Continuum Impacts
2 total works
Paul Virilio traces the twin development of art and science over the 20th Century, a development that emerges as a nightmare dance of death. In Virilio's vision, art and science vie with each other for the destruction of the human form as we know it. At the start of the 21st century science has finally left art behind as genetic engineers prepare to turn themselves into the worst of expressionists, the Human Genome Project their godless manifesto, the human being, the raw material for new and monstrous forms of life. Virilio makes all the connections clear: between the way early 20th Century avant-gardes twisted and tortured the human form before making it vanish in abstraction and the blasting to bits of men who were no more than cannon fodder in the trenches of the Great War; between the German Expressionists' hate-filled portraits of the damned and the "medical" experiments of the Nazi eugenicists; between the mangled messages of sensationalist advertising and terrorism. A brutal logic rules this shattering of representation: our ways of seeing are now fatally shaped by unprecedented "scientific" modes of destruction.
Negative Horizon is Paul Virilio's most original and unified exploration of the key themes and ideas running through his work and thought. Provocatively and forcefully written, it sets out Virilio's theory of dromoscopy: a means of apprehending speed and its pivotal - and potentially destructive - role in contemporary global society. Applying this theory to Western political and military history, Virilio exposes a compulsion to accelerate, and the rise of a politics of time - encapsulated in the importance accorded to speed - over territorial politics of space. Moving through human history from the cave paintings at Lascaux that depict the first hunters, through the domestication of animals and the building of the first roads, to the 'stealth technologies' deployed in contemporary warfare, Virilio shows how resistance to speed and movement has consistently been eroded, and the physical world adapted, in order to satisfy the urge to move further and faster. In exposing what he believes to be the consequences of this constant acceleration for human sensory perception and, ultimately, global democracy, Virilio offers a vision of history and politics as disturbing as it is original.
This new translation by Michael Degener makes available in English for the first time, one of Virilio's seminal works - set to be required reading for anyone interested in the rise of new technologies and the direction of global politics.
This new translation by Michael Degener makes available in English for the first time, one of Virilio's seminal works - set to be required reading for anyone interested in the rise of new technologies and the direction of global politics.