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

Modernity is the time when time has a history

In the time of the Greek Olympics no one thought of track or Olympic records, let alone of breaking them. The invention and deployment of something other than the power of human or animal muscles was needed for such ideas and for he decision to assign importance to the differences between the capacities of human individuals to move, to be conceived and to stimulate practice – and so for the prehistory of time, that long era of wetware-bound practice, to end, and the history of time to start. The history of time began with modernity. Indeed, modernity is, apart from anything else, perhaps more than anything else, the history of time: modernity is the time when time has a history.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Polity Press, 2012) p. 110

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

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 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