| Phil Graham on 11 Oct 2000 22:26:20 -0000 |
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| <nettime> PAUL VIRILIO NEWSLETTER #3 -- John Armitage |
From the Cybersociety list Phil ---------------------------------------------- PAUL VIRILIO NEWSLETTER #3 October, 2000 --------------------------------------------- ***Please feel free to forward this Newsletter to other interested researchers*** -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------- Introduction Welcome to PAUL VIRILIO NEWSLETTER #3. This Newsletter will be of interest to all those concerned with the work of the French cultural theorist of technology, Paul Virilio. As usual, I have arranged the news about Virilio in order of publication or anticipated publication. French publications dates in square brackets. Any readers who have Virilio related information are encouraged to mail it on to me. I will include it in the next --irregular -- Newsletter. Best wishes John Armitage --------------------o0o-------------------- 1. _Another Modernity, A Different Rationality_ (1999), By Scott Lash. Oxford: Blackwell. There is a substantial chapter on Virilio in Lash's most recent book. It is entitled 'Virilio: Bad Objects'. ----------o0o---------- 2. _McLuhan and Baudrillard: The Masters of Implosion_ (1999), By Gary Genosko. London: Routledge. Genosko briefly discusses the strained relationship between the work of Virilio and McLuhan. ----------o0o---------- 3. _The Information Bomb_ (2000 [1998]). London: Verso. As most of you will know, Virilio's book has now been published in the UK. As far as I am aware, there are three reviews of it so far: a) 'Dromographic Stress Disorder: How E-Commerce Makes Survivors of Us All', by Steve Beard. This review appeared in _Mute_ magazine and on the _nettime_ list. I have appended it to the end of this Newsletter. b) 'The Theorist of Speed', by John Armitage. This review appeared in _New Left Review_ No. 2 March/April 2000. c) 'The Uncertainty Principle: Paul Virilio's 'The Information Bomb', by John Armitage. This review article appeared in the 'Speed' issue of M/C: A Journal of Media & Culture in June 2000. The URL for this article is: http://www.api-network.com/mc/archive.html#speed -----o0o----- 4. _Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond_ (2000). Edited by John Armitage. Sage Publications in association with _Theory Culture & Society. As most of you will know, this book was published in the UK in May/June. As far as I am aware, there are no reviews of it so far. The URL for this book at Sage is: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/shopping/Detail.asp?id=6977 -----o0o----- 5. _La Procédure Silence_. 76 pp., 98 F, aux éditions Galilée dans la collection l'Espace critique dirigée par Paul Virilio. This is Virilio's latest book, recently released in France. According to my good friend Patrice Riemens, CSL's official European Correspondent (Paris-Prague-Vladivostock), the book is causing some controversies already in Parisian circles. However, as anyone has met Virilio will tell you, he is the sort of person who thrives on intellectual fisticuffs; in fact, Virilio can start a punch up in room containing only himself. For a sampler of such controversies in French please see the article below in _Liberation_: http://www.liberation.fr/quotidien/semaine/20001006venzr.html -----o0o----- 6. _The Kosovo W@r Took Place in Orbital Space & Beyond Postmodernism? Paul Virilio's Hypermodern Cultural Theory_, by John Armitage. All being well, the above excerpt from my new and long interview with Virilio on the war in Kosovo plus a paper of mine presented at the _3rd International Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference_ in Birmingham, UK 21-25 June, 2000, will appear in the next couple of weeks in _CTHEORY_. I will post them on to the Cyber-Society-Live (CSL) List when they are published. -----o0o----- 7. _Strategy of Deception_ (2000 [1999]). By Paul Virilio. Verso, London. This is Virilio's take on the war in Kosovo, published in France last September. I spoke to the people at Verso this week and I have been told that the English translation of this book will be in the shops in the UK in around 6 weeks time. -----o0o----- 8. _Dromoeconomics: towards a political economy of speed_. This is an article written by fellow CSL member Phil Graham and myself. It will appear in a theme issue -- on the 'economies of excess' -- of the cultural studies journal, _parallax_, No 18, in January 2001. -----o0o----- 9. _Virilio Live: Selected Interviews_. Edited by John Armitage. This is an edited book of Virilio interviews, inclusive of several never before published in English and one or two never before published at all. All being well, it will be published by Sage in association with _Theory, Culture & Society_ towards the end of next year. -----o0o----- 10. _Virilio Over Denmark_. My friend, Danish Virilio expert and CSL member, Niels Brugger, has recently told me that his work on Virilio will be published in book form in Danish in the coming year. Look out for it in Copenhagen shortly. -----o0o----- 11. _Dromographic Stress Disorder: How E-Commerce Makes Survivors of Us All_, by Steve Beard. This appeared in issue 18 of the UK "Critical/Information/Services" magazine Mute: =============================================================== Dromographic Stress Disorder: How E-Commerce Makes Survivors of Us All by Steve Beard20 Does Paul Virilio still have something to say about cyberspace now it has morphed from an electronic frontier into a 24/7 automated trading post? The wily French theorist has always been a bit of a doom-monger when it comes to new media but he has also been highly adept at making connections between the seductions of platform portability and the dangers of reflex cognitive-behavioural conditioning (have you checked your email/mobile/stock price yet? how long before you reply to an electronic message? the interval defines a breathing space). In fact his particular brand of apocalyptic Catholic moralising means he positively relishes the darkside of the virtual force. Virilio is the electronic desert prophet constantly warning of the "generalised accident" which waits at the end of the technological curve. In the dark days of nuclear deterrence this used to be the threat of extermination posed by the atomic bomb. But in the new times of engineered virtual enlightenment it is the "information bomb" which apparently threatens to exterminate us in something like a global stock market annihilation. Virilio is the great annunciator of the technological endtime, but as demand-management economist Joseph Maynard Keynes remarked long ago in the long term we are all dead anyway (life is determined by human reproduction and not by technological evolution). Virilio's new book The Information Bomb (Verso) is full of dire auguries and sees him beginning to clear new ground with distant early warnings about the dangers of genetic engineering. But it his pronouncements on the domain of e-commerce or what he calls the "global perception market" which are most interesting. Virilio's theoretical roots in Edmund Husserl and the French school of phenomenology means he is particularly well placed to understand that, as a post-nuclear medium of parallel processing and networked communication, the internet not only bypasses any root node of strategic command-and-control but also over-exposes the distributed perceptual cues of the survivors we have all become. In this scenario the spooky Echelon surveillance system is merely a retro-nuclear nostalgia cult while it is the live web-cams which dot the net which are actually doing the real business of turning us all into each other's keepers by heralding privileged "points of view" as future "points of sale" (get your JenniCam T-shirts here). Virilio himself may be nostalgic for what he regards as the unmediated sustainability of an inhabitable ecological niche, but he also understands that the information landscape is delivered through the "instantaneous superimposition of actual and virtual images." In other words, he understands that the web is a pure advertising medium whose condition of entry is that objects should become commodity-signs in an ecstatic cult of self-reflexive mourning. "Actual" things doubled up as their own "virtual" effigies are like second-hand items displayed in heat-sealed plastic bags: they recover a margin of untouchability whose fetishistic allure begins to incite the fashionable to play the familiar game of provoking death. From here on in it's all really just a matter of joining new media whores to old media punters through the data revenue stream generated by a transaction. What this means in banal terms is a movement towards the discipline of electronic customer relationship management and Virilio begins to hook up from the other side of his cautionary analysis (and probably much to his horror) with a gung-ho digital marketing guru like Seth Godin. Godin is the Vice President of Direct Marketing at the American portal Yahoo! and the author of the cult manual Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers (Simon & Schuster). He has argued persuasively that older media like magazines, radio and television depended upon a model of "interruption marketing" in which advertising messages appeared in the intervals between the flow of content. The web however explodes the interval into a new spacetime of instantaneous ubiquity in which the important thing for traffic analysts is not to increase click-through rates but to "make each click worth more." The click defines a hyper attention deficit which is capable of being leveraged by a new science of cognitive-behavioural therapy into an engineered perception of brand value. Godin acknowledges that the basis of permission marketing is "trust" and insists that "you can't market at people anymore: you have to market with them." What makes this functional are the new techniques of data collection and analysis which allow the sustainability of engineered perceptual cues to be measured over the "lifetime value of the average customer." Virilio takes a less sanguine view of this kind of tactical databody capture when he links it to the commercial applications of the human genome map as a form of "cybernetic eugenicism". But what is fascinating is how far ahead the American is of Virilio's own thinking. Godin insists that interruption marketing is not web-friendly because it depends upon the one-to-many massifications of "demographic reach" whereas the secret of permission marketing is the one-to-one personalisation afforded by "frequency" (As he says: "Ten TV ads cost ten times as much as one TV ad. That's why permission marketers tend to focus on reach not frequency. But on the net frequency is free. The people who subscribe to your newsletter get it from you every week and it costs you nothing to send it out. Digital media have zero marginal cost and infinite potential frequency"). It is here that Godin sketches out a science of "dromographics" which succeeds Virilio's own art of "dromology". "Dromographics" might be considered the science of modelling relative analogue speed vectors within a digital spacetime whose absolute limit is defined by the speed of ones and zeros travelling along a fibre-optic cable. (Information now travels at the speed of light unlike the human capacity to process it.) In this sense Godin boundary-rides the flight of perceptions within Virilio's "light-time" of networked electronic commerce. Emergent platforms, file formats and protocols like WAP and MP3 in this scenario become technological vehicles which abstract the flux of disintermediated intersubjective communication in order to deliver new possibility spaces for arresting the structural play of value. This moment of totemic arrest can be identified as a "hit" or a "meme" or a "trend" and at the moment its sequencing still ghosts the older rites of negative taboo whose contours persist like core memory dumps in the information landscape (Virilio lists some of them as Heaven's Gate, Sensation!, Rape in the Highlands, the Museum of Eroticism and transgressive body art). But it seems that more familiar rites of positive taboo like the gift are just as effective for supporting the extraction of surplus value. Godin suggests that the web user will be gratified to offer up information about themselves in return for something like a free sample, a big discount or even a commodity up for grabs within a specified interval like a download time or an hour of the day. This however is no cybernetic registration of a communist utopia (English cyber-cult scholar Richard Barbrook's late notion of "cyber-communism" as an "evolving synthesis of gift and commodity within the net" is naturally a transparent apology for the Blairite mixed economy). Instead it reinscribes the circuit of profitable exchange within a post-nuclear medium by liquidating its depreciating military-industrial stockpiles of sink capital and reserve labour and flipping them into a chaotic regime of digital recombination where capital becomes human and labour becomes symbolic. What Virilio seems reluctant to admit is that when the nuclear apocalypse failed to occur it precisely detonated the information bomb within whose global impact zone of mutually assured production we all now compete. All of which is perhaps only another way of saying that the sticky path through the jungle of e-commerce leads directly from the start-up dream of an Initial Public Offering into the Xanadu of an interactive fall-out shelter. It looks as if advancing a credible exit strategy really is the only way of receding the symptoms of dromographic stress disorder. # distributed via <nettime: no commercial use without permission # <nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net ================================================================= "Nothing is true. Everything is permitted." - William S. Burroughs John Armitage Principal Lecturer in Politics and Media Studies Division of Government & Politics University of Northumbria Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 8ST UK Tel: 0191 227 4971 Fax: 0191 227 4654 Email (w): john.armitage@unn.ac.uk Email (h): j.armitage@technologica.demon.co.uk Read: Machinic Modulations: new cultural theory & technopolitics http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/archive/r-archive/ang-con.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Opinions expressed in this email are my own unless otherwise stated. Phil Graham, Lecturer (Communication), Graduate School of Management University of Queensland, Ph: 617 3381 1083; Fax: 617 3381 1083; Mobile 0401 737 315; homepage: www.uq.edu.au/~uqpgraha -------------------------------------------------------------------------- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net