Date: Fri, 7 Jun 1996 09:38:23 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: DROMOLOGY QUESTION


I read Virilio's _Speed and Politics_ a while ago, and found it 
interesting--though I wasn't over the moon about it.

Lots of stuff, as I recall, about ships, navigation, trade, and the impact
of the invention of latitude and longditude etc. on the conception of
space.  At least, that's also what Deleuze and Guattari pick up from that
book. 

It's simply not trying to do the same thing as physics.

It's more along the lines of Braudel and the Annales school and their 
histories of everyday life.

Along the same line, I wonder what anyone thinks of Manuel DeLanda's _War 
in the Age of Intelligent Machines_, which is quite indebted to Virilio, 
and which tries to trace history through technology without subsiding 
into reductionism--isn't this in some ways the marxist project?  DeLanda 
is quite virulently anti-marxist, however, as he sees marxism's concept 
of history as being foreshortened.  The durees aren't longue enough, as 
it were.  But I don't think this is a necessary incompatibility.

Virilio, by the way, is supposedly some sort of militant Catholic pacifist.

Take care

Jon

Jon Beasley-Murray
Literature Program
Duke University
jpb8-AT-acpub.duke.edu
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons


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