For more than fifty years Virilio has offered incisive and provocative criticism on technology and its moral, political, and cultural implications. The Paul Virilio Reader collects for the first time English extracts reflecting the entire range of Virilio's diverse career. The book's introduction demonstrates that Virilio has produced an important--if controversial--"theory at the speed of light" that uncannily illuminates the impact of new information and communications technologies in a world that collapses time and distance as never before.
A critic of the art of technology, Paul Virilio has taught us that much media image is a strategy of war and that accident is becoming indistinguishable from attack. In these times of fierce conflict over which kind of capitalism is to take over the shrinking globe, and indeed which modernities we will live in during the twenty-first century, Paul Virilio is a significant contemporary theorist. But Virilio's work, originally published in French and stretching back to the 1950s, has until now been very difficult to access in full in English translation, available as it is in expensive little books or obscure catalogues and journals. The Paul Virilio Reader collects together for the first time readable extracts of Virilio's work from the entire range of his career. It is prefaced by an editorial introduction showing that Virilio has produced important - if controversial - 'theory at the speed of light' that can uncannily illuminate the impact of new information and communications technologies in a world which collapses time and distance as never before. Features* Extracts have been carefully selected to reflect the whole of Virilio's diverse career* A chronological ordering illustrates the development, and interconnectedness, of Virilio's work* Each extract is prefaced by a bibliographical and contextual commentary, and the book is completed by an innovative guide to reading Virilio.
First English language collection of the writing of French social critic, Paul Virilio. This volume represents his most important work, including five new translations and an exclusive interview with Virlio conducted by the editor reflecting the diverse career of this great social commentator on life in the late twentieth century.
For more than fifty years Virilio has offered incisive and provocative criticism on technology and its moral, political, and cultural implications. The Paul Virilio Readercollects for the first time English extracts reflecting the entire range of Virilio's diverse career. The book's introduction demonstrates that Virilio has produced an important -- if controversial -- "theory at the speed of light" that uncannily illuminates the impact of new information and communications technologies in a world that collapses time and distance as never before.
Paul Virilio is known as the high priest of speed. His discourses on speed, military technology, and modernity are highly influential among urban and cultural theorists, but he has influenced the work of many in other fields as well, including media theory, international relations, art history, cultural politics, architecture, and peace studies, to name a few. The first authoritative study of the life and work of Virilio, Steve Redhead's Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture explains and analyses Virilio's work, correcting many mistaken interpretations that have surfaced in the literature over the years. Although now retired from his position at the École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris, Virilio remains an active political and cultural thinker and commentator with a significant catalogue of work stretching back to the 1950s. Redhead reviews Virilio's intellectual career, from his days hanging out in an architect's office in the 1960s to his recent creation of a major art foundation exhibition on 'the accident' in the wake of 11 September 2001. Paul Virilio: Theorist for an Accelerated Culture is a rigorous and accessible introduction to Virilio that places him in the pantheon of critical thinkers in today's accelerated culture.
Writer and political activist Paul Virilio makes a passionate critique of information technology and the global media. OPEN SKY is a call for revolt against the insidious manipulation of perception by the electronic media and the infantilism of cyberhype. Virilio pleads for a new ethics of perception and a new ecology, to protect not only the natural world, but also the urban community.
Examining how the `here and now' of space, territory, the body, are being redefined by new technologies and how this undoes simplistic versions of the globalization thesis, Paul Virilio demonstrates how technology has made inertia the defining condition of modernity. An instantaneous present has replaced space and the sovereignty of territory; everything happens without the need to go anywhere. This book will be a key reference for students and scholars of the latest thinking in social theory.
A new interview with the philosopher of speed, addressing the ways in which technology is utilized in synchronizing mass emotions. We are living under the administration of fear: fear has become an environment, an everyday landscape. There was a time when wars, famines, and epidemics were localized and limited by a certain timeframe. Today, it is the world itself that is limited, saturated, and manipulated, the world itself that seizes us and confines us with a stressful claustrophobia. Stock-market crises, undifferentiated terrorism, lightning pandemics, “professional” suicides.... Fear has become the world we live in. The administration of fear also means that states are tempted to create policies for the orchestration and management of fear. Globalization has progressively eaten away at the traditional prerogatives of states (most notably of the welfare state), and states have to convince citizens that they can ensure their physical safety. In this new and lengthy interview, Paul Virilio shows us how the “propaganda of progress,” the illuminism of new technologies, provide unexpected vectors for fear in the way that they manufacture frenzy and stupor. For Virilio, the economic catastrophe of 2007 was not the death knell of capitalism, as some have claimed, but just further evidence that capitalism has accelerated into turbo-capitalism, and is accelerating still. With every natural disaster, health scare, and malicious rumor now comes the inevitable “information bomb”—live feeds take over real space, and technology connects life to the immediacy of terror, the ultimate expression of speed. With the nuclear dissuasion of the Cold War behind us, we are faced with a new form of civil dissuasion: a state of fear that allows for the suspension of controversial social situations.
