Hello everyone,
This blog is a response to the task assigned by professor Dilip Barad sir as part of a thinking activity. In this blog I would like to share my understanding after watching the given videoes.
So first of all Who gave this theory?
Paul Virilio:-
Paul Virilio was a French cultural theorist, urbanist, architect and aesthetic philosopher. 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. According to two biographers, Virilio was a "historian of warfare, technology and photography, a philosopher of architecture, military strategy and cinema, and a politically engaged provocative commentator on history, terrorism, mass media and human-machine relations."
Virilio developed what he called the "war model" of the modern city and of human society in general and is the inventor of the term 'dromology', meaning the logic of speed that is the foundation of technological society. His major works include War and Cinema, Speed and Politics and The Information Bomb in which he argues, among many other things, that military projects and technologies drive history. Like some other cultural theorists, he rejects labels - including 'cultural theorist' - yet he has been linked by others with post-structuralism and postmodernism. Some people describe Virilio's work as being positioned in the realm of the 'hypermodern'.
What is Dromology?
Dromology is derived from the Greek ‘dromos’:- avenue or race course.
The theory of dromology interprets the world and reality as a resultant of velocity. In Paul Virilio’s 1977 essay entitled “Speed and Politics”, the french philosopher makes a compelling case for an interpretation of history, politics and society in the context of speed.
Virilio has a flawed conception of technology that is
excessively one-sided and that misses the emancipatory and democratising aspects of new computer and media technologies. Virilio was initially an urbanist who suggests that the city is a dwelling place organised by channels of communication and transportation, penetrated by roadways, canals, coastlines,
railroads, and now airports. Each crossing has its speed limits, its regulations, and its systematic enclosure and spaces within a system of societal organisation. The city itself is a conglomeration of these roads, a stopover for travel, and a system of "habitable circulation". City life unfolds in the spectacle of the street with its progressions and movements, its
institutions and events, mobilising and moving flows of traffic and people. Likewise, politics unfolds in the streets and urban sites of demonstration, debate, revolt, and revolutionary insurrection.
For Virilio, the city and its institutions have military origins. In his view, the mediaeval cathedral and early modern fortified cities were military camps.
In Virilio's words:
"Before it became the throne of totality, the Christian sanctuary was a stronghold, a bunker, a fortified church for those
who remained within it; all their powers and capacities were deployed and strengthened in,
through and as combat".
The vector is a key term for Virilio that indicates the trajectory of various technologies along a
fixed length and direction, but from no fixed point. It refers to any trajectory along which goods, money, information, or military apparatuses can flow, including roadways, airwaves, and
communication and military circuits. Territory is the space across which speed, technology, politics, economics, and urban and everyday life flow across vectors of transportation, commerce, war, social interaction, communication, and information. From a political and
military perspective, territory is the space of human habitation, it is a space to be defended and
secured, and to be invaded and colonised. Within modern societies, the nation-state was the
territory that defined politics and the city, with its public spaces and institutions, serving as its
privileged site.
In the contemporary world, however, the city has been displaced by technologies
of speed and power. In the military sphere, the city no longer serves as a break against military
conquest and as a site of protection of its citizens when instantaneous military violence can
assault it from hidden spaces -aeroplanes, nuclear submarines, and missiles. With politics
occurring through media and information circuits, the time of deliberation and consensus is
obliterated. Space and time are thus overwhelmed by technologies that travel at ever faster
speeds and when new technologies instantaneously circulate images and information across
space.
Dromology also involves analysis of the forces that brake or diminish speed as well as those
forces that accelerate it.
For Virilio, theories of light and speed replace time and space, as a new immateriality and "new
illuminism" comes to dominate contemporary scientific thinking. Virilio believes that as with the
notions of critical mass or temperature, when states of affairs break up and become radically
another, space too becomes "critical". The notion of "critical space" refers to
the breaking up and dissolution of previous configurations of space under the impact of
technology. For Virilio, telecommunication that eradicates all duration and extension of time in
the transmission of messages and images, as well as mass transportation and interactive
computer technologies that decenter urban or lived space, all constitute threats and dissolutions
of previous configurations of experience as space becomes virtual and takes on new modalities.
Ted.ed talk:-
Speaker starts his talk with an observation that A world obsessed with speed, with doing everything faster, with cramming more and more into less and less time. Every moment of the day feels like a race against the clock. To borrow a phrase from Carrie Fisher,;
"These days even instant gratification takes too long."
He gave some examples of the things which we make faster, So we used to dial; now we speed dial. We used to read; now we speed read. We used to walk; now we speed walk and we used to date and now we speed date. He says that some things are naturally slow but we make them faster by changing their speed. He gave an example of a gym , where he found speed yoga.
He says that there's a very serious point, and according to him, that is in the headlong dash of daily life, we often lose sight of the damage that this roadrunner form of living does to us. We're so marinated in the culture of speed that we almost fail to notice the toll it takes on every aspect of our lives on our health, our diet, our work, our relationships, the environment and our community. And sometimes it takes a wake-up call, doesn't it, to alert us to the fact that we're hurrying through our lives, instead of actually living them; that we're living the fast life, instead of the good life.
He has two questions in mind,
1) How did we get so fast?
2) Is it possible, or even desirable, to slow down?
If we tried to find a reason behind this we would think about urbanisation, consumerism, the workplace, technology. But if we cut through those forces, you get to what might be the deeper driver, the nub of the question, which is how we think about time itself. In other cultures, time is cyclical. It's seen as moving in great, unhurried circles. It's always renewing and refreshing itself. Whereas in the West, time is linear. It's a finite resource; it's always draining away. You either use it, or lose it.
As Benjamin Franklin said,
"Time is money"
To make everything better people start doing things slowly, as they eat better, exercise better, love better as part of the "International Slow Movement."
Slow movement started in Italy and now many people became part of it. And it's driven by a very simple and sensible message, which is that we get more pleasure and more health from our food when we cultivate, cook and consume it at a reasonable pace. They want to get back to slower rhythms. And out of the Slow Food movement has grown something called the Slow Cities movement, which has started in Italy, but has spread right across Europe and beyond. Speaker gave many other examples where people start working slowly and enjoying their work and quality of their works. But if we see in today's generation they are more speedy in every aspect of life for example children who has hurry to complete homework as fast as possible. At the end of his video he asked a question that why is it so hard to slow down? There are various reasons. One is that speed is fun, It's all that adrenaline rush. It's hard to give it up. We fill our head with distraction, with busyness, so that we don't have to ask, am I well? Am I happy? Are my children growing up right? Are politicians making good decisions on my behalf? Another reason although I think, perhaps, the most powerful reason why we find it hard to slow down is the cultural taboo that we've erected against slowing down. "Slow" is a dirty word in our culture. It's a byword for "lazy," "slacker," for being somebody who gives up. You know, "he's a bit slow." It's actually synonymous with being stupid. In today's time people are busy making things faster and making time consumer but in the process we actually lost quality over quantity and that's what speaks about and also gave some solutions to this issue by naming Slow Movement.
Conclusion:-
Slow movement is not anti-speed but faster is not always good. Being Slow means doing everything at the correct speed: quickly, slowly or whatever pace works best. Slow means being present, living each moment fully, putting quality before quantity in everything from work and sex to food and parenting. Slow world will be a world that is healthy, happy and humane. But we have to be realistic. The world is too complex and interconnected for that.
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