Inner screens and cybernetic battlefields:Paul Virilio and RoboCop

Padilha’s new Robocop film can be read in the light of Paul Virilio’s theoretical work, notably Desert Screen. Robocop serves as the city’s warrior but also as a munition in the hands of global media forces. Still, even if the film presents the fallibility of robotic technology, its true failure is in sustaining the progressivist myth of technology perfectly under human control

Rewriting Modernity

This article rereads Paul Virilio, drawing on the distinctionbetween topography and topology to argue a case for Virilio as a rewriter of modernity. Invoking Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of rewriting modernity as an unbroken process of accumulation founded on affective life in “Re-writing Modernity” and “Argumentation and Presentation: The Foundation Crisis,” it enlists topology as a horizontal spatial structure that enables us to rethink space, time,and modernity outside the limits of the “squared horizon,” where the“squared horizon” is viewed as a spatial and textual metaphor for framing perspectives on the past, present, and future. The analysis deconstructs the topography of the “squared horizon” as a relationality in an unfolding continuum, where spaces exist ontologically and where the immaterial forces of the dromospheric and the atmospheric generate a relational and historical connectedness

Securing By Design

This article investigates how modern neo-liberal states are 'securing by design' harnessing design to new technologies in order to produce security, safety, and protection. We take a critical view toward 'securing by design' and the policy agendas it produces of 'designing out insecurity' and 'designing in protection' because securing by design strategies rely upon inadequate conceptualisations of security, technology, and design and inadequate understandings of their relationships to produce inadequate 'security solutions' to readymade 'security problems'. This critique leads us to propose a new research agenda we call Redesigning Security. A Redesigning Security Approach begins from a recognition that the achievement of security is more often than not illusive, which means that the desire for security is itself problematic. Rather than encouraging the design of 'security solutions' a securing by design a Redesigning Security Approach explores how we might insecure securing by design. By acknowledging and then moving beyond the new security studies insight that security often produces insecurity, our approach uses design as a vehicle through which to raise questions about security problems and security solutions by collaborating with political and critical design practitioners to design concrete material objects that themselves embody questions about traditional security and about traditional design practices that use technology to depoliticise how technology is deployed by states and corporations to make us 'safe'

Une anthropologie du pressentiment

L’instant réel est-il présent ? De quelle réalité l’histoire des sociétés est-elle chargée, celle des siècles, des années, celle des civilisation des générations passées ? L’accélération de la réalité présente-t-elle un impact décisif sur l’historicité des faits avérés, plus précisément encore une histoire du temps réel est-elle encore « historique » ? Autant d’interrogations qui affectent aujourd’hui l’anthropologie. En effet, peut-on encore parler d’un monde contemporain ? Ne devrait-on pas..

NUEVA YORK DELIRA

El atentado del World Trade Center (02/02/95) es el primero después de la guerra fría. Sean quienes fueren sus autores, inaugura una nueva era del terrorismo, que nada tiene en común con las explosiones a repetición que sacuden regularmente a Irlanda e Inglaterra. En efecto, el aspecto distintivo de semejante atentado es que estaba clara y definidamente destinado a derrumbar el edificio del World Trade Center; dicho de otra manera, a provocar la muerte de decenas de miles de personas inocente..