Here’s a book report I wrote. Sometimes I do this shit for fun. Not a book report on something you’d want to read, a book report on a French theorist talking about technics. Hopefully one or two people will find it to be interesting in some sense.
I’d preface this by noting that I’m no philosophy or theory expert – I did pretty poorly in the classes I had that leaned toward the philosophical, in fact. I’m a writer and as such like to know something or other about a lot of things. I’m also keenly interested in technology and social network analysis, both in a critical sense and in the sense that these represent the important issues in the direction in which we seem to be heading in general, and it’s best to think about these things and try to make positive social change as much a part of our advancement as possible (and if it’s not possible, to try and slow that advancement, I suppose).
Paul Virilio has ties with the same corner of French theory brought up by Baudrillard and Deleuze and Guattari, and has published with Semiotexte and is a frequent citation on Ctheory. But he’s something of a throwback in a way as well: where the aforementioned theorists blast off into overwrought and hard-to-read analogy, Virilio mixes his theoretical work with more practical political and social concerns, with special attention to urbanism and technology. He’s more easily classed with Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul than anyone so far as I’m concerned (he shares Mumford’s preoccupation with time and Ellul’s Christian, and in some ways even conservative, values as well).
The Information Bomb (English translation: Verso, 2000) is a relatively short theoretical communique that wanders all about contemporary culture and technology, arguing against the push toward automation and cybernetics and what Virilio calls “technoscience.” Technoscience, to Virilio, is the new face of science: advancing technology for the sake of advancing technology, not discovery for the sake of making things better. Efficiency for efficiency’s sake. Western Pennsylvania native Edward Abbey put it succinctly when he said, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Virilio’s argument is obviously slightly more drawn out, but rests on the same assertion.
Throughout the book, Virilio brings examples of a world headed in the direction of increased automation; he moves through Bob Dent, the first automated suicide, to the “doomsday machine” we remember from Dr. Strangelove and the idea some have of automating government as much as possible – basing policy and services on an algorithm rather than the rational mind. Technoscience brings us the tools to automate much of what was formerly difficult human work; Virilio argues that in taking advantage of these tools, we gradually give up our humanity and enter the realm of cybernetics.
Virilio is often associated with the term pure war; he comes to the term only on the last page of the book, as a culmination of the pages preceding it:
“Not ‘clean war’ with zero deaths, but ‘pure war’ with zero births for certain species which have disappeared from the bio-diversity of living matter.” (Italics and boldface both Virilio’s.)
Time has been sped up, telecommunications rules over all else, and, through cloning, genetic manipulation and cybernetics, we embark upon a eugenic project: to cleanse the world of inefficiency, simply for the sake of efficiency. This is essentially Virilio’s argument.
Virilio tends to skip over elements of technological advancement that the disciples of some of his contemporaries, especially Deleuzoguattarians1, tend to extol – the rhizomatic, open-source, open-access nature of online communication. If the Deleuzians (if not Deleuze himself) are at times disciples of cybertechnics and the social change the internet can bring about, Virilio offers a counterpoint: he fears and reviles the new threat, what he calls the “integral accident” of new technologies.
Each new technology brings with it an integral accident. The automobile cuts travel time and makes it easier for people to meet face to face; the integral accident brought on by the development of the automobile, however, is the car wreck. Virilio points out that, as our society becomes more dependent on computing technology and telecommunications, we become more vulnerable to the integral accident. At the time he was writing (1998), the Y2K possibility – which proved to be a bust – was just beginning to loom. This sort of possibility, whether it came to pass in that case or not, is nonetheless a spectre looming over a technological society.
Think of cars: twenty years ago, if you bought a new car, much of the functionality was contolled mechanically. A key controlled the locks and the ignition, a carburetor controlled the fuel-air mixture that entered the engine cylinders, and so on. Now most new cars are controlled in great part by computerized parts: the doors are opened with a remote control, the fuel and air are mixed with a computerized fuel injection system. If something goes wrong with these systems, it’s more difficult to fix – and since everything is encoded on tiny computer parts, these systems are more vulnerable to trouble than the mechanical systems were. The computerized-car project has been advanced based on the goal of efficiency and convenience; the result is a greater risk of error within the system and greater difficulty fixing it. (Another example, perhaps more insidious, would be the resourceful work of the pharmaceutical industry, of which Dr. Catherine DeAngelis, the editor of the JAMA amusingly said recently on NPR: “Don’t believe anything — not one thing — put out by a pharmaceutical company.” They continually develop and advertise drugs to treat minor maladies, only to find that the root causes of those maladies tend to adapt and become even more problematic in the face of the new drugs.)
Much of what Virilio says, and what I’ve underlined to this point, isn’t horribly off from what many other critics of contemporary technological society are saying, though he might say it more succinctly and convincingly in many cases. But the underlying philosophy Virilio puts forth is what most notably marks his work: rather than simply advising us to be critical of new technology, Virilio lays out precisely why:
“[W]hether it be speed of acquisition, transmission or computation, information is inseparable from its acceleration in energy terms – slowed-up information being no longer even worth of that name, but merely background noise.”
It’s Virilio’s fixation on speed and time that ties him to Mumford and to an extent Ellul, and which also makes him an important prophet in a technological era. He’s able to tie speed and “the information bomb” (which he conceives as having replaced the atom bomb as the new threat) to most every contemporary political and technological situation, and as such positions it as the key issue of the current age, and positions himself as a key contemporary thinker.
1. Best worst word ever.
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