version

Well-known member
I've just read most of Administration of Fear and it's very much in line with some of the stuff we've being discussing here. He's talking about things like the enclosing of space through the ideologies of health and security, society breaking up into fractals and time having more or less completely overrun space via technology.

There's a bit of a mad bit where he suggests we'll end up using genetic engineering to make more "efficient" humans who need less water, oxygen etc and can function in a world ravaged by climate change; also warns of "hyper-racism" - thought that was just a silly Landism... - once these people appear and "naturals" are seen as inferior, but, that clunky sci-fi stuff aside, it's a decent read.

His interviewer makes some comment about him not worrying about sharing the language of conspiracy theorists when he mentions the military-industrial complex and he says he's not a conspiracy theorist, he only describes logics.

😂
 

version

Well-known member
There's another bit where he says something like "as you know, I studied bunkers," and it reads like something someone would stick on a meme of him.
 

version

Well-known member
One of the bits that really leapt out at me was him saying he wasn't against technological progress per se, what he's talking about is the way technology, and the speed of it in particular, compresses life into a single, breakneck rhythm it's impossible for people to keep up with; also that one of the problems with speed is that the faster you go, the less you notice anything but what's directly in front of you.

He starts talking about how life used to be structured around things like seasons and whatnot and now that's all gone out the window, that there's an expectation that everything's 24/7, no reason you can't also work on Sunday etc.

There's also a bit where distinguishes between "green" and "gray" ecology, the former being plants, animals and so on, the latter being things like distance and time measurement, which he says are also being polluted.
 

luka

Well-known member
i agree you cant stop any more. in the same way that you cant take time off from the pandemic. theres no way to escape it for a second.
 

version

Well-known member
Yeah, he says that about fear too; describes it as an environment we now just live in due to the speed at which information travels round the world; a bomb goes off somewhere and we all immediately know about it.

He goes after Fukuyama at one point and says he should have declared the end of geography rather than history, also says Baudrillard was wrong re: simulation because it doesn't end with simulation, a simulated reality will integrate itself and keep generating further realities.
 

luka

Well-known member
intergrate itself with what? reality? so that it becomes a facet of reality and reality responds to it and emeshes itself with it? or what?
 

version

Well-known member
I haven't read enough Baudrillard yet to know whether Virilio's misrepresenting him here, but he says his disagreement with Baudrillard is that Baudrillard favours seduction and simulation whereas he favours repulsion and replacement. He says Baudrillard stops at a simulated reality whereas he believes a simulated reality will keep changing itself into different realities until you have a chain of successive ones;

Baudrillard - The Matrix supersedes the real world.
Virilio - The Matrix continually dismantles itself, creating yet more Matrixes.

I'm hoping he elaborates a bit in some of his other books as this is about three lines in this one. There's not a lot to go on and I could be way off.
 

luka

Well-known member
Well this is why I say it's too difficult for me. I like to understand what I read or I feel stupid.
 

version

Well-known member
It's mostly quite straightforward. You've just homed in on basically the one bit in it about Baudrillard, who isn't straightforward.

I was reading stuff about their relationship earlier and apparently Baudrillard spent years using a phrase of Virilio's without ever explaining what he meant by it only to finally explain he was using it in a different way anyway;

Concepts and Catastrophes: Jean Baudrillard’s Paul Virilio
Notes on the intersecting lives of Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio

I can see why some people hated him. He always seemed to be on something of a wind up,

“There is nothing worse than this obligation to do research, to seek out references and documentation,”
-- Baudrillard, Cool Memories

🤪
 

version

Well-known member
Baudrillard’s writing took place at great speed – where things appear and disappear rapidly – it is the essence of the Baudrillardian poetic (and the annoying [to some] passing over of references)...

This is the moment he has been avoiding and now finds enveloping him. It is the moment when Baudrillard was overtaken by fiction and accepts that theory can be, and always is, pure fiction. We have, by this point, travelled some distance from the practicalities and efforts to make sense that is Virilio’s thought and writing...

Baudrillard also understands that writing is something very different for he and Virilio. For Virilio writing is “a resistance, a defence of the old world and slowness” whereas for Baudrillard it is “a form of singularity, a thing which doesn’t conform… the invention of another antagonistic world”...
 

catalog

Well-known member
I got hold of that virilio book about the bunkers, cos the guy who wrote applied ballardianism, Simon sellars, raves about it (and I really liked his book). But it didn't really clci Keith me. The photos were cool for a bit, like all the weird outlandish shapes, but nothing in the commentary grabbed me.
 

version

Well-known member
I got hold of that virilio book about the bunkers, cos the guy who wrote applied ballardianism, Simon sellars, raves about it (and I really liked his book). But it didn't really clci Keith me. The photos were cool for a bit, like all the weird outlandish shapes, but nothing in the commentary grabbed me.
That one doesn't interest me at all. I don't think much of his "bunker church" either,

210784785_602651d214_z.jpg
 

version

Well-known member
Was he the only one of the post-'68 lot who was religious? I'm assuming the rest were agnostic or atheist.
 
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