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# Speed and Politics

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But to be sure, Virilio's core exhortation diverges from that ofered by a "frictionless capitalism" and its ideologies of reflexive transparency and seamless control. Instead, he sees the cumulative destiny of dromological globalization as a successively violent, increasingly integrated history of accidents. This Ballardian depiction of technology suggests that the invention or adoption of a new technology is always also the invention and adoption of a new accident. The invention of the ocean liner is also the invention of its catastrophic sinking, the internal combustion engine is itself the invention of greenhouse gases, the discoveries of genomic science also bring with them the latent horrors of a "genetic bomb," and the comprehensive integration of personal social lives into information networks is also their inevitable crash, taking with them the very social bonds that they contain and mediate for us. Such solutions also increase the scale of our shared risk. Virilio's recent work focuses on what he calls the "integral accident which may someday becomes our habitat," a kind of global (terminal?) accident in which the comprehensiveness of dromological administration promises as well an inevitable, equally global calamity of dysfunction.8

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There is also an accident contained in theoretical technologies, and in the absorption of Virilio's theory by t�e institutional positions it seems to criticize so fiercely. "I am studied in military academies," he tells Sylvere Lotringer in Pure "Wtr, and indeed he is. Like that of advertising strategists pouring over the works of Guy Debord, this is but one instance of theory itself performing as a kind of "accidental" conceptual avant-garde for the institutions it had hoped to undo by careful description. Perhaps the most direct and disquieting exemplar is Israeli Brigadier General Aviv Kokhavi, the IDF Paratroop commander, charged with leading attacks on and thereby "redesigning" Palestinian territories in Nablus and elsewhere. Kokhavi is also an avid reader of Deleuze and Guattari's theoretical technologies of deterritorialization, smooth/striated space, and nomadology. In his holster, their richly nuanced theories of emergent antagonisms become tactical technologies for a newly sophisticated apparatus of state violence and rhizomatic repression.9 But aren't such inversions-both simulations and dissimulations-somehow already intrinsic to the dromological violence in question? Aren't these "accidents of theory" already artifacts of the inversions that fundamentally characterize such configurations of violence? Football simulates primordial territorial clan warfare, and the supporters of Red Star

Introduction: Logistics of Habitable Circulation

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Belgrade are quickly recast as the shock troops of Serbian sweeps through Bosnia. As for American Football, the Louisiana Superdome, site of the universal simulated siege of the Superbowl, becomes after Katrina the host of a real siege and the festering bodies of those displaced by a slow war of systemic neglect-one still broadcast with high ratings. Are such inversions, or "accidents" (including the consumption of Virilio's theory of the dromological accident becoming a form of "intelligence" for the tactical management of dromocracy) are not (just) the exceptions but also the rule?

In the years since the publication of Speed and Politics, there has developed a rich discourse around the political function of the "exception," and the architecture of the camp as a space of that exception. For Giorgio Agamben, the camp represents an extralegal territory, derived from its exceptional status as being both founded outside the normal juridical procedures of the State, and precisely through this exceptional character, embodying the State's sovereignty not only over laws, but over law and the authority that it realizes.10 The logic of the camp exceeds the normative productive link of power and resistance, revealing the exception as the real nexus of sovereign authority. Slavoj Zizek writes, in discussing Bahktin, that "what most deeply holds together a community is not so much identification with the Law that regulates the community's 'normal' everyday rhythms, but rather identification with a specific form of transgression of the Law, of the Law's suspension ... "<sup>1</sup>1

Virilio's own theories of dromocracy and the modernity of accidents should be considered in relation to this discourse. He writes that "the precious lesson of the camp and the gulags has not been heeded, because it was erroneously presented not only as an ideological phenomenon, but also as a static one, an enclosure. Its absolute inhumanity is .. . the social bestiary of the immense biomass, proletariat subsumed under logistical demands" (98). In the camp, the administration of "bare life," of the metabolic vehicles of dromocratic modernity, is rendered in stark relief. There is also a softer repetition of this in the world's "special economic zones, " those extralegal logistical archipelagos that weave the flows of global commerce, and mobilize a new normative order in their image. But again, for Virilio the lesson is not the pretentious self-image of hyperefficiency that such networks communicate, but rather the exception that remains withi1 th� exception itself: the accident. The accident-within-the-accident emerges from the identifcation with the exception that Zizek names, perhaps in ways that Virilio might not himself recognize. Terrorism, for example, as well as the "state of emergency" of counter-terrorism, is neither entirely complicit with a symmetry of resistance to the law, nor ever possibly entirely outside it, but instead makes its claims over the sovereign exception to the law's authority to author. This is also the crux of the wonderment and awe provoked by the event of catastrophic failure. It is not only horrific, it is mesmerizing, and because it is, the accident is also a critical source of solidarity, a binding exception that is the real condition of acceptance. The carnival of atcidents is revealed as technolo-$\mathbf { g } \mathbf { \vec { y } } \mathbf { \vec { s } }$ own exceptional bacchanalia, staged at our expense and on our behalf.

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Benjamin H. Bratton is a theorist and consultant based in Los Angeles. He teaches at SCI\_Arc (The Southern California Institute of Architecture) and UCLA. <sup>w</sup>.bratton.info

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Notes

3. P. 68 of the present edition. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology. Semiotext(e), New York. Subsequent parenthetical quotations are from this same edition.

4. The term "software society" is developed further in a forthcoming essay co-authored by Lev Manovich and myself

5. Gilles Palsky, Des chiffees et des cartes, naissance et la cartographie quantitative francaise au X!Xe siecle developpement. (Memoires de la section de geographie No. 19). Paris: Comite des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 1996. (translated by Daniel J. Denis) Pp.51-52

6. These rolling gated communities provide a more direct identification with military purpose. During the first Gulf War, a common bumper sticker was "I Support the Troops," whereas the parade of post-9/11 Hummers says rather "I Am The Troops."

7. The "security environment" is populated by small and large architectures of control: from "sit-proof benches" (benches and sidewalk planters designed with uncomfortable barbs to prevent loitering and keep pedestrians moving,) to the locking of workers overnight into the Big Box emporiums where they restock shelves until morning. We are treated to invited competitions by major newspapers for the "architectural" design of the U.S./Mexico border, and the current conception of a "Freedom Tower" at the former site of the World Trade Center as a ponderous concrete fortification wrapped in semi-translucent glass-an enduringly disingenuous symbol of martial culture.

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8. The notion of technology revealing itself most directly in its failure again links Virilio's critique to Heidegger's. See Virilio, Unknown Quandty, Fondation Cartier pour !'art contemporain. Thames & Hudson, 2003. P.25

9. Kokhavi is quoted by Eyal Weizman, "Several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaus became instrumental for us ... allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not otherwise have explained them. It problematized our paradigms . . . Most important was the distinction they have pointed out between the concepts of 'smooth' and 'striated' space .. . In the IDF we now often use the term 'to smooth out space' when we want to refer to operation in a space as if it had no borders." Weizman, "Lethal Theory," Log 7, Winter/Spring 2006. P. 59'.

10. Agamben recounts recent responses to that the "scandalous" discovery of correspondence between Walter Benjamin and fascist jurist, Carl Schmitt, on sovereignty and violence-another "accident of theory"-and argues that it is Benjamin who should be understood to have "infected" Schmitt's position. See Agamben, State of Exception. University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. 52-64.

11. Slavoj Zizek, The Universal Exception. New York: Continuum Press,   
2006. P. 64.

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Part

THE DROMOCRATIC REVOLUTION

I wouldn't want to be a survivor.

\- Jean Mermoz

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From Street Fight to State Right

The mass of individuals that the smallest military unit ofers

the eye, united in a common voyage.

\- Clausewitz, 1806

IN EVERY REVOLUTION there is the paradoxical presence of circulation. Engels remarks in June 1 848: "The first assemblies take place on the large boulevards, where Parisian life circulates with the greatest intensity. " Less than a century later, Weber says of the disappearance of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (as if he were talking about the results of a car crash) that "they called to the streets, and the streets killed them. " The masses are not a population, a society, but the multitude of passersby. The revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street, where for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a motor (machine of attack), in other words a producer of speed.

For the mass of unemployed, demobilized workers without an occupation, Paris is a tapestry of trajectories, a series of streets and avenues in which they roam, for the most part, with neither goal nor destination, subject to a police repression intended to control their wanderings. For the various revolutionary groups, as for the

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