The art of the motor by Paul Virilio

Author:Paul Virilio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Information technology.
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 1995-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

VICTIMS OF THE SET

Beaches or mountaintops: the preferred playgrounds of this final civilization rather resemble the nihilist camp of Julien Gracq's warriors, those prowlers of city fringes, lounge lizards of the apocalypse, living free from material cares on the edge of their domesticated ravines—and off the locals, whom they offend with their loose morals and beliefs. International tourism currently recreates this colonial violence, with the introduction of holiday clubs and luxury hotels that now look like advanced posts in places mostly poverty stricken and hostile.

But we must not forget that without fast ships there would be no trading posts, without trains no significant tourist resorts, without cars and planes, no worldwide commercial tourism. At first glance, though, it may seem paradoxical that Langweile, the repeated sensation that time is standing still, could find relief in a motor, a machine, which by definition only produces the same, invariably repeating itself. Unless the dilemma is resolved by precisely the one variation the motor is capable of: acceleration. The question of engine speed, however, carries its own limits and therefore a specific Langweile due to the final exhaustion of time by speed, just as Heine suggested.

It seems this might explain why the choice destinations of this last civilization, from the nineteenth century on, have been places at the end of the line —in the case of tourist resorts, mountaintops and coastal spots in an unstable telluric state, subject to perpetual metamorphosis. Some time in the 1920s, a young servant girl, seeing the ocean for the first time one day in a storm, waxes lyrical about the

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