[D66] The Administration of Fear

[A.O.]

https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/paul-virilios-legacy/8320

Paul Virilio (1932 – 2018)

Paul Virilio passed away on the 18th of September 2018 at the age of 86.
In this piece, Mark Lacy reflects on his life, work and contemporary
relevance.
Article0_large-

Paul Virilio (1932 – 2018) is not for everyone. Books with strange,
alien titles such as Negative Horizon, Polar Inertia, Bunker Archaeology
and the Lost Dimension – and books written in a style that can be
equally strange (and alienating), filled with concepts such as
endo-colonization, dromology, the integral accident and the aesthetics
of disappearance.

But running through books that could come across like academic
counter-points to the novels of J.G. Ballard were the reflections of a
man who as a child – like Ballard – had experienced the trauma of the
Second World War and wanted to understand the role of war in our past
and how it might shape our futures: he mentions in a collection of
interviews the death of a girl from his neighbourhood who was shot by a
German Patrol and how the experience of war gave him the sense that the
world had all the permanence of  a film set. His work went on to examine
the ‘accidents’ that resulted from our desire for safer, more
technologically advanced lives and to examine the conditions of
possibility of future accidents, and victims, that might be produced in
a world of climate change, biotechnology, artificial intelligence and
advances in robotics. In this sense, Virilio is for everyone.

Virilio passed away on the 18th of September 2018 at the age of 86, in
many ways the last of the generation of French intellectuals that
emerged from the new possibilities opened up after the events of May
’68. While not as famous (or infamous) as Foucault, Deleuze, Baudrillard
and Derrida, Virilio leaves us with a body of work that seems to grow in
importance in the 21st century as we deal with the ‘pace of change’ in
technology and international politics.

I think one of the keys to understanding Virilio is his friendship with
the poet George Perec. In books such W or Memory of a Childhood Perec’s
work experimented with ways to examine the fascism and anti-semitism
that had destroyed his family during the war – there was a playful,
experimental but deadly serious project in his writing. Virilio also
developed a style of writing that often feels experimental, searching
for a new way of understanding of the world, as if the impact of the
Second World War generated the need to write differently, to live
differently, to build differently, to escape all that had come before.

For Virilio,  this project for building a different world began in his
thinking about architecture, thinking that had been inspired by his
obsession with the bunkers on the Atlantic Coast (in an interview he
tells of how as a child he drew plans of the bunkers that  he would pass
on to the resistance). His architectural work developed alongside the
work of his partner Claude Parent in the group Architecture Principe:
there is a photograph of the two driving around Paris in what looks like
a jeep with ‘Architecture Principe’ painted on the front. Virilio and
Parent wanted an architecture of the ‘oblique function’ that would
engage the body in a way that was disappearing in the passivity-inducing
consumer worlds of comfort, conformity and efficiency.

Drawing on their ideas, they built the Church of St Bernadette in Nevers
between 1963 and 1966 but the group disbanded after the events of 1968.
Virilio took part in the occupation of Parisian universities, teaching
students about the importance of military bunkers (and supposedly had to
escape back to Brittany after the unrest of May); Parent had no time for
the student movements of May ‘68 and went off to make money and
buildings: he designed French nuclear power stations, among other
projects. He later described Virilio - perhaps rather defensively – as
Mr Catastrophe.

Reading about Virilio’s life you get the sense of a man who loved Paris,
building his life and career there, moving through the worlds of cinema
(he was friends with the film director Eric Rohmer), the worlds of
literature (Virilio even pops up in a description of everyday life in
Paris written by Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris from
1974), the academic world populated by Deleuze, Foucault and Baudrillard
(who appear to always be involved in healthy and not so healthy
competition) and the worlds of politics. But while Virilio may have
loved Paris, central to his work was the darkside of cities. Modern
cities have been the experimental laboratories in new types of policing
and control: and his work in the 1970s and 1980s anticipates a world
where cities would become increasingly like airports, filled with new
technologies to ensure that the urban environment would not descend into
disorder, crime and terror. During the 1990s he also anticipated the way
in which cities would become the key terrains of conflict and terror in
a world where information technologies would create the possibility for
new types of global event.

There are three broad areas that emerge from Virilio’s interest in
cities that give us a sense of what makes his work so fascinating and
often disturbing: movement, vision and the accident.

Throughout his work Virilio is interested in movement. The modern city
creates messy, complex environments where individuals, groups and
vehicles move around the city in greater numbers: for the police and
politicians one of the key concerns was with preventing this movement
becoming chaotic or dangerous. You want your police forces to be able to
move quickly and efficiently around the city- and you don’t want a
revolutionary group being able to block your movement and disrupt the
political and economic life of the city. Virilio suggests that the
design of Paris during the Nineteenth century was profoundly concerned
with urban planning for security and order: for example, making
boulevards that were so wide blockades and barricades were impossible.
But in one of Virilio’s most influential books - Speed and Politics: An
Essay on Dromology  (1977) - he makes the argument that it was this
revolution in the technologies of movement that made modern, industrial
scale war possible. To be able to move greater and greater numbers of
people and objects across larger and larger territories (and at faster
and faster speeds) produced the age of industrial scale killing and war.
This history of movement, logistics and war – and the future of war - is
fundamental to Virilio’s work.

To be able to move faster and faster – and then to have machines move
faster and faster – becomes one of the primary military obsessions. The
culmination of this obsession with speed and war is the nuclear age
where for Virilio the concern is that the price of deterrence is the
possibility of the accident and the proliferation of weapons that can
end life on earth. But the concern is also that we enter into an ‘arms
race’ that now extends to a range of new technologies and sciences. In
our search for security and better defence we might be on a path that
changes life - and what it means to be human - in radical and
unpredictable ways. Indeed, in current U.S. military thinking - and in
initiatives like the Third Offset Strategy - there is very clearly a
sense that the race is on: new technologies are emerging and we might
not be able to control their impact on society and warfare – and it
might also be that rival states and non-state actors might get access to
these technologies of biotechnology, robotics, machine learning or
cyberweaponry before us and use them against us. So we need to stay
ahead when it comes to the innovations; this race for technological
supremacy is the logic that drives our societies.

The next key area of Virilio’s work is vision. Again, returning to
Paris: the city became one the most ‘visible’ modern cities because of
one of the most fundamental technologies of security – the streetlight.
The streetlight transforms zones of insecurity into zones of
surveillance and safety, expanding the economic potential of a city,
transforming Paris into the city of lights. Virilio suggests that the
policing and military obsession with vision takes us from the castle
turret, to the street light, to the CCTV camera, to the drone surveying
the territory and ‘patterns of life’ below, to the big data and
artificial intelligence that will try to see deeper into every aspect of
our lives and behaviour.

In War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (1989) Virilio shows how
the military obsession with ‘vision machines’ – from the early cameras
used to map the activities on the battlefield through to the creation of
propaganda films in Nazi Germnay- transformed how we could see the world
(and how we could be seen), culminating in a world where screens are
everywhere and where ‘vision machines’ to record all aspects of life are
ubiquitous. Virilio is interested in how an ‘aesthetics of
disappearance’ not only comes to shape how we experience the media
presentation of increasingly ‘invisible war’ but also how images and
photographs continue to contain the possibility of being able to change
our perception of the world. Exploring this, Virilio curated a number of
exhibitions in Paris such as the Unknown Quantity and Native Lands that
used visual techniques to challenge how we come to understand the world.
For Virilio media technologies would come to transform politics in the
21st century. During the 1990s Virilio anticipated the negative
consequences of the information age or the network society, warning of
the age of the information bomb ‘Disinformation is achieved by flooding
TV viewers with information, with apparently contradictory data.’
Anticipating the concern with fake news and election hacking, Virilio
was concerned that politics would be profoundly transformed by the
information bomb.

The other key element in his work is on what he sometimes describes as
the integral accident. Throughout his work, Virilio suggests we are
heading into a disturbing new age of technology, paranoia, inequality,
authoritarianism and what he calls ‘impure war’ (the type of conflict
that some say we see being orchestrated by Russia, the ‘hybrid wars’
that use new techniques and technologies to infiltrate informational
spaces rather territorial space). Writing at the end of the 1970s, he
concludes Speed and Politics by suggesting we are entering an age of
anarcho-capitalists, a type of capitalism that will celebrate the idea
of the privatized utopia: there might be utopias for some but they will
be utopias within gated communities. The rest of us will be left to buy
our protection. During the 1990s, Virilio suggested that Europe and
America should look to Africa and South Africa to see our future: it is
unclear what he means by this – it might mean the creation of urban
environments that depend more and more on gated communities or it might
mean the emergence of a different type of politics and politician. As
Mario Vargas Llosa recently told an interviewer, “Trump is so Third
World-esque. Who would have thought that the US would succumb to such
demagoguery?”

What concerns Virilio here is the idea that the liberal story or myth of
progress might just be a story we tell ourselves, a story about to reach
a critical stage as we deal with the consequences of the technologies
that promise the path to a better future for all. Whether it is the idea
of robotics and artificial intelligence leading to a world of perpetual
underemployment and new techniques of control (rather than a world of
new possibilities for work and leisure, basic incomes and so on), or
that climate change will create a world of climate refugees and new
territories and trade routes to fight over as we search for
technological fixes through geo engineering (rather than developing new
types of energy and economy), Virilio leaves us with a bleak vision of
the future, the type of future depicted in the films Elysium or Blade
Runner 2049, a world of cascading accidents and catastrophes in which
the financial crisis and the war or terror are just the trailer. And a
situation where our information bombed politics might be unwilling – or
unable – to deal with.

But what Virilio aimed to do was encourage thinking that constantly
sought to undermine the type of ‘magical thinking’ that politicians,
technologists and bureaucrats sometimes become entranced by in matters
of economy, war and technology. There is a purpose to his ‘negativity’,
a vision of politics and society that we see in the activist work he did
for the homeless in Paris, a political position that I think still holds
on to his worldview from the 1960s: that we can - and must - build
something different. As thinkers – if we want to try to understand the
world – we must search wide, exploring worlds that might be alien to us,
from architecture, to computer science, to military history, to
philosophy, to whatever we need to make sense of this accelerating 21st
century world.

In the last two years I have been waiting to read Virilio’s observations
on the state of the world today with Trump, populism, climate change,
artificial intelligence, hybrid war and cybersecurity. But there was
silence and now there will be no more writings on the broad range of
issues he explored so often since the 1960s. But really it’s all there
anyway, in the writings and questions he leaves us with.

Dr Mark Lacy is a senior lecturer in the Department of Politics,
Philosophy and Religion, Lancaster University. He has written about Paul
Virilio’s work in Security, Technology and Global Politics: Thinking
with Virilio (Routledge, 2014). He is currently writing a book on the
future of war.


On 21-09-18 11:48, A.O. wrote:
> 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)
> 
> Request Permissions
> Overview
> Author(s)
> Summary
> 
> 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.
> 
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