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the kitsch utopia of Beaubourg, the commercial center buried underneath the Forum des Hales, the new information headquarters at La Defnse, followed by the nightly spectacles at Berey. Perhaps this had to be expected. Didn't Mai end with a dour Pres. d� Gaulle going on television, instead of appearing in person on the balcony of the Hotel de Ville, as would have been the custom? The anti-climactic broadcasts managed to accomplish through the single-channel television something no urban strategy could have done: to stop the tumult of the deterritorialized streets, and to bring the nation if not to o rder, then to attention, to fix their gazes on a new national center, not of buildings, but of screens.

Virilo's work from this period can be understood as a sort of immediate pre-history of the "Software Society. "4 By 1 9 86, and the time of this English translation, the problematics of information technology, computational technologies (particularly database and qptical media) had displaced the city (it reappeared in his later work, but as a artifact of the media that had partially consumed its earlier functions) .

Virilio's logistical Modernity is meant "to carve and guide the masses," the metabolic multitude, into mobile traj ectories. Dromology is a shifting, restless logistics of diferential governance transforming the raw material of the world and rendering it "in a more appropriate form" (36) . For Virilio, "The city is but a stopover, a point on a the synoptic path of a trajectory, the ancient military glacis, ridge road, frontier or riverbank, where the spectator's glance and the vehicle's speed of displacement were instrumentally linked. As I have said in the past, there is only habitable circulation" (3 1 ) . Cities govern these multiple scales of relative object velocity. They accelerate and I or frustrate: ''.All [cities] are uncertain places because they are situated between two speeds of transit, acting as brakes against the acceleration of penetration" (33). As a technology of space, cities galvanize both human and non-human metabolisms, channeling them, amplifying them, concentrating them into centers, domesticating them into suburbs. The question that would animate much of Virilio's subsequent work is: how have these core functions of the city been assumed by other dromological media?

10 I Speed and Politics

Our Logistical Modernities

"History progresses at the speed of its weapons systems;" that is, at the speed of the competitive capacities to envision, draw, map, curtail, mobilize, contour, stabilize and police the polis (90) . At least since Vitruvius defined the rules of architecture based on his own military engineering experience, it is understood that the design of space is already a strategic weapon of fortification. But architectural media are only one such means and the evolution of their deployments is interrelated and serpentine. Marquis de Vauban, Louis XIV's chief military engineer of fortifications (and of their breaching) , made to his king the unusual recommendation that in order to secure a less permeable border with France's neighbors he should voluntarily cede contested land deemed "indefensible. " The plan realized Richelieu's earlier image to France as "le pre carre," or the "squared field," and in fact this same phrase was later used to describe Vauban's parallel lines of fortifications up and down the now consolidated national enclosure. In 1 782, Charles de Fourcroy's tableau poliometrique appeared. This "first known flowchart" is a diagram of the relative sizes of European metropoles, and in it, as geographer Gilles Palsky notes, "We see the passage to abstract, to fictitious features. By these proportional triangles, [de Fourcroy] constructs an image that does not return or relate to [the] original existence . " 5 De Fourcroy's semiotic innovation was this figural territorialization, the drawing of the comparative scale of cities as relative, primary geometric forms. This "map" does not correspond to any direct representation of the geographic juxtaposition of the cities, but rather graphs their relative quantitative diference in the population. This inscription produces another virtual space with which to order the natural territory of the polis as a proj ected image of an enclosed, administrative totality.

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For Virilio, this also signals the production of logistical space as a Modern administrative horizon. "This means the universe is redistributed by the military engineers, the earth 'communicating' like a single glads, as the infrastructure of future battlefield, " not one limited by given terrestrial geography (85). With the French Army of Engineers being assigned the task in 1 790 of "expand[ing] the logistical glacis over the whole territory, " this era marked the birth of Modern administration-by-calculation, an on-going project in which all of the vicissitudes of land and its inhabitants are continuously charted, symbolized, and manipulated. Virilio locates its emergence in the history of military geography, especially naval techniques. "Total war is omnipresent; it is first waged on the sea because the naval glacis naturally presents no permanent obstacle to vehicular movement of planetary dimensions," and the mobility of smooth maritime space would return to organize land in its logistical image (73) . Governance by speed (by states or otherwise) is logistics, and logistics, like the oceanic vectors from which it is born, is omnidirectional.

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Speed and Politics

Today the speed of logistics is also largely computational, but this is not to say virtual, immaterial, or distant. Quite the contrary. Supermarket shelves, for example, are a human interface to a vast internet of things: a network of supply-chain, demandchain and customer-relationship management softwares, steel containers, ofshore factories, inter-modal exchange protocolsall forming an unimaginably complex, robust and nimble assembly of everyday purchase commands with vast economies of production and distribution. Today's "fleets-in-being" are the exabytes and gigatons of component inven�ories in permanent transit, hurtling between trade zones as the consumable artifacts of their sponsoring corporations' technological and legal eficiencies. Finally, these (disin)corporations and their far-flung suppliers of parts, labor, and expertise, guard nothing so dearly as the legal agency of brands, those operational fictions which they so carefully embed into the demographically-microsegmented experiential touch-points of everyday life. This "flat world" imagines itself as slippery, oceanic grid modulated by diferentially transporting, activating, internalizing, and/or prophylactically exteriorizing technologies: from shipping ports to aerotropoli, from banking software GUis (graphical user interfaces) to web browser layout engines and - data security protocols. Like an Andreas Gursky photograph, this "frictionless" landscape of interconnected objects and subjects is the constitution of a new architecture, one that relies on fragile alibis of virtual immateriality and procedural transparency to achieve the political, economic eficacy it enjoys. The reality of its performance, however, is also a uncontrollable accumulation of-very real and opaque-unintended consequences.

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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

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").

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The Information Bunker and the Ubiquitous Front

Today information is architecture by other means, framing and contouring the relative motility of social intercourse. While the city remains a locus of this staging and dissimulation of security, it is supplanted by other network media that have assumed some of its traditional mandates. Now highly evolved species of de Fourcroy's tableau poliometrique proliferate on screens and surfaces in the form of the graphical user interfaces, narrating the afordances of the softwares they inscribe. But these GUI are not just diagrams of virtual action to be taken, they are also mechanisms through which a user's motivation is first framed and then realized in the network and on the world. Modes of representation that were once cartographic and diagrammatic are now instrumental and mediational.

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Speed and Politics

As the diagram becomes an interface, when the map becomes the tool, personal, individual social action becomes more logistical. The subjective manipulation of virtual symbols becomes a structural form of agency in this (pre-formatted) landscape of proximate and immediate contact. Consider how the political function of the urban gateway or boulevard to centralize and coordinate trafic and attention has been augmented by web portals and search engines, interfaces to the vast exabytes of online data curated and mainstreamed for public accessibility. There the preferences of mobs are codified in the ranking of search results associated with potential words, places, and concepts. Search represents a new configuration of public tools with which to seek, browse, meander, and exchange files with others, to be proximate to others in your social networks. Not unlike cities themselves, Search is legislated by a shifting balance of demographic desires, share-holder interest, and State paranoia. Virilio writes, "The State's political power. . . is the polis, the police, in other words, highway surveillance" (39) . Indeed many core innovations in Search technology are sponsored by security interests (state and otherwise) needing to meaningfully sift petabytes of "chatter" from which intelligence critical to securing the polis might be gleaned.

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Newer Search software works by making the world itself into the operant interactive metaphor for the world itself. Google Earth's interactive map/search/data visualization software, borrowing its interface aesthetics from previous generations of satellite-image-based battlefield simulation suites, promises to further incorp6rate personal logistics of everyday life into the tropics of "intelligence. " Its open API (application programming interface) also allows users to link Google Earth to other data streams, personal and public, furthering tipping the logic of its performance from that of a "map with interactive capabilities, " toward that of a real "meta-interface" based on cartographic, diagrammatic metaphors.

Just as diagrams become interfaces, computation also transforms physical urban interfaces by making them in turn increasingly diagrammatic. "In all parts of the world .. . implanted at the edges of cities, highways or railways . . . [is a] whole apparatus that is only the reconstitution of the various parts of the fortress motor, with its flankings, its gorges, its shafts, its trenches, admission to and escape from portals, the whole primordial control of the masses by organisms of urban defense" (40) . Of the masses of things, that is. Today the urban interfaces of material exchange between supply chains and demand chains include ports of entry, now refitted as computationally-intensive logistics parks, which serve as regional switching mechanisms for the routing of components and the formation of geographically distributed assemblies of producers and consumers. There is a dromological heaven in these. The United Arab Emirates currently plans a truly Modern city of the future in their own in Jebel Ali, the Dubai Logistics City, which hopes to dwarf the strategic centrality of competing hubs in Rotterdam, Singapore, Shanghai and elsewhere by providing seemingly endless acreage of sea-air and air-air multi-modal passenger and cargo services: "merge-in-transit, customization, postponement, packaging and labeling, and final assembly." Today our visionary architecture is designed not for the care and habitation of people, but as a utopia of and for objects.

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Im_pure War and the Exce_ptional Accident

Virilio's history-and our present moment is a profile of violence, of both binding and fissure. While Virilio begins with the literal, primordial bunker, he extends the economy of attrition to characterize Modernity itself. The bunker and its double, the camp, are the elemental spaces of this. The bunker is a concrete prophylactic, the camp is incarcerating. Both are hygienic, defensive. One is an architectural membrane against a hostile world, and one is an expulsion-by-enclosure of the Other from the normal performance of law. In their extreme forms, both spaces, even as they are often architecturally identical, are in their way zones of pure logistics. They are sites where the only compulsion is the execution of governance on a raw mass, mobilizing it, diagramming it. They are only ideal types, and the real world is full of spaces (factories, airports, warehouses, laboratories, jails, shipping ports, etc.) that are complex combinations of the bunker and the camp, switching from one the other, inverting exteriorization and interiorization moment by moment.

For Virilio, the accumulation of capital is a means to ensure security, not the inverse. He writes: "Bourgeois power is military even more than economic, but it relates most directly to the occult permanence of the state of siege, to the appearance of fortified towns, those 'great immobile machines' made in diferent ways" (36) . The competitive and complicit energies of the masses are understood as possessing a permanent poliorcetic historical mission (conducting or resisting sieges), and their movements are governed by the immobile surfaces of city, resolved in a suspended state of soft siege. This slow, permanent war is itself a technology of glacial attrition and shared deterrence. The city is in essence a bunker, characterized by Virilio as a deliberate "reduction of power in favor of a better trajectory, life traded for survival" (85). The "front" of this "pure war" is everywhere and everything, both inside and outside of the "closed world" of the "society of control." The comprehensive enclosure of earthly territory under dromocratic supervision totalizes this soft siege as a condition of global social space. Today's "security environment" (a preferred catch-phrase of Rumsfeld's) is populated by a Poliorcetics Lite, in which the defense of common civilian passage from potential acts of violence is folded into design criteria for the dissuasion of both petty and grand' crime.7

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