Works of art exist in infinite solitude.
Rainer Maria Rilke in Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1975
As destruction became a form of production, war expanded, not only to the limits of space but to all of reality. The conflict had become limitless and therefore endless. It would not come to an end, and, in 1945, the atomic situation would perpetuate it: the state had become suicidal.
Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1975
The bunker has become a myth, present and absent at the same time: present as an object of disgust instead of a transparent and open civilian architecture, absent insofar as the essence of the new fortress is elsewhere, underfoot, invisible from here on in. … The bunker is the protohistory of an age in which the power of a single weapon is so great that no distance can protect you from it any longer.
Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1975
Contemplating the half-buried mass of the bunker, with its clogged ventilators and narrow slit for the observer, is like contemplating a mirror, the reflection of our own power over death, the power of our mode of destruction, of the industry of war. The function of this very special structure is to assure survival, to be a shelter for man in a critical period, the place where he buries himself to subsist. If it thus belongs to the crypt that prefigures the resurrection, the bunker belongs too to the ark that saves, to the vehicle that puts one out of danger by crossing over mortal hazards.
Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1975
In brick or stone constructions, in assemblages of discontinuous elements, the balance of the buildings is a function of the summit-to-base relationship. In the construction of single-form concrete, it is the coherence of the material itself that must assume this role: the center of gravity replaces the foundation.
Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1975
Linked to the ground, to the surrounding earth, the bunker, for camouflage, tends to coalesce with the geological forms whose geometry results from the forces and exterior conditions that for centuries have modeled them. The bunker's form anticipates this erosion by suppressing all superfluous forms; the bunker is prematurely worn and smoothed to avoid all impact. It nestles in the uninterrupted expanse of the landscape and disappears from our perception, used as we are to bearings and markers.
Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1975
Space was now homogenized, absolute war had become a reality, and the monolith was its monument. A new geography was created with the concrete shelters as its markers. From one end of Europe to the other a new synectics saw the light.
Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1975
Anachronistic in normal periods, in peacetime the bunker appears as a survival machine, as a shipwrecked submarine on a beach. It speaks to us of other elements, of terrific atmospheric pressure, of an unusual world in which science and technology have developed the possibility of final disintegration.
Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1975
The artificial climate of the new [nuclear] arms required that military construction correspond exclusively to artifice. The value of positioning changed; one saw a general movement underground in high contrast to the elevation of ancient walls. ... It was no longer in distance but rather in burial that the man of war found the parry to the onslaught of his adversary; retreat was now into the very thickness of the planet and no longer along its surface.
Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1975
The possibilities of weapons had become so great that the mineral element became a part of the fluidity of fluid; with the exception of rock, all the Earth is part of the movement of the ocean, a mutation of physical territory, in fact the first type of 'disintegration' before the arrival of nuclear arms. In truth, the principle of arms has always been aimed at this deconstruction, first of man's body, of armor, then of the rampart built for his protection. Afterwards, the very conditions of the human habitat became the primary objectives of this destruction/destructuration.
Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1975
The art of fortification is but the art of setting up or spreading out the lines on which the foundations for the shape and circuit of a place will be built, so that from whatever side the enemy attacks, he should be frontally and laterally in sight and under attack.
Since the arming of the jet, and especially since the arrival of artillery on the scene, warfare has not only created a landscape by defensive constructions, by the organization of fronts and frontiers, but it has also competed successfully with natural forces; firearms, explosives, smoke screens, and gasses have contributed to the creation of an artificial climate, reserved to the battleground or, more precisely, to the moment of combat. This discovery itself deserves to be closely studied, for it is the origin of what we are now - though not for that long - used to calling pollution, saturation, and biological disequilibrium.
Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1975
Archaeology tries to define not the thoughts, representations, images, themes, preoccupations that are concealed or revealed in discourses; but those discourses themselves, those discourses as practices obeying certain rules. It does not treat discourse as document, as a sign of something else, as an element that ought to be transparent, but whose unfortunate opacity must often be pierced if one is to reach at last the depth of the essential in the place in which it is held in reserve; it is concerned with discourse in its own volume, as a monument. It is not an interpretative discipline: it does not seek another, better-hidden discourse. It refuses to be “allegorical.”
Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, 1971
The requirements in secrecy, dissimilation, and deception concerning the object, the course, the subject, the most diverse of opportunities to set up the defense of a continent's immensity allow us to take rough stock of the reuse of weapons and weapon systems, which had formerly been put to the test in distant conflicts.
Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1975
Perhaps the country over a long period of years was going to transplant, to secrete at its borders luxurious settlements, a lazy and violent military caste, counting on civilians for their daily bread but finally exacting it from them, like the armed desert nomads demanding tribute from the educated marginals. Species of prowlers along the confines, loafers of the apocalypse free of material cares on the edge of their friendly abyss, familiar only with the signs and portents, with no other intercourse than with several major catastrophic uncertainties, like in those watchtowers you see on the seashore.
Julien Gracq in Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1975
Chinese tactics revolved around prolonging the time of war as opposed to the extreme shortening of that time to the Occidental apparatus. ... This overlay of these two strategic ways of thinking in today' world is not limited to geography, that is to say, to a more or less declared opposition of the Occident to the Orient. The overlay is found especially in the more fundamental opposition of the rural to the urban, between those who are territorialized and those who tend ceaselessly to dissipate in their conquest of elemental totality, in pure spatiality: sea, sky, and empty space.
Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1975
After three hours of nuclear conflict we go headfirst into the unknown.
Andre Beaufre in Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1975