knowledge. He goes on to argue that,
if new technologies modify perception, they correspondingly help to construct a new ‘real’.
For Virilio, the new modes of perception are inextricably linked to military developments in
technology. Ideology in this sense is materialised: the way we engage with the world is framed
by technologies of perception, particularly vision. In War and Cinema, Virilio theorises war as
that which is capable of ‘scoring territorial, economic or other cultural victories as in appropriating
the “immateriality of perceptual fields”’ (Virilio 1989a: 7). It is the capacity of military
technology to appropriate our perceptual fields that concerns Virilio. He makes a convincing
case for the collapse of militarist perceptual techniques into civilian life, but we can also see
the opposite, as we know from ‘watching’ the Gulf War, where the war was constructed through
western media as ‘cinema’.
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Link: Satellites
From its inception, the logistics of perception was the battlefield logic of informational
domination from an elevated position. Satellites are simply the next technological step in
this ever expanding tactic of warfare resulting in the scale of every conflict being raised to a
global one.
Der Derian and Virilio 76 (Paul Virilio and James Der Derian. Professor of Philosophy at the European
Graduate School in Switzerland and research professor with a focus on global security and media studies
respectively. Transcription of an interview of Virilio by Der Derian in Paris. 1976.
http://asrudiancenter.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/interview-with-paul-virilio/.)
Virilio:Cinema interested me enormously for its kinematic roots; all my work is dromological.
After having treated metabolic speed, the role of the cavalry in history, the speed of the human
body, the athletic body, I became interested in technological speed. It goes without saying that
after relative speed (the railroad, aviation) there was inevitably absolute speed, the transition to
the limit of electromagnetic waves. In fact, cinema interested me as a stage, up to the point of the
advent of electromagnetic speed. I was interested in cinema as cinematisme, that is the putting
into movement of images. We are approaching the limit that is the speed of light.
Der Derian: This is a significant historical event. Has this changed the nature of war? -Of course.
It changes with the logistics of perception. The logistics of perception began by encompassing
immediate perception, which is to say that of elevated sites, of the tower, of the telescope. War
is waged from high points. The logistics of perception was from the start the geographic
logistics of domination from an elevated site. Thus the “field of battle” which is also a “field of
perception” – a theater of operation – will develop on the level of perception of the tower, of
the fortified castle or on the level of perception of the bombardier. Such is the Second World War
and the bombings over Europe. The battlefield is at first local, then it becomes worldwide and
finally global; which is to say expanded to the level of orbit with the invention of video and
with reconnaissance satellites. Thus we have a development of the battlefield corresponding
to the development of the field of perception made possible by technical advancements,
successively through the technologies of geometrical optics: that of the telescope, of wave-optics,
of electro-optics; that of the electro-magnetic transmission of a signal in video; and, of course,
computer graphics, that is to say the new multi-media. Henceforth the battlefield is global. It is
no longer “worldwide” [mondialisÈe] in the sense of the First or Second World Wars. It is global
in the sense of the planet. For every war implicates the “rotundity” [rotonditÈ] of the earth,
the sphere, the geosphere.
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Link: Satellites
Satellites are the next step in the military battle of information.
Virilio 89 (Paul Virilio. Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. War and
Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. pp71. 1989.)
On the one hand, the secret of victory is written in the air by the ballistics of projectiles and
the hyper-ballistics of aeronautics; on the other, it is negated by speed since only the speed of
film exposure is capable of recording that military secret which each protagonist tries to keep
by camouflaging ever larger objects (artillery batteries, railways, marshalling yards, and
eventually whole towns as the black-out belatedly responded to the lighting war of 1940).
Just as weapons and armour developed in unison throughout history, so visibility and
invisibility now began to evolve together, eventually producing invisible weapons that make
things visible - radar, sonar, and the high-definition camera of spy satellites. The Duke of
Wellington once said he had spent his life guessing what was on the other side of the hill.
Today's military decision-makers don't have to guess: their task is to avoid confusing the
forms of a representation which, while covering the broadest regions of the front, must take in
the minute details always liable to influence the outcome of a conflict. The problem, then, is
no longer so much one of masks and screens, of camouflage designed to hinder longrange
targeting; rather, it is a problem of ubiquitousness, of handling simultaneous data in a global
but unstable environment where the image (photographic or cinematic) is the most
concentrated, but also the most stable, form of information.
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Link: Satellites
The images provided by satellites are the ammunition used to wage war in a dromologic
society.
Armitage and Virilio 01 (John Armitage and Paul Virilio. Dromology scholar and Professor of Philosophy at
the European Graduate School in Switzerland respectively. Virilio Live: Selected Interviews. Accessed via
Library.nu)
JA: In the early 1980s you produced one of your most well-known books, War and Cinema: The
Logistics of Perception (1989a [1984]). In this book you discuss the use by the military of
cinematic technologies of perception. Why is the analysis of the relationship between war and the
cinema so important for you?
PV: Because images have turned into ammunition. Logistics deals in the first place with the
supply to the front-line of ammunition, energy and so on. The front-line is constantly being
replenished with ammunition, energy and foodstuffs. Now, from the end of the First World War
onwards, but especially with the Second World War, the front-line is also being fed with images
and information. That means that a ‘logistics of perception’ will be put in place, just as there
is a logistics of fuel supplies, of explosives and shells. For instance, one can observe that the
First World War was fought on the basis of maps. Maps were being drawn, lines were sketched
on them and height-lines established, whereupon the artillery was told where to fire. But at the
close of the war, maps were being displaced by aerial photography, shot by planes and then
assembled on tables like mosaics – I did that kind of job myself, when I was a HQ staffer. How did
that come about? Well, because the destructive power of artillery is such that the ordinary
topographical landmarks simply disappear – here, again, the aesthetics of disappearance at work!
Only film or photography keep the memory of the landscape as it was, and as it is constantly being
reshaped. The film substitutes for the ordnance survey and, at the same time, architecture
goes underground. It buries itself in the soil, in bunkers, in order to escape control from the
skies. If you look at the Second World War, there was no bombing without photographs of the
planned bomb site being taken back, being scrutinized with specialized equipment. Images
thus become a product of extraordinary strategic importance. And if we switch to
contemporary military conflicts, what you get are video missiles, unmanned miniature planes or
‘drones’, observation satellites and more wondrous things. War has morphed into images,
into the eyes …
JA: According to you, war is now a war of images?
PV: Absolutely. It is impossible to imagine war without images. And, if possible, ‘live’ images.
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Link: Satellites
Finding your target is more important than the weapon. The instantaneous transmission of
information via satellites is a precondition for war and makes it more likely.
Brugger and Virilio 01 (Niels Brugger & Paul Virilio. Researcher at the Institute for Information and Media
Studies & Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, respectively. Virilio Live:
Selected Interviews. Accessed via Library.nu)
NB: So instantaneity reigns, which, by the way, we saw during the Gulf War, where there
were two kinds of instantaneity: instantaneity on the battlefield and instantaneity in
transmission (even if there weren’t any transmissions from the battlefield).
PV: Absolutely. The Gulf War was managed from Washington, the Pentagon and Atlanta,
where the centre for calculating the missile paths is located. So in a certain sense what happened
in the Middle East, in Iraq and in Kuwait, was tele-guided from geostationary satellites
located just above the battlefield that instantaneously sent information either to Maryland,
the Pentagon, or Atlanta. And these instantaneous perceptions made possible the incredibly
precise weapon guidance that won the war without war, so to speak, in that besides the
bombardments there was almost no war. So this Gulf situation was actually the start of this
contraction. It was a world war that took place locally, but a world war because it made use of
the entire world.
NB: And it was the first war in real time?
PV: Yes, it was even the war of real time. Real space was infinitely less important than real
time. In previous wars, even in Vietnam, the territory played an extraordinarily large role: they had
to fight in rice fields, traverse deserts and fortresses, which took a very long time. In the Gulf
War, everything was controlled instantaneously and in only five weeks.
NB: The problem of this disqualification of territory leads me to another crucial point related to
perception: immateriality. By this, I’m referring to the immateriality of the battlefield and
immateriality in general.
PV: Any battlefield is above all a perceptual field, because the primary act is that of aiming,
of attaining an objective. Once we have seen something, we have already started to destroy it.
As long as something is invisible, it is protected by its invisibility. Whether it is arrows or stones
people throw at each other, perception is the determining factor of war. Something my mother
used to say always comes to mind: ‘It isn’t polite to point at people.’ This statement surprises
me because it suggests that pointing at people is a threat. So, in a certain sense, each war
reorganizes the perceptual field; for instance, by the conquest of elevated sites: the higher up one
is, the farther one sees, the more one fore-sees. Before the telephone, people went up to the highest
points. Next balloons were invented to see from above, even when the battles took place on plains,
and it stands to reason that the invention of airplanes equipped with cameras during the First World
War was an attempt to reorganize the perception of the world. Allow me to cite an example:
survey maps lost their interest to the advantage of film. We should be aware of the importance
of cartography in history, even philosophically – a map is a method of writing. But suddenly, with
the First World War, all of this changes in favour of photos, photo mosaics, then film, and
finally television. Today of course, satellites have assumed this important role, now more
important than survey maps or films shot from airplanes. So the immateriality of vision becomes a
crucial factor, even to the detriment of explosives and weapons. If aiming is more important than
the weapon itself, it is understood that one day deterrence will no longer be caused by
weapons but by the gaze. Think of a weapon, a revolver, for example. If I stick a revolver in
your face, first of all you don’t know if it is loaded or not; it may not be loaded, but when I
say ‘give me your money’, you are going to give me your wallet, and I don’t even have to
make use of my weapon, maybe there aren’t even any bullets in it. So this power of deterrence is
one of the determining factors of a weapon. A weapon is not so much a means to kill, to injure,
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than it is a means to deter action, to forbid an action and cause someone to surrender. All
weapons always have an active dimension (they can actually kill) and a passive dimension – but
also active – deterrence. But up until and including the atom bomb, deterrence was caused by
weapons. Someone says ‘I have a great big bomb’, okay, you surrender and reach an agreement.
This is what happened between the Soviet Union and the United States. But today our visual
capacities are surpassing the very capacities of the atomic weapon, and the Gulf War was the
first time in history that the capacity of perception prevailed over the capacity of destruction.
And with this we arrive at the third kind of supremacy in weapons. Three types of weapons have
succeeded each other in history: weapons of obstruction, weapons of destruction and weapons
of communication. Weapons of obstruction are, for example, all kinds of shields, helmets,
ramparts, or bunkers. Weapons of destruction include arrows as well as missiles. Weapons of
communication are, for example, spies, smoke signals, messenger pigeons, satellites and spy
airplanes. As mentioned previously, the faster speed dominates over the slower speed – there are
no longer horses on the streets, there are cars. Today missiles no longer possess the greatest
speed (they don’t fly particularly fast, only a few thousand kilometres an hour), but instead means
of communication (radar or satellites of all kinds that function at the speed of light); so they
are superior because they pose the threat of destruction. For the first time, the Gulf War
places the supremacy of weapons of communication above the supremacy of weapons of
destruction, including nuclear destruction. This does not mean that tomorrow there will no
longer be nuclear arms; it means that we are witnessing a revolution in how the world is
perceived, as was the case with the conquest of summits and the construction of towers.
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Link: Technology=Progress
The view of technology as an instrument of progress leads to the technological colonization
of human frames of meaning.
Cooper 02 (Simon Cooper. Technoculture and Critical Theory: In the service of the machine?. 2002. Accessed
via Library.nu)
Ultimately, for Virilio, the progressivist and idealist understanding of technology, which
regards it as a useful and beneficial instrument of progress masks a more baleful reality
where the technological reconstitution of human life leads to inertia, powerlessness, a loss of a
meaningful conception of what is real, and a militarised form of subjective engagement
within civilian life. As we have already seen, Virilio’s work extends beyond a critique of
‘ideology’, in the traditional sense, and examines the way our modes of relation with the world
have become increasingly mediated or, in Virilio’s opinion; colonised by technology. Broadly,
Virilio’s work has focused on the following areas: time, space, movement, social relations and the
body. Virilio argues that technology’s capacity to transcend limits has led to the increasing
colonisation of the earth and of the human species. Much of his work is devoted to describing
this process, largely through concentrating on the technological reconstitution of time. While
Lyotard’s work, The Inhuman, has also examined the colonisation of time and its relation to the
capitalist structure of exploitation, Virilio is more concerned with the way technological time
can empty out the ontological frames of meaning for the human subject. What is interesting
here is how Virilio grapples with this process through the concept of ‘disappearance’.
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Link: Transmittin’ for the win
High speed transmission for the purposes of instantaneous communication requires the
“effective destruction of the world” to achieve the desired “totality of perspective.
Featherstone 03 (Mark Featherstone. “The Eye of War: Images of Destruction in Virilio and Bataille”. Journal
for Cultural Research, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2003, 433–447. http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=89ad8900-11a640b1-ae14a2bb1e2db3b8%40sessionmgr12&vid=1&hid=21&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#db=ap
h&AN=11985206)
Following this understanding of the limits of representation one can better appreciate how
Virilio views the relationship between the virtual image and the substance of actuality, or the
event, it seeks to describe. Throughout his work Virilio appears to advance a form of poststructuralism that shows how the construction of an image, or representation, always results in
the expulsion of a ghostly remainder or excessive supplement. Thus, in much the same way that
G´ericault’s vision of the wreck of The Medusa was unable to portray the exact moment or
particular mode of death of the corpses that litter his raft, one may suggest that Virilio’s central
thesis revolves around a post-structural exploration of both the destructive effects of the
attempt to completely subdue contingency and the apocalyptic potential of the return of this
excess of indeterminacy within an order which is organized around the principles of absolute
control. As such, Virilio may regard the strategies employed by G´ericault (total vision and shock)
as prophetic representations of the progress of the contemporary techno-scientific world order. In
other words, while the invention of orbital power, through surveillance satellites and spy
planes, has allowed for the development of total vision, the destruction of both geography and
direct human perception, which is required to allow orbital power to perceive and hence
visualize the world at light speed, has led to the desertification, or more accurately the
nascent mortification, of the phenomenological life-world (Virilio 1997). Through his reference
to G´ericault’s work, Virilio suggests that the emergence of technologies of total vision (coupled
with the shock of light speed, which is guaranteed by the quasi-instantaneous or accidental nature
of such machines) relates our age to the Greek myth of the Gorgon, Medusa. Akin to the
Gorgon’s murderous vision such technologies freeze the body and invent a state of paralysis
that Virilio calls inertia or critical space (Virilio 1984, 1998, 2000a). Here, the philosopher of
speed’s version of the technologized representation of the world follows our analysis of
G´ericault’s work by encoding the total vision of frontality and the shock value of
monstrosity within a fatal machine that buries the death of the world beneath the tombstone
of the phatic image. Similarly, like G´ericault’s work, which replicates the mechanism of this
accident prone technology through the romantic aesthetic, we may argue that the fatality of
Virilio’s version of technological vision centers around the idea that such an imaginary requires
death to achieve its ultimate ends, i.e. complete vision through totality as frontality and
instantaneity as monstrosity. According to this theory, the mortification of the world, or the
flatness of life, is required to allow for the high-speed transmissions that determine the
possibility of both total vision and instantaneous communication. It is precisely for this reason
that Virilio views the development of technological vision as closely related to the violence of
modern warfare. Their relationship forms an inter-dependent circuit: the creation of a
virtual perspective that relies on the progressive mortification of the world. Thus, it is clear
why Virilio’s theory of vision and war explains how the comparative success or failure of any
given war becomes dependent on securing ocular dominance. Later texts such as Strategy of
Deception, which refers to the paradox of the humanitarian war (2000b:14), show how the central
objective of postmodern war has become the destruction of the enemy’s landscape and the
creation of a desert that may allow for the dominance of one’s own information
transmissions. Here, Virilio aims to show how contemporary war centers around dominating
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lines of communication and securing the totality of perspective. By recognizing the
importance of this struggle for total vision we may understand how war represents a
perspectival conflict and grasp why victory depends on securing the effective destruction of
the world in the name of one’s own vision.
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Link: Satellites
The proliferation of communications satellites represents the defining aspect of
virtualization and is a precondition for globalitarianism.
Virilio 98 (Paul Virilio. Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. The Information
Bomb. pp. 13-15. Originally published in 1998, version accessed was a 2005 republication.
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~ryanshaw/nmwg/Virilio_Information_Bomb.pdf. )
The more that time intervals are abolished, the more the image of space dilates: 'You would
think that an explosion had occurred all over the planet. The least nook and cranny are dragged out
of the shade by a stark light,' wrote Ernst Junger of that illumination which lights up the reality of
the world. The coming of the 'live', of 'direct transmission', brought about by turning the
limit-speed of waves to effect, transforms the old 'tele-vision' into a planetary grand-scale
optics. With CNN and its various offshoots, domestic television has given way to telesurveillance. This sudden focusing - a security-orientated phenomenon of the media monitoring
of the life of nations – heralds the dawn of a particular form of day, which totally escapes the
diurnal-nocturnal alternation that previously structured history. With this false day,
produced by the illumination of telecommunications, an artificial sun rises, an emergency
lighting system which ushers in a new time: world time, in which the simultaneity of actions
should soon gain precedence over their successive character. With visual (audiovisual)
continuity progressively taking over from the territorial contiguity of nations, which has now
declined in importance, the political frontiers were themselves to shift from the real space of
geopolitics to the 'real time' of the chronopolitics of the transmission of images and sounds.
Two complementary aspects of globalization have, then, to be taken into account today: on the one
hand, the extreme reduction of distances which ensues from the temporal compression of transport
and transmissions; on the other, the current general spread of tele-surveillance. A new vision of a
world that is constantly 'tele-present' twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, thanks to
the artifice of this 'transhorizon optics' which puts what was previously out of sight on
display. 'The destiny of every image is enlargement,' declared Gaston Bachelard. It is science,
techno-science, which has taken responsibility for this fate of images. In the past, it did so with
the telescope and the microscope. In the future, it will do so with a domestic tele-surveillance that
will exceed the strictly military dimensions of this phenomenon. The exhaustion of the political
importance of extension, which is a product of the unremarked pollution by acceleration of the lifesize nature of the terrestrial globe, demands the invention of a substitute grand-scale optics.
This is an active (wave) optics, replacing in a thoroughgoing way the passive (geometric) optics
of the era of Galileo's spy-glass. And doing so as though the loss of the horizon-line of
geographical perspective imperatively necessitated the establishment of a substitute horizon: the
'artificial horizon' of a screen or a monitor, capable of permanently displaying the new
preponderance of the media perspective over the immediate perspective of space. With the
relief of the 'tele-present' event then taking precedence over the three dimensions of the volume of
objects or places here present ... This helps us better to understand the sudden multiplication of
those 'great lights'2 that are meteorological or military observation satellites. The repeated
sending into orbit of communications satellites, the spread of metropolitan video-surveillance or,
alternatively, the recent development of live-cams on the Internet. All this contributing, as we
have seen, to the inversion of the usual conceptions of inside and outside. Finally, this
generalized visualization is the defining aspect of what is generally known today as
virtualization. The much-vaunted 'virtual reality' is not so much a navigation through the
cyberspace of the networks. It is, first and foremost, the amplification of the optical density of
the appearances of the real world. An amplification which attempts to compensate for the
contraction of distances on the Earth, a contraction brought about by the temporal
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compression of instantaneous telecommunications. In a world in which obligatory tele-presence
is submerging the immediate presence of individuals (in work, trade, etc.), television can no
longer be what it has been for half a century: a place of entertainment or of the promotion of
culture; it must, first and foremost, give birth to the world time of exchanges, to this virtual
vision which is supplanting the vision of the real world around us. Grand-Scale Transhorizon
Optics is, therefore, the site of all (strategic, economic, political ... ) virtualization. Without it,
the development of globalitarianism, which is preparing to revive the totalitarianisms of the
past, would be ineffective. To provide the coming globalization with relief, with optical density,
it is necessary not merely to connect up to the cybernetic networks, but, most important, to
split the reality of the world in two. As with stereoscopy and stereophony, which distinguish left
from right, bass from treble, to make it easier to perceive audiovisual relief, it is essential today to
effect a split in primary reality by developing a stereo-reality, made up on the one hand of the
actual reality of immediate appearances and, on the other, of the virtual reality of media
trans-appearances.
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Link: Immediate Telepresence
The aff’s attempt to have a constant interactive view of events in a non local scene is an
example of “the pathology of immediate perception” that stands to overload our
informational capacity leading to a mentally confused population prone to the “tyranny of
real time”.
Beard and Gunn 02 (David Beard and Joshua Gunn. “Paul Virilio and the Mediation of Perception and
Technology”. Enculturation, Vol. 4, No. 2, Fall 2002. http://enculturation.gmu.edu/drupal/4_2/beardgunn/logic.html)
The term that Virilio develops for this phenomenon is "real time." Real time, as many online
gaming fans would attest, refers to the notion that events are unfolding in one's immediate
field of view irrelevant of spatial relationships. Real time is the word for the way that our
perceptions are shaped by these technologies that place the not-here here, in the field of my
present. Further: real time manifests when tele-objectivity allows one to witness an event at
daybreak in England when it’s pitch black night in one's neighborhood. Real time means, in
the most current of online videoconferencing, for example, "meeting at a distance, in other words,
being telepresent, here and elsewhere, at the same time" (Open 10). Certainly we are conscious
of differences in time zones while we watch a live broadcast or partake of a videoconference;
certainly we can see that it is dark here but light there. But we are primarily conscious of our
"presence" at the event. We are primarily conscious that "now" for us is "now" for them,
despite differences in the sun's position. The real nuance to Virilio’s theory enters here: Real time
is not, as one might suppose, the opposite of "delayed time." The difference between watching a
real time broadcast of Princess Diana’s funeral and watching it on videotape at a later hour, for
example, is not relevant to real time as a theoretical construct. Real time is, instead, opposed to
"real presence"—a sense of local time and local place. While spectators or viewers partake of
real time, a place of "here" gives way to the ever-present "now." Virilio argues that real time
results in a loss of the spatial boundaries to which humans typically coordinate their bodies.
But real time is also a result of a warped sense of what "present" can mean. Virilio points to
Paul Klee for an articulation of the impact of real time on our sense of the present: The painter
Paul Klee expressed the point exceptionally well when he noted, "Defining the present in
isolation is tantamount to murdering it." This is what technologies of real time are achieving.
They kill "present" time by isolating it from its presence here and now for the sake of
another commutative space that is no longer composed of our "concrete presence" in the
world, but of a "discrete telepresence" whose enigma remains forever intact. ("Third" par. 5)
This example appears in many places in Virilio’s work. Virilio argues that "Paul Klee hit the
nail on the head" because murdering the now is precisely what Virilio says "teletechnologies
of real time are doing: they are killing 'present' time by isolating it from its here and now, in
favour of a commutative elsewhere that no longer has anything to do with our 'concrete presence' in
the world" (Open 10). In a more consciously analytical approach, Virilio describes this
phenomenon with some precision: Human beings exist in three dimensions of chronological
time—past, present, and future. It is obvious that the liberation of the present—real time or
world time—runs the risk of making us lose the past and future in favor of a presentification,
which amounts to an amputation of the volume of time. Time is volume; it is not only space-time
in the sense of relativity. It is volume and depth of meaning, and the emergence of one world
time eliminating the multiplicity of local times is a considerable loss for both geography and
history. (Politics 81) Real-time technologies (global broadcasting was a first step; interactive
technologies only reinforces the effect) “eliminate the multiplicity of local times.” It remains
for us to explicate what Virilio sees as this loss. Importantly, our entry into the mediascape of
real time is described by Virilio as "pathological." In Open Sky, he laments: "I personally fear
we are being confronted by a sort of pathology of immediate perception that owes everything,
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or very nearly everything, to the recent proliferation of photo-cinematic and videoinfographic seeing machines" (Open 90). The primary effect of this psychosis is, in the end,
neither a Nietzschean skepticism of these “seeing machines” nor radical doubt of the
representations placed before us, but a disorientation. It is to the implications of this
disorientation that we now turn. Phrased most baldly, Virilio claims that "the tyranny of real
time is tantamount to a subjugation of the television viewer" (Politics 87). The disorientation
which Virilio believes to be inherent in real time (as the common-sense orientation toward space
described in Merleau-Ponty is eroded) becomes pervasive. As Virilio claims, "the conquest of
panoptical ubiquity would lead to the conquest of passivity, with populations not so much
going down in military defeat as in the past[,] but [by] succumbing to mental confusion"
(Strategy 55). We are “mediatized” (in the Napoleonic sense) by the media technology, rather
than by force. Virilio sees this disorientation and inevitable confusion as inherently
dangerous for democracy:
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Link: Overstretch
Their attempt to avoid “stretching ourselves” is indicative of an age of pure war in which
we develop technology to make war stationary—this move kills value to life.
Virilio 2k (Paul Virilio, Director of the Ecole Speciale d’Architecutre, Paris, A Landscape of Events, pg. 61-62)
No longer to travel, except on the spot. No longer to stretch ourselves, to spread ourselves
thin in the passing distraction of a physical journey, but just to relax here and now, in the inertia
of immobility regained. Social quietism leads our societies to wrap themselves in the shroud of
interior comfort, the bliss of a reverse vitality in which lack of action becomes the height of
passion. A society of hardened lounge lizards, where everyone hopes not to die or suffers, as
Western masochism has been said to want, but to be dead.
The whole panopoly of the latest technologies invites us suddenly to be stuck at home under
the house arrest of telematics and the electronic workplace, which turn erstwhile televiewers
into telereactors in an instantaneous interactivity that exiles us from real space, from contact with
our fellow man.
A remarkable convergence between hidden desire for sensory privatization and this
technological assistance, this assisted conception of existence: the pleasure of the rendezvous
at a distance, of a get-together without getting together, pleasure without risk of contamination
offered by the anonymous telecommunications of the erotic Minitel or the Walkman; abandoning
our fellow man in favor of unknown and distant beings who remain aloof, ghosts of no importance
who won’t mess up our plans.
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Link: Accidents
The rhetoric of accidents justifies massive humanitarian intervention as we attempt to
purge the world of malfunctions in machinery.
Owens 2k3. (Patricia Owens, professor of international relations at the University of London, “Accidents Don’t
Just ‘Happen’: The Liberal Politics of High Technology ‘Humanitarian’ War,” Millennium - Journal of International
Studies 2003 32: 595, pg. 595-616, sage)
The meaning of an accident is never given. A decision to assign the label to an event, with its
usually related idea of ‘no fault’, can be contested by different and unequal parties via
arguments supporting particular social and ideological ends. ‘Accidents’ may offer support
to a variety of interpretations about ‘what happened’, many of which can be difficult to
disprove. The terms ‘accident’ and ‘humanitarian war’, therefore, have not been used throughout
this article to ventriloquise liberal state justifications for civilian deaths and the use of force. In
other words, the events labelled ‘accidents’ were not accidents until they had been narrated as
such, contrary to the liberal state (and positivist) assumption that they must self-evidently be
accidents. We should expect in the future more interventionary campaigns endorsed with
allusion to humanitarian as well as post-9/11 ‘terrorist’ alarm. This is the outlook when the
normative discourse of humanitarianism is mapped onto the security and national (also deemed
‘civilisational’) interests of the United States and the politics of ‘accidents’ play an important
part. The ‘humanitarian’ rationale for force makes it more difficult to defend violence both
logically and politically if great harm is caused to civilians. Bearing this calculation in mind,
describing civilian casualties as ‘accidents’ forms an integral part of the project of justifying
war. With such opting out of accountability, however, the risks of entrepreneurial warfare, like
the risks of capitalist expansion in general, are legitimated because no one in power saw or
wanted their consequences. In contrast, re-reading the accidents of high- tech warfare brings
death front and centre to the analysis. Despite ‘human-ness’ returning to war through death,
however, we do not humanise the world through war, or even by facing up to ‘accidents’. We can
only humanise ‘the world’, as Hannah Arendt said, ‘by incessant and continued discourse about its
affairs and the things in it’.87
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Link: Presence of absence
The aff attempts to insert human presence in a place of absence, creating a perception
based war machine.
Dercon and Virilio 01 (Chris Dercon & Paul Virilio. Director of the Tates Museum of Modern Architecture &
Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland respectively. Virilio Live: Selected
Interviews. Accessed via Library.nu)
CD: You have mentioned fugacity. Another very important concept in the almost real
functioning of the magnetoscope is that of establishing a program of absence. What is the
relationship between the idea of fugacity and the idea of a program of absence?
PV: I think the old image, the old reality, was a reality that can be presented as a space-time
reality. Man lived in a time system of his actual presence: when he wasn’t there, he wasn’t
there. Today we are entering a space which is speed-space. Contrary to popular belief, the space
we live in is a speed-space. This new other time is that of electronic transmission, of high-tech
machines, and therefore, man is present in this sort of time, not via his physical presence, but
via programming. We program a computer or a videotape machine to record a telecast in our
absence, to be able to watch it the next day. Here we have, I think, a discovery: the olden spacetime was an extensive space, a space where duration of time was valued. Whatever was shortlived was considered an evil – something perjorative. To last a short time was to not be present; it
was negative. Today we are entering an era of intensive time: that is to say that new technologies
lead us to discover the equivalent of the infinitely small in time. In previous times we were
conscious, with telescopes, of the infinitely large, and with microscopes, of the infinitely small.
Today, high-speed machines, electronic machines, allow us to comprehend the same thing in
regard to time. There is an infinitely long time which is that of history, of carbon-14, which
enables us to date extremely ancient artifacts. Then, we have an infinitely short time, which is
that of technology’s billionths of seconds. I think the present finds us squarely between these
two times. We are living in both the extensive time of the cities of stories, of memories, or
archives, or writing, and the intensive time of the new technologies. That’s the ‘program of
absence’ that’s how we program our definitive absence, because we’ll never be present in that
billionth of a second. No human being can be present in the intensive time that belongs to
machines. Man is present in the average time situated in the long duration of historical phenomena
and the short duration of his reflexes, of the ‘twinkling of an eye’. We can say the same for the
cinematographer. Beyond 60 images per second you can no longer perceive anything. Here
again, you see, the problem of space is central. The new space is speed-space; it is no longer a
time-space, a space where time is manipulated. What we are manipulating is no longer man’s
time, but machine’s time, which I call speed-space, or the dromosphere, meaning the sphere of
speed. In conclusion, from my point of view, speed is not a means, but a milieu – another milieu,
and one that tends to escape us. When we think of speed, we say it’s the means of getting from
here to there fast, it’s the means of seeing the Antipodes live when there’s a game, or of watching
the Olympics in Los Angeles. But I say no to this. It’s a milieu, and a milieu in which we
participate only indirectly through the videotape machine after recording, through
information science and ‘robotized’ systems.
CD: You have spoken of the relationship between dromospheric space – of speed-space – and an
aesthetics of disappearance, in connection with the machinery of war.
PV: Yes.
CD: For you, one of the most important factors in this new time-space concept – let’s call it
speed-space – is the strategic or stratifying development of war.
PV: Yes, insofar as war has always been the laboratory of the future. Because of the necessity
to survive, and to face the possibility of sudden death, be it in ancient or new societies, war has
always been the laboratory of techniques, of mores. I really believe this, and we must not forget
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it. War has also been the laboratory of speed. When Sun Tzu, the old Chinese strategist of
several centuries ago, said that ‘promptitude is the essence of war’, he said it at the time of the
cavalry. Now it is obvious that this saying is still true: witness the debate over euromissiles in
Europe just a year ago. So, war is in fact the laboratory of modernity, of all modernities. And it
is in this sense that it has been a subject of permanent study for me. It is also because I myself have
experienced it. I lived through a war in my childhood, and it affected me deeply. Thus, war is not
merely an amoral phenomenon, it is an experimental phenomenon inasmuch as it reverses
productivity relations. War produces accidents. It produces an unheard-of accident, which is
upsetting the traditional idea of war. Substance is necessary and accident is contingent and
relative! That is the traditional story of the return to the accident. In war time the opposite is true.
Here accident is necessary and substance relative and contingent. What are war machines? They
are machines in reverse – they produce accidents, disappearances, deaths, breakdowns. I
think war in this sense conveys something which at present we are experiencing in peacetime;
the accident has now become something ordinary.
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Alt: Political Economy of Time
The alternative is to substantiate a political economy of time by declaring the aff’s use of
light speed transmission a form of violence.
Sterckx and Virilio 01 (Pierre Sterckx and Paul Virilio. Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate
School in Switzerland,. Virilio Live: Selected Interviews. Accessed via Library.nu)
PS: But if acceleration has become impossible and (economically at least) it is impracticable to
stop, all we have left is deceleration. How can we regress without being reactionary?
PV: Whenever you come to a wall, you bounce back. Before we can develop an intelligent idea
of future societies, we need to note the current backwards movement. I am not talking about
decadence like that of the Roman Empire. We are regressing because we have reached the limit
of acceleration. If the time of societies is accelerating, so is the reality of time. We are now
experiencing this dual acceleration, which is why, if we want to understand history, we must do
more than pore over the traces and books of formulae, but also study wave functions,
instantaneous emission-reception systems, CD-Roms and information superhighways. We
need a political economy of time, just as there is a political economy of wealth. If time is
money, speed means absolute power. The power of a computer is its speed. One could
consider the speed of a locomotive as progress, but this new speed, which is an element, must
be sanctioned as a form of violence, otherwise there can be no city.
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Alt: Reject Pure War
The alternative is to reject the affirmative for their complicity with pure war. We should
carve out this debate round as a space of reflection.
Featherstone 10 (Marker Featherstone, senior lecture in sociology at Keele University in the UK, “Virilio’s
Apocalypticism,” http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=662#bio)
II Virilio's Notion of Catastrophic Modernity For Virilio [37] modernity must be understood as a
catastrophic epoch which has led to what he calls a 'toposcopical disaster' characterised by
humanity's inability to properly perceive the phenomenological reality of the environment
that functions as its life support system. Against this catastrophic condition - which he tells us
leads to the psychopathological condition of the planet man who falls into megalomania by virtue
of his inability to understand his relation to the totally mediated virtual world that has been
condensed to the infinite density of a singularity by the light speeds of new media technology Virilio explains that we need to find a new form of art suitable for illustrating our condition
and illuminating our apocalyptic situation. [38] From this insight I think we can make two
points. First, it is methodologically significant that Virilio discusses the redemptive quality of
art, rather than critical theory, because what this illustrates is his view that complex
theoretical constructions are unlikely to impact upon a high speed society where knowledge
and thought have been more or less destroyed by an excess of information and
communication. The value of art is, therefore, that it makes an emotional, rather than
cognitive, impression upon the audience and causes them to feel, rather than necessarily
theoretically comprehend their situation in an epoch where theoretical comprehension has
been, at best, marginalised, and at worst, foreclosed by the light speeds of new technology.
We know that Virilio [39] foregrounds this methodological approach in his work because he has
the tendency to explain the ways in which his own work leaps from idea to idea without necessarily
working out the connections between theories and concepts. The effect of this procedure is,
therefore, to give the reader first, an impression and second, an invitation to work backwards
through the theoretical connections present in his work. We can, of course, find a precedent for
this approach to critical writing, which is perfectly symmetrical with the trajectivity of the
post-modern empire of speed, even if it does run the risk of collapsing into the vortex of
information and communication that characterises our mediated world. We can compare
Virilio's thought to the German critical theorists' notion of the thought-image, which was similarly
meant to oppose the banality of the culture industry from the inside through the construction of
media-friendly critical bombs. [40] In the case of both the German critical theorists, such as
Adorno and Horkheimer (and to a lesser extent Benjamin), and Virilio, I think we can, therefore,
pinpoint a notion of political activism, whereby critical writing is itself an artistic activity
meant to oppose the banality of technology that simply works for the sake of working, and
somehow to spark critical reflection in the minds of the disorientated and stupefied masses.
As Virilio [41] knows very well, the potential problem of this strategy is that it is not possible to
fight speed with speed. From the perspective of the Frankfurters, the threat is that Virilio's user
friendly critiques may be transformed into commodities through the process of knowledge
exchange on the open market, thus becoming little more than fantastical representations of radical
critique in a globalised system that has no other. However, my view is that there is more to
Virilio's [42] turn to critical art than the attempt to simply mimic the dynamism of the
empire of speed, and that it is possible to understand this strategy in ways that render it
perfectly symmetrical with his other major radical theory, grey ecology [43], or the concern
with the speed limit. My view is that what Virilio's turn to critical art seeks to achieve is a
connection to the masses caught under the sign of light speed that is able to lift them out of
the endless passage of events and freeze time, creating a moment of solitude, concentration,
contemplation, and reflection, which in other works he calls critical space. [44] My thesis is,
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therefore, that it is this critical space of reflection that Virilio wants to open up in order to
create the possibility of apocalyptic transformation and that understanding this strategy is
key to comprehending the meaning of his political activism. This point about Virilio's activism
is important because it shows us that his apocalypse is never immediate, but rather relies on the
recognition of the catastrophic nature of modernity that his work may produce in the audience. It is
only at this point that Virilio's apocalypse, where apocalypse refers to a process of revelation,
would truly appear. Herein resides the second point about the nature of Virilio's theory of the value
of art for illuminating the catastrophic nature of contemporary processes of globalisation; although
the catastrophe is always already present, and taking place as we speak, the apocalypse is not
now, and can never be now, without the revelatory function of representation to tip the
balance away from the unthinking catastrophe of modernity that is endlessly taking place
and towards the critical ecological-phenomenological demand for a new relationship between
humanity, the world, and technology. The apocalypse resides, therefore, in the moment of
unveiling, in the moment or event when the catastrophe becomes so apparent that it is
impossible for the audience or tele-viewer not to recognise its representation or presentation
in critical art and act upon this recognition. Since this has not happened yet, and we remain
caught up in the end times where catastrophe is everywhere and apocalypse nowhere, we
might say that we live in the epoch of unrealised catastrophe. This is because the true realisation
of catastrophe, not the basic media representation of catastrophic events that is fed to passive televiewers, but rather the existential realisation of the catastrophe taking place now, the endless
catastrophe pushing humanity and the world to the very edge of existence, is the apocalypse.
This is the true moment of revelation, that would change our relationship to both technology
and the world forever, and demand us to actively reformulate our way of living in the world
on the basis of that revelatory experience. If this revelatory experience, this apocalyptic moment,
is the objective of Virilio's thought, I think that we should read his works as a history of the
catastrophic nature of modernity, hyper-modernity, and the emergence of the post-modern moment
of globalisation when time and space are exhausted and there is nowhere else to go. As
catastrophe piles upon catastrophe in a totally mediated, totally inter-connected world where
everything impacts upon everything else, Virilio's [45] wager is that we will wake up to the
catastrophe of modernity realised or post-modernity and change our situation. Shifting into
reverse, and considering his now classic Speed and Politics [46], Virilio shows how modernity and
the obsession with speed and progress began with the French Revolution. In his view the
Revolution destroyed the immobility of the feudal universe that had reigned more or less
unchanged since Aristotle considered the idea of the great chain of being, and inaugurated a society
and social form ordered by the principle of futurity and modernisation. This new society was
formed on the basis of science, reason, technology, and democracy and was eventually meant
to reach its final destination in a utopia of techno-scientific reasoned virtue. However, as
Žižek [47] has shown in his essay on Robespierre's famous 'Virtue and Terror' speech, the
revolutionaries, who Virilio calls dromomaniacs, knew that their new society of speed,
movement, and progress could never succeed without overcoming or simply crashing through
whatever obstacles lay in its path. In this respect Žižek highlights Robespierre's insight that virtue
was always bound to terror, that virtue was in fact impossible without terror, in much the same way
that Virilio foregrounds the terminal relationship between speed and war, to show how the
history of modernity, the epoch of speed, has always been about the violent overcoming of
obstacles and limits through terrorist ballistic technologies. This much is evident when we
consider what Virilio [48] calls pure war, his term for explaining the thin or even invisible line
separating war from peace in modern society. Consider the principal site of modernity,
modernisation, and speed, the city, which Virilio [49] regards as a site of 'habitable circulation'. If
we think about the city, which Mumford [50] tells us is the originary site of human sociability and
civilization, through the works of the Italian Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni and the German
sociologist Georg Simmel, we enter a completely different scene to the foundational city painted by
Mumford. In Boccioni's The City Rises [51] or Simmel's The Metropolis and Mental Life [52] we
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are presented with the image of the city as a place of enormous energy and vitality, but also
abstraction, alienation, and violence.
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Solvency: Street Corner Work
When asked how to resist pure war on an everyday level, Virilio references his own local,
individualized resistance to the effects of this concept in the form of “street corner work”.
Our advocacy signifies the equivalent within the debate round.
Armitage and Virilio 01 (John Armitage and Paul Virilio. Dromology scholar and Professor of Philosophy at
the European Graduate School in Switzerland respectively. Virilio Live: Selected Interviews. Accessed via
Library.nu)
JA: At this point, I would like to ask a question on behalf of my students. For when I give a
lecture on your work there is one question that comes up over and over again at the end of the
session. It usually runs something like this: ‘While I find Paul Virilio’s analyses of pure war, and
revolutionary resistance against the military–industrial complex extremely thought provoking, I’m
not quite sure what he is suggesting I actually do about these issues at the political level, at
the level of the everyday?’ What, in your view, should one tell them?
PV: Well, tell them the following. I was a militant against the atomic bomb. I joined leftist
movements during the events of May 1968. But I must say that I became very disappointed
about political struggles, since they appear to me to lag very much behind developments both
within the postindustrial revolution and technoscience. Thus I am, and many people with me,
out of phase with real existing political movements. I feel henceforth marginalized, and the
only action I can partake in takes place within the urban realm, with homeless people, with
travellers, with people whose lives are being destroyed by the revolution brought about by the
end of salaried work, by automation, by delocalization. You may call it street-corner work in
a sense. For instance, together with Abbé Pierre, I was member of the High Committee for the
Housing of Destitute People that was instituted by President [François] Mitterand and [Jacques]
Chirac. I was on that Committee for three years. That work has stopped now, but, for the last
fifteen years, I have been a member of private associations which work together with
homeless people. These are Christian associations for the most part, and there lie my political
activities these days. I am a disappointed man of the left. By the way, this is no fun because at
the same time there is the rise of extremist political parties like [Jean-Marie] Le Pen’s Front
National, and so on.
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Solvency: Techno-Fundamentalism
Technological Fundamentalism stands to change civilization with the dropping of the
information bomb and the embrace of informational monotheism. The impact of the aff’s
development of information technologies is a future without humanity and can only be
curbed by interrogating this logic through debate.
Virilio 01 (Paul Virilio. Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland,. Virilio Live:
Selected Interviews. Accessed via Library.nu)
PV: I believe that a caste of ‘technology monks’ is being created in our times, and that there
exist monasteries of sorts whose goal it is to pave the way for a new kind of ‘civilization’; one
that has nothing to do with civilization as we remember it. The work of these technology
monks is not carried out in the way that it was in the Middle Ages. Rather, it is carried out
through the revaluation of knowledge, like that achieved for Antiquity. The contribution of
monks to the rediscovery of Antiquity is well known. But what is not well known is that we now
have technology monks, not mystics, but monks who are busy constructing a society without
any points of reference. Indeed, we are confronted with what I call ‘technological
fundamentalism’. That is, fundamentalism in the sense of a monotheism of information. No
longer the monotheism of the Written Word, of the Koran, of the Bible, of the New
Testament, but a monotheism of information in the widest sense of the term. And this
information monotheism has come into being not simply in a totally independent manner but
also free from any controversy. It is the outcome of an intelligence without reflection or past.
And with information monotheism comes what I think of as the greatest danger of all, the
slide into a future without humanity. I believe that violence, and even a kind of ‘hyper
violence’, springs out of technological fundamentalism. For example, at present, there is a lot of
talk about the problems posed by the resurgence of militant Muslim fundamentalism. Bombs
are planted and so on. But I believe that at the same time almost as much work is going into
the development of the information bomb; a bomb that will have the same destructive effects
on society’s capacity to remember its past, a past that has a structure of its own and shapes
the present. We are merely the product of what was. And whoever forgets the past is
condemned to live it anew, as the saying goes. And yet this is exactly what is happening with
new information and communications technologies. That said, I am not at all inimical to
information. It is simply that there is not enough debate about the totalitarian dimensions of
information. On the other hand, I do not think that it is appropriate to blame the technology monks
for the sins of technological fundamentalism just because no one else takes responsibility for them.
The technology monks do not always know about these sins. What’s your opinion on the
fundamentalist dimension of information?
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Solvency: Techno-Fundamentalism
Techno-Fundamentalism brings an information overload with the creation of the
information bomb—the social equivalent of a nuclear weapon. We should interrogate the
positives and negatives of contributing technologies through debate.
Kellner 2k (Douglas Kellner. "Virilio, War, and Technology: Some Critical Reflections," Theory, Culture and
Society, Vol. 16(5-6), 1999: 103-125; reprinted in Paul Virilio. From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond,
edited by John Armitrage (London: Sage Publications, 2000: 103-125.)
In a 1995 interview with German media theorist Friedrich Kittler (1995c), titled "The information
Bomb," Virilio draws an analogy between the nuclear bomb and the "information bomb,"
talking about the dangers of "fallout" and "radiation" from both. In contrast to the more
dialectical Kittler, Virilio comes off as exceedingly technophobic in this exchange and illicitly, in
my view, deploys an amalgam of military and religious metaphors to characterize the world of the
new technologies. In one exchange, Virilio claims that "a caste of technology-monks is coming
up in our times," and "there exist monasteries (of sorts whose goal it is to pave the way for a
(kind of) 'civilization' that has nothing to do with civilization as we remember it." These
monks are avatars of a "technological fundamentalism" and "information monotheism," a
world-view that replaces previous humanist and religious worldviews, displacing man and
god in favor of technology. [This world-view] comes into being in a totally independent
manner from any controversy. It is the outcome of an intelligence without reflection or past.
And with it goes what I think as the greatest danger (of all), the derailment, the sliding down
into the utopian, into a future without humanity. And that is what worries me. I believe that
violence, nay hyperviolence, springs out of this fundamentalism. Virilio goes on to claim that
fallout from the "information bomb" will be as lethal for the socius as nuclear bombs,
destroying social memory, relations, traditions, and community with an instantaneous
overload of information. Thus, the technological "monks" who promote the information
revolution are guilty of "sins in technical fundamentalism, of which we witness the
consequences, the evil effects, today." One wonders, however, if the discourse of "sin," "evil,"
and "fundamentalism" is appropriate to characterize the effects and uses of new technologies which
are, contrary to Virilio, hotly and widely debated, hardly monolithic, and, in my view, highly
ambiguous, mixing what might be appraised as positive and negative features and effects. Yet
Virilio is probably correct that the dominant discourse is largely positive and uncritical and
that we should be aware of negative aspects and costs of the new technologies and debate
their construction, structure, uses, and effects.
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Solvency: Policymaking
A rejection of dromologic knowledge is necessary to separate policy from the old paradigm
of space-time—this is especially problematic in the context of the aff’s establishment of
telepresence.
Dercon and Virilio 01 (Chris Dercon & Paul Virilio. Director of the Tates Museum of Modern Architecture &
Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland respectively. Virilio Live: Selected
Interviews. Accessed via Library.nu)
CD: The last question: what are the consequences of this dromospheric space, speed-space, for
the workings of the city? I’m thinking especially of the difference between urbanity and
suburbanity. Does it still exist?
PV: It’s important to return to the city. To return to the city is to return to politics or to the political
people. It’s not by chance that in Greek the city is called the ‘polis’. The city was created in a
relationship to territorial space. It is a territorial phenomenon, a phenomenon of territorial
concentration. Old villages are spread over a territory which is not a territory but a field, in all
senses of the term. There is creation, from the old villages, through what has been called kinesis, of
an urban territorial unit – the Greek city-state, to take a well-known reference. Since politics and
the city were born together, they were born through a right: the creation of a territory or of an estate
by right, being established, the right of autochthonism. There are rights because there is territory.
There are rights and therefore duties – he who has land has war, as the people of Verde said. He
who has rights in an urban territory has the duty to defend it. The citizen is also a soldier-citizen. I
feel this situation survives up to the present; we are experiencing the end of that world. Through
the ups and downs of the state, the city-state, the more or less communal state, and finally, the
nation-state, we have experienced the development of politics linked to the territory; always
down-to-earth. In spite of railroads and telephones, we experienced a relationship to the soil and a
relationship to a still coherent right. There was still a connection to territorial identity, even in the
phenomenon of nationalistic amplification. Today, as we saw earlier with the end of time-space
and the coming of speed-space, the political man and the city are becoming problematic.
When you talk about the rights of man on the world scale, they pose a problem which is not
yet resolved, for a state of rights is not connected with a state of place, to a clearly determined
locality. We can clearly see the weaknesses of the rights of Man. It makes for lots of meetings,
but not for much in the way of facts. Just take a look at Eastern European countries or Latin
America. It seems to me that speedspace which produces new technologies will bring about a
loss, a derealization of the city. The megalopolises now being talked of (Calcutta, or Mexico
with 30 million inhabitants) are no longer cities, they are phenomena which go beyond the city
and translate the decline of the city as a territorial localization, and also as a place of an
assumed right, affirmed by a policy. Here, I’m very pessimistic. I feel we’re entering into a
society without rights, a ‘non-rights’ society, because we’re entering a society of the nonplace, and because the political man was connected to the discrimination of a place. The loss
of a place is, alas, generally the loss of rights. Here, we have a big problem: the political man
must be reinvented – a political man connected to speed-space. There, everything remains to be
done, nothing’s been accomplished. I’d even say the question hasn’t been considered. The
problem of the automatic responder we were talking about earlier, the legal action which Clifford
Johnson is taking against the US Congress, is in my opinion the trial of the century. The problem of
rights there is the right of the powerful man, the last man, he who decides. Now, he too will no
longer have the right, if he delegates his right to an automatic machine. We truly have here a
political question and an urban question, because at present the cities are undone by technology,
undone by television, defeated by automobility (the highspeed trains, the Concorde). The
phenomena of identification and independence are posed in a completely new way. When it
takes 3 hours to go to New York, and 36 to New Caledonia, you are closer to American
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identification than to Caledonian or French identification. Before proximity, there was territorial
continuity. We were close because we were in the same space. Today we are close in the
speed-space of the Concorde, of the high-speed train, of telecommunications. Therefore, we
don’t feel conjoined to people, the compatriots of the same people – the Basques or the
Corsicans. We no longer have the time to go to Bastia, because practically, we are closer to New
York, because you can’t go by Concorde to Bastia. We have here a phenomenon of distortion of
the territorial community that explains the phenomenon of demands of independence. Before,
we were together in the same place, and could claim an identity. Today, we are together
elsewhere, via high-speed train, or via TV. There is a power of another nature which creates
distortions. We are no longer in space, but in speed-space. Because of speed-space there are
fellow countrymen participating in the same nonplace who feel close, whereas one’s own
countrymen in Corsica or New Caledonia are in reality so far away in speed-space, so beyond
36 hours or 10 hours, that they are strangers and therefore desire their autonomy. There’s a
logic there, and it’s a logic which poses problems.
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Solvency: The Political
The rapid speed of today’s information based and electronic politics makes legitimate
political praxis utterly impossible—only our advocacy can make politics meaningful again.
Virilio 2k2. (Paul Virilio, Director of the Ecole Speciale d’Architecutre, Paris, Desert Screen: War at the Speed of
Light, pg. 43-44)
No politics is possible at the scale of the speed of light.
Politics depends upon having time for reflection. Today, we no longer have time to reflect, the
things that we see have already happened. And it is necessary to react immediately. Is a real-time
democracy possible? An authoritarian politics, yes. But what defines democracy is the sharing power.
When there is no time to share what will be shared? Emotions. A change in our relationship to time has
recently taken place. Before, we had the past, the present, and the future. Today, the choice is nothing
more than that between deferred time and real time. Humanity no longer lives in the
present, but rather in the tele-presence of the world. On the level of morality, of aesthetics, of ethics,
major political questions immediately arise. This change and this acceleration have modified the
conduct of war. Ancient war depended upon the citzen-soldier. Progressively with automated destruction and
P.V.: The threat is that of fusion and confusion.
nuclear weapons that impose a dramatically shortened period of decision, we have delegated political power of the major
states to a single man, the head of the state, who himself delegates the execution to a machine. Soon, war will be
waged by automatic answering machines. The new weapons being designed will strike their
objectives with a lightning speed of nanoseconds or milliseconds. At the speed of light, man
can neither see the weapon arrive nor fend off the attack.
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Solvency: Democracy
Absolute speed destroys the possibility for democratic decision-making. Democracy’s
greatest enemy is no longer the tyranny of a dictator but rather the tyranny of technique.
Brugger and Virilio 01 (Niels Brugger & Paul Virilio. Researcher at the Institute for Information and Media
Studies & Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, respectively. Virilio Live:
Selected Interviews. Accessed via Library.nu)
NB: In respect to this close connection between the city, war, and politics, it would be
interesting to reintroduce the problem of speed. Since the disappearance of the fortified castle
played a crucial role in the fall of feudalism, one might wonder what happens to politics when
speed is increased to the speed of light in the technologies of war, in the construction of the city,
and in the constitution of political space. Is politics going to undergo just as profound a
change today as that which caused the fall of feudalism?
PV: Until now societies have only used relative speeds: the horse, the ship, the train, or the
automobile, the airplane. From now on, they will make use of the absolute speed of
electromagnetic waves. There is thus the risk that the fall of feudalism will in the future be
succeeded by the fall of democracy. The question is whether we can actually democratize
ubiquitousness and instantaneity, which in fact are the prerogatives of providence, in other
words, absolute autocracy? Today the tyranny of a dictator is being replaced by the tyranny of
real time, which means that it is no longer possible to democratically share the time it takes to
make decisions. But let’s go back in time, to the origin of the Greek city-state. Athenian democracy is also
a dromocracy, a hierarchy of speed and not just of wealth. In ‘The constitution of the Athenians,’ a text
dating from c. 430 B.C., it says that in Athens the people and the poor matter more than the noble and the
wealthy, which is fair in that it is in fact the people who make the ships sail and who thus give the city-state
its power. In contrast to Sparta, this is a maritime democracy, the power of Athens being primarily supported
by ships and less so by infantry. Athens is, then, democratic, but also dromocratic, since those who make the
ships sail are the ones who control the city. As opposed to traditional autocratic regimes, the sharing of
power in Athens goes hand in hand with the physical power of displacement – which was never the case for
antique knighthood, in particular equites romani. Likewise, in Venice both the spoils and speed were shared.
Thus, the considerable political and cultural power attained by these two great historical cities literally stems
from the propulsive capacity of a population completely involved in the great accelerating movement of
history. Athens and Venice are both cities where civil rights are linked to the population’s capacity for
propulsion, while in land-based societies, where the cavalry predominates instead of the ship, it is the nobility
that is dominant. And cavalry implies knighthood and feudalism, or the rejection of democracy. It is very
surprising to see that of two vehicles, one animal and the other technical, one brings about democracy and the
other forbids it. There are no democratic knights in the history of our societies. But what exactly is
democracy? Democracy is sharing. The sharing of what? It is not the sharing of money, it is
the sharing of the decision from the beginning: we have the right to share the decision. But in
contemporary societies decisions are made within incredibly short time limits. Once again, the
revolution in the means of transportation and transmission brings about a speed in decisionmaking beyond democratic control. So today the question of democracy is not that it is
threatened by some tyrant, but by the tyranny of technique. Allow me to exemplify this: the
crash on Wall Street. What exactly is the automation of the quotations on Wall Street? The
installation of an automatic quotation system that functions without human assistance and in
real time poses the problem of decisions no longer being shared, since it is the machine that
decides. This is an example taken from the stock market, but it is an example that indicates
that a democracy in real time is almost impossible. Is democracy at all possible, that is, the
control and sharing of a decision, when the time in which to make the decision is so short that
there is no longer time for reflection? This is the big question today. In former societies and up
until today, the possibility of sharing decisions existed because the societies were based on relative
speeds. But as soon as societies start being based on the speed of light, what decision will
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remain to be shared if time can no longer be shared? Allow me to present another example. In
the beginning there were supreme commanders. In democratic societies, there were captains,
generals, and so forth, each with his own responsibility in war time. Little by little, as the time
available for decision-making became shorter, the general staff was invented. And then with the
atomic bomb, who is it that decides? Gorbachev and Bush are the final decision-makers in
the end. Tomorrow these two men won’t even be necessary, as the response will be
automated, given by computer. This analysis demonstrates the degree to which using absolute
speed instead of relative speeds threatens the very essence of democracy.
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Solvency: Technological Colonization
Employing Virilio’s work in a critique of contemporary technology disrupts logic of
domination that advances the techno-colonization of the human subjective.
Cooper 02 (Simon Cooper. Technoculture and Critical Theory: In the service of the machine?. 2002. Accessed
via Library.nu)
All of Virilio’s work is an attempt to critique the logic of domination inherent in the
technological will to power. Where many see technology extending human capacities, Virilio
sees exploitation and habitual destruction. More importantly, he sees the possible return of a
fascist logic bound up in the Futurist aesthetic, which celebrated the coupling of the human
and the technological in the war machine. In this context, Stelarc aestheticises the extension
of the war machine into the body itself. Yet Stelarc is, according to Virilio, merely a victim of
the current ideology of technology, ‘a victim of the situation’ (ibid.) This ‘situation’, that is, the
aim for technological transcendence over physical and biological limits, is similarly manifest in the
utopian discourses that surround cyberspace, virtual reality and the science laboratory at MIT (see
Chapter 7). Stelarc’s aim for technological transcendence is merely an aesthetic representation of
this broader phenomenon. Stelarc’s technological performances take on a darker reality
according to Virilio in the case of the remote-control suicide machine created by Philip
Nitschke. This technologically enabled form of euthanasia takes away the dimension of human
agency. For Virilio, it ‘wipes away the patient’s guilt, together with the scientist’s responsibility’
(Virilio 2000: 5). Such technological domination also reveals itself in the case of the world
chess champion Kasparov ‘playing a game against a computer specially designed to defeat
him’ (Virilio 2000: 5). Both examples reveal a kind of euthanasia of human subjectivity, the
first literally, the second metaphorically. For Virilio, technological expansion is inextricably
linked with colonisation, not just of exterior or outer space but of our inner selves as well.
Echoing both Heidegger’s and the Frankfurt School’s equation of the domination of outer and inner
nature, Virilio observes that ‘[w]e have never, in fact, dominated geophysical expanse without
controlling . . . the microphysical core of the subject being’. He lists many examples of such
control, beginning with the domestication of other species, through the disciplining of the soldier,
to the ‘necessity’ for athletes to take anabolic steroids. Stelarc is thus merely the latest and most
literalised example of the intertwining of inner and outer control, masked by the ideology of
expanded freedom made possible through technological mediation. New technologies such as
cyberspace and genetic engineering, rekindle the Futurist dream of transcendence over prevailing
conditions. However, for Virilio, there is one important difference. If the Futurists embraced a
particular aesthetic ideology, Virilio argues that this ideology has become increasingly
centralised, and more importantly materialised, through contemporary technology. He writes
that: the ‘new machine’ has certainly materialised the cutting loose initiated by Futurism, Cubism
or Surrealism, but now it is less a question of dissociating objective appearances from reality, from
the artist’s subjective interpretation, than of shattering man’s unity of perception and of producing,
this time AUTOMATICALLY, the persistence of a disturbance in self-perception that will have
lasting effects on man’s rapport with the real. (Virilio 1995: 146–147)
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Solvency: Revolutionary Change
Only the alternative makes possible revolutionary change.
Featherstone 10. (Marker Featherstone, senior lecture in sociology at Keele University in the UK, “Virilio’s
Apocalypticism,” http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=662#bio)
In this new global crash culture, where the ideology of global capitalism talks about freedom of
movement and works off the idea that increased proximity in a society where it is impossible to
evade the other will lead to more love, sharing, and community, Virilio's [66] point is that reality
is defined by surveillance, suspicion, paranoia, security, hatred, petty jealousy, revulsion
towards the other, and ultimately pure war. This, then, is the catastrophe of the empire of
speed without limits. This is the catastrophe awaiting a revelatory moment to transform it into
an apocalyptic event that may enable us to enact radical, revolutionary, change. The
challenge remains, of course, to find some way to produce this apocalyptic moment, to
produce this moment of revelation, through artistic endeavour and critical thought in a
society of speed where everything is reduced to the status of information, communication,
and commodity to be exchanged and passed on. In other words, there is no apocalyptic moment
in the empire of speed because the empire of speed is defined by what we might variously call
following Kroker [67] and Wilson [68] post-modern, virtual, hyper, or supercapitalism. In the
hyper-capitalist world, if we choose to adopt Kroker's name for the new form of high speed, high
tech, totally virtual capitalism, there is no telos, there is no apocalyptic end, no fatal moment of
collapse, since, as Wilson [69] points out, death is distributed across the system. In this vision of
the new capitalist world, mortality invades every aspect of life in the form of a death drive that
compares to Virilio's concept of pure war[70] which shows how war is no longer contained in
a discrete event, but rather exists everywhere, nowhere, and is at the same time never and
always on. For Virilio [71] this death drive is explained by America's attachment to the idea of
the frontier, or what he calls, citing Jackson, the frontier effect, which has led the land of the
free towards a form of nihilism set on the destruction of the environment for the sake of
development, modernisation, progress, and creation of what Deleuze and Guattari [72] call
smooth space. That is to say that the American determination to conquer or overcome
obstacles, to create smooth space suitable for the speed of movement for capital and human
flows, in many respects reproduces Hobbes' capitalist metaphysics of legalised movement in
real space. It is this innovation that transforms the phenomenological world of embodied
experience into a metaphysical or virtual abstraction that humans, or perhaps we should say those
post-humans plugged into the network society, experience through inter-face with technology.
Virilio's [73] America, the land of Hobbesian materialist metaphysics realised, is for this reason
comparable to Baudrillard's [74]Nietzschean land of fascinated banality. It exists as a land of
deserts, a featureless landscape, a smooth Euclidean space, that has come to define post-modern
globalisation as a catastrophic space awaiting the arrival of its apocalypse.
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Only the alternative facilitates real political activism—the creation of new concepts in
opposition to the technological picture of the 1ac is the best way to create legitimate
intellectual praxis.
Styhre 06. (Alexander Styhre, fellow at the Fenix Research Program and professor of Project Management at
Chalmer’s University of Technology, “Knowledge Management and the Vision Machine: Paul Virilio and the
Technological Constitution of Knowledge,” Knowledge and Process Management Volume 13 Number 2 pg. 83–92)
Paul Virilio has published a remarkable number of books on his favourite themes of speed, power,
per- ception, war and technology since the 1970s. Most of his recent publications have appeared in
English. In the social sciences and in management studies, Virilio’s influence is miniscule which is
somewhat surprising given his emphasis on technology and perception as key components in
processes of orga- nizing. One reason for this may be that Virilio has managed to escape the most
conventional labels such as poststructuralism or postmodernism and inhabits very much his own
idiosyncratic concep- tual universe. Virilio position himself in the first place as a follower of
Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) phe- nomenological thinking, giving priority to the human perception and
embodied experiences, while other commentators such as Der Derian (1998: 50–51) points at
Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, and Walter Benjamin as related thinkers.
Virilio himself does however express little sympathy for McLuhan and Baudril- lard. Reading
Virilio is not always gratifying because his texts are filled with evocative state- ments, references
to political theory and literature, newspaper articles, anecdotes, neologisms, and a wide array of
heterogeneous textual resources that Virilio thinks suit his argumentation (Kellner, 1999). His
writing is in short an oeuvre based on a diverse set of texts brought together in a restless flow of
arguments, stories and statements pointing in various directions (Der Derian, 1998). Virilio is
therefore more of an expressive writer rather than a traditional theorists in the analytical tradi- tion,
a penseur or Denker rather than a theorists (see Lotringer, 2001). Virilio thus here follows in a
continental tradition represented by for instance Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot
wherein writing is not used for constructing theories but for provoking new thinking. Der
Derian (1998: 6) writes: ‘Like Deleuze, Virilio constructs concepts as mental images for the
purpose of disturbing conventional, commonsensical views of the world’. Virilio says that his
propensity to offer neologisms in his texts is a part of his political agenda; by offering new
concepts, novel thinking may emerge and therefore Virilio talks about being a ‘conceptual
activist’: ‘To be a conceptual activist means to produce concepts. This is true political
activism’, Virilio says (Armitage, 2001: 96). However, Virilio’s thinking contains provocative
statement that help the reader reflect on the outline and organization everyday life. His texts
are somewhat dystopic in their tone (see e.g. Virilio, 1997, 2000a, 2002; Zurbrugg, 1996),
something that Virilio himself claims does not imply that he is negative toward technology. For
Virilio himself, he would prefer to be regarded as a critic of technology, similar to a critic of art or
literature.
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D&G Alt Solvency
Armitage and Virilio 01 (John Armitage and Paul Virilio. Dromology scholar and Professor of Philosophy at
the European Graduate School in Switzerland respectively. Virilio Live: Selected Interviews. Accessed via
Library.nu)
JA: Before we leave the subject of war, could I ask you about your relationship to Deleuze and Guattari’s
philosophy and politics of desire? Their ‘Treatise on Nomadology: The War Machine,’ in A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1987 [1980]) is obviously influenced by your writings about
pure war, military space, speed and power. But what, if anything, have you learnt from their writings and
how has it influenced your thinking? PV: I do not think there is influence here, but, rather, convergence.
If you care to look in A Thousand Plateaus, I believe there are twenty-seven references to my work.
That’s not nothing. Now, I am not stating this in order to claim as my own the qualities of Deleuze and
Guattari, whom I have loved very much, but to emphasize that, here again, there were parallels at work.
However, I felt rather closer to Deleuze than to Guattari because I am totally devoid of any
psychoanalytic background or culture. Guattari and I were, though, on extremely friendly terms, and we
did things together. You see, Deleuze was, like me, a man of ‘the event’, someone who not only worked
with the concept of the event but who also rose to the occasion when an event occurred and who reacted
with feeling, as befits a phenomenologist. Hence, to me, the interest of A Thousand Plateaus lies chiefly
in its liberating effect from a certain kind of academic discourse, one which belonged to the end phase of
structuralism. I am not talking about Foucault here. I am referring to [Claude] Lévi-Strauss, to [Louis]
Althusser and so on. Here, again, liberation took on a kind of musical hue. For me, A Thousand Plateaus
is also a form of, shall we say, ‘ritornello’ [a recurring couplet or refrain in a folk song], as they called it
themselves. So what I like about Deleuze and Guattari is their poetic language, a language which enables
them to convey meanings that cannot be conveyed otherwise … JA: Do you mean that Deleuze and
Guattari have a poetic understanding of the world, as opposed to a prosaic or an analytical one? PV: Yes,
but even better, a ‘nomadological’ understanding of the world – they have that word of their own after all
– stemming from the fact that the world is constantly on the move. Today’s world no longer has any kind
of stability; it is shifting, straddling, gliding away all the time. Hence their ideas about superimposition,
strata, layers and cross-currents. Ours is a world that is shifting, like the polar ice-cap, or ‘Continental
Drift’.18 Nomadology is thus an idea which is in total accordance with what I feel with regard to speed
and deterritorialization. So, it is hardly surprising that we clearly agree on the theme of
deterritorialization.
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Solvency Turn
When information becomes instantaneous and constant, the world is reduced to nothing in
a form of spatial imprisonment, destroying all will to act.
Armitage and Virilio 01 (John Armitage and Paul Virilio. Dromology scholar and Professor of Philosophy at
the European Graduate School in Switzerland respectively. Virilio Live: Selected Interviews. Accessed via
Library.nu)
JA: While some cultural theorists are sympathetic to your critique of speed, few of them appear to
appreciate the stress you place on the relationship between absolute speed and its ‘Other’ – inertia?
Indeed, you have written a book about speed and the environmental crisis entitled Polar Inertia
(1999 [1990]). Why is speed inextricably bound up with inertia?
PV: That is quite simple. When what is being put to work are relative speeds, no inertia obtains, but
acceleration or deceleration. We are then in the realm of mobility and emancipation. But when
absolute speed, that is the speed of light, is put to work, then one hits a wall, a barrier, which
is the barrier of light. Let me remind you that there exist three recognized barriers: the sound
barrier, which was passed in 1947 by Chuck Jaeger, the barrier of heat, which was crossed in the
1960s with rockets, at what is called ‘escape velocity’ and, finally, the speed of light, which is
the effectuation of the ‘live’ in almost all realms of human activity. That is, the possibility to
transfer over distance sight, sound, smell and tactile feeling. Only gustation, taste, seems to be left
out of it. From that moment onwards, it is no longer necessary to make any journey: one has
already arrived. The consequence of staying at the same place is a sort of Foucauldian
imprisonment, but this new type of imprisonment is the ultimate form because it means that
the world has been reduced to nothing. The world is reduced, both in terms of surface and
extension, to nothing and this results in a kind of incarceration, in a stasis, which means that
it is no longer necessary to go towards the world, to journey, to stand up, to depart, to go to
things. Everything is already there. This is, again, an effect of relativity. Why? Because the earth
is so small. In the cosmos, absolute speed amounts to little, but at that scale, it is earth which
amounts to nothing. This is the meaning of inertia. There is a definite relationship between
inertia and absolute speed which is based on the stasis which results from absolute speed.
Absolute stasis leads – potentially – to absolute stasis. The world, then, remains ‘at home’ [in
English], already there, given. I repeat: this is a possibility, a potentiality, but here we are back to
what I said before: when the people are in a situation of possible inertia, they are already inert.
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A2: Perm
The 1ac will use technological information warfare against the alternative—guarantees it
doesn’t solve.
Graham 04. (Stephen Graham, professor of architecture planning and landscape at the University of New Castle,
“Vertical Geopolitics: Baghdad and After,” Antipode 2004, Blackwell Publishing, pg. 12-23)
As “Full Spectrum Dominance” meets global urbanisation, a clear rethinking of the nature of
US “hyperpower” is now required as an element within the broader re-theorisation of strategic
power. Instead of the classical, modern formulation of Euclidean territorial units jostling for space on contiguous maps,
geopoliticians now need to build on the work of Virilio and Deleuze, to further inscribe the
vertical into their notions of power. Such a (geo) “politics of verticality” (a term developed by the architect
Eyal Weizmann in 2002 to describe the architecture of the Israeli–Palestinian war) would face at least four challenges.
First, adopting a fully three-dimensional view of space–time, it would need to place the globespanning and real-time killing power of “network centric warfare” into the context of the
verticalisation of territory that comes with urbanisation and the growth of underground
complexes. As Paul Virilio (1992) has argued, the city and warfare have mutually constituted each
other throughout urban and geopolitical history. Now, however, this occurs as electronic
technologies of instantaneous, verticalised power interpenetrate and (attempt to) control or
destroy urban territories from afar—a process that seems to bring with it a new age of the (underground)
urban fortress or bunker. We should remember, however, that even within the US military, these strategies
are always contested. Many within the “grunt culture” of the US Marines and Army, for example, are sceptical
about the useful- ness of high-tech, distanciated warfare. And, as US casualties mount in Iraq, and the vast cost
and scale of occupation becomes increasingly clear, complex institutional and political battles are
underway which may even make the position of the architect of the invasion, US Defense
secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, untenable. Second, it would need to inscribe the contemporary
geopolitical imagination with a paradigm which addresses the ways in which global air and
space power are used to marshal geopolitical access to, and control over, key underground
resources (Iraqi and central Asian oil, Palestinian water, etc) to fuel the ecological demands of Western urban
complexes. Third, a vertical geopolitical imagination would need to address the ways in which the
distanciated verticalities of surveillance, targeting and real-time killing confront the
corporeal power of resistors to US hyper-power in ways that break down and implode
conventional separations of “national” and “international”, “military” and “civil”,
“domestic” and “foreign”. Here geopolitical verticalisation meets an intense telescoping of
spatial scales, as the body interpenetrates with the globe (Smith 2002). After all, post 9/11,
Predators now fly over US cities as well as Middle Eastern ones (Bishop and Phillips 2002). The US
military practice urban warfare in US cities, as well as in Kuwait and Israel, so that they can
react against mass, urban unrest in the “Homeland”, as they did in the 1992 LA. Riot.3 Finally,
a geopolitics of verticality would need to analyse the ways in which the full might of US military
communications, surveillance and targeting systems are now being integrated seamlessly into
American civil and network spaces, as well as into transnational ones, as part of the “Homeland Security”
drive. The evaporation of the line between law enforcement and military power associated with
Bush’s “war on terror” means that anti-globalisation protestors, Internet-based social
movements and civil demonstrators now face the same kind of verticalised and virtualised
electronic and military power and surveil- lance that is such a key feature of the US
geopolitical expansion strategy in Afghanistan, Iraq (and who knows where else as the “permawar” rolls
on and on ...) (see Warren 2002; York 2003).
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Impact: Pure War
The impact is the end of the human race.
Kellner 08 (Douglas Kellner, professor of philosophy at UCLA, "Preface The Ideology of HIgh-Tech/Postmodern
War vs. the Reality of Messy Wars."
http://gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/essays/2008_Kellner_MessyWarPreface_ver29052008FINAL.pdf)
Hence, phenomenal new military technologies are being produced in the Third Millennium,
described as the instruments of an emergent postmodern warfare, and envisaged earlier by
Philip K. Dick and other SF writers. These military technologies, described in Messy Wars, are
changing the nature of warfare and are part of a turbulent technological revolution with
wide-ranging effects. They are helping to engender a novel type of highly intense "hyperwar,"
cyberwar, or technowar, where technical systems make military decisions and humans are
put out of the loop, or are forced to make instant judgments based on technical data. As
computer programs displace military planners and computer simulations supplant charts
and maps of the territory, technology supersedes humans in terms of planning, decision
making and execution. On the level of the battlefield itself, human power is replaced by
machines, reducing the soldier to a cog in a servomechanism. These developments are alarming
and led French theorist Paul Virilio (1989, 84) to comment in War and Cinema: The disintegration
of the warrior's personality is at a very advanced stage. Looking up, he sees the digital display
(optoelectronic or holographic) of the windscreen collimator; looking down, the radar screen, the
onboard computer, the radio and the video screen, which enables him to follow the terrain with its
four or five simultaneous targets; and to monitor his self navigating Sidewinder missiles fitted with
a camera of infra-red guidance system. The autonomization of warfare and ongoing
displacement of humans by technology creates the specter of technology taking over and the
possibility of military accidents, leading to, Virilio warns us, the specter of global catastrophe.
There is a fierce argument raging in military circles between those who want to delegate more
power and fighting to the new "brilliant" weapons opposed to those who want to keep human
operators in charge of technical systems. Critics of cyberwar worry that as technology supplants
human beings, taking humans out of decision-making loops, the possibility of accidental
firing of arms at inappropriate targets and even nuclear war increases. Since the 1980s,
Virilio criticized the accelerating speed of modern technology and indicated how it was
producing developments that were spinning out of control, and that, in the case of military
technology, could lead to the end of the human race (see Virilio and Lotringer’s Pure War
1983). For Virilio, the acceleration of events, technological development, and speed in the
current era unfolds such that "the new war machine combines a double disappearance: the
disappearance of matter in nuclear disintegration and the disappearance of places in
vehicular extermination" (Virilio 1986: 134). The increased pace of destruction in military
technology is moving toward the speed of light with laser weapons and computer-governed
networks constituting a novelty in warfare in which there are no longer geostrategic strongpoints
since from any given spot we can now reach any other, creating "a strategy of Brownian
movement through geostrategic homogenization of the globe" (Virilio 1986: 135). Thus,
"strategic spatial miniaturization is now the order of the day," with microtechnologies
transforming production and communication, shrinking the planet, and preparing the way
for what Virilio calls "pure war," a situation where military technologies and an
accompanying technocratic system come to dominate every aspect of life. In Virilio's view, the
war machine is the demiurge of technological growth and an ultimate threat to humanity,
producing "a state of emergency" where nuclear holocaust threatens the very survival of the
human species. This consists of a shift from a "geo-politics" to a "chrono-politics," from a
politics of space to a politics of time, in which whoever commands the means of instant
information, communication, and destruction is a dominant sociopolitical force. For Virilio,
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every technological system contains its specific form of accident and a nuclear accident would
be catastrophic. Hence, in the contemporary era, in which weapons of mass destruction could
create an instant world holocaust, we are thrust into a permanent state of emergency with
hightech networks that enables military state to impose its imperatives on ever more domains
of political and social life, as shown in Messy Wars’ chapter 3 about war environment.
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Impact: Pure War
The impact is extinction.
Borg 03. Mark B. Borg, practicing psychoanalyst and community consultant in New York, Psychoanalytic Pure
War, journal of psychoanalysis, questia
Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer's concept of "pure war" refers to the potential of a culture to
destroy itself completely (12). (2) We as psychoanalysts can--and increasingly must--explore the
impact of this concept on our practice, and on the growing number of patients who live with the
inability to repress or dissociate their experience and awareness of the pure war condition. The
realization of a patient's worst fears in actual catastrophic events has always been a profound
enough psychotherapeutic challenge. These days, however, catastrophic events not only threaten
friends, family, and neighbors; they also become the stuff of endless repetitions and
dramatizations on radio, television, and Internet. (3) Such continual reminders of death and
destruction affect us all. What is the role of the analyst treating patients who live with an everthreatening sense of the pure war lying just below the surface of our cultural veneer? At the end of
the First World War, the first "total war," Walter Benjamin observed that "nothing [after the
war] remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of
destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body" (84). Julia Kristeva makes
a similar note about our contemporary situation, "The recourse to atomic weapons seems to prove
that horror...can rage absolutely" (232). And, as if he too were acknowledging this same fragility
and uncontainability, the French politician Georges Clemenceau commented in the context of
World War I that "war is too serious to be confined to the military" (qtd. in Virilio and Lotringer
15). Virilio and Lotringer gave the name "pure war" to the psychological condition that
results when people know that they live in a world where the possibility for absolute
destruction (e.g., nuclear holocaust) exists. As Virilio and Lotringer see it, it is not the
technological capacity for destruction (that is, for example, the existence of nuclear armaments)
that imposes the dread characteristic of a pure war psychology but the belief systems that this
capacity sets up. Psychological survival requires that a way be found (at least unconsciously)
to escape inevitable destruction--it requires a way out--but this enforces an irresolvable
paradox, because the definition of pure war culture is that there is no escape. Once people
believe in the external possibility--at least those people whose defenses cannot handle the weight
of the dread that pure war imposes--pure war becomes an internal condition, a perpetual state
of preparation for absolute destruction and for personal, social, and cultural death.
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Impact: Ocular Dominance
Total vision and high speed information transmissions require the chaos of death and the
domination of life in order to secure ocular dominance.
Featherstone 03 (Mark Featherstone. “The Eye of War: Images of Destruction in Virilio and Bataille”. Journal
for Cultural Research, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2003, 433–447. http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=89ad8900-11a640b1-ae14
a2bb1e2db3b8%40sessionmgr12&vid=1&hid=21&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#db=ap
h&AN=11985206)
Reading this thesis it is clear that the obstacles of the world and the slowness of the body are
necessarily expendable as war becomes a military assault on both the land and civilian
population of the enemy power. Therefore, we can see that what lies beneath this battle for
total vision, through the shock of high-speed information transmissions, is the chaos of death
that is required to secure ocular dominance. Like Bentham’s panopticon, famously described
by Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1977), Virilio’s version of total vision refers to the
progress of a machine that dominates life by imposing a system of suffocating idealism: sense
as abstract theory. Moreover, as with Bentham’s mechanical terror, that relied on the light of a
lantern to create the silhouette of an omniscient observer (Bo˘zovi˘c 2000), Virilio’s fatal system
requires total light, or frontality, to discipline its object of scrutiny. Here, world and body
become criminal elements that require technological correction. Such contingencies must be
over-written by abstract sight. The gaze must freeze chance because total vision is impossible
without the monstrosity of shock, the speed of light that illuminates everything through the
instantaneity of a global flash.
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Impact: Vision Machine
The vision machine necessitates the destruction of humanity and its world.
Featherstone 03 (Mark Featherstone. “The Eye of War: Images of Destruction in Virilio and Bataille”. Journal
for Cultural Research, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2003, 433–447. http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=89ad8900-11a640b1-ae14a2bb1e2db3b8%40sessionmgr12&vid=1&hid=21&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#db=ap
h&AN=11985206)
In contrast to Bataille’s attempt to secure the death of humankind by plunging humanity into the
void of undifferentiated animality, Virilio is concerned to show how the postmodern economy
of excess lives off the blindspots that seem to delimit its drive for omniscience. For Virilio, the
vision machine’s version of totality requires the stains that forever cloud its will to telepresence. Thus, the body and its world become refuse, trash that the vision machine recycles
to power its relentless drive towards the high speeds that constitute the absolute barrier
where humanity gives way to the scene of the posthuman imaginary. Here, tele-presence
conflates the twin infinitives of absolute presence/total absence and civil space begins to
vanish into the void of total differentiation/un-differentiation. It is the appearance of this
singular point, where all distinctions collapse into the absolute nondistance of a technological
“dead centre”, that Virilio’s work critiques as the endless jouissance, which Bataille might
celebrate as the discovery of an absolutely general/ intensely particular limit experience but the
philosopher of speed views as a sign of the onset of the mortification of the human species. Within
the context of the technological model, then, the constant restatement of the violence of the
instant requires that the slowness of the body and its world become sacrificial offerings to the
weightless, ethereal nature of the image. Virilio’s (2000a) theory of the birth of the “terminal
man”, who is always already at death’s door, leads one to compare the postmodern theory of lightspeed to Descartes’ conception of illumination, where the transmission of light omission/ reception
is instantaneous, over Newton’s model, which introduced a degree of temporality to the laws of
physics. It is this reference to Descartes over Newton, as the thinker who can explain
postmodernity as a site which is apart from temporality, that allows Virilio to achieve his
formulation of a “dead centre”. For Virilio, this timeless zone, where all difference collapses
towards the greyness of the same, becomes representative of the barbarization of humanity.
Following the etymological root of the word “barbarism”, which stems from “barbaros”, the Latin
word for “foreigner”, he excavates a situation that we may call the generalization of the enemy.
Regarding this idea, Virilio explains how social relations become obsolete as people discover
total intimacy as the absolute absence of self, and refers to the notion of “multiple solitude”
(1994:10) to show how everybody becomes an alien to both themselves and everybody else. As
such, we can see how Virilio’s particular theory of alienation, whereby the self acquires the
properties of a living corpse and the other becomes a phantom, reworks Sartre’s theory of
the gaze from the texts Being and Nothingness (1966) and No Exit (1989). Akin to Sartre’s
phenomenology of paranoia, I want to suggest that Virilio’s theory of technological
postmodernity illuminates the process that plunges humanity into a war of all against all; a
brutalizing state of nature that leads people to fear an enemy which is so general that it
appears to reside nowhere and a threat which is so particular that it seems to appear
everywhere. Here, the claustrophobic violence of the endless moment coils around the inertia
of the “dead centre” to create the abyssal black hole that threatens to consume both
humanity and its world.
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Impact: Information Bomb
Information bombs due to psychological warfare are MORE LETHAL than nuclear
weapons. They also causes the break down of the system as technological accidents cause
the collapse of humanity.
Kellner 99 (Douglas Kellner, professor of philosophy at UCLA, “Virilio, War, and Technology,”
http://gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/illumina%20folder/kell29.htm)
Shrilly technophobic and consistently hysterical, Virilio
demonizes modern information and
communication technologies, suggesting that they are do irreparable damage to the human
being. Sometimes over-the-top rhetorical, as in the passage just cited, Virilio's 1990's comments on new information
technology suggest that he is deploying the same model and methods to analyze the new
technologies that he used for war technology. He speaks regularly of an "information bomb"
that is set to explode (1995a, 1995b, 1995c, 1997a, and 1997b), evoking the specter of "a choking of the
senses, a loss of control of reason of sorts" in a flood of information and attendant
disinformation. Deploying his earlier argument concerning technology and the accident, Virilio argues that the
information superhighway is just waiting for a major accident to happen (1995a and 1995b; 1997a
and 1997b), which will be a new kind of global accident, effecting the whole globe, "the accidents of
accidents" (Epicurus): "The stock market collapse is merely a slight prefiguration of it. Nobody has
seen this generalized accident yet. But then watch out as you hear talk about the 'financial bubble' in the economy: a
very significant metaphor is used here, and it conjures up visions of some kind of cloud,
reminding us of other clouds just as frightening as those of Chernobyl..." (1995b). In a 1995
interview with German media theorist Friedrich Kittler (1995c), titled "The information Bomb," Virilio draws an analogy
between the nuclear bomb and the "information bomb," talking about the dangers of "fallout" and "radiation" from both.
In contrast to the more dialectical Kittler, Virilio comes off as exceedingly technophobic in this exchange
and illicitly, in my view, deploys an amalgam of military and religious metaphors to characterize the world of the new
technologies. In one exchange, Virilio claims that "a caste of technology-monks is coming up in our times," and "there
exist monasteries (of sorts whose goal it is to pave the way for a (kind of) 'civilization' that has nothing to do with
civilization as we remember it." These monks are avatars of a "technological fundamentalism" and "information
monotheism," a world-view that replaces previous humanist and religious worldviews, displacing man and god in favor
of technology. [This world-view] comes into being in a totally independent manner from any controversy. It is the
outcome of an intelligence without reflection or past. And with it goes what I think as the greatest danger (of all), the
derailment, the sliding down into the utopian, into a future without humanity. And that is what
worries me. I believe that violence, nay hyperviolence, springs out of this fundamentalism . Virilio goes
on to claim that fallout from the "information bomb" will be as lethal for the socius as nuclear
bombs, destroying social memory, relations, traditions, and community with an
instantaneous overload of information. Thus, the technological "monks" who promote the information
revolution are guilty of "sins in technical fundamentalism, of which we witness the consequences, the evil effects, today."
One wonders, however, if the discourse of "sin," "evil," and "fundamentalism" is appropriate to
characterize the effects and uses of new technologies which are, contrary to Virilio, hotly and widely
debated, hardly monolithic, and, in my view, highly ambiguous, mixing what might be appraised as positive and negative
features and effects. Yet Virilio is probably correct that the dominant discourse is largely positive and
uncritical and that we should be aware of negative aspects and costs of the new technologies
and debate their construction, structure, uses, and effects. Virilio is also right that they constitute
at least a threat to community and social relations, as previously established, though one could argue
that the new communities and social relations generated by use of the new technologies have
positive dimensions as well as potentially negative ones. Virilio notes as well the ways that new
technologies are penetrating the human body and psyche, taking over previous biological, perceptual, and creative
functions of human beings, making humans appendages of a technological apparatus. He writes: "I am a materialist of the
body which means that the body is the basis of all my work" (Virilio 1997a: 47). In his early work, Virilio spoke of
the body as "a vector of speed" and "metabolic vehicle" in which increased speed and
velocity overwhelmed the human sensorium and empowered controllers of technologies of
speed over other humans (1986). In more recent work, he has described the body as a planet, as a unique center
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around which objects gravitate, and criticizes increasing derealization of the body in cyberspace and virtual technologies
(1997a and 1997b). Virilio is thus in part a materialist humanist and phenomenologist who is
disturbed by the invasion of the human body by technology and the substitution of the
technological for the human and lived experience. We noted above Virilio's disagreement with
Baudrillard over the issue of simulation which Virilio prefers to interpret in terms of substitution of
one mode of experience or representation for another. Virilio's project is to describe the losses,
the disappearances, of the substitution, describing now technology displaces human faculties
and experience, subjecting individuals to ever more powerful modes of technological
domination and control. Thus, Virilio describes the effects of new technologies in terms of an
explosion of information as lethal as nuclear explosion and warns of the ubiquity of new types
of accident that will require new modes of deterrence and dissuasion. He also envisages progressive
derealization and dematerialization of human beings in the realm of virtual reality which may come to rule every realm of
life from war to sex. From this perspective, technology emerges as the major problem and threat of the
contemporary era, as a demonic force that threatens to erase the human. Much as his predecessors,
Heidegger and Ellul, Virilio warns of the totalitarian threat in technology and calls for a critical discourse on technology,
recognition of its possible negative effects, and regulation of technological development, subjecting technology to human
and political control.
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Turns Case: Accidents
The plan’s globalized web of information takes the instance of the accident from a local one
to a global one with the potential to “destroy everything”.
Armitage and Virilio 01 (John Armitage and Paul Virilio. Dromology scholar and Professor of Philosophy at
the European Graduate School in Switzerland respectively. Virilio Live: Selected Interviews. Accessed via
Library.nu)
JA: Could you elaborate on the concept of the integral, or, generalized accident, a little further?
PV: Let me put it this way: every time a technology is invented, take shipping for instance, an
accident is invented together with it, in this case, the shipwreck, which is exactly
contemporaneous with the invention of the ship. The invention of the railway meant, perforce, the
invention of the railway disaster. The invention of the aeroplane brought the air crash in its wake.
Now, the three accidents I have just mentioned are specific and localized accidents. The Titanic
sank at a given location. A train derails at another location and a plane crashes, again,
somewhere else. This is a fundamental point, because people tend to focus on the vehicle, the
invention itself, but not on the accident, which is its consequence. As an art critic of
technology, I always try to emphasize both the invention and the accident. But the occurrence
of the accident is being denied. This is the result of the hype which always goes together with
technical objects, as with Bill Gates and cyberspace, for instance. The hype in favour of
technology dismisses its negative aspects. It is a positive thing to have electricity, it is a
wonderful device, but at the same time it is based on nuclear energy. Thus what these three types of
accidents have in common is that they are localized, and this is because they are about relative
velocities, the transport velocities of ships, trains, and planes. But from the moment that the
absolute velocity of electromagnetic waves is put to use, the potential of the accident is no
longer local, but general. It is no longer a particular accident, hence the possibility arises of a
generalized accident. Let me stress the point by giving you two examples: the collapse of the
stock exchange and radioactivity as result of a nuclear conflict. These examples mean that when an
event takes place somewhere today, the possibility arises that it might destroy everything. A
virus in an electronic network, an atomic leakage in Chernobyl – and that was not much, compared
to a massive nuclear strike. Today’s collapse of the stock exchange is a nice icon for the integral
accident, in the sense that a very small occurrence changes everything, as the speed of
quotations and programmed trading spreads and enhances any trend instantaneously. What
happened a few weeks ago in [South East] Asia is an integral accident, well, almost an integral
accident.
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Accidents Inevitable/Turns case
The technology to avoid accidents is a potential accident in and of itself. Accidents are
inevitable and the advent of information technology makes that disaster a global one.
Der Derian and Virilio 76 (Paul Virilio and James Der Derian. Professor of Philosophy at the European
Graduate School in Switzerland and research professor with a focus on global security and media studies
respectively. Transcription of an interview of Virilio by Der Derian in Paris. 1976.
http://asrudiancenter.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/interview-with-paul-virilio/.)
Der Derian: What about accidents?
Virilio: Accidents have always fascinated me. It is the intellectual scapegoat of the
technological; accident is diagnostic of technology. To invent the train is to invent derailment;
to invent the ship is to invent the shipwreck. The ship that sinks says much more to me about
technology than the ship that floats! Today the question of the accident arises with new
technologies, like the image of the stock market crash on Wall Street. Program trading: here
there is the image of the general accident, no longer the particular accident like the derailment or
the shipwreck. In old technologies, the accident is “local”; with information technologies it is
“global.” We do not yet understand very well this negative innovation. We have not
understood the power of the virtual accident. We are faced with a new type of accident for
which the only reference is the analogy to the stock market crash, but this is not sufficient.
Der Derian: What comes next?
Virilio: 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, real space to nearly nothing. Therefore, in the near future, people will have
a feeling of being enclosed in a small, confined, environment. In fact, there is already a speed
pollution which reduces the world to nothing. Just as Foucault spoke of this feeling among the
imprisoned, I believe that there will be for future generations a feeling of confinement in the
world, of incarceration which will certainly be at the limit of tolerability, by virtue of the
speed of information. If I were to give a last image, interactivity is to real space what
radioactivity is to the atmosphere.
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Pure War: Turns Case
Pure war means that society is based upon war—guarantees continuous intervention,
which turns the case.
Cooper 02. (Simon Cooper, Lecturer in Mass Communications and Writing at Monash University, 2002,
Technoculture and Critical Theory, pg. 119-120)
One of Virilio’s most important observations about ideology, however, goes beyond a critique of
idealist progressivism. For Virilio, ideology is not confined to an abstract pattern of belief. Instead,
he argues that specific ideologies, such as technocratic rationality and militarism become
materialised through technology. Technology works to reconstitute our sensory perceptions
so that such ideologies are naturalised, in a manner that goes beyond even Althusser’s most
pessimistic conclusions about the way ideology is practically lived out (see Althusser 1971). This
observation, concerning the manner in which technological mediation allows for the
materialisation of specific ideologies, is at its clearest, in Virilio’s work, when he discusses the
intertwinement between the military and the development and implementation of new technology.
He comments on how the ‘virtualisation’ of everyday life, that is, the increasingly technological
mediation of the world via media images and communication systems, is made possible through the
cohabitation of the military and the technological, not only because military research can be carried
over into the civilian sphere, but also because the technological reconstitution of the real constructs
the social realm as a quasi-militarised space. Virilio writes that: the tangle of [communication]
networks blackening your map is only the triumph of the military population, the administration of
a territory set up for the conductability of war . . . this is what the doctrine of security is founded
on: the saturation of time and space by speed, making daily life the theatre of operations, the
ultimate scene of strategic foresight. (Virilio 1990:92) The militarist ideology, the collusion of
technological development with militarised terror, extends across the social realm as Virilio
traces the passage from ‘wartime to the war of peacetime’ (Virilio and Lotringer 1983:142).
The reconstituting ability of the war machine has disseminated across the social field itself. This is
what Virilio means when he talks of society as in a perpetual state of war, ‘all of us are
already civilian soldiers, we don’t recognise the militarised part of [our] identity’. This aspect
of our identity is constructed through technologically reconstituted modes of perception and
engagement, modes first developed in the military.
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FW: Dromology
Dromology is a way of viewing the world and infiltrates our perception of the real—only
the alternative can expunge it from the debate sphere.
Brugger and Virilio 01 (Niels Brugger & Paul Virilio. Researcher at the Institute for Information and Media
Studies & Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, respectively. Virilio Live:
Selected Interviews. Accessed via Library.nu)
NB: To conclude our discussion of perception, I would like to address a final theme: the relation
between speed and vision, or rather between movement and vision. Is it possible to say that the
ultimate means of transportation today are the machines that transport vision without
transporting the body?
PV: It goes without saying that speed is a way of visualizing the world. When I walk at the speed
of 4 kilometres an hour, I have a certain vision of the world. When I stop to look at a tree, it is
immobile. When I start walking again, the tree seems to pass by. This passing by is tied to the
speed of the observer. If I pass the tree quickly in a car, the tree will become indistinct, and if
I pass it very quickly, I won’t see anything; I’ll only see a blur, a fog. So speed is always a way
of seeing the world differently. Means of transportation are not only a means of displacing
oneself from one point to another. I have often used different vehicles for the mere pleasure of
seeing the speed; for example, in the beginning I often took the TGV [high speed train] to see its
effect on the countryside, and I wrote about what I have called dromoscopy, that is, the vision
of speed, which implies a major philosophical question: which tree is the true one? The tree
that is only a frozen image whose branches and every single piece of bark I can describe in
detail, or the blurred tree that passes by? We know very well that both trees are true. Yet in
Newtonian rationalism (space and time are absolute and speed is relative), the true tree is the
frozen, immobilized tree. The true man is the statue; the canon of the statue, as Michel Serres
would say. But I believe that we are heading in the opposite direction, where the genuine tree
is the tree that passes by, because we are always moving: my eyes move, I move even if I’m
sitting down. So in a certain sense, our relationship to reality has been affected by the
Einsteinian era, in which speed is essential, absolute, while space and time are relative; the
tree can no longer be the same.
NB: This is precisely the problem you described in The Vision Machine (1994 [1988]) in
connection with the discussion between Auguste Rodin and Paul Gsell.
PV: Indeed. Rodin’s comment is very interesting. Paul Gsell says to Rodin: ‘a photographic instant
is truth’. And Rodin says: ‘No, it is false because in reality time does not stop’. And he is
absolutely right because the photograph is but a frozen image. Besides, we should not be speaking
of the photograph now; we should be speaking of frozen images. But Rodin is right in respect to
the photograph; in a way he anticipates the cinema. It is not photography that is false. He says:
‘Photography is false and my art is true.’ But it is not the photograph itself that is false; it is only
false because it is halted. And this leads us toward the question of the relationship between
movement and vision. Just as airplanes and weapons are becoming outdated in respect to
means of communication, means of transportation are becoming outdated in respect to
‘means of vision’. It is no coincidence that videos are set up in elevators and movies are shown in
airplanes. I’m convinced that just as cars have replaced horses, cars themselves are in the
process of disappearing in favour of highly sophisticated transmission techniques, of which
data-suits, virtual reality and cyberspace are the first signs. The dominance of speed certainly
seems to point in this direction.
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FW: Analogical Reasoning
Analogical reasoning allows us to compare similar systems and develop a schema to
analyze and sculpt policy.
Peterson 97 (M.J. Professor of Political Science at UMass-Amherst. “The Use of Analogies in Developing Outer
Space Law”. International Organization, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Spring, 1997), pp. 245-274. JSTORhttp://www.jstor.org/stable/2703450)
Reasoning by analogy rests on the basic premise that when two knowledge domains (which
can be a broad issue or problem, a set of phenomena, or new instances of some recurring problem
or phenomenon) are significantly similar, the two can be treated as instances of the same thing
or results of the same causal process.7 This assumption allows us to treat knowledge domains
that are similar in some respects as similar in others, so that information from the familiar
("source") domain can be used to fill gaps in information about the unfamiliar ("target")
domain. Leaving aside claims that at the deepest level virtually all human reasoning is
analogical, political actors use analogies either for the focused purpose of understanding a
particular situation or for the broader purpose of comprehending a whole new issue-area or
type of problem.8 The large literature on uses of analogy in policy decision making deals with
the first sort of use and shows how policymakers comprehend new situations and generate
expectations about what will happen if they act in particular ways.9 Though the basic
reasoning process is similar, the second way of using analogies involves constructing a
conceptual scheme for analyzing whole classes of actual or potential situations and
establishing guidelines for dealing with them.
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FW: Analogical Reasoning
Analogies are particularly useful when cognizing the legal implications of space and can help policy
makers develop conceptual frameworks for addressing policy options. Peterson 97 (M.J. Professor of
Political Science at UMass-Amherst. “The Use of Analogies in Developing Outer Space Law”.
International Organization, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Spring, 1997), pp. 245-274. JSTORhttp://www.jstor.org/stable/2703450)
The Antarctic analogy was accepted initially by the superpowers as a way of extending the
open access and nonappropriation principles of outer space law to celestial bodies. Yet the
features and gaps of that analogy inspired ideas opposed by the superpowers. Read back onto
the vacuum of space, the Antarctic analogy supported banning military activity anywhere in space,
including near-earth space. Such a course had been urged by a few developing states in the 1960s
and came back onto the international agenda after 1978. Yet the superpowers remained
unpersuaded. To them, the syllogism that "space is to high seas as celestial bodies are to
Antarctica," produced by combining high seas and Antarctic analogies, was hard to dislodge
because it accorded so well with their perceived interests. Lack of a mineral resources element
in the Antarctic analogy permitted the Group of 77 to draw on other inspirations for rules regarding
lunar resource activity. The analytical similarity of being outside the limits of national jurisdiction
encouraged drawing on proposals to treat the deep seabed as "common heritage of mankind."
Though the eventual expression of the principle was very weak, the text of the Moon Treaty
represented a greater move in that direction than the superpowers would have adopted on their
own. Unable to stop the impetus in negotiations, they had to resort to nonacceptance of the treaty to
avoid association with it. Students of foreign policy have shown how analogical reasoning helps
political leaders, military commanders, and diplomats understand the particular situations
they face at any time, evaluate the material and moral impact of possible actions, and
anticipate the results of taking each one. Yet the same reasoning process, applied at a more
abstract level, can also be used to develop the conceptual framework guiding activity
regarding an entirely new issue or problem. Here analogies are used to create definitions of
the issue and what is at stake, establish regulatory rules for conduct, and even establish the
symbolic meanings that permit creation of the social and institutional facts needed for
successful management of an issue or cooperation on solving a problem. Thus, the insights of
cognitive science are relevant not only to students of comparative foreign policy but also to those
seeking to understand the development of broad patterns of cooperative or competitive behavior
among states and other actors.
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A2: Baudrillard
Der Derian and Virilio 76 (Paul Virilio and James Der Derian. Professor of Philosophy at the European
Graduate School in Switzerland and research professor with a focus on global security and media studies
respectively. Transcription of an interview of Virilio by Der Derian in Paris. 1976.
http://asrudiancenter.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/interview-with-paul-virilio/.)
Der Derian: Is this true of the Gulf War? Did it even take place, as Jean Baudrillard claims,
anywhere outside of the media?
Virilio: Baudrillard’s statement is negational, and I have criticized him for it. The Gulf War was a
world war in miniature. Let me explain. The monitoring of the globe by American satellites was
required to win a local war. Therefore we can say that this was a fractal war: at once local and
global. With the new technologies and with the new logistics of perception, the battlefield was also
developing the field of perception. The Gulf War, for example, was a local war in comparison with
the Second World War, with regard to its battlefield. But it was a worldwide war on the temporal
level of representation, on the level of media, thanks to the satellite acquisition of targets, thanks to
the tele-command of the war. I am thinking of Patriot anti-missiles which were commanded from
the Pentagon and from a satellite positioned high above the Gulf countries. On the one side, it was
a local war, of little interest, without many deaths, without many consequences. But, by contrast,
on the other side, it was a unique field of perception. For the first time, as opposed to the Vietnam
War, it was a war rendered live, worldwide – with, of course, the special effects, all the information
processing organized by the Pentagon and the censorship by the major states. In fact, it is a war that
took place in the artifice of television, much more than in the reality of the field of battle, in the
sense that real time prevailed over real space.
Der Derian: How does this differ from the war in Bosnia?
Virilio: The Gulf War and the Bosnian War are not comparable. First of all because the territory is
very different. The Iraqi territory is a desert whereas Bosnia is a territory extremely broken up by
its topography. Its people fight under guerrilla conditions. We are looking at two radically different
wars: a “civil” war and an “international” war. When one cannot wage war, one plays the role of
police. At this moment in time, NATO forces and those of the UN are police forces, that is, a police
army. The situation, on the scale of Europe, is very close to that which takes place in the suburbs of
cities. When a situation is very close to civil war, the only thing possible is the police. This said,
the role of the media in these two cases is comparable. Let me explain. Without the media, without
television, the war in Yugoslavia would not have taken place. The triggering of the civil war was
linked to the media, to the call to war by the media. The geostrategic and geopolitical dimension:
this is the power assumed by those who control television. Moreover, the photographic and
televisual coverage are not of the same nature. Every war has a particular personality. Each is
unique in itself, even if there are similar armaments, rifles, machine guns, airplanes or tanks. Are
you saying that we are moving from geopolitical to geostrategic wars?
-The geopolitical is essentially dependent upon geography. The geopolitical is older than the
geostrategic. I want to say that in order for there to be “geostrategy,” a technological means must
be developed. For example, there was a naval geostrategy before there was an aerial and spatial
geostrategy with satellites. The geopolitical: this is Julius Caesar and the war of the Gaules, the
Peloponnesian war and Thucydides. It is a war of territory, the conquest of sites, of cities. The
domination of territory is a determining element of the battle. The war in Yugoslavia is still tied to
territory. It is for this reason that the West is afraid of it. They fear having an Afghanistan or a
Vietnam in Europe. Something inextricable. And Yugoslavia was the first to implement a strategy
of popular self-defense. The Yugoslavians had a self-managed society including the sphere of
defense. The civil war could develop so quickly in Yugoslavia, because the armaments were
distributed throughout the territory, except for the tanks that were located in the barracks of large
cities. So we have a very particular structure that is a structure of guerrilla or civil war tied to a
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specific area. For example, a civil war would not have been possible in the Iraqi desert, just as a
“Desert Storm” would not work in Yugoslavia. The geography does not allow for a very developed
geopolitical war. On the other hand, the Iraqi desert permits a very developed geostrategical war
because the territory is like billiards, like the sea.
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A2: Realism
Realism totally ignores the dangers of technology.
Scheuerman 09. (William E. Scheuerman, professor of political science at Indian University, 'Realism and the
critique of technology', Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 22: 4, 563 — 584)
Realist international theory hardly seems like a sensible place to turn to gain constructive insights
about contemporary technological trends and their pathological or at least ambivalent
consequences. When analysing the prospect of nuclear omnicide, arguably the most ominous
technological possibility faced by humankind since 1945, present-day Realists exude a
remarkable nonchalance, as perhaps best illustrated by Kenneth Waltz’s unforgettable view
of nuclear proliferation: ‘more may be better’ in nuclear weapons, since allegedly the Cold
War model of bipolar nuclear deterrence can be extended to the post-1989 political universe (Sagan
and Waltz 2003, 44). Nor have Realists had much of value to say about that other great
technologically induced threat to human survival, global warming. John Mearsheimer, the
most impressive advocate of ‘offensive Realism’, describes ‘environmental degradation,
unbounded population growth, and global warming’ as constituting ‘at most second-order
problems’, none of which is ‘serious enough to threaten the survival of a great power’
(Mearsheimer 2001, 372). Offensive Realism, with its emphasis on the centrality of great power
rivalry, apparently can sleep soundly even in the face of global ecological and population
disaster. Mainstream contemporary Realist methodology, which typically envisions the
natural sciences as the paragon of intellectual rigour, perhaps lies at the root of this striking
tendency to downplay the dangers of recent technological development. In light of their fidelity
to a somewhat rigid model of scientific inquiry, should we be surprised by the failures of most
present-day Realists to grapple seriously with the perils posed by technology, or ‘applied
science [which] threatens to destroy man and his social and natural environment’
(Morgenthau 1972, 3)?
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A2: Virilio is pessimistic
Virilio aint no pessimist
Sterckx and Virilio 01 (Pierre Sterckx and Paul Virilio. Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate
School in Switzerland,. Virilio Live: Selected Interviews. Accessed via Library.nu)
PS: I imagine you are sometimes accused of being a pessimist?
PV: Let’s put it this way, I am not an optimist in the medium term, but in the long term. I think
that, up to the 1980s/90s, the twentieth century was the product of the nineteenth. There has been
no twentieth century, only a prolongation of the nineteenth. If, as Camus said, our epoch is
‘pitiless’, that is because it reproduces but does not innovate. We have repeated and created
nothing, apart, that is, from great disasters.
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A2: Pomo Bad/Virilio hates science
On the contrary, Virilio’s phenomenologically based work couldn’t be farther away from
postmodernism. He even cites Einstein a bunch.
Armitage 2k (John Armitage. Dromology scholar. “Beyond Postmodernism?: Paul Virilio's Hypermodern
Cultural Theory”. 11/15/2000. http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=133)
Virilio's exegesis of military space and the social organization of territory is an important
contribution to critical cultural theory because it diverges from the increasingly sterile current
debate over the differentiation of modernism and postmodernism. It is, for instance, quite
wrong of critical cultural theorists such as Harvey (1989: 351), Waite (1996: 116), and positivist
physicists like Sokal and Bricmont (1998: 159-166) to characterise Virilio's thought as
postmodern cultural theory. Indeed, such characterisations are so far wide of the mark it is
difficult to know where to begin. I will explain.
For one thing, although the concept of postmodernism, like Virilio, came to prominence in
architectural criticism in the 1960s, Virilio's thought is neither a reaction against the
International Style nor a reaction against modernism. Postmodernism, Virilio proposes, has
been a 'catastrophe' in architecture, and has nothing to do with his phenomenologically
grounded writings (Armitage, 2000b: 25.) This is because Virilio's work draws on the
modernist tradition in the arts and sciences. As I have noted elsewhere, in The Information
Bomb, Virilio routinely references modernist writers such as Kafka and relishes the latter's
declaration that 'the cinema involves putting the eye into uniform'. The same could be said of
Virilio's combative relationship to both Marinetti's modernist Futurism and the Chapman brothers'
postmodern or 'terminal' contemporary art practices (Armitage, 2000c: 146; and 2000d). Virilio's
philosophical reference points are Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, phenomenologists and
modernists. Furthermore, he regularly cites Einstein's writings on General Relativity Theory,
instances of Virilio's commitment to the theory of scientific modernism established in 1915.
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The alternative doesn’t entail a rejection of technology, just a reconsideration of our
relationship with it.
Featherstone 10. (Marker Featherstone, senior lecture in sociology at Keele University in the UK, “Virilio’s
Apocalypticism,” http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=662#bio)
In my view the
catastrophic financial crash is apocalyptic in Virilio's terms not simply because
of its effects on large numbers of people who have lost their homes. This is a condition which we must
understand first individualistically, in terms of the personal catastrophe for the individuals involved; second sociopolitically, through the idea that globalisation has produced the forced liberation of people from their
environment and led to the emergence of a world of flows; and third phenomenologically-existentially,
insofar as this event realises the theory of humanity torn from its environment, made homeless,
and cast out into an alien world. But the crash is apocalyptic not simply for these reasons, or because of the
ways that it can be seen to reveal the completion or limit of the light speeds of globalisation and hyper-modern
marketisation in the collapse of these forms into chaos. Rather, I would suggest that beyond these markers, which
may be seen to locate the event as a secular catastrophe, we should regard Virilio's take on the financial
crash as truly apocalyptic in nature because of the ways in which he understands the location
of the crash on the virtual, textual, and metaphysical level of signs and information. That is to
say that I think we should see Virilio's apocalypticism in the ways in which he imagines the
virtuality or textuality of this catastrophe of signs as an esoteric text inviting the revelation of
the destructive capacity of hyper-modernity for humanity and suggestive of the idea that we
must use this revelation to discover some new form of technological society habitable for
embodied human beings who cannot but live in the world.
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**Aff Castle**
Virilio’s philosophy draws on one single dimension of critique, resulting in a totalizing
theory that can’t take in outside factors.
Brugger 99 (Niels Brugger. “Critical introduction to the work of Paul Virilio” presented as part of The
Danish Transport Council: SPEED-A workshop on space, time and mobility. October 1999.
www.trg.dk/transportraadet/pup/NT/NT-99-05.doc)
The 'negative' critical remarks can be summarized in two words: one-dimensionality and totality.
One-dimensionality as well as totality manifests itself within Virilios theory, his fields of
analysis and his method. The bias of one-dimensionality can be seen in the fact that Virilio's
theory points out one single phenomenon - speed and its acceleration - as the factor that
determines the organization of the world as well as the progression of civilisation. And taking
this single phenomenon as a point of departure, Virilio's theory is able to explain everything,
which gives it its bias of totality. When - for instance - Virilio argues, that "history progresses
with the speed of the weapon-systems", it is obvious, that he is relying on a philosophy of
history, and as it is often seen in that genre this means: 1) that the motor of history is reduced
to one single principle that can explain everything; 2) which - simultaneously - makes the
theory blind to the importance of other potential forces. To put it in a paradoxical way: a
theory that makes speed and its acceleration the dominant pivot can explain almost
everything; and what it cannot explain, it simply does not explain. A theory and a strategy of
analysis that tends to re-capture the already known and to make it difficult to find the unknown - as
a philosopher, who has just got a new hammer and therefore sees nails all over. How can the bias
of one-dimensionality and totality be seen in Virilio's choice of fields of analysis and in his choice
of method? Especially one single field of analysis is said to be the most important, namely the
military field. Anything can be derived from the development of speed within the military
field. And concerning the method: the archaeologist of the future chooses - without caring
about such trivial elements as representativity - exactly the examples that most clearly
illustrate the theory; and in the very same movement these examples are often extended to
what is said to be a general tendency.
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Virilio’s work fails to outline a reflexive method of opposition, making him complicit with
his subject of objection.
Cooper 02 (Simon Cooper. Technoculture and Critical Theory: In the service of the machine?. 2002. Accessed
via Library.nu)
Paul Virilio has remarked that ‘we should, after two centuries of positivism, progressivism and
idealism of techno-science, come to critique the negative aspect’ (Virilio in Madsen 1995: 80).
Much of his work has been devoted to highlighting the negative aspects of technological
development and change, writing with a certain apocalyptic sense of what an extrapolated
technological future might hold. Virilio’s work has become increasingly influential, going well
beyond its initially favourable reception in the avant-garde circles of art and social theory. Yet,
there has been relatively little discussion as to the overall value of Virilio’s critique of
technology. Certainly, there is much to be said for his sustained opposition to the increasing
colonisation of life by technology. At a time when new technologies are the subject of an enormous
amount of uncritical hype, when even ‘critical’ intellectuals seem content to revel in the play of
technologically- mediated simulations, Virilio’s is almost a voice in the wilderness. But despite his
consistent critique, and pointed observations concerning the ‘negative aspect’ of technology, I
want to argue that Virilio’s work remains limited in the degree to which it can contribute to a
critical or ethical engagement with technology. More than any other theorist discussed in this
book (except perhaps Heidegger), Virilio has focused on the role of technology as a
reconstituting agent, in relation to embedded social and cultural meanings. In this sense, his
work is vital in that he sketches out the ground on which we can assess the impact of
technological change. However, his work never goes beyond this point. So while Virilio is
valuable for one part of my argument (critique), it is severely limited in terms of outlining the
ground for a more reflexive theory of technology. Indeed, this limitation at times makes
Virilio partially complicit with the trends and ideologies he opposes. Virilio’s aphoristic
brilliance allows his theoretical insights to reveal themselves spectacularly, like the technological
‘accidents’ which briefly counter the prevailing technological telos. As with the nature of accidents
however, Virilio’s rapid fire missives fade almost as quickly as they appear.
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Virilio’s theory of the “presence of absence” limits our analysis of social relations and relies
upon a unsubstantiated oxymoron to express his theory.
Cooper 02 (Simon Cooper. Technoculture and Critical Theory: In the service of the machine?. 2002. Accessed
via Library.nu)
Yet it is here that we can begin to question the terms of Virilio’s analysis. While he recognises a
shift in the way social relations are carried out, he can only express this as an oxymoron, ‘the
presence of absence’, and relate it to the activity of speed. By doing this, he theoretically
constitutes social relations within a single abstract plane. It is simply not the case that ‘we will
never be neighbours’ through the use of tele-communications. Rather, the social bond is
constituted more abstractly, but we relate to these intangible others as if we could carry on a faceto-face discussion. In ignoring the contradictory manner through which abstracted modes of
integration are constituted, Virilio misses out on a crucial critical perspective, as we shall see
below.
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Virilio’s use of hyperbole brings about technological determinism and reproduces his
impacts.
Cooper 02 (Simon Cooper. Technoculture and Critical Theory: In the service of the machine?. 2002. Accessed
via Library.nu)
There is no doubt that Virilio writes at times with a certain apocalyptic fervour. While the
reconstitution of our habitat, subjective framework and body by technology is doubtless occurring,
this is not so comprehensive a process as Virilio would have us believe. No doubt Virilio's is a
deliberate strategy, a kind of cathartic nihilism intended to prevent the actual outcome of what he
describes. As Conley points out, much of Virilio's work 'mimes the very system he criticises by
projecting his way of apprehending the present into futuristic visions' (Conley 1993: 86). Yet
this strategy can only be limited and has its own dangers. In particular, there is the danger of
succumbing to technological determinism. While Virilio might be horrified by the
technologised future, as he imagines it, his descriptions are in essence no different form those
who succumb to a progressivist ideology of technology. His discussion of Stelarc is illustrative
of this point: while he repeatedly calls Stelarc a prophete malheur, a prophet of doom, it is difficult
to see how Virilio's own claims are ultimately any different. As Virginia Madsen points out, '[i]n
essence, Stelarc's observations are pure Virilio' (Madsen 1995: 80). Obviously, Virilio is
horrified by a future increasingly harnessed to technological speed, yet writes in a manner
that has an ideological effect similar to much cyberpunk fiction presenting a technological
dystopia that is as fascinating as it is appalling. Overstatement and technological determinism
prevent the elaboration of a reflexive relationship to technology; such as has been outlined
consistently throughout this book. Instead, Virilio can do little else than simply say 'no' to
technology.
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Virilio’s terminology keeps him trapped in the chains of the system that he criticizes.
Cooper 02 (Simon Cooper. Technoculture and Critical Theory: In the service of the machine?. 2002. Accessed
via Library.nu)
The problem lies in Virilio's analytical terms such as speed, vectors, and disappearance, all of
which implicitly construct a one-dimensional ontology trapped within the confines of the very
technological system he opposes. For instance we can question the overemphasis given to the
term 'disappearance'. All too often in Virilio's work, the reconstituting capacity of technology
is equated with the disappearance of something. Virilio himself has stated that 'I have always
been interested in missing things . . . people, time, history'. As Kroker perceptively notes: Virilio
can write The Aesthetics of Disappearance because all his texts have focussed on 'absented'
subjects: from the absented city of Bunker Archaeology and the absented bodies of Speed
and Politics to the absented (human) vision of Cinema and War and The Sight Machine.
(Kroker 1992: 42) One might well add the absence of the 'human' altogether with the publication of
the Art of the Motor. But there are serious problems in conflating technological reconstitution
with disappearance. Two in particular revolve around the use of a term like disappearance. The
first is overstatement: time, space, bodies do not simply disappear, but rather their meanings are
reconstituted, they still exist, but their meanings unfold through a more abstract framework.
Such overstatement also precludes the construction of a space for resistance based around the
question of ontological contradiction. In other words, people may not wish for so easy an
acquiescence in such disappearance; or they may attempt to reclaim or preserve prior
frameworks of meaning outside the sphere of technological abstraction which initiates such
disappearance (the current 'backlash' against the Internet may be a case in point). Second, by
framing 'disappearance' around the aesthetic, Virilio ignores the existence of several constitutive
levels within the social. Social relations with the other can occur at a face-to-face level and at an
extended and abstracted level (in Virilio's terms 'tele-proximity'). The second level does not entail
the disappearance of the first, indeed it draws its meaning from the prior framework, which structured the significance of intersubjective activity. Yet the twin axes of co-existence and drawing
upon a prior framework are elided by Virilio who conflates and aestheticises this process
around the question of disappearance. A similar observation can be made about the use of
'vector' and 'speed.' Both terms structurally preclude a consideration of the qualitative
differences which occur between actions that arise within different constitutive frameworks.
For instance, a communicative 'vector', established in a relation of presence of tangibility, is
qualitatively different from the movement of information on the Internet, or images transmitted
through the vectors of the global media. Yet the term 'vector' tends to collapse these different levels
into a single level, through which all vectors pass (as does Lyotard's description of the subject as a
'nodal point'). Similarly, 'speed' can only describe quantitative, but not qualitative difference,
thereby eliding questions of how we could create frameworks that would allow a
differentiated sense of temporality to unfold. In this way, Virilio's terminology remains
complicit, at an analytic level, with that which he opposes. Perhaps the most efficient way to
show how Virilio's work flattens the social out into a single constitutive layer would be to
examine a writer who has, in fact, attempted to harness this work in order to engage in a
strategy of resistance to the dominant technological framework, something Virilio himself
never attempts. Here we examine the work of McKenzie Wark who has attempted to harness
Virilio's central concept of the vector so as to strategically read the globalised media society against
its own grain.
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Virilio’s prescription of the world is rooted in technophobia and leaves us with a bleak
world with no chance of improvement.
Case 10 (Judd Ammon Case. Geometry of empire: radar as logistical medium. May 2010.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1659&context=etd&seiredir=1#search=%22geometry%20empire%22)
Virilio’s pessimism in the face of all things technological has been noted by scholars (Redhead,
2004; Cubitt, 2001), as has his moralistic anti-statism (Crogan, 2000; Crawford, 2000; McQuire,
1999). Despite occasional admissions that “all is not negative in the technology of speed. Speed
and that accident, that interruption which is the fall, have something to teach us on the nature of our
bodies and the functioning of our consciousness,“ (Virilio & Lotringer, 1997, p. 39) at times he
crosses the line into technophobia: He broadly compares media to the German occupation of
France during World War II (Redhead, 2004). He argues that interactivity amounts to forced
collision (Virilio, 2005). He describes technologies as tools of endocolonization (Virilio, 2005;
Virilio & Lotringer, 1997). Contributing to the gloom and doom is the fact that while Virilio is
a humanist, he has no sociology to speak of and has shown little interest in the possibilities of
culture-based appropriations of technologies.76 Virilio declares the eminent demise of
politics, democracy, apple pie, and the body, but offers few ideas about how the situation
might be improved.
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Technology is an extension of our own being and limiting it denies the ability of expanding
our capabilities.
Case 10 (Judd Ammon Case. Geometry of empire: radar as logistical medium. May 2010.
http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1659&context=etd&seiredir=1#search=%22geometry%20empire%22)
Kittler’s consideration of people as technology, as “self-guided missiles,” contributes to his
agreement with Benjamin that the masses cannot be trusted to overthrow technocratic
modernity (Comay, 2004; Kittler, 1997).79 Kittler further realizes that “To follow Benjamin is
to gather military information,” and therein finds himself telling “a story of strategic
command” (1997, p. 118). The broad questions at stake in Kittler’s story, though, are: Can the
entire world be conceived in digital binaries? Is nature a Turing (which is to say, a Universal)
machine? Is the real “as Jacques Lacan would have it…what is impossible in relation to our
machines and systems?” (1997, p. 25). These questions lead Kittler to conclude that “it is from
the specific terms—the equations, blueprints, circuit diagrams—that technology itself
provides that one must proceed, in order to see…what mechanisms determine and set the
limits of our bodies, our subjectivities, our discourse” (1997, p. 25). Therefore, Kittler traces the
military facets of cybernetics. Kittler approves of technological and militaristic progress and is
enthusiastic about digitalization. After noting fiber optic cables’ allowance of electronic warfare,
he off-handedly quips that, “Before the end, something is coming to an end. The general
digitalization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media. Sound
and image, voice and text are reduced to surface effects” (Kittler, 1999, p. 1). Kittler is not
concerned about an eschatological “end,” and delights in the technological integration and
synchronization that Virilio condemns. In a sense, Kittler cannot wait for Virilio’s dreaded
information bomb to drop. The interpretive differences between the two scholars are striking,
especially considering that both believe that war is “the father of all things technical,” and that the
media are powerful quartermasters of society (Kittler, 1999, p. xxxvi). Kittler is willing to push
cybernetics to its limit. For him, the promise of digitalization is nothing less than erasure of
“the very concept of medium,” and the replacement of distinct wiring, people, and
technologies with an endless loop of absolute knowledge (1999, p. 2). His discussion of Junger’s
war memoir is overt in this regard. He describes the dissolution of soldiers inner beings’ amidst
overwhelming weapons and/or media technologies, and in so doing barely conceals his
construction of social activity as warfare. Conclusively, Virilio’s technologically determined hell
is Kittler’s technologically determined heaven.
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Information overload has been a part of human perception for centuries and only leads to
innovative ways to process it.
Jungwirth 02 (Bernard Jungwirth. “Information Overload: Threat or Opportunity?” Journal of
Adolescent & Adult Literacy. 2002. http://www.isrl.illinois.edu/~chip/pubs/03LIA/13-003.pdf)
Humans have dealt with a permanent information overload in every aspect of their lives and
in every part of their history. Because humans are incapable of universal perception, what we
perceive is inherently selective. Information overload affects every human’s perception.
Historical examples support the view that information overload is not a new phenomenon. Ancient
writers and writers in the Middle Ages produced so much data that there was a permanent
threat of overfilled information storages, which led to the development of new information
processing techniques (Giesecke, 1992). There were similar fears after the invention of the
printing press. Concerns with information glut are the result of uncertainty during navigation
of newly constructed information spaces, but they do not really depend on the particular
amount of information.
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The rejection of technology only makes the information glut worse—the technological
innovation of the aff only has a chance of making it better.
Jungwirth 02 (Bernard Jungwirth. “Information Overload: Threat or Opportunity?” Journal of
Adolescent & Adult Literacy. 2002. http://www.isrl.illinois.edu/~chip/pubs/03LIA/13-003.pdf)
Human history is often viewed as a history of the extension of man. Explaining technology in
relation to the human body has a philosophical tradition. Kapp, who published the first systematic
philosophy of technology in Germany, looked at the human body as a basis for every
invention. Technology for Kapp (1877) was an imitation of the body (e.g., the hammer is an
imitation of the arm; optical devices rely on how an eye functions). Even Sigmund Freud
described a human being as a “god of prosthesis.” This thinking leads to the idea of
technology as a means of dealing with information overflow—technology as an extension of
the brain. We can already observe the use of simple implementations. Imagine that the World
Wide Web is printed out on paper, and you have to find a certain term manually. It would be
almost impossible to succeed, but with the help of search engines it is comparatively easy.
Technology has been and will be a useful tool for managing information glut. Just mentioning
buzzwords such as artificial intelligence and information agents gives the impression of further
development. Not only pure technology but also design-related disciplines become more
important. The growth of information architecture faces the challenge of increasing
information. It deals with the design of organization and navigation systems to help people
find and manage information more successfully (Rosenfeld, 1999). Cognitive Adaptation
Adaptation to the requirements of the information glut could take place not only on the level
of cultural techniques or technology, but also on a physiological level, at least in the long
term. According to Rötzer (1999), researchers have discovered a brain area that is responsible
for multitasking. Practice in using this area could certainly increase the ability to handle
information overload.
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Virilio’s never explains the normative, quazi-religious views of the human self that support his
arguments. He is no more than a one-sided writer that cannot include the developments of the
modern era into his critique.
Kellner 2k (Douglas Kellner. "Virilio, War, and Technology: Some Critical Reflections," Theory, Culture and
Society, Vol. 16(5-6), 1999: 103-125; reprinted in Paul Virilio. From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond,
edited by John Armitrage (London: Sage Publications, 2000: 103-125.)
Thus, Virilio is highly one-sided and does not develop a dialectical conception of technology or
a progressive technopolitics. So far, Virilio has produced no master oeuvre that will pull
together his ideas and perspectives, that will provide a synthetic overview. His long interviews
with Sylvere Lotringer (1983) and John Armitrage (in this issue) contain the best overview of what
I take to be his most valuable work, but it remains to be seen whether he will attempt to develop a
critical theory of technology for the present age. In addition, as a critical philosopher, Virilio is
quite ascetic, never articulating his normative position from which he carries on such a
sustained and ferocious critique of technology. He seems to assume something like a religious
humanism, that human beings are significant by virtue of their capacity for speech, reason,
morality, political deliberation and participation, and creative activity, while technology is
seen as undermining these human capacities, taking over human functions and rendering
humans subservient to technological rationality. But Virilio himself does not adequately
articulate the humanist or religious dimension of his critique and, as noted, describes himself
as a materialist and abstains from developing the normative perspective from which he
carries out his critique. Virilio's reflections on technology, speed and war, recall Walter Benjamin
who pointed out that the human body could simply not absorb the speed and lethality of modern
war. But first and foremost his critique of technology has echoes of Heidegger's and Ellul's
complaints concerning the totalitarian ethos of modern, and we would now add postmodern,
technology, the ways that its instruments and instrumentality dominate human beings and create a
novel world in which things and objects increasingly come to rule human beings. To the extent that
Virilio's works illuminate the great transformation that we are currently undergoing and warn us of
its dangers, too often ignored by the boosters and digiterati of the new technologies, he provides a
useful antidote to the uncritical celebrations of the coming computopia. But to the extent that he
fails to provide critical perspectives which delineate how new technologies can be used for
democratization, human empowerment, and to create a better world he remains a one-sided
critic rather than a philosopher of technology who grasps the full range and import of the
dramatic developments of the contemporary era.
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Virilio’s inability to cast aside a highly technophobic rhetoric makes it impossible for him
to adequately address technology. This brings into question the entirety of his work.
Kellner 2k (Douglas Kellner. "Virilio, War, and Technology: Some Critical Reflections," Theory, Culture and
Society, Vol. 16(5-6), 1999: 103-125; reprinted in Paul Virilio. From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond,
edited by John Armitrage (London: Sage Publications, 2000: 103-125.)
Yet Virilio has never really unravelled what he calls 'the riddle of technology', which would
require an interrogation of its fascination, power, and complexity, and not just its negativity.
Virilio criticizes the discourses of technophilia, that would celebrate technology as salvation, that
are totally positive without critical reservations, but he himself is equally one-sided, developing a
highly technophobic and hypercritical discourse that fails to articulate any positive aspects or
uses for new technologies, claiming that critical discourses like his own are necessary to
counter the overly optimistic and positive discourses. In a sense, this is true and justifies
Virilio's predominantly negative discourse, but raises questions concerning the adequacy of
Virilio's perspectives on technology as a whole and the extent to which his work is of use in
theorizing the new technologies with their momentous and dramatic transformation of every
aspect of our social and everyday life. Part of the problem with Virilio's writing in _Open Sky_
and all of his major texts is that they are highly disjointed and elusive. He throws out in
scattergun fashion fascinating ideas and some illustrations, substituting a highly evocative and
rhetorical mode of writing for systematic theoretical analysis and critique. His style is
extremely dromoscopic -- running and leaping from topic to topic with alacrity, juxtaposing defuse
elements and themes, proliferating images, quotes, and ideas which rapidly follow each other, often
overwhelming the reader and making it difficult to grasp the thrust of his argument. His work is
fragmentary and disruptive, deploying collage methods of assembling pieces of quotes, examples,
and analysis, while quickly moving from one topic to another.
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