Virilio, Paul (1932–)

An important, if little understood, theorist of social and spatial change is Paul Virilio—the so-called high priest of speed, a planner, a historian of technology, a photographer, and a philosopher of architecture and cinema. Other than military service, his formal education included the study of art at the École des Métiers d'Art as well as phenomenology at the Sorbonne.

Impressed by the events of World War II, Virilio's work is grounded in the practices of the military, and he regards the culture of speed as driven primarily by its needs, whose conquest of the tyranny of distance extends repeatedly into civilian life. Virilio takes as his point of departure the intersections of military technology and the experience of speed, underscoring the machinic qualities of time and space as they are produced and conceptualized through his central concern, war. Thus, the state is essentially a machine to wage war, exhibiting a logic quite different from the Marxist emphasis on capital accumulation; in Virilio's reading, the state is a “means of destruction,” not a means of production. For him, geography is a product of warfare because the preparation for and engagement in military conflict, including things such as logistics, intelligence, and the speeds of military machinery and rockets, are the fundamental bases of territorial organization. Space here is reduced to little more than a theater of war, and the state is simply a machine for waging it. Steady improvements in the ability to wage war are thus instrumental in developing the ability to bind together ever-larger units of space and time. Not capital accumulation but the dynamics of military conquest are the driving force behind the historical rounds of time-space compression. Space and time are the products of speed as it emanates from the prerequisites of warfare. Thus, Virilio asserts that

Telecommunications also figure centrally in Virilio's worldview, in which digital technologies [Page 3019]produced a world in which information is speed and duration is nonexistent. Virilio maintains,

The tyranny of constant speed leads to alienated, stressed-out, exhausted citizens who populate the virtual geographies of the space of flows; distorts human perception; sterilizes communications; forces a colonialism of daily life by machines; and generates a mindless automation that robs people of their humanity in a hypermotorized, digitized world. Virilio asserts that time-space compression has become sufficiently complete so that the struggle for space—geopolitics—has been displaced by chronopolitics, the struggle for time. In Virilio's view, postmodern capitalism has created such enormous time-space compression that “distinctions of here and there no longer mean anything” (1991, p. 13) Despite the hyperbole, Virilio's insights are useful in understanding that speed and velocity are not simply technical issues but profoundly cultural and political ones as well.

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