1999 Information Bomb Interview with Virlio
http://www.ip.pt/flirt/arquivo/f_julho/julho/textos/virilio.htm
Interviwing Paul Virilio Courtesy of the AjoBlanco magazine - February of 1999
Paul Virilio interviwed in Paris by Luisa Futoransky, by the occasion of the release of his new book, The Informational Bomb
- Let's s art at the beginning, your biography…
- I'm form 32. A real war baby. My father, an Italian communist that was resident in France, but not a French citizen, my mother, from Bretaigne, and myself, moved to Nantes. In 1940 I assisted the swift arrival of the German troops along the shores. But the worst was yet to come. And, on the 16th and the 23th of September of 1943, the Allies started the bombings. 8000 buildings crumbled to ashes, whole quarters on fire, the city devastated. Since then, I was 11, I become relativist. War made me understand the fragility of appearances. For a child, the city is indestructible, and I was a child that had seen his city turned to ashes, just like Nero had seen Rome on fire. War made me understand that destruction's power is totalitarian and it questions reality itself. I wouldn't believe my eyes anymore, everything became a fake to me. A destructive power that can begin in Coventry, or in Guernica, and that it ends in Hiroshima, but doesn't forget Auschwitz and field massacres. In my opinion, Auschwitz and Hiroshima are twin towns in the same historical plane. I know that a bomb that ends a war is no comparable to genocide, nevertheless Hiroshima is the beginning of a new military technological era that is able to destroy everything.
- I figure that the Liberation brought some peace to the war baby, at least literally. What happened then?
- The first thing, seeing the ocean, because despite living close we couldn't walk down there, being a forbidden area. I found out that there were bunkers at the beaches, and they stood like riddles, Easter Island statues of some kind, flies of a totalitarian space. The city and the war, the destruction through techniques, stand at the beginning of my life. When peace comes, I am no longer a child but an adult, because I'd seen too many monstrous things, severed heads… From then on, it's imperative a philosophical option. Most of my friends became Marxists, but my father was a Communist, so I sought a different solution…I was converted…
- To what?
- Christianity. I began reading the Bible as others read The Capital.
- Do you still linger to both?
- I am a man of the lefts. Better put, I am a communal, but since my 18teens I'm an adult and convinced Christian. The reading of the Bible converted me. It was in 1949. Someone told me there was this priest that worked at the Renault plant, a proletarian, and that lived at some small attic at Saint Denis. I went to see him, we discussed things out and, finally, he was the one who baptised me.
This is Virilio's Montparnasse period. He dedicates himself to painting, and lives from making movie canvas ads: "four by twelve meters walls", he corrects. Ironical ambiguity this life, someone making ads for theatres, someone who was since early times in the most felt opposition against «the pollution of our visual fields». Thamks to his experience, he starts to realise «what's behind propaganda, the great bluff and the consciences violations». But his professional formation his of a glass-shaper, an activity that held him the opportunity to work with two of the most important painters of this century, also glass-makers themselves: Matisse and Braque.
- Little by little, I was penetrating the sacred art milieu. At the some time, I was hoping to understand the total war phenomenon, and I used for ten years a Leica camera, making a highly detailed photographic inventory, rather unique, on the bunkers. The result was my first book, from 1975, The Archaeological Bunker. And I also went to Vladimir Jankélévitchk's and Raymond Aaron's courses, I read in absolute fascination Merlau-Ponty's books and all his perception phenomenology. During that period, I also discovered Victor Segalen, his homage to the Chinese statuary and steles. I realise that both of us have similar quests: Segalen, looking for abandoned Budas and ruins among Chinese fields, and me, walking through Atlantic beaches, doing practically the same thing.
- But one thing is a poet descant about faraway funerary steles, another is a self-made scribe of fortifications, and another still is you building the only cathedral made in France in this century.
- That's right. In that time I, along with Claude Parent, won the concourse for the construction of the Nevers Cathedral, that is today regarded as a historical monument. The project departed from that monster that the bunker is, a myth of the dissuasion of war and a refuge during the 60's and the 70's. But what I'm doing is christianise that terrifying shape. In Germany, the anti-aerial refuges were transformed into hospitals, vegetable depos, and churches. Thus my blockhouse, my cathedral based on all this, but this is something that happens also at the lourdes cave, a shadowy and restless cement shape, that actually had a great opposition.
- Inside the Church itself?
- Inside, around and beyond. Let me tell you an anecdote: while the liturgical cerimony wa being held, the consecration of the Cathedral, the bishop just couldn't stop saying »This is horrible1 Horrible!» So the church's priest stood in front of the bishop and said: «Monsignor, you are not in an exorcism, but in a consecration of what shall become my church, and I cannot tolerate that».
With May of 68, Virilio joins the historical occupation of the Odeón theatre, he gathers the students and an idea is brought up: the creation of the Special School of Architecture, of which Virilio will be the most responsible member until December, 1997. He says that «this is the only private architecture school of all France». Due to his close relationship with architecture, he defines himself as an «urbanist», His last book, The Informational Bomb, recently published in France, focuses the life of the multifaceted and sometimes quite hot-headed urbanist, and his mission of translating the world and its machines, motors and screens, alerting everyone that is willing to listen of the risks of a total accident that can be triggered by the new technologies, the ones in which velocity already has a decisive role, the political and social controller role.
- You say that the world today, as we know it, is an interactive system capable of provoking catastrophic chain reactions. In a word, we're too close of the cyberbomb…
- I was inspired by a sentence that Einstein spoke in the late 50's, some time before dying. An meridian and whole-contemplating phrase. There are three bombs, he said, at man's time to come: the atom bomb - that as just exploded - ; the information one - remember there were no informatics back then - and the demographic one. This idea marked me for good. Due to my research about velocity, I'm conscious about the fact that interactivity is related to information as radioactivity to energy: both are colossal potencies. Yester's atom bomb and tomorrow's genetic bomb are not thinkable without the informational one. After the atomic bomb, that can disintegrate matter through radioactivity's energy, so can this second bomb, the information's, at the end of our millennium, disintegrate nations' world-wide peace through informatics' interactivity. It is not information the threat, but rather its instantaneous and immediacy possibilities; an interactivity that is seen in our days at a global level, that produces a feedback effect, cybernetic and absolutely terrifying.
- Can you mention any precise phenomenon in which we can perceive such an effect?
- The several cracks at Stock Markets that travel around the globe are related to what I call systemic risk, that is, the set of cybernetic risks: a market pushes the other down on its fall until we come before the great catastrophe, before the complete accident. The immediacy of automatic quotations helps out the instantaneous global scale crack. Now I understand Futurist Marinetti's premonitions about velocity as a violence felt in all fields. It would be necessary political economics of velocity, dromology, a subject whose interests are the damages provoked by velocity.
- Can we consider you a severe critic of technology?
- I am not against technology. I'm not an ecologist. I'm not defending the return of the wheelbarrow or think that we should clap our hands instead of using the phone. But I think we should not idealise or turn into myths the technological objects. When the trains were being used for the first time, they said that an universal democracy would be shaped by it, but what actually happened was World War I, with the German troops getting nearer by train. Anglo-Saxons and French used trucks and with them, a new step towards destruction was performed. In WWII, you would march onward with radio and phone blows. Hitler screamed and De Gaulle screamed back with the radio program "The French talk to the French". When an object is made, it's always subverted into a tyrannical use, to do evil, and you have to fight it. Fighting again like Jacob fought the Lord's angel.
- Milleniarism oblige. Does your accusation as a Cassandra or as a catastrophic prophet bother you? Back where I'm come from it is said, «of poets and madmen, we all share a bit».
- For me, there's no such difference. Great poets are also prophets. In that sense, Kafka is a prophet, being one of the greatest writers of the XX century, in my opinion, the greatest. He warned us of Dachau and anticipated the XX century with great accuracy.
- More than Benjamin, Beckett or many others?
- Kafka was the first. He has an extraordinary prophetic responsibility in relation to the Jews, the constitution of Europe and everything that's happening right now. I'm also a grand admirer of Karl Kraus, that adds poetry to vision, and Holderlin, another prophet. These are different creators, people I'm inspired by and that I respect.
- This century began with high praise to Fairy Electricity. Can we begin the next by praising Fairy Informatics? Why call her Witch of all Demons? Why the excess of fearlogy, a taste of apocalyptic shivers?
- Chernobyl is produced by electricity. Our century is the century of huge accidents: the Titanic and Chernobyl.
- You also analysed the wrongs of our democracies…
- Yes, democracies are being threatened. In France, by extreme right-wing parties like Front national and by tyrants and mobs. But, generally speaking, democracies are being threatened by technology, by the speeding up of information. The great internet threat against democracy is its idea look-likeness: a megabrain of sorts in which the whole world in connected with the whole world and in which you just have to think of a question to get the right answer. This is the negation of representative democracy, on the benefit of a virtual or automatic democracy. Interactivity technologies leads us to cybernetic democracies that are no longer representative, but "presentative", no longer explanatory but a simple display. That is, hallucinatory, just like the media.
Just look at the humanitarian campaigns, and think how a democracy could be like them. At my regard, democracy is a time of common reflection and not the conditioned reflex of opinion surveys.
- How and with which elements can we fight these conditioners?
- You just made the key-question. The better image to answer such a question is from the bible. I'm thinking of the fight between Jacob and the angel. Abraham, Isaac and Moses are, let us say, the shapers of the One God, of monotheism, but Jacob is the one who will meet the loving, dreaming one, his own god, shaped as the image of god, and he will fight him not to death but to life. He will remain standing all night facing him. That's in contrary signal to everything that is made today: we adulate the god machine, we bow in our knees before the deus ex machina that was built with our own very hands. These new technologies are publicised by millions. Bill gates has millions of dollars just for cathodic publicity. My role is not of a Cassandra, but of someone who is resistant to global publicity. It's possible to be resistant in relation to two things: the occupation, during the war - nowadays the media are the occupation forces - , and before the information and interactivity acceleration that are threatening democracies and freedoms. This is my role: build a intelligence resistance line, through my analysis of technologies, of media, and my war techniques knowledge. In a world divided between being collaborationist and resistant, I am the latter.
- Can we resist Dolly, whose reproduction can do without sexuality?
- We use too much the lamb symbol. All those efforts in reading the human genoma and construct chimeras, not only clones, is linked to the information potency, to the DNA deciphering, that programs life. You cannot think of this without the computer's calculus. Without it, we couldn't think of reading the human genoma. Remembering Aesop's fable about language, I would say the computer is the best and the worst of things. Who will be next Mengele's son? An English or a North American? The new eugenics is based on new genetics, biotechnology and the potency of computer deciphering. Today's threat doesn't come only from fascism, that doesn't cease its return trials, but also from the madness of a science that wants to become divine, to which the computer is the main tool and weapon. In this sense it's a bomb, that won't explode but implode, destroying the knowledges, the respect for life, for justice…
- You, as any prophet, are more known outside the borders of your own language. Do you travel often? Do you seeks your readers?
- There are few critics of technology. There's Jacques Elul, who's dead, Ricardo Petrella and Ignacio Ramonet, from Le Monde Diplomatique. It is certain that I'm a little lonely in my critique, but I do not have any problems with the reader. I don't travel a lot, but I'm translated very often.
- From translations to Babel, another of your favourite themes, it's a small step…
- Babel also leads us to architecture, and even if I am not a professional architect, I consider myself an urbanist, a man of the city. Babel is, for me, a grouping, like Noah's Ark, one of the greatest myths of modern world. The city is the greatest shape of man's history and it imposes itself as a superior political form. It doesn't just give its name to politics (from polis), but it lends ii its own shape. Babel is undoubtedly the image of the megalopolis that cannot surpass itself, the pre-image of the capital. In the past, there were the City-States, like Sparta or Athens. Then, the States-Nations, with its countryside capitals and its national capital. After World War II, megalopolis showed up such as Calcutta, Mexico, São Paulo, Tokyo, Cairo, and Peking. But Babel is the lying program to them all. It's the city that will assume the totality of politics through an unified, consensual, single language. Hopeful wonders, but also terrifying! Politicians today are not ready for the surrounding technologies, the techno-scientific potential and globalisation. The feudalism-like lords of the Markets hold the real power: the Gates, the Murdock and the Soros.
Let me tell you about two piece of news: UNO is getting ready the UNL, Universal Network Language, that is, a superesperanto. One language only. It will be great. We will all understand each other and at the same time it will be the diversities confusion. We are facing terrible paradoxes. The second thing is that Swatch had thought of releasing January the 1st a watch whose unity is the beat, that is equivalent to 84,6 seconds, and is something that will substitute the seconds, the minutes, the hours and even the days by an abstract hour. The time meridian will be the Swatch's boss office. A single language and a time pattern with no cosmogonical reference. We're really deep within Babel. Don't you think?
Glossary:
Absolute velocity: Acceleration of reality. The speed at which telecommunications are now functioning, not at local or relative velocity anymore.
Cyberbomb: As opposed to Einstein´s two other lethal bombs, the atomic and the demographic ones, the cyberbomb destroys the principles of reality itself and then rebuilds it. It could bring about the information war. Its interactivity might allow chain reactions of catastrophes once exchanges become global.
Cybernetic tyranny: When technologies of substitution are/will be used for war and/or for global information control.
Cyberspace: A complete light show where reality is accidented and destroyed, split between the real and the virtual. It is dominated by its quest for God, to be God, to be here and there, seeing and hearing everything.
Deus ex Machina: A machine-God, towards which technologies are converging, thus negating transcendantal God.
Dromology: Study of the effects of the acceleration of velocity in society. Comes from dromomaniac: a compulsive walker.
Global time: Live time, not local anymore. It is caracterized by an instant feedback between reception and transmission. Explains how economic crisis reverbate uncontrollably around the world.
Information war: The global control of information that posits a threat to democracy.
Man-machine: When technology enters the body, stimulating memory and perception and rendering it torn and desintegrated.
Media buildings: Places where the function of information prevails over that of habitation such as sport stadiums where the giants screens are as important as the terraces.
Picnolepsia: Mental state of the modern subject who is always suspiscious of having missed something.
Stereo-reality: A unity of perception between the real and the virtual. A desired state.
Virtual city: City of the information networks, where the local and particular space is abandonned in favour of a ´tele´ space, removed from where the real occurs. It is still only economic and military in nature, not yet political.
Virtual reality: A substitution (and not just a simulation) of reality by means of new technologies, with the intent of rendering it more powerful than the original. Reality thus becomes symetrical, split in two parts at odds with each other, leaving humans completely disorientated.
*These are Virilio´s own defintions.
