The Squared Horizon: Arms, Divinity, Affect

Telecommunicative technologies are rapidly changing how we see and perceive the present and the past. For decades Paul Virilio has been at the forefront of debates on the impact of this technology on real-time consciousness and space-time consciousness and more generally on the pervasive nature of this technology across many aspects of our daily lives. In their coedited collection Virilio and Visual Culture (2013), John Armitage and Ryan Bishop testify to Virilio’s rich life of intellectual engagement, from the 1950s and his writings on architecture through to the 1980s, and his more celebrated contributions to debates on the sociocultural effects of cinematics, vision technologies, and surveillance and the role of accelerated cultural developments in advanced societies. Technological innovation has long been seen as a signifier of national pride and supremacy. Consider the role played by the panzer tank in the German Nazi Party’s strategy of territorial expansionism (lebensraum); the race between the United States and the Soviet Union to put the first person in space and on the moon; and lest we forget, the development of nuclear weapons that paradoxically established years of cold war between the Soviet Union and the West, the end of which Virilio (2002: 33) pinpoints as the beginning of the new electromagnetic warfare we see played out on screens today: “In becoming strategic, it is the weapons themselves that