John Armitage on 5 Oct 2000 08:14:56 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] The Uncertainty Principle: Paul Virilio's 'The Information Bomb' |
Hi all For some unknown reason, I have been cut adrift from _nettime by my university for a while now. Consequently, I have only just seen the article by Steve Beard on Paul Virilio's _The Information Bomb and the correspondence. For an alternative take on this book see my review article in the 'speed' issue of M/C --excerpted below -- or the alternative version which appeared _New Left Review back in May/June of this year. Cheers John ================================================== http://www.api-network.com/mc/archive.html#speed The Uncertainty Principle: Paul Virilio's 'The Information Bomb' John Armitage Paul Virilio. The Information Bomb. London: Verso, 2000. 145 pp., ISBN: 1-85984-745-5 (hardback). Born in Paris in 1932, the French political and 'technocultural' theorist Paul Virilio is the leading exponent of the idea that 'dromology' (the logic of speed) stands at the centre of the political formation and technocultural transformation of the contemporary world. Virilio is an architect of the 'Brutalist' school and political 'critic of the art of technology' as well as a Husserlian phenomenologist and post-Einsteinian analyst of technoculture. In recent years Virilio has developed his own political approach to the technocultural and experiential effects of speed and technoscience on the organisation of cyberspace and cyberculture. It is an approach that is increasingly being adopted and adapted by a variety of pre-eminent thinkers on the Left such as Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Zizek and Andre Gorz. As the son of a Breton mother and an Italian communist father in Nazi- occupied France, Virilio spent the majority of World War II as an anxious evacuee in Nantes. In 1950 he converted to Christianity in the fraternity of 'worker-priests'. Virilio was educated at the L'École des Métiers d'Art in Paris and first became a craftsman in stained glass before becoming a sort of intellectual provocateur and co-editor of Architecture Principe, an architectural group and occasional review devoted to radical political and architectural experimentation. Between 1963 and 1966 Virilio dedicated his time to studying the architecture of war and to the construction of the 'bunker church' of Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay at Nevers. Virilio became politically active during the 1968 May revolt and this led to an irrevocable split with his partner in Architecture Principe, the architect Claude Parent. In 1969 Virilio was instated as a professor of architecture at the École Speciale d'Architecture at the behest of the students there, a position he occupied until his retirement in 1997. Virilio's major work is Speed & Politics: An Essay on Dromology (1986), written, he maintains, to raise the political question of speed as the hidden side of economic development. Virilio's recent texts such as Open Sky (1997) and now The Information Bomb can therefore be regarded as important advances in his current work on the politics of techno, or, cyberculture. ... ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ "The military is the message." John Armitage Principal Lecturer in Politics & Media Studies Division of Government & Politics University of Northumbria at Newcastle Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8ST UK Tel: 0191 227 4971 Fax: 0191 227 4654 E-mail (w): john.armitage@unn.ac.uk; (h): j.armitage@technologica.demon.co.uk Read: Paul Virilio: From Modernism To Hypermodernism and Beyond http://www.sagepub.co.uk/shopping/Detail.asp?id=6977 _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold