Virilio speed and politics

His study of dromology, or a science of speed reexamines politics and social change form the perspective of the capacity to move with speed and occupy space according to that speed. The axis of his work is the analysis of war and the transformations of the forms of war, with a special interest in weapons, and in the organization of army of proletarians.
"In every revolution there is the paradoxical presence of circulation. (...) The masses are not a population, a society, but the multitude of passers by. The revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production but in the street, where it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a motor (a machine of attack) in other owrds a producer of speed (emphasis in original)" (3)

Politics is not about occupying a building but of holding the streets.
If the asphalt is a political terrain then state power is not over territory but over the streams of movement. "All through history there has been an unspoken, unrecognized, revolutionary wandering." The city is where the mass confronts the police. The mass is what threatens power and the police is the main state power. State power is not sovereignty over space but about controlling traffic, on setting speed limits and traffic norms, on holding control over highways.

He sees the development of movement from the mob, to mob riots. Dromomaniacs are the compulsive walkers as the deserters form the army, they circulate with no fixed direction, they attack like a pack of dogs [de acá algunas características del nómade de Del y Guattari]. The study is over circulation, speed, rythm, trajectory. Street demonstrations are about giving rhythm to the mobile mass's trajectory (He refers to Goebbels who claims that propaganda has to be about words and images, not writing, this is do not stop the masses dynamism.)

Every revolution is in the city, not so much because of the place of the city but because of a division between stasis and circulation. The revolution is about the instantaneousness of the mass in the street [and also the synchronicity? what he calls rythm of the passers by, but also what forces people out of their homes - work, what is the affect that makes people move] This instantaneousness of movement, the fact people get together but then they vanish [disperse or vanish as a pack, not sure], demands particular ways of register and this is where audiovisual media is more effective than writing.

City is a place of dwelling but mostly of interweaving channels of rapid communication. The city is only a stopover, a point on the path of a trajectory. The city construction obscures the migratory phenomenon, the mass attracted by the city's riches is stopped in the periphery. The boundaries of the city filter the fluidity of the newcomers. The utopic cities of socialism as the democratic agora, are buried under the construction of the city, the city veils the migrations, the people that trigger the revolution. The migration to the city is a passage form the outside to the inner city's riches, with no transition. The spectacle of the city is the traffic, the pilgrim;s progress at once movement and improvement. The street is where teh social flow can be measured.

The rest of the essay unfolds the history of war. He develops the history of the proleterian soldier. I find interest in his chapter on the body and its prothesis for movement, the car and the plane but also bionic men/women -interstingly it is related with disability: "disable" bodies that are still useful for war, or injuries transformed into superpower, and then any body is disable if it has not a plane a tank (that needs o road).- The ending stress the importance of the vector as a last stage of war. War of position is no longer important, missiles can be anywhere and only counteracted by other missile located anywhere. There is no human defense over the missile, and very little over the bullet. Both bullet and arrow kill but is the capacity to avoid them that makes them different. It is speed and the trajectory and not so much the destructive force what makes this weapons powerful.

As a result of winning the war on Oil (1920s), and triumphs in european markets by its logistics. "The market was created not by the object of consumption but by the vector of delivery" (109) America (north) the politics of comfort replace state welfare, through the technical assistance of bodies, form the household robot to the company psychiatrist, to the futuristic bionic bodies, but for this politics there is a new shift in to that of social standing in which each person controls its owns neighbors and that is what constitutes state internal security.

History is then the history of a strategic advance over the terrain the historian is but "the captain in the war of time". He quotes from Costa-Gomes (Portuguese) "revolution is always faster than the people" this is because the revolution is always done by the military. We live in military - industrial democracies and all social categories are collapsed in the order of speed "whose hierarchy is controlled more and more each day by the state (headquarters), form the pedestrian to the rocket, form the metabolic to the technological." (119-20)

The war now is no longer about the strategy over the terrain but about the strategy of time "in the relativity of travel time" (121). Thus, at present the "time is a matter of vectors. Territory has lost its significance in favor of the projectile. the strategic value of the non place of speed has supplanted that of space." (133)The new nuclear weapons are both about disintegrating distance in the vectors of their speed, and about disintegrating the matter both in exploding and imploding. If explosion is always deferred the extermination of distance is made effective. If strategy was about which point we apply force to "We have to recognize that geographic localization seems to have definitively lost its strategic value and inversly that this same value is attributed to the delocalization of the vector. All that count is the speed of the moving body and the undetectability of its path." This transition in war marks the transition for the state of siege to the state of emergency of the war of time. War is still about deterrence. Weapons are to stop the movement of the enemy more than destroy him, conversely the aptitude of war has been the one to move. The last years the hindrance to movement is not about the enemy resisting but about the refinement of the vectors, the explotion being deferred they are athreaten as long as there is an efficient vector taking them anywhere unpredicta;bly. (147) "The danger of the nuclear weapon is thus not so much that it will explode, but that it exists and is imploding in our minds."(150)This creates the state of emergency "The violence of speed has become both the location and the law, the world's destiny and its destination." (151)