An accidental history and a purely anecdotal historicity

Past, present, future: once more, what remains of the long duration of history or the short durations of the event in the face of the lack of duration involved in instantaneity, if not the beginnings of an accidental history and a purely anecdotal historicity?

Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant (Polity Press, 2010) p. 100

Atemporal futurism is gearing up to swamp the secular shores of general history

Global warming on the one hand, economic overheating on the other: honestly, disaster anticipation is becoming so widespread we'll soon need to set up meteopolitics in place of a geopolitics that is obviously too 'down-to-earth' now that atemporal futurism is gearing up to swamp the secular shores of general history before too long!

Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant (Polity Press, 2010) pp. 94-95

Deterrence of the future as well as of the past

In the nineteenth century, Progress meant the Great Commotion of the railways. In the twentieth century, still meant more the Great Speed of the bullet train and the supersonic jet. In the twenty-first century, it means the Instantaneity of the intereactive telecommunications of cybernetics. So the anachronistic acceleration of present reality certainly does not spell the end of historicity. More importantly, it does spell the emergence of lying, not by omission any more, but by deterrence of the future as well as of the past.

This involves a sudden loss of memory, every bit as much as of imagination, about the future of a too-cramped telluric planet, cluttered – and rendered insalubrious – not so much by rubbish these days as by the illusion it entertains, its great progressive illusions.

Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant (Polity Press, 2010) pp. 70-71

An exurbanism that is not so much metropolitan as omnipolitan

The original town is giving way to the ultracity produced by an exurbanism that is not so much metropolitan as omnipolitan.

Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant (Polity Press, 2010) pp. 36-37

The futurism of the instant

And so, after the twentieth century's Futurism of long-term History, denounced by Daniel Lévy and celebrated by Marinetti, the time will then have come for this futurism of the instant, which Octavio Paz spoke to us about, observing bitterly: 'The moment is uninhabitable, just like the future.'

It is this form of insalubrious uninhabiting that today speaks to us through the exoduses, through the distant exiles, through all this dislocation of expatriation that is only ever deportation in disguise – not, as in days gone by, propelling people towards the extermination of the camps, towards genocide, any more, but driving them towards externalization, the outsourcing, of the ultracity to come, the genocide of the twilight of places, the exhaustion of the resources produced by the geodiversity of the terrestrial globe.

Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant (Polity Press, 2010) pp. 23-24

The Metacity will be outsourced to the middle of nowhere

For if the Axis of the World ran through the heart of the city of antiquity long ago, tomorrow's ultracity, the Metacity, will be outsourced to the middle of nowhere!

Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant (Polity Press, 2010) p. 15

The megalopolis of the excluded

In fact, after the pluralist era of sustainable staying-put in the different neighbourhoods of registered urban land – a form of stationary settlement that once in antiquity, introduced the notion of 'citizenship', as deriving from political localization, and with it, ultimately, of the 'legally constituted state' of nations – the era of habitable circulation is now dawning with the transpolitical delocalization that is now overturning the geopolitics of settlement in the age of globalization. And this is happening at the precise moment that the teletechnologies of information are ensuring that sedentary man is at home everywhere, and the nomad nowhere, beyond the provisional accommodation offered by a now pointless transhumance. That transhumance is now taking place, not only from one country to another. Now people are displaced within their very homeland from their heartland to some vague territory where refugee camps have not only taken over from the shanty towns of days gone by, but from the towns. The megalopolis of the excluded of all stripes, pouring in from all sides, has now come to rival the all-too-real megalopolis of the included, the ultracity.

Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant (Polity Press, 2010) pp. 2-3

Escaping nihilism

The great challenge, in fact, will be escaping nihilism. Nihilism is no revelation, it's just "Viva la muerte!" I believe that there's a hope beyond hope – Saint Paul's phrase – in finitude, in the magnitude of poverty. I believe there is something of the unknown, a terra incognita in the logic of poverty.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) pp. 224-225

The field of freedom shrinks with speed

Speed allows for progress in space, only progress in space has been identified with progress in time, in history. And that is really an abuse of language. We know very well that progress in space is not necessarily progress in time. The fact of going faster from Paris to New York doesn't make the exchanges any better. It makes them shorter. But the shortest is not necessarily the best. There again it's the same illusory ideology that when the world is reduced to nothing and we have everything at hand, we'll be infinitely happy. I believe just the opposite – and this has already been proven – that we'll be infinitely unhappy because we will have lost the very place of freedom, which is expanse. All current technologies reduce expanse to nothing. They produce shorter and shorter distances – a shrinking fabric. Now, a territory without temporality is not a territory, but only the illusion of a territory. It is urgent that we become aware of the political repercussions of such a handling of space-time, for they are fearsome. The field of freedom shrinks with speed. And freedom needs a field. When there is no more field, our lives will be like a terminal, a machine with doors that open and close. A labyrinth for laboratory animals.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) pp. 82-83

No more illusions about technology

No more illusions about technology. We do not control what we produce. Knowing how to do it doesn't mean we know what we are doing. Let's try to be a little more modest, and let's try to understand the riddle of what we produce. Inventions, the creations of scientists are riddles which expand the field of the unknown, so to speak. And there we have an inversion. This inversion is not pessimistic per se, it's an inversion of principle. We no longer start from a positivistic or negativistic idea, we start from a relativistic idea. The problem is the following: technology is a riddle, so let's work on the riddle and stop working only on technology.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) pp. 76-77

As if the end of history were the end of duration

History as the extensiveness of time – of time that lasts, is portioned out, organized, developed – is disappearing in favor of the instant, as if the end of history were the end of duration in favor of instantaneousness, and of course, of ubiquity.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) p. 60

Death is an interruption of knowledge

Death is an interruption of knowledge. All interruptions are. And it's because there is an interruption of knowledge that a time proper to it is constituted. The rhythm of the alternation of consciousness and unconsciousness is "picnolepsy", the picnoleptic interruption (from the Greek picnos, "frequent"), which helps us exist in a duration which is our own, of which we are conscious. All interruptions structure this consciousness and idealize it.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) pp. 47-48

The invention of the boat was the invention of shipwrecks

In classic Aristotelian philosophy, substance is necessary and the accident is relative and contingent. At the moment, there's an inversion: the accident is becoming necessary and substance relative and contingent. Every technology produces, provokes, programs a specific accident. For example: when they invented the railroad, what did they invent? An object that allowed you to go fast, which allowed you to progress – a vision à la Jules Verne, positivism, evolutionism. But at the same time they invented the railway catastrophe. The invention of the boat was the invention of shipwrecks. The invention of the steam engine and the locomotive was the invention of derailments. The invention of the highway was the invention of three hundred cars colliding in five minutes. The invention of the airplane was the invention of the plane crash. I believe that from now on, if we wish to continue with technology (and I don't think there will be a neolithic regression), we must think about both the substance and the accident – substance being both the object and its accident.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) p. 46

Duration is the proper of man

Transpolitics is the beginning of the disappearance of politics in the dwindling of the last commodity: duration. Democracy, consultation, the basis of politics, requires time. Duration is the proper of man; he is inscribed within it.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) p. 42

Politics is first and foremost the polis

Urbanist and politician, etymologically speaking, are the same thing. Involvement in a political ideology has obscured the fact that politics is first and foremost the polis.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) p. 17

Architecture is only a movie

After the age of architecture-sculpture we are now in the time of cinematographic factitiousness; literally as well as figuratively, from now on architecture is only a movie; an un-habitual motility is successor to the habitudes of the city, become an immense darkroom for the fascination of the mobs, where the light of vehicular speed (audiovisual and automobile) renews the glare of solar light; the city is no longer a theatre (agora, forum) but the cinema of city lights: they've returned to Ur (Our, light), believing now that the desert is without horizon.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991) p. 65

The more informed man is the more the desert expands

Man, fascinated with himself, constructs his double, his intelligent specter, and entrusts the keeping of his knowledge to a reflection. We're still here in the domain of cinematic illusion, of the mirage of information precipitated on the computer screen – what is given is exactly the information but not the sensation; it is apatheia, this scientific impassibility which makes it so that the more informed man is the more the desert of the world expands around him, the more the repetition of information (already known) upsets the stimuli of observation, overtaking them automatically, not only in memory (interior light) but first of all in the look, to the point that from now on it's the speed of light itself which limits the reading of information and the important thing in electronic-information is no longer the storage but the display.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991) p. 46

Art is the presentation of the illusion of the world

The world is an illusion, and art is the presentation of the illusion of the world.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991) pp. 35-36

The desert of uncertainty and effort

The Hebraic tradition manifests two kinds of lack, expressed by two deserts, emerging one from the other, heart of everything, in its heart everything. One is named Shemama, despair and destruction, and the other is Midbar, which is a desert not of dereliction but instead a field of uncertainty and effort. The shemama is, rather, polarity of the City-State (City of Ur – Our, light), its desert is the tragical one of laws, ideology, order, as opposed to what could have resulted from wandering.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991) p. 27

The mind is a thing that lasts

To Descartes' sentence: "the mind is a thing that thinks", Bergson retorted: "The mind is a thing that lasts..." The paradoxical state of waking would finally make them both agree: it's our duration that thinks, the first product of consciousness would be its own speed in its distance of time, speed would be the causal idea, the idea before the idea.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991) p. 22