Paul Virilio
Virilio developed what he calls the 'war model' of the modern city and of human society in general and is the inventor of the term 'dromology', meaning the logic of speed that is the foundation of technological society. His major works include War and Cinema, Speed and Politics and The Information Bomb in which he argues, among many other things, that military projects and technologies drive history. Like some other cultural theorists, he rejects labels - including 'cultural theorist' - yet he has been linked by others with post-structuralism and postmodernism. Some people describe Virilio's work as being positioned in the realm of the 'hypermodern'. He has repeatedly affirmed his links with phenomenology, for example, and offers humanist critiques of modernist art movements such as Futurism. Throughout his books the political and theological themes of anarchism, pacifism and Catholicism reappear as central influences to his self-proclaimed 'marginal' approach to the question of technology. His work has been compared to that of Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Ellul, and others. Virilio is also an urbanist. After having been a longtime resident of the city of Paris, he now lives in La Rochelle. Virilio's predictions about 'logistics of perception' - the use of images and information in war - (in War and Cinema, 1984) were so accurate that during the Gulf War he was invited to discuss his ideas with French military officers. While Baudrillard infamously argued that the Gulf War did not take place, Virilio argued that it was a 'world war in miniature'. The integral accident[edit] Virilio believes that technology cannot exist without the potential for accidents. For example, Virilio argues that the invention of the locomotive also contained the invention of derailment. He sees the Accident as a rather negative growth of social positivism and scientific progress. He believes the growth of technology, namely television, separates us directly from the events of real space and real time. In it he suggests we lose wisdom and sight of our immediate horizon and resort to the indirect horizon of our dissimulated environment. From this angle, the Accident can be mentally pictured as a sort of "fractal meteorite" whose impact is prepared in the propitious darkness, a landscape of events concealing future collisions. Aristotle claimed that "there is no science of the accident,", but Virilio disagrees, pointing to the growing credibility of simulators designed to escape the accident— which he argues is an industry that is born from the unholy marriage of post-WW2 science and the military-industrial complex. In Hurricane Katrina and the disastrous events that followed, Virilio sees a good example of his integral accident concept, which brought the eyes of the world upon a single nexus of time and place. From his article on Katrina, "Ah oui, ce méchant vent, vent qui siffle, siffle. Tout le monde regarde, c'est sur toutes les chaînes, c'est l'émission dont le monde parle. Et c'est tellement, tellement mouillé la bas." Roughly translated, "Oh yeah, that evil wind, wind that blows, blows. The whole world is watching, it's on every station, it's the program the world is talking about. And it's so, so soggy, down there." Dromology[edit] ‘Dromos’ is the Greek noun for road, but Virilio takes it to mean the activity of race (Virilio 1977:47). It is with this meaning in mind that he coins the term 'dromology', which he defined as the "science (or logic) of speed“. Dromology is important when considering the structuring of society in relation to warfare and modern media. He notes that the speed at which something happens may change its essential nature, and that which moves with speed quickly comes to dominate that which is slower. 'Whoever controls the territory possesses it. Possession of territory is not primarily about laws and contracts, but first and foremost a matter of movement and circulation.' Logistics of perception[edit] In contemporary warfare, logistics does not just imply the movement of personnel, tanks, fuel and so on, but also the movement of images both to and from the battlefield. Virilio talks a lot about the creation of CNN and the concept of the newshound. The newshound will capture images which will then be sent to CNN, which may then be broadcast to the public. This movement of images can start a conflict (Virilio uses the example of the events following the broadcasting of the Rodney King footage). The logistics of perception relates also to the televising of military maneuvers and the images of conflict that are watched not only by people at home, but also by the military personnel involved in the conflict. The 'field of battle' also exists as a 'field of perception'. War of movement[edit] For Virilio, the transition from feudalism to capitalism was driven not primarily by the politics of wealth and production techniques but by the mecha