Speed Of Time Essay Research Paper Virilio

Speed Of Time Essay, Research Paper

Virilio and Gleick use speed as an analytic tool/concept to understand post-contemporary society. Both authors trace the

evolution of speed through technology. However, Virilio sees the evolution of speed through war and Gleick analyses speed

through the evolution of “time”. Virilio.s technological military determinism in .Speed and Politics. illustrates how we lost

slowness through technology and further more how it was developed for the purposes, and from the logic, of war. In .Faster.,

James Gleick provides context for the complexity of post-industrial life and its transformation by technology. He tries to

define our relationship with .time. to understand post-contemporary society. He places our culture’s infatuation with speed into

a context; historically, technically, and psychologically. Gleick dissects time, showing us how the ability to measure time in

ever more exact ways has affected us and the world in which we live in. He claims: .if we don.t understand time, we become its

victims.. Gleick and Virilio.s technological determinism illustrates that technology, not humanity, is responsible for

determining the direction and development of human life.

Virilio argues that the city, politics, culture, human presence and values are decaying due to the speed/acceleration of life.

.We are passengers of the empty circle who only wish to arrive before they leave. Speed is a perfect will to impotence.. Virilio

uses speed as an analytic tool to theorize a post-contemporary society. He develops his post-structuralist critique through the

lens of his new methodology, .dromology.; the science, and study of speed. “Dromomatics” alters our perceptions of speed,

examines the role of speed in history and its important functions in urban and social life, warfare, the economy, transportation

and communication.

.In this precarious fiction speed would suddenly become a destiny, a force of progress, in other words a “civilization” in which

each speed would be something of a “religion” in time. [141].

This “dromocratic revolution” involves means of fabricating speed with the steam engine, then the combustion engine, and in our

day nuclear energy and instantaneous forms of warfare and communication.

Technology is used to build the global war machine, .the more speed increases, the faster freedom decreases. [142]. According to

Virilio the phenomenon of technology came in large part from the arsenal and war economy. The author.s concept of

post-contemporary reality is founded on the sociology of military technology, which changes the contemporary perceptions of

space and time.

.the transportation capacity created by the mass production of automobilies [.] can become a social assault, a revolution

sufficient and able to modify the citizen.s way of life by transforming all the consumer.s needs, by totally remodeling a

territory.. [26].

It is the dissolution of the social. The conquest of the postmodern technology of pure speed as a war machine, one in which we

are all processed: .the militarization of societies [.] makes every citizen a war machine. [90].

Weapons of war are based on developing the speed of attack. “Speed is the essence of war” [Sun Tzu]. Military technology,

technologies of representation, and new computer and information technologies have constituted the post-contemporary. War

intensified through technology, which is accelerated by speed. War is the center of civilization.

.The class struggle is replaced by the struggle of the technological bodies of the armies according to their dynamic efficiency.

[48].

We are a culture inclined towards extremism at a point where technology appears to speed up as it approaches inertia. .The

treshold of speed is continously shrinking, and the faster engine is beconig more and more difficult to conceive of. [46].

Technologies of simultaneity and coherence, maintain civilian society in a state of permanent mobilization, driven by the

competition for markets, resources and spheres of influence. . Revolution is movement, but movement is not revolution. [18]. A

battle for supremacy in the processes of economic concentration, in which the fronts, no longer drawn up along national

boundaries and between political systems, are defined by technical standards. A battle in which the power of knowledge is

managed as a profitable monopoly of its distribution and dissemination.

Bourgeois power is military even more than economic, but it relates most directly to the occult permanence of the state of

siege, to the appearance of fortified towns. [11]

Gleick traces the evolution of time through technology, .only in an age of speed, can we stop time.. He reveals how through

technlogy time has changed from the second to the millisecond and finally to nanosecond. .During a nanosecond balls, bats,

bullets and droplets are motionless. [6]. The Directorate of Time, devised by the Defense Department, maintains a Master Clock

that sends its timely data on the steady movements of “atomic beams

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