Dromology
Dromology
Definition
Dromology (from Greek dromos, "race/course") is Paul Virilio's name for the science/logic of speed as the determining structure of political power, social organization, and historical change. Virilio's thesis: "History progresses at the speed of its weapons systems." There is no industrial revolution, only a "dromocratic revolution"; no democracy, only dromocracy; no strategy, only dromology. Power is the control of the speeds at which bodies, goods, and information circulate. The city is a "poliorectic" machine — a fortress whose political triumph was to spread the state of siege over the entire national territory.
Key Thinkers
- Paul Virilio — originator: Speed and Politics (1977), War and Cinema (1989), The Aesthetics of Disappearance (1991).
- Gilles Deleuze — smooth/striated space; Bratton notes Virilio works "in concert with Deleuze and Guattari" on the "machinic species" of collective formation.
- Michel Foucault — governmentality; Bratton notes that for Virilio, as for Foucault, "state apparatuses are functions, artifacts even, of dromocratic machinations that exceed their constitutions."
Related Concepts
- Logistics of Perception — the perceptual/aesthetic dimension of dromology: the supply of images as the equivalent of an ammunition supply.
- Aesthetics of Disappearance — the terminal phase of dromology: speed produces absence, derealization, and the "integral accident."
- Spectacle — Debord's image-economy as the civilian counterpart of Virilio's military logistics of perception.
- Noopolitics — the affective/mental regime of power that dromological speed enables.
- Ideology — dromology as a material, infrastructural account of power (not a "false consciousness" but a logistics).
Source Support
Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:
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Architectural purgatory (Morey & Alkanoglu 2018) — the domestic register: the dromological system received into the house — "the car became as much of an inhabitant of architecture as the human. They produce immense density, with the tendency of driving intense loneliness. We sit, watching lives that will never meet ours pass us by, separated only by the technology that is made to connect us. We follow the red lights to our destination, looking at the white lights of those that have experienced our adventures return to where we come from." Speed's social accident (loneliness) rendered from inside the cabin. See car-as-inhabitant, constant-interior.
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Streamlining: The Aesthetics of Waste (Lupton & Miller 1992/2006) — speed's merchandising: the dromological image detached from the vehicle and sold as style. Streamlining "used bulbous forms with tapered ends and graphic 'speed whiskers' to invoke the rapid movement of an object through air or water" (p. 205); "It quickly became a stylistic code evoking 'speed' and 'modernity,' applied to immobile objects for which aerodynamic engineering is more fictional than functional" (p. 209). Where Virilio's speed is power's logistics (the vehicle that must circulate), streamlining is speed as sign-value on the object that does not move — the waffle iron wearing the locomotive's teardrop. Speed here is not infrastructure but aesthetic code: the consumer economy borrowing dromology's prestige without its function (see streamlining, consumerism, novelty).
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Towers in the Park, Bungalows in the Garden (Keil 2015) — the automobility register: speed's myth-function in the suburban settlement, where suburbs are "mostly imagined as places of low density, privatism and automobility" (p. 579). The automobile "became the connector that provided mobility when needed and always symbolized freedom, perhaps even more than the title to the suburban home" (p. 581); it was "the important missing link between the suburban home and the productive and consumptive hubs of the emerging landscape of the Keynesian-Fordist economy of the mid-twentieth century" (p. 582). The infrastructure is the determining factor: "expressway networks laid over the auto-accommodating grid, and later the cul-de-sac structure of suburbanizing cities in particular, allowed development to fan out – also supported by extensive other networked infrastructures such as big sewer pipes and electricity grids – over extensive swaths of subdivided land" (p. 580), the ubiquitous grid letting "the car… move freely, without regard for the centre, through the various ecologies of the suburbanizing metropolis" (p. 581). And the regime's cost: "lower densities were made socially sustainable and marketable by what we now know to be the diseconomies of the automobile" (p. 584) — the automobile as connector, symbol and diseconomy at once; freedom's desire distributed over "the most unsustainable economy in the world" (p. 586). Where Virilio's dromology is the state's logistics of speed, Keil's automobility is the household's: speed as privatized freedom whose diseconomies are socialized. See car-as-inhabitant, automobile-vernacular, urban-sprawl.
Open Questions
- How does dromology relate to Foucault's governmentality? Both see state apparatuses as artifacts of machinations that exceed their constitutions, but the relationship is underexplored.
- Does the "integral accident" offer a critical purchase on the spectacle, or does it collapse into the fatalism Baudrillard is often accused of?
- How does the "right to the road" connect to Lefebvre's "right to the city"? Both are claims on circulation, but Virilio's is framed through military logistics rather than urban life.
- Streamlining is speed's image on objects that never move ("a stylistic code… more fictional than functional"): is the speed-whisker the dromological regime's purest form — speed as pure sign — or its first mutation, where the logistics of circulation becomes the decor of stillness? See streamlining, spectacle.
