Fast capitalism is a 24/7 reality. Its statics and dynamics require social theorists to delve into dromology, or disciplined discursive deliberations over the new modes of power and knowledge generated by speed itself. As one gains awareness of how speed shapes social practices, it is clear that social theory must consider the power of kinetics as a fundamental force in everyday life. Whether it is defined as "dromocracy" (Virilio 1986), "time-space compression" (Harvey 1989) or "fast capitalism" (Agger 1989), today's temporal terrains, as Virilio asserts, are embedded in "chrono-politics" through which "speed rules" over every aspect of life now being reformatted by "the dromocratic revolution" (Virilio and Lotringer 1983:43-51). These effects are both global and local in their scope and impact, although their impact on culture, economy, and society is not fully understood.
Consequently, this analysis develops an alternative critical approach to "kinematics," or the study of practice-carrying motions considered in themselves, for understanding the unusual fixities of form coevolving with the rushing ephemeralities of global flows. "Since movement creates the event," as Virilio argues, "the real is kinedramatic"(1995:23). A theoretical appreciation of the kinedramatic also indicates that the currents of global exchange are generating cohesive structures of movement on a worldwide scale, or "kineformations," which could be understood as "global flowmations" (Luke and Ó Tuathail 1998). These actually existing new social formations in the fast capitalist world are held together within the compressed time-space of flowmationalized discourses and practices. Whether it is Nike, FedEx, British Air or Exxon, transnational capital sells speed as either its key service or as a critical quality of its products. Flowmationalization, in turn, expresses the kinedramatic events of globalization as the dominant operating logic of the post-1989 New World Order.
Global flowmationalization develops gradually out of transnational discourses and practices as a world of sovereign governments from the seventeenth century and its Westphalian system of nation-states erupts with dromological trends as it comes under the sovereign reach of world governmentality. The "slow folks" get separated from the "fast class," "steady savers" are run over by "fast money," "slow growth" falls into disfavor with "fast pay-offs" as speed rules. Indeed, "fellow traveling" at common rates of speed eclipses common citizenship in place as a key nexus of many individuals' identity. The volatilization of once solid states by global trade, media, traffic, and data flows has compressed traditional permacultures into today's ephemeracultures (Luke 1992:72-76), embedding corporate engineered fast capitalist turnover into the reproduction of everyday life.
Still, such ruptures are costly. As Virilio observes about today's world, destroying "its stationary organization merely revealed that tendency to chaos, which, according to Schlegel, is hidden in all ordered creation" (1995:71-72). The purposive construction of chaos as capitalist opportunity clearly advances the interests of transnational enterprise inasmuch as new strange attractors of desire and goods spontaneously order chaotic flows of needs and satisfactions in global markets. Liberating these flows to go anywhere anytime anyway has extraordinary kinedramatic effects, because it means
...not only annihilating the duration of information—of the image and its path—but with these all that endures or persists. What the mass media attack in other institutions (democracy, justice, science, the arts, religion, morality, culture) are not the institutions themselves but the instinct of self-preservation that lies behind them. That is, what they still retain of bygone civilizations for which everything was a material and spiritual preparation directed against disappearance and death, and in which communicating meant to survive, to remain. (Virilio 1995:53)
Volatilizing old social formations, then, generates the turbulent chaos of today's New World Order in which these kineformations of global exchange emerge around the vortices of various strange attractors and shapeshifting wormholes in flowmations of commodities, currencies or concepts. On the one hand, one finds corporate entities celebrating the new freedoms of kineformation. Their plastic Visa cards carrying anyone anywhere anytime 24/7; and, on the other hand, one hears laments over the loss of what was once regarded as trusted and reliable sites of good incomes, stable employment, and moral consensus.
Foucault's genealogies of capitalism, statism, and managerialism in modern Europe focuses on the interventions of governmentality: how they are developed, what ends they served, which structures were implicated in applying them. This analysis must continue today in new social flowmations. Most importantly, kinematic power disembeds people from the enduring persistence of localistic traditions, and then reconfigures them as individual integers of abstract populations to bring the whole planet into a "governmentalization of the state" (Foucault 1991:103). Global flowmations no longer need to ground their sense of right disposition, convenient ends or even things as such in very narrow national terms. The flux of tastes and flows of people give capitalist kineformations the leverage needed for interventions into everyday life as the power/knowledge containments for their biopowers. The move to tailor marketplaces to products or buyers to goods as fast as tastes change, or can be changed, is one dromocracy of flowmationalization. Transnational businesses, media groups, banking syndicates, and national blocs all feed these tendencies toward world governmentality by advancing their own polyglot visions of convenience to engineer the right disposition of things for producers and consumers. This pluralization of global populations "as a datum, as a field of intervention, and as an object of governmental techniques" (Foucault 1991:102) is the basis of world governmentality. And, the kineformations of commodities emerge as part and parcel out of the major dromocratic shifts which no longer "isolate the economy as a specific sector of reality" (Foucault 1991:102), but rather transform economics into an identity that is the universalizing totality of the real.
As flowmationalizing disruptions get launched, the world's populations suffer promotional diasporas. Forced out of their hometowns, homecities, homelands or homeworlds they enter the kineformations of their own special Nike Towns, Sun Cities, Disneylands, and Mac Worlds. Once fixed in place there, globalizing fast capitalist agencies, like Citibank, McDonalds or Gap, and not traditional nation-states, increasingly sustain the disciplines and/or delights needed "to manage a population" not only as a "collective mass of phenomena, the level of its aggregate effects," but also "the management of population in its depths and details" (Foucault 1991:102). Flowmationality, in turn, becomes a group focus in such flowmations, and nationality often fades, or maybe even fails, for the fast capitalist classes. Such lifestyles enable one to flow locally along with styled living as high standards of living cash out in the fast lane as paths to living up to high standards in the global flows. If one judges their success more often by the goods and services shared by the other "successful fifth" of nations (Reich 1991) against that denied the "failed four-fifths," even though they are still perhaps one's fellow citizens, then one discovers their closest coaccelerants riding the same fast capitalist tracks in polyglot global flowmations. Since 1979, globalist neoliberals have sung the praises of the marketplace to create a seamless World Wide Web of exchange so that anybody anytime can prowl to associate themselves with those things the fast classes find to be mutually satisfying solutions for living on a small planet. Some currents of commodification keep capital and people contained at home, while others accelerate them outward in the world's flows.
I. Rethinking Kineformations and Freedom
To make political or social theory matter, one must ask, "where are we going?" (Flyvbjerg 2001:612). What is being regarded as desirable is too simple: trust scientific experts and business owners to do what is best for the common good in accord with prevailing scientific and business practices. Liberal democratic assumptions about science and capital privilege those with the technology (or the "know-how") and/or who have capital (or the "own-how") in the economy and society (see Yanow 1996) with kineformative power. Yet, these same assumptions ignore how fully those same economic and social relations are organized to guarantee that most members in society cannot acquire know-how or accumulate own-how (Mumford 1963; and 1970). In fact, the existing regime of power/knowledge in liberal democratic society of the U.S.A. actively works to ensure that most of its members do not know-how or own-how it operates, because the subpolitical impulse has mostly displaced the political as the driving force in most economies and societies (Baudrillard 1981).
Unlike the larger public projects anchoring what is usually identified as "the polis," fast capitalism unveils much smaller corporate and professional agendas for private profit and power that sustain the broader and denser networks at the core of today's economy and society, which Beck sees as a realm of "the subpolitical." The financial, professional, and technical networks behind the subpolis freeze possibilities for collective action and imagination somewhere between a traditional vision of politics and non-politics (Luke 1999). As Beck suspects, big technological systems, like cybernetic networks, telecommunications grids, or computer applications, are becoming the material basis for kineformative powers as,
...a third entity, acquiring the precarious hybrid status of a sub-politics, in which the scope of social changes precipitated varies inversely with their legitimation....The direction of development and results of technological transformation become fit for discourse and subject to legitimation. Thus business and techno-scientific action acquire a new political and moral dimension that had previously seemed alien to techno-economic activity....now the potential for structuring society migrates from the political system into the sub-political system of scientific, technological, and economic modernization. The political becomes non-political and the non-political political....A revolution under the cloak of normality occurs, which escapes from possibilities of intervention, but must all the same be justified and enforced against a public becoming critical....The political institutions become the administrators of a development they neither have planned for nor are able to structure, but must nevertheless somehow justify....Lacking a place to appear, the decisions that change society become tongue-tied and anonymous....What we do not see and do not want is changing the world more and more obviously and threateningly. (Beck 1992:186-187)
Ironically, then, collective decisions made by technicians and tradesmen to structure the economy and society around such "subpolitical systems of scientific, technological, and economic modernization" (Beck 1992:186) are now changing the world in kineformative structures without much, if any, direct state regulation, political planning, or civic legitimation (Beck 1997).
From these structural contradictions, the promise of freedom emerges as a space without boundaries, a place of complete immediacy without sheltering barriers, and a decentered zone for commercial performance. With scientific experts carefully engaged in 24/7 surveillance over many local economies and environments, dromologies take us essentially "back in spatial itself," and critical analysis might infer "a certain supplement of spatiality in the contemporary period and suggests that there is a way in which, even though other modes of production....are distinctively spatial, ours has been spatialized in a unique sense, such that space is for us an existential and cultural dominant, a thematized or foregrounded feature or structural principle standing in striking contrast to its relatively subordinate and secondary....role in earlier modes of production" (Jameson 1992:365).
Decisions taken on one level at a certain scale and tempo in national space, then, rebound on another level for individuals living and working in other scales and tempos in technified space as kineformative fields of practice. Because the subpolitical runs beneath, beside or behind the national with its more openly administrative processes and structures, its workings are essentially subpolitical both by design and default. The prerogatives of professional expertise and individual property in liberal democratic societies are essentially unquestioned. In turn, the restraints of the subpolitical are created. Liberal codes of property and professional credos of technocracy become shields held up against all political attempts to ask the "who, whom" question of infrastructures, systems, and technologies in national politics. Meanwhile, it is in the subpolitics of transnational systems where the real decisions about "who, whom" are made, and then made to hold fast (Luke 1999).
Precise knowledge about the space and its inhabitants in this context is meant to guide "the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes" (Foucault 1980:141). Not everyone will be inserted or adjusted in same ways to make these mechanisms succeed. Instead, new inequalities and unfreedoms come from kinematic ensembles of economic exchange shifting their value-added products to a few privileged locales, leaving their value-detracting by-products in many other places that now divide the world's populations and space in new degraded ways that are taken to be, at the same time, "free to choose." In this manner, the practices of governmentality serve as "methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern" (Foucault 1980:141). Indeed, the most decisive revolutions are being made globally and locally, as Beck maintains, "under the cloak of normality" (1992:186) in the realms framed by technics and economics. Therefore, "in contemporary discussions," as Beck suggests, "the alternative society" is no longer expected to come from parliamentary debates on new laws, but rather from the application of microelectronics, genetic technology, and information media" (1992:223).
II. On "Quasification"
Alongside Beck's thoughts on the subpolitical, Latour claims that modernity has little to do with the invention of humanism, the emergence of science, the secularization of society or the mechanization of the world. Instead, his analysis of the present highlights a modern willingness to accept as "truths" the conjoined generation of new Nature/Society/God constructs in which a series of checked-and-balanced pairings switch between transcendence and immanence. Simultaneously, those who are modernizing or modernized can believe:
They have not made Nature; they make Society; they make Nature; they have not made Society; they have not made either, God has made everything; God has made nothing; they have made everything.... By playing three times in a row on the same alienation between transcendence and immanence, we moderns can mobilize Nature, objectify the social, and feel the spiritual presence of God, even while firmly maintaining that Nature escapes us, that Society is our own work, and that God no longer intervenes. (Latour 1993:34)
Accepting these constitutional principles permits hybrid collectives (Latour 1993:4) to proliferate—as the abstractions typically labeled as science, technology, culture, society or markets—as kinedramatic modernity. Hybrids are the fabric of our lives, those good things corporations bring to life, or where science and technology get down to business, while they deny the very existence of these hybridized actualities in conventional Enlightenment fables of live human subjects dominating dead non-human objects through science and technology. "The essential point of this modern Constitution," as Latour maintains, "is that it renders the work of mediation that assembles hybrids invisible, unthinkable, unrepresentable" (1993:34).
Modernization, as Latour frames it, requires two sets of practices: translation, which mixes entirely new types of beings, or hybrids of nature and culture; and purification, which disputes these mixtures as it "creates two entirely different ones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other" (1993:10-11). As long as everything and everyone treats these practices as separate and distinct, then one can think and be "modern." Translation builds conventionalized constructs in the networks of quasi-subjects/quasi-objects betwixt "a natural world that has always been there, a society with predictable and stable interests and stakes, and a discourse that is independent of both reference and society" (Latour 1993:11). Any effective analysis of modernity, then, must confront the "quasification" processes in hybridity, because clearly "objects are not the shapeless recreatables of social categories—neither the 'hard' ones nor the 'soft' ones....Society is neither that strong nor that weak; objects are neither that weak nor that fabricated, much more collective than the 'hard' parts of nature, but they are in no way the arbitrary receptacles of a full-fledged society" (Latour 1993:55). Environments—artificial or natural—cannot be understood fully without seeing how these quasifications constantly either pull back into purifications of discourse or fail to disclose translations in action. As they do, speed matters most.
Nature's supercession creates a second nature, a processed world or a postmodern condition—mixing together quasi-objects and quasi-subjects—in which those who own and control the material and mental means of enforcing order amidst these asymmetries concretize new inequalities on a global scale in many landscapes, places, and spaces—urban, rural, suburban, and exurban—which are neither metropolitan nor peripheral. Without saying so, Latour here essentially walks into Beck's subpolitical domain. Indeed, where we are going derives from the quasi-objective and quasi-subjective characteristics of people and things caught up within routine governmentality. Who gains and who loses are conditions that fuse hybridized objects and subjects within techno-scientific quasification in all of its amorphic (con)fusions. Here one finds the quasipolitical order in which speed is matter, and in which kineformations must matter—which are global and local, industrial and agricultural, commercial and nonprofit, urban and rural, built and unbuilt.
Knit together out of quasi-objects and quasi-subjects into systems of politicized technocultural practice, and, desirable or not, this praxis constitutes our kinedramatic forms, ways or standards of living. One example of such quasipolitical forces is "the grid"—that system of systems that generate, distribute, and use electricity to sustain living in the fast lane. Others would be the food machines, water works, road systems, freight carriers, housing complexes, mass media or health services that also shape the spaces and sites of urban-industrial life quite profoundly as matter as well as materialized social science. Where we are going, following Flyvbjerg, became a path paved with such artifacts as they came together during the Gilded Age. It congealed—via episteme, techne, and phronesis—both to structure agency and to activate structures in those countries that can develop and deploy such systems of systems—water, sewer, gas, electricity, telegraph, telephone, road, and rail—to organize both their subjects' and objects' conduct. As these modernizing processes unfold, praxes of "the polis" become entwined with clusters of quasified operations embedded in "the quasipolis," or these hybridizations of machinic systems, human populations, and territorial spaces. Indeed, the unfolding of world capitalist markets are part and parcel of a "quasipolitan" order, which anchors, in part, "freedom to," "freedom from," and "freedom through."
The attainment of popular sovereignty during and after the Enlightenment clearly constitutes a major milestone for liberty in the North Atlantic Basin, which demands certain correlative forms of subjection, certain types of domination or control to operate well (Luke 1999a). This empowerment of people through technified media of control, information, and order in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries makes society and science central to modes of "freedom" set forth by the Enlightenment (Foucault 1991). Strangely enough, this transformation is not juridico-political as much as it is techno-economic. Therefore, few, if any, studies by political theorists or cultural critics have investigated its ramifications. While popular sovereignty plainly marks a transfer of authority to the people, getting "power to the people" through quasipolitan means now constitutes the sine qua non of "modernity." This kind of liberating empowerment rarely is, however, thought about systematically.
Of course, societies exist with popular political sovereignty, and no quasipolitan liberties; and, other societies attain quasipolitian liberties without enjoying popular political sovereignty. In seeking to make it matter, most conventional social science focuses with classical realist categories upon men and their quest for power in each national polis exercising the will to dominate every other polis. A more realistic reading of these times, however, should look at the quasipolis of international, national, regional, and local systems in which "all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind" (Marx and Engels 1978:476). There are different struggles among men, and women, within the quasipolis over how to, first, make possible and then, second, why to take to relying upon these probable nonhuman conditions of life, as new relations with both their own kind and other machinic systems. Living inside the accidental normality of today's advanced built environments is made possible, or impossible, by the power and knowledge embedded in material regimens that run the kineformative grids of water, gas, sewer, road, telephone, radio, television, and electricity systems interwoven into every quasipolis. Here one can, and should, make social theory matter.
III. Kinematics and Quasipolitics
Quasipolitanization could be seen as the unfolding of reason in history, but then, as Lyotard argues, such appeals to rational development do not convince many people these days. Few now believe that progress in knowledge or technology will bring "a society emancipated from poverty, despotism, and ignorance. But all of us can see that the development continues to take place without leading to the realization of any of these dreams of emancipation" (Lyotard 1984:39). Rather poverty, despotism, and ignorance have become naturalized as background conditions for many in the world, while a few organize the artificial world to realize hyperdeveloped outcomes that openly undercut most of modernity's myths (Tabb 2001). With this eclipse of politics by the systems of quasipolitics, Lyotard asserts science and technology are falling under the sway of "another language game, in which the goal is no longer truth, but performativity—that is, the best possible input/output equation" (1984:46) in synchronizing the productivity or quasi-objects and quasi-subjects together.
Technologies never fall fully fabricated or ready made out of the clouds (Adas 1989; and, Nye 1990). They must instead be made ready by their owners and/or managers for some sort of profitable business and personal use by enrolling producers, consumers, and advocates in new social movements to build national systems that promote their utility, tout their necessity, and herald their inevitability as "freedoms to" (Greenfeld, 2001). How to live in societies organized around such systems of sustaining systems, as they are embedded within commodity markets, is now a disciplinary approach to life that virtually is ignored by mainstream political science. Yet, everyday life requires a broad range of new cultural compliances from everyone acceding to, or resisting against, the governmentality created by the quasipolis' many different language games, various skill sets, and several new systemic technocultures (Agger 1989).
The multiplicity of material human interests in civil society once rose politically from distinct quarters of cities, regions, and nations among divergent occupational, financial, and technical groups distinguishable by their class, ethnic, and religious memberships (Mumford 1963). The satisfaction of human needs today, however, transpires quasipolitically in the world market where large and small corporate entities oversee cycles of production and consumption for the goods and services required to supply global demands (Nye 1996; and, Reich 1991).
Firms concentrate energy, information, and material in market exchange. Their operational networks, in-house technologies, and company strategies constitute the everyday environments needed for organizing, institutionalizing, and enjoying the economic performances of many different agents and structures (Tabb 2001). These social forces do this with near complete authority, but political science essentially neglects it. They configure agents and structures as quasipolities—without sovereignty but with authority, regulations, power, and identities—in many other places around the region, different countries, or even the world at large in support of their particular corporate, national, and technical systems by collecting information, moving people, using energy, and processing materials as it suits them. As a result, the public agenda, when it is understood as politics, rarely moves forward unless it too is shaped to serve the quasipolitical interests of what allegedly is the public per se. Thus, the system of systems first serves a much smaller subset of highly salient interests espoused by the owners of big companies and/or expert managers of powerful technologies (Virilio 1997).
Corporations now function, because of the systems of systems in global markets, as complex machines (Luke 1996; Greenfeld 2001; and, Goldstone 2001). Furthermore, producers and consumers in almost all the world's markets are compelled, for the most part, to express their goals, find their resources, and generate their life outcomes out of the machinic operations of such major corporations. The seat of empowerment, understood as the generation of development, modernization or even civilization, now flows through the accidental normality that rests upon such quasipolitical systems. Inasmuch as any modern culture represents corporate acts and company artifacts shaped by particular enterprises in specific settings, the good life promised by the polis is now made and remade from ideas and material things mobilized to advance profit-seeking corporate strategies (Luke 1989). Today, for example, many would see "empowerment" first as getting electricity rather than attaining popular sovereignty. Before "powering up" society, most forms of development and modernization are hard to envision. By the twentieth century, then, it was no accident that attaining "freedom" required "power." Clearly, Lenin regarded attaining socialism for the USSR as being equal to "electrification plus Soviet rule" or that General Electric in the USA has seen its corporate mission as "bringing good things to life" through electricity.
Electrification's, motorization's or mechanicization's modes of empowerment, for example, shows how market-based technologies of production and the self cogenerate new kineformative linkages between objective systemic productivity and subjective idiosyncratic consumption for producers and consumers in the quasipolitical regimens of globalization through objects (Baudrillard 1996). "Plugging in" becomes tacit consent to governmentality's dictates as technics conduct one's conduct through multiple technified grids of command, control, and communication as "freedom through" the system. The end users of corporate commodities are redesignated through their purchase of commodities to play the role of capital asset, causing "the ultimate realization of the private individual as a productive force. The system of needs must wring liberty and pleasure from him as so many functional elements of the reproduction of the system of production and the relations of power that sanction it" (Baudrillard 1981:85). In other words, corporate plans for social transformation gain life, liberty, and property through the buying decisions of individuals rather than the other way around. For transnational businesses, the liberation of personal "wants" or individual "needs," as they are allegedly felt by everyone anywhere, is fixed by making more and more commodities hitherto inaccessible in many markets available to all who desire them.
Liberating these needs, however, matches capital and its experts with new mobilizations of fresh commodities (Virilio 1997). Subjectivity is redefined through quasipolitanization as a material need for coexisting with artifacts and systems as commodified goods, and modern subjects are those who can be defined by their material demand for such goods and services freely designed to supply and thereby satisfy them (Baudrillard 1996). Disciplinary objectivities, in turn, shape disciplined subjectivity through quasipolitan order. As Baudrillard observes,
The consumption of individuals mediates the productivity of corporate capital; it becomes a productive force required by the functioning of the system itself, by its process of reproduction and survival. In other words, there are these kinds of needs because the system of corporate production needs them. And the needs invested by the individual consumer today are just as essential to the order of production as the capital invested by the capitalist entrepreneur and the labor power invested in the wage laborer. It is all capital. (Baudrillard 1981:82)Ideologies of competitive corporate growth realized through the exploitation of labor are inscribed in each quasipolitical commodity, even though these authoritative objects are delivered to compliant consumers as true tokens of the new "freedoms to" find their collective liberation via "the market."