Speed and Politics

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SPEED AND POLITICS

Paul Virilio

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SEMIOTEXT (E) FOREIGN AGENTS SERIES

Oiginally published in 1977 as "Vitesse et Politique," Edition Galilee, Paris.

Copyright © 1977 Paul Virilio

Copyright© 2006 Semiotext(e)

Translation © Semiotext(e) and Mark Polizzotti

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

Published by Semiotext(e)

2007 Wilshire Bl_".d., Suite 427, Los Angeles, CA 90057

w.semiotexte.com

Special thanks to Nicholas Zurko and Mark Polizzotti.

Cover: Map of Paris published in 1847 depicting Baron Georges Eugene Haussman's plan to transform Paris into "the capital of capitals." In red are the networks of new streets and boulevards and in green are the parks. Courtesy of the New York City Public Library.

Back Cover Photography: Sylvere Locringer

Design: Hedi EI Kholti

ISBN-10: 1-58435-040-7

ISBN-13: 978-1-58435-040-8

Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England

Printed in the United States of America

SPEED _AND POLITICS

Paul Virilio

Translated by Marc Polizzotti

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Contents

Introduction: Logistics of Habitable Circulation 7
PART 1. THE DROMOCRATIC REVOLUTION 27

1. From Street Fight to State Right 29
2. From Highway Right to State Right 49

PART 2. DROMOLOGICAL PROGRESS 59

1. From Space Right to State Right 61
2. Practical War 73

PART 3. DROMOCRATIC SOCIETY 81

1. Unable Bodies 83
2. The Boarding of Metabolic Vehicles 96
3. The End of the Proletariat 115
4. The Consumption of Security 136

PART 4. THE STATE OF EMERGENCY 147
Notes 169

Logistics of Habitable Circulation

A brief introduction to the 2006 edition of Sped and Politics

If there had never been a war, I would have made a very good architect.

\- Ahmed Shah Masoud, Afghan opposition leader reportedly

assassinated 9.9.01 by suicide bombers who were, it is

assumed, trained by Osama Bin�Ladan on behalf of the Taliban,

as quoted in the Los Angeles Times, the morning edition of

September 11, 2001.

PAUL VIRILIO'S MODERNITY is logistical. It doesn't directly deal with war, but with everything that makes it possible . Logistics is the preparation for war through the transfer of the nation's potential to its armed forces in time of peace as in times of war. 1 Modernity is a world in motion, expressed in translations of strategic space into logistical time, and back again. It is a history of cities, partitions, trading circuits, satellites, and software; of a political landscape governed by competing technologies of surveillance, mobilization, fortification and their interdependent administrations. It begins as an archaelogy of naval routes, strategic techniques and urban distributions, and becomes an integrated world of events reduced to shapes and symbols, viewed and manipulated instantaneously on screens. In Virilio's narrative,

Benjamin H. Bratton

7

architectural regimes become computational, and vice versa. Both are logistical media for mobilization and its administration, technologies that consolidate territory into logistical fields and enable a Modern governance based on the abstracted calculation over omnidirectional spaces and surfaces, from open oceans to shared spreadsheets. This comprehensive technologization of the globe signals for Virilio both integration and disintegration, both control and accident. And it is finally through the accident, the realization of the imminent, irreducible risk that logistics hopes to contain, and not through control, that the strongest bonds of the polis are formed. For Virilio, they are an exceptional condition already contained within, and rigorously predicated by the invention that made them possible.

In the 1 9 60's, Virilio collab orated with architect Claude Parent to develop a challenging program for an oblique architecture using inclined planes. It followed the principle of "habitable circulation, " intending to radically expand the usable surface of urban landscape. His work as a theorist from the mid- 1 970's to today can be seen' as a retroactive thesis on the possibility of such an architecture, and an ultimate abandonment of it in the face of other emerging spatial media. "The focus of my research," Virilio noted, "has shifted from topology to dromology, i.e., the study and analysis of the increasing speed of transport and communications on the development of land-use. "2 The image of the 'polis' (city) as a dynamic, vehicular landscape is both Virilio's initial architectural solution and his eventual theoretical warning. "Dromology" (from Gr. dromos: race course) is this government of diferential motility, of harnessing and mobilizing, incarcerating and accelerating things and people. His third book, Vitesse et Politique I Speed and Politics ( 1 977, 1 986, 2006) is a history of what he calls an "inevitable technological vitalism" through which multiple projectiles-the inert membranes of fortress and bunkers, the "metabolic bodies" of soldiers, and transport bodies of naval vessels-mutually prostheticize each other in a pursuit of the competitive advantage of speed.3 Among the key metabolic transformations traced in the book is the movement from the urban fo rtress to the open, smooth glacis of the sea, now a "vast logistical camp" in which naval, and finally amphibious strategies organize a "right to the sea." This in turn framed a "right to the road" and later diagrammed the land in the smooth image of maritime drift. In that shift, the condition of hab�table circulation, and its o rigins in military logistics-mobilization and fortification -remains of critical importance. What was once asked of architecture, though, is now accomplished by other means, both informational and computational. Now the presence and vehicular movement of people and objects through global space is tightly integrated with an infrastructure of software, and to send objects in motion or to impede their trajectory is a logistical labor performed by pulses of light as much as flesh and steel.

8 I Speed and Politics

" ... An Essay on Dromolo_gy"

Speed and Politics was first published in Paris against a backdrop characterized by the complicit, symmetrical stand-of of nuclear superpowers sealed by the SALT II accords, as well as by the rise of political terrorism in London, Rome, Mogadishu, Stammheim, Phnom Penh, Palestine, etc. By then, May 1 968 (to which Virilio owed his appointment as Director of the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture) had soured into a restless, if also fertile, malaise. A new French society was reconfiguring itself around audiovisual media:

Introduction: Logistics of Habitable Circulation

I 9