Dromocracy: Government by Prosthetics
Where does Virilio locate the historical agency of dromology (speed) and dromocracy (politics)? How does one become the other? The recurring actor in Virilio's history is the State, if only because it is also the legal signatory of modern war. But his is hardly a traditional political theory. "In fact there is no 'industrial revolution' but only a 'dromocratic revolution;' there is not democracy, only dromocracy; there is not strategy, only dromology" (69) . States employ dromological techniques to exercise power, but as for Foucault, state apparatuses are functions, artifacts even, of dromocratic machinations that exceed their constitutions and incorporations. For Virilio (in concert with Deleuze and Guattari) such state governments are profiled as a sort of "machinic species" of collective formation. Echoing Heidegger, he writes that "dromocratic intelligence is not exercised against a more or less determined military adversary, but as a permanent assault on the world, and through it, on human nature" (86) . Likewise, the mobilization of economic production is characterized less in terms of maximizing surplus labor value than according to the distribution of metabolic intensification in the service of an historically comprehensive acceleration.
Dromocracy establishes and reproduces standardized forms of assembly and disassembly for the systematic integration of human energy into specific infrastructures. "Factory work must not escape the dictatorship of movement. It reproduces the enclosure on the spot, in the obligatory and absurd kinetic cycle ... a condensed machine of the logistical glads" ( 1 0 1 ) . This is the design of corporeal discipline in the pursuit of the image of speed [not the image of truth as Foucault might prioritize it] in which "the class struggle is replaced by the struggle of the technological bodies of the armies according to their dynamic eficiency: logistics" (72) . Indeed the exercise of political authority in and through the dimensions of the body-in-motion appears for Virilio in its most extreme and comic form in those performances of collective singularization that are Marxist state stadium pageants. Their choreographies of motor functions move according to the party line, now a literal grid. The numb aesthetic of "miming the joys at being liberated" and through this, "the simplicity of a power that comes down to the constraint and housebreaking of bodies," is repeated upside down in the camps where the, misbeliever's body absorbs the cultivation of the law (5 5 ) . Virilio writes, " His dissidence is a postural crime" (56) . Even today, as this script of fleshly discipline has largely been exported from the commanding GS metropoles to its satellites, another softer intercourse emerges between the individual and his logistical destiny, transposed into other symbolic and informational economies.
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I Speed and Politics