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After a couple of years of me wondering whether he's a genius or a madman, his latest book Art and Fear convinced me that he's a madman. However, I'm still using Open Sky (dreadful translation of the French title, La vitesse de liberation = 'escape velocity'), and rereading it at the moment. This is a thread for anyone to share insights into, basically, whatever the hell they think he's going on about.
Crunchy - here's a theorist of the body for you, come to think of it. In both Speed & Politics and Open Sky he considers space and time to have a 'natural' scale based on the capacities of the non-prosthetized, 'able' (ie not 'disabled') human body, and his work explores the consequences for space and time of various technological advances ("There was no industrial revolution, only a dromocratic revolution").
I'm basically using his work to develop some ideas about political space-time. I'm interested in his term 'urbanization' in Open Sky, because it's Latin to the Greek 'politicization', and because Arendt defines the polis as a space built for human action - Virilio introduces the term 'teleaction', which seems to correspond to this shift from Greek (Rousseauist fantasy of the political community based on earshot - ie on the range of human voice through air) to Latin (telecommunicative/teletechnologically conditioned) space. Valis comes into it at some point. |
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