The Virilio Reader

by James Der Derian (Editor)

First English language collection of the writing of French social critic, Paul Virilio. This volume represents his most important work, including five new translations and an exclusive interview with Virlio conducted by the editor reflecting the diverse career of this great social commentator on life in the late twentieth century.

Genres: Theory

224 pages, Paperback

First published October 22, 1998

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I pledged to return to Virilio when I’d recovered from my writing my thesis, and so I have. ‘The Virilio Reader’ reminded me of why I read critical theory for fun. For one thing, doing so reminds you of the many different styles of incomprehensibility there are. Virilio has two that predominate. The first consists of starting off in a calm register, then gradually becoming more agitated until at the end of a chapter he is in a state of academic hysteria, yelling at you, “...a secret desire of AUTONOMY, of UNIVERSAL AUTOMATION rejoining the apocalyptic tendencies of the moment, this revelation of the PRECARIOUSNESS OF HUMAN WILL, figure of a DESPAIR on the scale of the ambition of the sciences, a DECEPTION where the idea of nature from the era of the Enlightenment FADES AWAY, along with the idea of the REAL, in the era of the SPEED OF LIGHT.” (Capitalisation mine.) Those are the final five and a half lines of a monumental nineteen line sentence that was surely intended to be declaimed in great agitation. Virilio’s second method of confusing the reader is periodically dipping into theoretical physics and discussing how ‘imaginary time’ is actually reality and real time is imaginary. A challenging combination of complex scientific concepts and explanation in the language of social theory results in bafflement, for me at least.

I initially decided to read Virilio as he is known to be fixated on the concept of speed and its social consequences. In my parochial innocence, I assumed that he would consequently have a lot to say about transport. How excessively literal of me. In fact, the selections in this reader are almost exclusively focused on the military consequences of technology and speed. It’s striking to observe how his work evolves over time, as the Cold War gives way to Gulf War Mark 1. Both analyses are interesting, as are his comments on World War I and the rise of aerial reconnaissance during the Battle of the Marne. This reader was published in 1998 and I naturally wanted to know whether Virilio had foreseen elements of the War on Terror and our troubled times. He certainly emphasises the shift towards automated warfare, even name-checking drones several times. I also liked his term ‘fractal war’, a conflict both local and global in nature. On the other hand, I found his emphasis on urban degeneration as an adjunct to technological change cruder and much less useful. I was fine with the generally gloomy and apocalyptic tone, though. It calmed slightly once the Cold War was over and nuclear annihilation seemed less likely, whilst remaining deeply pessimistic about the inevitability of a ‘general global accident which could well have radioactivity as its emblem’.

When considering the wider social consequences of information technologies, Virilio asks some great questions without being able to answer them. Amongst others:

What are we to think of the character technology might assume, if, in excess, it no longer pretends to be guided internally by reason and progress, but rather by non-progress and terror?

How does one hope to control decisions that not only escape us by virtue of their speed, but which also escape their ‘authors’ by the very automatism of the materiel that make these decisions for them?

Can one democritise ubiquity, instantaneity, omniscience and omnipresence which are precisely the privileges of the divine, or in other words, of autocracy?

These matters are also considered more practically in a much more recent book, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. Virilio does appear somewhat prescient, though, and his ideas retain relevance.

Another way to enjoy ‘The Virilio Reader’, and critical theory in general, is to play the game ‘Neologism or Typo?’ I think ‘proxemic’ is a neologism, but ‘stragetic’ seems to be a typo for strategic. ‘Atopia’ could go either way. The two worst neologisms I found were ‘interpretosis’ and ‘on-line compunication’, both of which I hope never to see again. The latter really should be a typo, however this possibility is closed by the helpful bracketed ‘(computer communication)’ that follows it. Can you imagine if that had caught on?

[Conor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow. Given how much I liked Virilio's Aesthetics of Disappearance, I figure I would have loved this. Instead it seems very limited in scope, completely missing the parts of his thought that I really like. I don't know if there were permission issues or what, but the material also seems to overlap too much.

Maybe we'd just be better off reading his books?

I think I would.