The Administration of Fear by Paul Virilio

The Administration of Fear Reviews

• 
  Joseph Phillips

  Interesting Q & A with a dromologist re: relationship of speed and society. Uninhabitable speeds of technology have unexpected and disruptive consequences, possibly in spite of the facile nature with which people interact with social media. Instantaneous, total communication has not necessarily put an end to history, but made it merely complementary to the ability for a social group to communicate certain ideas at a certain rate of speed. Virilio sees shared, emotionally-charged civic unrest, entertainment, or non-localized workspace as a sort of destruction of boundaries that demand answers to questions of privacy.
  
  The ability for the whole world to experience an event together creates a form of panic, albeit a controlled panic. He likens it to a circuit, wherein the Arab Spring protester, the OWS squatter, the weekend warrior are trying to inhabit a cogent relationship with a society it is trying to escape...and come back to his or her own identity changed, as though one were using experience as a sort of gate that expands into a tunnel that eventually spits one out at the front door of the more tolerable version of one's life.
  
  Virilio imagines that people explore the concept of identity like tourists. The cybernetic geography is fluid, the architecture completely imaginary. Because of this freedom, there will be an ever-tightening noose of surveillance on the population, in order that the old leaders of our world may at least subordinate what it does not understand. Internets. Tubes. Maps. The government doesn't like the idea that it's not even remotely capable of being the relevant disseminator of mythos, of history. It's no longer centralized, but atomized, granular and invisible. Surveillance poisons the well.
• 
  Joshua

  Virilio and a buddy swap dark jargon in an interview edited for unclarity. Crushing but prescient French dread, put to words in 2012, but presaging the COVID pandemic of 2020 to ??? with alarming precision. Well, not precision exactly because I (nor you, let’s be honest) understand WTF half of what they’re saying means. BUT constricted time, the brutality of instantaneity, the sense of loss of human rhythm, all facilitated by technological progress for its own sake, this all resonated with me big time, like “dude, that’s what I’ve been saying!” And especially so what with quarantines and WFH and Zoom and Teams, etc, etc. Don’t say Virilio didn’t tell you so. Even if he told you in postmodern code.
• 
  Bryan

  In 90 short pages, this interview with Virilio captured in words everything that I couldn't express that causes my anxiety and unease about the postmodern world. If you've ever felt overwhelmed by the speed of information, helpless by your inability to act on it, and overwhelmed by its unending nature, this book will let you know why. The only thing it doesn't know: if there's anything we can REALLY do about it.
• 
  Jim

  Virilio is always a fascinating read. I am never let down by his ideas or how he presents them. He has this manic-acceleration quality to his writing - in this case his speaking - which is hard to mitigate while reading. As usual, he covers a multitude of topics, issues, concepts, theories, and ideas, all with a distinctly unique style. short book I won't try to summarize, it's the reading of it that provides the intellectual value and emotional punch.
• 
  Heather Clitheroe

  An excellent interview - the notion of fear and terror as something propagated by immediacy and the speed at which things (like communication) occur. Well worth reading.
• 
  beentsy

  Such a thought provoking book. I do wish I was just a little bit brighter though. I'm not sure I was intellectually up to the task of fully appreciating this.
• 
  Rachel

  "The faster we go, the more we look ahead in anticipation and lose our lateral vision. Screens are like windshields in a car: With increased speed, we lose the sense Of lateralization which is an infirmity in our being in the world, its richness, its relief, its depth of field.  ... Screens have become blind."
  
  "... the most reasonable hells are created for the best reasons in the world. Public health and security end up devouring everything. From this perspective, "hyper-interactive" children are a sign of this situation. There have always been hyperactive children. Today, they are panic signs. They are pushed aside even though they are in unison with the mad rhythm of the world."
  
  "Getting carried away has taken the place of enthusiasm, and reaction, action. We are in the fit of rage along with a lack of verbalization, a deficit in the mastery of language."
  
  Hard to believe this was written over ten years ago already. Really excellent points that warn of the dangers to come should we stay the current course.
• 
  Rhys

  Virilio's theme of the compression of space and time with speed, and a theory of relativity for politics. Speed is anathema for reflection leaving only emotion in the present.
  
  "This first regime consisted of the standardization of products and opinions. The second, current regime is comprised of the synchronization of emotions, ensure the transition from a democracy of opinion to a democracy of emotion" (p.31).
• 
  Eve

  Everyone should read this.
• 
  melancholinary

  This is the most paranoid Virilio text ever. His opinion on progress is always interesting to read, which somehow raises more questions on the relation between speed, acceleration and progress.
• 
  Anna

  I liked the exploration of the phenomenology of speed and its affective connotations, but apart from that found it a bit boring.
• 
  Angela

  you know when you buy a book and just wait for the perfect time to read it? and how sometimes that takes years? yeah <3
• 
  Glen Parks

  A fascinating little read, this is transcription of an interview of Paul Virilio by Bertrand Richard, looking at the fear as a result of globalisation, hyper-capitalism and the acceleration of reality. It's a very dense book and I expect it would help to have a background in the subject matter (something I don't have), but there's plenty of food for thought. I found the discussion of rhythms particularly interesting, and the idea that we need to develop a political economy of speed.
• 
  John Defrog: global citizen, local gadfly

  I don’t always get my book recommendations from Warren Ellis, but when I do, it’s often something like this, a 90-page interview from 2007 with philosopher/cultural theorist/urbanist Paul Virilio, in which he explains how fear has become an environment, generated in part by globalization and the acceleration of technology and everyday life, to the point that governments and leaders now find themselves in a position to manage that fear rather than do anything to alleviate it. Like most books from Semiotext(e), it’s written at a highly intellectual level to the point of being buried in philosophic academia. You have to be the equivalent of a philosophy professor (or at least a philosophy major) to understand half of it – so in that sense it’s not very helpful or practical in terms of identifying solutions to the overall problem. Still, there are some interesting ideas here, so at least it’s thought-provoking enough to get a discussion started, which is never a bad thing.
• 
  Whitney

  This is the second book I've read by Paul Virilio. The first was "War and Cinema". What I liked about the other book was it's introduction and conclusion, I found the body of the book to be a bit scattered and I felt like Virilio had a hard time proving anything or making a finite case for anything. It seemed more like a random dumping of facts. I found this book to be even worse. As an interview, the interviewer posed certain questions to Virilio, and he would somehow go off on all sorts of tangents, and I had a hard time connecting how the prior sentence would lead into the following one. All of the ideas and phrases are there, and it's very stimulating to read, but it was such a slog to get through that I feel as if I haven't really gained anything from reading it. I wish I somehow could have filtered out this book, because it seems like everything could be there, if it just wasn't so hard to detangle.
• 
  Steve Redhead

  Grand old man of urban studies, war and accelerated culture, Paul Virilio is still producing new books at the ripe old age of 79 - though he was actually 78 when this one came out in 2010. It is still only available in French, published by Textuel in Paris, at the moment and not scheduled to be translated into English as yet. This new volume is a series of conversations with Bertrand Richard (who keeps his words to a minumum) and is chock full of everything from Virilio's views on Facebook to his usual diet of war technologies (for example, the Manhattan project), the spreading 'fear' of the title and the horrendous, catastrophic state of the planet we inhabit. In case you are wondering, the title originates from playing with a book title from author Graham Greene - suitably another confused and haunted Catholic like Paul Virilio.
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  xDEAD ENDx

  I agree that speed and magnitude are significant in contemporary society, and that studying it through these lenses can illuminate something insightful, I don't think they are the factors that determine the world in which I want to live. Virilio seems to claim that we should operate at a more appropriate speed, rather than critically rethink society as a whole. Calling himself "revelationary" rather than "revolutionary" positions him very comfortably in this world as a an armchair academic.
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  Scot

  Easiest to understand of all Virilio I have read. Straight forward interview that allows the reader to both see the simple answers to all questions asked but also get a sense of how the intelligentsia attempts to pick apart and analyze his thoughts and ideas. Central thesis is how we are moving toward instantaneous global affect and that may not be a good thing. I tend to agree and hope we find a way to slow down and truly understand life rather than speed ahead to the next accident. Highly insightful and truly enjoyable.
• 
  Tucker

  An interview of Paul Virilio conducted by Bertrand Richard. These are comments on how globalization and technology are speeding up the world, and this changes how humans experience fear. His overall judgment is that there used to be a cultural assumption that fear is childish and undesirable, but today, politicians and media professionals send the message that we should all be afraid all the time.
• 
  Jamie

  A meaningful and accessible interview of Paul Virilio by Bertrand Richard, Virilio provides further insight into his concerns around globalization, technology, and the production of fear at the speed of light through the dromosphere. A need for a university of disaster and a studying of chronopolitics of instantaniety is further reinforced.
• 
  Roderick Mcgillis

  As always, Virilio is stimulating. He is an alarmist. He is what he terms a 'revelationary'. He reveals rather than foments revolution. His vision of the shrinkage of space and the acceleration of time speaks to our fears of homology and surveillance and Eco-collapse and violence and so on and so on. His analysis of contemporary conditions derives from an architectural perspective.
• 
  Syd

  rave
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  Darren

  I read the book a long time before the Covid-19 pandemic.