By Arthur and Marilouise Kroker.
It is surely the fate of every engaged political theory to be
overcome by the history that it thought it was only describing. So
too, Paul Virilio. His writings have captured brilliantly these
twilight times in which we live: The Aesthetics of Disappearance, The
Information Bomb, War and Cinema, Speed and Politics -- less writing
in the traditional sense than an uncanny shamanistic summoning forth
of the demonology of speed which inscribes society. A prophet of the
wired future, Paul Virilio's thought always invokes the doubled
meaning of apocalypse -- cataclysm and remembrance.
Cataclysm because all his writings trace the history of the
technological death- instinct moving at the speed of light. And
remembrance because Virilio is that rarity in contemporary culture, a
thinker whose ethical dissent marks the first glimmerings of a
fateful implosion of that festival of seduction, facination,terror,
and boredom we have come to know as digital culture. A self-described
"atheist of technology," his motto is "obey and resist."
But for all that there is a raw materialism in Virilio's reflection,
nowhere better expressed than in his grisly vision of information as
suffocation. In his theatre of thought data banks have migrated
inside human flesh, bodies are reduced to granulated flows of dead
information, tattooed by data, embedded by codes, with complex
histories of electronic transactions as our most private
autobiographies. Information mapping our lives -- process,
principles, concept, fact -- we have all become measurable. In
Virilio's writing what Hannah Arendt once described as "modern world
alienation" rides the whirling tip of history as the spirit of pure
negation that is everywhere today. Negative politics, negative
subjectivity, negative culture. It is impossible to escape the
technological accident that has become us.
But for all that history will not long be denied. Just as Nietzsche
once prophesied in The Gay Science that with the birth of human
subjectivity, twisted and scarred and deliriously unpredictable, the
gods actually stopped their game of wagers and took notice because
something new was moving on the earth -- a going across, a tremulous
wakening, a pathway over the abyss -- so too with Virilio, the gods
of history take notice once again. And not just take notice, but
actively respond to the fatal challenge that is the thought of Paul Virilio.
Are we beyond Speed and Politics? [...]
<http://ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=597>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2008/11/city-of-transformation-paul-virilio-in.htm>monochrom
at 11/16/2008 12:21:00 PM
