'A century of hyper-violence' Paul Virilio: an interview

Nicholas Zurbrugg

Paul Virilio is one of the leading French theorists addressing late twentieth-century media culture. He is the General Director, ESA (Ecole Speciale d'Architecture), Paris. English editions of his books include Bunker Archaeology (Princeton University Press), Speed and Politics and The Aesthetics oj Disappearances (Semiotext(e)), The Vision Machine (British Film Institute) and Laurence Louppe's anthology Traces of Dance (Dis Voir).

Paris, 13 January 1995

NZ: I'd like to begin with a very' general question. Does the term 'postmodem' have any specific meaningJor you? Do you consider that the term has any legitimacy, and if so, what lor you is its central significance?

PV: I think that it's an expression which, in terms of architecture, has predominantly negative overtones. I recollect that the term 'postmodern' was used quite extensively by architects before becoming a more general qualification - and above all by American architects, among whom it was very influential in the 1970s. Personally, I have to say that it is a term that never really appealed to me. Firstly, because it seemed to me that postmodern architects were merely syncretic. Just as religious syncretism mixes several cults into a composite form, their work culminated in a kind of composite architectural form, and as such didn't interest me at all. For me, syncretism is a confusion which fails to translate the intensity of contemporary existence. Moreover, the postmodern impulse in architecture has virtually disappeared and is now considered little more than a kind of distraction.

How do you respond to the concepts of/he 'modern' and of the tradition of''modemity '?

For me, that which is 'modern' is always the present. It's not a past epoch - the fifteenth century, the beginning of the Renaissance or the end of the Middle Ages and of 'magical' or 'mystical' thought - I don't agree with any of that. For

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me, the notion of 'modernity' applies to the present, and doesn't apply to a particular form of thought which is opposed, for example, to magical thought by virtue of its rationality, its classicism and so forth - based upon Descartes, Galileo and so on. That seems to me to be a very old-fashioned point of view.

So in this respect you'd find Habermas '5 definition of the enlightenment tradition of modernity too narrow, and the prevalent idea of the postmodern culture mix too general?

That's right.

Nevertheless, there seem to be many writers who think of our epoch as a mixture of various impulses and currents without atry profound direction or identity.

I don't believe that at all. On the contrary, I believe that the twentieth century is a monolithic century in terms of its violence. For me, the century that I've experienced - the twentieth century - is a century of hyper-violence in all domains. In the domain of war - Auschwitz and Hiroshima, in the domain of technology - the extraordinary power of the technology allowing landings on the moon, but also Chernobyl, and the impact within cities of the destruction of the very form of urban politics. As an urbanist, I'm conscious of witnessing the end of the primary political form - that's to say, the city. The primary political form of our history is the city - for us, in the West, though not exclusively so - and the violent momentum of twentieth-century technologies has virtually swept away the form of urban politics. In demographic terms, the destruction of family unity, the return to individualism, the emergence of the single-parent family - all of these are clear, absolutely brutal phenomena, which Nazi, communist and fascist totalitarianisms in many ways anticipated.

The climate of the twentieth century is not confused at all. It is as brutal as a fist in the face. For me, my century is the century of horror. Not simply a century of terror, but of horror. And by this I mean not just the horror of such and such a political regime, but also the horror brought about by technologies that have become autonomous - the kind of horror that mutilation and body art now exemplify and symbolize. So for me, there is no confusion - it's a very violent century. One might even say that it is the century of war - in Guattari's terminology, the twentieth century is the century of war machines.

Guattari also interestingly argued that what one might call the minestrone mentality of postmodernism - in your terms, its imprecise syncreticism - leads to a kind of 'ethical abdication' across all intellectualfields. In his terms, this kind of mentality has already left a 'black stain on history', insofar as intellectuals have refused to acknowledge the violence and the accelerated complexity of their time. All the same, what would you say were the overall consequences of this violence and speed? You've said that we're witnessing the 'end' of all kinds of social and political structures. Is our

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epoch necessarily a kind of ultra-violent fin de siecle, or are there also certain tendencies which modify this violence?

I am not apocalyptic! I don't believe in the end of the world - I believe in the end of a world. And from a certain perspective, the problem of pessimism or optimism with regard to the twentieth century seems to me to be a false debate. I am quite convinced that in subsequent centuries there will certainly be less violent epochs. Without a doubt! I am in no way despondent before either the twenty-first or the twenty-second centuries.

I simply believe that we have experienced a rupture far exceeding that of the industrial revolution, and which, in a certain way, is still taking place before our very eyes. And what this means is that the questions of our relations to space and of our relations to time now arise, as it were, upon our very earth, whereas for Galileo or Copernicus questions of relations to time and space arose in the cosmos.

Let's take an example. We can equate the breakthrough from the Middle Ages with the work of Copernicus and Galileo. Both offered new ways of considering the cosmos, and alternatives to magical or mystical thinking - that's to say, geocentric and anthropocentric perspectives. In much the same way, I think that today, relations between space and time have once again become completely overthrown - but this time in terms of terrestrial reality itself - not the astronomical universe of Copernicus and Galileo, but the very earth itself. Relations between terrestrial time and space have been completely overthrown to such a point that we can no longer reduce things to the laws of geometry, the laws of the calendar, the laws of time and space. We have lost our spatial reference points right here - not out there, but right here - and even our relations with others have entered this de-territorialized dimension.

With innooations like the fax, it '.I obvious that things have changed quite extraordinarily.

Totally, totally.

All the same, isn't the central question still perhaps that of whether or not we can master these new technologies?

But there's nothing sad about what I've just been saying! Surely we're agreed! Galileo, like Copernicus, destroyed a world, we can certainly say that, but surely we're agreed that there's nothing sad here either? Here too, there's a process of destruction - there's no longer the world of magical thought - but there's the world of territorial thought, of geographical thought, of anthrogeographical thought. Now, in its turn, this world has become lost, and we're still waiting to enter into relation with the next world - we don't yet have a contemporary Galileo.

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In other words, one could either say that we're witnessing the death of one civilization, or the birth of its successor. So the problem is that we haven 'tyet got a very clear vision of the most significant new developments. Nevertheless, certain contemporaries, such as John Cage for example, have argued that we have 'electronic' souls, and that we are always potentially capable of mastering and assimilating new technologies, rather than necessarily being technology 's slaves.

Cage's comment leads, I think, to quite an extraordinary conflict of ideas - one which is becoming increasingly evident in the context of interpretations of certain developments which have still not yet entirely come into being - the profound difference between Anglo-Saxon thought, or what I'd call 'maritime' thought, and Continental, or 'territorial' thought. Characterized as it is by maritime and oceanic traditions and by such great novels as Molry Dick - when I think of England or America, I think of Mo/~V Dick and Melville and the sea - I think that Anglo-Saxon thought is particularly suited to undulating, electronic ideas. Whereas Continental thought - be this Chinese or European - is far more grounded in territories, in solidity and durability, and also in the measurement - the geometric measurement - of the earth.

And so, in a sense, Cage's 'maritime' perspective, which drew upon such varied traditions as those ofDuchamp and of Zen, is typicalb' 'intercontinental'?

Yes. There seems to be a conflict between territorial and maritime mentalities - between the agrarian, rural mentality grounded, as it were, in the land and, on the other hand, the nomadic, 'naval' mentality.

How wouldyou descnbeyour oam mentality?

My mentality is littoral-I'm a creature of the shore - I've written a book about the littoral mentality, entitled L 'insecurite du terruoire. I'm a creature of the shore, of the frontier - my mother came from Brittany and my father came from Genoa - and I'm something of a Breton, so I get on well with Anglo-Saxons.

That's quite interesting, because a number of artists and writers similarly seem to exist between or across frontiers - Beckett, Nabokoc, Burroughs - those whom one might think oj as voluntary exiles for much oj their lives.

Voyagers, visionaries.

The Australian multi-media artist, Stelarc, whom you discuss in L'art du moteur, has similarly spent many years overseas in Japan. What is your general response to Stelarc's work?

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I think of Stelarc as a kind of prophet - a kind of prophet of bad news.

Isn't Stelarc at least partially optimistic in so for as his writings - like those of Burroughs - postulate that man's destiny is one of continual evolution into a species capable of inhabiting both land and space? Why does L'art du moteur suggest that Stelarc is a 'victim' of technology?

My perception of Stelarc is that, like Antonin Artaud, he's an extremely important artist in so far as he does not simply play with body-an, but expresses something profoundly true, something profoundly authentic. I know the contemporary art world quite well and - without necessarily categorizing it as modern or postmodern - there seems to be a great deal of mystification and very little authenticity. Since Marcel Duchamp, many artists have used Duchamp's genius as a pretext for the most inconsequential gestures. That's not Stelarc's case at all - for me, Stelarc is an extremely consequential artist. For me he also offers the perfect illustration of something that I feel will become increasingly prevalent in the next century, and which - as I suggest in L 'art du moteur - already exists, that's to say the third technological revolution.

The first technological revolution was that of modes of transportation - that's to say the great industrial revolution. The second technological revolution was that of electronic communications - that of immediate, 'live' information, tele-action, cyberspace, and so forth. The third technological revolution - and one which is still largely ignored - is that of transplants. That's to say that, as technologies have developed, they no longer simply invade the earth's body - as for example with railways, motorways, airways, and so on. All of these infrastructures assumed that technology provided superior machines - machines which, as in the case of the steam-engine, required a great deal of space. By contrast, with the subsequent informatics revolution, technology has become infinitely miniaturized, so that we now have microscopic, atomic, modes of nanotechnology.

Subsequent modes of technology no longer aspire to invade the world - the world of time and space is to all intents and purposes a thing of the past. Rather, technology now aspires to occupy the body, to transplant itself within the last remaining territory - that of the body. I'm not speaking here of science fiction. Pacemakers, for example, typify such developments - recently two little sisters were fitted with pacemakers shortly after their birth. In other words, it's no longer simply a question of a foreign body being inserted into a human body, but rather, the insertion of a foreign rhythm, the rhythm of technology and informatics.

All Marvin Minsky's writings discuss these developments - the way in which technology becomes a kind of nourishment, and the way in which we live on technology, just as we live on chemical products in order to survive. In

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many respects, Stelarc seems to me to be a kind of prophet for this extraordinary revolution.

But he's very much what I'd call a 'positive' prophet, in so far as he doesn't seem altogether aware of the losses implicit in new technological practices. He is aware of their power and their performative potential- he's quintessentially a performance artist - but he doesn't seem aware of the losses incurred by this revolution.

What exactly are these losses?

What exactly are these losses? I'd have to reply that these are so important that it is still not really possible to perceive them in their totality. But at very least, it seems absolutely evident that what one might call the loss of the physical body is quite as momentous as the loss of the territorial body. The earth's territorial body - viewed in terms of its relations with time and space - can be said to have become lost with the advent of telecommunications. Even though it is still there, the earth's territorial body can be said to have disappeared or become disqualified - whether one's thinking of the Atlantic or the Pacific or the vastness of Asia, it's all become compressed to next to nothing by the rapidity of telecommunications.

The second loss, then, is the loss of the physical body - of my body, of your body, of all bodies! And it seems to me that Stelarc might be said to herald this invasion - or this colonization - of the human body by technology. And it's really a colonization! How, after all, has technology conquered the world? By establishing colonies! Remember the famous words of the English colonial minister who proclaimed: 'Great colonies require a great navy!'

In other words, global technological colonization was brought about by means of transportation, and today proliferates itself by means of mass communication. Henceforth, thanks to the miniaturization of technology, it's our very bodies - our very lives - that are about to be colonized. And this process is something quite extraordinary - quite extraordinary - and something quite tangible rather than some kind of mythology! But to deny the concomitant losses brought about by this process is to completely misunderstand what's taking place.

But to understand what's taking place, shouldn't one recognize both these processes of loss and equally significant kinds of discovery? Stelarc, for example, might claim that thanks to his artificial third arm, he can now write three numbers or three letters simultaneously.

Of course - that's obvious! But I'd be tempted to say that it's so obvious that, intellectually speaking, it's of very little interest. Technologies are obviously invented for positive reasons - I'm not talking here about the technologies of

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atomic warfare - technologies are created to introduce new kinds of performance and new kinds of benefit. Faster motor cars are invented to allow faster travel. But it's so banal that it's scarcely worth making any further comment about all this.

Well, I'm not entirely in agreement. It's obvious that Jaster motor cars allow Jaster travel. But it's not obvious that such cars can perform new kinds oj motorized acrobatics -just as the general rules oJfootball don't necessarily imply the possibility oj virtuoso football. So, if one considers the impact oJtechnology on the arts, there mal' be a~l' number oj artists who use its discoveries in a predictably naive and elementary way. But perhaps the real challenge is that of identiJj,ing those artists who are exploring substantially new creative possibilities in substantially new ways?

But at this point the problem is that one cannot advance technologically within the arts without first formulating a critical theory commensurate with technological art. I don't think that there can be art without critical theory, and I'd argue that any contemporary artform that lacks a critical theory is not really an artform. Likewise, any technology without a critical theory is not really a technology. The problem is that, so far as most technological art is concerned, there is virtually no critical theory. And it's a considerable problem - and one that I've frequently tried to address in my critical writings on new forms of technological art.

For example, if a music or an opera critic criticizes one of Wagner's operas in terms of some other composer's work, nobody accuses them of disliking Wagner and nobody accuses them of disliking opera in general! They'll say, 'That's an interesting interpretation of Wagner - I don't agree, but it's interesting'. By contrast, when one makes the same kind of criticism with reference to works of technological art, people will say, 'You're opposed to technological creativity'. But it's not the case at all. On the contrary, it's quite evident that my writings on art are all clearly in favour of technology! So far as I am concerned, technology is inseparable from art - it's absurd to separate art from technology! In much the same way, I've always argued that music and speed are inseparable - indeed, I frequently discussed this issue with Deleuze and Guattari. They were very interested in my work on speed, and they used to ask me what other areas it might also address. And I replied, 'music' - because isn't music a question of speed?

Well, not always, in so Jar as music can be both rapid and slow.

Well of course, speed in both senses, negative and positive speed - they're both aspects of speed. I don't just mean acceleration. Deceleration is also an aspect of speed - 'negative speed', whereas acceleration is defined as 'positive speed'. What interests me is their totality - the two of them.

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Several oj your books discuss speed above all in terms oj the technologies oj the war-machine.

Yes, that's the- essence of my research.

And this leads to reflections on the resultant disappearance oj our capacity to perceive reality. Nevertheless, it's perhaps interesting to consider the example of the Australian video and computer artist, Peter Callas, who remarks that while he was very inspired by your writings on acceleration, in so for as his work is usually so rapid that one cannot really follow its images, he would now argue that with new technologies, such as CD-Rom imaging, one can also decelerate images and perhaps retrieve what he calls 'personal time'.

It's one interpretation - everything's relative - it's certainly possible.

In this respect, decelerating technologies seem to allow a new kind ofperceptual surgery to take place.

Without doubt, technology offers a number of extraordinary discoveries. The discovery, for example, of ultra-rapid cinema with a million images per second was something quite extraordinary which allowed unprecedented ballistic analysis - an object travelling at supersonic speeds could be analysed as if in slow motion. So there are always discoveries - always!

In much the same w~y, the sound poet Henri Chopin argues that tape-recording technologies now allow us to analyse the complex qualities oj the voice, somewhat as microscopes have revealed the complex quality ofblood-cells.

To be sure, one should never separate the negativity from the positivity of technology. What worries me most, however, is that up to now the development of new technologies has been discussed above all in the superficially positive discourses of publicity, as opposed to the more rigorous discourse of critical theory. To my mind, the discourse of publicity is that of those who are opposed to technology, in so far as they merely address its most obvious consequences. Whereas critical theory can lead technology - and technological creativity - to surpass itself.

Let's consider an example that I've often used elsewhere - the example of the 'block system' used by railway systems. When the first steam-engines and railways systems were introduced in the nineteenth century, there were two kinds of engineers - those who worked on tunnels, bridges, stations and extremely sophisticated networks of railway lines, and others who invented ever more efficient locomotives. Then suddenly they discovered negative consequences - trains were derailed, many fatalities occurred, along with highly unfavourable publicity. So another form of engineering evolved - traffic engineering - which led to a means of preventing derailment: the 'block system'.

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Nowadays there are immaterial 'derailments' within new technologies, but there are no 'traffic engineers', and everyone simply says, 'It's marvellous, it's marvellous'. That's why I'm more interested in the negativity of the new technologies. If the new forms of technology and technological art have accelerated it is because some art critic has discovered a comparable 'block system' for the new technologies. One is much closer to progress when one focuses upon the accidents within a new system, rather than upon its more obvious achievements.

Perhaps art can therefore be defined as a series of conceptual 'block systems' responding to significant 'accidents '?

Yes, in a sense Artaud, Van Gogh and Duchamp can be thought of as 'accidents' in the history of art - and there are obviously many others.

Are there any contemporary! artists that you find equally interesting?

I'm interested by two kinds of art at present: dance and video-installation. So far as dance and choreography are concerned, I'm interested in their relation to the body - two years ago I wrote a book with the mathematician Rene Thorn on dance notation. All kinds of artistic practices involving the body interest me today - hence Stelarc, whom I've always considered as a dancer. Nietzsche continually makes reference to the dancer, and so do I, because the dancer's body is the body of speed. The dancer, or the athlete or the runner - the athlete is the one who runs - are at the base of all my work. I call my research 'dromology' from 'dromos' which means 'race'. In Greek culture the adolescent was called 'dromeus' - the one who runs. So for me, the race - and the racer - are a central part of history - on foot, on horseback, in racing cars or in planes. For me, Stelarc and contemporary dance both point back to the origin - to the body as the origin of every kind of race. And then I'm interested in video-installation - not in video, but in video-installation - because it poses the question of the relationships between images and space.

And the question of conceptual space?

Precisely, precisely. For me, Michael Snow's La Region Centrale is an extraordinary work, then Bill Viola, the Vasulkas, Sherrie Rabinovitch and Kit Galloway are very interesting.

Bill Viola - rather like Robert Wilson - seems to me to be particularly interesting as an artist working with extremely slow multimedia images. Discussing his Nantes Triptych, a work recently purchased by London s Tate Gallery, in which you see Viola s wift about to give birth, Viola's mother on her deathbed, and a central image of

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Viola floating in a tank of water, one critic commented that, bejore this work, one is led into a new kind of spatial and temporal dimension.

Yes, it's that kind of thing which I find interesting. I tell my architectural students that they need to pay attention to developments in installation art, because the problems confronting contemporary architecture are precisely those of video-installation. The problem of space - the crisis of space and of time - highlights the crisis of architectural space. And it's for this reason that one sees all these transparent spaces, fragmented in all directions - and usually rather ineptly so. For me, video-installations are much closer to the challenges of architecture - to new conceptions of space - than most new architectural constructions. I'm certain that video-installations - installations within space - offer responses to the crisis of space that we spoke of earlier, to our sense that the earth can no longer be measured in time and space. Certain video-installations help us to resolve this question - Michael Snow's La Region Centrale, for example, and Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinovitch's Le Trou dans l'Espace - another work that I find extraordinary.

In this respect, perhaps one could also argue that certain video-installation artists are now addressing the same kinds of questions concerning time and space as earlier writers and artists such as Proust or Turner, and that - at best - the new media are entirely commensurate with such substantial thematics.

Yes, I think so. There's a quality of truth in the work of the best of these artists that clearly corresponds to that of the great writers, the great painters - and the great architects.

Perhaps this might seem a little paradoxical, in terms ofyour suggestions in The Art of Disappearance that our culture has tnrtually witnessed the disappearance of certain kinds of 'infra-ordinary' realities or truths, such as Bernadette Soubirous' sighting of the Virgin Mary. I think you argue that contemporary experience no longer seems likely to offir this quality of revelation. I'd be tempted to ask if certain kinds of technological deceleration might not perhaps recuperate aspects of such 'infraordinary" vision. Baudrillard's most recent writings on photograp~y, for example, suggest that even in the centre of the city, with all its noise and confusion, photographs of objects can at times identify a fundamental sense of silence and immobility. More curious still, Baudrillard's general evocations of the w~y in which certain objects seem to impose themselves upon his attention, detaching themselves from their background, seems remarkably similar to the terms of Bernadette Soubirous ' description of the way in which her vision imposed itself, while 'all around nothing moved '. It almost seems as ifBaudrillard is identifying a kind of symbolist photography.

It's curious, because when I met Baudrillard, he had a real horror of images - a real horror. I was taking photographs at that time - architectural photographs, so Baudrillard's conversion to images must be fairly recent! More specifically,

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though, the problem here seems to be one of mediation. In mystical sightings - in the notion of such sightings - there is no sense of technical mediation. I remember that the poet Max Jacob had visions of Christ, and all his friends - such as Picasso - maintained that this was a joke. But this wasn't a joke - it was poetry -it was true, it was true. And I believe that the poet like Max Jacob, or the ecstatic saint like Bernadette, who saw the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, are very similar. Their visions don't involve any mediation and don't require any mediation. Or let's take another example. When Saint Francis of Assisi was converted, he experienced a vision in which he was told 'You have been able to learn without books'. I think all of this is quite typical. MaxJacob, Bernadette, Saint Francis - neither one of these had any kind of mediation - no books, no photographs, no sculptures, no statues. There's an absolute opposition here to all kinds of technological mediation.

Does this imply that such profound experiences still take place, despite the impact of contemporary technologies and contemporary' catastrophes?

Of course, of course. But now, on the one hand, there's the divine object - Christ for MaxJacob, the Virgin Mary for Bernadette, and, on the other hand, technological mediation - synthetic images, cyberspace and virtual reality. In this respect, there's a kind of confusion between deus and deus ex machina!

Perhaps the deus ex machina - perhaps the machine - can reveal other essential dimensions?

If it is regarded critically! If one is capable of regarding this mediation critically! Just as religious mediation was previously submitted to rational critique - which of course is no easy matter.

Returning to the potential oI dance and to various kinds of 'perjormance art, couldn't one argue that certain performances attain considerable intensity and profundity?

Yes - it's for that reason that I like dance, because, apart from musical rhythm, there's no mediation, there's just the body.

Perhaps there's a kind of conceptual mediation - born, as it were, from previous technological mediation - in so for as artists might initially work with rhythm, montage and simultaneous narrative in their studios, and might then transfer techniques perftcted technologically to more or less technologically un mediated modes oflice perjormance?

But as I've mentioned in L 'art du moteur, Merce Cunningham suggests that dancers now have difficulties with electronic music, in so far as they used to

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count 'one two, one two', along with musical accompaniment, and with electronic accompaniment they can no longer count in this way.

But, from another point of view, technology perhaps sometimes facilitates a certain kind of counting, in so [ar as Robert Wilson sends numbered video clips of different kinds (~r mmiement to his actors, and then rehearses by calling out particular numbers.

It's a question of rhythm, a question of rhythm. As I suggested earlier, the problem of technology is one of foreign rhythms, rather than of foreign bodies.

Perhaps such foreign rhythms can be both mechanical and organic, rational and extra-rational? Certain poets - jor example, the sound poet Henri Chopin - argue that they don't have written scores for their work, and that their quite complicated sonic montages, usually combining live and pre-recorded materials, are above all a matter of memory or ofa kind of instinctive rather than chronometric rhythm. I've often found such work extremely moving and extremely inventive.

Well, for me, the question of rhythm is one of the great questions today. It's for that reason that I'm interested in the proximity between speed and music. We still lack a rhythmology for technology. We have a rhythmology for music - the whole history of instrumental music - butwe still don't have a rhythmology for technology. In a way, the block system was a kind of railway instrument, allowing railways to play certain rhythms, rather than derailing. In this respect, it was a very positive instrument.

Perhaps video and CD-Rom technologies can facilitate the analysis of the rhythms of technological performance by allowing such performances to be screened and reconsidered in minute detail?

Yes, it's certain that one of the great benefits of technology is its function as a means of memorization - of recollection. It's something quite extraordinary. The industrialization of memory is surely the supreme benefit of the informatics revolution. Before it was an art, the art of memory, whereas now it is a computerized industry of almost unimaginable proportions. Hence the whole problem of information superhighways stretching who knows where? Who knows where?

To put things very simply, the most exciting critical task seems to be that of exploring the full potential of these multimedia horizons.

Certainly! I hope that my remarks in our dialogue haven't led to any kind of misunderstanding. My research is not at all opposed to technology or technological performance. It's simply another way of working with these things. It's a little like judo, in which one does not so much destroy the negativity of one's adversary, as use this negativity in order to create a certain

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sort of movement or play. That's my kind of work. Unfortunately, I realize that many people claim that I am apocalyptic, negative, pessimistic. But all of that is out of date - it doesn't rise to the heights of the situation!

Isn't there a danger that, when using this kind 0/ conceptual pla_y, one might perhaps lose oneselfin the spirals of cerebral judo, rather than focusing upon the essentialfacts 0/ contemporary culture and creativity? At worst, it seems to me that this kind of conceptual play might become as circular and self-contained as the kind of syncretic impulse that one might identify in trans-aoant-gardc painting and in postmodem arch itectu re. Whereas for me, the real problem is that ofperceioing and exploring those things that are in the very process 0.( evolving and becoming visible - from every point of view.

Of course, absolutely! I feel the same way - it's the challenge of being curious - of la grande curiosite1 One of my favourite statements was made by the French writer, Paul Leautaud. Whereas Goethe said: 'More light, more light' - a phrase which I personally don't find particularly important, Paul Leautaud's last words were quite extraordinary. To the question: 'What are you experiencing, Paul Leautaud?', he replied: 'An enormous curiosity', I feel the same way with regard to technology, which I consider in some respects to be comparable to death. 'An enormous curiosity' - something far from negative.

Cage said »irtuall» the same thing. He recounted how his cat walked around his studio eve!)! morning, even though he knew the studio quite well, in the manner of a permanently curious tourist, and said that his ideal was to maintain this same continual sense of curiosity.

Very good, very good! But with the publicity mentality, there is no curiositysimply the declaration that 'Multimedia are wonderful! Video is wonderful!' and so on.

And so it's not really interesting at all- at best it's a bland Reader's Digest kind 0/ curiosity. But what about the model of the war-machine, which is central to your research? Does this model share a~J' 0.( the limitations of the model offered by the publicity-machine?

In order to respond to that question, I'm going to have to speak biographically. I was formed by war - I was born in 1932, one year before the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, and I spent the war in Nantes, a city with armament factories and a submarine port, which was destroyed by air-raids. I was traumatized by the war, I began writing during the war. I kept a notebook when I was only 10 years old, describing my experiences, describing the destruction of my city - I mention all this in my preface to L 'insecunte du terntoire. War

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constituted my origins. War was my trauma ana my birth. So for me war is something central.

It's not simply a convenient metaphor?

No, not at all. It's my life - it's something biographical. It's not an intellectual choice. War and the city are the origins of my work. For me, the city is the site of technology, and war is the site of super-technology. The air-raids of the 1940s were quite extraordinary.

A real baptism b)' fire.

A real baptism by fire, during which death literally fell from the skies. All of that had a considerable impact upon me, and all of my early books bore the traces of the war and opposed the violence of the war. It's not a matter of choice but rather something central to my generation. As I've written elsewhere, war was my university - at once my father and my mother.

Doyou feel a certain sense offrustration when confronted by ayounger generation that knows nothing of this experience and that judges contemporary culture on the basis of its publicity and its pop culture?

Yes, that happens with my students. I've many students who know nothing about Hitler - but I also have many Lebanese refugee students - also many Pakistani, Israeli, Syrian and Iraqi and Iranian students. During the recent wars in these regions, many students came to study with me, because they found 'With you, we can talk about war'. My French students were very astonished by all this, because they knew nothing about it. Sometimes I'd suggest that students should take planes to Beirut - and some of them went to Beirut during the war and came back transfigured, saying: 'It's appalling!'

B_}' contrast, Baudrillard remarks that he was not really interested in travelling to see the Gulf fiVar first-hand, on the grounds that he wouldn't have really seen anything new.

Well, there we have different points of view.

Perhaps your work's rigorous focus upon the implications of warfore is particularly apparent in your discussion of the way in which Greek warriors chanted the agon - a ritual that seems to confront both the general terrors of war and personal acceptance of death in combat for one's country. Commenting upon this ritual, you describe it as 'the end for the end, the "art for art's sake" of death in combat'. I'm probab(v misinterpreting this phrase now, but it seems to me that many theorists today seem to be creating an 'art for art's sake' of apocalyptic theory. Your writings frequently

lnteroieui with Paul Virilio 125

mention the disappearance of categories and Baudrillard also tends to pia), with the idea of the end of the end of the end.

Yes, it's true - there's something tautological there. But if the chanting of the agon interests me, it's because it touches me very intimately. The chanting of the agon is very interesting because it brings together the question of the city, the question of individual rights, and the question of individual life. Individuals who benefited from the rights of the city - citizen's rights - were also obliged to defend their rights against the non-rights of tyrants or of civil war. Democracy had two enemies - civil war and tyranny. Individuals who benefited from these rights were therefore obliged to risk their lives for their rights, and would therefore leave their fortified city, place themselves on the battlefield before their enemy, and declare: 'I have already died for my rights, my rights and my life are the same thing, you cannot kill me, since I have already accepted to die for these rights'.

In my opinion, this acceptance of death for one's rights - this acceptance of death for the conditions of human liberty - is the very origin of civilization. It is what led to the struggle against Hitler. It is a benefit that surpasses life itself. And so the agon chant is an extraordinarily positive utterance.

In other words, the 'art' of the agon is not at all a question ofapocalyptic play, but rather a quintessentially existential declaration?

There's nothing playful about it at all. Moreover, each soldier chants the agon for themself - not for anybody else. It's a question of accepting death for one's rights, against non-rights. It's the struggle against Hitler. If one questions the grandeur of the agon, one throws everything into question. Andre Malraux wrote, 'One becomes a man when one says "No" '. For me, the agon is the most explicit formulation of 'No'. It's not negation, it's much more than that - ~J' life/or ~J' rights - it's the whole of history, the whole of civilization, for me.

Such existential and ethical responsibility seems rare these days. Often contemporary! theory seems informed instead bj! a kind of self-conscious cynicism and nonchalance, and ~)J a refusal of all values.

Which leads to catastrophe! 'Which leads to catastrophe - to the situation in Yugoslavia, in Algeria or in Rwanda! We can't afford to drift any further in this direction. In the beginning, the agon defined the first kind of rights - those of the city state. Next came the rights of the nation state, and now, obviously, it's a question of the rights of the global state. But the question of

126 Nicholas Zurbrugg

rights remains the same - they must always be defended. It's the most important question.

Note

This interview first appeared in the Australian journal Eyeline (27 AutumnlWinter 1995: 8-14). It is reprinted by permission of Nicholas Zurbrugg who conducted and translated the interview.

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