 |
| VIRILIO |
|
|
 |
|
 |
 |
Paul Virilio
"In the near future, the human body will become the training ground for micromachines that will travel through it in all directions and do so, they say, without causing any pain. So here then are the latest prostheses, the new automatons: these animates that will colonize our organism, just as we ourselves have colonized and controlled the expanse of the earth's body."
"If the possibility of acting instantaneously without having to move about physically to open the blinds, switch on the light or adjust the heating has partly removed the practical value of space and time intervals to the sole benefit of the speed interval of remote control (thanks to the feats of the live transmission revolution), what will happen when this capacity for action or, rather, for instantaneous interaction, with the biotechnological transplant revolution, migrates from the thickness of the walls or floors of the wired apartment and settles not on, but inside, the body of the inhabitants, introducing itself, lodging itself inside their bodies, in the closed circuits of their vital systems?"
"With acceleration there is no more here and there, only the mental confusion of near and far, present and future, real and unreal- a mix of history, stories, and the hallucinatory utopia of communication technologies."
"Today, when the notion of 'distance' has given way in physics to the notion of an instantaneous transmitting 'power,' physical optics winds up in 'a fluctuation of appearances' in which distance is no longer, as the poet hoped, presence's depth, but merely its flickering."
"Beating an enemy involves not so much capturing as captivating them."
"If the star looks directly into the camera, his 'form-image' will look directly, in the televised interface, at those who are watching, whether they are in the city, suburbs or countryside, whether they are in France or elsewhere. Pagnol's movie star will be infinitely multiplied, like the stars of Flaubert's telescope."
"With this invention of a day defined by technological speed, in direct opposition to astronomical time, the primary question becomes less one of relations to history than one of relations to time, and to the regimes of temporality that issue forth from advanced technologies."
"A few souls were already talking about a hole in space some years ago; others, more recently, have been talking about a hole in time, the real time of the instantaneous transmission of historic events and, in particular, the Gulf War."
"Implicitly doing away with the 'historic' time of politics- more precisely, of geopolitics- and exclusively promoting the 'anti-historic' time of the media, the general spread of real-time information causes a radical divide beside which the industrial revolution will pale into insignificance."
"Each new regime remains unrecognizable when it emerges since it preserves certain traits of the preceding regime, much as a son looks vaguely like his father. We have thus, without realizing it, gone from simple statistical management to a new phenomenon of representation, the virtual theatricalization of the real world."
"We saw this kind of deconstruction and morphological irruption of architecture in the earlier emergence of metallic structures at the London and Paris World's Fairs: the accrued transparency of appearances, the residual character of an industrial construction that was already nothing more than a scaffolding for glass but also- with that recuperated supremacy of light over matter- the devaluation of stone, the decline of dense materials for facades and partitions, the rise of the structuralism of the curtain wall."
"We can now better understand the precise materiality of architecture which fascinated Walter Benjamin. It was connected less to the walls, floors, and opacity of surfaces than to the primacy of the access protocol of doors and bridges, but it also referred equally to the ports and other means of transport, that prolonged the nature of the threshold, the practical function of the entryway. This protocol of physical access gave all its meaning to the space of a dwelling and of a City; both were linked to the primacy of the sedentary over the nomadic ways of our origins. And all of this is being swept away by advanced technologies…"
"The technician becomes the victim of the movement he's produced; having become aphasic, he rehearses, in the absolute of the control room of the nuclear center, the simplified gestures of a primal magnetic rite whose 'mobility-without-mobility' no one bothers to clarify."
"The decay of visible markers, the loss of sensible referents, the disintegration of various 'standards,' excesses affecting the interpretation of phenomena and acculturation successively reaching to physics and geophysics, in order to pursue the astrophysical and cosmogenic quest for 'the first moments of the universe,' a retrospective inquiry that consists of climbing back through time with the aid of scientific certainties, in order to pose yet again the question of beginnings, the famous Big Bang, the explosion of causality that, according to physicists, was supposed to end tomorrow in a gigantic implosion of finality, a theoretical or meta-theoretical construction capable of saving the matter of the absence of sense, of preserving the creation of a creator, a secret desire for autonomy and for universal automation uniting all contemporary apocalyptic trends, this revelation of the precariousness of the human will, this face of hopelessness that is perfectly matched to the degree of ambition among the sciences, this deception in which the idea of nature from the science, this deception in which the idea of nature from the Enlightenment blurs into- and finally becomes confused with- the idea of the real, left over from the century of the speed of light."
"The framework for the planner's point of view in the computer screen now resembles neither that of spectators and telespectators, nor the frames of reference for graphic or photographic representation, precisely because the computer screen contains them all, united now into the same interface, one single commutation of vision that dispels all normative distinctions between the real and the simulated."
"'Intoxication is a number,' according to Charles Baudelaire. Digital optics is indeed a rational metaphor for intoxication, statistical intoxication, that is: a blurring of perception that affects the real as much as the figurative, as though our society were sinking into the darkness of a voluntary blindness, its will to digital power finally contaminating the horizon of sight as well as knowledge."
"The latest drones will be nanotechnological, which is to say that they will be no bigger than a wasp….Work on drones is heading toward the miniaturization of insect-sized microcameras that will be sent to swarm over the enemy."
|
|
 |
|
