Tomáš Hauer: Dromocratic teletopy and status of man. In: Ostium, vol. 20, 2024, no. 4.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Dromologic research of “man’s status in the world” shows that man – his perception, his language as well as his thinking is substantially changed by the speed of information translation. This paper critically analyses the theory of a French cultural critic, city planner and philosopher Paul Virilio. Virilio’s texts deal with the impact of speed on the contemporary world. The development of means of transport used by people for the purpose of movement – from horse carts, railways and cars to planes, culminated by the arrival of digitalized audio-visual hypertext, the last “vehicle” that replaces its drivers’ physical movement by total inertia. How does that historical succession starting with metabolic vehicles such as a horse, ships, railways, cars planes to the latest ways of tele-transfer, tele-presence and audio-visual vehicles, influence our present-day concept of the world? What are the social, cultural, political and economic consequences resulting from continuous acceleration of social processes, from inertia of absolute speed? Can increasing the speed of our technologies lead up to the irreversible immobilization of social players? Does our effort to represent the reality depend on the kind of media and on speed? The study analyses Virilio’s texts and it presents the interpretation of the main propositions of his dromology.

1. Speed and slowness
At the beginning of human history, there was only slowness – slowness of life of agricultural society. Speed was created by people – merchants, soldiers, industrialists, scientists, engineers, computer scientists, bankers, etc. The present-day identification with the speed may lead us to many different conclusions. The speed of our world is full of contradictions, the accelerated world conceals quite a few paradoxes. Most speed phenomena seem reasonable at first glance and usually it is actually the case. This applies particularly to those devices and equipment that we use every day – from cars and Velcro over Fast Food and email, to our computer and particle accelerators. Their formation is understood as a response to the clearly defined need, their further development as a useful improvement. In today’s life, it is only speed that counts, and nothing else. The question how much speed one needs and what rate of acceleration is tolerable for the economy, society and environment, remains unanswered. Speed began to gain positive value in the late 19th century. Dromology by P. Virilio seeks to analyze the ways that were crucial for the development of speed. He asks how the principle of acceleration in Central and Western Europe arose and explains the origin and method of spreading “various triggers of speed.” Virilio’s theory shows the far-reaching extent to which the speed conquered all and everything over the centuries: transportation and production, peace and war, men and women, urban and rural areas, work and leisure time, arts and commerce. Virilio clearly shows us how the principle of acceleration of the word has taken root in professional and private lives of individuals and societies in both good and bad sense, and how it has changed and continues changing our standards, values, perceptions and mentality.

Today man is constantly exposed to attacks of two dominant forces of the contemporary world, which organize and structure its logistic of perception: speed and technological devices. “The development of high technical speeds would thus result in the disappearance of consciousness as the direct perception of phenomena that inform us of our own existence. Cinema is not a seventh art but an art that combines all of the others: drawing, painting, architecture, music, but also mechanical, electrical works, etc.”[1] Dromological research by Paul Virilio present a critical analysis of the consequences for our perception and logistics caused by polar inertia, inertia of absolute speed. Speed changes the field of our perception because it transforms the habitual understanding of ontological characteristic of reality, i.e. time and space. “Speed treats vision like its basic element; with acceleration, to travel is like filming, not so much producing images as new mnemonic traces, unlikely, supernatural. In such a context death itself can no longer be felt as mortal; it becomes, as in William Burroughs, a simple technical accident, the final separation of the sound from the picture track.”[2] What is much more important for Virilio’s concept of aesthetics of disappearance is the role of unconscious disappearing of objects from our field of perception, aesthetics of disappearing, one of the consequences of dromology, is based on studying cinematographic effects coming from the area of art, film, television and video. “What is given to see is due to the phenomena of acceleration and deceleration in every respect identifiable with intensities of light.”[3]

Philosophic background of Virilio’s theory is neither G. Marcel’s French existentialism, nor postmodernism, which is unequivocally refused by Virilio, mainly as far as architecture is concerned, surprisingly it is phenomenology in M. Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation. “Postmodernism is a notion that makes sense in architecture, through the work of Robert Venturi and so on. Since I am teaching architecture, to me, postmodernism is a suitcase word, a syncretism.”[4]

Virilio summarizes his teacher and mentor Merleau-Ponty’s influence on him as follows: “First of all, I was a pupil of Merleau-Ponty, of Jean Wahl and of Vladimir Jankelevitch, to name three French philosophers who were teaching at the Sorbone at that time. The one to which I felt most attracted was quite naturally Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and his Phenomenology of Perception.”[5] In many of his texts Virilio emphasises that speed is not a phenomenon, but a relation between phenomena. The difference between contemporary society and societies of the past consists in the fact that earlier speed used to be mainly connected with transport, now it concerns relations within information. “The question of speed is central. Speed and wealth go hand in hand. To give a philosophical definition of speed, we can say that it is not a phenomenon, but rather the relationship between phenomena. In other words, it is relativity itself.”[6] Concerning speed, in the book Pure War Virilio claims as follows: “Speed is the unknown side of politics, and has been since the beginning, this is nothing new. The wealth aspect in politics was sportlighted a long time ago. One usually says that power is tied in with wealth. In my opinion, it’s tied and foremost with speed. Wealth comes afterward. People forget the dromological dimension of power, its ability to inveigle, whether by taxes, conquest, etc. Every society is founded on a relation of speed. Every society is dromocratic.”[7]

2.Dromology
Virilio’s influential book Vitesse et politice (Speed and Politics), analyses new problems resulting from the fact that the development of industrial capitalism has reached the stage in which wealth and power in society have been interconnected with ever increasing speed. In view of Virilio’s statement that wealth is an aspect of speed,[8] it has become necessary to consider speed and all its aspects and consequences through a prism of a new discipline – dromology. In an interview with J. Armitage, Virilio comments on this: “Dromology originates from the Greek word dromos. Hence dromology is the science of the ride, the journey, the drive, the way. To me this means that speed and riches are totally linked concepts. And that the history of the world is not only about the political economy of riches, that is, wealth, money, capital, but also about political economy of speed. If time is money , as they say, then speed is power. You see it with velocity of the predators, of the cavalry, of railways, of ships and maritime power. So all my work has been about attempting to trace the dromocratic dimension of societies from ancient Greek to our present-day societies. All societies are pyramidal in nature. The higher speed belong to the upper reaches of society, the slower to the bottom. The wealth pyramid is the replica of the velocity pyramid.”[9] Dromologic revolutions cause artificial acceleration of speed in the form of steam or combustion engine, or, nowadays, nuclear energy and they immediately form both e.g. waging wars and kinds of communication. Vehicles of speed create new tracks and nodal points (ports, roads, airports, telecommunications etc.) through which things, goods, money, weapons, people or information will start flowing within a different structure. A territory is space across which speed, technology, politics, economy and everyday life flow by means of vehicles of speed (transport, communication, etc.). Nowadays, both politics and the city are victims to nodal points through which transport of things and transfer of information flow.[10]

There is no ethics without certain relatively settled and legitimized ways of social behaviour, acting as its carriers. Nowadays, networks and meta-networks are more and more frequently becoming dromocratic carrier of ethical norms. The importance of their role for creating and distribution of moral values and ethical standpoints in the contemporary society is increasing. Virilio tries to point out (as far as forming of present-day ethical theories is concerned) that we encounter a peculiar phenomenon in dromocratic teletopy. Moral values and ethical standpoints are no longer linked to a particular location in space. Although they are linked to the addresses in a network, these are, with a certain overstatement, nowhere geographically. Gradual release of moral values and ethical substantiations from the relationship to a concrete space of physical locations, and locating it in virtual space of dromocratic teletopy establishes a brand new situation for ethical thinking. There is a competition between old space of locations and new space of virtuality. This new situation will result in many significant consequences for ethical research.

We live in the epoch of direct substitution of clear perception by the perception coming from the media hypertext sphere. Therefore, the term substitution in Virilio’s theory works in the same way as the expression simulakrum for Baudrillard. The substitute does not hide the truth about something, but it hides the fact that there is nothing. However, above all, the basic principle of Virilio’s dromologic research is inadvertent movement of objects, located out of the reach of perception; the object can only be made perceivable, apparent and comprehensible on the basis of special operations. Virilio quotes Michelangelo: “They paint in Flanders to fool our external vision… the beguilements of the world have robbed me of the time accorded me to worship God.”[11] Michelangelo perceived the power and role of illusion in art, pure imitation of nature or a concrete model disquieted him. Aesthetics of disappearing changes time into sequential and information blurs. It often happens that we are absent-mindedly “staring” into space. We call it blank moments or momentary escape of mind from the current “reality”. Piknolepsia (from the Greek pyknos, frequent, plentiful), is one of the main terms in Virilio’s aesthetics of disappearing. In the context of medicine, piknolepsia is children’s paroxysmal disease manifested by rhythmic electric discharge in brain and quick arrival. Clinical symptoms include sudden stopping the activity in progress, usually without losing the previous attitude. The fits are often accompanied by rhythmic motion of eyelids or lips. Usual duration is 5-10 seconds. Several fits like that can happen daily.

Virilio does not consider Piknolepsia a disease, on the contrary, he views it as mass phenomenon of the contemporary period, as one of the main consequences of inertia of absolute speed. Virilio defines piknolepsia as “mass phenomenon” and describes the present-day postmodern subject, which is in constant fit of moderate epilepsy, as piknoleptic. The contemporary technological prosthetic devices (television, the Internet, computers, tablets, so called smart phones, etc.) result in information transfer by the terminal velocity of light, inertia of absolute speed. Therefore, the dominant form of contact is telepresentation (from the Greek telé-distant, vize-vision). “Like the war weapon launched at full speed at the visual target it’s supposed to wipe out, the aim of cinema will be to provoke an effect of vertigo in the voyeur-traveller, the end being sought now is to give him the impression of being projected into the image.”[12] According to Virilio, telematic vehicles pervading the contemporary film industry function by creating illusion, artificial reality, artificial day thus altering our own reality and our perception of what is real. “Film what doesn’t exist, the Anglo-Saxon special effects masters still say, which is basically inexact: what they are filming certainly does exist, in one manner or another. It’s the speed at which they film that doesn’t exist, and is the pure invention of the cinematographic motor. Melies liked to joke. The trick, intelligently applied, today allows us to make visible the supernatural, the imaginary, even the impossible.”[13] Virilio works with the term optical clones denoting a number of images of contemporary man. In this way he points out that in the present-day society, man is not only the owner of his own body, but also of his image.

After piknolepsia subsides, man subconsciously resorts to using technological prosthetic devices, which are supposed to help him see the world like in the childhood. “The film industry will enter into crisis when it ends production of the false day, when it pretends to verisimilitude.”[14] For example, a lot of photographers confirm that their photographs are result of craving for re-establishment of piknolepsia. “To produce prostheses of subliminal comfort is to produce simulators of day, even of the last day, metamorphosis of the objects of industrial production where the ensemble of economic realities would be the relay for the cinematic function.”[15] The arrival of speed has also brought about irretrievable change in visual aspect of women, who started to adapt to the current society demands and technical progress. “The disappearance of the woman in the fatality of the technical object creates a new mass language, a faithful reflection of the fascist language of the old futurist elite of the beginning of the century, the heat of a piece of iron or wood is, from now on, more exciting for us than a woman’s smile or tears…”[16] The first notification was manifesting masculine features in woman’s clothes. The less impression of a fragile creature a woman gave, the more desirable she was considered. A typical representative of this fashion era is indisputably Marlene Dietrich. Women lost their fatality while fighting speed. Men, former hunters, nowadays collectors of luxurious vehicles, exchanges their ideal of femme fatale for fatally fast means of transport.

3. The Aesthetitics of Disappearance
Nowadays, according to Virilio, film production is confronted with decline caused by man’s constant urge to travel. Film becomes a mere stage set as a substitution for landscape. One of the crisis manifestations is banality and triviality of topics. If a film depicts the same everydayness as advertising, it acquires the same value. Aestheticizing of tragic events is another manifestation of the decline of film. Television broadcast anesthetizes its audience showing it the horrors of war, holocaust or terrorist attacks, events thus becoming mere television programme. “The cinematic motor has accustomed us to finding the mystery of movement in this transitory world natural, to no longer wonder how acceleration of amorous gesture can suddenly become murderous, how the Pavan dance of a falling or propelled body can become fatal. At the same time this vulgarized violence of movement, revealed by the distortion of vision, shows us its inconsistency; the violence of speed dominates the technical world but remains nevertheless, as in the time of the Sphinx, the basic enigma.”[17] The world is flooded with progress and development. What is invented now, at the particular moment, is obsolete in the next one. By means of the phenomenon of speed and disappearing, Virilio explains those peculiarities and shifts in human thinking and assessment. It is the speed that he “accuses” to be the carrier of power arousing the desire in people to get this power. Virilio quotes Rilke’s idea, “what happens is so far ahead of what we think, of our intentions, that we can never catch up with it and never really know its true appearance.”[18] Thus the speed becomes the core of aesthetics of disappearing.

In modern society, moral values, aesthetic standpoints and substantiations solving various social dilemmas and conflicts were linked both to real space and historical time. Space and time are basic ontologic categories. Dromologic analysis considerably changes its content. It discovers their new dimension emerging thanks to the absolute speed of information translation. In other words, continuing modernization, which is according to Virilio one of the consequences of speed, constructs its new dimensions of space and time: dromologic teletopy and dromospheric chronology. Surprisingly, it is possible to live, communicate, do business, become rich, love, acquire higher share in power and even wage war in these new dimensions of time and space. Another floor of society’s life emerges. Nowadays, speed of development in society is more and more linked mainly to dromocratic teletopy, i.e. the ability and readiness to get connected. As Jean Baudrillard observed, the classical esse est percipi has been replaced by to be is to be connected. Not from a historically determined territory, but from anywhere wheresoever – and the last two expressions cannot be further specified. It is a new floor in what the Greek called oikos. Old floors have not disappeared, they are only inhabited in a different way and mainly – they will be inhabited in a different way and life will be different there. Wealth and power are an aspect of speed. The distribution of wealth and power, which, to a large extent, unfortunately also means the distribution of happiness and health, is increasingly subjected to chronopolitics based in dromocratic teletopy of networks. With the arrival of mass industrial production of speed (means of transport, the media…) we move more and more in the virtual world, thus moving away from the real world. Virilio puts it simply that “collective thinking established by various telematic vehicles aimed at destructing original perceptions.” “In 1934 Walter Benjamin interrogates this photographic object, incapable of registering a barracks or a pile of garbage without transforming them. Transforming everything abject about poverty, it’s transformed it also into an object of pleasure.”[19] In the world of mediated images heralded in the media, the original model loses its trustworthiness. Virilio thus points out frequently less visible negative impacts of the virtual sphere expansion. Loss of trust in “eye reality,” i.e. in what we can see with our own eyes, and ever higher dependence on illusory view constructed by means of technological devices. As the author states, to hypnotize the masses, it is necessary to speak mainly to eyes. “Abel Gance loved quoting Napoleon: To magnetize masses, you must above all talk to their eyes, and he affirms that the future of the movies is a sun in each image.”[20] Virilio also ponders on how technology affects human conscience and sensory experience when conscience as direct perception of phenomena disappears due to high technical speed which destroy time and space

We find ourselves in a situation comparable to the time of our ancestors, when new railways tracks were built and railways were extended, when the migration routes were changing according to new diggings of fossil fuels and other raw materials, when urban agglomerations emerged around coking plants and ironworks. Nowadays, networks are extended and handling information is getting faster. Undoubtedly, it will have epoch-making importance for the process of transferring ethical standpoints, like the events of that time. Virilio’s dromologic analyses need attentive and slow reading. The author’s strong point is the ability to find relations among phenomena that are not seemingly related, Even if not all these connections can be considered relevant and convincing. Metaphors and discursive strategies presented by Virilio are indisputably elaborated and original. They reveal interesting parallels, thus enriching our social imagination. “In the last century we had already become aware of the paradox of speed. The train doesn’t make voyagers of us but packages that are expedited… remarked Tolstoy. The hurried man of Morand ruminates. We need to find something even more idiotic to block the course of time completely, total abstention from all action. To say today that speed is obsolete is an untruth as obvious as that which consists in praising slowness.”[21] Speed, we are still captured by speed.

4. Conclusion
Today man is constantly exposed to attacks of two dominant forces of the contemporary world, which organize and structure its logistic of perception: speed and technical images. Paul Virilio, the “high priest of speed” deals with the impact of speed on the contemporary world in his texts. Virilio’s theory shows the far-reaching extent to which the speed conquered all and everything over the centuries: transportation and production, peace and war, men and women, urban and rural areas, work and leisure time, arts and commerce. Virilio clearly shows us how the principle of acceleration of the word has taken root in professional and private lives of individuals and societies in both good and bad sense, and how it has changed and continues changing our standards, values, perceptions and mentality.

B i b l i o g r a p h y
Armitage, J., ed. (2000): Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond, London: Sage Publications.
Armitage, J., ed. (2001): Virilio Live (Selected Interiews), London: Sage Publications.
Virilio, P. (1986): Speed and Politics, trans. M. Polizzotti, New York: Semiotext(e).
Virilio, P. (1991): The Aesthetitics of Disappearance, trans. P. Beitchman, New York: Semiotext(e).
Virilio, P. (1994): The Vision Machine, trans. J. Rose, London: British Film Institute.
Virilio, P. (1995): The Art of the Motor, trans. J. Rose, Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Virilio, P. (1997): Pure War, 2nd edn. New York: Semiotext(e).
Virilio, P. (1999): The Politics of the Very Worst, trans. M. Cavaliere and S. Lotringer, New York: Semiotext(e).
Virilio, P. (2000): Polar Inertia, trans. P. Camiller, London: Sage.

N o t e s
[1] Virilio, P. (1991): The Aesthetitics of Disappearance, trans. P. Beitchman, New York: Semiotext(e), p. 104.
[2] Ibid., p. 60.
[3] Ibid., p. 19.
[4] Armitage, J., ed. (2000): Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond, London: Sage Publications, p. 25.
[5] Ibid. p. 28.
[6] Virilio, P. (1999): The Politics of the Very Worst, trans. M. Cavaliere and S. Lotringer, New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 13-14.
[7] Virilio, P. (1997): Pure War, 2nd edn. New York: Semiotext(e), p. 57.
[8] Virilio, P. (1999): The Politics of the Very Worst, p. 49
[9] Armitage, J., ed. (2000): Paul Virilio: From Modernism to Hypermodernism and Beyond, p. 35
[10] Virilio, P. (1986): Speed and Politics, trans. M. Polizzotti, New York: Semiotext(e), p. 7.
[11] Virilio, P. (1991): The Aesthetitics of Disappearance, p. 36
[12] Ibid., p. 58.
[13] Ibid., p. 15.
[14] Ibid., p. 63.
[15] Ibid., p. 73.
[16] Ibid., p. 91.
[17] Ibid., p. 100.
[18] Ibid., 19.
[19] Virilio, P. (1991): The Aesthetitics of Disappearance, p. 47.
[20] Ibid., pp. 54-55.
[21] Ibid., p. 104.

prof. Dr. Tomáš Hauer
Katedra filozofie
Filozofická fakulta Trnavskej univerzity v Trnave
Hornopotočná 23
918 43 Trnava
e-mail: tomas.hauer@truni.sk
ORCID 0000-0002-0615-4145