The volume makes one wager, and it is legible before any single extract opens: that a single line runs from the bunker photographs of the 1950s to the post-9/11 catalogue of the accident, and that the line is the increasing speed of things. Speed abolishes distance; the abolition of distance turns the accident from a local mishap into the general condition of a wired world; and the theorist's task becomes the disclosure of that condition before it completes itself. The editor puts the wager in his title, “Theory at the Speed of Light,” and rests it on the sequence itself. The epigraph states the whole arc in one breath.
This is an edited reader, not a treatise, and the edit is itself the argument. Redhead selects the twenty extracts and orders them by date of writing, and says why.
page 8
They are presented in the order in which they were written and originally published in French to show the development, and interconnectedness, of Virilio's work.
The reconstruction below holds that order, because the order is the volume's thesis: that the corpus is one continuous development rather than a series of subjects. The through-line it tracks is the one the title names and the extracts bear out, acceleration and speed, together with the cluster of virtuality concepts that speed organizes across the later work, disappearance, overexposure, trans-appearance, and polar inertia. Each entry reconstructs the extract's move-structure in paraphrase and carries its load-bearing formulations whole, at the pagination of the Reader in hand.
Reader: Steve Redhead, “Editorial Introduction: Theory at the Speed of Light,” pages 1–9.
The headnote does three jobs. It positions Virilio against Baudrillard, the pairing the volume never quite drops. Their fates run together, and the market pairs them, but the fame is asymmetrical.
page 2
Their fates, however, are often intertwined. As it happened, Baudrillard and Virilio were indeed the two French theorists chosen by New Left publishers Verso in 2002 for their mini series dedicated to the first anniversary of the events of 11 September 2001.
page 2
Virilio's celebrity, however, will never be of the same order as Baudrillard.
It names the apparatus a researcher should reach for, the Lotringer interviews, as the way into Virilio's spoken thought.
page 7
The nearest one gets to a Virilio ‘conversation’ is to read the whole of the various interviews with him conducted by Sylvère Lotringer.
And it supplies the single datum most useful for tracking development: the corpus contracts as it accelerates.
page 9
the cost was often prohibitive, especially given Virilio's tendency to produce shorter and shorter books.
Reader chapter 1, pages 11–13. Source: Paul Virilio, “Bunker Archaeology,” in Paul Virilio and Claude Parent, Architecture Principe 1966 and 1996, trans. George Collins (Besançon: Les Éditions de l'Imprimeur, 1997), English edition, pages xvii–xix. Piece written 1958.
A phenomenological reading of the German blockhouses of the Atlantic Wall as monuments emptied of function. The war-object detaches from the ground and the earth loses its density, so that the bunker reads as a carcass rather than a building.
page 12
the mass is no longer anchored in the ground, but centred on itself, independent, capable of movement and articulation. This architecture floats on the surface of an earth which has lost its materiality. Approaching one of these beach monoliths, it suddenly appeared to me almost animal in nature, an empty carcass, abandoned, toppled over into the sand, like the skin of a defunct species.
The closing turn does the conceptual work of the piece, converting the bunker into a program for an architecture keyed to the psyche rather than to the body's measure. This is the seed the whole corpus grows from: architecture detached from human proportion.
page 13
these primitive works announce a new architecture founded no longer on the physical proportions of man but on his psychic faculties, an urbanism in which, the elementary analysis of social reality finally overcome, habitat can finally unite with the secret possibilities of individuals.
Redhead's headnote supplies the biographical density and Virilio's refusal of the architect's title, quoting him directly.
page 11
He has said, ‘I don't like that culture. I love painting.’ He has also described himself as ‘a man of the theatre’, reminiscing that ‘as a kid I designed theatrical sets’.
Reader chapter 2, pages 15–18. Source: Virilio, “Cryptic Architecture,” in Virilio and Parent, Architecture Principe 1966 and 1996, trans. Collins. Written September 1965.
The earliest statement of the appearance/disappearance pairing that becomes a signature. Cryptic power is defined as the capacity to hold appearance and disappearance together in one continuum, drawing on an energy of concealment that runs through all living things.
page 16
‘Cryptic power’ derives from access to these two principles, a power residing essentially in the potential to produce a ‘continuum’ by making the conditions of architectural appearance indissociable from those of disappearance. The architecture results from the variations of a self-same energy, cryptic energy, itself indissociable from the survival of all living species. It is the energy of everything that hides itself.
The lettered program of tendencies is opaque on its face, but it states the compensatory logic Virilio will keep, shelter as a response to phobia and to the accident, clearing a space in which the higher faculties can operate.
page 16
… (b), in terms of compensation for our phobias, (c), by the penetration of an element emptied of ordinary objective accidents, (d), to stimulate our faculties of genesis and thus (e), their ambitious aim on pre-existing reality and its meaning.
The structural pairing here, visibility set against the work of concealment, is the conceptual germ of the later aesthetics of disappearance (extract 6) and, eventually, of trans-appearance (extract 11).
Reader chapter 3, pages 19–23. Source: Virilio, “Architecture Principe,” in The Function of the Oblique: The Architecture of Claude Parent and Paul Virilio 1963–1969, trans. Pamela Johnston (London: The Architectural Association, 1996), pages 11–13.
A retrospective on the oblique, and the extract that contains the volume's hinge. Virilio narrates the bunker research and routes it through the two disciplines that will underwrite everything after, the logistics of circulation and the ballistics of the projectile.
page 20
In my efforts to understand the spaces of conflict, I drew on Gestalt theory, the psychology of form and the phenomenology of perception. This approach revealed the extreme importance of the LOGISTICS (and fluxes) of circulation during the Blitzkrieg, and enabled me to realize the effect of the BALLISTICS of different projectiles on the configuration of contemporary military architecture.
The function of the oblique is set in a historical typology of habitats, each keyed to an era's dominant order.
page 21
After the HORIZONTAL order of the rural habitat in the agricultural era, and the VERTICAL order of the urban habitat in the industrial era, the next logical (or, rather, topological) step was for us the OBLIQUE order of the post-industrial era.
The phenomenological warrant is Merleau-Ponty, cited by name to license a body put in motion rather than an eye placed before a view.
page 22
‘It is not the eye which sees,’ according to the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but ‘the body as a receptive totality’.
Then the pivot of the whole volume. Forced off the space of the oblique, Virilio turns to time, and names the turn on the record, in his own retrospective voice. Every extract from 4 onward is downstream of this sentence.
page 23
Since being forced to abandon the space of the oblique, I have devoted myself to time, or more precisely to the diverse phenomena of acceleration in this era of the ‘global village’. The focus of my research has shifted from TOPOLOGY to DROMOLOGY, i.e. the study and analysis of the impact of the increasing speed of transport and communications on the development of land-use.
Reader chapter 4, pages 25–43. Source: Virilio, “The End of the Proletariat,” in Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986), pages 96–118. French Vitesse et politique (Galilée, 1977).
The foundational dromology text, and the one Redhead says defines Virilio for most readers. Its argument rereads the proletariat as a military rather than an industrial figure: proletarianization is one form that militarization takes, and a passing one, superseded once the speed of vectors rather than the mass of bodies decides outcomes.
page 26
The proletarianization of the working classes is only one form of militarization, a temporary form. From 1914 onward, the proletariat's motor, and thus political, power was no match for the European battlefields.
The bomb is political for Virilio not as detonation but as a permanent apparatus of watching, which reorients the whole meaning of political power around the speed and reach of the vector.
page 29
The bomb is political, we like to repeat, political not because of an explosion that should never happen, but because it is the ultimate form of military surveillance.
The American passage is the densest in the extract, and it states the media thesis in dromological terms: what makes a market is the delivery system, not the thing delivered.
page 36
Once more, the market was created not by the object of consumption but by its vector of delivery!
Howard Hughes enters the corpus here, as the figure who lives entirely in transit and dies inside the vehicle, the prototype of the transit-obsessed subject Virilio will develop through the whole later work.
page 35
Hughes cared only about that which passes in transit. His life rebounded from one vector to another, as has, for 200 years, the power of the American nation he adored. Nothing else interested him. He died in the open sky, in an aeroplane.
The speedbody is developed through the Olympic stadium and the kamikaze. Sport is read as the theatricalization of the assault, bodies ranked by the speed of their penetration.
page 41
What the Berlin stadium's celebration of the Olympic liturgy shows is a hierarchy of bodies according to speeds of penetration. The athletic body is prytanic, projectile or projector. The excitement of the speed or distance record is that of assault.
Its terminal image is the body's own vanishing, which ties the speedbody back to the disappearance thread.
page 41
for the ultimate metaphor of the speedbody is its final disappearance in the flames of explosion.
The coinages established here, dromology and its family, carry the whole reading, and the extract states the wager that names fascism in speed's terms rather than ideology's.
page 40
Fascism was totalitarian only insofar as it intended to be totally dromocratic.
The closing thesis reduces history to a strategic advance over terrain and the historian to a figure inside the war rather than above it. The formulation is one Virilio recycles, and it returns verbatim in the next extract.
page 42
Pure history, then, is only the translation of a pure strategic advance over terrain. Its power is to precede and be final, and the historian is but a captain in the war of time.
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