Theories of Paul Virilio and Contemporary Media - Book Report/Review Example

Write an essay applying the theories of Paul Virilio to an example or examples of contemporary film or media. Paul Virilio is one of the most prominent French cultural theorists of today's age and time. He is popularly known as the inventor of concepts such as 'dromology' (the 'science' of speed). At the same time, Virilio is renowned for his claim that the logic of acceleration lies at the heart of the organization and transformation of the modern world. Irrespective, his ideas and concepts remain misunderstood by many postmodern cultural theorists. In this paper, and supporting the trend setting work of Arthur and Marylou's Kroker contribution of Virilio's writings will be evaluated by expressing that they exist beyond the terms of postmodernism and that they should be conceived of as a contribution to the emerging debate over 'hyper modernism'. Virilio was born in Paris in 1932. His mother was a Breton and fathers an Italian Communist. Soon, in 1939 Virilio was taken to the port of Nantes, where he continued to be bogged and petrified by the spectacle of Hitler's Blitzkrieg during World War II. He got his initial training at the Cole des M'tiers d' Art in Paris. Virilio soon became an artist in stained glass and interned alongside Matisse in different churches in the French capital. In 1950, he converted to Christianity amidst the company of 'worker-priests'. This was following military conscription into the colonial army during the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962). In the meanwhile Virilio studied and focused on phenomenology with Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne. The military, spatial, and organizational features of urban territory aroused Virilio's curiosity and inspiration. Henceforth, Virilio's early writings began to appear while he catapulted and projected himself as an 'urbanist'. Although Virilio is known for the innumerable short pieces and architectural drawings, he came up with in the 1960s. His first major work was a master piece in its own right. It was a photographic and philosophical study of the architecture of war entitled Bunker Archeology (Armitage)He continued with his work and in the process came up with Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology before moving on to The Aesthetics of Disappearance War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception Politics of the Very Worst Polar Inertia The Information Bomb and, most recently, Strategy of Deception It has been only very recently that the magnitude and impact of Virilio's cultural theory has recently begun to be recognized the English-speaking world. This situation is probably not a surprise because irrespective of several international speaking invitations weekly, he would barely leave Paris and even today seldom converses in public outside France. Virilio subsequently gave up on teaching in 1998. Currently he is resorted to writing and working with private organizations concerned with working to rehabilitate the homeless in Paris. The significance of Virilio's theoretical work crops out from his central claim that, in a culture that is influenced by war, the military-industrial complex is of crucial significance in debates In Speed & Politics, for example, Virilio introduces a credible 'war model' of the growth and development of the modern city. He also insinuates on the development of human society. Hence, as per Virilio, the encapsulated city of the feudal period was a stationary and at a standstill. The unassailable 'war machine' only added to an attempt to modularize the circulation and the momentum of the immigration of the urban masses. Thus, the fortified city was a unique amalgamation of political space of habitable inertia, the political configuration, and the physical underpinning of the feudal era. Nonetheless, as far as Virilio was concerned, the basic question was the reason behind the disappearance of the fortified city. He tried to answer none stereotypically and pointed out that did so due to the influx of ever increasingly transportable and accelerated modern weapons systems. Such innovations proved rather drastic and transformed the siege into a war of movement. Moreover efforts undertaken by the authorities were undermined. They aimed at governing the flow govern the flow of the urban citizenry and therefore pioneered the arrival of what Virilio called as the 'habitable circulation' of the masses. Virilio differed from Marx in his belief that the, the transition from feudalism to capitalism was more than just an economic transformation but a "military, spatial, political, and technological metamorphosis. " It all started in 1958, when an inquiry was launched into the military space and organization of the territory which was then claimed as the Atlantic wall. The 15,000 Nazi bunkers constructed it during World War II alongside the coastline of France to repel any Allied assault -.Virilio intensified his explorations within the Architecture Principe group. An important yet overlooked aspect of Virilio's work since the beginning has been his continued proximity to a psychologically based gestalt's theory of perception and vision. This theory was not only primarily responsible for Virilio and Parent's development of the concept of the 'oblique function' but also for their development of the 'bunker church' in Never in 1966. Inadvertently, Virilio continued to widen his theoretical sweep, pointing out in the 1970s, for example, that the drastic and rapid militarization of the contemporary cityscape was causing what Deleuze and Guattari (Clausewitz)conceptualized as the 'deterritorialization' of capitalist urban space . Virilio termed it as the arrival of the speed or what many claim as the chronopolitics. While assessing the frightening dromological fall-out from the communications technology revolution in information transmission critiqued over the plight and future of revolutionary resistance against pure power. This naturally flowed into the next the next important phase of his theoretical work through aesthetically derived notions of "'disappearance', the 'fractalization' of physical space, war, cinema, logistics, and perception." Furthermore, as other authors pointed out throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, Virilio critically discovered the cultural impact of the use of remote-controlled and cybernetic technologies in the rapidly evolving urban environment of 'techno' or 'crash' culture. Tracing the 'third age of military weaponry' in the form of new information and communications technologies for instance the Internet, Virilio came up with post-Einsteinium cultural theory. It focused primarily on the notion of 'polar inertia', the 'third', or, 'transplant revolution', Steward's cybernetic performance art, and the Persian Gulf and Kosovo wars.4 War and Cinema, is one of his most famous and successful works. In this Virilio has applied the idea of 'substitution' while elaborating over different kinds of reality that have appeared since the beginning of time. It is quiet similar to Baudrillard's (Baudrillard)concept of 'simulation'.Virilio's primary concern was the connection between war, cinematic substitution and what he claimed to be the 'logistics of perception'. (Clausewitz)The significance of the idea of the logistics of perception can also be perceived in the context of 'post' and 'hyper' modern wars like the Persian Gulf War of 1991 and the Kosovo War of 1998-9. For in these kinds of wars not only do settled topographical features go invisible during war but so does the basic architecture that makes up these battlegrounds. Indeed, the military high command has a very limited choice. It can either entomb or encapsulate itself within the subterranean bunkers to eradicate what one of Coppola's helicopters in the film Apocalypse Now named as 'Death from Above'. (Baudrillard)Or, alternatively, it can take to the clouds with the intention of taking over what Virilio has dubbed in the CTHEORY interview, 'orbital space'. While demarcating the logistics of perception in which the world vanishes in a war and where war phenomenon disappears from the eyes of the world, Virilio had been successful in critiquing in analyzing the association between the war, substitution, human and synthetic perception since the 1980s. This can be seen in some of his major texts such as L'ecran du desert: chroniques de guerre .Virilio derives his interests in war, cinema from military perception in warfare. According to various authors it remains quiet comparable to civilian perception and, particularly to the art of filmmaking. (Armitage) Ergo cinematic substitution culminates in the form of a 'war of images', or, Infowar. Infowar is not really a traditional war. In Infowar images are not produced of actual battles. Instead it is a war where the difference between the images of battles and the actual battles is undone and serialized. To be as clear as possible, Virilio, wars are not about confrontation. They have to do more with movement .Quiet like Baudrillard's infamous claim that the Gulf War did not take place; Virilio's assertion that war and cinema are virtually indistinguishable is open to debate. However Virilio's stand as far as Infowar is considered, remains intact with the view that the only way to keep track of cultural advancements. He remains affirm in his belief on the parallels that exist between the war, the cinema and the nuances of perception. The first rule or principle Virilio marks out is that there war and representation go hand in hand. War has graduated and has become more scientific and meticulous then it could ever before. It doesn't stay away from the 'pre-technical' notions of war as deception and illusion, spectacle and captivation. So other than mere maps and strategizing (representations of the battlefield) there are mediations such as the piercing sound of swooping planes and missiles. They were specifically created to paralyze their predictable victims. Ergo, what was claimed as the "theatre of operations" before has been taken over by the "theatre weapon" not just on battle ground but also in theaters. (Stevenson) Reflecting on the cultural and economic ties between the industries, Virilio argues that cinema fits perfectly within the spheres of the war machine: he claims that for instance, arms industry funding of the German film company UFA in the 1930s. He also points out the role of cinema stars and directors during the two World Wars (not just in propaganda, but also selling war bonds, etc.). On the contrary, he insists that the war machine - through its focus on mass-management against diverse locales, logistics and planning - fits within the spheres of cinema, and marks up to the scaling-up of production for master films like Birth of a Nation. According to Virilio, cinema is not the production of images but the manipulation and adaptation of these images: pans alongside tracking shots, the zooming in and out, editing, magnifying etc. Cinema is the integration and manipulation of dimensions, producing depth and intensity through movement in the process. As has been pointed out by artists and writers preceding Virilio, that this co-joins the experience of watching movies against flying ambitions. And while ace directors were coming to terms with this new found aspect of cinema, he asserts that, aviation in the early twenties was less about crossing speed records and more about a new way of seeing. The cinematic manipulation of dimensions draws its history from the rifle scope. "In his pencil-like embrasure, the look-out and later the gunner realized long before the easel painter, the photographer or the filmmaker how necessary is a preliminary sizing-up. This action, like the seductive wink so fashionable in the thirties, increased the depth of the visual field while reducing its own compass" (Stevenson) It can be noted that The replacement of places of war goes hand in hand with shifts in technologies of beliefs and perception by the mind and eyes: in order to run away from the look-out's view alongside Arial photography, "The army began to bury its strongholds and outworks in a third dimension, throwing the enemy into a frenzy of interpretation. Invisible in its sunken depths, the camera obscure also became deaf and blind, its relations with the rest of the country now depending entirely on the logistics of perception, with its technology of subterranean, aerial and electrical communication". Virilio also claims that "fortress-tombs, dungeons and bunkers are first and foremost camera obscure ' Their hollowed windows, narrow apertures and loopholes are designed to light up the outside while leaving the inside in semi-darkness" (Stevenson) At different points in his cultural theory, Virilio tries to compare the stars and the pilots, and albeit between directors and dictators. He points out while referring to Cecil B Deville that they displayed an irrevocable amount of charismatic infallibility albeit cropping out from foreknowledge of scripts. And as ironic as it may seem, sometimes the scripts did not even exist. He discusses that for as long as one whole generation of cinematic miracle-workers, the entire process of direction and execution, even when revised and edited, literally took the form of revelation - "that is divine action which makes known to men truths that they would not be able to discover by themselves" (Stevenson) However it can't be denied that at the same time a new breed of military and revolutionary leaders were beginning to take over. These men were pioneers of the trans-political era: as the entire scenario had changed back then. Power was distributed amidst the logistics of weaponry and of sound and images. Therefore, putting it another way, it was between war cabinets and propaganda departments. The parliamentary power had practically disappeared" (Stevenson) The world is a way of Hitler's plan for a new German empire. He aimed for a complete a "transformation of Europe into a cinema screen" (Stevenson)He wanted to take "to reestablish the concept war as an epic" (Stevenson)A major reason was the role of propaganda; the conference from Lena Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will was entirely preconceived for the celluloid - everything was executed and conceived keeping in perspective the nuances of the camera. Virilio has also elaborated time and again on what he calls the merger and dispersion of technologies of perception and of warfare. He begins afresh, and this time with the introduction of searchlights in the Russian-Japanese battle of Port Arthur in 1904. The first war projectors were marked by these search lights and later in cinema as well - according to Virile "illuminated a future where observation and destruction would develop at the same pace. Later the two would merge completely ' above all [with] the blinding Hiroshima flash which literally photographed the shadow cast by beings and things, so that every surface immediately became the war's recording surface, its film" (Stevenson).Virilio pointed out the difference between old cinematic wars and modern cinematic wars as projected in cinemas that in the wars of old, strategy mainly consisted in choosing and marking out a theatre of operations. However, this even involved projecting a battlefield which had the best visual effects and flowed with movement. A battlefield, with the best visual conditions had great scope for movement and transition. In the Great War, however, the main task was to grab on the opposite tendency. They did so by narrowing down on targets. A fake self conceived picture was also created for a battle for troops blinded by the massive reach of artillery units. Thus Virilio established through his theory that things like, trenches, shell-shock, moving front lines, the destruction of landmarks and so on, all obstructed vision in one way or another. This prompted the need for mass production of aerial photographs and of a new logistics of perception come acknowledgement. Virilio also writes in his theory that the irrevocable harmony between the eye and weapon can be deadly. In his words, both the fusion and confusion of these operations had complete their course as weapons "open their eyes" - examples include "heat-seeking missiles, infra-red and laser guidance systems, warheads fitted with video cameras" (Stevenson). A key point in this regard was that pilots were trained to distrust their own eyes - Virilio points out that the albeit important moment has passed, in which flight simulation hours are officially recognized as on par with real flight hours for training. In conclusion, would like to say that that it is not hard to see how Virilio's arguments extend to the current Cinema and inadvertently on War on Terror, where an invisible threat has gone hand in hand to undulating levels of US secrecy and spying. Meanwhile, the searchlight with which Virilio began continues to hold sway in every other city on the map today, and of course inadvertently in the culture of cinema. Bibliography Armitage. "Dissecting the Data Body: An Interview with Arthur and Marilouise Kroker"." Machinic Modulations: new cultural theory & technopolitics. Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities. (1999). Baudrillard. Simulations. NewYork: Semiotext, 1983. Clausewitz, Von C. On War. Ware. Wordsworth Editions, 1997. Stevenson, Michael. Masters of Media, News Media, Amsterdam. 10 May 2008. 27 May 2009 . Read More