Virilio's concept of perception begins with that developed by his teacher and mentor Maurice Merleau- Ponty, in his magnum opus, Phenomenology of Perception (2002 [1945]). In that work, perception is fi gured in contradistinction to the Platonic assumption that perception is only valid insofar as a distinction is maintained between mind and body, self and world, and the world and the realm of pure forms. Merleau- Ponty argues, in short, that all previous theories of perception have remained Platonist to the extent that they fail to consider the primacy of perception as lived experience, prior to second- order theorising about it. In other words, his approach to perception is a materialist rather than an idealist one, in that the perceptual fi eld is always constituted by the interconnection of mind, body and world.

The experience of time that is one of Virilio's central concerns, then, and which he often conceptualises as speed, is fi ltered by the mind–body intertwining with the world, which constitutes a perceptual fi eld in accordance with the qualities of a particular place and time. Thus, Virilio extends the primacy of perception found in Merleau- Ponty, just as Merleau- Ponty extends it from the phenomenological philosopher Edmund Husserl, considering the political signifi cance of the technocultural alteration of the perceptual fi eld. What he discovers, in summary, is that acceleration of communication and transportation speeds leads to a space- time compression that disrupts all previous instantiations of the mental environment, or what he (2009b) calls ‘grey ecology’. Far from simply advocating a return to autonomous, embodied perception, however, Virilio takes the primacy of the perceptual fi eld as a given throughout his analyses.