Virilio, Paul

Paul Virilio (b. 1932), the French self-styled “urbanist” and “critic of the art of technology,” was, until his retirementin 1998, professor of architecture at the École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris. Virilio's importance for understanding contemporary culture arises from his constant engagement with many of the most significant theoretical questions within the field of cultural studies. In his writings Virilio has made a vital and wide-ranging contribution to the understanding of the cultural features of modern architecture as well as offering critical studies of urban planning, speed, and war, including several volumes of critique on cinema, technology, political organizations, social hierarchies, and aesthetic practices. Encompassing “military space” and “dromology” (the study of the compulsive logic of speed), Virilio's “war model” is a highly stylized methodological line of attack on postmodern culture that spurns the analysis of such concepts and realities as mere objects for cultural or theoretical reflection. By way of his conception of the “aesthetics of disappearance” (art founded on retinal and materially persistent reality), Virilio has also idiosyncratically reinterpreted the cultural history of modernism, inclusive of the writings of artistic revolutionaries, philosophical leaders, and technoscientific thinkers such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Einstein.

Accordingly, in Bunker Archeology (1994), Virilio focused his attention on the military space of the Atlantic Wall—the 15,000 Nazi bunkers constructed during World War II along the French coastline to prevent an Allied landing. Virilio and the French architect Claude Parent's The Function of the Oblique (1996), by contrast, argues for the establishment of an urban system founded on the theory of the “oblique function.” Introducing sloping planes and corporeal dislocation, the theory nonetheless culminated in the concrete edifice of the bunkerlike Church of Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay at Nevers. Likewise, Virilio's The Lost Dimension (1991) is not literally involved with the inner city and structural design. Rather, it is concerned with urbanism and architecture as the military spaces of the “overexposed city” that is permeated by “morphological irruption,” “improbable architecture,” and critically, those new political “speed-spaces” of information, communications, and vision technologies such as the Internet.

Virilio's conception of speed-space may persuade readers to contemplate merely the overexposed city. But adheringto the terminology created in his Speed & Politics (1986), the genuine difficulties of the development of “dromocratic” culture and society emerge from its unending “state of emergency.” Dromology has nothing to do with urban peace and, as in the military space of war, everything to do with the increasingly technologically induced death of distance that has become a planned certainty effecting immense sociocultural consequences, while it also ties in with the annihilation of space during wartime. Virilio's “dromological” war model therefore tracks the metropolitan, architectural, and technopolitical vectors of the military machine. Hence, the “logistics of perception,” maintains Virilio in his War and Cinema (1989), elucidate a future in which the technological functioning of contemporary civilian vision machines (e.g., surveillance cameras) and war machines progress simultaneously. Harmonizing the tasks of the human eye and the technology of weaponry, the military field of perception turns into a machine that produces a telescopic regime that lies far beyond the capacities of human sight. In Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles (1990), by comparison, Virilio reflects on “pure power,” the enforcement of surrender without engagement, and “revolutionary resistance” to war. In so doing, he refuses to comprehend, for instance, the present-day Palestinian struggle as simply “popular defense,” insisting that it is also a “popular assault” against its own geopolitical disappearance.

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