Paul Virilio (1932–2018) Spoke to an Age of Acceleration and Total War
McKenzie Wark pays tribute to the French cultural theorist, who called our era one of ‘dromocracy’: the reign of speed
Strangely enough, Paul Virilio, who died on 10 September 2018 at the age of 86, breached the Anglophone world with a book he did not exactly write. Pure War came out in 1983 and is based on interviews he conducted with Sylvère Lotringer, the philosopher and founder of Semiotext(e), who put it together as a real act of friendship. That book burst like an incendiary shell in certain readers’s minds and highlighted his two consistent themes: war and speed.
Virilio’s first love had been architecture. But what is architecture in the age of total war? For centuries, the European city had defended itself against slings and arrows with ramparts and walls, but the city was no match for modern artillery and aerial bombardment. The balance between war and the city shifted decisively in the modern age. The vector trumps the location. This was the bittersweet theme of his first major book, Bunker Archaeology (1975), which, among other things, is a meditation on the German defenses that had failed to keep the Allies at bay when they stormed the beaches and ended the war.
But war doesn’t really end, as Virilio noted, it just accelerates, approximating ever more closely to its pure form. In an era infatuated with the ‘politics’ of everything, he thought instead in terms of war. Modernity is war on ever increasing scales: expanding from the tactical to the strategic to the logistic. World War II was won not by generals but by quartermasters, by the ones who kept the biggest flows of boots and bullets and bodies moving toward the front.
Modernity is also war on more and more kinds of terrain. Warfare not only took to the air but to the airwaves. The modern world is a condition of generalized information warfare. Not only is architecture vulnerable to bombs, it proves defenseless against information, passing through the doors and walls of our homes, rearranging the space and time we imagine we live within.
And Huxley wrote on this Time of Dystopia coming into existence and so we have been warned. Now is the hour of G3PSndroids. Global Public Private Partnerships that control Global finance and the world’s economy. G3P sets world, national and local policy (via global governance) and then promotes those policies using the mainstream media (MSM) corporations, which are also “partners” within the G3P.
https://www.technocracy.news/technocracy-in-china-the-worlds-first-technate-part-1/
Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote enthusiastically, through a paper-thin veil of caution, about how a “global scientific elite” could not only use extreme, all-pervasive propaganda, economic and political manipulation to determine the direction of society, but could also exploit technology and behavioural science to genetically alter and brainwash the population.
Describing the form of this society and the potential for technocratic control, he wrote:
Such a society would be dominated by an elite whose claim to political power would rest on allegedly superior scientific know-how. Unhindered by the restraints of traditional liberal values, this elite would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control.
He claimed that the “Technetronic Age” he described was inevitable. Therefore he asserted that the future of the United States (and the planet) must be centrally planned. These planners would eventually displace “the lawyer as the key social legislator and manipulator.”