Virilio’s third book is a history of political modernity read off the history of speed, and its wager is that once speed is treated as the concealed substance of power, the categories that organize both Marxist and liberal political thought stop describing anything. Production, class struggle, the juridical State, revolution as the seizure of the means of production: each is demoted to a surface effect of something prior, the management of circulation and the race between vehicles. The book is written in aphoristic fragments that accumulate rather than deduce, and it moves by a single substitution repeated at every scale, the substitution of the vehicle for the actor, the trajectory for the decision, the engine for the will.
The thesis is stated flatly and then treated as settled, the whole book a working-out of it. Virilio names the operative science dromology, from the Greek dromos, race course, the study of speed as a political fact.
Virilio states it as a demolition of the standard periodizations:
page 69“In fact, there was no ‘industrial revolution,’ but only a ‘dromocratic revolution;’ there is no democracy, only dromocracy; there is no strategy, only dromology. It is precisely at the moment when Western technological evolutionism leaves the sea that the substance of wealth begins to crumble, that the ruin of the most powerful peoples and nations gets under way—viz. Carter’s declarations about the end of the American dream. It is speed as the nature of dromological progress that ruins progress; it is the permanence of the war of Time that creates total peace, the peace of exhaustion.”
Written against the backdrop of the SALT-era nuclear standoff and a French Left still arguing production and party, the book was published as Vitesse et politique (Éditions Galilée) in 1977 and dates its own present to September of that year. Its antagonist is any account, Marxist or strategic, that locates power in what is made or in what is decided rather than in what moves and how fast. The through-line the reconstruction below follows is the one the book itself lays out in order: the communal fortress as immobile war machine, the sea and the fleet in being, the highway and the tank, the camp and the metabolic body, and finally the nuclear vector, at which point speed contracts political decision toward zero and the argument arrives at its destination.
That destination is the book’s last sentence, and it is the claim the whole reconstruction is built to earn:
page 167“After the time of the State’s political relativity as nonconducting medium, we are faced with the no time of the politics of relativity. The full discharge feared by Clausewitz has come about with the State of Emergency. The violence of speed has become both the location and the law, the world’s destiny and its destination.”
Benjamin Bratton’s introduction reframes the 1977 text for the software present and supplies the term that organizes the whole reading, logistics. It opens by refusing the obvious subject. War is not what the book is about; the transfer of a nation’s potential into force is.
Bratton’s first paragraph fixes the keynote:
page 7“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. 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.”
He recovers the architectural origin of the theory and lets Virilio date his own turn from architecture to speed. The passage is the cleanest self-description of the research program the book belongs to, and Bratton quotes it whole.
Bratton quotes Virilio, from Architecture Principe:
page 8“The focus of my research 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.”
The interpretive move that makes the reissue matter is the reading of 1977 forward into computation. Bratton treats the book as a prehistory of the software condition, the city’s old functions of channeling traffic and attention having migrated to interfaces, search, and supply chains.
On page 10, marking the periodization:
page 10“Virilio’s work from this period can be understood as a sort of immediate pre-history of the ‘Software Society.’ By 1986, and the time of this English translation, the problematics of information technology, computational technologies (particularly database and optical media) had displaced the city (it reappeared in his later work, but as an artifact of the media that had partially consumed its earlier functions).”
Two of Bratton’s emphases are the ones a researcher will come back for. The first is the integral accident, Virilio’s claim that each technology invents its own catastrophe, extended by Bratton to a global terminal accident. The second is the accident of theory, theory absorbed as an instrument by what it set out to criticize, with Virilio’s own reception as the first exhibit. Both loci sit on page 21.
Bratton on the integral accident:
page 21“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.”
And on theory becoming an instrument of what it describes, Virilio quoted from Pure War:
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