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:
page 21“There is also an accident contained in theoretical technologies, and in the absorption of Virilio’s theory by the institutional positions it seems to criticize so fiercely. ‘I am studied in military academies,’ he tells Sylvere Lotringer in Pure War, and indeed he is.”
Bratton develops this through IDF Brigadier General Aviv Kokhavi reading Deleuze and Guattari on smooth and striated space, quoting Eyal Weizman that the IDF uses the phrase “to smooth out space” for operating “in a space as if it had no borders” (page 25, note 9). He then sets Virilio beside the post-2001 discourse on the exception, citing Agamben’s State of Exception on the camp and Žižek on the community held together by identification with a transgression of the law. That comparative and forward work is Bratton’s; the reconstruction below holds to Virilio’s 1977 argument in his own terms, and marks Bratton’s extensions as Bratton’s wherever they appear.
The first Part establishes the founding substitution: revolution is not the seizure of production but the organization of movement, and the State is not a juridical order but the management of circulation. It runs from the street riot to the highway, and it reads the modern State backward out of the medieval fortress. The Part carries the epigraph from the aviator Jean Mermoz, “I wouldn’t want to be a survivor” (page 27), which the argument will later cash out as the logic of assault over flight.
The chapter’s opening move relocates the revolutionary subject from the factory to the street and redefines it as a mass in motion. The stake is that the whole Marxist siting of politics in production is being displaced in the first paragraph.
page 29“In every revolution there is the paradoxical presence of circulation. Engels remarks in June 1848: ‘The first assemblies take place on the large boulevards, where Parisian life circulates with the greatest intensity.’ Less than a century later, Weber says of the disappearance of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (as if he were talking about the results of a car crash) that ‘they called to the streets, and the streets killed them.’ The masses are not a population, a society, but the multitude of passersby. The revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street, where for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a motor (machine of attack), in other words a producer of speed.”
Goebbels supplies the thesis in slogan form, and the argument treats fascist practice as the clearest confession of the dromocratic truth of politics.
page 30“In 1931, during the National Socialists’ struggle against the Marxist parties in Berlin, Joseph Goebbels notes, ‘Whoever can conquer the streets also conquers the State!’”
The demand for immediacy follows: the mass’s efficiency depends on speed, so reading, which takes time, is its enemy. Virilio reads the preference for image over text as a strategic and not a stylistic choice.
page 31“‘Propaganda must be made directly by words and images, not by writing,’ states Goebbels, who was himself a great promoter of audiovisuals in Germany. Reading implies time for reflection, a slowing down that destroys the mass’s dynamic efficiency.”
From the mobile mass Virilio derives the reading of the city itself: not first a dwelling but a circulation system, the street a road that happens to pass through a settlement. This is the home locus of the habitable circulation formulation Bratton quotes in the introduction.
page 31“It seems we’ve forgotten that the street is only a road passing through an agglomeration, whereas every day laws on the ‘speed limit’ within the city walls remind us of the continuity of displacement, of movement, that only the speed laws modulate. The city is but a stopover, a point on the synoptic path of a trajectory, the ancient military glacis, ridge road, frontier or riverbank, where the spectator’s glance and the vehicle’s speed of displacement were instrumentally linked. As I have said in the past, there is only habitable circulation.”
The suburb, poorhouse, barracks, and favela are then read not as zones of exclusion but as speed-regulators, brakes on penetration, a formulation Bratton also lifts.
page 33“All of them are uncertain places because they are situated between two speeds of transit, acting as brakes against the acceleration of penetration.”
The fortress is then recast as a machine rather than a wall. After Machiavelli, Vauban is made to supply the definition of fortification as an energy-transformer that receives the assailants’ mass and returns it “in a more appropriate form,” a phrase that recurs across the book as the formula for what dromocratic order does to the masses.
page 36“After Machiavelli, Vauban will heartily support this means of avoiding carnage and of breaking up the enemy simply by constructing a topological universe made of ‘a totality of mechanisms able to receive a defined form of energy (in this case, that of the mobile mass of assailants), to transform it and finally to return it in a more appropriate form.’”
The rampart takes on a class function, and bourgeois power is redefined as military before it is economic, tied to the permanence of the siege. This is one of the book’s load-bearing reversals of Marxist priority.
page 36“Bourgeois power is military even more than economic, but it relates most directly to the occult permanence of the state of siege, to the appearance of fortified towns, those ‘great immobile machines made in different ways.’”
The fortress as immobile machine fighting its own inertia yields the book’s recurring law, quoted here from Colonel Delair. This is the first of two full statements of “stasis is death” (the second, raised to the general law of the world, arrives on page 89).
page 38“Around 1870 Colonel Delair notes: ‘Every fortress must possess a certain particular state, a certain power of resistance, which in men is called good health. In peacetime, we officers of the engineering corps are responsible for keeping the fortress in good health.’ And a bit further on: ‘The art of defense must constantly be in transformation; it is not exempt from the general law of this world: stasis is death.’”
The chapter delivers its central redefinition of the State. Class oppression is demoted to a secondary function; the primary one is traffic control, and revolt is read as a traffic problem. The passage is the one to carry whole, since the entire dromological reading of politics is compressed in it.
page 39“The State’s political power, therefore, is only secondarily ‘power organized by one class to oppress another.’ More materially, it is the polis, the police, in other words highway surveillance, insofar as, since the dawn of the bourgeois revolution, the political discourse has been no more than a series of more or less conscious repetitions of the old communal poliorcetics, confusing social order with the control of traffic (of people, of goods), and revolution, revolt, with traffic jams, illegal parking, multiple crashes, collisions.”
The reading of the Revolution follows from this: the mass uprising is a rerouting, and the Terror’s conscription is the removal, not the liberation, of the masses.
page 44“In fact, mass movements under the ancien regime, wandering in search of the person of the monarch/State, prefigure the new organization of traffic flows that we arbitrarily call the ‘French Revolution,’ which is nothing other than the rational organization of a social abduction. The ‘mass uprising’ of 1793 is the removal of the masses.”
The chapter closes on the battlefield derivation of speed as survival, where the infantryman must cross to the enemy cannon in the interval of its reloading. Speed becomes time torn from death, and Napoleon supplies the mechanical formula that the book will keep returning to.
page 46“Everything in this new warfare becomes a question of time won by man over the fatal projectiles toward which his path throws him. Speed is Time saved in the most absolute sense of the word, since it becomes human Time directly torn from Death—whence those macabre emblems of decimation worn down through history by the Assault troops, in other words the rapid troops (black uniforms and flags, death’s heads, by the uhlan, the SS, etc.).”
page 46“Napoleon expresses it clearly: ‘Aptitude for war is aptitude for movement,’ and he specifies that one must evaluate the strength of the army ‘as in mechanics, by its mass multiplied by its speed.’”
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