Bookmarklets | MOVABLE TYPE There is always a link with military shtuff !!!! Via Marc Tuters : "In Virilio"s military origins of the city, urban space is controlled by military cartographers, whose lines of sight have determined the extent of mapable, and thus, controllable territory. The further the cartographer"s view of the territory/city extended, the more time it allowed to defend the city, and the further in turn the city grew outwards; making the city a temporal event related to control of the territory. Thus the Atlantic Wall of bunkers that the Germans built to defend fortress Europe in World War II, in Virilio"s theory, transformed Europe into a continent wide city. Following this line, the entire planet has become a generalized urban security zone, surveillanced by military satellites such as GPS, with which one"s exact location can be determined from anywhere on the planet by triangulating the time of arrival of satellite transmissions. "Sovereignty no longer resides in the territory, but in the control of the territory", and, as William Bogard notes, in the generation of its simulation which distracts attention from the underlying disciplinary regimes of power in space"
"One cannot understand the development of information tech, without understanding the evolution of military strategy" Paul Virilio
"there is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons"Giles Deleuze
While, in an increasingly mediated society, military derived technologies of surveillance and simulation attempt to control people, there remains a destabilizing force at the heart of Virilio"s city. While cartographers organize space by attempting to control its flows, the city essentially emerged at the intersection of the flows when nomads settled down in walled cities giving-up some of their freedom in exchange for protection (thus urban space is a defensible space of "habitable stasis"). The anarchic Virilio believes that the city"s streets retain a connection to the nomadic territorial order and continue to introduce nomadic vectors which cannot be controlled and out of which all the meaningful movements in history have emerged.
Inspired by Virilio"s early work Deleuze and Guattari developed the concept of nomadology as a way of constructing space that grows out of a territorial connection with place. As an example, they present the itinerant labourers who built the great cathedrals of Medieval Europe. These "freemasons", whose guilds have always remained outside of "the State", constructed space from the rock itself, in contrast to the conceptual space of the architects according to whose plans the monuments were built. Similarly, for Henri Lefebvre, all social movements produce their own integral fluid spaces, while architects and urban planners, as handmaids of "the State", produce "representations of space" that encode hierarchical power dynamics into the built environment, where they become naturalized and erased from view. These "representations of space" marginalize and fracture the social body so that the head can no longer see the feet (Lefebvre), severing meaningful connections with place (Deleuze and Guattarri), and ultimately, through an abstract spectacle of circulation, they exert perceptual control on the atomized individual generating a cultural nihilism which manifests itself as a will to speed (Virilio). Yet, while the State"s dominator culture attempts to channel the flows of the nomad, it tends to be sedentary and static while nomads are mobile and emergent (for which Deleuze and Guattarri use the metonym of the rhizome; a decentred, heterogeneous collective assemblage)"