TOTAL PEACE – PURE WAR
Perhaps one of the most startling conclusions that Virilio draws from his analysis in Bunker Archeology, one upon which he builds in subsequent works, is that the Second World War did not come to an end (Virilio 1994°: 58). The logic of total war is such that the state of war itself becomes limitless. Virilio draws this conclusion because he sees an essential continuity between the aerial bombing of European and Japanese cities and the threat of extermination posed to civilian populations by nuclear weapons in the post-war period. If the redundancy of frontier fortifications signals the advent of total war, then the advent of the nuclear bomb and the threat of extermination it implies inaugurates a period of what Virilio terms ‘Total Peace’. This continuity between the total war of aerial bombardment and the total peace of nuclear deterrence, and by implication the absence of any real distinction between war and peace in the post-war period, could be defended with simple reference to the actual use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The deployment of nuclear payloads was arguably a direct extension of the strategy of bombing urban centres which was already in place and, whilst the destruction of the two Japanese cities clearly brought hostilities between the Allied and Axis powers to a close, it was also the opening chapter of what came to be called the Cold War, that is, the nuclear stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union.
For Virilio the Total Peace of nuclear deterrence is an inverted continuation of the total war of aerial bombardment, or as he puts it in an interview with Sylvère Lotringer, ‘the Second World War never ended . . . There’s no state of peace. It isn’t over because it continued in Total Peace, that is, in war pursued by other means’ (Virilio and Lotringer 1997: 30–1). Here Virilio inverts Clausewitz’s statement about war being a continuation of politics and transforms it into the following: ‘the Total Peace of deterrence is Total War pursued by other means’ (Virilio and Lotringer 1997: 31).
Looked at from this perspective the claim that the Second World War did not come to an end is perhaps not so startling, although it clearly recasts the question of what a ‘cold war’ might be in different terms. This argument is taken up by Virilio in the work published immediately after Bunker Archeology in 1976, entitled The Insecurity of Territory (L’Insécurité du territoire).
Once again he emphasizes the manner in which the Second World War can be seen as a transitional moment of decisive importance in the history of conflict and the political structures which are shaped by military space. Here he focuses again on the impact of aerial warfare: ‘Total war was a threshold for our civilization to the extent that it was the first global aerial war’ (Virilio 1993: 92).
The shift from total war to total peace needs to be understood quite specifically in the context of the technology of war, and the dialectic of attack and defence which, according to Virilio, provides the motor for the development of war technology. Here he suggests that the transition from total war to total peace is an implicit necessity of technological progress which will inevitably aim to increase the power, speed and penetration of weaponry: ‘Already, total war carried within it its technical self-surpassing, the Cold War then total peace’ (Virilio 1993: 133). Yet, however much aerial bombing and nuclear deterrence might seem very different from each other, Virilio argues that they bring about in reality the same state of affairs, that is, a generalized insecurity of civilian populations on the basis of which military strategy is pursued: ‘the principle of these successive strategies derives only from the creation and expansion of civil insecurity inside national frontiers, an insecurity which would have been inconceivable a few decades earlier’ (Virilio 1993: 133). The assertion that the Second World War did not come to an end is not simply an abstract redrawing of the distinction between war and peace. For Virilio the continuation of total war in the shape of total peace implies a very real lived insecurity on the part of civilian populations (as those who lived through this period may all readily testify). As was shown earlier, Virilio questions in more general terms the distinction between war and peace, since he affirms the presence of war in peacetime (Virilio 1994°: 43) and the occult permanence of the state of siege (Virilio 1986: 11). Yet the Second WorldWar marks a point where this more general permeability of the two states is radicalized to the point where even the experience of a state of war and a state of peace becomes more radically indistinct. For Virilio the logic of nuclear deterrence brings with it nothing less than the end of the distinction between these two states and signifies ‘the end of the centuries-old alternative between war and peace, the passage of total war to a new and unknown state: total peace’. If, hitherto, war was present in peacetime, or subsisted into peacetime in an ‘occult state of siege’, henceforth the two states fold into each other to form an entirely new military and political form. This state of total peace is closely connected to what, in subsequent works, Virilio comes to call ‘pure war’. Both these terms are used in relation to the logic of nuclear deterrence, but it is arguable that ‘pure war’ becomes a far more all-embracing theoretical term in so far as it more directly implies, not just a military strategy based on generalized insecurity, but comes to stand as a figure for a global, technological, economic and even metaphysical organization the state and of collective experience. Pure war is similar to total peace in so far as both imply the conflation of the states of war and peace described above. In Popular defence and Ecological Struggles Virilio expresses this as follows: ‘PURE WAR is neither peace nor war, nor is, as we may have believed, “absolute” or “total” war, rather it is the military instance in its perennial ordinariness’ (Virilio 1990: 35). Yet, arguably, the term ‘pure war’, in Virilio, develops further some of the assumptions which were already implicit in ‘total peace’. In The Insecurity of Territory nuclear deterrence is described as a strategy which strips warfare of its contingent aspects: ‘the bomb does not suppress war, it suppresses a certain number of its random elements [hazards] while shifting strategic decision making into other categories’ (Virilio 1993: 143). The bomb, as it were, ‘purifies’ war of the random or accidental possibilities of the battlefield and places decision making with those who plan strategy, make decisions to site missile silos or, indeed, press the nuclear trigger. More generally Virilio refers to the doctrine of nuclear deterrence as a: ‘conspiracy, in which science and technology radiate their all-powerfulness, and become mystical figures’ (Virilio 1993: 140). It is these two aspects, that is, the stripping from war of the contingency of the battlefield, and the raising of technological power to the level of a mystical or metaphysical figure, which come to characterize Virilio’s use of the term ‘pure war’. War in its ‘pure’ form appears almost to transcend the question of conflict per se and to become a mode of organizing or structuring the whole of human reality. It is located in the scientific or techno-scientific view of the world, that is,‘war operating in the sciences . . . everything that is perverting the fieldof knowledge’ (Virilio and Lotringer 1997: 27). Unlike total peace, pure war is to be seen less in relation to a specific conflict (e.g. the Second World War) and far more in terms of techno-scientific discovery. Pure war, for Virilio, isn’t ‘tied down to confrontation between East and West, but to the development of science as techno-science’ (Virilio and Lotringer 1997: 167). In the final analysis, it appears to describe an almost religious attitude rather than a specific mode of conflict: ‘Pure War is the absolute idol . . . Pure War is entirely comparable to that of the idol in ancient societies’ (Virilio and Lotringer 1997: 164). It is an ‘ultimate metaphysical figure’ (Virilio 1990: 102).
What these citations imply is a development in Virilio’s thinking during the 1970s. His meditation on the concrete fortifications of the Atlantic seaboard is inserted into a wider thinking about the technology of war. The archaeological remains of the bunkers become a key symbol of a transformation of military and political space brought about by the opening up of the third front of aerial bombardment. From this Virilio concludes that the Cold War period following the Second World War was, in fact, a period of total peace, that is to say, the continuation of war by other means (nuclear deterrence). This, in turn, develops into a thinking of pure war, a thinking which more explicitly foregrounds the techno-scientific ideology which underpins nuclear deterrence as both a mode of organizing the whole of human society and a metaphysical figure or belief system which shapes a collective view of reality. In effect Virilio moves from a thinking of military technologies which shape social and political space to a thinking of a military-technological world view which shapes our entire apprehension of reality. Pure war becomes, for Virilio, a modern cult, a ‘military-scientific messianism’ which underpins the global order of security based on nuclear weapons. It might be argued that Virilio’s account of pure war is too all-embracing, too much inflected by his Christian background, or what Steve Redhead calls his ‘Catholic anti-statism’ (Redhead 2004: 85). In his privileging of the body proper of phenomenology (see Chapter 1) or of an implicitly Christian conception of the human (both of which would place the technological in a secondary position) Virilio could be said to be more than a little technophobic and therefore overemphasize the structural and ideological importance of military and techno-scientific thinking. It has been suggested here, however, that his general account of war, and the more specific account of bunkers, total peace and pure war, are of value in so far as they allow us to interrogate the fundamental ways in which military, political, social and ideological space may be profoundly interlinked. If nuclear deterrence is to be understood not just as a military strategy or doctrine, but also as an ideology which is inseparable from a broader technological and political worldview or belief system, then Virilio’s analysis serves to deepen or at the very least stimulate our understanding.
As always with his arguments what is of primary importance is the constitution of space, the relative rates of movement or penetration through what can, as elsewhere in Virilio’s writing, be called ‘speed-space’.
Ultimately what is at stake is the manner in which (military) technology and speed-space interact to create possibilities of spatial organization which then form some basic elements of collective experience and consciousness
(i.e. social and political life). For Virilio the advent of aerial bombs, ballistic missiles and nuclear payloads or warheads poses questions which are fundamental and cannot be ignored. Yet if the technologies of the third front of the aerial warfare are decisive for this account, the advent of what Virilio calls the ‘fourth front’ is of no less importance.
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