Paul Virilio

Ian James

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415359641
• eBook ISBN: 9781134240487
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Paul Virilio is a challenging and original thinker whose work on technology, state power and war is increasingly relevant today. Exploring Virilio's main texts from their political and historical contexts, and case studies from contemporary culture and media in order to explain his philosophical concepts, Ian James introduces the key themes in Virlio's work, including:

• speed
• virtualization
• war
• politics
• art.

As technological and scientific innovations continue to set the agenda for the present and future development of culture, communications, international economy, military intervention and diverse forms of political organization, Virilio's unique theoretical and critical insights are of enormous value and importance for anyone wishing to understand the nature of modern culture and society.

KEY IDEAS

1
THE POLITICS OF PERCEPTION

Phenomenology, form and the interstices of vision

A preoccupation with the human body lies at the very centre of Virilio’s interest in technology. The question of bodily orientation in space and the impact this has on perception and understanding underpins the entirety of his work from the 1960s to the present day. Virilio’s response to the development of contemporary technologies and his account of an ‘accelerated society’ need to be understood within the context of this preoccupation with the body. Throughout his work Virilio aims to affirm the bodily dimension of our experience. He wants to draw our attention to ways in which modern technologies shape the manner in which we experience space and time by orientating our bodies in new and different ways. Above all he wants to draw our attention to the manner in which technologies of speed might diminish the richness and diversity of our situated bodily experience.

Virilio’s work has been judged by some to be overly negative or pessimistic with regard to technological development (Virilio 1999: 47) and even, at times, to be somewhat apolitical or conservative (Armitage 2000: 81, 120). Such judgements need to be treated with caution, however. In political terms Virilio’s itinerary, like that of many French intellectuals and thinkers of his generation, is broadly of the nonconformist (that is, non- Marxist) left and he has described himself, perhaps disconcertingly, as ‘an anarcho-Christian’ (Armitage 2001: 20). Yet this Christian commitment is rarely explicitly engaged with as such and Virilio takes pains to put some distance between his personal theological beliefs and the theoretical concerns of his writing. To that extent his approach is very different from other important thinkers of technology such as Jacques Ellul (Ellul 1965). The apparently negative or overly pessimistic tenor of Virilio’s works must be understood within the context of the specific discursive strategies, at once provocative and polemical, which inform his writing. Above all his outlook needs to be understood within the context of his explicit philosophical and theoretical commitments. Virilio’s primary philosophical engagements are with the phenomenological thought of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61). The insights provided by the early twentieth-century school of psychology known as Gestalt psychology are also of key significance for Virilio. What follows in this first chapter will give an introductory overview of these philosophical and theoretical perspectives and relate them to the way in which bodily experience is affirmed in Virilio’s work. It will also relate these theoretical concerns to his background in urbanism and to his early interest in painting.

URBANISM AND ARCHITECTURE PRINCIPE

Virilio’s commitment to the dimension of situated bodily experience is clearly present in his early work as an urbanist and architect. His background in urbanism dates back to the 1960s and to his collaboration during this period with Claude Parent around the review Architecture principe. The general outlook of this review and of those grouped together around it was one of dissidence in relation to the general direction of post-Second World War urban development. This development was perceived to be dominated by an emphasis on the vertical. The perception was that contemporary architecture was far too focused upon the building of structures which would be erected at ever increasing heights. According to the writers of Architecture principe the proliferation of skyscrapers and high-rise dwellings was accompanied by a tendency towards a standardization of design whose impact was to disfigure the urban landscape (Joly 2004: 26–7, 57). This standardization of design was, they maintained, characterized by the dominance of construction organized around the ‘orthogonal’, that is to say, relating to or composed of right angles. Skyscrapers would be built along constructions of horizontal and vertical lines (the outer walls but also the arrangement of windows). A most obvious example of this would, of course, be the World Trade Center in New York which was destroyed in September of 2001.

Against this dominance of the vertical and the orthogonal the collaborators of Architecture principe advocated the introduction into contemporary architectural design of what they called ‘the oblique function’. Through their championing of ‘the oblique function’ Virilio and Parent sought to promote a form of urban design and planning which would redefine the relationship maintained between the human body and the surface of the earth. The body would not be located more or less indifferently within an architectural or urban space dominated by excessively tall, right-angled constructions. Rather, the body would be placed within a space organized around inclined surfaces. This environment of inclined surfaces would, as it were, affirm a relation to the movement of the body and its physical situatedness. The ‘oblique function’, in insisting on a dominance of inclined planes in the design of both ground space and building construction, would demand that a new urban order be thought and a new architectural vocabulary be invented (Architecture principe, 1, February 1966, in Virilio and Parent 1996). From the contemporary perspective this revolutionary architectural thinking might appear to be somewhat utopian. Indeed, even at the time Virilio sought to defend his theory against such charges. He argued that the modern attitude to urban space, the physical environment and the consumption of material resources would prove to be unsustainable. Therefore a questioning of the relationship between construction design, spatial planning and the masses of bodies which inhabit cities would, Virilio asserted, be an inevitable and necessary feature of future urbanism (Architecture principe, 2, March 1966 in Virilio and Parent 1996).

What is clear is that the ‘theory of the oblique’ developed by Virilio and Parent favoured an architectural design which would privilege the spatiotemporal first-person experience of the situated human body. If there was a refusal of contemporary development here it was a refusal carried out in the name of a specific affirmation of the spatiality and temporality of bodily experience. Endorsing the work of a contemporary urban designer, Jean- Michel Wilmotte, Virilio recently wrote: ‘To neglect this spatial-temporal sphere would imply a total misreading of the world’s future metropolitisation, would strip all objects and signs of their very meaning’ (Wilmotte 1999: 10). This comment is entirely consistent with Virilio’s early work of the 1960s. The gesture of refusal in relation to dominant contemporary trends which characterized the review Architecture principe was not a form of conservatism nor pessimistic nostalgia for a past urban space. Rather it was an attempt to address a fundamental orientation of bodily experience. It aimed to uncover and promote a different or dissident understanding of architectural design. This was based on the hope that future and hitherto unthought possibilities of development might be conceived. This twofold gesture of refusal and affirmation can be found in Virilio’s work as a whole. He refuses certain aspects of contemporary development but does so only to affirm the possibilities of the human body and the diverse ways it can be situated within space. This twofold gesture of refusal and affirmation can be understood more clearly when related to Virilio’s commitment to the philosophical perspective of phenomenology (see box).

PHENOMENOLOGY

The reference to phenomenology in Virilio’s work offers the key to understanding the central place occupied by the body and the relation of technology to bodily experience. Allusions to phenomenological thought occur throughout his work, most prominently in references to Husserl in The Insecurity of Territory (Virilio 1993: 118), in Polar Inertia (Virilio 2000d: 71–87) and in The Lost Dimension (Virilio 1991a: 115). The phenomenological perspective is also present in his persistent appeal to aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, in for example The Vision Machine (Virilio 1994b: 7), and The Art of the Motor (Virilio 1995: 81, 141). What interests Virilio in the work of both philosophers is the idea that ‘space is limited to the world of sensible experience and beyond that there is no longer any space worthy of the name’ (Virilio 1995: 141). From the perspective of phenomenology space is not simply the extension of three dimensions such as it can measured by mathematics. Phenomenology is not interested in traditional debates relating to the question of whether space is a substantive thing in itself or simply a relation between things (theories known as substantivalism and relationalism respectively). Rather phenomenology thinks space as that which is first and foremost experienced. It thinks of space as spatiality, that is to say, as a spatial perception or awareness which is inseparable from the manner in which our bodies are positioned. Spatiality is inseparable from our capacity to sense, touch and see within the context of a specific bodily orientation. It is only on the basis of this prior experience of spatiality, the argument runs, that we can come to some abstract or theoretical understanding of space. The theoretical understanding of space as the extension of three dimensions (or indeed any other theoretical or scientific understanding of space) would not be possible if we did not first encounter space as situated and lived spatiality.

This argument is given most clearly and fully by Husserl in his lectures of 1907 on Thing and Space (Husserl 1997) and is developed in different ways within the phenomenological tradition after Husserl. It is developed, for instance, in the account of existential spatiality given by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time (Heidegger 1962: 135–48) or in the account given by Merleau-Ponty of space and perception in Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 116 ff.). What is important to note here is that, for the phenomenologist, our experience or perception of space is inseparable from the positioning and movement of the body in relation to its surroundings. Our gaze on to the world can be thought of only as a gaze which is first and foremost embodied. Our experience of the world might, for instance, be very different if we were not upright animals and did not have eyes placed at the front of our head. Can one imagine, for instance, how the world might look if we had one eye positioned on either side of our heads and could see forwards and backwards simultaneously?

PHENOMENOLOGY

Phenomenology is a philosophical project which aims to describe the character of consciousness in the most clear and systematic way. Its concern, therefore, is with what appears (i.e. with phenomena) in lived sensible experience. The existence of phenomena independent of experience is not posed here, nor is it thought to be a viable philosophical question. The founding father of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), sought to interrogate phenomena in terms of the way in which we direct our consciousness to them. What is important to the phenomenologist is the manner in which objects appear to consciousness according to the intentions we have towards them. The phenomenologist interrogates those intentional structures or abstract elements which shape the directedness of our consciousness. It is on the basis of these structures of directedness or intentionality that the world of sensible appearances is constituted for us as meaningful and intelligible. The aim of Husserlian phenomenological investigation was to isolate the meaning-constituting structures which make consciousness possible. Husserl rejected the claims of empiricism. According to the philosophy of empiricism the logical laws of sense and meaning can be located in actual mental activity, in, for instance, the physiology of brain function. To this extent Husserl’s philosophy is concerned not with physiological or neurological properties but with the logical conditions of possibility of experience. It excludes or brackets off any specific or particular content of experience. These logical conditions are, for Husserl, both universal and necessary. To this extent his philosophy can be placed within the tradition of idealism such as it developed in the wake of the eighteenth-century German philosopher Emmanuel Kant. Husserl affirmed the existence of what he termed the transcendental ego. With the term ‘transcendental ego’ he aimed to describe an impersonal realm distinct from the empirical self or subjective ego. The transcendental ego, for Husserl, works to constitute the world for us by way of meaning-constituting structures and abstract logical elements. Husserl maintained that all knowledge, all theoretical, rational or scientific endeavour depend upon and are derived from acts of consciousness and the intentional structures which give them life. The logical priority given to immediate consciousness or perception over theoretical abstraction or speculative reason is continued in the phenomenological tradition after Husserl, in, for instance, the different forms of existential phenomenology developed by Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre. In their different ways each of these three thinkers criticizes Husserl’s emphasis on ideality and abstraction; they question the existence of the transcendental ego and affirm the impossibility of isolating formal logical structures within conscious acts. As existential phenomenologists they shift the emphasis away from ideal or logical essences in favour of structures of ‘being-in-the-world’. By this account the intentional acts through which meaning-constitution occurs are possible because of our prior insertion into a series of pragmatic worldly engagements which both precede and exceed the possibility of their isolation as abstract forms. Merleau-Ponty, for example, replaces the transcendental ego with the idea of the body-subject. Neither mind nor body in the traditional sense, Merleau-Ponty’s body-subject experiences the world as meaningful only in so far as it is orientated in space and inserted into more or less diffuse horizons of sense and purpose. These horizons exist prior to conscious intentionality or will and constitute the ‘intentional arc’ of the body-subject, that is, the field of purposeful engagements on the basis of which meaningful experience can occur. The existential phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty maintains Husserl’s key insistence that all abstract or theoretical knowledge must be viewed as secondary to and derived from the life of immediate consciousness, perception and experience.

This question of the embodied or situated gaze is fundamental to the way in which Virilio understands our relationship to the world. Our gaze shapes our encounter with worldly space as it is immediately experienced in embodied perception. He speaks, for instance, of: ‘the real horizon of the world, towards which, Merleau-Ponty tells us, we first move by way of our gaze [le regard]’ (Virilio 1995: 81). For Virilio it is above all the ‘mobility and motility of the body’ which allow our perceptions of the world to occur and with this an experience of ourselves as worldly spatial creatures (Virilio 1993: 260). He is interested in how the landscape of places and things will look or appear differently depending on the way in which they are approached. As an example of this he cites the situation of a passenger on a train viewing the passing scenery: ‘it is the movements of my body that are producing this landscape . . . a bit like a passenger on a train sees trees and horses darting past, sees hills bending away’ (Virilio 2005a: 30). When travelling by train or car we often think of ourselves simply as passing through space. Yet from the phenomenological perspective this everyday interpretation of our experience is possible only because we first experience the figures and forms surrounding us in a rather different manner: the tree which we might otherwise approach on foot, see looming above us and then touch or even climb, emerges rapidly into our field of vision, reduced in size, and sweeps past, untouched and unclimbed and has disappeared in an instant. The spread of the landscape which might otherwise surround and envelop us is deformed by rapid movement; it is not something experienced in its material dimensions as such since our body does not experience the fatigue or the extended delay of passing across it on foot. In each case (travelling by train or on foot) the world appears to us or is perceived in a very different manner. This example demonstrates the central importance of bodily perception in Virilio’s thinking. It indicates, clearly, why the reality of movement and speed remains so fundamental. Movement and speed are not, for Virilio, simply thematic concerns. Rather they are structuring principles of the manner in which we experience the space of the world. In this respect Virilio’s, primarily phenomenological, understanding of space is different from that of science. He does not, as it were, think in three dimensions, but holds rather that the ‘dimensions of space are only fleeting apparitions, in the same way that things are visible only in the trajectory of the gaze, this gaze that is the eye and that defines place’ (Virilio 2005a: 118).

What this phenomenological perspective suggests is that Virilio’s approach to the world, and to the way the world is experienced, is removed from our everyday understanding. Husserl describes this everyday understanding as the ‘natural attitude’. According to the natural attitude we assume more or less unreflectively that we live in a world of things which are exterior to us and exist objectively in an extended space and in a linear time. We assume that there is a distinct separation between these things and our consciousness of them, or our subjective engagements with them. The phenomenological perspective does not, of course, deny the objective existence of things. It does, however, insist that this objective existence can be understood only relative to, and on the basis of, our shared perceptions of these things within a lived (that is, embodied) spatial and temporal experience. We always encounter or perceive objects within the context of the shared forms of sense or meaning that are bestowed upon them. Things appear to us as meaningful entities only in the context of such a shared horizon of sense.

Virilio explicitly affirms this understanding of the existence of things at the beginning of Negative Horizon: ‘forms, things, emit and receive, they emit a sensible reality and what they have undergone, they receive and return the totality of the sense of their milieu and their immediate surroundings’ (Virilio 2005a: 27). So if I walk into a room, see a desk, sit at it and begin to write, I do so because the desk appears to me as an object which is intelligible and meaningful for me only against the background of a prior horizon of sense. This horizon of sense or meaning determines the context of the room, the functional nature of the space within the room and therefore the purpose or sense-value that the objects placed in there will have for me. According to the natural attitude of everyday understanding all these things – that is, the study, the space within, the desk and writing materials – are entities whose identity is simply given in the presence of the object itself. Everyday understanding tells me that I encounter these things as objects of my will and decision. It allows me to assume that the identity or sense value of such objects exists independently of my encounter with them and of the decisions I might make with respect to them. A central premise of the phenomenological approach is that the unreflective natural attitude which presupposes this straightforward objectivity or givenness of things conceals or obscures the manner in which objects in the world actually appear to us. They are not simply ‘there’, rather they are encountered as meaningful in the spatial and temporal orientation of an embodied perception and within the context of shared horizons of sense. The aim of the phenomenological approach, then, is to suspend the natural attitude and with that our everyday understanding of the world and to interrogate that layer of more primordial experience which lies concealed beneath it. It allows an inquiry into the way in which things appear to us in the first instance and into the more original horizon of sense-giving which makes that appearance intelligible as such. Virilio’s phenomenological outlook is perhaps the most difficult initial aspect of his work to understand or assimilate. This is perhaps because we tend to be firmly wedded to the natural attitude described by Husserl. Perhaps more easy to understand or assimilate is the extended account of his early experience as a painter which Virilio gives at the beginning of Negative Horizon. This personal account of his early experiments with painting more clearly exemplifies what is at stake in his commitment to phenomenology and to the phenomenological questioning of perception and embodiment.

PAINTING

The rejection of abstract formalism which characterizes Virilio’s relation to architecture and urbanism also underpins his interest in painting. In so far as this interest in painting also exemplifies his phenomenological outlook, it can shed light on the method or approach of his w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Why Virilio?
• Key Ideas
• After Virilio
• Further Reading
• Works cited
• Index