Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Sun 21 Sep 2008 03:25 PM PDT
City Lights Booksellers& Publishers in conjunction with the Consulate General of France in San Francisco present:
TRAJECTORIES OF THE CATASTROPHIC
A symposium exploring the ideas and arguments put forth in the
theoretical works of Paul Virilio. From the sweeping effects of
technology on culture to the history of the City as war-machine,
internationally acclaimed artists and scholars will critically examine
the ideas of one of the foremost theorists of the information age.
Lectures, film screenings, and roundtable discussions spanning over a two day period featuring:
Dominic Angerame, Jordan Crandall, James Der Derian, Ricardo Dominguez,
Arthur Kroker, Marilouise Kroker, Sylvère Lotringer, John Martini, Timothy Murray, Steve Redhead, John Rogers, DJ Spooky, and Stelarc
Dates & Locations:Friday, October 24, 2008-San Francisco Art Institute Auditorium, 800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco, 7:00 pm Saturday, October 25, 2008-Battery Townsley, Marin Headlands, GGNRA, Marin County, 12:00 pm, 1:00 pm-San Francisco Art Institute Auditorium, 800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco, 4:00 pm
Who is Paul Virilio? Click here
Paul Virilio Interview:
City planner and authority on speed, Paul Virilio's smile is
as
wide as his remarks are serious. "Who loves well punishes
well," he
likes to repeat. "When you like something, you
hope it will progress.
Those who like technology can only resist
all that is regressive,
self-centered or insufficient. The
limitations of technology must be
exposed," he says, somewhat
annoyed by the excitement surrounding the
information
superhighway. An occasional Internet user ("I prefer to
keep
my distance and participate laterally. Frontal encounters
are
encounters where you never fail to be 'had'."), Paul
Virilio has come
out with Cybermonde, la Politique du Pire, an
interview format book
about the frightening and profound risks
inherent in new
technologies. He is as lucid as he is alarmist.
- In Cybermonde, la Politique du Pire you talk about
"propaganda"
surrounding the Internet, going so far as
to compare the media to the
"Occupation" and your work
to that of a "Resistance fighter". Isn't
that an
exaggeration?
When computer science appeared in 1947-1948, computer
scientists
said it was the best of things but that it could also
be the worst.
We were coming out of a totalitarian period and
computer science
itself, through the birth of the computer, served
in the struggle
against totalitarianism. But the computer
scientists of that time
warned us that this new power must not
become a "cybernetic" power, a
new, worse
totalitarianism. I am only forging a link with this
tradition.
If I have become a Cassandra, it is because the publicity
became
so strong in September of last year with the introduction
of Windows
95, that I could only cry foul faced with this delirium
of publicity.
Serge Daney used to say, "During the Occupation
you didn't talk about
the Resistance. And the media are the
Occupation". If the media are
the Occupation, the multimedia
are likely to be far worse. Just as
they entail promise: the world
citizen will be shaped by worldwide
information. It's obvious. But
we are not there yet. First we must
fight against the negativity
of the new technologies.
- Because for you there is no profit without loss, no
invention
without accident...
To invent something is to invent an accident. To invent the
ship
is to invent the shipwreck; the space shuttle, the explosion.
And to
invent the electronic superhighway or the Internet is to
invent a
major risk which is not easily spotted because it does
not produce
fatalities like a shipwreck or a mid-air explosion.
The information
accident is, sadly, not very visible. It is
immaterial like the waves
that carry information.
- Yet you call yourself an "adept of technologies".
I am an art critic of technologies, a fan worried about
the
propagandistic and sudden nature of the new technologies.
When
machines begin to be idolized, social catastrophe is never
far
behind.
- Is the "propagandistic nature" of the new technology,
according
to you, due solely to the financial powers?
If large corporations such as Time Warner, Microsoft,
Disney,
etc., are in the process of becoming giants, it is because
they must
be competitive on the worldwide level. The
multinationals did not all
aspire to worldwide status. But, today,
a multinational corporation
is necessarily faced with becoming
worldwide. Hence, a considerable
increase in publicity investment
and an inevitable propaganda effect.
The second aspect of this
propaganda: the origin of technologies such
as Internet. They
derive from deterrence. Specifically, from the
Pentagon and
Arpanet, that network intended to resist the
electromagnetic
effects of a nuclear war. One cannot understand the
development of
information technology without understanding the
evolution of
military strategy. Since the atomic bomb is no longer a
real
deterrent, outside of superpower politics, an information war
has
occurred, an absolute power. This mixture is not to be trusted:
on
one side an investment in publicity; on the other a
silence
concerning the control of information by the military
powers.
- Yet, by giving the Internet user the possibility of being
a
receiver as well as a potential sender, it is hard to understand
how
information can be controlled.
This is true. But you cannot focus on Internet and forget the
rest
of the information superhighway and the whole system. The
term
"linked" applies to a system of which Internet is
only a part. The
debate on the Decency Act is linked to a future
media control. There
exists a de facto Department of Worldwide
Information: it's the
National Security Agency (the NSA, the
American intelligence agency
that intercepts almost all the
radiowaves in the world). The Internet
and the NSA are linked in
one way or another. How far will this
complicity go? Is the
Internet the Resistance fighter of the NSA
Occupation? You cannot
focus on the Internet and forget what
surrounds it. What
characterizes cybernetics is that it is
systematic. Everything is
connected, linked in a system of world
power, in the hands of the
Pentagon, and maybe tomorrow, of the
Europeans....
- Does this mean that channels of diffusion have been opened,
the
better to control them later on?
The Internet is a stunt designed to legitimize the
future
information superhighway. It is in kind publicity, a loss
leader,
very attractive as well, which therefore ensnares those
who might
have some reservations concerning information made
worldwide. The
goal of both the spiderweb and the Web is to catch
everything.
- In your book, you claim that cyberspace has nothing to do
with
democracy, that "the point of absolute speed is to also
be absolute
power".
I do not at all believe in what I call automatic democracy.
I
believe in reflection, not reflex. The new technologies
are
conditioning technologies and they are frightening in that
they are
related to the Audimat [French Nielsen ratings] and to
polling.
So-called electronic democracy will be the end of
participatory
democracy. While direct democracy may be viable for
microscopic
societies like the Swiss cantons or university AG's,
it cannot be
viable on a worldwide scale.
- You even speak of a guarantee'd "regression", now that
man has
reached the limit of speed, that of real time ...
Each time a wall is reached, there is a retreat. And history
has
just struck the wall of worldwide time. With live
transmission, local
time no longer creates history. Worldwide time
does. In other words,
real time conquers real space, space-time.
We must reflect on this
paradoxical situation which places us in a
kind of outside-time.
Faced as we are with this time accident, an
accident with no equal.
- What might this "regression" look like?
Worldwide application brings about the autonomization of
limited
groups. In other words, of sects that share power. There
is an
Internet sectorization and sectarianism, an integral part
of
worldwide becoming. The nation-state is superseded by
smaller
groupings. There is a deconstruction of the nation-state
which does
not mean a progression beyond but a regression to the
tribes, to the
special interest groups that had preceded the
nation-state... And it
will only be by fighting the negative
impact of progress that a
parade will be invented; as the railway
engineers did in 1880 when
they met to prevent train derailments
by inventing the block system
to regulate traffic. It is our turn
to invent the block systems of
worldwide information. Before there
are any accidents.
- For you, as a City Planner, the new technologies undermine
one
of man's basic freedoms, freedom of movement...
The teletechnologies of distance information reduce movement.
When
traveling is no longer necessary, the development of inertia
or
cocooning is to be feared. And that the overequipped able
becomes the
equivalent of the equipped disabled. There is a menace
of infirmity
and paralysis. But also a psychological menace, for
the future
generations of implemented interactivity who could see
the world
reduced to nothing. Generations may experience a feeling
of "great
internment", of an Earth too small for the
speeds of transport and
transmissions, a feeling of
"incarceration". This is a fearsome
distance pollution
for the collective imaginary of tomorrow. We
already feel this
contraction of the world with the speed of
supersonic planes or
teleconferencing....
- Hence, your idea of a "hypercity", a world city, of a
"real time
which is urbanized as soon as real space is
de-urbanized.
The virtual city is the city of all cities. It is each
important
city (Singapore. Rotterdam, Paris, Milan, etc.) becoming
the borough
of a hypercity, while ordinary cities become in some
sense suburbs.
This metropolization of cities leads us to conceive
of a hypercenter,
a real-time city, and thousands of cities left
to their own devices.
If I am correct, this would lead to a
pauperization, not of
continents but of cities, in all regions of
the world.
- Despite these harsh observations, do you find some merit in
the
information society?
Yes. It finally poses the question of a common language. It
cannot
be otherwise if there is to be world citizenship. It is
Babel,
moreover. What we are witnessing is not the Tower of Babel
but the
return of Babel! Can the world have a single language? Is
this
unicity of communication good or evil? Another positive
point:
Information will make us Earthlings. In the sense that
there is a
natural identification of man and the Earth and that
the question of
world citizenship prompts that of Earth being
where ecology would no
longer simply be an ecology of nature, but
a social, planetary
ecology, where the human species would be
united around the globe.
But all this is also fearsome: these
questions somehow accomplish
what totalitarianism never even dared
to hope.
Interview by David Dufresne
Translation by Jacques Houis
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