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The Information Bomb 2000 Translation to English by Chris Turner 145 pages Complementary Texts N.
Katherine Hayles (How We Became Posthuman) Jay David Bolter
& Richard Grusin Keywords Copyright © 2004-2007 Isabel Pedersen |
Paul Virilio, architect and philosopher, is very well known for using the war model as the justification for new media creation. He takes a strong deterministic stance on media creation in his work, The Information Bomb. He explores domination by cyber technologies. In one of the chapters he offers the label the “totalitarian techno-cult” as the situation whereby Western society ceases to criticize technology in a rational way and succumbs to the dogmatism of a techno-culture actually becoming penetrated by technology: As we are gradually deprived of the use of our natural receptor organs, our sensuality, we are obsessed, like the invalid, by a kind of cosmic lack of proper ‘measure’, by the phantasmatic pursuit of different worlds and modes in which the old ‘animal body’ would be out of place, in which we would achieve total symbiosis between technology and the human. (Virilio 40) For Virilio, this situation is a disease; it is bio warfare. He actually names it “an unutterable technical contamination” (Virilio 39). Technology attacks the body and infiltrates it like a germ, riddling it with an omnipresent biological affliction. Rather than embracing technology as a means to liberate the body like Donna Haraway’s cyborg or Stelarc’s merged human-machine clamouring to respond to the realization that the body is obsolete, Virilio’s human subject is always dogged by the violence, warfare or even eugenic outcomes of cyber technology (Virilio 132). For Virilio, media or technology not only “determine our situation” as Kittler insists, it actually attacks. It is not only that war breeds media; it is that media are warring upon the human. |