Ian Douglas: When you talk about virtual diplomacy, what exactly do you have in mind?
James Der Derian: Technically it means bringing ‘there’, ‘here’; collapsing distance, collapsing time. Unfortunately in the very use of the technology there is also the possibility of collapsing the distinction between fact and fiction, because its very easy to manipulate the images used. But the whole idea is that you have dual use. Here, at Ars Electronica, everyone is talking about the use of information for warfare. But this is about applying it as a mediation. So you a medium, meaning you’re separating belligerents, using the “media”, but you’re also using the medium to convey messages in new ways that can maybe break people out of their states of antagonism.

So insofar as it fits with military practice its part of the process of deterrence?
Well .. there are people who want to appropriate virtual diplomacy to those ends. I’m arguing for more of a more civilian based, non-governmental, transnational application of virtual diplomacy. There is a ‘beltway’ — meaning the Washington beltway — version, that is completely on the same continuum as virtual war. For instance, people down at STRICOM — the newest military base (Simulation, Training and Instrumentation Command) — have projects now that use the same technologies that are used for command and control warfare, for getting people around a table to talk about what do you do when the last bullet is fired. They claim that it can be used to prevent warfare, but their idea of preventing warfare means often to subdue without fighting, the philosophy of Sun Szu; the best war is won where you don’t have to go to the battlefield to win. So, to be sure, there is a continuum between violence and diplomacy, where we saw in Bosnia where virtual diplomacy was used at Dayton Ohio, where they brought in the exact same technology that pilots used to train for the bombing runs of the Serbian installations, to convince mainly Slobodan Milosevic that he should widen the Gorazde corridor: this was the main sticking point, the whole Dayton accords was going to collapse. So they brought him into this ‘map room’ (we have this anachronistic term for it) and projected 3D images of Bosnia. They showed him exactly how if you only made it five miles there was all kinds of lines of fire that would make it impossible for you to have a peaceful transit. Slobo actually got a hold of the joystick, and started flying over Bosnia, and looking at other possibilities, and came away convinced. So this was a case where it worked. But it really only worked because he knew that the same technology could be used against him once again in a bombing campaign, if he did not agree. So the pure use of this I think has not been exercised yet, but certainly the coercive diplomacy — what we might call coercive virtual diplomacy (virtual diplomacy backed by force) — has been effective.

Is it the immediacy of the medium which makes it different?
Yes.

Because we’ve had for a long time the idea of the armchair-general, shifting pieces around a table—armies, artilery, cavalry—which is essentially a visualization of the theatre of war. What’s so different when its digitized and represented on a computer screen?
The enemy has a face, for one. The iconic representation of the enemy, gives you all kinds of distancing, so that the virtual element of it minimizes; doesn’t collapse, but minimizes. Now, is this a good or bad thing? It is if you want to be able to have a dialogue. Now suddenly you can project an image on a Barco table — which is basically a very large, very high resolution computer screen — which allows 3D representation of the opponent. You get people in the room, who wouldn’t normally ever sit across from each other; they can be on the screen, interacting. That can be a good thing. It means that you can have a give and take; it’s not static, like little pieces in a chess game, or figures moved around on paper. But, there’s danger, which I think you’re aware of — it’s implied in your question — which is that you might mistake this new “more real” representation with the real thing. If you put Yasser Arafat and Netanyahu on a Barco table under virtual diplomacy, I don’t think you’re going to mistake each other’s iconic representation for the real thing, for they have a long of history. But that history is missing. And it is believed that you can do this kind of sui generis creation of identities that people can negotiate from. When you go from that Barco table to the real world that agreement is going to fall apart; for it was based on what amounts to an artificial intelligence of their positions. So really what you try to do is create something that is in between: that combines experiencial history, takes away the gut level animosity that keeps them from meeting, and adds enough verisimilitude through technology that they can hash out issues, and get back to the so-called real world.

One of the things that Virilio asks in Bunker Archaeology, at the end of the first essay—which is republished in The Virilio Reader (Blackwells, 1998, ed. James Der Derian)—is ‘by the way, who invented Peace?’ As we know, alongside Kant when he writes his treatise on perpetual peace lies Clausewitz who takes war as a societal model, if not the very engine of history. What seems to have happened — when we think about virtualization — is a blurring of these positions, war and peace, so that now we no longer know in which state we’re in, or which is better than the other. Foucault, of course, also critiqued an overbearing politics of tranquility imposed from above from what was termed in the 1700s as the police. Virtual technologies seem to allow us to further blur the lines between war and peace, and further question whether peace is a solution to war; or at least bring to attention the dangers of winning wars in advance of the battle (which is what virtual technologies seem most to used for; they’re actually not so good in the context of “real war”). Is there any way for ordinary people like me and you resist this blurring, and its attendant dangers?
It is interesting you use this example of the police, because I think you’re right. A lot of people here — at Ars Electronca — have been arguing about the role of the military. But increasingly the military is seeking out a policing role. Technology allows them to intervene in civil society. What we traditionally conceive of as war — being organized violence between nation states — is clearly devolving into new forms, often invested within civil society; what Virilio calls “endocolonization”. It’s a fusing of peace and security, and this is what Virilio is trying to resist. All too often in the discourse of security peace is simply the absence of war. Now, how do you construct something which is based on a negativity? This is one place where the virtual can play a very positive role. Because the virtual, according to Deleuze, is not in opposition to reality. It’s in opposition to the actual. The virtual, according to Deleuze, is based on pure difference: it doesn’t have the same relationship as reality does to possibilities. It has a very creative constitutive relationship to the event. And so what you can do is use — now that we have the means — the virtual to make peace, and take these creative leaps, but at least it’s not based on the pure negativity of security discourse.

One of the things that Virilio suggests is that this move toward a domestic, or civic role for the military has long been in preparation. He sees this civic role as the last phase of the war machine: the idea of the war of preparation — Pure war, total war — which is internalized in modern society. So the endpoint of the military — which was in fact always its starting point — is essentially the control of civil security. It seems, at least, with this discourse of information war, we’re still laboring under this illusion of the external enemy, without coming to terms with the possibility that the first object of military intelligence is the internal population. All of this money is being spent in war-gaming, simulations, and so on, which can all be applied to a domestic insurrection. And yet this cannot be stated publicly. Are we being fooled by a mass dissuasion, or are external threats still important to the high command?
I wouldn’t put it quite in the terms of agency that you do; that the military is choosing to take a more internal pacification role. I think its one of these cases where the discourse is lagging behind new realities. Now, there’s always going to be this give and take between the extent to which a discourse shapes reality and reality determines discourse, but as I think some of the best students of transformation have demonstrated, is that it’s in periods of great cleavage between reality and the discourses which are supposed to help us understand it — what we may call the structures of experience — that’s when crisis arrives. This point about states of emergency that Benjamin talks about. What you have to do is mine those emergencies, because there’s are also — as we know — opportunities within the dangers that they present. So yes, I think there is this internalization of threat, because for one we’ve lost our most significant threat — the Soviet Union — which means we’ve lost the “we” behind the statement we have lost the Soviet threat. So many of these tactics and strategies of war-gaming are about maintaining the “we” in light of the lack of the “them”. So to that extent I’ll agree with your synopsis of the situation. That yes, there’s a weird disfunctional disjuncture of military planning; that it almost seems to be fishing for an enemy. Even to the extent to which, for instance, when I go and observe some war games, they make up these ludicrous enemies. They take them from Marx brothers movies; “Freedonia”, and so on. Here we are sitting on the Danube drinking our Ouzo and honoring the Turks who came up the Danube, and at the same time the 1st Armoured Division that crossed this river, up in Germany, is doing war games about invasions involving characters from a Marx brothers film. Either the war gamers have a remarkable sense of humor — which I doubt — or they’re really hard pressed to come up with a political, and politic, enemy at the moment.

What I find strange is that this cannot be any surprize to anybody. When Reagan stumped up the military budget and ripped America out of its possible economic slump, it was pretty clear that the end point was going to be the dissolution of the Soviet Union …
Well … first of all … the locution that you’ve chosen here reveals a tendency we should all avoid. When marxists say it is no surprize, what are they really saying? That we have the correct vision that allow us to interpret history in such a way that we can take pragmatic action. Now, that locution might have been effective, I think, against some of the material forces that they were up against at the turn of the century, that gave rise to this empire of the Soviet Union. Let’s face it: I think it’s always a surprize that change happens, and how it happens. And such we shouldn’t put a gloss on it, sort of ex-post facto, in this fashion. I think we’re living in a world in which our best hope is for contingency, for the contingency of surprise. And try to be flexible enough both of mind and of governance to not fear surprise, to not fear the unknown, not to fear the contingent, but to respond to it in a way that Ronald Reagan could not; which is flexibility, and if necessary dump the old paradigm. It took us years — we still haven’t gotten rid of the national security discourse of the Cold War. It went through several transmutations, be it the drug war, be it the attempt the create the Chinese as the next threat. What it means is getting rid of the pretext that we can get rid of surprise. Because, if anything, people took 1989 and turned what was a remarkably creative event into just one more — as Bob Keohane put in a famous conference at Cornell — as one more data-point. So who cares? It was one data-point among many; how could it be considered significant?

I guess what I had in mind though … Well … it seems to me — and this might be a naïve view — that the event of the collapse of the Soviet Union was predictable insofar as one takes a broad view of the trajectory of Western culture. We’re not just talking of a security discourse, but security in its broadest sense, which is to do with the internal constitution, regulation, reproduction of the state. It seems to me that the Cold war was a classic war of position within an overarching consensus; this being rationalized, scientific, disciplinary productivist state. Capitalist versus communist doesn’t really matter if the rational and disciplined basis of the state is broadly the same. Given this, the Cold war becomes merely a war of information over the means not the ends of a certain strategic outlook; that which is both necessary for — and a function of — the modern state. For sure one thing is certain: both the Soviet Union and the United States were modern states. One still is. What remains to be explained is the disappearance of the other. How it looks to me confirms your notion of the contingent, but at the same time seems clearly also to confirm the very nature of modern states in general; that above all they are accumulators not of resources and capital, or even people, but power. For by the early 1980s a window opens up: crisis sweeps across the economies of the world, and in order to retain power — both structural and relational — the United States did what it always did, which was to pump the military-industrial complex. But something new and unprecedented enters: the new idea that the Cold war could be won; or even more precisely, that it ought to be won. Until then people were happy with the balance; or least leaders were, for everyone else lived under the terrible threat of nuclear annihilation. The extremity of the now global economic situation produces such forces that all cards have to be cashed: Reagan upsets the whole cart, unwrites a whole decade of détente, and possibility of “winning” is thrown on the table as the cost of stablizing the American economy. My point is that it was clear — or I suggest it had to have been — from the moment the choice was made to save the American economy through a massive injection of Pentagon dollars that the result would be the disintegration of the Soviet Union. You see, what I’m suggesting is that the Cold war was a victim of globalization. It was a victim, but nobody killed it: the Americans didn’t win it — I’m not even sure they’d have wanted to. The extremity of economic slowdown — remember Marxists were talking everywhere of a structural crisis of capital—coupled with the ever more developed interconnection of economies — both from North to South, but also from South to North — produced a situation in which something had to give. America choose. It choose the death of the Soviet Union. It did so because it is an advanced democracy, and everyone there was complaining about gas prices. Democracy and globalization killed the Soviet Union. But the real winner was the universal state.
I could agree with much of the analysis … but the flaw, in my view, is that you attribute too much intelligence to the state. Raison d’etat, reason of state, is the great myth. I think that Meinecke did a wonderful job at looking at how raison d’etat changes in historical periods. You have the raison d’etat of the absolute monarch . You have the raison d’etat of democracy. And many people have slammed Meinecke for being too harsh on his interpretation of raison d’etat and democracies: he’s very critical of it, people call him an elitist, it’s too amorphous and too diffuse to be even called reason. But I think he’s on to something here. Part of the reason why its very difficult to build resistance against the very effects which you have just described, is that it’s a remarkably diffuse, amorphous body which produces these effects. You, a couple of times, said ‘the United States caused this’, ‘the military caused that’, ‘Reagan did this’. I can’t help being reminded of that Saturday Night Live sketch — as someone from outside the US your probably never saw it. I think it was Phil Hartman, who died recently, playing Reagan. Reagan has got all these girl scouts around him and he’s saying, ‘Oh, I’m so glad to see you representing the best of America. Please here accept this tribute’. And so then the aides usher out the girl scouts. As soon as the girl scouts go he’s snapping out orders to all his aides, ‘What’s the value of the yen? We have to immediately bolster the dollar. Okay, what’s going on in Yemen? I want you to send two thousand troops there tomorrow.’ It’s this idea of Reagan as excusing his senile-ridden state as a means of pulling the wool over the eyes of America. Well, since Reagan in his last press conference he ever gave argued that the only way you could ever have this global governance you’ve been describing is if aliens invaded, I get the effect of Reagan as more the latter view, that this was a pre-senile presidency. That in some ways they got lucky. Some places they created egregious human rights violations, in Latin America. It’s not to avoid responsibility for these actions, or to give credit. But you should do both. Did they concoct Star Wars to beggar the Soviet Union? — Yeah, to be sure there are dark ideologues within the Reagan administration who did, but there were also some rationalists who said, no, it won’t work—who were wrong, of course. And then there were others who thought it was a bad idea within the CIA. So it’s not quite a monolith — and I know you know this — and finding agents is probably the greatest task of any social critic, but it does make our work harder, and I think we should recognize that.

By way of a quick response, I think one of the last positions I would take would be that Reagan, or “the government”, or whoever was on the National Security Council, had a monopoly of information. In a sense, I think this is the revolution that was enacted by Napoleon, in that precisely what becomes important is a power over life operated at the level of — indeed springing up from — the mundane. It seems to me that the strategy that was used was not first and first a “military” — I mean in the way that typically scholars of international relations conceive the term — but “strategic” in a broader way; as I say, to do with securing the American economy in a context of transnational turbulence. It was the test given to the (American) commercial economy which called it to account, tested it’s resolve, and made necessary a kind of win or lose contest between two models of essentially the same ends. These two models being the commercial, or consumer economy on the one hand, and the command, or planned economy on the other. As I say, they were not opposites; as the mere existence of the “military-industrial complex” is testament. If that wasn’t a planned, or command economy I’m not sure what is. And beyond that similarity, the forms of the two power systems of which these economic models were part — the Soviet Union and the United States — were not fundamentally different in the essence of their make-up. Or at least the differences (democratic, autocratic, etc., depending on the critic and the ideology at stake) were weighed against all kinds of fundamental similarities: the both exhibited attributes of exclusionary practices (prisons, asylums, etc.); they both exhibited attributes of training and welfare (schools, hospitals, universities, etc.); they both exhibited attributes of a concern with security and defense (police forces, militaries, complex systems of surveillance and correction, etc.). That one was “communist” and the other “capitalist” is incidental to the fundamental similarities I’m trying to highlight. But that aside, the turbulence of the late 1970s put these two “means models” in a death grip with each other. It happens that historically the United States was in a better position to deflect the turbulence that was the Soviet Union — most probably because in being instrumental in the opening up of the capital markets, especially the Euromarkets, it had been largely responsible for the unleashed turbulence. But no matter that, it was in a position to win, and whether it was a difficult decision or not — a decision to lose, or let go, the comfortable structure of bipolarity—the fact is the United States choose to dissolve the bipolar system.
I think it’s indisputable that Reagan’s election, and what followed, resulted in a military Keynesianism—the whole priming of the pump through massive government spending which because of his ideology, could never have been done for social programs. So there was a coincidence of the ideology of the hollow army, the need to pump up the economy, and his pretty die hard anti-communist beliefs that produced the meta-paradigm for the Reagan revolution. So I agree with you. I think military Keynesianism was definitely operating on a rational level, amongst many of his policymakers.

If they were and they gave away bipolarity for multipolarity, what kind of deterrence against war has replaced the bipolar nuclear one? Is the atomic bomb being replaced by an informational one? Are telematics being used to keep people — and other states — in line, in the same way nuclear dissuasion did? Is the future of cybernetics to be seen in a kind of “cyber-deterrence” to be employed by the state?
It’s not only deterrence. I think it’s quite possible to use infowar in a kind of ju-jitzu way, or as a method of resistance. But the requires you to be as mobile, as flexible, and certainly as media-savvy as the state has become, as the government has become, as the White House has become. And unfortunately, just like generals fight the last war, a lot of the social movements with which we identify with tend to be like these old generals fighting the last war. This is a war of maneuver unlike what Gramsci meant. It’s a war where you have to be willing to concede that you’re not going to have time to develop a story about the truth of the matter, a la Norm Chomsky. Instead, you’re going to have to develop a counter-simulation to the simulations that are surfeit, that are in super-abundance at time’s crisis.

Is it possible to do that without becoming a state machine?
(Laughing) … Yeah! Certainly you have to have some access to alternative media, or even be able to get on and get a counter-narrative going. I think Edward Said has been very effective at this. In his own way, Christopher Hitchens. But it has to be done more at a local, molecular level. So far it’s be done pretty much primetime. And there the choke-points are too narrow and really too arbitrary to allow a mass message to ever get out. And we could go into the whole idea of what the web means, what new media means for disseminating information, or information warfare. But just like Third World tyrants have learned from the Gulf War certain lessons, like ‘get your hands on a nuclear bomb, or a chemical weapon’, I think people who want to resist war have to learn those lessons as well, and be ready to apply new techniques and new technologies with what Paul Virilio called ‘pure dromology’.

Is our aim to resist war? You know, when I read through Paul Virilio’s work, or I listen to the words of writers like Michel Foucault, I tend to conclude that it’s not actually about resisting war per se, but making war a personal thing, insofar as it becomes a negotiation — constantly — of your individual existence. I become more skeptical of universal peace than of life lived as war. Is it possible to reject the state discourse and use of war without at the same time resigning oneself to a state constituted and useful practice of peace? Afterall, what does the state want but a happy peaceful populace?
Yeah, that’s a sham. Besides what Foucault identified as the greatest truth about power — that every form of power creates its own resistance, every form of resistance presupposes power — in the actual doing of it, this is where the greatest requirement is probably taxing our most atrophied aspect of our being. Which is our ability to be creative and poetic when it comes to the ever predictable forms of oppression; be it the repressions that take place on a mental level — a decline in wages, an increase in the hours we all have to work, etc — or many others. What it means is you have to resist not on an event by event, but a day by day encounter with others and the world.

Virtuality. Rapidity. Globalism. Universalism. Not quite the field of dreams we were told they would be. Indeed, Virilio argues the reverse; the counter-world into which we’re slipping is actually incarcerating us. Not content to destroy dimension we’re now set on eradicating duration; the two in their absence defining the ‘no-place’ of light-speed existence (cyberspace, cyberpace). This ‘slip’, argues Virilio, is felt not only by civilians. The codification of real space, that until our own century was the first principle of urban planning (infrastructure) and population control (biopolitics), is now giving way to the urgency of managing real time (the ‘infrastructure’), with its own array of blockages and asperities, viruses and delinquencies. From a culture of imperial geophysics (the politics of territory; its regularization and mapping) we pass into the ‘state of emergency’ of chronographics (ubiquity, immediacy, information intensity); all of us passive witnesses to the radical recasting of governance and citizenship alike.

This passivity is, for Virilio, latent within information technology. Now that everything arrives on the screen without the incumbent having even to leave, only the control of the real instant will remain; an illusive control that we have already passed over to the domain of sensors, captors and various microprocessing interfaces (DataGlove, DataSuit, trackpad and so on) allowing us to “meet at a distance” (telepresence); indeed, see, hear and feel at a distance (television, teleaudition, tele-tactition). This new generalized remote control, made possible by electromagnetic, now optoelectronic communications, is revolutionizing – argues Virilio – man’s relation to himself, to others, to technology, to politics, and most particularly to the planet itself. Where the last century’s revolution in transportation gave rise to an age of generalized mobility, our own tools of instantaneous transmission are reversing the tendency. With the dissolution of the scale of our human environment (prefigured by the telescope and radicalized by the satellite), the very reality of the world is reduced to nil (or next to nothing), leading inevitably to a ‘catastrophic sense of incarceration now that humanity is literally deprived of horizon’ (p. 41). Having lost our sense of the journey in the commutation of space during the industrial age, we now lose departure in the age of electromagnetics and the speed of light.

‘Behavioral inertia’ sets in. A rigor mortis all-too-evident in the soon-to-be-ideal ‘terminal-citizen’; ‘decked out to the eyeballs with interactive prostheses based on the pathological model of the ‘spastic’, wired to control his or her domestic environment without having physically to stir’ (p. 20). In obliterating space, this ‘armchair navigator’ (p. 124) replicates the experience of the astronaut in breaking through the vertical littoral of universal attraction – poking a hole through the sky – only to find that ‘beyond Earth’s pull there is no space worthy of the name, but only time’ (p. 3); a universal inert time, patently self-evident to the passengers of Apollo I1, landing on the lunar region named so aptly thereafter, Tranquillity Base. Back here on Earth, optoelectronics, having exhausted all possible forward acceleration (nothing moves faster than light), will have secured for us all a kind of brutal tranquillity. Walled-in at home with our various interactive apparatuses – a veritable life-support system – and soon even an ‘electroergonomic double’ (the Datasuit, our virtual alter ego), we find ourselves the unwitting victims of a domestic enslavement identical to that of the para- or quadriplegic (p. 16). Our only salvation is to be found in illusion, in ‘flight from the reality of the moment.’² Hence the masochistic popularity of the ‘virtual dimension’; which is of course nothing of the kind, ‘existing’ as it does quite literally nowhere. The circle is squared. A perfect panopticism where the inmate runs to the prison guard for protection against the institution within which he finds himself!

A radical dislocation, indeed physical removal from the space of politics and political existence. An individualism, as Virilio suggests, that has ‘little to do with a liberation of values’ (p.11). ‘Service or servitude, that is the question’ (p. 20) No one, of course, is informed in advance of this informational downside, nor of the immediate physiological pathology of having ‘everything within one’s reach’: the surreptitious obsolescence rendered on the body (in particular the muscles, but soon also memory and consciousness) through the proliferation of ‘remote control’. Much of Open Sky is in fact devoted to this very question; the revolution that follows that of transportation and transmission (bear in mind that we’ve scarcely come to terms with either of these, especially the latter). This ‘third revolution’ – that of transplantation – is, for Virilio, a natural consequence of the commutation of real space and the universalization of real time associated with the proliferation of transportation and transmission technologies respectively. Having nowhere left to go by way of extension, and no time by which to get there in duration, we find suddenly an inversion of the technological trajectory. Reductionism and miniaturization take over where networking and urbanization left off; mechanical communication supplanted by ‘electromagnetic proximity’.

The profound nature of this inversion is, for Virilio, seen best in the microphysical invasion of our very bodies by the ‘nanomachines’ of biotechnology. This invasion – of all kinds of stimulators, grafts and implants, quite apart from the usual array of prostheses – is reversing, he argues, the very principle that has hitherto determined the social history of technology. Instead now of inhabiting machinery (the motor car, the elevator, the moving walkway, etc.) for the sake of conserving one’s own energy (what Virilio calls ‘the law of least effort’), now – in the age of telepresence – it is energy that instantaneously inhabits andgoverns us (p. 54). The “tragedy of the fusion of the ‘biological’ and the ‘technological” (p. 57) is thus that we lose – potentially – the very being of intentionality. Convenient for those that profit, politically, socially and economically from this “total, unavowed disqualification of the human in favor of the definitive instrumental conditioning of the individual.”³ We shouldn’t forget that such ‘self-reproducing automata’ were the very dream of cybernetics in the first place.⁴ And hasn’t the idea of ‘zero-intelligence’ not gained a certain currency in mainstream economics?⁵

Such coincidences are hard to swallow. But those that govern might be losing out also. As Virilio writes; the ‘journey without a trajectory’ becomes ‘fundamentally uncontrollable’ (p. 19). Like the Formula I racing cars outgrowing the capacity of the circuits upon which they compete, so information at light speed is not only eliminative of the civitas. It also provokes a radical insecurity at the very heart of the pentagon of power; though who, we might ask, is better equipped to cope with such ‘information shocks’? The possibility nonetheless is opened, argues Virilio, of a ‘generalized accident’ supplanting the ‘specific accident’ that has hitherto dogged our experience of rapidity (the shipwreck, the derailment, the car crash). Though good news for no one, it is interesting to speculate as to what use this new social threat (the information bomb that replaces the atomic one) will be put, perhaps not so much by the terrorist-hacker as by the State itself. Could it be that the accident of instantaneous interactivity is working as a new form of social deterrence, akin to that which accompanied the nuclear umbrella; ensuring the hyperproductivity of whole societies through a constant regime of displacement for the fear of being ‘caught’ in the wrong time and place as the accident happens? Not so much a vision of the sedate paraplegic as a hyper-frantic DataGlove making all sorts of weird gestures in the effort to endlessly delocalize the individual who was in fact nowhere anyway.

What Virilio proposes in response to all this–to the desertification of the world’s surface (inherently dematerializing duration), to the inertia-point of collision with real-time (entailing not only behavioral immobilism but the end of history itself), to the inward turn of technology on the human organism, not to mention the virtualization of perception and the frightful demographic consequences of not only acting at a distance but now even loving at a distance (cybersex)–is a radical new ecology and ethics of perception. New, for as Virilio sees it, environmentalism has consistently failed to question the ‘man-machine dialogue’, and most especially the birth of machinic temporality. By way of a corrective, Virilio asks that we engage the event at the speed it occurs; bringing forth not only a ‘true sociology’ of interactivity, but a ‘public dromology’ of the pace of public life (p. 23). A ‘grey ecology’ (‘speed destroys color’) would no longer deny the pollution of the ‘lifesize’ or ‘scope’ of the planet – or matter in general – by our various tools of technological proximity. On the other hand, an ‘ecology of images’ would mark a ‘conscientious objection’ to the hold of the public image by photo-cinematographic and video-infographic “seeing machines’. For with the speed of light we are not only talking of the de-location of the event (the confusion of here and there, now and then), but also a radical visual distortion of the event. As Virilio reminds us, until our own century man’s perception of existence – of time and space, the Earth in its detail – was bound, acknowledged or not, to universal gravitation: precisely the force by which we measure the world, seeing with our own eyes the near and the far, the high and the low, depth and perspective, extension and duration, dimension and position. An ‘ethics of perception’ engaging the event necessarily would question the ‘immediacy’ of an image whose speed far outstrips the ‘escape velocity’ hitherto necessary to launch a vehicle off the Earth and into the stratosphere (now infosphere); breaking open the sky, stripping all weight (and meaning), a radical ‘flattening’ of reality and perception.

Taken together Virilio’s grey ecology and ‘hyper-vigilance regarding immediate perception’ constitute a bold reaffirmation not only the life of the planet, but our own lives, our memories, the anima of our souls; everything that distinguishes us from mere automata. The right not to be rushed. The right to find distances – the true measure of the world – in one’s own heart. The right to screen-out motorized appearances; to affirm one’s freedom of perception and imagination. The right to protect the meaning of our immediate environment, our loved ones, the very bodies around us, from the stream of sequences rendering reality less than relative, if not irrelevant by optoelectronic fetishism (p. 90). Ultimately, Open Sky is about a kind of politics that is not so virtual. What Virilio ends up taking on – and he says as much himself – is the whole question of being; ‘of being hereand now, being located in this world’ (p. 67). His re-reading via ‘dromology’ (his own neologism for the ‘science of speed’) is both courageous and profound, taking its place alongside the nomadic materialism of the likes of Deleuze, the pataphysical irony of Baudrillard, as well as the microphysical, resolutely political investigations of Foucault, as one of the most important of all rethinkings of the nature of the question of man and technology.

It is this rethinking that will secure Virilio’s reputation as one of the most innovative and challenging writers of our time. In the shorter term, Open Sky is yet further evidence of the practical and immediate significance of this rethinking: taking on, as it does, the present in the name of returning truth; liberating the reader from the radical dissimulations of the age of information; swimming back stream in the defense of society. When the stakes are so high – the future political view of community, the very horizon of the species one can only hope that the voice of Paul Virilio will not be lost in the endless noise of media pollution faced by us all in this age of universal communication.

just imagine a complete and universal order embracing
all humanity, in a word, a state of perfect civilian order.
Take my word for it, it’s sheer entropy, rigor mortis,
a landscape on the moon, a geometrical plague ..
— Robert Musil

This immobilization of the populace — this ‘freezing’ of time and space — was not only an emergency measure. It was also the first principle of the ‘correct means of training’ (the psycho-politico/physical organization of the human type itself) witnessed foremost on the military courtyeard, and writ large across the spaces of early-modernity. ‘Disciplina militaris restitua’; the legend that is borne on the coin commemorating the symbolic importance for the age, of Louis XIVs first military review, whereupon, also engraved, as Foucault described, stands the king,

This incredible reversal of function (the inanimate becomes animate, the mobile becomes sedentary) is emblematic of the security-aesthetic of the pre-classical age.¹ The pose of the frozen soldier gave the sign and correlative disciplines to define not only the “state of emergency” but the state of normality, traversed throughout with surveillance and hierarchy, classification and writing; the regularization of power over segmented bodies. At the critical phase in the birth of our world, these imaginaries overlap, repeat and converge, filtering down into the image and the dream of the ‘utopia of the perfectly governed city’; secured not by the threat or the practice of dispersion, but an individualized inertia of meticulous discipline ..

The discovery of motion

It is important however to see this as an ideal, for in practice by the end of the 17th century the broad technology of power that underpinned the emerging modern society was already beginning to rethink its own modus operandi; the result of a profound culmination of transformative impulses, practices and fragments of knowledges stretching back at least as far as the 16th and 15th, if not 14th and 13th centuries, but finding a home in the governmental requirements of ascendant modernity.² In The Will to Know, Foucault described in outline the nature of these requirements, and more importantly, their consequence. ‘Since the classical age’, he wrote,

Witness then the emergence of a power bent on generating trajectories, lines of flight, life-forces, rather than incarcerating them. From where did such a profound revolution spring?

Foucault’s own suggestions lie within the broad parameters of the theme that would dominate his writings in the mid- to late-1970s: his analysis of security and populations in the ‘age of bio-power’. Two poles of intervention of this ‘power over life’ emerge in Foucault’s account. The first centres on the ‘body as a machine’; an ‘anatomo-politics’ aimed to extort individual energies and optimize capabilities (without, however, ‘making them more difficult to govern’). The second centres on the ‘adjustment of the phenomena of population’ (its very broadest trajectory) to the material constraints of the state in question; a ‘bio-politics’ focused on demography, the synchronization of resources and citizens, the social constitution of contracts and interests, wherein the health and well-being of the civitas became a ‘general objective of policy’ and domain of investment. Rather than be satisfied with the archaeology of the ‘dark, but firm web of our experience’, Foucault increasingly turned his attention to the ‘absolutely conscious strategy’ attested in both political texts and the ‘mass of unknown documents’ constitutive of the question of government; its historical politics, techniques and practices.

Foucault’s genealogy begins with the birth of statistics (the mathematics of state).³ It was this domain of knowledge that first attempted to tabulate the unpredictable nature of the body’s forces in order that they be made probable. For Foucault this science finds its zenith in the notion of ‘reason of state’ (in the writings of among others, Botero, Rosello, Piccolomini, and Segni); the Italian revolution in the language and practice of politics, where the greatness of cities and states is linked to the strength and productivity of the population.⁴ The ‘great eighteenth-century demographic upswing in Western Europe’ — no doubt in part a consequence of this new concern with the collective power of people — adds only urgency to already established necessity for co-ordinating and integrating bodies into the apparatuses of production and adequate power mechanisms, whereby,

With this subtle shift from observation to intervention we pass from the age of ‘fearing’ to the age of ‘facilitating’, populations. Statistica gives way to political arithmetik. Annotation gives way to adding-up. This new accomodation with the once regarded ‘dangers’ of the mass is epitomised best in the writings of the Austrian and Prussian “consulate administrators” — whose work was known to contemporaries as Oeconomie, policey-wissenschaft, or ‘police science’ — domains mysteriously forgotten in our usual histories of the rise of the West; a fact all the more curious as, in the words of Marc Raeff,

In many respects the forerunners to ‘political economy’, Seckendorff (1656, 1693), Wolff (1719, 1728), Dithmar (1731), Darjes (1749, 1753, 1756, 1776), Zinke (1751), Moser (1758), Bergius (1767-74), and Mueller (1790), among others, aimed to produce a new combinatory technology of population; ‘cameralistics’. To make individuals ‘useful for the world’ in such a way that ‘their development also fosters the strength of the state’ was the sole aim of these lost registers.⁵

This ‘strength of the state’ was (importantly) conceived in two ways: one the one hand, as the material result of the harnessing and channelling of energies and trajectories (industry) into the productive economy, and on the other, as the securitization of governance through workfare, occupation and the incentive to profit (enrichment). Productivity, diligence and happiness emerged as the objectives of the mode of government that came to dominate the classical age and inscript itself into the utilitarianism of modern liberalism. This new mode of governing — simultaneously differentiated (in the classification and organization of bodies) and aggregated (in the policing of rhythms and processes of populations) — is a true innovation of quite incredible proportion; a kind of kinetic arithmetic, or constitution of useable forces. A universal power of engendering; at least in ambition.

Kinetic arithmetic

‘The breeding of human beings’ as Martin Heidegger reminds us, ‘is not a taming in the sense of a suppression and hobbling of sensuality; rather, breeding is the accumulation and purification of energies in the univocity of the strictly controllable ‘automatism’ of every activity’. Not least the most important innovation of the classical age was the emergence of a comprehensive practical reason that would take as its focus the knowledge and facilitation of this automatism. Police science was among the foremost in this aim. Finding inspiration in a whole array of ‘advances’, from Leonardo’s anatomical notes and drawings, Versalius’ first public autopsy and De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), Descartes’ declaration that the body is no more than an ensemble of ‘moving machines’, Hobbes’ assertion that the universe is ‘corporeal’ (and indeed his own fascination with motion⁶ … ), this practical reason heralds nothing less than a new spatio-temporal imagination of human existence: the appropriation of the world of men and things built upon the geometrical classification that had dominated the pre-classical/post-Renaissance age, known to everyone universally as ‘mechanics’.

‘Mechanism’, as Jonathan Sawday has so rightly described,

This new physical body of regular motion finds its home in the body-politic of the disciplined and tranquil society. With progressions in the knowledge of planetary movements, the psychology of perception and duration, the social diffusion of the clock, the mathematical, cartographic and anatomical revolutions, a new interest in the possibilities and aesthetics of uniformity was born. With the coming together of the historical sciences (which as Cassirer has reminded us is much more an 18th than a 19th century phenomena), the notion of the kinetic and dynamic trajectory of society through time and space — the awareness of the very possibility of molding populations into giant automata of movement — fast came to define the parameters of ‘public safety’, good order, and the functioning society, measured and controlled, regular and real; made to obey the rules of the world’s movements.

In addition to the physical body let us not forget the inward reorganization of the human type itself; by which I mean the soul and the conscience, and the seals of ‘responsibility’. For not the least part of the kinetic and biopolitical revolutions of the classical age was the burning into memory, as Nietzsche would have it, of the very possibility of acting within a structure of promises and contracts. The mind — as he so forcefully describes in The Genealogy of Morality — that can project itself into the historical future. ‘To breed an animal’ he writes, ‘that can make promises — is that not the paradoxical task that nature has set itself in the case of man? Is it not the real problem regarding man?’ That the kinetic and biopolitical revolutions would become linked with the rise of modern capitalism becomes clear: the making of promises — or transcending time, or of launching the mind in and through time — is only possible when the human ‘animal’ has become, in Nietzsche’s words, ‘calculable, regular, necessary’. This making of men calculable is precisely what political arithmetic took as its task.

The burning into memory — what Nietzsche calls ‘mnemo-technics’ — of the ability to promise was, as Nietzsche described, achieved for hundreds of years by the scaffold, the stocks, the pillory, or the rack. Yet by the end of the 18th century — as Foucault would describe with such efficiency and precision in Discipline and Punish — new requirements were being generated. And so we might rename Nietzsche’s mnemotechnics, mnemo-kinetics. The will becomes indistinguishable from the trajectory of contracts. Responsibilty ensures the memory will never stray too far from the pressures of the future: a future of conscience and promises, burned into the psyche by pursuasion and coercion. Suddenly whole masses of men — the state — can be conceived as ‘progressive’; synchronized according to expediency, and put into motion at the the will of the govenor. Note in this regard the remarkable words of Johann von Justi (1755), Prussian cameral administrator, writing in the middle of the 18th century, summarising precisely the nature of the great displacement effected in the name of the grandeur of the state. ‘A properly constituted state’ he writes, ‘must be exactly analogous to a machine, in which all the wheels and gears are precisely adjusted to one another; and the ruler must be the foreman, and the main-spring, or the soul .. which sets everything in motion’.

Frederick the Great, the ’meticulous king of small machines’, was surely the first statesman to bring together the two themes that would dominate the historical horizon of the modern period; bio-power and moving-power (mnemo-technics and mnemo-kinetics). By the turn of the 19thC these themes were running in parallel, a fact of which Foucault seemed well aware,

A ‘collective, obligatory rhythm’ was emerging; a ‘meticulous meshing’. ‘We have passed’, Foucault continues,

What we find then is the gradual emergence of a ‘science of time’ mediating man’s relation to motion within the confines of acceptable limits to reason and order defined in the movements of the natural world and celestial heavens and inscripted into the day–to-day realities of the commercial and industrial economy. The condemnation of idleness as the ‘source of all disorders’, culminating in the obligation to work (madness as ‘the absence of work’⁸ … ) is surely the most conspicuous indication of the links newly forged between motion, good order and the individual. As Mumford describes, ‘Time as pure duration, time dedicated to contemplation and reverie, time divorced from mechanical operations, was treated as a heinous waste’. In this, as described by Jonathan Sawday, ‘the “power” of the soul gave way to a sequence of mechanical movements .. the silent forces of springs, wheels, and cogs, operating as a contrived whole .. The modern body had emerged: a body which worked rather than existed’.

The implications were both enormous and diffuse. In Flesh and Stone, Richard Sennett takes up the point of how these references to motion and capital accumulation came to define the very design of early-modern city. New principles of urban planning and policing emerge based upon new medical metaphors of ‘circulation’ and ‘flow’ (Harvey, 1628, Willis, 1684). The health of the body becomes the comparison against which the greatness of cities and states will be measured. The ‘veins’ and ‘arteries’ of the new urban design are to be freed from all sources of possible blockage. ‘Enlightenment planners’, writes Sennett,

The regularisation of cleanliness and sanitation, and the removal of madmen, beggars and idlers from the highway can all be related to the question of the efficiency of movement that dominated the historical imaginary of the classical age. As Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1748) would remark, only organized matter was endowed with the principle of motion. We may also add that matter endowed with the principle of motion was increasingly regarded as ‘ordered’. Expressed with perfection in the words of Guillaute (a French police officer writing in 1749), ‘Public order will reign if we are careful to distribute our human time and space by a severe regulation of transit; if we are attentive to schedules as well as to alignments and signal systems; if by environmental standardization the entire city is made transparent.’⁹ When transparency and transport come together in Guillaute’s words; when mnemo-technics joins mnemo-kinetics in the constitution of order; this is when we reach the threshold of the world of which we are still prisoners; the world brought to being on the back of the classical dream of the tranquil society — achieved, despite its violence, in the universalization of societies founded on the dual daemonic principle: ‘facilitate life, facilitate speed’. Forget about post-modernity: let’s excavate the birth of biokinetic society.

The birth of biokinetic society

If Frederick was the foreman of this newly constituted machine-in-motion, Napoleon would surely become it’s soul. If we need any further confirmation that the genealogy of kinetics runs hand-in-hand with the state we need look no further than the subject of Goya’s Collosus; the true addition to Hobbes’ Leviathan. More than anyone prior, Napoleon would embody the next phase of history, defined not so much by the ‘art of governing’, as the ‘art of motorizing’.¹⁰

Under the Committee of Public Safety the levée en masse is established providing the first clear model of modern conscription. Perfected by the hand of Bonaparte, the energy tapped from the newly mobile populations was unmatched in history. And not only in warfare did the principle of kinetic force come to dominate, but also in his Civil Code — the Code Napoléon — of which he claimed the, ‘most compact government with the most rapid circulation and the most energetic movement that ever existed’. All of this was unthinkable without the elaborate ensemble of powers in which the new kinetic state was anchored; the disciplinary codes that would come to define modern governance; its permissions and illegalities, nature and future. Prefigured perfectly in the words of French military reformer Comte de Guilbert,

More than anyone before him Napoleon would understand the real politics of supply. In the measured words of Emerson, ‘Such a man was wanted, and such a man was born; a man of stone .. a worker in brass, in iron, in wood, in earth, in roads, in buildings, in money and in troops .. a master-workman .. with the speed and spring of a tiger in action.’ In Napoleon’s own words, “I am the revolution.” Witness the birth of a new technical, geometric, chronographic imagination of men and things: an ‘unrecognised order of political circulation’, in the words of Paul Virilio, tragically crystallised in the French Revolution, which,

Revolution replaces circulation, automotion supplants motion: the increase in pace acting to secure tranquillity through compulsion; what Paul Virilio has termed so profoundly, the ‘peace of exhaustion’. In looking at the birth of biopower as a kinetic phenomenon, we gain the essence of a possible outline of the political technique through which the ‘problem’ of early modernity (the problem of populations) was transcended and turned to the advantage of the new state that would quite literally march through history. Populations become, from this silent threshold, nothing more than armies at speed; beaten into submission by the very velocity of their lives. With Napoleon, as Will and Ariel Durant have so perfectly described, ‘the ecstasy of liberty yielded to the dictatorship of order’.

The illusion of liberation

Let us imagine before concluding the flagpoints of this history — this geometrical plague of political order — in summary form. In early modernity we find a rabble populace, poorly disciplined, wandering and blighted by the spectres of unreason, idleness and environmental destitution. The aim of political reason — in the context of broader societal transformations (the discovery of order through production, the rise of the money economy, commercialism and early mercantilism¹¹ … ) — is to navigate a course between the extremes of revolution and stagnancy. Having recognised that (in the words of Botero) the ‘true strength of a ruler consists in his people’, political rationality aims also to ‘multiply’ the citizenry as a productive force. A new politics of order, both of detail (looking into men’s souls), and of generality (the new concern with the biology of populations) becomes a technical necessity. Working together, these techniques of intervention (‘anatomo-power’ and ‘bio-power’) produced at the heart of the classical age an initial stasis; seen best in the military courtyard, the hospital, the prison and the school. The power of movement was subject to a territorial codification (in the city, in the workhouse, in the asylum, in the manufactory).

By the beginnings of the 19thC the place of the state and political reason in constituting spaces for existence had been secured, and a second ‘reordering’ could now be effected, heralding perhaps less the age of bio-politics as the age of bio-kinesis. Rather than charting the middle ground between rapidity and stasis, power would aim to ‘release’ the full productive, dynamic efficiency of the (national) population in and through time. ‘Motion’ (or more precisely, motorization¹² … ) had emerged as the destiny and law of a new politics of order. The full equivalence of Virilio’s ‘metabolic vehicles’ to Foucault’s ‘bearers of order’ becomes clear. ‘Dromological power’ — or in Foucault, ‘capillary power’ — had emerged as the practical basis and first principle of capitalist modernity established simultaneously with the apparatus of modern governance. Mobility, in other words, had become simultaneously the means to an illusionary liberation and the means to an all-too-real domination; the accumulation of men running hand-in-hand with the accumulation of movement. Speed was to be taught as a virtue because it has in itself become an incarcerating discipline.

This final threshold — of speed as discipline — indeed finds its birth in the formative years of modernity, and as such is inextricably linked with it. In the words of Richard Sennett, ‘the Enlightenment planner made motion and end in itself.’ No doubt this is when ‘globalization’ (though yet to find its linguistic expression) first emerged as the imaginary endpoint to liberal freedom. Expressed so well in the words of Karl Jaspers, ‘The surface of the world became universally accessible; space capitulated’. Or as Paul Virilio describes in Speed and Politics, ‘the dromocrat’s look .. causes distances to approach.’ An obligation-to-mobility (moving-power) had emerged, that for Virilio this is clearly worrying,

Does this automotion through telepresence not take us back to Foucault’s disease-ridden city, or the military spaces of Louis’ review? ‘Losing one’s soul’, Virilio reminds us, ‘means losing the very being of movement.’ Yet as William Mitchell in City of Bits, has recently approved, ‘As networks and information appliances deliver expanding ranges of services, there will be fewer occasions to go out’. ‘The crowd’, wrote Foucault, ‘a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities’. When considered in the context of the rise of neoliberalism — indeed the liberal-rational capitalist project as a whole — one can surely see the answer to the question that Foucault poses for himself: ‘How is power to be strengthened in such a way that, far from impeding progress, far from weighing upon it with its rules and regulations, it actually facilitates such progress?’ This is surely the true achievement of security: a form of power that simultaneously fixes and makes mobile to the speed of light the malleable body of the ‘terminal-citizen’.

‘If last century’s revolution in transportation’, writes Virilio,

Of this in a very similar thesis Louis Mumford warned us over 25 years ago. As he wrote then,

There is a term in scientific discourse for an object that appears to be moving while actually static. Its called an autokinetic illusion. What can we say about the world being destroyed by dromomania? Is this world in its entirety an autokinetic illusion? Finally to our epigraph: ‘Imagine order’, wrote Robert Musil,

Our current danger is that this plague will triumph not because the town is left open and exposed, but because it is frozen, and we with it, in time and space, becoming little more than prisoners of the utopia of the perfectly governed city.

In fact, there was no “industrial revolution”, but
only a “dromocratic revolution”; there is no democracy,
only dromocracy, there is no strategy, only dromology …
Thus, the related logic of knowing power, or power-
knowledge, is eliminated to the benefit of moving-power
— in other words the study of tendencies, of flows.
— Paul Virilio

So what does this mean? Three implications at least. First, that we may question the precision of Virilio’s dating of the ‘dromological revolution’, and the move to the ‘age of the accelerator’. As this qualification seems to me of interest only in passing I’ll not labour the point. Second, that we ought better to recognise — alongside military ‘dromomaniacs’ — the importance of a whole band of administrators, reformers, bureaucrats and technicians that sought actively to create societies at once suited for speed and tranquillity. This seems to me much more important, both as a corrective to Virilio’s overly militaristic reading of speed, and as a reminder that beneath the politics of speed (indeed, the politics of the military) is ultimately the politics of order. Third, that having better understood the history of man’s experience of power-in-motion over the modern epoch as a whole we may be better prepared to think about how political technology operates in our own immanent present. Taken together — I argue — Virilio and Foucault provide us with a whole battery of concepts with which we can approach the politics of contemporary dominant social realities.

I begin with the question of motion in the early modern period.

Imagining motion in the Classical age

In Madness and Civilization, philosopher Michel Foucault described how the ‘problem of mobility’ was central to the identification and diagnosis of insanity and unreason in the Classical age.¹ Within the popular imaginary, mania was related to an ‘excessive mobility of the fibres’, leading to a lightness in disposition, and melancholia to a congestion and thickening of the blood, and subsequent dullness of character. An episteme of medical perception arose around the question of movement within the body. This episteme was embodied and reflected in a series of practices, suggestions and knowledges aimed to regulate the centre ground between the extremes of rapidity and stasis:

The result, as Foucault described (also later in Discipline and Punish) was the gradual emergence of a ‘science of time’ mediating man’s relation to motion within the confines of acceptable limits to reason and order. The parameters of a whole society were established vis-à-vis the question of ‘movement’.

In Flesh and Stone, Foucault’s friend and collaborator, Richard Sennett, describes how this medical perception of movement came to define the organization of Classical and Baroque urban space. In doing so, Sennett, like Foucault, makes the crucial link between the organization of bodies and that of the broader ‘body-politic’. New principles of city planning and policing were emerging based upon the medical metaphors of ‘circulation’ and ‘flow’.³ The health of the body became the comparison against which the greatness of cities and states would be measured. The ‘veins’ and ‘arteries’ of the new urban design were to be freed from all sources of possible blockage:

The regularisation of cleanliness and sanitation, and the removal of madmen, beggars, vagabonds and idlers from the highway can be related to the question of the efficiency of movement that dominated the historical imaginary of the Classical age.⁵ As Julien Offray de La Mettrie would remark, only organised matter was endowed with the principle of motion.⁶ We may also add that matter endowed with the principle of motion was increasingly regarded as ‘ordered’. What was emerging was a particular relation between politics, space and time. In the words of Guillaute (a French police officer writing in 1749): “Public order will reign if we are careful to distribute our human time and space between the city and the country by a severe regulation of transit; if we are attentive to schedules as well as to alignments and signal systems; if by environmental standardization the entire city is made transparent, that is, familiar to the policeman’s eye.”⁷

Channelling movements

Running parallel to this mapping of the physical body, and the regularisation of the urban landscape, was a third form of motion — a kind of civic pulsation (the actual movement of bodies) — nascent and yet to be controlled. Contrary to common perception, this new civic energy finds its threshold not in the industrial and recreational innovations of the 19th century, but rather in transformations of state and society in the Classical age. Described by Mumford, it is the sixteenth century which marks the emergence of a new era of generalised mobility. The ‘new spirit of society’, he argues: “ .. was on the side of rapid transportation. The hastening of movement and the conquest of space, the feverish desire to ‘get somewhere’, were manifestations of the pervasive will-to-power. ‘The world’, as Stow remarked .. ‘runs on wheels’. Mass, velocity, and time were categories of social effort before Newton’s law was formulated.”⁸ Jacob Burckhardt’s classic study, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, traces this will-to-power back even further to the reconceptualisation of distance and space during the Crusades.⁹ For both, this new spirit could not be explained exclusively in terms of technology, but had to be seen within the context of what Burckhardt would call ‘systematisation’ (through which man would come to recognise himself), or what Mumford more knowingly would term biotechnics (the ways in which man codifies, differentiates and stratifies in establishing mastery over the realm of men and things).¹⁰

What both Mumford and Burckhardt point the way to is a pre-existing politico-administrative, rather than technico-military, history of speed, only in part foregrounded in the works of Paul Virilio. In actual fact — viewed in this way — the genealogy of speed takes on an entirely new dimension identified in the works of Michel Foucault, Gerhard Oestreich, and Brook Blair. In The Will to Know, for instance, Foucault traces the politico-theoretical imagination of what we may call ‘kinetic channelling’: the accumulation and direction of the energies and flows of the populace as a whole. In his classic study, Neostoicism and the early modern state, Oestreich charts a similar ambition in the Netherlands Movement, the revival of stoic values (late 16th century onward), and the rise of the constitutional state. Blair, more recently, has deepened this analysis to consider the advent of what he calls ‘universal productionist order’ and the ‘mass mobilizations’ of the modern epoch of biopower.¹¹

For Foucault, a critical threshold is reached with the genesis and ascendance of concepts and practices of ‘reason of state’. In the lecture, ‘Omnes et Singulatim’, he describes how during the course of the sixteenth century a new principle of ‘civil prudence’ emerged: the populace was to be maximised as a productive force.¹² The making of individuals ‘useful for the world’ became the central objective of political reason.¹³ Within this reason — dominated throughout the early modern epoch by the same physiological metaphors of ‘circulation’ and ‘fluidity’ — the principle of motion was in essence synonymous with the principle of production; of the functioning politico-economic order.

As Foucault was variously at pains to point out, this ‘functioning’ was to depend upon facilitating rather than the subduing the populace. In the words of von Rohr, writing at the turn of the 18thC: “The best means of enriching a land is to take care that many people are drawn into the land, and also that all the subjects though diligent labour may have their support and means of gain.”¹⁴ The metaphor of ‘drawing in’ captures perfectly what Foucault would describe with such effect as the broader transformation taking place: the ‘entry of life into history’ (the passing of the processes of human existence into the realm of knowledge, power and political technology).¹⁵ Underpinning this transformation was the neostoic revival in military discipline and drill embodied in the practices and procedures of Lipsius, Maurice of Nassau, Gustavus and Montecuccoli, and passed on through Eugene, Marlborough, Guibert and Frederick II, to the French Revolutionaries.¹⁶ Before men could be made to run at the enemy, they had first to be taught how to stand in space and time. This disciplinary revival — practised first on the military courtyard, and then in the General Hospital, the workhouse, the almshouse, and later the prison — was the essential first step in mastering and channelling the ‘release’ of energies of the newly ascendant masses, organised and brought forth (called forth even) by a whole range of political theorists and advisers.¹⁷

The image of society emerging was one of a complex of relays, each to be synchronised, made efficient and effective. In the words of 18th century thinker von Justi: “The domestic security of a state consists in such a well-ordered constitution of the same that all parts of the civic body are held in their appropriate correlation, and in the consequent repose .. ”¹⁸ If the ‘civil machine’ achieved a modicum of fluidity, productivity and order would be achieved simultaneously. As described by Immanuel Wallerstein, a new framework was required: “ .. within which individual mobility was possible without threatening hierarchical work-force allocation.”¹⁹ The aims of this process of mobilising and ordering would be expressed throughout the Eighteenth century in a mass of directives, codes and regulations through which modern social contractarianism was practised. “The foundations were laid .. ” writes Hubert Johnson, “ .. for the future development of an entrepreneurial bureaucracy that would, in the next century, work hand in glove with government.”²⁰

Police science and the regularisation of energies

These foundations are found nowhere better than in contemporaneous ‘cameralistic’ writings of Seckendorff, Dithmar, and Darjes, among others. Under the alternative name of ‘police science’, these writings, taken together, embody a commitment to the social order and the emergence of a progress defined in material production. The assurance of motion was, for the cameralists, the surest way to ensure the ‘happiness of the state’. Man at once decentred in the Copernican revolution was recentred at the heart of political economy — or perhaps more precisely, political technology. This recentering had its own implications. Slowly but surely an organic view of society was emerging; one in which the dynamic relations of ‘men and things’ were to be synchronised. Niccolò Machiavelli clearly stands at a threshold here, but it is not until well into the eighteenth century that the parameters of the social order emerging could be recognised, and acted upon. Alongside the ‘system of positivities’ emerging the fields of science, medicine, jurisprudence, and commerce developed an equally important order of knowledge defined not by its space, but its relation to time; what we might call an episteme of conscious mobility.²¹ The new requirements for social order that developed with the turbulence of the money economy in the 15th and 16th centuries had, almost independently, suggested the means by which populations could be at once maximised and minimised.

This episteme is expressed nowhere better than in the actions of the single most successful and influential figure of the period: Frederick II of Prussia. Indeed, so aware it seems was he of the new requirements of conscious mobility (not only in warfare, also in bureaucratic management²² was its rapidity .. His secretaries and ministers testify to the tyrannical discipline which he exercised over his mind and body.  With punctilious regularity he disposed of everything as soon as it came to him .. He was compelled to order his ministers to send reports of no more than two folio pages … The kind was forever threatening officials with disgrace and dismissal if their reports were not drawn up with the utmost brevity.” Walter L. Dorn, ‘The Prussian Bureaucracy in the Eighteenth Century’, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. XLVI (1931), pp. 412-4.] … ) that one imagines that the remarkable words of the cameralist von Justi were written entirely for him: “A properly constituted state must be exactly analogous to a machine, in which all the wheels and gears are precisely adjusted to one another; and the ruler must be the foreman, and the main-spring, or the soul .. which sets everything in motion.”²³ The threshold in the political economy of power at which he stands is so significant that perhaps it is necessary to add to Foucault’s formulation of the ‘birth of biopower’ with the notion of the ‘birth of biokinesis’ (the passing of movement into History, and the realm of political technology).

1789 and the disciplinary/dromological revolution

In the words of Martin Heidegger: “The breeding of human beings is not a taming in the sense of a suppression and hobbling of sensuality; rather, breeding is the accumulation and purification of energies in the univocity of the strictly controllable ‘automatism’ of every activity.”²⁴ With Frederick we find the first statesman of the modern period to bring together the two themes that were emerging to dominate an historical horizon: biopower and dromological power. It is true that at the turn of the 19thC these elements were in any case running parallel. Foucault seemed well aware of this:

A ‘collective, obligatory rhythm’ was emerging; a ‘meticulous meshing’. “We have passed .. ” Foucault continues:

As Foucault goes on to describe, it was exactly this implementation of a new economy of movement through time that enabled Frederick to dominate the 18thC, becoming the model for military knowledge from there on in. Speed was to be taught as a virtue. Yet if Frederick was the foreman of this newly constituted machine-in-motion, Napoleon Bonaparte would become it’s soul. That great disciplinarian, commander of detail, would make his life-project the discovery of disciplinary-kinetics. More than anyone prior, he would embody the next phase of history, defined not so much by the ‘art of governing’, as what we might describe — with a certain sense of misgiving — as the ‘art of motorizing’.²⁷ How far had European practice travelled from the Bourbon King who declared, “l’etat, c’est moi.”, to the military-Emperor who drew the subtle and yet profound distinction, declaring, “I am the man of the state. I am the revolution.”²⁸

It is this moment in history that serves — as we know — as Paul Virilio’s point of departure. “Up until the nineteenth century .. ” he writes, “ .. society was founded on the brake.”²⁹ Agrarian society then gives way to industrial or transportational society (or better still, ‘dromocratic society’). This society is built upon the possibility of ‘fabricating speed’: “And so they can pass from the age of the brakes to the age of the accelerator. In other words, power will be invested in acceleration itself.”³⁰ An ‘unrecognised order of political circulation’ was emerging, crystallised finally in the French Revolution. The events of 1789, he writes:

From this turning point (which was perhaps nothing more than a confirmation of a broader political investment in motion running parallel to the rise of commerce and the money economy, the militant-bureaucratic state, and new advances in the physical and medical sciences), Virilio goes on to charts the active planning of the time and space horizons of whole societies: what he calls the: “ .. primordial control of the masses by the organisms of urban defense.”³² For Virilio, as for Foucault, the aims of modern political rationality are clear: to make mobile the citizenry within the parameters of order, reason and tranquillity. Yet for Virilio, as again for Foucault, these parameters also included the channelling of surplus civic/kinetic energy for warfare. In the words of Virilio:

And in the words of Foucault:

So what we find — clearer in Foucault, but implicit in Virilio — is a parallel development of biopower and dromological power: a power that invests in bodies, and a power that puts those bodies in motion. Both forms of power — as their very roots in the classical age highlight — are concerned in the last analysis with the ordering, channelling, and disciplining of populations.

The biopolitical/dromological reversal

What Virilio adds to the story is a more focused description of the nineteenth century evolution of political technology, hinted at yet not fully assimilated in the works of Michel Foucault. From the threshold of modernity onward, disciplinary power invests less in the constitution of space than in the constitution of time. We may think of this as something of a rupture at the heart of modern political technology — one which continues to affect the practicalities of our lives. Individuals become subordinated to a higher realm of ordering (speed). Despite his interest in architecture, Virilio is then less concerned with the ways in which ‘stone can make people docile and knowable’, than the means by which revolution and not stasis has established itself as the universal principle of modern order, leading finally to what he has termed the ‘peace of exhaustion’.³⁵ In essence (though Virilio seems uninterested in extending his historical analysis to take account of the early modern period) his works describe in outline the political technique through which the ‘problem’ of early modernity (of how to maximise the power of individuals for the prestige of the state within the confines of stability and good order) was transcended and neutralised. Over the modern period proper, no longer is the dilemma of government how to mediate between the extremes of rapidity and stasis, productionism and docility, circulation and revolution. By the time of Napoleon, the sentiments expressed just fifty years earlier by Julien Offray de La Mettrie had already been surpassed. As he had written:

Not only now would political rationality understand the motion of matter, and of bodies, it would seek above all to perfect the mechanisms of producing it. The ‘movement-of-movement’, or ‘speed’, as a technical achievement, emerges at this time (the early 19thC) as a societal principle, reordering the whole of the modern world.³⁷ In the most radical way possible Virilio begins to answer the question of how efficiency was established in the modern urban landscape. He also uncovers — in the most discreet and disarming way (despite his want for rhetoric) — a whole new realm of power; one that still — 20 years after Speed and Politics was written — is yet to be explored in detail.

In the way of a summary of the history that I have aimed to highlight, let us imagine the flagpoints of that history in an alternative form: in early modernity we find a rabble populace, poorly disciplined, wandering, and blighted by the spectres of unreason, idleness and environmental destitution. The aim of political reason — in the context of broader societal transformations (the discovery of order through production, the rise of the money economy, commercialism and early mercantilism³⁸ … ) — is to navigate a course between the extremes of revolution and stagnancy. Having recognised that (in the words of Botero) the ‘true strength of a ruler consists in his people’, political rationality aims to ‘multiply’ the citizenry as a productive force.³⁹ A new politics of order, both of detail (looking into men’s souls), and of generality (the constitution of a whole society) becomes a technical necessity. Working together (what Foucault would describe as ‘anatomo-power’ and ‘biopower’), these techniques of intervention produced at the heart of the Classical age an initial halt. The power of movement was subject to a spatial codification (in the city, in the workhouse, in the hospital, in the manufactory).

By the beginnings of the 19thC this ‘codification’ had been achieved, and a second ‘reordering’ could now be effected. This reordering, rather than charting the middle ground between rapidity and stasis, aimed to ‘release’ the full productive, dynamic efficiency of the (national) population in and through time. Motion had emerged as the destiny and law of a new politics of order. The full equivalence of Virilio’s ‘metabolic vehicles’ to Foucault’s ‘bearers of order’ becomes clear. Dromological power — or in the words of Foucault, ‘capillary power’ — had emerged as the practical basis and first principle of the ‘free society’ and ‘coded individual’ established simultaneously with the apparatus of modern ‘governmentality’. Mobility, in other words, had become simultaneously the means to liberation and the means to domination; the ‘accumulation of men’ running simultaneously with ‘the accumulation of movement’, and — one might add — the ‘accumulation of capital’.

Bio-dromology and (global) capitalist modernity

On this note I want to change gear, moving now to consider — if only briefly — the importance of deepening Virilio’s genealogy of motion in the fashion outlined. As alluded to in the introduction, all of the above is not introduced as a corrective to Virilio’s historical slant. To do so would in many ways be irrelevant. Virilio is a dromologist, not an historian. As he himself admits: “I don’t believe in explanations. I believe in suggestions, in the obvious quality of the implicit.”⁴⁰ Rather, the reason why I have attempted to sketch-out, in crude simplicity, the development of our modern experience of motion is because I think that together, the works of Paul Virilio and Michel Foucault describe in that experience the genealogy of capitalism. In doing so they open up a whole new political space for the effective critique of contemporary discourses of social reality, and in particular the ‘social reality’ of contemporary ‘advanced capitalism’.

For Foucault, biopower was the essential missing link in genealogy of capitalist modernity. As he insisted in Discipline and Punish: “ .. the two processes — the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital — cannot be separated.”⁴¹ On the other side of the equation, Paul Virilio has stressed that his focus on speed in no way detracts from the importance of capital. As he insisted in Pure War: “Wealth is the hidden side of speed and speed is the hidden side of wealth.”⁴² And lest we forget, Marx also understood the political advantages of the collision of dromological/biopolitical technology:

Once in motion, political rationality had only to: “ .. give rhythm to the mobile mass’s trajectory through vulgar stimulation.”⁴⁴

Nowhere better do we find resonances of this ‘vulgar stimulation’ than the ensemble of discourses that seem now in the ascendant (the discourses of globalism and globalization), fast overtaking the globe, and in the same movement creating anew a fast globe. These discourses, and their subsidiaries (informatisation, risk, competition, efficiency) — reflected and enacted in a whole panoply of specific practices —  are all linked the double movement sketched out above (the ‘will-to-speed’ and ‘modern governmentality’). Taken together — I argue — we stumble across the unwritten history of globalization, and in that, the unwritten history of contemporary advanced capitalism.

The links are fairly simple. With dromology: the will-to-speed finds its final realisation in the destruction of the space (astronautical flight, space obliterated in proportion to the velocity of the vehicle). This destruction, as a social principle (Mumford’s ‘desire to get somewhere’), has reduced the expanse of the world to naught, thrusting us into the global epoch. With governmentality: we need look only to the proliferating discourses of risk, competition, informatization, self-monitoring, self-organization, efficiency, effectiveness and excellence to get a taste of the ways in which the discourse of speed works to order the world into which individuals — indeed whole societies — are thrown. Each element feeds of the other: dromocratic power has encouraged the release of the will-to-speed through which we face what Virilio has termed the ‘negative horizon’ (the implosion of space under the violence of speed). In parallel, disciplinary society has actively sought to produce this violence of speed (first in the military, then in the factory, then in the school, then in the prison) as a technical instrument in the ordering of populations (‘populations at speed’).

Two principles then: speed and governmentality. These principles conform to two others: spatial annihilation; and the obligation-to-motivation. Both impulses are reflected in the deep social myths that accompany the discourses of globalism in our contemporary era. On spatial annihilation: in 1973 First National City Bank run an advertisement for their ‘global transfer system’ with the headline: “Citibank — the bank to look to for speed in moving money.”⁴⁵ In 1987 Mikhail Gorbachev hails the ‘mechanism of acceleration’, and the putting of ‘society in motion’, by quoting the words of a Western politician: “If you do what you’ve conceived, this will have fantastic, truly global consequences.”⁴⁶ “You wanted to travel?”, asks an ad for Sky-TV: “No need to bother.” “We believe .. ” runs a promotion for Kawasaki, “ .. that to fulfil our potential as a global corporation, we have to continually push back frontiers of space .. “⁴⁷ On the obligation-to-motivation: in 1989 Jack Welch, chairman and CEO of General Electric talks of the ‘global moment’, of ‘lightening speed’, ‘fast action’, and ‘acting with speed’. “The world moves much faster today.”⁴⁸ In 1991, President and CEO of Asea Brown Boveri, asks: “Why emphasise speed over precision? Because the costs of delay exceed the costs of mistakes.”⁴⁹ In September 1994 The International Herald Tribune, distil perfectly the fearful risks apparent to all that operate to ensure the operation of universal governmentality: “For U.S. Corporations, the Modern-Day Byword Is ‘Globalize or Die’”.⁵⁰

As suggested, both impulses have a deeper history. The following words accompanied a picture of the globe from space on an advertisement published for Ashland Oil and Refining Company in 1969:

Alternatively, take the advertisement for Daimler Benz published in 19 under the epigraph ‘Progress is the realisation of Utopias’ (Oscar Wilde), and beneath, the NASA earthrise. The dialogue ran as follows:

The automobile is linked to the planets, the planets to the dreams of the ancients, and ourselves to the possibilities of the future. It is that future itself which establishes the obligation-to-motivation. “Companies that do not adapt to the new global realities will become victims of those that do.”⁵³ “The good news is .. ” writes Tom Peters, “ .. You have no choice.”⁵⁴ There is, in the words of Walter Wriston, ‘no place to hide’.⁵⁵ ‘Man waiting for motivation’, ‘productivity through people’, ‘involve everyone in everything’, ‘create a sense of urgency’, establish ‘friction-free capitalism’: as Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute has argued, in the face of global competition: “ .. people are going round with guillotines over their heads.”⁵⁶

Bio-global, biokinetic society: securitization through speed

“[I]t is the permanence of speed that creates the total peace, the peace of exhaustion.”⁵⁷ In one sentence Virilio illustrates perfectly what I would argue are the biopolitical impulses of our immanent (global) present. What I have tried to do is to introduce the longer political history to this ‘peace of exhaustion’, through an analysis of the imagination of motion in the early modern period, and its subsequent inclusion into the development of disciplinary society. I also suggested along the way that what we see emerge — over the period of modernity as a whole — is something more than simply disciplinary society. This ‘something more’ is a form of society that, in the words of Virilio again, pursues peace through exhaustion, that is, through speed. In this sense it might be possible to add to Michel Foucault’s formulation of the ‘birth of biopolitics’ (the techniques of disciplinary society), the notion of the ‘birth of biokinesis’ (the techniques of dromo-disciplinary society). In particular this seems a fruitful way to politicise the rise to hegemony of the political discourses of globalization, informatisation, risk and competition. What I have suggested is that in combination the works of urbanist Paul Virilio late philosopher-historian Michel Foucault, open new ground by which to interrogate modern political technology, and in particular, its contemporary transformations and appearances.

Virilio then, I would suggest finally, stands in part as the successor, debtor, and faithful disciple — if unrecognised — of the late professor of the Collège de France. No doubt there were differences between them (if indeed they had regular contact).⁵⁸ Yet the similarities, to me, are more striking. Virilio, like Foucault, is clearly ‘taking aim at the heart of the present’.⁵⁹ In doing so — again like Foucault — he opens up, as he writes, multiple sites of contestation and struggle. Indeed, if Foucault was the thinker in our century to radicalise — in his genealogies of the asylum, the clinic, philology, natural history, political economy, the prison, and sexuality — the politics of space, perhaps we may say that Paul Virilio is his complement, both in method and range, in his radicalisation of the politics of time. It remains, however, to be seen whether Virilio will, like Foucault, take on the role of an opener of worlds, suggesting, if not prescribing, how the practices and rationalities of violence that surround us may be faced-down with courage and defiance. Perhaps Virilio is himself too fascinated by velocity to pause enough to think out the alternatives.