Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles (Semiotext

by Paul Virilio, Mark Polizzoti (Translator)

What is popular defense? From whom do we have to defend ourselves? What is popular defense? From whom do we have to defend ourselves? Originally civilian populations were capable of defending themselves both in times of peace and war. A military racket was subsequently imposed upon them in the name of protection and popular defense lost its capacity to resist external attack. In case of total war, between the native populations which form the constitutional basis of all great modern states and the military now in charge of defending them there was no more "common culture." Industrial wars subsequently managed to replace the thousand-year-old pact of semi-colonization with total colonization. First experimented with in South America, this kind of "endo-colonization" (the military cracking down on its own population) was gradually extended to all the post-industrial countries through the exponential development of the techno-military complex.

Genres: Philosophy

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Paul Virilio was a cultural theorist and urbanist. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military.

Reviews

[Anna]

Trodding through this book. I am about halfway through it and so far it seems to be 20% lies, 40% skewed, 30% I forgot this percentile category, and 10% veritable. When Virillio writes about technology, he zeros in on something big (revealing, major, and true), important, and original. When off that topic, he is a nut! Maybe the undesignated 30% could also be fantastical, imaginative entertainment writing, (whatever else the percentage was when I first thought of it earlier this morning.) The outright lies could turn out to be a template for understanding something in his oeuvre. So that even if not true, describes an actual phenomenon of events that sheds light on something else. My 'reviews' on the Virillio books are ridiculous, I know that. Don't read them; just humor me by letting me post them. They are just for me to find later. I think.

[Alex Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Again, Virilio writes these tiny books. Here he attempts to show how the key technological view that constitutes the process "War Machine" also runs our political, economic and sociological ideals. His attempt to cohere around this techo-rationality presents for us a view of peace and war as managed and unmanaged areas. The borders of managed society are areas which the War Machine attempts to stabilize. I found that his all encompassing War Machine was only partially correct. His interest is in highlighting areas of maximal incoherency from the view of planned/managed society. Areas which are beyond management become "crisis" areas of which the technocratic territorialization machine can jump in and attempt to manage under the excuse of ecological-disasters. Another way to reframe is book is to recognize that ecology isn't environmental, it's rather the "outside" of our planned technocractic existence.

While Virilio is onto something he also misses the mark in that he misses some of the historic and planning sequence that happens for the rise of the technocractic state. So I found some of his mark incoherent. As is his style, Virilio writes a small book that reads fast, but in doing so he picks a point in the middle to try and tease out a logic. Without a historic mark to show its development and only an intuitive cut to highlight a rough shape, I am sure he would alienate many of his readers, especially when he loses them with his new mapping.