From: glevy-AT-acnet.pratt.edu
Date: Wed, 5 Jun 1996 05:20:56 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: DUMBOLOGY? or SPEEDOLOGY?


Is Sokal on the Net?  Here's a l'st for him to consider joining.

Does anyone have any critical comments on the following? Is it dumbology
or speedology?

Jerry

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Subject: New List: DROMOLOGY <snip>
	Announcement: Spoons list: Dromology
Dromology is the study of speed. Speed has been defined by Paul Virilio as
the social, political and military logic of systematic movement accelerated
to a vanishing point at which territory, as traditionally conceived, is
replaced by "a government of nothing but time." <snip>

Today, one is likely to hear...
Q: "how far is it from Los Angeles to Paris?"
A: "It's about eleven hours."
Revealed in this simple exchange is a radical rearrangement of the body's
relationship to time, space and technology. Distance becomes temporal
(miles become hours), and the standardization and globalization of the
social becomes its technological horizons (the airplane and the networks of
flight routes).. Suggested as well is an occupation of  personal reflection
by a significant and underexamined technological imaginary that transforms,
if not permeates, social action considered most broadly.

Virilio locates the origins of these movements in military needs to outpace
the enemy, to accelerate war and to reveal war's mode of information as
being the mode of acceleration. To govern is to see, and to see is to
shoot, and to shoot is reconnaissance, and back to start again. Not simply
the discipline of surveillance, the government of speed is
desubstantiating, ubiquitous, and relentlessly fatal (just ask the Iraqis).
But as the state is replaced by deterritorialized corporate entities as
the
monopolizers of violence, the "military" appetite for government has not
waned, it has simply found more flexible hosts.

While new if as yet unnamed forms of mediated experience take on
increasingly central roles in social life, their political characters are
far from decided.  The "military" personality of the dromological
subjectivity would like very much to colonize these new forms for its own
purposes, but this is not a necessary outcome. The deterritorializing,
decorporealizing affordances of speed also open new opportunities for
building better subjectivities and positions. The necessity of nurturing
the powerful and democratic counter-discourse in the always technological
war of hegemony, takes on immediate importance for intellectual politics.
Toward that end, Spoons is introducing the Dromology list. <snip>



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