Geography Reference
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theorist in this regard is Paul Virilio—the “high priest of speed” (Redhead
2004:2), a planner, historian of technology, photographer, and philosopher
of architecture, cinema, and the military—for whom the culture of speed is
driven primarily by the needs of the military, whose conquest of the tyranny
of distance extends repeatedly into civilian life (Bartram 2004). Virilio takes
as his point of departure the intersections of military technology and the
experience of speed, underscoring the machinic qualities of time and space as
they are produced and conceptualized through his central concern, war.
Thus, the state is essentially a machine to wage war, exhibiting a logic quite
di
erent from the Marxist emphasis on capital accumulation; in Virilio's
reading, the state is a “means of destruction” not a means of production. For
him, “all human geography is ultimately a product of warfare” (Luke and
Ó Tuathail 2000:365) because the preparation and engagement in military
con
ff
ict, including things such as logistics, intelligence, and speeds of military
machinery and rockets are the fundamental bases of territorial organization.
Space here is reduced to little more than a theater of war, and the state is
simply a machine for waging it. Steady improvements in the ability to wage
war are thus instrumental to social abilities to bind together ever-larger units
of space and time. Not capital accumulation but the dynamics of military
conquest are the driving force behind the historical rounds of time-space
compression. Space and time are the products of speed as it emanates from
the prerequisites of warfare. Thus Virilio (1995:365) asserts:
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War and the preparation for it produce the space-time of human experi-
ence as a function of projectile speeds, logistical rates of transport, or
intelligence insight gathering. The territorial organization of space into
human settlements and political units of authority, from the earliest
human village settlements to medieval city-states, modern nation-states
and worldwide empires, reveals a constant tendency: they express di
er-
ent orders of military power, knowledge and technological organization.
ff
figure centrally in Virilio's worldview, in which
digital technologies produced a world in which information is speed and
duration is nonexistent. Virilio (1999:21) maintains:
Telecommunications also
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Speed enables you to see. It does not simply allow you to arrive at your
destination more quickly, rather it enables you to see and foresee....
Speed changes the world vision. In the nineteenth century, with photo-
graphy and cinema, world vision became “objective.” . . . It can be said
that today, vision is becoming “teleobjective.” That is to say that televi-
sion and multimedia are collapsing the close shots of time and space as a
photograph collapses the horizon in the telephotographic lens.
Virilio's
fixation on speed leads him to conclude (1986:60) that “we no longer
populate stationariness; we populate the time spent changing place.” The
fi
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