Seminars!. “One of the most obvious facts about speed is that, despite its being central to the cultural experience of modern societies, it is hardly.

Seminars!Seminars!

“One of the most obvious facts about speed is that, despite its being central to the cultural experience of modern societies, it is hardly ever directly and

independently addressed in the major social scientific accounts of

modernity.” – John Tomlinson

“I stand rather alone in insisting that speed is clearly the determining factor. In my capacity as a social analyst, I do not wish to deliver monologues, but to partake in a dialogue. For the past twenty-five years, my work has never the less been solitary. To say that speed is a determining factor in society requires proof, an effort that is starting to exhaust me.” – Paul Virilio

What is speed?Speed in a cultural sense, rather than a scientific

sense, can be understood as the rate at which incidents or events happen.

Our direct experience of cultural speed is the rate at which events happen within our own lives. Because of

this the concept of speed as a cultural experience within its own right evades a lot of analysis as it is completely

subjective.

Speed as a cultural term usually means fast, but expands to slower rates too. (let’s take things slow)

Speed is not generative, i.e. it does not produce culture directly, but it changes culture by changing the speed at

which culture operates (usually by making it faster).

Paul VirilioPhilosopher of speed,

Inventor of Dromology,

“War was my university”

Career and Background• Born 1932• Went to art college and specialized in stained glass, worked along side

Matisse in Parisian churches• Became a Catholic• Conscripted in the Algerian war of independence (on the French side) • Studied phenomenology under Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne• 1958 carried out a phenomenological enquiry into military space• 1963 collaborated with the architect Claude Parent and created the

Architecture Principe group• Took part in the ‘68 riots in Paris• Was nominated professor by students at the Ecole Speciale Architecture• 1973 became the director of studies

• First renowned work was Speed and Politics published in 1977 by Semiotext(e) (45 years old)

• His predictions about the use of images and information within warfare were so accurate that he was invited to help the French army during the Gulf War

• Involved in many architectural projects• A friend of Giles Deluze• A phenomenologist

Architectural Work

Key Concepts . . .

Dromology

The philosophy of speed, from the Greek Dromos (to race).

The logic of speed is the foundation of technological society.

War and technology drive history.

The Integral Accident

Technology cannot exist without creating the potential for accidents - “To invent the ship is to also invent

the shipwreck”

Aristotle said there can be no science of the accident – Virilio disagrees, accidents are integral to

technology and are scientifically tested with crash dummies etc.

The Logistics of PerceptionThe movement of images and

information back and forth (i.e. between warzones and

the national press.)

The facility for images and information to be used as weapons

The War ModelWar drives history, society,

technology, cities etc.

Everything progresses at the speed of its

weapons systems.

The transition from feudalism to capitalism was due to the

mechanics of war (rather than politics of wealth and production

techniques)

Paul’s big break . . .

Speed and Politics (1977 Semiotext(e))

“The loss of material space leads to the

government of nothing but time… The violence of speed has become both the location and the law, the world’s

destiny and its destination”

1. From Street Fight to State Right

Locates the streets as the site of power within a contemporary city (“Whoever can conquer the

streets also conquers the State!” – Joseph Goebbels)

Starts with the citizens in relation to the roads and

highways, especially the unemployed, who he classifies as a moving horde that are constantly in

motion around the city, not allowed to loiter or linger.

“The revolutionary contingent (of the masses) attains its ideal form not in the place of

production, but in the street” p3

“For the mass of unemployed, demobilized workers without an occupation, Paris is a

tapestry of trajectories, a series of streets and avenues in which they roam, for the most part,

with neither goal nor destination, subject to police repression intended to control their

wanderings.”

“The masses are not a population, a society, but the multitude of passers by”

Totalitarian regimes rely on controlling the circulation of the masses. Speed limits on the roads and highway police and regulations are a way of

controlling the masses, denying them the ‘high of high speed’.

“revolution is movement, but movement is not a revolution”

The roads are the answer to the power of the city and the state. The state controls its subjects through controlling their transport.

Movement is the best way to occupy a territory. Speed and technologies of war brought about the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Gunpowder made the

impregnable fortress pregnable.

2 Highway Right to State RightGovernments gain control over the proletariat by

giving them sport and transport, the modern equivalent of bread and circuses.

Transport=Power

Modern power and control is about keeping people out of the streets “the temptation of the streets”

“The stroke of genius will consist in doing away with the direct repression of riots, and the political

discourse itself, by unveiling the essence of this discourse: the transportation capacity created by the

mass production of automobiles can be a social assault, a revolution sufficient and able to modify the citizen’s way of life by transforming all the consumers needs, by totally remodelling a territory that . . . had

no more than 400 kilometres of road” p26-7-De-politicising the population by completely changing

their needs and way of life through giving them all transport.

European forms of resistance (socialism, communism, Marxism etc) get subsumed into the ‘American

revolution’ (globalisation) which is about wanting the right to be a consumer, wanting the right to an

American automobile, wanting the right to travel, wanting the right to high speed.

This lead to the politicisation of the highways and cars

as well as the streets, there are speed limits and cars are bridled to stop them going too fast. The driver is

deprived of the right to high speed.

The mechanisation of the population through transport and radios (technologies of speed) prepared the unwitting masses for the mechanics of warfare, the population

became a reserve army.

Every corner garage and radio shack was like a training centre for the millions of youths becoming highly trained mechanics with skills that “could be readily transformed

in a short time, when the test came, into the ability to operate the complex implements of war” (account by V.

Bush)

The SA used to train car owners how to drive over different terrain and shoot while moving, the mobilisation of the

masses has an “extraordinary power of assault”

With the mobilisation of the masses (cars and bikes) time itself became political. Time became directly related to productivity as everything

became faster in terms of mobilising the workforce, transporting goods etc. Time became an entity in itself to be fought over because everyone

and everything could get around much quicker.

The revolution of the three eights – a unifying theme throughout all revolutionary movements (radical to

moderate)

(The ‘mysterious’ 8 hours leisure usually meant travel.)

The French revolution of 1789 was a revolt against constraint and immobility, against having to stay in one place.

“One day of revolt – not rest! A day not ordained by the bragging spokesmen of institutions holding the world of labor in bondage. A

day on which labor makes its own laws and has the power to execute them! All without the consent or approval of those who oppress and

rule. A day on which in tremendous force the unity of the army of toilers is arrayed against the powers that today hold sway over the

destinies of the people of all nations. A day of protest against oppression and tyranny, against ignorance and war of any kind. A

day on which to begin to enjoy ‘eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.’”

Paradoxically the immateriality speed brings about a materiality of behaviour. Belief is less important than acting in the correct way (making sure

everything runs smoothly)

Rehabilitation camps in Vietnam and China were where “materialism reaches its absolute form . . . granting importance to an opposing thought, to a

different concept, is totally eliminated.”

“The dissident is a body, his dissidence a postural crime – his indolence, his lavishness”

“There are hardly any more crimes of opinion, only crimes of gesture”

(This is similar to Zizek’s disavowal - it doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in money as long as you act like its real)

Pt2 Ch1 From Space Right to State Right

There are two types of humanity, populating the land and populating the sea.

Within modern warfare the infantryman becomes increasingly irrelevant with more bombing from air and sea.

“The permanent presence in the sea of an invisible fleet able to strike no matter where and no matter when, annihilating the enemies will to power by creating a global zone of insecurity in which it will no longer be able to ‘decide’ with certainty.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7892294.stm

British and French nuclear submarines collide in the Atlantic despite infinitesimally small chance of the accident happening

The cold war pushed the possibility of war until the point where it is no longer possible, bringing about a strange state of security on the basis of assured annihilation.

The point of nuclear weapons is not to actually using them, but by having them they allow you to act and behave in a

certain way.

The bomb is political because it is the ultimate form of military surveilance

Modern warfare is all about maintaining the enemy in a state of desperation without actually engaging in battle.

Pt2 Ch2 Practical WarOnce war wasn’t confined to specific territorial conflicts (‘theatres of war’)

“total war” emerges.

“we should be able to impose war on all the inhabitable parts of the universe”

“The war of attrition marks a new threshold; bourgeois society had believed it could endorse absolute violence in the ghetto of the army zone but,

deprived of space, war had spread into human time”

All the time the progression of war is the progression of history and society.War technology creates a necessity to go to war.

Pt 3 Dromocratic societyMechanics of war destroyed human bodies and brought about developments

in human prosthesis.An exponential development of medical knowledge came about because of

so much trauma.Extensive assault requires fast death (bombing), preparatory assault requires

slow death.Hostages, abduction and genocide are the preferred medium of dromocratic

violence“Dromological progress and what we conventionally call human and social

progress coincided but did not converge”

Dromological development as follows:1 society without (effective) transport, woman

is ‘logistical spouse’ mother of war and of the truck (?)

2 The use of the (soulless empty) proletariat as vehicles

3 The vehicular revolution4 Technology overtakes man5 “The end of the dictatorship of the proletariat

and of history in the war of time”

Now war is fought through economic penetration rather than territorial penetration. Make sure needs

are created, use the economy to deterritorialise and then reterritorialise a country (Deleuze)

On to “the time when as Lenin says, the working class suddenly found itself courted and solicited even by the capitalists”

“possibilities for properly human political action will disappear in a state of emergency”

With faster weapons systems, with less warning time, and more automated defence technologies, the margin for human

intervention becomes increasingly small

“Linear time is eliminated”The power to invade makes a right to invade

Privilege is access to speed

“The reduction of distances has become a strategic reality bearing incalculable economic and political consequences,

since it corresponds to the negotiation of space”“The strategic value of the non-place of speed has definitely

supplanted that of place”“We have to face facts: today, speed is war, the last war”“The war machine becomes the very decision for war”

“The more speed increases, the faster freedom decreases”