Speed Pollution

According to Paul Virilio, real time is prevailing over real space, reducing the
world to nothing.

By James Der Derian

Over the course of a diverse career as professor of architecture, film critic,

urbanist, military historian, peace strategist, and intellectual provocateur, French
author Paul Virilio has produced more than a dozen books. His writings move with a
rare fluidity from the quotidian (train wrecks and city planning) to the exotic (stock
market crashes and the ultramodern war machine). Since writing his first book, Bunker
Archeology, a study of Hitler's "Atlantic Wall," Virilio has gone on to crisscross the
circuitry of modern thinking with genre-busting studies of the impact of speed on
politics ("the dromocratic revolution") and the co-evolution of war and cinema ("the
logistics of perception"). Turning his corrosive intellect to the impact of technology
on war, the body, and the media, Virilio pierces some of the darker veilings of the
future. James Der Derian met with Virilio in Paris.

Wired: Is the author dead?

Virilio : Written work is threatened by the evocative power of the screen, and in
particular the live screen. Though not by the image - there have always been images in
books; there have always been images in architecture, like frescoes or stained-glass
windows. It is real time that threatens writing. Writing is always, always, in
deferred time - always delayed. Once the image is live, there is a conflict between
deferred time and real time, and this is a serious threat to writing and the author.

Is that why you write about film? Cinema interested me enormously for its kinematic
roots - all my work is dromological, related to the study of speed. Inevitably, after
having treated metabolic speed, the role of the cavalry in history, the speed of the
human body, I became interested in technological speed. It goes without saying that
after relative speed (the railroad, aviation) there was absolute speed - the
transition to the limit of electromagnetic waves. Cinema interested me as a stage in
between, the putting into movement of images.

Has this shift changed the nature of war? Of course. It changes the logistics of
perception. In war, the logistics of perception was from the start a geographic
logistics of domination from an elevated site - the tower, the telescope, the
fortified castle, or the level of perception of the bombardier. The development of the
battlefield corresponds to the development of the field of perception made possible by
technical advancements: the technologies of geometrical optics, the telescope,
waveoptics, electro-optics, the electromagnetic transmission of a signal in video,
and, of course, computer graphics, the new multimedia. The battlefield is no longer
"worldwide," in the sense of the First or Second World War. It is global, in the sense
of the planet.

Was the Gulf War the first global war? The Gulf War was a fractal war: at once local
and global. With regard to its battlefield, it was a local war - without many deaths,
without many consequences - in comparison with the Second World War. But it was a
worldwide war on the temporal level of representation, on the level of media. In fact,
it was a war that took place in the artifice of television much more than in the
reality of the field of battle. One can already say that real time prevailed over real
space.

In your writing, wartime seems to prevail over all time. I am a "war baby." As a child
I lived through the horrors of the Second World War, through the reign of technology
as absolute terror. I was in Nantes, which was destroyed by our allies - the Americans
and the English. For a child, a city is like the Alps, it's eternal, like the
mountains. Then one single bombardment and all is razed. War was my university.

What about the impact of technology on culture? There have been three industrial
revolutions. The first important revolution on the technical plane was that of
transportation. The second, which was almost concomitant, was the transmissions
revolution, including Marconi, Edison, radio, television. The third, which we are on
the verge of, is the revolution of transplantations. All these technologies of
telecommunications that had been employed in aviation and missiles favor
nanotechnology - the possibility of miniaturizing technology to the point of
introducing it into the human body. Just as the geographic world was colonized by
means of transportation or communication, we have the possibility of the colonization
of the body by technology - as if we had the city in the body and not the city around
the body. We are on the verge of the biomachine.

When hardware and wetware merge are there any ethical choices left? I believe that the
three revolutions lead to a technical fundamentalism, a "cybercult." Just as there is
religious fundamentalism, there is a technical fundamentalism. Modern man, who killed
the Judeo-Christian God, the one of transcendence, invented a god machine, a deus ex
machina. But it's necessary to be an atheist of technology! This is not simply
antitechnology. My fetish image is that of the battle of Jacob and the angel. Jacob is
a believer, he meets the angel of God; but to remain a free man, he is obliged
to do battle. It is necessary to obey
- but also to resist.

What comes next? I think that the infosphere - the sphere of information - is going to
impose itself on the geosphere. We are going to be living in a reduced world. The
capacity of interactivity is going to reduce the world to nearly nothing. In fact,
there is already a speed pollution, which reduces the world to nothing. In the near
future, people will feel enclosed in a small environment. They will have a feeling of
confinement in the world, which will certainly be at the limit of tolerability, by
virtue of the speed of information. If I were to offer you a last thought -
interactivity is to real space what radioactivity is to the atmosphere.

Translated by James Der Derian with Lauren Osepchuk and Michael Degener.

-James Der Derian (jderian@polsci.umass.edu) is editor of the forthcoming Paul

Virilio Reader (Blackwell Press) and author of "Cyber-Deterrence," in Wired
2.09.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.05/virilio_pr.html