[D66] The Administration of Fear

[A.O.]

RIP Virilio

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/administration-fear


>From Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series
The Administration of Fear

By Paul Virilio

With Bertrand Richard

Translated by Ames Hodges
A new interview with the philosopher of speed, addressing the ways in
which technology is utilized in synchronizing mass emotions.

Distributed for Semiotext(e)

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A new interview with the philosopher of speed, addressing the ways in
which technology is utilized in synchronizing mass emotions.

We are living under the administration of fear: fear has become an
environment, an everyday landscape. There was a time when wars, famines,
and epidemics were localized and limited by a certain timeframe. Today,
it is the world itself that is limited, saturated, and manipulated, the
world itself that seizes us and confines us with a stressful
claustrophobia. Stock-market crises, undifferentiated terrorism,
lightning pandemics, “professional” suicides.... Fear has become the
world we live in.

The administration of fear also means that states are tempted to create
policies for the orchestration and management of fear. Globalization has
progressively eaten away at the traditional prerogatives of states (most
notably of the welfare state), and states have to convince citizens that
they can ensure their physical safety.

In this new and lengthy interview, Paul Virilio shows us how the
“propaganda of progress,” the illuminism of new technologies, provide
unexpected vectors for fear in the way that they manufacture frenzy and
stupor. For Virilio, the economic catastrophe of 2007 was not the death
knell of capitalism, as some have claimed, but just further evidence
that capitalism has accelerated into turbo-capitalism, and is
accelerating still. With every natural disaster, health scare, and
malicious rumor now comes the inevitable “information bomb”—live feeds
take over real space, and technology connects life to the immediacy of
terror, the ultimate expression of speed. With the nuclear dissuasion of
the Cold War behind us, we are faced with a new form of civil
dissuasion: a state of fear that allows for the suspension of
controversial social situations.