Dromoscopy, or The Ecstasy of Enormities 1
Paul Virilio
Translated by Edward R. O'Neil
Figures
"For the driver, to look is to live."
--French Highway Patrol
Movement drives the event. In making transparency active, speed
metamorphoses appearances. In the accelerated enterprise of travel, a
simulation takes place which renews the project of trompe-l'oeil.
The depth of the landscape rises to the surface like an oilspot on the
surface of a painting. Inanimate objects exhume themselves from the
horizon and come bit by bit to impregnate the sheen of the windshield.
Perspective comes alive. The vanishing point becomes a point of assault
projecting its arrows and rays on the voyager-voyeur. The goal of the
chase becomes a hearth which hurls its rays at the astonished observer,
fascinated by the landscapes' advance. This axis that generates an
apparent movement suddenly becomes concrete in the speed of the engine,
but this concreteness is one that is completely relative to the moment,
since the object which precipitates itself on the film of the windshield
will just as quickly be forgotten as perceived: put back in the prop
room, it will disappear out the rear window.
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Let's disabuse ourselves: we are before a veritable "seventh art," that
of the dashboard. The opposite extreme from stroboscopy, which permits
one to observe objects animated by a rapid movement as if they were in
repose, this dromoscopy allows to one to see inanimate objects
as if they were animated by a violent movement.
To climb into a car is at once to step on board and to cross a border
2
(the sidewalk's edge, for example). But it's also for the agent of
this displacement to position himself before a sort of easel composed
of the windshield and the dashboard showing the instrumentation.
Arranged before the eyes of the driver this instrument panel forms a
totality: the agent of displacement will by turns observe the approach
of objects which will not fail to hit the windshield (images --but
also insects, gravel, feathered creatures) and also diverse movements
which will animate the gauges and counters. In this driving fascination
begins a double game of lining up the inside and the outside of the car.
With the help of the steering wheel and the accelerator pedal, the
author-composer of the trip will in effect arrange a series of speed
pictures, which will playfully sneak up on the transparent screen
of the windshield. With the monotonous unfolding
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of roadside scenes, each object perceived in an advancing depth of
field already identifies itself at that instant with a deferred crash.
On the centerstage of the driver's seat, the driver, by rolling dodges,
will pursue and flee at the same time, these precipitations being too
unreal for their suicidal character to slow the driver's advance.
In fact, the dromoscopic simulation hides the violent compression
of driving. Its dissimulation assures and reassures the driver in
his drive. If in its aero-dynamism the vehicle of the trip is only the
embryo of a constantly deferred becoming, by improvements decreasing wind
resistance the vehicle is also the figure of a generalized desertion,
a larva of speed the development of which one will not perceive except
in the emergence of a better shape permitting still greater speed.
It is the same with the dromoscopic play provided by the staging of
the motor. Each dashboard is nothing but a moment in the mise-en-scene
of the windscreen.
2
The rushes of landscape are nothing but a cinematic hallucination
which is the opposite of stroboscopy. In dromoscopy the fixity of
the presence of objects ceases, seducing the voyeur-voyager. In the
rapidity of this displacement, the voyeur-voyager finds himself in
a situation which is the opposite of that of the habitué of
darkened cinemas: it's the traveler who is projected. Both actor
and spectator in the drama of projection, in the moment of flight the
traveler plays the role of his own destination.
The art of the dashboard appears therefore both as a substitute for
hunting with its scenery and also as a substitute for dueling with
its feints. The accelerator pedal and the steering wheel function
respectively like sword and shield: the accelerator pedal projects the
assaulting vehicle which pierces through the theatrical sets of the
traversed land, while the movements of the steering wheel dodge the rays
projected from the enemy horizon.
In the mirror of the windshield, the windshield wipers maintain the play
of transparency, that transparency just as necessary to the dromoscopic
play of images as the escape in depth of the highway is to that of
the automobile. Despite its pane, the opening of the cockpit is not a
simple window: it's a stage where signs of the places traversed animate
themselves in a play of scenery changes composed of speed changes.
Restricting the visual field of the passengers, the frame
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of the dashboard expands the acceleration of that unfurling which confirms
the vehicle's speed. The dromoscopic simulation results from that double
reduction: of the distance-time of the trip, and of the narrowness of
the dashboard's frame.
In reality, the car driver's seat is nothing but a landscape
simulator: elsewhere, on certain supersonic flights, the direct
view from the aircraft of the landings is often abandoned in favor of
the electric images of a "flight simulator." Even if in flying school
the flight simulator gives the pilot the illusion of flying, in driving
school one uses a cinematographic projection to watch the sequences
of the driving film unroll. The driver imagines the arrangement of
dashboard meters of his future voyages. In the travel scenes of the
windshield the world becomes a video game, a game of transparency and of
"trans-peirce-n-cy" which drives the stage director of the mise-en-route.
3
The ability to control blurs into the permission to move--that is to
say, the license to drive.
The mastery of the dromoscopic projection assures the security of the
trip--in other words, the traveler's comfort depends upon being immobile
while moving. On the pain of death, the brutal truth of their status
will never be revealed to the passenger. Those who travel violently must
remain "silent as a painting," immobilized by the straps which recall
those of childhood. They can only impotently watch the exhibition of
tableaux of swirling colors which rapidly succeed each other before their
eyes. So long as the dromoscopic simulation continues, the comfort of the
passengers is assured. However, if this stops abruptly in a crash, the
voyeurs-voyagers would be immediately projected like Alice through the
looking glass of the dashboard, thrown from death but above all thrown
from the truth of their trajectory when the swerving of the show ceases.
The spectators will become actors. It's this sudden uprising which the
safety belt attempts to subdue.
With the DROMOSCOPE, it's required under the gravest penalties
to go through each gear. The opposite of CINEMASCOPE, the gear shifts
necessitate that the agent-driver make each sequence replace one another
on the screen of the windshield: from the acceleration, deceleration,
until the still shot of the stop, by way of the reverse dolly shot of
parallel parking.
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This backwards motion of images in the progressive arrest of the
projection is similar to that of the transmission gears. The unfolding
in stages is an obligation of speed. One never jumps over the order
of gears--first, second, third, fourth. The agent-driver maintains the
"dromocratic" order of the dictatorship of movement.
In this race-pursuit, the countryside is never exactly traversed but
rather perforated, brought to light. The driver is only the verifier
of this perforation where the real, it seems, folds back on itself like
a glove. Going as well as coming back, the trajectory is only a tunnel
where the meaning of distance's expansion reverses itself. With the
scenery changes of the gear shifts, the informational content of places
evolves, each state of movement of the car's engine corresponding to
a state of the signification of the milieus driven through. By the
dromoscopic figuration each gear appears a bit like a bureau of Time,
of the trip's duration.
The opening of the windshield is therefore not a window but a kind of
glass door through which the passengers pass non-stop, a glass door by
which the voyeurs-voyagers engulf themselves in the attraction of arrival.
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Comparable to the vertical turnstile of a revolving door, the screen of
the windshield functions a little like flaps at a tunnel's mouth,
of which the horizontal axis would be the vehicle, the flaps the
landscapes which successively pass by the car's exterior. In this
obscene overturning, the country exposes its underside, and in turning
over its landscapes, the territorial body excites the master of place to
the violence of speed by inciting him to a rape of distance. But the
transparent screen is also a sort of dial, a gauge which shows in its
dromoscopic simulation the violence of the trip. There, where the
viewers and the other dashboard indicators make known the state of the
motor, the glass of the windshield indicates the status of the journey.
The dromoscopic vision gives in plain language a double transparence,
of the window and of the road, the evolution of the physical world and
the simulated deformations of the visual field traversed. These are
the precious indications of the state of places. With daily mobility's
gallery of dashboards, the cultural revolution of transportation exposes
itself publicly. In the screen of the car trip, the speeding-up of images
is equivalent to an apparent seismic movement of which the epicenter would
place itself at the blindspot of arrival. The vector of transportation
is therefore nothing but an implosion, and the users of this ambulatory
catastrophe are less the privileged contemplators of the route
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and more a thwarted landing party. With the speed of pursuit, it's the
objective of the trip which destroys the path. It's the target of the
projecting projectile (the automobile) which seems to provoke the ruin
of distance. It's the passenger's desire to go to the end of the line as
fast as possible which produces in the drawing-on of the voyage the brutal
drawing and quartering of the landscape. The irresistible attraction
of the route dissolves with the fixity of objects, the time of travel,
the distance-time. The cognitive distance of space certainly subsists
somewhere, but it tends to become a memory, the commemoration of ancient
paths of faintly recalled journeys. The other end of the countryside is
closer and closer but the consistency of places has disappeared in the
aesthetic of rapidity, an optical phenomena. The goal of the voyage
acts like a hardener. The instrument controls permit one to seize on
the vivid--the suddenness of the tree, the instantaneity of houses, the
hills which successively explode the route. The excessive attraction
of the arrival changes the view of the passenger like the shutter of a
camera--an instantaneous luminosity.
The acceleration of the camera of dromographic shooting corresponds to
the progressive closing of the windshield, the will to rejoin as fast
as possible the goal of the voyage restraining the field of vision of
the voyeurs-voyagers, their depth of field.
Today, the means of communication not only produces as yesterday the
transfer from one point to another (no matter what the bridge), the means
of rapid transportation also produces a fleeting figuration of flight.
In simulating the transitoriness of immobile things, the means
of communication shows the unbelievable reality of an end to space.
The dromoscopic simulation makes believable the counter-truth of the
world's contraction.
The animation of dashboards deceives the voyagers with the
cataclysmic movement of the end, the arrival of the end. Like a
magic mirror, the windshield permits the future to be seen. In fact,
the DROMOVISION (automobile media) simulated transitoriness well before
the TELEVISION (audiovisual media) simulated proximity... all the way
until the not-at-all-unimagineable moment when the instantaneity of
omnipresence will abolish the distance of space, in the same blow making
the dromovisual apparatus the perfect equivalent of the audivisual
apparatus!
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The departure of the automobile should, however, be the occasion to
examine the prospects of projection. Somewhat as one
enters the laboratory, we should climb on board in order to decipher an
enigma, that of the incoherence of the motorized wandering, trying to
guess the logic of that desertion which impels travel.
If in the history of architecture the window initially appeared in places
of worship before proliferating in its usual habitat, this is because the
window's opening permitted one to contemplate the sky without touching
it: the environs of a temple. Yet more slowly, in pictorial history
this time, the frame of easel painting permitted a renewal of this
critical distance which geometric perspective confirmed scientifically.
Today, it seems very much that the screen of the dashboard repeats
this false proximity: with its rear-view mirror, its windowed doors,
its frontal windshield, the automobile forms a quadriptych where the
travel lover is the target of a permanent assault which renews the
perspective of painting. The illusion is the same, but henceforth it
extends itself at the surface of the world and no longer only on the
surface of the canvas. The drive replaces the painting's varnish: the
painter (driver) brings along behind him the viewer (passenger) in the
transparent wake of his driving. If yesterday
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painting attracted the gaze of art lovers in the painted work's
illusion of depth, currently the dromoscopic work attracts at the same
time the driver and his passenger in the "work" of an entire country.
Projected towards the light of the arrival, they occupy together the
soul of a sort of translucent pit where the countrysides compose the
measure of the journey.
From the driver's seat, immediate proximity means little. All that
counts is what holds itself at a distance. In the pursuit of the voyage
the vantage controls the advance. The speed of propulsion produces its
own horizon: the bigger this is, the farther the horizon.
The philosophy of the windshield necessitates foresight in addition to
plain sight, because the latter is tricked by advancing. It's the future
which decides the present of the route. In the accelerated wandering the
past is overtaken. The landmarks are essentially those of the future.
The dromovisual apparatus functions therefore above all like a means
of exhumation. As a means of communication it only communicates that
which is to come. In the unidirectionality of the trip, that which stands
still has long since disappeared in the archeology of the departure.
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For the forward-looking driver of the trip, the driver's seat is a
seat of foresight, a control tower of the future of the trajectory.
On the contrary, that of the airport is for the air traffic controller
the driver's seat of the airlines. Whatever be the apparent movement
of the countryside in the screen of the windshield or the real movement
of airplanes in the radar screen, that which counts for the controller
of the trip is the anticipation, the advance knowledge.
The technique of vectors henceforth replacing the tactics of bodies,
this vision of a world lost as soon as it's perceived identifies itself
well enough with a conqueror's vision, to the point that the control of
the dashboard could appear a bit like a misunderstood form of war game.
Let's remember: in the dialectic of war, that which unveils itself undoes
itself; the visible is lost because it escapes the prescience which is
the rule of the game of strategy. Likewise in the automobile's path the
foresight of the movement of the adversary horizon is for the driver
the twin of that movement of the adversary for the army commander.
A sophisticated form of kriegspiel, the dromoscopy would be in
some form a video game of speed, a blitzkriegspeil in which the
military staff's exercises would ceaselessly perfect themselves, each
rapid vehicle would be in sum a vector of command, a "command car."
It is, moreover, instructive to consider the historical
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evolution of diverse "cockpits": if yesterday one still drove in the
open air, in contact with the atmosphere while hearing the noise of the
motor and the wind, feeling the machine vibrate, one can notice that the
excess of speed has contributed to progressively enclosing the driver,
first behind the screen of goggles, then behind the windshield, and
finally in the interior driver's seat.
The driving "by instinct" of the pioneers has given way to the "driving
by instruments," then to the "auto-pilot," while awaiting the likely
integral automation of automobility....
In fact, the driver's seat of machines offers a political image of
the future. The instrument panel exposes to he who wants to observe it
the foreseeable evolution of power. A veritable crystal ball, these
screens and dials illuminate by their dim glow forthcoming political
paths. The new "machine of war" brings with it the last "machine of
surveillance." The two together become one. There is no more, as in the
past, a dichotomy between the function of the weapon and that of the eye.
The assault vehicle carries a scope machine, and the destruction of the
looking illustrates that of living. Unfortunately, the dromoscopic
accidents are less spectacular, it appears, in their immediate
consequences than the telescopic accidents, not one wreck subsists
and "visibly" nothing concerns itself with the security of looking.
Nonetheless, in confronting this vertigo which attacks the passenger when
he plunges in the depth of the countryside, we should question ourselves.
This ecstasy of enormities which follows such vertigo and overtakes
certain abatements of acceleration is formidable. The size of the world,
its extension, is suddenly penetrated by the will to power of the driver:
it's the assault which brings to light the regions of the journey.
The territory no longer exists but by the violence of the advance.
It's the advance which in the end provokes the dawning of places.
The voyeur-voyager no longer has need like his sedentary brother to
hold himself behind the keyhole of a center of panoptic convergence.
His course is no more than a long look where the site and the sight
etymologically intermix.
4
As Martin Heidegger declared in 1933 in associating himself with the
philosophy of the Führer: "The beginning is also there. It is
not behind us as that which was a long time ago, but it holds itself
before us. The beginning has
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burst forth in our future. It stands apart like a distant disposition.
Through us, its greatness demands we rejoin it."
5
Since, a number of "drivers of the people" and other "great ensigns"
have succeeded one another behind the dromoscopic screen of absolute
power, but it seems no less reassuring to consider the army of their
offspring motorcyclists, automobile drivers, and family leaders who
reproduce in their little daily evasions the dromocractic order of the
great invasions. In this sharing of the power of speed's violence,
what political fallout does this betoken? In the control of the engine,
to what democratic illusion does this pertain? To what liturgy does
it belong?
In 1993 Edward R. O'Neill won a fellowship to study at the Centre Parisien
d'Etudes Critiques and the University of Paris III. Recently, he served
as a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the UCLA Department of Sociology,
as well as being a Visiting Lecturer at UC Irvine and the USC School of
Cinema-Television. From 1999 to 2000, he will be a Mellon Postdoctoral
Fellow in Media and Society at Bryn Mawr College.
Notes
1.
This essay was originally published in Traverses"le simulacre" 10
(Feb. 1978): 65-72. The title in French is "La dromoscopie, ou l'ivresse
des grandeurs." Virilio's invented neologism "dromoscopy" derives from the
Greek "dromos" meaning track or course, as in hippodrome, etc. I
have transliterated this Latinate term rather than translating, since
it is as much a neologism in either language. Further, this solution
retain the plays which Virilio makes between "dromoscopy" and "democracy."
2.
I've used the more British "windscreen" rather than windshield to capture
the play in the original between film and theatrical terms such as
"mise en scene" and driving terms.
3.
I have translated the French "transpercement," which means to pierce,
penetrate or run-through, with an English archaism in order to emphasize
the author's play on words. With the term "mise en route," Virilio clearly
plays off of "mise en scene"; since both this phrase and "en route" are
commonly used in English, I have left the phrase untranslated rather
than produce an unnecessary English equivalent.
4.
The French words for "site" or "place" is "lieu" and that for "eye" is
"oeil"; thus there is a closer literal proximity between the words
in French, a proximity I have tried to intimate through the pun of
"site"/"sight."
5.
In keeping with the French custom of avoiding footnotes, the author gives
no reference. An examination of certain of Heidegger's texts from 1933
did not immediately reveal to the translator a likely candidate. Thus,
given that this is a translation from French of a passage translated from
German, the possibility is quite high that the English version produced
here bears an undesirably weak relation to the German original. Cf. Martin
Heidegger's notorious, German Existentialism, tr. Dagobert D. Runes
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1965).
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