20 June 2016 by Jessica Palmer
Balzac’s Archaeology of War
David F. Bell
Duke University
DFBell@duke.edu
The characterization of Balzac as a historian, a social historian—even a proto-sociologist—of Restoration France is a commonplace of critical studies devoted to his great literary monument, La Comédie humaine. In the present essay, however, I would like to reflect on the idea of Balzac as archaeologist in the interest of enriching the notion of history that runs through so much Balzac criticism.1 The novelist himself authorizes us to think about his work from this slightly different perspective when he writes the following in the “Avant-propos,” describing what it means to author historical and social novels: “S’en tenant à cette reproduction rigoureuse, un écrivain pouvait devenir un peintre plus ou moins fidèle, plus ou moins heureux […] des types humains, le conteur des drames de la vie intime, l’archéologue du mobilier social” (Comédie humaine 1:11, my emphasis).
The writer as peintre, conteur, and, finally, archéologue: the three terms resonate in a rather complex way in this brief characterization of his creative method proposed by the author in a partially retrospective, partially prospective reflection on the project of the Comédie humaine. The cross-fertilization between art and literature in the nineteenth century is well studied and needs almost no commentary, except to recall here that Balzac’s depiction of reality incorporates techniques that are closely related to realist painting: the detail in his descriptions of objects, the notion of the literary portrait incorporating the physical traits of a character, the panoramic perspectives on geographical spaces that pepper his work are all painterly aspects of Balzac’s literary creations. As for the notion of conteur, we know that already in the unpublished “Avertissement” to Le Gars (1828), an early title for Les Chouans, Balzac distinguished his work from what he saw as dry and uninformative historical exposition, insisting on the fact that his descriptions were structured as narratives, woven together into stories capable of seducing a reader who might otherwise eschew the effort to toil through more traditional, straightforward renderings of social history: “ne plus faire enfin, de l’histoire un charnier, une gazette, un état civil de la nation, un squelette chronologique” (8:1680). Rather, the author of historical novels should learn from Walter Scott and “tente[r] de présenter à ces imaginations lassées du mauvais, des tableaux de genre où l’histoire nationale soit peinte dans les faits ignorés de nos mœurs et de nos usages” (1:1680). In fact, Balzac’s somewhat caricatured presentation in this text of the manner in which “academic” or “official” history was written in his period would be a fascinating topic to pursue in its own right.
The term archéologue, however, might ultimately be considered the oddest of the three concepts Balzac proposes, especially because it is yoked in Balzac’s phrase to an abstract expression one would not expect to encounter: “l’archéologue du mobilier social.” There is most assuredly an archaeology of furnishings, and, by extension, of objects that fill private and public spaces: uncovering the things used to decorate and fill living spaces in periods long faded from memory is indisputably an archaeological activity as the discipline was being defined in Balzac’s day. The extension of the notion beyond immediate, private living spaces is reflected in expressions like mobilier national or mobilier urbain, the former suggesting, of course, the sum total of objects contained in monuments that have been nationalized and have thereby become the property of the nation, the latter referring commonly in our own day to the amenities provided by local and national governments to render public spaces more serviceable (street lamps, benches, bus stops, and the like). Broadly speaking, as the Miriam Webster puts it, archaeology is “the scientific study of material remains ([…] fossil relics, artifacts, and monuments) of past human life and activities.” But what, precisely, can mobilier socialactually mean, to what phenomena or objects does it refer? Balzac is clearly stretching the term mobilier beyond its primary material meaning, suggesting that social spaces, filled with objects and amenities, are also filled with social types, groups, and a network of relations among them.
Even if we set aside the ambiguous suggestiveness of the expression mobilier social, however, and concentrate on the primary, more material meaning of the activity of the archaeologist, that is, finding and interpreting objects that cultural and production systems produced in previous historical periods, the complexity of archaeology as an analytic activity does not really become appreciably simpler. The dilemma immediately confronted by the archaeologist in any site of study is that the structure of past human life and activities is never quite apparent, certainly never transparently obvious, because relics, artifacts, traces, and monuments are always fragmentary, in need of synthesis and interpretation. Take the case of the Napoleonic Empire in Balzac’s time, a relatively recent historical moment from the author’s perspective and thus not at all a far-removed era presenting tricky reconstruction problems attributable to a lack of data: much evidence and many memories upon which to draw in order to characterize that period of French history remained in the ambient culture of the 1830s and 1840s. It is almost as if Napoleonic France extended in some ways seamlessly into the Restoration, despite the defeat at Waterloo and the apparent break ushering in a different political period. But the immediacy of this past, which is hardly a past at all, might, in fact, be a worse dilemma than trying to reconstruct a more distant past with considerably fewer relics upon which to base any proposed synthesis.
This potential impasse is immediately apparent to modern readers of La Comédie humaine when they consult the index entry for “Napoléon” in the benchmark modern critical edition of Balzac’s work, namely, the Pléïade edition. To imagine Pierre Citron’s and Anne-Marie Meinenger’s indexing team at work trying to create some semblance of order in the references to Napoleon throughout the Comédie humaine (explicit and implicit) is really to witness some sort of Sisyphean literary historical task, one that can only lead to failure, no matter how thorough, how conscientious, how encompassing the totalizing attempt at such an index entry might be. It’s a little like Balzac himself, engaged in the always incomplete endeavor to create a social and historical totality in La Comédie humaine. Lucien Dällenbach subtly described the narrative and representational complexities working against this ambition in his classic article “Le Tout en morceaux” in Poétique in 1980, and one is sorely tempted, while reading the “Napoléon” index entry in the Pléïade edition, to think that an archaeology of the Empire can never be complete—in a manner that is clearly related to the difficulty encountered by Balzac in trying to construct a totality in his fictional world.
In the end, since the archaeologist can potentially be presented with an infinite series of relics or remains (the case when contemplating the traces of the Napoleonic Empire), certain ones among them have to be cut out of the continuum and elevated to exemplary status, after which they can be proposed as illustrations to stand for something beyond their immediate singularity, that is, for a totality forever beyond the grasp of any encompassing perspective. The parallel operation in the context of the literary text would be to create—or re-create—discrete scenes that can be designated by their prominence to stand for the whole. Faced with the dilemma of infinite details, as Balzac was when reflecting on the Empire, only certain details can be used, only certain historical moments can be described—and they will have to stand for the rest. Of course, for archaeologists, the opposite situation can often be true as well: they might, in fact, uncover only one precious find and be forced to extrapolate on the basis of the slimmest evidence possible. Balzac romanticizes this limit case in the antique store scene of La Peau de chagrin, when the narrator refers to Cuvier’s poetic talent at re-creating entire worlds from minimal traces:
Cuvier n’est-il pas le plus grand poète de notre siècle? Lord Byron a bien reproduit par des mots quelques agitations morales; mais notre immortel naturaliste a reconstruit des mondes avec des os blanchis, a rebâti comme Cadmus des cités avec des dents, a repeuplé mille forêts de tous les mystères de la zoologie avec quelques fragments de houille, a retrouvé des populations de géants dans le pied d’un mammouth (10:75).
But this is manifestly not the situation presented by the remains of the Napoleonic period with which Balzac is confronted; those traces are for all intents and purposes limitless, and one can understand why Balzac would rather dream idealistically about an archaeologist who can construct a narrative with partial relics—and whose narrative is thus not so easily challenged. If there is a lesson to be drawn from the endless succession of Napoleonic historical moments, an exemplary instant to be highlighted, in short, the formulation of a theory about what this sequence of historical traces might mean, some singular moment or tableau will have to be elevated above the rest: exemplariness has to be constructed through an interpretive act. The choice of the exemplary moment is inevitably an interpretive gesture fraught with ideological strife, that is, within a field of ideological confrontations about the meaning of the past: someone else will always be prepared to argue that another example might well lead to a radical variation on the interpretation originally proposed by the archaeologist—or, more directly challenging, the very same example could be interpreted in a fundamentally different manner.
Éric Méchoulan made some extremely suggestive remarks about the act of creating the exemplary in a recent reflection on the notion of close reading (“Close Reading” 5-6).2 He refers to Claude Imbert’s description of the structure and meaning of the case study and quotes from Imbert as follows:
Une étude de cas projette, sur une réalité qu’il ne s’agit plus de dissoudre dans le cours des faits—c’est-à-dire selon une épistémologie par défaut—un espace virtuel d’intelligibilité. Elle n’ignore pas la courbure qu’y impriment des figures symboliques et contractuelles instables, et pourtant essentielles parce qu’elles portent la réalité d’un processus de socialité où des capacités anthropologiques et cognitives composent avec des contraintes et des commodités techniques, éminemment composites et révisables. (Imbert 152; quoted from the original French rather than the English translation that appears in this passage of “Close Reading”)
Méchoulan comments that the example is “a projection beyond its own time, beyond the singularity of its context, and a projection onto the world of events in order to endow them with the virtuality of a reiteration—that is, with value and meaning” (“Close Reading” 5). This is not to say, of course, that the value and meaning are fixed once and for all, as Imbert is careful to argue: the case study is presented under cognitive, cultural, and historical constraints that are unstable and that will change, making reinterpretation of the case a regular occurrence, promising, in fact, that the case study of today will give way to another exemplary case study tomorrow. Any interpretation constructed in the present will inevitably become a monument tomorrow, fodder for some future archaeologist.
The exemplary is produced in a field of tension and conflict, very much tied to tools and contexts available to the thinker who produces it. To reinforce the point, Méchoulan reminds us that the origin of the French term induire is the Latin term inductio, which itself comes from the Greek term epagô. The Greekepagô has an unexpectedly broad semantic field, referring, as Méchoulan writes, “to the act of amassing supplies and allies for a battle, of marching upon the enemy, of striking a blow or bringing legal action against someone” (5). Moreover, the term is related to the charms of witchcraft, the veiling or seduction of the spell, produced, precisely, by amassing details in an epagogic argument. In Cicero, induction, as a rhetorical method of argument, can refer to a veiling or a deceiving, to an attempt to make one’s interlocutor assent to a doubtful proposition that resembles an earlier one. Ultimately, induction gathers and concentrates the representational force of the example and of the apparent similarity between two objects or events, establishing their parallel nature by mimicking it through a parallel rhetorical construction. “The induction performed by an example,” Méchoulan concludes, “is not the neutral arrangement of a logical space, but the conflictual mechanism that presides over the marshalling of available powers for better penetration—one could almost say for a better seduction—of the events” (6). Méchoulan neatly highlights the fact that creating the exemplary always results from a tactic of seduction that generates coherence out of what is otherwise simply an unbroken flow of events, or one should probably say non-events: the exemplary is ultimately a piece of reality made into an event by “marshalling […] available powers,” in a rhetorical or analytic gesture related to both the military and magical suggestiveness of the Greek term epagô.
When Balzac chooses to portray the emperor “in person” toward the end of Une ténébreuse affaire, the novelist has clearly chosen to produce an exemplary moment, to highlight this particular scene among the many possible historical or semi-historical tableaux available to him in any retrospective on the Empire: we are invited to read it in its exemplariness.3 I will briefly recall the context of the scene that occurs near the end of Une ténébreuse affaire in the Scènes de la vie politique of the Comédie humaine, glossing over the complexities of the plot in which Laurence de Cinq-Cygne has participated with the Simeuse and Hauteserre brothers. Suffice it to say that together they perpetrated a kidnapping and contributed to an attempt to oust Napoleon. Fouché’s right-hand man, the police agent Corentin, succeeds in exposing the plot, and the participants are tried and condemned to death. Laurence de Cinq-Cygne intervenes to plead with Talleyrand to spare the lives of her co-conspirators, whereupon the minister informs her that the only hope for mercy is an appeal to the Emperor himself, but he is presently engaged in the campaign leading up to the battle of Jena. Not only will it be difficult for Laurence and the marquis de Chargeboeuf to avoid the surveillance of the police, intent upon preventing their flight out of France, but they must get to the emperor as quickly as possible if there is any hope to save those who plotted with Laurence against him. They set out by coach to go to Napoleon’s encampment on Talleyrand’s advice: “[G]agnez la Prusse par la Suisse et par la Bavière” (8:676).
The fact that the dramatic conclusion to Laurence’s quest to obtain mercy for her friends imposes a very long trip upon her and her companion, transporting them in an epic coach ride through Swiss mountains and on muddied Bavarian and Prussian roads, is highly appropriate. Her demure demeanor during her life in a provincial château earlier in the novel concealed the fact that she was and is an extraordinary horsewoman, a character who has in an important way been defined by her capacity to move quickly across the difficult topography of her region and to support a political conspiracy through her talent at getting from one place to another faster than anyone else.4 The voyage upon which she embarks as a result of Talleyrand’s pointed recommendation has all the earmarks of her earlier prowess. Moreover, the narrative presentation makes the trip seem to occur in a flash, with surprising rapidity, foreshortening it considerably by the brevity of the description. Ultimately, the expedition with the marquis de Chargeboeuf brings out fundamental elements concerning the significance of the roads taken that were not quite so apparent earlier in the novel: I would argue that Balzac’s description of the trip becomes, in fact, an interpretation of one of the fundamental meanings of the Napoleonic road system and, by extension, a partial archaeology of Napoleonic war.
Once the marquis and Laurence have crossed through Switzerland and find themselves in Prussian territory, the roads upon which they travel are suddenly transformed into a theater of military operations:
[I]l fut bien difficile aux deux voyageurs de ne pas percevoir l’immense mouvement d’hommes et de choses dans lequel ils entrèrent, une fois en Prusse. La campagne d’Iéna était commencée. Laurence et le marquis voyaient les magnifiques divisions de l’armée française s’allongeant et paradant comme aux Tuileries. Dans ces déploiements de la splendeur militaire, qui ne peuvent se dépeindre qu’avec les mots et les images de la Bible, l’homme qui animait ces masses prit des proportions gigantesques dans l’imagination de Laurence. (8:677-78)
The comment that the sole means grandiose enough to describe the scenes Laurence perceives would have to be biblical must be left aside here. More to my present point is the fact that the roads carrying Laurence so quickly into Prussia are the very transportation axes that were an essential characteristic of the Napoleonic Empire: roads were a constituent factor in the process of rearranging the space of Europe into a domain adapted to the circulation of a military machine. Horses, men, cannons, supply wagons cannot transit over natural terrains—a considerable effort in construction and transformation is required to remove asperities, to flatten the surface of the landscape in order to make it uniform, in order to allow the speeds necessary to transport men and materials to distant battlefields, as Paul Virilio has relentlessly argued.5The Napoleonic period put the question of velocity and precision in road travel and mail circulation back at the center of French national concerns. As one historian puts it, “Dans [l’] esprit [de Napoléon], le point de vue stratégique et politique est prédominant. Les routes doivent porter dans les régions les plus lointaines la puissance de son administration et de ses armées” (Petot 405). Another adds: “L’Empereur exigeait d’être bien servi et vite. Le mot d’ordre, pendant tout son règne, fut la vitesse” (Cavaillès 216).
In this culminating episode of Balzac’s Une ténébreuse affaire, then, civilians and soldiers encounter one another in the same space of transportation: almost without realizing it, Laurence finds herself in the midst of the vast maneuverings in preparation for a major battle. The imperial significance of the European road network is thus exposed in her headlong rush to get from Paris to Prussia—in the form of its military dimension. It is deeply appropriate that the very moment Balzac would choose to elevate to the status of exemplary historical tableau, presenting the emperor in a scene that only biblical terms can suitably render, would be a moment of rapid maneuvers upon a complex military road system on the eve of a key battle in the Prussian campaign of 1806. Napoleon’s strategic gifts in organizing and amassing troops and supplies (epagô) provide precisely the perfect case study, the exemplary moment, the epagogic argument that foregrounds the manner in which the historical actions of the man and the very meaning of the notion of the exemplary are made to coincide.
Simply to find the emperor requires uncanny speed: “[L]es deux voyageurs […] tach[aient] de rejoindre Napoléon qui allait avec la rapidité de la foudre” (8:678). Laurence and the reader reach journey’s end only when the marquis, who is himself driving the calèche he found to ferry Laurence into the heart of the battle zone, loses his bearings, and the intrepid travelers come to a standstill atop a plateau overlooking a wide swath of the countryside. They have literally outrun the French army: “Vous êtes en avant de l’avant-garde de l’armée française, madame. […] Vous ne pouvez même rester ici, car si l’ennemi faisait un mouvement et que l’artillerie jouât, vous seriez entre deux feux” (8:679). But, of course, they have not outrun the emperor, who appears immediately on the same plateau, looking out over the battlefield: “Il examinait, avec une lorgnette, l’armée prussienne au-delà de la Saale” (8:679). The road system is an integral part of a military theater of operations, and the metaphorical term theater is enacted here: Laurence and the emperor are on raised ground that provides a cartographically panoramic view of the land surface upon which the battle will unfold. From this distance and from this height, the nooks and crannies of the terrain before them have been erased, and a totalizing view opens up. Paul Virilio’s work on perception and military technologies has revealed the extent to which the field of battle is a field of vision and perception, a theater dominated by the spectator’s view. In an interview with James Der Derian, Virilio makes the following observation:
The logistics of perception was from the start the geographic logistics of domination from an elevated site. Thus the “field of battle” which is also a “field of perception”—a theater of operation—will develop on the level of perception of the tower, of the fortified castle or on the level of perception of the bombardier. Such is the Second World War and the bombings over Europe. The battlefield is at first local, then it becomes worldwide and finally global; which is to say expanded to the level of orbit with the invention of video and with reconnaissance satellites. (“Future War” n. pag.)
There is no tower or raised fortification in this scene, and the next best thing will have to do, namely, a hill, a promontory that provides the panoramic vision necessary to take in the whole field of the theater of operations where the ensuing battle will unfold: “On peut dire que la majesté de la guerre éclatait là dans toute sa splendeur. De ce sommet, les lignes des deux armées se voyaient éclairées par la lune” (8:680). A lunar landscape, purged of irregularities, within which battalions will maneuver, reveals itself before the gaze of the perpetually mobile emperor.
Even when Napoleon decides to bivouac for the night on this overlook, his own immobility in no way slows the frenetic pace of the operations in which his forces are engaged. In fact, the point on the map where he is located is best understood as the hub of a network of communication proceeding at quasi-overload speeds: “Après une heure d’attente, remplie par le mouvement perpétuel d’aides de camp partant et revenant, Duroc, qui vint chercher Mlle de Cinq-Cygne et le marquis de Chargeboeuf , les fit entrer dans la chaumière” (8:680). In a crowning touch to the moment of encounter, when the two suppliants find themselves in the presence of the emperor, he is poring over a map of the coming battlefield: “Napoléon était assis sur une chaise grossière. […] Il avait sa main sur une carte dépliée, placée sur ses genoux” (8:680). We are far from the twentieth-century moment described by Virilio when the strategist’s gaze sweeps over the theater of operations on a screen as the radar antenna or the spy satellite draws and redraws the terrain at the speed of light, but the principle at the origin of this technological extension is already at work. The task of the emperor is to assemble as much information in his panoramic perception of the theater of operations as possible. He speaks to Laurence of the preparations for the battle in terms of information that is available only to one who possesses the most complete overview possible: “Voici, dit-il avec son éloquence à lui qui changeait les lâches en braves, voici trois cent mille hommes […] Eh bien, demain, trente mille hommes seront morts, morts pour leur pays!” (8:681). This broad, abstract generalization is possible only for the one person whose viewpoint is furthest above the fray, who can grasp the whole arc of the events that are about to unfold in the theater before him. Moreover, as the conversation with Laurence proceeds, an interruption confirms the idea that we are in the midst of a bustling theater of operations: “[L]e général Rapp se précipita dans la cabane. ‘Sire, la cavalerie de la Garde et celle du grand-duc de Berg ne pourront pas rejoindre demain avant midi’” (8:682). No conversation can be sustained without constant disturbances brought on by messengers bringing updates on the status of the forces amassed on the battlefield.
I have claimed that this scene is an archaeology of war, because it uncovers the significance of a network of roads and communication that turns out to be an integral part of a war machine. In a fascinating turn of the screw, the very content of the scene recounted in this passage echoes the interpretive technique of the exemplary, because it is all about amassing materials for a battle—just as the exemplary is an epagogic strategy of amassing arguments that Balzac appropriates in order to depict the Napoleonic Empire. We must add, however, that the relentlessly positive perspective on the emperor that Balzac explores in this constructed literary moment runs counter to many other descriptions of the negative fallout of the Empire in La Comédie humaine. One need only think of portraits of fraudulent exploiters like the baron Hulot or of brutal former Napoleonic cavalry officers like Philippe Bridau. The scene at Jena does not stand alone in La Comédie humaine. On the contrary, the depiction of the Empire is fraught with complexities that traverse the fictional work: for every moment of positive valence, it seems as if there is at least one corresponding moment of negative valence. Despite the striking nature of Laurence’s encounter at Jena, Une ténébreuse affaire is really no exception. In the tried and true narrative strategy of the epilogue, of which there are so many in La Comédie humaine, the novel does not actually close with the scene just analyzed. Balzac tacks on an epilogue that considerably modifies the meaning of the encounter between Napoleon and Laurence. It describes Laurence de Cinq-Cygne’s life in Paris under the Restoration after the disappearance of the Empire and leads, in fact, to another rather exemplary scene. In other words, the aftermath of the Empire, presented ostensibly as an afterthought in the form of an epilogue, is not an afterthought at all, but strikingly at the heart of any Balzacian commentary on the Empire.
The novelist has a disconcerting way of reorienting everything a narrative seemed to say by redoubling the endings to his novels. At a certain moment, Laurence finds herself in a Restoration salon into which strides the very person who was kidnapped many years ago during the conspiracy, Malin de Gondreville. Espying him, she exits the soirée in a huff, and Henri de Marsay has the juicy pleasure of recounting to a group of friends and fawning admirers the story of the conspiracy in which she was involved—this time from the perspective of those who were around the emperor at the time, including “supporters” back in Paris who were wagering on his fall. It turns out that the generosity displayed by the emperor on the heights overlooking the battlefield at Jena was undercut precisely by the scheming of his supporters through their back-room agreements: the emperor implicitly promised mercy for Michu, Laurence’s faithful adjutant, during the late-night meeting on the heights overlooking the Jena battlefield only to have his magnanimous gesture reversed when Michu was ultimately executed anyway. The majestic, even biblical, presence of Napoleon on the battlefield can never triumph completely over the unsavory maneuvering that also characterized his rise to power. The exemplary moment is only a moment, and, in the end, it cannot stand for the whole. War’s underside is a dirty political realm where the players calculate their chances to choose the winning side.
Notes
1. In “Balzac, Archéologue de la conscience” and “Mind as Ruin,” Scott Sprenger, has applied the notion of archaeology as an approach to understanding how Balzac interprets the layered memory of events.
2. I am attributing to Éric Méchoulan a section of this preface I know to be his.
3. Maurice Samuels has taught us much about the meaning of the historical tableau in France during the first half of the nineteenth century in his The Spectacular Past.
4. See my Real Time, 97-102.
5. See, for example, Vitesse et politique.
Works Cited
Balzac, Honoré. La Comédie humaine. Ed. Pierre-Georges Castex. Bibliothèque de la Pléïade. 12 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1976-81.
Bell, David F. Real Time: Accelerating Narrative from Balzac to Zola. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004.
Cavaillès, Henri. La Route française. Son histoire, sa fonction: Etude de géographie humaine. Paris: Armand Colin, 1946.
Dällenbach, Lucien. “Le tout en morceaux (La Comédie humaine et l’opération de lecture. II).” Poétique 42 (1980): 156-69.
Imbert, Claude. “Le cadastre des saviors.” European Academy of Sciences: EAS Annals Online Edition (2006-2007): 135-52. Web. 11 Feb.2010. <http://www.eurasc.org/annals/docs/Imbert_TeamR_full.pdf>.
Petot, Jean. Histoire de l’administration des ponts et chaussées: 1599-1815. Paris: Librairie Marcel Rivière, 1958.
Sprenger, Scott. “Mind as Ruin: Balzac’s ‘Sarrasine’ and the Archaeology of the Self.” Histoire de la terre: Earth Sciences and French Culture 1740-1940. Ed. Louise Lyle and David McCallam. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008: 119-136.
____. “Balzac, Archéologue de la conscience,” in Archéomanie: La mémoire en ruines, eds.Valérie- Angélique Deshoulières et Pascal Vacher, Clermont Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, CRLMC, 2000, 97-114.
Samuels, Maurice. The Spectacular Past: Popular History and the Novel in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.
The Editors. “Close Reading: A Preface.” SubStance 119 (2009): 3-7.
Virilio, Paul. Vitesse et politique. Paris: Galilée, 1977.
____ and James Der Derian. “Future War: A Discussion with Paul Virilio.” Virtually2k: Dialogues (1999): no. pag. Web. 13 Feb. 2010. <http://www.watsoninstitute.org/infopeace/vy2k/futurewar.cfm>.