With the condescension of the readers of the Sul Informação, allow me to pay here a heartfelt and simple tribute to the French philosopher, architect and urban planner Paul Virilio, who died last September 10th, at the age of 86 years.
Your philosophy is very peculiar. In his words, “My foreign language is speed, it is the acceleration of reality”. At the base of his reflections is the triangulation between speed, technology and politics. Always highly imaginative, he created dromology, an interdisciplinary field of study about speed and how it changes the perception of time and space and, therefore, the nature of political, social, economic and cultural phenomena. As he said, the “XNUMXst century should be concerned with nanotechnologies, but also with nanochronologies, with infinitesimal time, with the conquest of the infinitely small of time”.
In its most expressive philosophical statements, almost all related to the “times that time has”, speed marks both the slow time of art and culture and the infinitely small time of cyberspace, that sixth continent to which we virtually emigrate. Here are some of these statements. The words are by Paul Virilio, the composition is my responsibility. An article close to this is in the Observador newspaper.
Speed and chronopolitics
We live in the era of chronopolitics, in full cult of speed-light, in a real race against time. Everything is left behind. The speed of transactions exceeds the time of politics, making the nation-state an increasingly decorative figure.
Likewise, the speed of transactions allows and guarantees the hegemony of speculation over the real needs of the economy. In the same sense, speed is a kind of intoxication that leaves the sensitive world and sensibility behind.
In the race against time, everything contributes to the formation of a black hole of extra-territoriality, where anything can happen.
Accidents of knowledge
It must be stated bluntly. The propaganda of progress hides the accidents of knowledge, the gravity of accidental time. In the idolatry of progress, speed is the hidden face of wealth and power. An investigation that does not investigate its own tragedy or disaster is not an investigation.
By transferring a significant part of knowledge to time machines, we run the risk that the synchronization of automatic systems and the speed of propagation of their effects will put us on the brink of “comprehensive disaster”.
Geocide or the end of geography
We're committing a kind of geocide. History was transferred from Earth to Heaven. Today, power is no longer geopolitical, we live in the mystical dimension of the cosmos, of the great sidereal void, of the waves that cross cyberspace.
It's the end of geography, the end of places of identity. The Earth is too small for speed, the economy and the ecology will come face to face and merge, that is, the acceleration of time makes the world flat. In the flat world non-places emerge and identity gives way to traceability. Without a place to be, I become a stranger.
the prisoner's dilemma
We live in the prisoner's dilemma, trapped as we are in the webs of immediacy and mediation. The acceleration of time prevents us from seeing the difference between true and false. On the other hand, the acceleration of real time undermines the perception of the sensible world and the empathy between human beings.
Finally, due to the torrent and madness of information, the deconstruction of the general culture is underway which can lead to hallucination.
Human time has been surpassed by machine time, an instantaneous, infinitely small time, a time of reflection and not reflection. We are prisoners of this infra time that acceleration transforms into an uninhabitable and unbreathable time.
the virtual colony
In a virtual democracy of conditioned reflexes, we see everything through a screen that competes with writing and the image in competition with language. Cyberspace, the sixth continent, is a kind of virtual colony to escape the flat world.
In this virtual colony, we experience the synchronization of emotions or the possibility of a communism of affections, that is, we run the risk of a new tyranny of feelings. On the sixth continent the acceleration of reality prevents us from seeing reality, human time is crushed, we see nothing.
We no longer live in the present, we live in the instant of an accelerated reality, all in an instant. The snapshot and the immediate, these are the concepts of the present time and the substance of our ways of life.
Transport and transmission have shrunk the world, in such a way that we live in a kind of psychological imprisonment, where we seem to be constantly being watched.
Automatic systems
Speed was the revolution in transport, today speed is the revolution in instantaneous transmissions. If time is money and speed is power, the financialization of the economy is a matter of high speed.
Mini-crashes will become more frequent due to the automatism of the machines and the mathematization of reality. Speed transforms the nation-state into an endogenous variable of globalization, accident economics will be a recurrent topic.
The art and culture of slow time
Globalization generates a feeling of claustrophobia in humanity, the Earth is too small for the telecommunications revolution. Well, we also live by distances.
Art and culture introduce distance and duration, that's why we say, make your life a work of art.
There is no globalization without virtualization, theater and dance are the only two lines of resistance to virtualization, the two body arts par excellence.
The abolition of geographical distances means the aging of the world, the exhaustion of a finite world, what a melancholy!
The risk of a science without conscience
The finitude of life and the systemic accidents that await us: the atomic bomb, the computer bomb, the genetic bomb, the climate bomb.
There is a moment when the arrogance of science becomes unbearable because it does not take into due account its negative effects: the ecological footprint, the computer footprint, the nuclear footprint, the genetic footprint, the climate footprint.
One day science will still be forced to swallow its techno-scientific arrogance and live up to the grandeur of poverty.
Final grade
It is time to read Paul Virilio, despite some criticism of the sometimes alarmist bent of some of his reflections.
It is true, perhaps it is not the end of geography yet, as it was not the end of history announced by Fukuyama. The dromology of Paul Virilio reveals that for each speed we will have chosen a reality and a lifetime.
It is, therefore, essential that we dedicate special care to the “times that time has”, from the slow time of art and culture to the infinitesimal time of everyday moments.
In the end, each of us is also a product of multiple speeds, each opening up to a different reality in our lives.
Author António Covas is a full professor at the University of Algarve and a PhD in European Affairs from the Free University of Brussels
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