Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 14:52:47 -0800 (PST)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] Cubitt: "Review of Crepuscular Dawn by Virilio"


This is a review of Virilio's 'Crepuscular Dawn' which
is the book where he most explicitly lays out his
affinities with anarchism, stating that he marched
under the black flag with Lotringer during the Events
of May 1968, a subject which Cubitt's review touches
on (he later made himself a transparent flag to
represent his fondness for 'anomism'!)


***

Crepuscular Dawn

by Paul Virilio & Sylvère Lotringer
Semiotext(e) (Foreign Agents Series), 2002
185 pages, ISBN 9-781584-350132

Reviewed by Sean Cubitt, 
Screen and Media Studies, University of Waikato,
Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand 

seanc-AT-waikato.ac.nz

Paul Virilio has long been admired and cited by the
theoretically inclined techno-savvy of <nettime>.
Nowadays, largely thanks to the efforts of John
Armitage (2000, 2002), he is becoming an obligatory
citation for many social and media theorists of more
traditional kinds. This book forms an excellent career
overview, and contains plenty of surprises and new
material for readers who already know of his earlier
work. Crepuscular Dawn is a book-length interview with
Sylvère Lotringer, himself a doughty figure in
anarcho-artistic New York as the eminence grise of
Semiotext(e), the notorious journal and publishing
house. The title loses something in translation — in
French it probably has the paradoxical music of
Eliot's 'midwinter spring' - and the translating is at
times a tad slapdash (for example when an English film
title is translated back from the French), but these
are niggling criticisms of a fluent, likeable and
invigorating portrait of an exceptional, even
visionary mind at the top of his bent, relaxing with
an old friend in cafés around Paris, sparking ideas,
thinking aloud and on his feet. Dialogue is more often
praised than practised in contemporary theory: this is
less an interview than a conversation, and a
particularly eloquent and enjoyable one to eavesdrop
on.

Lotringer provides a handy introduction, then leaps
straight into the dialogue. Virilio recounts his early
days as a radical architect, in some detail,
culminating in the Oblique Function (you'll have to
read the book to figure this one out). Then on to
Nanterre, epicentre of May '68. Every French
intellectual alive at the time, and many active since,
have placed themselves on the map of ideas in relation
to Le joli Mai. Already 'anarchist Christian', Virilio
marched with the black flags of the anarchists until
he had the idea of making himself a transparent one
out of clear plastic. With Julian Beck of the Living
Theatre, who had been invited to play there but sided
with the students, Virilio and his colleagues took
over the Odéon Theatre, a major centre of the May
events. Students who heard him speak there invited him
to teach at the Ecole Supérieure d'Architecture, where
he has remained, more a thinker - and activist – than
a builder of buildings.

The events of May also transformed Virilio's thinking.
Initially inspired by the architecture of the bunkers
left by the German army along the Normandy coast,
subject of a remarkable early book, Virilio
increasingly turned his attention towards time, and
specifically towards speed. Of the major figures of
the day, Virilio cites Henri Lefebvre and Gilles
Deleuze as colleagues with whom he had political
disputes, but who also took up, in their own ways and
in their own good time, the temporal problematic.
Lefebvre is especially important, given his active
part in May '68 and his association with the
Situationists, especially Guy Debord. Lefebvre's
Production of Space (1991) is a landmark in the
(post)modernisation of geography, but failed, in
Virilio's view, to understand the vector of time as it
accelerates in the post-war period. Virilio's basic
discipline remains urbanism and town planning, a field
where transportation is a central concern. His
uniqueness comes from his understanding that media are
also means of transport (he has an eloquent
description of the windscreen of the car being a kind
of TV screen), an apperçu that has become more complex
and richer as networks speed up, become more
ubiquitous, and lose their architectural anchorage to
become portable and wearable.

Virilio, as is well known, shares with Friedrich
Kittler a belief traceable back to Nietzsche that war
is the typical state of human societies. Here that
idea is extended towards genetic engineering, whose
roots Virilio traces back to eugenics and, most of
all, to Menegele's notorious experiments on the
inmates of the death camps. This issue is, to add a
geo-politically particular note, extremely
illuminating for New Zealand, where this review is
being typed. The last election and key negotiations
with the US will be fought on bio-security of a
fragile and unique environment and the supposed rights
of Monsanto and the others. At the same time the
academic community is being rocked, for the second
time in a decade, by a scandal concerning holocaust
denial. For Virilio, the two are strictly intertwined.
Mengele's experiments and those of bio engineering are
not only usurpations of God's role, from a Catholic
phenomenologica perspective. They unleash the prospect
of the Genetic Bomb.

To clarify this point, we need to bring in another of
Virilio's major arguments. The invention of the
railway is also the invention of the train wreck, the
automobile of the car smash, the computer of data
crash, and genetic engineering of biological collapse.
To the extent that all our media and transportation
systems are now networked in real time, the accident
stops being a purely local or personal event, and
becomes instead potentially global: the General
Accident. Virilio here puns on the philosophical term
'accidence', an actually existing phenomenon which
lacks the necessity of an absolute essence. Essential
matters have become inessential, simulacra and
simulations, and at the same time they have exploded.
This is especially the case with dimensions. Time has
begun to vanish in the perpetual acceleration of
media, and space threatens to disappear as media and
transport systems become more and more integrated into
what was once a wholly human body.

It is easy enough to run a critique of these ideas. In
these interviews, Virilio is open and unapologetic
about his Catholicism, and vocal in his announcement
of his phenomenological bearings (among information
theorists he reserves a good word for the
phenomenologist Varela). Yet he is not always accurate
in his accounts: media are not 'instantaneous', nor is
there much mileage in trying to find an example of a
society without media, or a human body untouched by
mediations, from gesture to clothing, language to
food. The materialism of contemporary science and
contemporary theory looks askance at the prospect of
essences transcending the accidence of physical
reality. And though in some ways Armageddon has been
an option since the arrival of the A-bomb, horror has
a way of creeping through the world rather than
blasting it in some blockbuster finale.

But it would be wrong to treat Virilio as a systematic
thinker, whatever he thinks about the matter. His
strength is as an aphorist. 'Apocalypse is happening
all the time, every day since Genesis. It never stops.
Man is the end of the world' he says, or,
distinguishing carefully that he is addressing the
labs rather than the gas chambers, 'Auschwitz was not
only a crime against humanity: it is the beginning of
the accident of science'. For Virilio, there is a
certainty, a destiny, involved in human affairs.
Fallen humanity sets out on broken paths, all of which
lead by crooked routes to the integral logic of their
conclusions. To the extent that the project of Western
science has been one of control, it has produced its
opposite. To the extent that it aims to secure a
better life, it produces not just a worse one, but
death, and on a scale that beggars imagination.

On the other hand, in the closing section during a
discussion of the Unabomber, Virilio recalls another
biblical episode that puts all this predestination
into perspective, as if fate were the product of a
scientific principle — the principle, presumably, of
predictability. 'That's what our job is', he argues,
'to wrestle with the genetic bomb as human beings —
not as gods. To wrestle with the information bomb so
as to produce something other than cybernetics. To
wrestle with the atom bomb so as to avoid blowing
everything to kingdom come. So I don't believe the
world is finished, either. I am not a nihilist. I am
simply saying that we have to fight like Jacob. Each
person must wrestle with the angel'.

Sadly this does not extend to many of the artists
involved in Leonardo. Stellarc ('futurist') and
Eduardo Kac both get a pasting. And the editor of
these digital reviews is name checked as a 'sorcerer's
apprentice'. But the epigrammatist who asks us to
reflect on whether reflection has become reflex, and
habitat a habit, has as his task to spur us into
thought - and action. Accuracy is a virtue for
accountants. The true visionaries will have to have it
in abundance, but till they arrive, it's good to have
someone there to remind us how high the stakes are
that we are all playing for.

REFERENCES

Armitage, John (ed) (2000), Paul Virilio: From
Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond, Sage, London.

Lefebvre, Henri (1991), The Production of Space, trans
Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell, Oxford.



===="“It does not matter how many people chose moral duty over the rationality of self-preservation - what does matter is that some did. Evil is not all-powerful. It can be resisted. The testimony of the few who did resist shatters the authority of the logic of self-preservation. It shows it for what it is in the end - a choice." 

- Zygmunt Bauman, 'Modernity and the Holocaust'

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