Dromocracy depends on technologies that in their employment, straddle the pre-political and the hyperpolitical, working on the bodies of the masses as a practical material that can be strategically designed and deployed. If the city is a collective prostheses of its inhabitants, other technologies are for a more individual, specific purpose, for example the car. "The transportation capacity created by the mass production of automobiles became a social assault on space" that would undo centripetal urban concentration exploding it into the congested network of the open highway (50). "No more riots, n o need fo r much repression; to empty the streets, it's enough to promise everyone the highway: this is the aim of [the Nazi party's] Volkswagen plebiscite" (49). Dromocracy extends to this new platform: "Speed limits .. . we are talking about acts of government, in other words of the political control of the highway, aiming precisely at limiting the extraordinary power of assault that the motorization of the masses creates" (5 1 ) . Earlier in the century, the concentration of industrial technology into individual motorized locomotion had already revolutionized the battlefield in the figure of the tank; that "automotive fort" (78). These ofered their commanders a new calculus of speed and movement. As if sailing across a smooth surface, the tank "extends war over an earth that disappears, crushed under the infinity of possible trajectories" (79). Virilio suggests these "battleships of earth" (79) should not b e called "all-terrain," but "sans-terrain" in their obliteration of territorial impediment (78) . Later with the Jeep (and more grotesquely the Hummer) the personal fortress would allow for the (largely pretentious) presumption of this power to the performance of the daily commute.6 But vehicular prostheticization is not only automotive. Others are assimilated as surgical prosthetics, others as fashion. The long marches of soldiers across fields plowed by battle during World War I presented the· problem of damaged feet, and gave rise to the practical science of Orthopedics, and the redesign of the pedestrian soldier's locomotive technology: his shoes. This accomplishment is amplified and embellished in the cultural imaginary for which the sports shoe becomes a vehicle of personal ambulatory and logistical excellence ("Just do it").
Introduction: Logistics of Habitable Circulation
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