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:

• Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology (Virilio 1977)
• War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (Virilio 1989)
• The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Virilio 1991)
• Introduction to Spectacle and the Screen (Proto 2023)

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.