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The Speeds of Ambiguity: An Interview with Paul Virilio

Jason Michael Adams

Introduction

From 9/11 through the election of Obama, the events of the early
twenty-first century have both dilated and contracted the receptivity of
potential audiences to Paul Virilio’s unique oeuvre. On the one hand, the
practices of America’s imperial sovereignty have often exemplified his
polemics against “globalitarianism,” thereby drawing attention his way. On
the other, the sometimes-agreeable effects of space-time compression
have led many to search elsewhere for a more affirmative approach, cast-
ing Virilio aside as overly pessimistic. Indeed, many of the most nuanced
accounts of technoculture emphasize the latter, often as an implicit retort
to him, or to comparatively forceful figures such as Giorgio Agamben. For
instance, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest, as the Italian autono-
mists did more broadly, that insofar as they elude the logic of capitalism,

Introduction and interview by Jason Michael Adams. Translation by Drew Burk, with the
assistance of Hubertus Von Amelunxen. This interview was conducted on March 29,
2007.

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speed and circulation actually constitute “the first ethical act of a counter-
imperial ontology.” However, as Gilles Deleuze has suggested, developing
a critical disposition to the world that is as radical as it is subtle requires
not only the embrace of immanence as such but a discriminating eye with
respect to what is and is not affirmed within it. Virilio’s suggestion in this
respect, which he specifically stated in response to the autonomists when
they seemed to misappropriate his writings in the seventies, is that while
capitalism has rendered speed and circulation in a largely negative man-
ner, so too has much of that which claims to upend its logic. But this does
not mean that he condemns it as such: as Deleuze puts it in Nietzsche and
Philosophy,

[T]he yes which does not know how to say no (the yes of the ass) is
a caricature of affirmation. This is precisely because it says yes to
everything which is no, because it puts up with nihilism it continues
to serve the power of denying—which is like a demon whose every
burden it carries. The Dionysian yes, on the contrary, knows how to
say no. It is pure affirmation, it has conquered nihilism and divested
negation of all autonomous power. But it has done this because it
has placed the negative at the service of the power of affirming. To
affirm is to create, not to bear, put up with, or accept.

This interview was conducted on the assumption I have worked with

since I began reading Virilio’s work while completing my master’s thesis,
which sought to apply his thought to the War on Terror, as it was then unfold-
ing. To put it briefly, my intuition was that for all their seeming pessimism,
Virilio’s technocultural writings are more productively understood as a “Dio-
nysian yes” than as a simple assertion of the no as such. This assumption
was in fact verified numerous times during my interactions with him during
a European Graduate School seminar a few years back that was held in

. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000),
363.
. Referring to their use of pirate radio, for instance, he cautioned: “the problem is not to
use technology but to realize that one is used by it . . . when you spend several thousand
francs on material for a free radio, you know how to buy, you know how it works, but you
don’t know what to do while on the air!” (Paul Virilio, Pure War [New York: Semiotext(e),
1997], 80). For his critique of the Red Brigades’ use of his thought, see Paul Virilio,
“Popular Defense and Popular Assault,” in Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, ed. Sylvère
Lotringer and Christian Marazzi (New York: Semiotext[e], 1980), 266.
. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press,
1983), 185.

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his current city of residence, La Rochelle, France. In person and throughout

his writings, my hunch had been that the specificity of his thought derives
not from “the political” itself as it is explicitly stated but from the aesthetic
as itself political. In his version of that theme, that which is properly called
politics is merely one element of a technocultural disposition that has been
inculcated in the modern period so as to preclude its actualization. While
one might not agree with every element of the argument, the assertion of
a centrifugal rather than centripetal sensibility is one that we should still
take seriously, for, as Virilio has lamented, in reference to those who fail
to, an uncritical affirmation is itself a type of pessimism. “Progress is one
thing nobody sees as an object for criticism. Yet technology is the vector of
progress and I would say that there can be no art without criticism. An art
lover is at the same time an art critic, since a taste for art implies a certain
quality of judgment. As a lover of new technology art, I totally contest the
objective status accorded to the technosciences.”
What I am referring to as Virilio’s Dionysian yes, in other words,
emphasizes that an embrace of late modernity as such is nihilistic inso-
far as it precludes the true, creative potentiality of science and technology
by reifying the notion that to affirm simply means “to bear, put up with or
accept.” Criticism in this sense instead implies a cognizance of the posi-
tive, negative, and ambiguous dimensions of the object in question, just as
one would accord to a work of art: thus, there is no need to essentialize it
in any of these directions prior to engagement. This, of course, is why he
often recalls the image of Jacob wrestling with the angels before coming
to a conclusion about God; like Martin Buber, Virilio sees the oft-cited

. Paul Virilio, Virilio Live: Selected Interviews (London: Sage, 2001), 149.
. The reference is to Genesis 32:22–30, in which Jacob has set off to meet his brother
Esau, who, Jacob has just learned, has sent four hundred men to confront him. The
struggle with the angel along the way serves as evidence not only of his faith in the divine
promise that he will avert the danger but of his having arrived at that conclusion only
after having “striven with God.” The passage reads: “The same night he arose and took
his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of
the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and everything else that he
had. And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day.
When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and
Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, ‘Let me go, for the
day has broken.’ But Jacob said, ‘I will not let you go unless you bless me.’ And he said to
him, ‘What is your name?’ And he said, ‘Jacob.’ Then he said ‘Your name shall no longer
be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have pre-
vailed.’ Then Jacob asked him, ‘Please tell me your name.’ But he said ‘Why is it that you

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encounter “as a metaphor for all of humanity’s struggling with life’s existen-
tial questions.” Rather than “sleeping before technology,” then, by taking
our individualized, affectively inculcated experience for granted, Virilio sug-
gests that we wrestle with it too, by beginning with its deleterious qualities,
so that we might begin to engage it in a more complicated manner that
would introduce conditions of possibility for its future development in more
beneficial directions. “Today we have ad-men, even experts, who spend all
their time saying how wonderful technology is. They are giving it the kiss
of death. By being critical I do more for the development of new technolo-
gies than by giving in to my illusions and refusing to question technology’s
negative aspects.”
Virilio’s quip demonstrates why it is that although figures such as
Jacques Derrida and Deleuze take a more explicitly philosophical approach
to the question of speed, they are not necessarily more complex or even
more “affirmative” in their assessment, as might be presumed. To the con-
trary, even they have positively cited him, as the latter, for instance, does
throughout A Thousand Plateaus while also referencing his importance in
“Postscript on Control Societies” as one of the exemplary interrogators,
along with William S. Burroughs, of the world as it is emerging amidst “ultra-
rapid forms of free-floating control.” It is no surprise, therefore, that Virilio’s
Dionysian yes would engage the question of technology, as he asserts, “not
in order to destroy it, but in order to transfigure it.” For this reason, while
critics such as William Connolly, Sean Cubitt, and Patrick Crogan (among
others) are right to emphasize the agreeable dimensions of space-time

ask my name?’ And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the name of the place Peniel,
saying, ‘For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life has been delivered.’”
. Cited in Larry L. Lichtenwalter, Wrestling with Angels: In the Grip of Jacob’s God
(Hagerstown, Md.: Review and Herald Publishing Association, 2002), 11.
. Jérôme Sans, “The Game of Love and Chance: A Discussion with Paul Virilio,” avail-
able at http://www.watsoninstitute.org/infopeace/vy2k/sans.cfm.
. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” available at http://www.nadir.org/
nadir/archiv/netzkritik/societyofcontrol.html. “Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the
ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the
time frame of a closed system.” Also see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), in which they already allude
to the question of control, stating that “Virilio concludes that the issue is less confine-
ment than the management of the public ways, or the control of movement. Foucault was
already moving in this direction with his analysis of the naval hospital as operator and
filter [in Discipline and Punish]” (558).
. Virilio, Virilio Live, 157.

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compression, without concomitant attention to the disagreeable as well,

the affirmation of this world runs the risk of acquiescence to regressive ele-
ments that might yet have been overcome.10 Indeed, if speed and circula-

10. They also exemplify the distinction between the indeterminacy of the text and what
Paul Bové calls “the structure of reception” (Paul Bové, foreword, “The Foucault Phe-
nomenon: The Problematics of Style,” in Foucault, by Gilles Deleuze [Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 1986], viii). Thus, even though my own approach is very much
in league with Connolly, Cubitt, and Crogan, I still concur with Bové when he asserts
(after a critique of Charles Taylor’s reading of Foucault) that he is “not suggesting that
other disciplinary formations escape implication in this problematic of reception” (xix)
(before proceeding to engage the readings of Perry Anderson and Fredric Jameson).
With this in mind, see, in particular, William E. Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture,
Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), in the subsection of chap-
ter 7 entitled “Ambiguity and Speed,” where it is argued that “Virilio allows the military
paradigm to overwhelm all other modalities and experiences of speed” (178): through the
quotes and interview questions included here, I hope to have shown that this is some-
what of an overstatement. See also Sean Cubitt, “Virilio and New Media,” in Paul Virilio:
From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond, ed. John Armitage (London: Sage
Publications, 2000), in which he states that “the old liberal anarchist-tirades against state
and technology cannot bring us a politics adequate to the new media formations” (35).
Here I would return that Virilio has at times called himself an “anarcho-Christian,” while
more often seeming to be something of a “radical liberal,” but his analyses of new media
are some of the most nuanced available precisely because they are so ruthlessly critical,
which is what allows him to affirm otherwise in pursuit of the Dionysian yes. Cubitt’s own
engagement with his archive, moreover, would seem to belie his denunciations. And last
but not least, consider Patrick Crogan, “Theory of State: Deleuze, Guattari, and Virilio
on the State, Technology and Speed,” Angelaki 4, no. 2 (1999): 137–48, which claims
that the assertion of a specifically “nomadic” speed (elaborated upon below) is a means
through which “Deleuze and Guattari assert a position of theoretical superiority over Viri-
lio” (142). This is a hard assertion to back up: it is true that they suggest at one point in
A Thousand Plateaus that “Virilio tends to equate these groups [i.e., nomadic, controlled
and nihilistic modalities of speed] on account of their interactions and makes a general
case for the ‘fascist’ character of speed” (559). But they also affirm immediately after-
ward that “it is, nevertheless, his own analyses that make these distinctions possible”
(559). Taken together with the engagements below, the claim that they saw their work as
superior to rather than resonant with his seems unlikely. Furthermore, one could add an
additional modality of speed defended by Virilio since the late seventies, which is that of
“popular defense” (not to be confused with “popular assault”), a “defense without body,
condensed nowhere” (Paul Virilio, Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles [New York:
Semiotexte(e), 1990], 71). In fact, this form of nomadic speed is one that affirms precisely
what Crogan describes under that rubric as “those speeds/movement/phenomena which
have the potential to link up in unforeseen, creative, revolutionary assemblages” (145).
Virilio says this modality is exemplified in the Vietnamese Resistance, the Prague Spring,
and the Italian Autonomia (the latter of which he mostly defended while still vehemently

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tion are to serve as ethical acts of a counterimperial ontology as Hardt and

Negri wish, we would do well to consider first how concepts of belonging
are being not only hybridized with the collapse of the “old walls,” based on
ontopolitical representation, but also how they are being reinstated in onto-
political presentation as migrant bodies are subjected to “new walls,” which
we scarcely yet recognize as such.
The following interview, then, considers the extent to which Virilio
“has placed the negative at the service of the power of affirming”—even
though he has done so in a subterranean manner that largely remains
unnoticed by most of his commentators. The assumptions that his con-
cept of speed is unidimensional, that he conceives no alternative to the
contemporary technoscientific order, and that all forms of mass culture are
denounced as equally complicit with late modern power are thus destabi-
lized with the first several questions. Similarly, the notion that Virilio holds
that the manipulation of emotion negates democratic possibility as such,
that citizenship is entirely incompatible with globalization, and that the only
option in our time is to either entirely converge virtual and actual reality or
to abandon one in favor of the other is complicated in the remaining ones.
In this light, the implications of his answers for those seeking to interrogate
speed today are perhaps best stated by Deleuze and Félix Guattari when
they rearticulate the concept intensively rather than extensively, as one that
presupposes not striated identities on a grid but “local movements, differ-
ential speeds.”11 In this privileging of becoming over being, Virilio himself

opposing the “fascism” of the Red Brigades—this may be the source of some of the
confusion). The point has never been the crude opposition to speed as such, but the
subjection to speed as it is produced in the society of control, which he calls the “empire
of speed”: it is this which explains why he can affirm as early as 1977 that “the revolu-
tionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street,
where for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a
motor, in other words a producer of speed” (Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics [New York:
Semiotext(e), 1986], 3). For a more thorough engagement with this line of his thought, see
chapter 3 of my “Popular Defense in the Empire of Speed: Paul Virilio and the Phenome-
nology of the Political Body” (master’s thesis, Simon Fraser University, November 2003),
available at http://www.geocities.com/ringfingers/thesis.html.
11. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 260. Also see the chapter “Treatise on
Nomadology,” in which they differentiate this formulation of speed from that of movement:
“it is thus necessary to differentiate between speed and movement: a movement may be
very fast, but that does not give it speed; a speed may be very slow, or even immobile,
yet it is still speed. Movement is extensive; speed is intensive. Movement designates the
relative character of a body as ‘one’ and which goes from point to point; speed, on the

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must be considered as a vector whose concepts are in motion, indeed as

one who may seem to be making a definitive statement at one moment but
who complicates that very assumption at another. Thus, while the many
criticisms of his work are certainly formidable, they can never adequately
represent the composite nature of his thought itself, even when they go to
great pains to avoid the suppression of ambiguity.
Connolly’s Neuropolitics, for instance, suggests that as an epiphe-
nomena of his critique of acceleration, Virilio remains sunk in the territo-
rial nation at the very moment in which globalization has for the first time
revealed previously unthinkable potentialities, such as the overcoming of
narrow nationalisms and other chauvinisms.12 However, in a heated discus-
sion with Derrick de Kerckhove on the question of global civil war, we find
the following reply to a similar critique: “when I talk about globalization, I
am myself a citizen of the world. It is not about opposing globalization. I am
saying that the globalization of time . . . is a catastrophic event. So, to be
sure, the problem is not the globalization of dialogue among nations.”13 In
short, the argument that unfolds in that exchange is that when the percep-
tions, affections, and actions of nations and peoples become synchronized

contrary, constitutes the absolute character of a body whose irreducible parts (atoms)
occupy or fill a smooth space in the manner of a vortex, with the possibility of springing
up at any point. (It is therefore not surprising that reference has been made to spiritual
voyages effected without relative movement, but in intensity, in one place: these are part
of nomadism.) In short, we will say by convention that only nomads have absolute move-
ment, in other words, speed: vortical or swirling movement is an essential feature of their
war machine” (381). In their references to Virilio, it becomes clear that they rearticulate
his approach without “opposing” him in the process. Indeed, it is here that this theme
is reengaged by suggesting that the state seeks to relativize all extensive motions and
intensive speeds such that they are redeployed within its ever-expanding sphere of influ-
ence: “Paul Virilio’s thesis is important, when he shows that ‘the political power of the
State is polis, police, that is management of the public ways’ and that ‘the gates of the
city, its levies and duties, are barriers, filters against the fluidity of the masses, against
the penetration power of migratory packs,’ people, animals and goods. Gravity, gravitas,
such is the essence of the State. It is not at all that the State knows nothing of speed; but
it requires that movement, even the fastest, cease to be the absolute state of a moving
body occupying a smooth space, to become the relative characteristic of a ‘moved body’
going from one point to another in a striated space. In this sense, the State never ceases
to decompose, recompose and transform movement, or to regulate speed” (386).
12. Connolly, Neuropolitics, 178.
13. “Conflicts: A Conversation between Paul Virilio and Derrick de Kerckhove,” available
at http://90.146.8.18/de/archiv_files/20021/2002_206.pdf.

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at the planetary level, difference as such is impacted in a manner that ought

to be critically attended to rather than put up with. New walls and new forms
of control augment and even replace those which prevailed in the worlds of
nation-states, monarchies, and city-states without necessarily portending
cultural or political advance in the process. Connolly, Cubitt, and Crogan all
concur, of course, but the point is that Virilio’s approach does not condemn
globalization per se but only points in a premonitory fashion to the danger
which may or may not be encountered, depending on whether or not we
follow Jacob and “wrestle with the angels.” This kind of writing, then, is best
understood as a warning rather than a condemnation tout court: as Hölder-
lin’s famous line invoked in Martin Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning
Technology” reminds us, “but where danger is, grows the saving power
also.”14

Interview

JMA: You have sometimes been accused of harboring a unidimensional

account of speed that your contemporaries are said to have positively
amended. Can you articulate some of the complexities of your own concept
of speed with respect to that of other philosophers like Derrida and his
“aporia of speed,” or Deleuze and his “revolutionary speed”?

PV: One approaches speed from a scientific approach. That is to say

scientists, whether it be Einstein or many others. The scientific approach
was more important to me than the philosophic approach. My approach
toward speed comes from the science of speed, the science of relativity
much more than from philosophy. My approach came when I was fifteen,
seventeen years old and began reading scientific literature with great plea-
sure due to the relation of speed to war and to the scientific knowledge

14. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays (New
York: Harper and Row, 1977): “If the essence of technology, Enframing, is the extreme
danger, and if there is truth in Hölderlin’s words, then the rule of Enframing cannot
exhaust itself solely in blocking all lighting-up of every revealing, all appearing of truth.
Rather, precisely the essence of technology must harbor itself in the growth of the saving
power” (28). Although Virilio does not cite Heidegger often, he did in his first publication,
which, along with his self-proclaimed phenomenological influence (vis-à-vis his professor
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in particular), suggests that he undoubtedly serves as a “silent
partner” in the development of his thought. See Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology (New
York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008).

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of relativity. When there was the book attacking the French intellectuals—
Deleuze, Derrida, et cetera—I was defended by a serious astrophysicist
who wrote an article concerning my scientific leanings in La Liberation.
The world of biology is not my world, but physics certainly is. That is why
I can speak about “Big Science,” et cetera, because I was educated by it.
Deleuze, I liked very much, and he honored me by citing me often, but my
influence comes from science and war. You see why I critique science and
technoscience? They were my education.

JMA: When you are denounced by other thinkers as providing no alterna-

tive to the contemporary technoscientific condition, you often speak about
the conference of Brussels in 1883, where technologists and the general
population came together to democratically work out the potential prob-
lems of the new train technology. As a result, they came up with the block
system to prevent collisions. Is there any equivalent to this today that you
would point out?

PV: Yes, the cap-signal in the French TGV [high-speed trains]. This is a
very sophisticated system such that if something happens to the conduc-
tor, the train slowly comes to a stop. So, we have replaced the block system
with the cap-signal. The cap-signal is in every compartment. The block sys-
tem was a weight-based system which dealt with the iron of the rails; with
the cap-signal, it’s in the motor of the TGV.

JMA: As another possible element of a democratic technoculture, what do

you think of popular media such as the Wachowski brothers’ The Matrix
(1999) or Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002), which render possible
dystopian visions of the future to mass audiences? Can these serve a criti-
cal, premonitory function despite being themselves part of the empire of
speed?

PV: Baudrillard was interested in that a little, going to see The Matrix, but I
wasn’t interested in that. I preferred Philip K. Dick.

JMA: Bergson held that emotion could serve either to break or form habits
of perception, in a manner that is particularly suggestive politically. Can we
still affirm affect in this way, as a means through which inculcated disposi-
tions can be broken? Or has what you refer to as the “synchronization of
emotion” made this impossible?

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PV: One mustn’t confuse the status of public opinion with public emotion.
Because opinion is in general “reasonable,” it is what the public has in
common, in general, whereas emotion is individual. So we go from the
collectivization of opinion to an emotional community, which is obviously
individualist. The definition of emotions is that they are felt individually, even
if the whole world feels it at the same time. Here, we have an event that
somewhere along the way brings a religious element to the realm of poli-
tics, which is quite serious.15

JMA: You have argued for the privileging of accident over substance in
the analysis of contemporary technoculture. Foucault spoke of the tech-
nologies of the self and the political technology of the individual. Are politi-
cal technologies such as the modern citizen-subject also subject to the
accident?

PV: Yes, of course, in a certain way, the national limit of citizenship is going
away. The borders are nowhere, but the walls are everywhere. The borders
in Europe were made in order to suppress the walls around the cities. The
walls gave way to the borders of the nation. Now, the movement of Europe
into the European Union has suppressed the reality of the borders, but
it has re-created the walls. The walls are those of the ghetto, “the gated

15. Here one should recall Virilio’s statement referenced in the introduction that “mod-
ern man, who killed the Judeo-Christian god, the one of transcendence, invented a god
machine, a deus ex machina. It is necessary to be an atheist of technology! This is not
simply anti-technology. I am an amateur of technology. My fetish image is that of the battle
of Jacob and the angel. Jacob is a believer, he meets the angel of God, but in order to
remain a free man, he is obliged to do battle” (James Der Derian, ed., The Virilio Reader
[Oxford: Blackwell, 1990], 20). In other words, what he is critiquing is the tendency to
accept our emotions uncritically in the “natural attitude” inculcated by modern techno-
culture since we experience them individually, when a more discerning approach would
require us to wrestle with them collectively before deciding which we do and do not wish
to affirm. With respect to my question about Bergson, what this suggests is that “public
emotion” (to translate Virilio’s terms into his, an inculcated habit of perception, affection,
and action), since it is felt individually but expressed collectively, is not likely to be criti-
cally altered without redirecting attention to the trajectories it enables. In other words, it is
only through the Dionysian yes with its selective emphasis on what is and is not affirmed,
rather than the yes of the ass, in which everything that exists is taken for granted, that a
truly democratic “public opinion” is made possible. Furthermore, this statement should be
considered in light of his notion of “totalitarian individualism” (Steve Redhead, ed., The
Paul Virilio Reader [New York: Columbia University Press, 2004], 186).

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community.” The present situation changes completely what it means to

be a citizen. But in my opinion, it would be very difficult to estimate the
exact crisis of democracy without going back to the problem of monarchy.
There is a crisis of democracy that comes from its public, immediate char-
acter which makes it such that tyranny is no longer based in a person but
in the technique itself. That’s why I believe a king could take the place of
the president of the republic. Because, somewhere, he no longer needs
to be the tyrant, he needs only to be a referent. But that’s an enormous
question. I can’t say much more about it. There is a big menace to rep-
resentational democracy. Why? Because new technologies are presenta-
tive. They present, they do not re-present. “Live” World Trade Center, it’s
the presentation of the event. Live. While Democracy functioned under re-
presentation, here there is a denial of re-presentational democracy for the
hallucinatory position of presentation.

JMA: Given that the “contact senses” of smell, taste, and touch are not
transmittable over long distances (as are sight and sound), could becoming
more attuned to them help to restore some of what you feel has been
destroyed with the pollution of the grey ecology?

PV: Yes, as long as one reaches the position of what I call “stereo-
reality.” Stereo-reality is when there is “virtual reality” with technology,
and actual reality. The present is composed of both these realities. And
somewhere, we have a “relief effect” between virtual reality (real-time)
and actual reality. So there is a possibility of a visual relief of stereo-
reality. Today, perception could become stereo-reality. This is under the
condition of maintaining the two realities separate, and not falling into
glaucoma. Here, I believe there is a future for a perception, a perspective,
of “real-time,” which would be just as important as the “real space” of the
quarto cento. Reality today can become stereo-reality by way of screens
and direct perception. There is an effect of the field of vision that comes
from this doubling of stereo-real, stereoscopic perception as in stereo-
phony. I think for the moment we are fascinated by the virtual and have a
tendency to lose actual vision, direct vision. I think tomorrow we will have
to restructure around a new type of perspective that I call the perspective
of “real-time,” this effect of the visual field. We must take into account the
new relief of both fields of vision, because we won’t lose the screens or
direct perception. Here I think we have to go back to the perspectivists of

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the Middle Ages, to Paolo Uccello, to understand the importance of this

real-time position of perception.16 The actual and the virtual. This is posi-
tive. We are not yet there.

16. Virilio often upholds Uccello as the one who introduced perspective into Western
visual culture in order to suggest how today’s artists, thinkers, and activists might also
refuse the “objective status accorded to the technosciences.” As he states in an interview
with Sylvère Lotringer, once again reminding us that far from opposing speed as such,
he seeks to explode the distinction between technicians and the “general populace,”
such that they themselves become producers of (rather than being produced by) speed:
“if architects today want to prove themselves equal to the new technologies, like Paolo
Uccello or Piero della Francesca, they would make the software themselves, they would
get back inside the machine. Whereas now they are sold the equipment, and they work
with it. That’s what I can’t accept. This doesn’t mean I am some Luddite eager to destroy
machines, not at all. I have always said: Penetrate the machine, explode it from the inside,
dismantle the system to appropriate it” (Sylvère Lotringer and Paul Virilio, The Accident of
Art [New York: Semiotext(e), 2005], 74).

Published by Duke University Press