SETTING FOOT: PAUL VIRILIO ON THE META-CITY AND ITS TRAJECTORY

Abstract

If the sign of culture is hospitality, as Jacques Derrida writes in Cosmopolitanism
(2001), and hospitality presupposes an underlying reception of the other, then it may well follow
that the contemporary city is quickly losing its cultural and ethical sign. This is precisely Paul
Virilio‘s argument in City of Panic (2005). The modern metropolis is a kind of walled city,
defined by increasingly automatic and ubiquitous forms of cybernetic telecommunication systems.
In this sense, the so-called real city is being replaced by a deterritorialized meta-city in which our
concrete access to others will be transformed and mediated through an artificial horizon. Virilio
passionately and persistently describes this postmodern version of communication as virtual
incarceration, and thus it comes as no surprise when he derides the globalization of the meta-city
as inherently exclusionary and totalizing. In my paper I shall explore the relationship between
these two fundamental aspects of the meta-city as Virilio, Baudrillard, and others contend that a
―general accident‖ is necessarily entailed by these hyper-realized traits of mass synchronization.
Acknowledging that there are real dangers to be addressed in the acceleration and simulacrum of
reality, I will nonetheless argue that predictions of ineluctable catastrophe are deeply problematic.
KEYWORDS: Catastrophe; Meta-City; Virilio; Baudrillard.