First, freedom of mobility is a ruse



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Highways

____ The creation of infrastructure is essential the automobile’s use as the speed machine.


Virilio, Curator of the Museum of the Accident, in ‘5 |Paul, Negative Horizon, Pg. 150-151|

The automobile vehicle is not a 'machine' like others since it is both a stationary machine and a vehicular machine. Stationary: the motor on¶ its test rig, or its chassis; vehicular: the drive system, wheels, or tracks,¶ that take the vehicle over various surfaces, tracks, roads, highways; the¶ pairing of the driving wheels and the road engages the production of¶ the effects of speed, artifacts specific to each vehicle as it races along in¶ contact with the ground or in its immediate proximity. The automobile machine is not, therefore, a simple means of transmission, 'a speed machine', it is more the means of transmission of speed as such. The habit of identifying speed with the movement of transportation has misled us regarding the nature of the 'movement of movement'. As a quantity, speed possesses both a magnitude, the number of kilometres¶ covered per hour, and a direction; but it is also, therefore, a vector, and,¶ just as the automobile industry produces the vector-vehicle, so also does it manufacture and produce vector-speed. As we remember from¶ physics: 'Every movement can be resolved into one single proposition:¶ force and change in velocity are vectors that have the same direction'.¶ Thus, the automobile vehicle (car, boat, plane) is composed of two¶ vectors: both the mobile force-vector as well as the speed-vector of¶ movement, which is a consequence and direct product of the first, but¶ also of the ambient milieu and the particular element (earth, water, air)¶ of travel.¶ The drive of the automobile vehicle and its acceleration (positive¶ or negative) are thus both effects of the surface and atmospheric conditions, or, if one prefers, of the type of resistance to progress.¶ The functional and instrumental nature of the surfaces of contact of the infrastructure (roads and highways) as well as the forms of least resistance of the vector-vehicle contribute to making the speed-vector the essential characteristic of automobile movement, or, even more¶ precisely, one of its dimensions. In effect, speed only becomes one of the 'dimensions' of movement in so far as it can be conceived of as constant through the course of the time and conserved through the course of the movement. Meanwhile, this constant magnitude, secured in the past¶ (with difficulty) by the extreme rectification of the line of the surface for wheeled vehicles and thanks to the profile of vehicles, is maintained today by the electronic artifice of the on-board computer, a true speed programmer.¶ After the innovation, a long time ago, of the Greek and Roman¶ public road networks - and there is a half century of experience with¶ the highway infrastructure also contributing to affirm this - that is, after the spatial and geographical innovation of the unidirectionality and unidimensionality of the vectorial pairing, innovation now lies in the 'management of time and movement', thanks to the electronic control of the speeds of the course.¶ By this means, the vehicular complex composed of the 'small dynamic vehicle' (auto, motorcycle) and the 'great static vehicle' (road, bridge, tunnel) produces negative or positive acceleration like a new dimension of the world, or rather, like a constant renewal of its dimensions. Ceaselessly reprogrammed by technological advancements in the control of vectors, this renewal is not only perceptible in the shortening of distances of time, but also in the system of appearances, in the vision of passengers. 'A speed machine' and not solely 'a transport machine', the production of the vector-vehicle gives rise to the projection of a sort of illumination, the pairing of motor-wheels engages the pairing of car-road; between the departure and arrival, the country and its landscapes unwind like a drive belt. This artifact,¶ disregarded like an optical illusion, is nevertheless no more illusory¶ than the shrinking of the distance of the time of the course. One might¶ just as well consider this rapprochement in time as a mobile illusion,¶ since the geographic distance separating the point of departure from¶ the destination, the distance in space, does not vary any more than the¶ landscapes move in the dromoscopic vision of passengers travelling at¶ speed—

High Speed Rail

____ High Speed rail projects delink us from local communities and convert us into soldier-citizens to fulfill the state’s desires.


Virilio ’01 [cultural theorist and urbanist] Virilio Live pg. 75 edited by John Armitage

It's important to return to the city. To return to the city is to return to politics or to the political people. It’s not by chance that in Greek the city is called the ‘polis’. The city was created in a relationship to territorial space. It is a territorial phenomenon, a phenomenon of territorial concentration. Old villages are spread over a territory which is not a territory but a field, in all senses of the term. There is creation, from the old villages, through what has been called kinesis, of an urban territorial unit - the Greek city-state, to take a well-known reference. Since politics and the city were born together, they were born through a right: the creation of a territory or of an estate by right, being established, the right of autochthonism. There are rights because there is territory. There are rights and therefore duties - he who has land has war, as the people of Verde said. He who has rights in an urban territory has the duty to defend it. The citizen is also a soldier-citizen. I feel this situation survives up to the present; we are experiencing the end of that world. Through the ups and downs of the state, the city-state, the more or less communal state, and finally, the nation-state, we have experienced the development of politics linked to the territory; always down-to-earth. In spite of railroads and telephones, we experienced a relationship to the soil and a relationship to a still coherent right. There was still a connection to territorial identity, even in the phenomenon of nationalistic amplification. Today, as we saw earlier with the end of time-space and the coming of speed-space, the political man and the city are becoming problematic. When you talk about the rights of man on the world scale, they pose a problem which is not yet resolved, for a state of rights is not connected with a state of place, to a clearly determined locality. We clearly see the weaknesses of the rights of Man. It makes for lots of meetings, but not for much in the way of facts. Just take a look at Eastern European countries or Latin America. It seems to me that speed- space which produces new technologies will bring about a loss, a derealization of the city. The megalopolises now being talked of (Cak cutta, or Mexico with 30 million inhabitants) are no longer cities, they; are phenomena which go beyond the city and translate the decline of the city as a territorial localization, and also as a place of an assumed Mere. I’m very pessimistic. I feel we’ entering into a society without rights, a ‘non-rights’ society, because we’re entering a society of the non-place, and because the political man was connected to the discrimination of a place. The loss of a place is, alas, generally the loss of rights. Here, we have a big problem: the political man must be reinvented - a political man connected to speed-space. There, everything remains to be done, nothing’s been accomplished. I’d even say the question hasn’t been considered. The problem of the automatic responder we were talking about earlier, the legal action which Clifford Johnson is taking against the US Congress, is in my opinion the trial of the century. The problem of rights there is the right of the powerful man, the last man, he who decides. Now, he too will no longer have the right, if he delegates his right to an automatic machine. We truly have here a political question and an urban question, because at present the cities are undone by technology, undone by television, defeated by automobility (the highspeed trains, the Concorde). The phenomena of identification and independence are posed in a completely new way. When it takes 3 hours to go to New York, and 36 to New Caledonia, you are closer to American identification than to Caledonian or French identification. Before proximity, there was territorial continuity. We were close because we were in the same space. Today we are close in the speed-space of the Concorde, of the high-speed train, of telecommunications. Therefore, we don’t feel conjoined to people, the compatriots of the same people - the Basques or the Corsicans. We no longer have the time to go to Bastia, because practically, we are closer to New York, because you can’t go by Concorde to Bastia, We have here a phenomenon of distortion of the territorial community that explains the phenomenon of demands of independence. Before, we were together in the same place, and could claim an identity. Today, we are together elsewhere, via high-speed train, or via TV. There is a power of another nature which creates distortions. We are no longer in space, but in speed-space. Because of speed-space there are fellow countrymen participating in the same nonplace who feel close, whereas one’s own countrymen in Corsica or New Caledonia are in reality so far away in speed-space, so beyond 36 hours or 10 hours, that they are strangers and therefore desire their autonomy. There’s a logic there, and it’s a logic which poses problems.


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