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Dromomania: Reading Paul Virilio

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DROMOMANIA: READING PAUL VIRILIO

Daniel L Potter, Comparative Literature, Cornell

University

Culture Industry Conference, Cornell University, 1987

I.

Reading Paul Virilio on an airplane: contagious

process, invasion, virus, illuminating contours of
the now, hurtling through the medium of the
message. Contour though lacks the quality of
motion that Virilio wants to give to spatial terms
and categories. What he reveals is not precisely
contours of our world, but its tendencies,
contours leaning or even taking off in a certain
direction: contours in motion, as aerial vehicles
are houses in motion. Tendencies are vectoral
viruses probed by a new science -- dromology.
It is, literally, the study of the race (dromos
referring to the Spartan race course);
dromology produces readings of configurations
of speed, it pinpoints a tightly enmeshed
network of global problems related to velocity.
Its space is also a time and vice versa, because
speed always involves bizarre forms of intimacy
between the two.

Tendencies are the prey of dromology because

the method and the results involved in Virilio's
studies goes directly against the grain of a
"scientific" language that would situate an
object in a prone, defined, vivisected, cornered
position. Virilio does not seek to situate or
exhaust, but rather to set writing itself in
motion, send it on a trajectory that itself lacks a
precise itinerary. As he says in the interviews
with Sylvere Lotringer entitled Pure War:

1|Page
"I don't believe in explanations. I believe in suggestion, in
the obvious quality of the implicit. Being an urbanist and
architect, I am too used to constructing clear systems,
machines that work well. I don't believe it's writing's job to
do the same thing. . . . I work in staircases . . . .
Developments are the episodes. I try to reach the tendency.
Tendency is the change of level." [38-39].

Paul Virilio was born in Paris in 1932, directed

the cole Speciale d'Architecture in the early
seventies, has been on the editorial boards of a
number of French journals, was in the French
army before becoming a gonzo philosopher,
and considers himself an "urbanist." His first
major works, Bunker Archologie and
L'Inscurit du territoire, testify to his ability to
make use of various disciplines, various ways of
seeing -- seeing by means of war and the
military, seeing through the optic of the city,
seeing as a citizen of an advanced capitalist
nation in the twentieth century.

Responding to a question posed by Lotringer

regarding misunderstandings of his work, Virilio
sketches where he's coming from:

To be interested in technology through war already makes

people suspicious: war is generally considered a negative
phenomenon, and technology a positive one. So to say
that the positive phenomenon of technology came in large
part from the arsenal and war economy is already hard
for people to accept. They are forced to reject me. Thus I'm
either grouped in with a mystifying, mystical logic --
defrocked priest -- or with a military logic -- defrocked
officer. They can't recognize the situation as I present it.
This has to do with what I said at the beginning of the
interview: if war is the source of the city, then, being an
urban planner, I'm for war. If I say that war is the source of
technology, I reinforce what I said for the city. I reinforce

2|Page
the idea that I'm a strategist, a man of the war-machine,
and thus someone who shouldn't be trusted. As people
don't accept that war, and not commerce, is the source of
the city, as they don't accept the negativity in technology
(the negative tendency in technology), they push that
negativity back onto the person who says it -- me, as it
turns out. And since, to boot, I don't have a career in the
social sciences -- sociology of war, history of technology,
etc. -- to back me up, people have their doubts about me.
They say: how did he get where he is? And I answer: by
living. As a child, I was terrorized by war. As I say in my
preface to L'Insecurite du territoire, war was my father and
my mother. I didn't do it on purpose; one doesn't choose
one's parents. Later I fought in the Algerian War, as a
draftee. I'm not bragging about it; quite the contrary, it's
tragic. But both these wars initiated me into a profound
understanding of the military phenomenon. War was my
University." (Pure War, 24)

In Bunker Archeologie, his preoccupation was

with reconstructing the spatial dimension of the
second world war, what he calls the "European
fortress." Like Walter Benjamin, another
urbanist both in his writings and his life, Virilio
began writing from the perspective of
catastrophe, by digging around in the remains
of a type of city, the sedentary and imposing
constructions left by the war machine.
L'Insecurite du territoire attempts a much more
global project, and comprehends a whole series
of tendencies that mark the postwar world. This
horizon, the twentieth century's negative
horizon, or to quote Alexander Kluge, "the
assault of the present on the rest of time,"
continued to inform his subsequent books --
Vitesse et politique, L'Horizon negatif, L'Espace
critique, and several others, as well as his
frequent contributions to the journal Traverses.
Gilles Deleuze has provided a summary of
3|Page
L'Insecurite du territoire in a piece called
"Politics":

Paul Virilio has sketched the outlines of the World State

such as it appears today: a State of absolute peace more
terrifying still than one of total war, having fully realized its
identification with the abstract machine, where the
equilibrium of spheres of influence and the great segments
communicate with a 'secret capillarity,' where the
illuminated and totally cross-sectioned city now provides
shelter only for nocturnal troglodytes, each one buried in
his black hole, the 'social swamp.' ("Politics," On the Line,
99)

Or, following a formulation of Deleuze and

Guattari's: "The administration of a grand
organized molar security has for its corollary a
micro-management of small fears, a molecular
and permanent insecurity. . . ." (Mille Plateaux:
263)

II.

What is required of thought in view of and

inside the world exposed (or overexposed) by
Virilio's wakeful gaze? Paranoia,
nearsightedness, the pressing of the issue, the
pursuit of tendencies instead of happiness.
Virilio's writing, his manner and his topic, display
a resistance that systematically rejects the
unconscious will-to-apocalypse that theory has
tended at times to encourage, in favor of a
detective's eye view. The detective's job in this
case is to keep his eyes open and to wander
around in the scenes of the crime, the crime
being Pure War, which is to say the
inconceivable, always deferred potentiality of
nuclear exchange. Its scenes are our cities, our
airports, our missile sites and movie theaters,

4|Page
and the victims are spread out all over the
globe, in the first, second, third and fourth
worlds. Cogniscent of the diffuse nature of an
analysis that attempts to portray the present
moment from a global perspective of
emergency, Virilio makes of this very diffuseness
a virtue.

Speed is found in information exchange, in the

"world vision" of television and film, in travel, in
every instance where humans hook up with and
are saturated by technologies. Speed is also at
the heart of the manipulation of wealth. Indeed,
his idea is that speed precedes wealth, that
power always grows out of the possession of
the means of velocity. He describes this claim in
his talk with Lotringer:

Speed is the unknown side of politics, and has been since

the beginning: this is nothing new. The wealth aspect in
politics was spotlighted a long time ago. . . . it was a
mistake . . . to forget that wealth is an aspect of speed. . . .
People forget the dromological dimension of power: its
ability to inveigle, whether by taxes, conquest, etc. Every
society is founded on a relation to speed. Every society is
dromocratic. . . . We have two sides of the regulation of
speed and wealth. Up until the nineteenth century, society
was founded on the brake. Means of furthering speed were
very scant. You had ships, but sailing ships evolved very
little between Antiquity and Napoleon's time; the horse
even less; and of course there were carrier pigeons. The
only machine to use speed with any sophistication was the
optical telegraph, then the electric telegraph. In general, up
until the nineteenth century, there was no production of
speed. They could produce brakes by means of ramparts,
the law, rules, interdictions, etc. They could brake using all
kinds of obstacles. [Pure War, 44-45]

5|Page
The dromocratic revolution is Virilio's name for
the Industrial Revolution; the key to the steam
engine and the combustion engine was the
fabrication of speed. He goes on:

And so they can pass from the age of brakes to the age of
the accelerator. In other words, power will be invested in
acceleration itself. We know that the army has always been
the place where pure speed is used, whether it be in the
cavalry -- the best horses, of course, were army horses --
the artillery, etc. Still today, the army uses the most
pertinent speeds -- whether it be in missiles or planes. . . .
There is no political power that can regulate the
multinationals or the armed forces, which have greater
and greater autonomy. There is no power superior to
theirs. Therefore, either we wait for the coming of a
hypothetical universal State, with I don't know what
Primate at its head, or else we finally understand that what
is at the center is no longer a monarch by divine right, an
absolute monarch, but an absolute weapon . The center is
no longer occupied by a political power, but by a capacity
for absolute destruction." (45-46)

Closely related to the notion of speed is that of

the vector, the grid formation and formulation
of the earth, of perception and power. Recalling
Montaigne's style of indirection, Virilio's project
tracks down within the mobile and resourceful
form of the essay an immense number of grid
formations. Recalling Deleuze and Guattari, the
discourse here on territoriality considers space
relations in the optic of power, in the
panopticonflict. In the contemporary situation,
there is no assurance of a "natural" space to
which one might return. The nuclear horizon
eliminates the possibility of noble savagery,
while giving rise to a generalized savagery in all
sorts of local conflicts. As Adorno knew, thought
has no Archimedean detachment but must

6|Page
proceed nonetheless according to the logic of
the end. The trapped subject becomes the
most observant of the system of imprisonment.
She or he or it, the replicant on the run, is ready
to seize the juncture of escape not only by
confrontation but also by disguise and mimicry.

In fact, the mode of escape by vigilance conveys

something of the trajectory of Virilio's writings,
his incessant translation of the point into the
line. The ligne de fuite becomes for him,
without being overtly claimed as such, a kind of
radical obverse to the dictatorship of speed.
Speed can function like a sixth sense, be turned
into a defense mechanism as well as suffered as
tyrannical. The goal of the meditation on
technology is not to freeze, to extract a still
from the film that is constantly running, to
retreat into the slowness of writing, but rather to
bring writing up to speed. In this aim, whose
success or failure is indeterminate as yet, the
analysis of tendencies is turned into the
deployment of counter-strategies.

Is it possible that thought must take on for this

task a more mimetic behavior toward the "new
technologies" in order not to be hopelessly
confined to the archive, to lapidarian existence
in the era of telecommunications? If so, the seat
of knowledge must give way to a pense du
dehors, a nomad thought. This externalization
of thought recalls Nietzsche's invective against
the Sitzfleisch, which he called the "true sin
against the holy ghost," opting instead for
thinking while walking outdoors, or thinking as
dancing. What Virilio resists is the sedentary
path of science, that seeks to exhaust its subject
and succeeds often in exhausting itself. At the
same time, he pays closer attention to what the
7|Page
"hard sciences" have meant in their incessant
interventions in the social sphere, attempting
for instance to comprehend the mentality of the
military technocrat, and the logic of his
products.

Virilio's books are written in the form of essays.

They are dense and circular, sometimes
repetitive; arguments repeat themselves, but
always to go off in unexpected directions, rather
then repeat the same genealogy. The essay
form allows him to pursue the interdisciplinary
vocation of global detective, pursuing
tendencies, taking evidence. But the note-
taking is not primarily manifested as a textual
operation. It involves sifting through books, but
also and more notably the traversing of
contemporary landscapes. Nor is it leisurely.
Lotringer puts it this way:

"What seduced me from the beginning is precisely that a

book on speed should be so rapid. We've gotten too used
to seeing 'the end of the book' proclaimed in books that
are themselves interminable. Your work is not voluminous
because it is itself 'vehicular.'" (41).

III.

Call technology by its secret name, know its

passwords: this perspective makes Virilio's
enterprise a perilous one. The stakes are
increased, which means both the risks and the
rewards are accelerated when writing treats
itself to speed. One of the risks, as he notes in a
passage quoted above, is not to be trusted,
another is to desire the abstract machine. The
rewards are tactical maps of the
interpenetrations of various forms of
technology, or more precisely human-machine

8|Page
symbiosis slash metempsychosis. That
inventions play on each other, that machines
rely on certain previous machines while making
others obsolete, is not exactly news, but
certainly bears further examination in the light
shed by this type of analysis. Four of the great
blocks of activity where speed organizes itself
are the military (the business of war), business
(the manipulation of wealth), travel (the violence
of projection), and entertainment (the culture
industry).

These blocks cannot be seen apart from each

other -- they all preserve the division of labor
even as speed preserves them, keeping them
not merely running but accelerating.
Acceleration is the movement of movement,
and is essential in the current production and
maintenance of power and knowledge in all
these areas. Each builds on the knowledge
forged by the others; they all enjoy both
parasitical and hegemonic existences, and the
postwar global situation witnesses various
grotesque couplings of the spheres of work and
play, confrontation and leisure. A quick glance
at new devices shows not how firm the
commodity structure is but its reckless
trajectory, which comes to look more and more
like a death drive. England's dream is a
shopping scheme, as Johnny Rotten knew.
Pershing and MX missiles, CD players and dub
decks, speed metal and hard core, metros,
walkthings, moving sidewalks, microwaves,
private helicopters, ready tellers, modems: all
function by accelerating flows, and by creating
multiple interfaces between hysterical bodies
and hyperactive machines.

9|Page
IV.

Dromology may not be a philosophy per se, but

it is a return to philosophy's beginnings. As a
meditation on the formal constraints of life, it
provides perhaps a further chapter in Adorno's
Minima Moralia, which was subtitled
"Reflections from Damaged Life." Damaged life
is life spent under the negative horizon, in the
confines first of the European fortress during
WWII, then in the aftermath(s), which Virilio sees
as the reign of Total Peace under nuclear
dictatorship -- war pursued by other means.
Subjectivity is not depth or interiority, but the
"unable body" subjugated within the
prosthesis, hurtling forward in time and space,
circulating but never arriving.

Unlike Adorno, Virilio doesn't seem to retain

much old world nostalgia. His -- and ours (?)
even more extremely -- is a quite different
generation. He does, however, preserve an
intimate connection between lived experience
(reified or not, Erlebnis or Erfahrung ) and
writing. He begins his books Bunker
Archologie, L'Inscurit du territoire and
L'Horizon ngatif with observations on his
personal relationship to some external event,
situation, or representational problem. In the
first of these books, he remembers discovering
after the postwar liberation of the coast of
France the hugeness of the beach's horizon,
and the presence of a bunker, full of hidden
signification. In the second, it is Nantes at the
end of the war, the terror he experiences in
relation to the sky, occupied by planes. In the
third, he recalls his efforts to paint in a new
10 | P a g e
manner, concentrating on the spaces between
objects, to combat frabricated objects with the
study of "antiforms." He writes: "The eclipse of
anti-forms seemed to me like the consequence
of a sort of imperialism of apprehension." (22).
In each case, a curiosity about space leads to
reflections on its territorializations.

Subjectivity in these conditions necessitates a

vigilant observation and creative appropriation
of what he calls the "field of vision." Its
deformed character is a result of the violence of
speed, of technologization and formalization,
the narrowing of Borges' bifurcating paths to
rigid vectors of delivery. The price enacted from
the body doesn't have to be characterized in
the language of hermeneutic depth or that of
reification; although he doesn't rule out these
ways of gaining access to subjectivity, Virilio
prefers to investigate concrete situations
involving the harnessing of machines, where the
subject becomes a "voyeur-voyageur."

The term projection can be introduced here; it

is apt due to its overlapping of the registers of
television/film and transportation. The seat of
subjectivity is henceforth a spectral one, a
hurtling through space in the surroundings of
immobility, otherwise known as comfort. Virilio's
discussion in L'Horizon ngatif of the monture*
focuses on the situation of immobility. He traces
man's self-harnessing to animals (the horse as
the first machine of war). His analysis moves
from a nomadic configuration in which women
served as the means of transport for the man, to
the later use of the horse as a seat of power and
velocity which would dominate the exercise of
war.

11 | P a g e
Later forms of monture become so many facts
(or facticities) of daily existence; Virilio details
the "violence of speed" in the development of
vectors of transport, evaluating not simply the
specifics of the comfort-immobility syndrome,
but travel as a form of logistics.** Space and
then time undergo transformations that turn
them into grids. With the development of
technologies of transport from the early chemin
de fer to the Concorde, time itself becomes
habitable. One takes up residence in speed
when traveling. This residence, the Grand Hotel
Abyss of our times, is characterized at its
extreme by continual motion around the globe.
One example offered is the case of the
homeless PLO terrorist whose field of action is
the airplane and the airport, places of speed
and circulation, of continual transit. The
violence of terrorism situates itself within and
mimics in a complicated way the "violence of
displacement" that constitutes air travel.
Integral to this way of pinpointing the violence
in the machine are considerations relating to
the inertia of the passenger.

For Virilio, the politics of travel must go beyond

discussions of the need for increases of security
via seat belts and surveillance, and treat instead
the whole procedure of harnessing, the
problematic subject whose trajectory displays
very little choice, whose choices have been
made for her or him on a pervasive scale and
yet give off the surface glow of normality, i.e.
invisibility. This happens in relation to
consciousness in the time frame of always-
already, as what Adorno calls a "prehistorical
surgical intervention." The political unconscious
is a militarized one.

12 | P a g e
The medium is a massage. Not only in the one-
way communication of television is this true;
travel and communications and world-vision
technologies all share an origin in the
deployment of an economy of war. For Virilio,
the massage of entertainment forms the flipside
of the state of emergency, although individual
productions can help illustrate and work on the
situation in crucial ways. The era of nuclear
deterrence is also an era of the deterrence of
the nomadic or meandering path in favor of the
vector. The connections here are perhaps
obvious, as grids have become a recurring
fantasy in the cartesian-goyesque sleep of
reason. But Virilio succeeds at lending a
convincing background to their articulation. His
book Guerre et cinma: Logistique de la
perception, tackles the utilization of filming
techniques in conjunction with air missions in
WWII. The crossbreeding of technologies
appears to be the true terrain of Virilio's new
science (or anti-science) of observation. Bunker
Archologie used an archeological method to
discuss the profound connection of the military
and a specific architecture that would house its
lookouts and strongholds; Logistique de la
perception pursues another constellation of
technical knowledges, that of war and cinema.

The thesis is that arms are a means of

perception and that cinema is an armament.
Cameras mounted on reconnaissance planes
provide an exemplary chapter in the
colonialization of space/time in the name of
knowledge of and for destruction. This
constellation of machines also hastens the
connection between imperialism of the gaze
and war as penetration, the production of
information and territoriality. This is, of course,
13 | P a g e
war in the old sense, or rather in a recent or
previous sense. The end of the second World
War was also the inauguration of Pure War.
Virilio ascribes the term "state delinquencies"
to the range of armed conflicts since Hiroshima.
Global insecurity henceforth constitutes the
planet's atmosphere, while Pure War is
conducted hypothetically from command
centers staffed by immobile bodies. In Speed
and Politics, Virilio details the strategies of
tension that color every aspect of political
economy but extend as well into the immense
machine of culture exemplified but by no means
exhausted by Hollywood.

Speed is the ground of current first-world

culture, and this culture is still and always
imperialistic, tending to spread its vectors
around the globe, exporting and replicating
itself in insidious, digestible bits. Speed is the
form, content and apotheosis of culture. It
reaches its millenarian stage with music video,
which deterritorializes perception by a flux of
images and noise, but reterritorializes it without
fail as commodity. "Overaccelerated speed
renders us unconscious" he says. Speed sells,
speed can be packaged, but it also takes the
senses over a certain apperceptive threshold,
and points in the process to a sort of
cannibalistic enterprise; speed eats the body
because the senses start having a hard time
"keeping up." Perhaps we are entering a final
stage in the cult of sensation, in which our
bodies are unable to enjoy the extreme
pleasures that have been prepared for them
with frenetic excess.

14 | P a g e
Here are two quotes, the first from Adorno's
Minima Moralia, the second from Virilio. Adorno
writes in 1946:

Human dignity insisted on the right to walk, a rhythm not

extorted from the body by command or terror. The walk,
the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage of
the feudal promenade in the nineteenth century. . . .
Perhaps the cult of technical speed as of sport conceals an
impulse to master the terror of running by deflecting it
from one's body and at the same time effortlessly
surpassing it. The triumph of mounting mileage ritually
appeases the fear of the fugitive. [162]

Virilio counters in 1983:

Movement is now only a handicap -- a double handicap

that we know only too well. A motor-handicap: a man in a
car piloted by a driver (until such time as cars are
completely automatic, which won't take long) is motor-
handicapped. In his own way, he is just as bed-ridden as
Howard Hughes. The man sitting before his television
watching the soccer championship live from Santiago in
Chile is seeing-handicapped. For example, to be -- as we
are now -- sitting in well-stuffed chairs is a postural
comfort. Our muscles are relatively relaxed. They aren't
being called upon. It's a postural comfort with respect to
the body and to physiological materialness. Now, the
prostheses of automotive-audio-visual movement create a
subliminal comfort. Subliminal, meaning beyond
consciousness. They allow a kind of visual -- thus physical -
- hallucination, which tends to strip us of our
consciousness. . . . Subliminal comfort multiplies the speed
of consciousness -- the speed of the vivacity of reflexion.
This multiplication can be pleasant in relative acceleration,
that is, within the boundaries of my consciousness; but
these boundaries are very narrow, and if, as in certain
cases of 'invasion of privacy,' someone should use speed to
go beyond this, I am conditioned. This in fact what is called

15 | P a g e
subliminal advertising and, of course, propaganda directed
at entire populations. You see an image of which you are
not at all conscious, it imposes itself on you without your
being able to detect it, because it goes too fast. The
prosthesis is completely alienating. (74-5)

We have come a long way since Adorno's

memory of human dignity.

Without tackling here the full breadth of the

connections made by both of these thinkers, or
contemplating for too long the abyss that
separates Adorno's culture industry from ours,
let me note that Virilio's analyses of the war
machine are fruitfully transplanted to the study
of film, at least at what Lotringer calls the
episto-technical level. But to pose the operation
as one of transplantation is perhaps unfair to his
vision. Culture itself in its massive form, its
American form, its first-world form, its
commodity form, its industrial form, grows out
of war in innumerable ways. Just as Dada
transposed the shock of the Great War onto
language, the shock of Pure War is seen in
current Hollywood productions, especially in
their budgets. This type of cinema comes into
its own as the most advanced dream machine in
the era of war carried on by other means.

The clue that video offers the detective of these

connections can be uncovered by drawing a
parallel to the point of Virilio's about the status
of the body under what he calls "dromocracy."
He discusses the significance of air force pilots
being equipped with whole head computers,
visual mediators that process the raw data of
trajectories, speed, horizon, target, etc., slowing
down and simplifying the transmitted
information. The body is outgrown by the

16 | P a g e
 technology it still fits into anachronistically.
Examples of this type of operation can be
multiplied and will no doubt continue to
multiply. Donna Haraway has spoken of the
cyborg (human body equipped with bits of
machine) in a more positive light, that of
feminist intervention, the possible freeing of the
subjugated female body. In Virilio's eyes it
remains at the services of a repressive regime of
surveillance, engaged in the disciplining of
territory, but also the further refinement of the
obsolete body.

Daniel L Potter, Cornell University, 1987

__________

* Monture: animal for riding, mount; mounting,

setting, frame, support, socket . . .

** Logistics: branch of military science involving

the procuring, maintaining and transporting of
materiel, personnel and facilities . . .

17 | P a g e

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