Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light.
For me, the Asian financial crisis of 1998 and the war in Kosovo in 1999 are the prelude to the integral accident.
The globally constituted accident can be compared to what people who work at the stock exchange call 'systemic risk'.
I believe that the politics of intervention and the Kosovo war prompted a fresh resumption of the arms race worldwide.
If we turn to the war in Kosovo, what do we find? We find the manipulation of the audience's emotions by the mass media.
There is a buddhist proverb which I like a lot. It says: "Every body deserves mercy". That means that every body is holy.
GPS not only played a large and delocalizing role in the war in Kosovo but is increasingly playing a role in social life.
As I said back in 1984, the idea of logistics is not only about oil, about ammunitions and supplies but also about images.
I pursue through my research on speed and on my study of the organisation of the revolution of the means of transportation.
The technologies of virtual reality are attempting to make us see from beneath, from inside, from behind... as if we were God.
Resistance is always possible! But we must engage in resistance first of all by developing the idea of a technological culture.
Possession of territory is not primarily about laws and contracts, but first and foremost a matter of movement and circulation.
If we consider my latest book, Strategie de la deception, what we need to focus on are the other aspects of the same phenomenon.
Thus my research on dromology, on the logic and impact of speed, necessarily implies the study of the organisation of territory.
There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We'll dream of being blind.
There is, then, a link between the logistics of perception, the wars in Lebanon and the Gulf as well as with CNN and the Pentagon.
Hence not only the crisis of geopolitics and geostrategy but also the shift towards the emergence and dominance of chronostrategy.
Time is not something that can be measured with a pendule. Time is something that we build together within a tribe, a family, a region.
Nowadays, the tragedy of war is mediated through technology. It is no longer mediated through a human being with moral responsibilities.
The Gulf War may not have occurred in the actual global space, but it did occur in global time. And this thanks to CNN and The Pentagon.
The creation of a virtual image is a form of accident. This explains why virtual reality is a cosmic accident. It's the accident of the real.
In a way, technologies have negated the transcendental God in order to invent the machine-God. However, these two gods raise similar questions.
Look at the US, look at Russia. Both of these countries are immense geographical territories. But, nowadays, immense territories amount to nothing!
For me, then, territory and movement are linked. For instance, territory is controlled by the movements of horsemen, of tanks, of planes, and so on.
I have said many times before, interactivity is the equivalent of radioactivity. For interactivity effects a kind of disintegration, a kind of rupture.
As I have been arguing for a long time now, there is a real need not simply for a political economy of wealth but also for a political economy of speed.
I am always concerned with ideas of territory and movement. Indeed, my first book after Bunker Archeology was entitled L'insecurite du territoire (1976).
The body is extremely important to me, because it is a planet. For instance, if you compare Earth and an astronomer, you will see that the man is a planet.
While the human gaze becomes more and more fixed, losing some of its natural speed and sensitivity, photographic shots, on the contrary, become even faster.
GPS are everywhere. They are in cars. They were even in the half-tracks that, initially at least, were going to make the ground invasion in Kosovo possible.
Sovereignty no longer resides in the territory itself, but in the control of the territory. And localisation is an inherent part of that territorial control.
Digital messages and images matter less than their instantaneous delivery; the shock effect always wins out over the consideration of the informational content.
For the time being, technologies are colonizing our body through implants. We started with human implants, but research leads us to microtechnological implants.
Science, which is not so attached to 'truth' as it once was, ut more to immediate 'effectiveness', is now drifting towards a decline, it's civic fall from grace.
Science, which is not so attached to 'truth' as it once was, but more to immediate 'effectiveness', is now drifting towards a decline, it's civic fall from grace.
Jean Baudrillard is a friend of mine, I do not agree with him on that one! For me, the significance of the war in Kosovo was that it was a war that moved into space.
While the United States (US) can view the war as a success, Europe must see it as a failure for it and, in particular, for the institutions of the European Union (EU).
Moreover, it is clear that the era of the information bomb, the era of aerial warfare, the era of the RMA and global surveillance is also the era of the integral accident.
As I have said many times before, the speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light. And it is nothing else!
... the blinding Hiroshima flash... literally photographed the shadow cast by beings and things, so that every surface immediately became war's recording surface, its film.
In this way, history now inscribes itself in real time, in the 'live', in the realm of interactivity. Consequently, history no longer resides in the extension of territory.
In a way, everybody is wounded from the wound of the real. This phenomenon is similar to madness. The mad person is wounded by his or her distorted relationship to the real.
As I pointed out in The Art of the Motor and elsewhere, from now on we need two watches: a wristwatch to tell us what time it is and a GPS watch to tell us what space it is!
Art used to be painting, sculpture, music, etc, but now, all technology has become art. Of course, this form of art is still very primitive, but it is slowly replacing reality.
May I remind you that the bombs that were dropped by the B-2 plane on the Chinese embassy or at least that is what we were told were GPS bombs. And the B-2 flew in from the US.
We have already seen some instances of systemic risk in recent times in the Asian financial crisis. But what sparked off the Asian financial crisis? Automated trading programmes!
The true problem with virtual reality is that orientation is no longer possible. We have lost our points of reference to orient ourselves. The de-realized man is a disoriented man.
For the US, GPS are a form of sovereignty! It is hardly surprising, then, that the EU has proposed its own GPS in order to be able to localize and to compete with the American GPS.
It will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be what I have dubbed 'the integral accident' that is the continuation of politics by other means.
I think that cinema and television have nothing in common. There is a breaking point between photography and cinema on the one hand and television and virtual reality on the other hand.