ABINADI MEZA, VISION MACHINES: CULTURES OF SPEED 1 Key Concepts from Virilio: The Metempsychosis of the Passenger and

The Great Vehicle, in Negative Horizon 1) Vehicular Transfer = Metabolic Economies of Reproduction. A transport is, in some way, a means of reproduction: "we could say that the female is the means that the male found to reproduce himself...woman is the first means of transportation for the species, its very first vehicle..." NH37 This may be understood as a War of Numbers (Multitudes): "war arose from conflicts between members of the same species and not from a confrontation with animal kind, so also did its sophistication further develop in connection with internecine struggles as opposed to conflicts against outsiders" NH38 Economy of multiples? Anima's body becomes a body-bridge. 2) Time is gained via the transport. The woman gave the man (warrior) time..."free time...'time gained' over prey, over the adversary..." and "with the breeding of the horse, war will last even longer and extend over a greater area..." NH39 Time = specialization? "The obscenity of the narcissistic and homosexual duel" Hunter->Breeder->Rider. The invention of the mount...the invention of the road...Speed becomes a destiny...Time, a means to sustain and prolong violence. 3) The Death of the Displaced Body, the Accelerated Body. A hostage..."deprived of his own motility...we play this game of hide and seek with hour body which we call: assistance, comfort, support, well-being...in order to feel our animal body less we are constantly on the move..." NH41 This constant search for ideal weightlessness. "To mount the horse or ride in the automobile is to prepare to die to the moment of the departure, and thus, to be reborn in the moment of arrival (to die a bit...)" NH42 4) Passenger as Parasite, Desiring Body. "This desire for a foreign body...the desire for the different body (of heterosexuality)...comparable to the invention of fire, but an innovation that has been lost in the obscurity that surrounds animality." NH43 From the desire for death to the desire for incorporation...erotic desire for prosthesis... 5) Force x Fear = Weapon of Power, Weapon of Extension. Range. Projector. "Extension and protraction come to be identified with protection and defense..." (The creation of military space?) Concealment. The nature that places the mask of the visible over the invisible, is only an appearance corrected by a transparence - Victor Hugo

=== 6) Kinetic Detachment of the Body = Cinematic Spectral Images. "The inauguration of a desocialization. If yesterday, in the unity of the neighborhood, the other was both known and recognized through the daily repetition of encounters, with the transportation revolution this neighbour will become a 'spectre' that one will only see again accidentally...the very notion of a neighbour will at some point disappear for ever..." NH51 Bodies become liquid along with the liquidation of the world. Along with this declining political and cultural presence we inaugurate a politics of comfort. 7) Disappearance, Disintegration: A New Aesthetics of Assault and Defense. The war of movement dissolves fortifications as it dissolves the bodies of the combatant masses. The 'lost children' as chaos engines..."here it is already a question of an aesthetic of disappearance in mobility and no longer under shelter, an aesthetic that modern war will perfect without end" NH62 Disintegration of bodies, disintegration of solidity of space. 8) A Dromocratic Revolution requires a Ministry of Time. The State is a Travel Machine. Acceleration of communications, control mechanisms as guarantors of safety...allowing or denying entry..."This innovation of the rail catastrophe, contemporary with the advent of the railway, demanded that the authorization to take certain routes is only possible on the condition that others be prohibited." NH67 9) Building Better Voids. Speed demands not only the absence of obstacles but also the absence of matter. Tunneling, subterranean networks. "After having contributed to the straightening, then to the scraping bare the surface of the route (roads, railways), the locomotive vehicle still demanded an airtight course, the production of a perfect void." NH71 A (Nihil)Utopian Logistics? 10) Politics of Deportation Densities vs. Population Densities. Political importance was once identified with the populating of space, it is now recognizable by a depopulating resulting from the mobility of people, messages and goods..."Total mobilization (travel, leisure) does not so much aim at transporting populations from here to there...but at the shifting them out of phase to an accelerated rhythm. This social deregulation and carefully maintained desynchronization between the space and time of human activities came to be the key to a vectorial power..." NH72 This delocalization of the means of communication does not strike visibly at the site of the metropolitan concentration. The city functions like a residue or, rather, essential fallout of the transportation revolution..."a pole to be reached in the round-trip exercise"