Cold Panic

CULTURAL POLITICS 27 REPRINTS AVAILABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHERS. PHOTOCOPYING PERMITTED BY LICENSE ONLY© BERG 2005 PRINTED IN THE UK CULTURAL POLITICS COLD PANIC PAUL VIRILIO It seems that the period of the Cold War, with its sinister threats of the annihilation of cities, has givenwaytoatimeofcoldpanicatamassterrorism that may well inflict disasters similar to those that occurred in the old forms of international conflict. Between the battlefield of the military campaigns of yesteryear and the anti-city strategy of the present age, postmodern war has undergone hyperconcentration. Like the “world economy,” it is becoming a monopoly, in which the old geopolitics based on the size of nations has suddenly given way to a metropolitics of domestic terror that strikes indiscriminately at unarmed populations. Geostrategic extension has lost its time-honored military importance and has been supplanted by a metrostrategic centralization, in which the distinction between civil and military is tending to disappear, like that between private and public. Hence the advent of a third type of conflict,after “civil war” and “war between nations”: namely,war on civilians; hence, also, the major political importance of the consequences of the (natural or industrial) catastrophic accident and the massive attack (whether anyone claims responsibility for it or not). Almost imperceptibly, then, with the decline of the nation state, an end is being put to the state’s monopoly of public VOLUME 1, ISSUE 1 PP 27–30 PAUL VIRILIO LIVES IN LA ROCHELLE, FRANCE. FOR OVER TWENTY-FIVE YEARS HE TAUGHT ARCHITECTURE AT THE ÉCOLE SPÉCIAL D’ARCHITECTURE IN PARIS. HIS LATEST WORKS IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION ARE ART AND FEAR AND UNKNOWN QUANTITY. > CULTURAL POLITICS 28 PAUL VIRILIO violence, and with that comes a shift toward domestic terror that greatly threatens not just democracy but also the republic and its constitutional state. The expanded European community will not be able to ignore these questions for much longer: questions that are not simply political,but “metropolitical,” since the demographic concentration of its populations in megalopoles has progressively shifted the theatre of operations from the countryside to the town, with the twentieth century’s raids of aerial annihilation prefiguring the “massive attacks” on the dense fabric of the metropolitan conurbations of the early twenty-first. The very notion of defense is, in fact, changing radically. After the military defense of nations and the civil defense of populations, it seems a pressing need has arisen for new thinking. To national security – depending primarily on armed forces – and social security – threatened wherever it genuinely exists and underdeveloped in several constitutional states – has been added the question of human security, extending the old notion of “public interest” guaranteed by the state. As former UN High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata recently pointed out, “11 September 2001 demonstrated that no state, even though it be the strongest militarily, is capable of protecting its citizens,even within its own borders” (quoted from Pons 2004). In the face of this alarming statement, which raises the prospect not merely of a nihilism with regard to defense – as seen in some Nordic countries before the Second World War – but also a nihilism of public space with the city as its epicenter, it might be appropriate to analyze once again the historic development of armed forces that has seen military conflict move over the years from siege warfare – with the domination of weapons of obstruction (ramparts and fortifications of all kinds) – to a war of movement and, lastly, to that Blitzkrieg, in which weapons of destruction supplanted urban and other entrenchements, to the point where the strategy of deterrence appeared. This strategy was one in which, in the absence of actual battle, the (relative) inertia of the balance of terror encouraged not just the arms race and the eccentric proliferation of weapons, but also, most importantly, the development of those weapons of mass communication that today are upsetting not just the old geopolitics of nations but, above all, the stability of a military culture that has been cut adrift for ten years or more; or, to put it another way, since the fall of the “rampart” that was Berlin and the collapse of the “keep” that...