Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology

SEMIOTEXT(E) FOREIGN AGENTS SERIES

Originally published in 1977 as "Virese et Politique," Édition Galilee, Paris.
Copyright © 1977 Paul Virilio
Copyright © 2006 Semiotext(e)
Translation © Semiotext(e) and Mark Polizorti

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Special thanks to Nicholas Zurko and Mark Polizorti.

Contents

Introduction: Logistics of Habitable Circulation 7

PART 1. THE DROMOCRATIC REVOLUTION 27

From Street Fight to State Right 29
From Highway Right to State Right 49

PART 2. DROMOLOGICAL PROGRESS 59

From Space Right to State Right 61
Practical War 73

PART 3. DROMOCRATIC SOCIETY 81

Unable Bodies 83

Benjamin H. Bratton

Logistics of Habitable Circulation
A brief introduction to the 2006 edition of Speed and Politics

If there had never been a war, I would have made a very good architect.

— Ammed Shah Masoud, Afghan opposition leader reportedly assassinated 9.9.01 by suicide bombers who were, it is assumed, trained by Osama Bin-Ludan on behalf of the Taliban, as quoted in the Los Angeles Times, the morning edition of September 11, 2001.

PAUL VIRILIO'S MODERNITY is Logistical. It doesn't directly deal with war, but with everything that makes it possible. Logistics is the preparation for war through the transfer of the nation's potential to its armed forces in time of peace as in times of war.

architectural regimes become computational, and vice versa. Both are logical media for mobilization and its administration, technologies that consolidate territory into logistical fields and enable a Modern governance based on the abstracted calculation over omni-directional spaces and surfaces, from open oceans to shared spreadsheets. This comprehensive technologiography of the globe signals for Virilio both integration and disintegration, both control and accident. And it is finally through the accident, the realization of the imminent, irreducible risk that logistics hopes to contain, and not through control, that the strongest bonds of the palliis are formed. For Virillo, they are an exceptional condition already contained within, and rigorously predicated by the invention that made them possible.

In the 1960's, Virilio collaborated with architect Claude Parent to develop a challenging program for an oblique architecture using inclined planes. It followed the principle of "habitable circulation," intending to radically expand the usable surface of urban landscape. His work as a theorist from the mid-1970's today can be seen as a retroactive thesis on the possibility of such an architecture, and an ultimate abandonment of it in the face of other emerging spatial media. "The focus of my research," Virilio noted, "has shifted from topology to dromology, i.e., the study projectiles—the inert membranes of fortress and bunkers, the "metabolic bodies" of soldiers, and transport bodies of naval vessels—mutually prostheticize each other in a pursuit of the competitive advantage of speed." Among the key metabolic transformations traced in the book is the movement from the urban fortress to the open, smooth glacis of the sea, now a "fast logistical camp" in which naval, and finally amphibious strategies organize a "right to the sea." This in turn framed a "right to the road" and later diagrammed the land in the smooth image of maritime drift. In that shift, the condition of habitable circulation, and its origins in military logistics—mobilization and fortification—remains of critical importance. What was once asked of architecture, though, is now accomplished by other means, both informational and computational. Now the presence and vehicular movement of people and objects through global space is tightly integrated with an infrastructure of software, and to send objects in motion or to impede their trajectory is a logistical labor performed by pulses of light as much as flesh and steel.

"...An Essay on Dromology"

the kitsch uopia of Beaubourg, the commercial center buried underneath the Forum des Halles, the new information headquarters at La Défense, followed by the nightly spectacles at Bercy. Perhaps this had to be expected. Didn't Mai end with a dour Pres. de Gaulle going on television, instead of appearing in person on the balcony of the Hotel de Ville, as would have been the custom? The anti-climatic broadcasts managed to accomplish through the single-channel television something no urban strategy could have done to stop the tumult of the deterritorialized streets, and to bring the nation if not to order, then to attention, to fix their gazes on a new national center, not of buildings, but of screens.

Virilo's work from this period can be understood as a sort of immediate pre-history of the "Software Society." By 1986, and the time of this English translation, the problematics of information technology, computational technologies (particularly database and optical media) had displaced the city (it reappeared in his later work, but as a artifact of the media that had partially consumed its earlier functions).

Virilo's logical modernity is meant to carve and guide the masses, the metabolic multitude, into mobile trajectories.

Our Logistical Modernities

"History progresses at the speed of its weapons systems," that is, at the speed of the competitive capacities to envision, draw, map, curtail, mobilize, contour, stabilize and police the polis (90). At least since Viruvius defined the rules of architecture based on his own military engineering experience, it is understood that the design of space is already a strategic weapon of fortification. But architectural media are only one such means and the evolution of their deployments is interrelated and serpentine. Marquis de Vauban, Louis XIV's chief military engineer of fortifications (and masses), the metabolic multitude, into mobile trajectories.

metropoles, and in it, as geographer Gilles Palsky notes, "We see the passage to abstract, to fictitious features. By these proportional triangles, [de Foucroy] constructs an image that does not return or relate to [the] original existence." De Foucroy's semiotic innovation was this figural territorialization, the drawing of the comparative scale of cities as relative, primary geometric forms. This "map" does not correspond to any direct representation of the geographic juxtaposition of the cities, but rather graphs their relative quantitative difference in the population. This inscription produces another virtual space with which to order the natural territory of the polis as a projected image of an enclosed, administrative torality.

For Virilio, this also signals the production of logical space as a Modern administrative horizon. "This means the universe is redistributed by the military engineers, the earth communicating' like a single glacier as the infrastructure of future battlefield" not one limited by given terrestrial geography (85). With the French Army of Engineers being assigned the task in 1790 of "expandling the logistical glacies over the whole territory," this era marked the birth of Modern administration-by-calculation, an on-going project in which all of the vicissitudes of land and its inhabitants are con-

Today the speed of logistics is also largely computational, but this is not to say virtual, immaterial, or distant. Quite the contrary. Supermarket shelves, for example, are a human interface to a vast internet of things: a network of supply-chain, demand-chain and customer-relationship management software, steel containers, offshore factories, inter-modal exchange protocols—all forming an unimaginably complex, robust and nimble assembly of everyday purchase commands with vast economies of production and distribution. Today's "bees-in-being" are the eabyes and gigantes of component inventories in permanent transit, hurting between trade zones as the consumable artifacts of their sponsoring corporations' technological and legal efficiencies.

Finally, these (disin)corporations and their far-flung supplies of parts, labor, and expertise, guard nothing so dearly as the legal agency of brands, those operational fictions which they so carefully embed into the demographically-microsegmented experiential touch-points of everyday life. This "flat world" imagines itself as slippery, oceanic grid modulated by differentially transporting, activating, internalizing, and/or prophylactically exteriorizing technologies: from shipping ports to aerotropolis, from banking software GULS (graphical user interfaces) to web

Dromocracy Government by Prosthetics

Where does Virilio locate the historical agency of dromology (speed) and dromocracy (politics)? How does one become the other? The recurring actor in Virilio's history is the State, if only because it is also the legal signature of modern war. But his is hardly a traditional political theory. "In fact there is no industrial revolution" but only a 'dromocratic revolution'; there is not democracy, only dromocracy; there is not strategy, only dromology (69). States employ dromological techniques to exercise power, but as for Foucault, state apparatuses are functions, artifacts even, of dromocratic machinations that exceed their constitutions and incorporates. For Virilio (in concert with Deleuze and Guattari) such state governments are profiled as a sort of "machic species" of collective formation. Echoing Hedegger, he writes that 'dromocratic intelligence is not exercised against a more or less determined military adversary, but as a permanent assault on the world, and through it, on human nature' (86). Likewise, the mobilization of economic production is characterized less in terms of maximizing surplus labor value than according to the distribution of metabolic intensification in the service of an historically struggle is replaced by the struggle of the technological bodies of the armies according to their dynamic efficiency: logistic" (72).

Indeed the exercise of political authority in and through the dimensions of the body-in-motion appears for Virilio in its most extreme and comic form in those performances of collective singularization that are Marxist state stadium pageants. Their choreographies of motor functions move according to the party line, now a literal grid. The numb aesthetic of "mining the joys at being liberated" and through this, "the simplicity of a power that comes down to the constraint and housebreaking of bodies" is repeated upside down in the camps where the miscellier's body absorbs the cultivation of the law (55). Virilio writes, "His dissidence is a postural crime" (56). Even today, as this script of fleshy discipline has largely been exported from the commanding G8 metropoles to its satellites, another softer intercourse emerges between the individual and his logistical destiny, transposed into other symbolic and informational economies.

Dromocracy depends on technologies that in their employment, straddle the pre-political and the hyperpolitical, working on the bodies of the masses as a practical material that can be strategically designed and deployed. If the city is a collective prostheses

government, in other words of the political control of the highway, aiming precisely at limiting the extraordinary power of assault that the motorization of the masses creates (51). Earlier in the century, the concentration of industrial technology into individual motorized locomotion had already revolutionized the battlefield in the figure of the tank, that "automotive fort" (78). These offered their commanders a new calculus of speed and movement. As if sailing across a smooth surface, the tank "extends war over an earth that disappears, crushed under the infinity of possible trajectories" (79).

Virilio suggests these "battleships of earth" (79) should not be called "all-terrain," but "sans-terrain" in their obliteration of territorial impediment (78). Later with the Jeep (and more gorgeously the Hummer) the personal fortress would allow for the (largely pretentious) presumption of this power to the performance of the daily commute. But vehicular prosthetization is not only automotive. Others are assimilated as surgical prosthetics, others as fashion. The long marches of soldiers across fields plowed by battle during World War I presented the problem of damaged feet, and gave rise to the practical science of Orthopedics, and the redesign of the pedestrian soldier's locomotive technology: his shoes. This accomplishment is amplified and embellished in the cultural imagery for which the supplanted by other network media that have assumed some of its traditional mandates. Now highly evolved species of de Fourier's tabuau poliometrique proliferate on screens and surfaces in the form of the graphical user interfaces, narrating the affordances of the softwares they inscribe. But these GUI are not just diagrams of virtual action to be taken, they are also mechanisms through which a user's motivation is first framed and then realized in the network and on the world. Modes of representation that were once carographic and diagramatic are now instrumental and mediational.

As the diagram becomes an interface, when the map becomes the tool, personal, individual social action becomes more logistical. The subjective manipulation of virtual symbols becomes a structural form of agency in this (pre-formated) landscape of proximate and immediate contact. Consider how the political function of the urban gateway or boulevard to centralize and coordinate traffic and attention has been augmented by web portals and search engines, interfaces to the vast exabytes of online data curated and mainstreamed for public accessibility. There the preferences of mobs are codified in the ranking of search results associated with potential words, places, and concepts. Search represents a new configuration of public tools with which to seek, browse, meander, and exchange

Newer Search software works by making the world itself into the operant interactive metaphor for the world itself. Google Earth's interactive map/search/data visualization software, borrowing its interface aesthetics from previous generations of satellite—image-based battlefield simulation suites, promises to further incorporate personal logistics of everyday life into the tropics of "intelligence." Its open API (application programming interface) also allows users to link Google Earth to other data streams, personal and public, further tipping the logic of its performance from that of a "map with interactive capabilities," toward that of a real "meta-interface" based on cartographic, diagrammatic metaphors.

Just as diagrams become interfaces, computation also transforms physical urban interfaces by making them in turn increasingly diagrammatic. "In all parts of the world...implanted at the edges of cities, highways or railways,...is a whole apparatus that is only the reconstitution of the various parts of the fortress motor, with its flankings, its gorges, its shafts, its trenches, admission to and escape from porals, the whole primordial control of the masses by organisms of urban defense" (40). Of the masses of thing, that is. Today the urban interfaces of material exchange seemingly endless acreage of sea-air and air-mi-modal passenger and cargo services: "merge-in-transit, customization, postponement, packaging and labeling, and final assembly." Today our visionary architecture is designed not for the care and habitation of people, but as a utopia of and for objects.

Impure War and the Exceptional Accident

Virillo's history—and our present moment—is a profile of violence, of both binding and fissure. While Virillo begins with the literal, primordial bunker, he extends the economy of attrition to characterize Modernity itself. The bunker and its double, the camp, are the elemental spaces of this. The bunker is a concrete prophylactic, the camp is incarcerating. Both are hygienic, defensive. One is an architectural membrane against a hostile world, and one is an expulsion-by-enclosure of the Other from the normal performance of law. In their extreme forms, both spaces, even as they are often architecturally identical, are in their way zones of pure logistics. They are sites where the only compulsion is the execution of governance on a raw mass, mobilizing it, diag-

towns, those great immobile machines made in different ways
(36). The competitive and complicit energies of the masses are understood as possessing a permanent polioretic historical mission (conducting or resisting sieges), and their movements are governed by the immobile surfaces of city, resolved in a suspended state of soft siege. This slow, permanent war is itself a technology of glacial attrition and shared deterrence. The city is in essence a bunker, characterized by Virillo as a deliberate "reduction of power in favor of a better trajectory, life traded for survival" (85). The "front" of this "pure war" is everywhere and everything, both inside and outside of the "closed world" of the "society of control." The comprehensive enclosure of earthly territory under democratic supervision totalizes this soft siege as a condition of global social space. Today's "security environment" (a preferred catch-phrase of Rumsfeld's) is populated by a Polioretic Lite, in which the defense of common civilian passage from potential acts of violence is folded into design criteria for the dissection of both petty and grand crime.

But to be sure, Virillo's core exhortation diverges from that offered by a "fictionless capitalism" and its ideologies of reflexive transparency and seamless control. Instead, he sees the cumulative into information networks is also their inevitable crash, taking with them the very social bonds that they contain and mediate for us. Such solutions also increase the scale of our shared risk. Virillo's recent work focuses on what he calls the "integral accident which may someday become our habitat," a kind of global (terminal?) accident in which the comprehensiveness of dromological administration promises as well an inevitable, equally global calamity of dysfunction.

There is also an accident contained in theoretical technologies, and in the absorption of Virillo's theory by the institutional positions it seems to criticize so fiercely. "I am studied in military academies," he tells Sylbere Louringer in Pure War, and indeed he is. Like that of advertising strategists pouring over the works of Guy Debord, this is but one instance of theory itself performing as a kind of "accidental" conceptual avant-garde for the institutions it had hoped to undo by careful description. Perhaps the most direct and disquieting exemplar is Israeli Brigadier General Aviv Kokhavi, the IDF Paratroop commander, charged with leading attacks on and thereby "redesigning" Palestinian territories in Nablus and elsewhere. Kolhavi is also an avid reader of Deleuze and Guatari's theoretical technologies of deterritorialization,

Belgrade are quickly recast as the shock troops of Serbian sweeps through Boonia. As for American Football, the Louisiana Superdome, site of the universal simulated siege of the Superbowl, becomes after Katrina the host of a real siege and the feeting bodies of those displaced by a slow war of systemic neglect—one still broadcast with high ratings. Are such invisions, or "accidents" (including the consumption of Virilio's theory of the dromological accident becoming a form of "intelligence" for the tactical management of dromocracy) are not (just) the exceptions but also the rule?

In the years since the publication of Speed and Politics, there has developed a rich discourse around the political function of the "exception." and the architecture of the camp as a space that exception. For Giorgio Agamben, the camp represents an extralegal territory, derived from its exceptional status being both founded outside the normal juridical procedures of the State, and precisely through this exceptional character, embodying the State's sovereignty not only over laws, but over law and the authority that it realizes. The logic of the camp exceeds the normative productive link of power and resistance, revealing the exception as the real nexus of sovereign authority. Slavoj Zizek writes, in discussing Balkutin, absolute inhumanity is...the social bestiary of the immense biomass, proletariat subsumed under logistical demands" (98). In the camp, the administration of "bare life," of the metabolic vehicles of dromocratic modernity, is rendered in stark relief. There is also a softer repetition of this in the world's "special economic zones," those extralegal logistical arthropedagos that weave the flows of global commerce, and mobilize a new normative order in their image. But again, for Virilio the lesson is not the pretentious self-image of hyperefficiency that such networks communicate, but rather the exception that remains within the exception itself the accident. The accident-within-the-accident emerges from the identification with the exception that Zizek names, perhaps in ways that Virilio might not himself recognize. Terrorism, for example, as well as the "state of emergency" of counter-terrorism, is neither entirely complict with a symmetry of resistance to the law, nor ever possibly entirely outside it, but instead makes its claims over the sovereign exception to the law's authority to author. This is also the crux of the wonderdement and aw provoked by the event of catastrophic failure. It is not only horrific, it is mesmerizing, and because it is, the accident is also a critical source of solidarity, a binding exception that is the real condition

Notes

Paul Virilio/Sylvère Lotringer, Pure War, Trans. Mark Polizzotti, New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
Paul Virilio, "Architecture Principle," AA Documents 3: The Function of the Oblique, Architectural Association, London, 1996. P.13.
P.68 of the present edition. Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dramaology, Semi-oxect(e), New York. Subsequent parenthetical quotations are from this same edition.
The term "software society" is developed further in a forthcoming essay co-authored by Lev Manovich and myself.
Gilles Palby, Des diffres et des cartes, naissance et la carographie quantitative française au XIXe siècle development. (Memoires de la section de geographie No. 19). Paris: Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 1996. (translated by Daniel J. Denis) Pp.51-52.
These rolling gated communities provide a more direct identification with military purpose. During the first Gulf War, a common bumper sticker was "I Support the Troops," whereas the parade of post-911 Hummers says rather "I Am The Troops."
The notion of technology revealing itself most directly in its failure again links Virilio's critique to Heidegger's, See Virilio, Unhousen Quantity, Foundation Carrier pour l'art contemporain. Thames & Hudson, 2003. I25.
Kohkawi is quoted by Eyal Weizman, "Several of the concepts in A Thouand Plateaux became instrumental for us... allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not otherwise have explained them. It problematized our paradigms... Most important was the distinction they have pointed out between the concepts of 'smooth' and 'sirtated' space... In the IDF we now often use the term to smooth out space when we want to refer to operation in a space as if it had no borders." Weizman, "Lehall Theory: Log 7, Winner/Spring 2006. P.59.
Agamben recounts recent responses to that the "scandalous" discovery of correspondence between Walter Benjamin and fascist jurist, Carl Schmidt, on sovereignty and violence—another "accident of theory"—and argues that it is Benjamin who should be understood to have "infected" Schmidt's position. See Agamben, State of Exception. University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. 52-64.
Slavoj Zizek, The Universal Exception. New York: Continuum Press, 2006. P.64.

THE DROMOCRATIC REVOLUTION

I wouldn't want to be a survivor.

From Street Fight to State Right

The mass of individuals that the smallest military unit offers the eye, united in a common voyage.

— Clausewitz, 1806

IN EVERY REVOLUTION there is the paradoxical presence of circulation. Engels remarks in June 1848: "The first assemblies take place on the large boulevards, where Parisian life circulates with the greatest intensity." Less than a century later, Weber says of the disappearance of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (as if he were talking about the results of a car crash) that "they called to the streets, and the streets killed them." The masses are not a population, a society, but the multitude of passersby. The revolutionary

Apaches and other shady populations of the city's ousikirts, it will be less a matter, when the time comes, of occupying a building than of holding the streets. In 1931, during the National Socialists' struggle against the Marxist parties in Berlin, Joseph Goebbels notes, "Whoever can conquer the streets also conquers the State!"

Can asphalt be a political territory? Is the bourgoois State and its power the street, or in the street? Are its potential force and expanse in the places of intense circulation, on the path of rapid transportation?

As Goebbels writes about the battles for Berlin, "The ideal militant is the political combatant in the Brown Army as a movement... obeying a law that he sometimes doesn't even know, but that he could recite in his sleep... Thus we have set these fanatical beings in motion."

He then scientifically compares the transcripts of his various speeches, made first in the provinces and then later in Berlin, and notices that the "anorphous sociological conglomerate" of the capital required the invention of a "new language for the masses": "The rhythm of the metropolis with its four million souls throbs like a burning wind through the declarations of propagandists..."

a polemical symphony, transmitted far and wide, from one to the other, polyphonic and multicolored like the road signals and traffic directions meant to accelerate the telescoping, the shock of the accident. This is the ultimate goal of street demonstrations, of urban disorder. "Propaganda must be made directly by words and images, not by writing," states Goebbels, who was himself a great promoter of audiovisuals in Germany. Reading implies time for reflection, a slowing down that destroys the mass's dynamic efficiency. If a monument should be penetrated by the mob, it will be rapidly transformed into a place of passage, where everyone enters and exits, brings to and takes away. It's the free-for-all, plunder for plandering's sake, as we saw even in 1975 at the fall of Saigon.

All through history there has been an unspoken, unrecognized revolutionary wandering, the organization of a first mass transportation—which is nonetheless revolution itself. Thus the old conviction that "every revolution takes place in the city" comes from the city, the expression "dictatorship of the Paris Commune," used as far back as the events of 1789, should not suggest so much the classic opposition of city to country as that of stasis to circulation.

Despite convincing examinations of city maps, the city has not been recognized as first and foremost a human dwelling place pene-

This is particularly evident today in Japan—for example, in those immense revolutionary battles that come down to simple collision, to the provocation of a clash with the urban police, in which the mass of overtrained militants is armed with audio visual machines: movie cameras, tape recorders, etc. Awareness of the kinetic nature of their actions, it's the instantaneousness of their presence (in the next second they have vanished from the street that they film and record); they, the passers-by for whom the ban on loitering goes hand in hand with the ban on gathering. In the same way they evaded the very revelatory slogan of the 1848 insurgents: "Desperate masses," writes Engels, "who demand bread and work, or death."

In fact, the watchword of these "workers' battalions" (as those who would be deported by force to the provinces or drafted into the army were called) was "were stayin'"... we're not moving from here! The socialist uopia of the nineteenth century, like the democratic uopia of the ancient agora, was literally buried under the vast scaffolding of urban construction, obscuring the fundamental anthropological side of revolution, of proletarianization: the migratory phenomenon.

On September 21, 1788, Arthur Young notes in his famous journal: "...the great commercial city of Nantes... Arrive—go to its customs posts are dams, filtering the fluidity of the masses, the penetrating power of the migrating hordes. The old, swampy

sudden absence of motivity, ineluctably creating a quasi-organic corruption of the masses.

"Neutral spaces, spaces without gene," writes Balzac, "where every vice, every misfortune in Paris takes refuge." This is the origin of the sub-urb, at once the province of interdiction and a linear and temporal distance—in other words, the depot and "trans-shipment" of the social matter as of the merchandise, provisions and livestock to which the "beer" proletariat has been likened for centuries: essentially wild animals become beasts of burden, warhorses or pack animals. The conditions of the proletarian masses' exploitation, furthermore, illustrate perfectly the definition that Geoffroy Saint Hilaire gives of domestication: "To domesticate an animal is to accustom it to living and breeding in or near men's dwellings."

The "right to lodging" is not, as was claimed, the "right to enter the city." Like the inorganic mass of wild animals, the proletarian horde carries a menace, a load of unpredictability and ferocity. It is allowed as "domestic" to gather and reproduce near the dwelling of men, under their watchful eye. The problems of human habitation properly speaking are absolutely differentiated from those of the proletarian cattle, in the barnyard of the castle, in the outskirts of the fortified city. As with the stable or endosure, cities, the right to security and preservation within the perilous migration of a world of pilgrims, burges, soldiers and eagles moving onward by the millions.

Starting in 1077 with the Commune of Cambrai, the "urban franchises" will spread little by little to every commercial city. We could easily spot them on a map: logically, they are all situated on large waterways or highways, while regions difficult to reach such as Brittany or the Massif Central have few or no communes. The advent of bourgeois power with the revolution of the communes can already be likened to a "national war of liberation" since it sets, on its terrain, a native population against a military occupier come from the East who claims to govern its conquest. The guarantee of urban franchises is first and foremost the reorganization of the old Gallo-Roman site following the layout of the fortified castle, the construction of those impregnable fortresses that had nothing to fear from the war machines then in use, but everything to fear, at every moment, from surprises and strategems come from without, from afar, with the nomadic masses.

If the reorganization of the old villa, its transformation by the feudal colonizer into a castle replete with moat, set up stockades and dirt embankments against every natural danger and scourge without

psychological constraints can be imposed. After Machiavelli, Vauban will heartily support this means of avoiding carnage and of breaking up the enemy simply by constructing a topological universe made of "a totality of mechanisms able to receive a defined form of energy" (in this case, that of the mobile mass of assaults), to transform it and finally to return it in a more appropriate form.

Reorganized according to the same principle, the communal fortress remains a "field of strategems" set for the adversary. But the later changes character once more, becoming first and foremost a social enemy.

Aside from its military function, the rampart of the fortified place assumes a class function; its polioretic conception allows it to prolong the social combat indefinitely. The communal bourgeoisie give rise to a new phenomenon, like a prolonged and patient war that all the earmarks of the inertia of peace, and nothing more of the bloody effusions of ancient civil war, the seasonal outbursts and violent movements of the country battlefield. Bourgeois power is military even more than economic, but it relates most directly to the occult permanence of the state of siege, to the appearance of fortified towns, those "great immobile machines made in different ways."

In the same way, the decadence of the enclaved bourgeoisie, the loss money and what seems to found it, its military significance"—Marx to Engels, September 25, 1857). But he doesn't go far enough in designing the latter as technical manufacturer, as engineer (of weapons). In fact, it was the military engineers who, depending on the opportunities afforded, were able to protect or destroy private securities within the bourgeoisie. And here we have the unspoken conjecture from which, the "cannibalistic classes" will come—not only the bourgeoisie, but also the permanent military class. The Marxist definition of capitalism, "consumer of human life and founder of dead labor," is quite apt for the bourgeoisie, but only insofar as it is associated with its military technical adviser, who simultaneously invents the means of producing and of destroying what he produces, a war entrepreneur who will be at the origin of the State armies and later of the military industrial complex. Just as the condutive had benefited from this system of ruin by leaning on the city's economic orientation, so the communal bourgeoisie already carries within itself the same ambiguous association of wealth and the production of destruction.

This fatal merger was formed on these grounds like a chance meeting. "The strategic importance of a given proposition is not the result of largely hypothetical combinations, but of the very con

continued to mix, in almost medieval fashion, military men with the civilians whose resources (supplies, physical labor, lodgings, arms, etc.) were of no small importance to the army. The very givens of capitalism, the inactivity of its wealth, directly contribute toward maintaining the state of siege!

If the fortified town is an immobile machine, the military engineers specific task is to fight against its inertia. "The goal of fortification is not to stop armies, to contain them, but to dominate, even to facilitate their movement." Around 1870 Colonel Delair notes: "Every fortress must possess a certain particular state, a certain power of resistance, which in men is called good health. In peace-time, we officers of the engineering corps are responsible for keeping the fortress in good health." And a bit further on: "The art of defense must constantly be in transformation; it is not exempt from the general law of this world: stasis in death."

The communal fortress is a city machine, so much so that Cortmouaine, Fouroy and many engineers of the eighteenth century, in their "fictional diaries of sieges" or their "moments of fortification," don't even mention the troops assigned to defend it, as if the fortress were capable of functioning by itself. General de Villemois in the nineteenth century notes its technical superiority: "Out of peace and war, just as the garrison will be obliged to perform daily tasks, each one being assigned a fixed and invariable function, repeated day after day.

The occupants of the Maginot Line, for their part, had gotten into the habit of calling it "the factory." Long after the dismantling of the old communal city and up until the twentieth century, when large fortified places still exist, the military class continues to find work with its old bourgeois employer, the two slowly becoming "compradores." The interests of the war entrepreneur remain aligned with those of capitalism in permanent strategic schemas: in 1793, Barere compares the young Republic (the Paris Commune) to a large city under siege and he calls for all of France to be no more than a vast camp. The political triumph of the bourgeois revolution consists in spreading the state of siege of the communal city machine, immobile in the middle of its logistic glacis and domestic lodgings, over the totality of the national territory. And in 1795, it will entrust to Carnot's new armies the job of pushing as far back as possible the assault by the popular masses come from the suburb, of encircling the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, of forcing the dismayed workers to give up their weapons to its 20,000 soldiers "who had forgotten that they were also of the people" (Babeuf).

respect, since they reinscribed, on the national territory, Barrés old plan to cut France in two; at the center the decisive baron of the capital where the right triumphs, and all around the war camp of the suburbs and provinces that voted for the left because they were conscious of becoming a hinterland in which productive activity was on the decline. On the other hand, these elections also show how much the opposing party’s discourse is dominated by the reactionary schema of bourgeois poliocercles, confining the mass’s ability to move with its ability to attack—the ulreia of pilgrim’s progress. But beyond that, this political police schema, accepted until very recently by every ideology, influences both urban and worldwide planning; the passage from the “great immobile machine” to the State-machine, and finally to the planet machine, is accomplished without difficulty. The words “politics of progress” or “of change” are devoid of meaning if, behind the electric megalopolis, the city knows no rest, if we can’t distinguish the obscure silhouette of the old fortress struggling against its inertia, for whom stasis is death.

In all parts of the world, social lodgings, the city-dormitory or port of transit, implanted at the edges of cities, highways or railways, the toll systems that the government insists so strongly on instituting at the very entrances to a capital that selection is depopulating. Their supposed ideology, the proper role of every totalitarian regime is to bring to the fore the mitigated role of the army and the police (i.e., their rivalry) via a vis the unrecognized order of political circulation. We could even say that the rise of totalitarianism goes hand-in-hand with the development of the state’s hold over the circulation of the masses. Because of this, from the outset, it is easy to spot in the history of the great administrative bodies of the State it was Sully, himself a grand master of roads and canals, who brought the administration of fortifications” out of the rut with the edict of 1604 and gave it a modern form which continued well into the twentieth century, despite apparent revolutions.

As Tocqueville remarks, the quartermasters of fortifications simultaneously perform, in the most ambiguous fashion, the state’s civilism and military duties. Under Louis XIV, Mestine will be assigned to create permanent companies of miners, sappers and boatmen who will originally be part of the corps of engineers, and who will replace the volunteer engineers—labor inspectors come up from the ranks or civilian public works officials, such as the famous Tanade, who was also in charge of Parisian sanitary engineering. Thus, on the eve of the bourgeois revolution of ‘89, the Army Corps of Engineers was providentially given a national task:

priest or man of the Church assigned to teach "the art of limiting camps and fortified places by geometrical layouts." (But already, as Colonel Lazard noted, it was no longer a question of a specifically military art, but rather a kind of reign of descriptive geometry projected onto the sites, over the totality of nature...) $^{12}$ The military class is not born of the overpopulated headquarters of the ancient regime, offices in which one saw marshals and general officers alternate, almost daily, the command of the traditional armies. Under such conditions—even if they had considerable budgets at their disposal—the there was little danger that these armies could demonstrate any kind of unified thought or strategic imagination. The only military activity that requires continuity of ideas, then, is the logistical project of the urban fortress. And it's from this equivocal logistical duty that the mixture of combat planning and territorial layout, christened "National Defense" by the bourgeois revolution, is born. Vauban is the precursor here. An avid reader of Vitruvius and obsessed by the Roman colonial model, he thinks that the basis of war is geo-political and universal, that human geography should depend not on chance but on organizational techniques able to control fairly vast spaces, fairly durable empires. Aside from the old highway maintenance, this new military thought incorporated eco-ruin), becomes totally confused at the end of the ancien regime with the thinking of the bourgeois political class, its taste for rational nomenclature, its tireless activity of totalitarian scribe (encyclopedist), the osmosis taking place at the entrance to the cities (permeable membrane between the highway and the street). The head of the first Parisian municipality was, as we know, the director of the Flame. $^{13}$ The City Hall overlooked the waterfront, and the boat has remained the vehicular emblem of what was no more than a nauta-city. The same preoccupations reappear toward 1749 in the works of police officer Guillaume, for example: "No more revolts, no more seizures, no more tumults," he writes. "Public order will reign if we are careful to distribute our human time and space between the city and the country by a severe regulation of transit; if we are attentive to schedules as well as to alignments and signal systems; if by environmental standardization the entire city is made transparent, that is familiar to the policeman's eye."

Today many people are discovering, somewhat late in the game, that once the "first public transport" of the revolution has passed, socialism suddenly empires of its contents—except, perhaps, military (national defense) and police (security, incrimination, detention camps).

roward its explosion as the ultimate argument of reason. In the same way, "political socialism," by its political nature (polis), usually fails when the acceleration of civil war toward urban collision stops, itself being nothing other than...

Some regard unfavorably the current proliferation of parades in the city, ambulatory manifestations, even a "tally of the unemployed," such as in April 1977 in Thonville. They don't really see, after the sporting grand finale of May '68, the professional or social effectiveness of such performances. Nonetheless, these urban cross-country races, these obstacle courses, have a precise goal that the classics of western revolutionary culture, such as Prada, again revealed in the summer of 1976; "Parading in the streets is a worker's best possible preparation for the battle for power."

Already under the ancien regime—the monarch's physical person being associated with the State—we see disturbances, scenes of revolt as soon as the king's place of residence becomes uncertain. The Parisian populace penetrates the Royal Palace; then, after having been admitted to contemplate the sovereign, leaves feeling calmer. In the same way, for the proletarian masses from the country or the suburbs, the simple fact of penetrating to the heart of Paris, of feeling under their feet its avenues and opulent streets, is a very concrete way of dissuades the mobile masses; it designates a new revolutionary State as not being here in the city, in the streets, but over there, far away, in the excessiveness of a universal and timeless raid. "Embrace," cries Gregoire, "the expansion of the centuries that of the regions... avoid a much-heeled prejudice that would circumcribe the Republic in a very restricted territory." (November 27, 1792)—while the bourgeoisie immediately gives itself new properties and estates, and threatens with death all who would question the right to private property (March 18, 1793). What it offers as territories to its "conscripts" are the roads of Europe. "Where the feet are, there is the fatherland" (uhi pades, this patria). Roman law had already decreed. With the French Revolution, all the highways became national!

The movement of the Parisian sans-culte preceded the "mass uprising" of '93 as, much later, the sinister adventure of Hitler's Brown Shirts; the Sturmabteilung, would precede the German mobilization for total war. Like them, the sans-culte are dromoniacs, "courtiers of terror" sent forward before the Revolution onto the Parisian pavement. The decree of March 21, 1793, legalizes their specific function: these militant political fantasies are only the logistical agents of terror, members of the "police": denunciation of

But beyond this, what should we think of this revolution that will soon prefers to take his contingents from the Parisian popular forces; the soldier of Year II is torn from the street that he wanted to conquer and involved in the irrational voyage, the deportation of the long and murderous "forced march." The new army, writes Carnot, is a mass army crushing the adversary under its weight in a permanent offensive, to the tune of the Marseillaisie. The national anthem is only a road song, regulating the mechanics of the march. In his memoirs, Poulies de la Siboutie notes, "Never had we sung so much...song were a powerful revolutionary means, the Marseillaisie' electrified the populace..."

The mathematician Carnot and the doctor Poulies were not mistaken: the revolutionary song is a kinetic energy that pushes the masses toward the battlefield, toward the kind of Assault that Shake-spare had already described as "Death killing Death." And that is in fact what it is all about, since one had to charge the enemy artillery, and the only way was for the infantryman to rush toward the cannons, to kill its servants on the spot. But to reach them, he had an extremely limited amount of time: the time it took the enemy artillery to reload. As soon as the shot had been fired, therefore, the infantryman had to rush toward the enemy cannons.

Hegel, admiring the French revolutionaries, writes in January 1807 to a friend: "Every Frenchman has learned to look in the face." In particular, he compares the old institutions to "those children's shoes, become too tight, that hinder the goit, and that the revolutionaries soon gor rid of." Always the unconscious dynamic

the inordinate development of the kinetic energy of the revolutionary masses. This discourse likens the acquisition of high speeds of assault, of invasion, even of explosion, to the "mechanics" of a revolution symbolized primarily by the conquest of the streets, then liberating itself on the highway.

Significantly, every totalitarian combat will repeat this procedure. The German National Socialists, enemies of the bourgeoisie—or at least claiming to be in order to mobilize the domonianiacs of the Brown Shirts—take over the German State, city by city, or rather street by street, before spreading highway by highway toward the neighboring territories; as if the German masses "set in motion" by their leaders' dynamic declarations, could no longer be stopped.

After the conquest of the streets and the massacre of the Brown Shirts, the National Socialist motor will nonetheless come back to its ordinary drivers: the lower- and middle-class administrators; the big capitalism that since the 1920s, had furnished it with important subsidiaries; the Reichswert and the vehicles of Rommel and Guderian, carrying the military front far off," where the tanks are." With the National Socialist lightning-war, the old, outmoded frontier wall disappears, ostensibly replaced by the rapid path. Already, the

AS SOON AS it takes power, the Nazi government offers the German proletariat sport and transport. No more riots, no need for much repression; to empty the streets, it's enough to promise everyone the highway. This is the "political" aim of the Volkswagen, a veritable plebiscite, since Hitler convinced 170,000 citizens to buy a VW when there still wasn't a single one available. The "NSKK" (National Socialistisches Krieffnahr Korps; the National Socialist automobile corps) is organized locally, according to the categories of privately-owned cars. It soon gathers half a million drivers and trains them to

gangsterism begin in the street where they wander as beggars, as foreigners—the famous Jim Colosimo began as a streetsweeper and, like many of his compatriots, naturally passed over the threshold of the political shop as an electoral agent, a door-to-door salesman.

Later, the municipalities remain under the influence of the "brown troop" of their S.A. for, there as well, the automobile apotheosis of the 1920s, with its kidnappings, its shootings, its street battles, the wild chases of its armored cars, but is a technical episode in the dromocratic assault on the city and its wealth by a migrant mass come from Europe or Asia—before it becomes the Assault on the American State itself. But wasn't Al Capone supported on the national scale by the Republican Party? And didn't he owe his "training" to his voluntary service in the U.S. Army?

The unknown troops of gangsters will furthermore be spotlighted during the last war at the time of the Italian liberation, and its men revealed as "good American citizens."

On another level, we can understand how the American government will survive the economic crisis of the 1930s and cure the masses of their "temptation of the streets." Here as well the experience of the gangster-dromocrats is fairly instructive. The stroke of genius will consist in the direct repression of riots, and the could immediately become useful to the motorization of the German Army. If the thinks that motorization presents only a limited advantage over long distances, he nonetheless recognizes that over a short distance it has the power to increase the Assault Forces' strength to an extraordinary degree.

On the shores across the way, the perpetual transformation of the barbarous esthetic of the mass-produced American car, the provocative excess of its body, of its ornaments, manifest the permanence of the social revolution (progress toward the "American way of life"). But at the same time, this great automobile body has been emasculated, its road holding is defective and its powerful motor is bridled. Just as for the laws on speed limits, we are talking about acts of government, in other words of the political control of the highway, aiming precisely at limiting the "extraordinary power of assault" that motorization of the masses creates.

This frustration inflicted on the driver (who is suddenly deprived of the "high" of high speeds as he is of alcohol), this vehicular prohibition is also the constitution by the State of a new beyond: "There were literally millions of youngsters who could drive cars, or repair them, who could build their own radio sets and communicate as 'hams' all over the world (experts in cross-country..."

by the mass armies before that of cars. In 1792 the Supply Corps are able to furnish the barefoot troops with 200 pairs of shoes, when they would need 80,000. Nonetheless, since walking is a strategic instrument even apart from military engagement, as we saw, this kind of Assault is, first launched against Time and can be realized theoretically even when the material means are lacking.

Currently, the opposition parties are fighting about the "transportation time" of the workers. Here again, it's a question of "time saved," and we return to the origins of social "necamorphosis." We are here at the level of the "revolution of three eights" so deft to the men of 1848—eight hours of work, eight of sleep, eight of leisure time. A more remarkable fact is that this demand, when it is made, has from the outset had the singular merit of creating unity between all the parties, in every revolutionary movement, from the moderates to the extremists. This "time war" waged by the workers "has all the advantages of a revolutionary demand without any of the drawbacks." Thus the Soviet republic decides to introduce it in autumn 1917, and the German public in 1918.

The French republic, at the end of the war, fears a bloody May 1. And in fact, for that day in 1919, an enormous parade is again being organized, and the government knows that the only watchful front lines is only a return to normalcy, to the citizen's basic distrust of and disdain for the masses of govouvages regaining their freedom of movement, again becoming available for the political battle...

In 1936 the true nature of these "eight hours of leisure," which has until then remained mysterious, is revealed: leisure means paid vacation, and paid vacation means travel—even the "last voyage," as was strangely underlined by a famous song of the so-called euphoric Popular front. A revolution in transportation, not in happiness—toward campasipes, youth hostel/barracks camps everywhere, the great camp of territory. But isn't the Spanish Civil War about to be declared, and French non-intervention to become the tomb of the Popular Front that stops dead by refusing the "beyond" of this final voyage?

The abusive manipulation of the dramatocratic discourse by the men of the political bourgeoisie should have warned us long ago about their true revolutionary intentions.

The events of 1789 claimed to be a revolt against insurrection, that is, against the constraint to immobility symbolized by the ancient feudal serfdom (which furthermore persisted in certain regions)—a revolt against arbitrary confinement and the obligation to reside in one place. But no one yet suspected that the "conquest of the freedom to come and go" so deft to Montraigne could be a cliché of front lines is only a return to normalcy, to the citizen's basic distrust of and disdain for the masses of govouvages regaining their freedom of movement, again becoming available for the political battle...

The abusive manipulation of the dramatocratic discourse by the men of the political bourgeoisie should have warned us long ago about their true revolutionary intentions.

The strategic schema of the revolution gives the two dominating classes their specific proletariat: the "nation on the march" of the mass army's military proletariat sent out on the "highway territory," and an industrial proletariat, a "woker's army," as it is called, that remains enclosed in the vast camp of the national territory. We can thus clearly distinguish two functions (or rather, functionings) of the thus-mobilized proletariat base, for never were the terms of proletarianization more radically set than by the Convention in its decree of February 1793: "The young shall go to war," while "married men women and children will be forced to work in manufacturing" (arms, clothing, tents, bandages, etc.)—in short, logistical provisions. We see, then, that the new commercial bourgeoisie tends to enrich itself by amassing the productive movements (actions) of the industrial proletariat (the bourgeoisie of the Gironde and the war suppliers, the Swiss bank with Pereguaux, etc.), while the military class amasses the destructive act of the mobile masses, and the production of destruction is accomplished by the proletariat's power of assault.

History shows that the decay of the enclosed bourgeoisies necessarily marks the decline of the productive masses and the rise in the State of methods of military proletarianization. In its doings, the Marxist State, for example, first appears as a dictatorship of motor twenty-five years earlier to the Sorbonne by Kieu Samphan. Thus we know where the virus that is ravaging this unfortunate country comes from: the utopian schema of the Cambodian revolution is only the anthesis of the bourgeois revolution. The large cities were brutally emptied of their inhabitants, who were massacred or thrown out into the countryside; certain neighborhoods were razed, replaced by rice fields there is no communication between city and country; the only inhabitants of the depopulated city now are several infantry battalions, the Khmer leaders and certain diplomatic missions. More than a revolution, it's the tragic end of the siege on the communal fortress, finally submerged by its assaults.

In "liberated" Vietnam, they discover other kinds of proletarian mobilization: after the fall of Saigon, certainly, a primary concern of the revolutionary armies was to put "unworthy" elements such as prostitutes or the lazy black market dealers of the great Southern city to work on logistical reconstruction (of strategic roads, railroads, bridges, etc.). But it was also to teach its youth, decked out in new uniforms, to "mine" its joy at being liberated—thus teaching it the simplicity of a power that comes down to the constraint and housebreaking of bodies. The dictatorship of the proletariat is only this dictatorship of movement (of the act) that is created by

But even more interesting are the rehabilitation camps which the Vietnamese, after the Chinese, are evidently so proud of, since they will supposedly eliminate from the system bloody repression and brutal punishment. These camps, to which they send men without judgment, should warn us by their very medical designation: rehabilitation has to do with the mechanical programming of invalid or handicapped bodies; it claims to repair them. The ideological delinquent or dissident is no longer considered a political opponent; he is not allowed the preferential psychiatric treatment accorded by the Russians or the Americans to their intellectuals. Materialism reaches its absolute form, since even the possibility of granting importance to an opposing thought, to a differing concept, is totally eliminated. The dissident is a body his disdain a postural crime—for example, his indolence, his lasciviousness. Osensibly, there are hardly any more crimes of opinion, only crimes of gesture. The confession is superceded: bodies are guilty of being out of synch, they have to be put back in the party line, at the speed of an entire population in maneuvers, for whom everything is an opportunity for public physical exercise, from the classic handling of arms to relaxation and gymnastics in the street, in the camps, in the factories, in team sports and dance, telluric and ecological guard duty, etc.?

It is understandable that the political revolution ends up redistributing police functions (powers) to all the militants as if they were so many agents of the military highway patrol, harnessed under the ancient regime to the establishment of social transparency, to the observation of postures and movements not conforming to the social corpus—but also observation of the territorial body, as in telluric surveillance; a kind of ecological police that resives urban control, and seems for the powers that be to be a solution of the future.

Castro trading in his sloppy guerilla garb for a uniform à la Pinochet, Brezhnev dressing up as a marshal, the massive presence of overdecorated military leaders in every socialist grandstand in the world tell us: the ultimate capitalizers on the productive act, the true dictators of movement—are them. It’s from them, and not from vague philosophers or ideologues, that the political idea of nations on the move was born in 1789—the masses of the new military proletariat becoming projectiles toward the middle of the nineteenth century with the triumph of industrial artillery and the spread of machine warfare. "Heavy cannons," writes Trotsky in 1914, "instil in the working classes the idea that when you cannot get around an obstacle, you can still break through it; the static phases of their psychology then give way to the dynamic phases."

Part 2
DROMOLOGICAL PROGRESS

From Space Right to State Right

The creature bound by water is a creature in vertigo. It dies at each instant; something of its substance is constantly collapsing.

— Bachelder

AN ENGLISH CARTOON from the nineteenth century shows Bonaparte and Pit cutting chunks out of an enormous globe-shaped pudding with their sabers, the Frenchman taking the continents while the Englishman claims the sea. This is another way of parceling out the universe: rather than confronting each other on the same terrain, within the limits of the battlefield, the adversaries choose to create a fundamental physical struggle between two types of humanity, one populating the land, the other the oceans.

"I had believed in your works, there would have been no need for war..." or at least there would have been no need for combat.

To defeat, without fighting, a continental adversary who constantly exhausts himself by rushing into the spatial and temporal limits of the terrestrial battlefield is, as we know, what England will manage to do. Hulie, like Napoloon, will be defeated by the fleet in being, which will constantly draw its victory from its inaccessibility to combat, from its abandonment of the harmful principle that we must attack as soon as the enemy is in sight, that we must shorten the distance between them and us. The fleet in being is logistics taking strategy to its absolute point, as the art of movement of unsuen bodies; it is the permanent presence in the sea of an invisible fleet able to strike no matter where and no matter when, annihilating the enemy's will to power by creating a global zone of insecurity in which it will no longer be able to "decide" with certainty, to want—in other words, to win. Thus, it is above all a new idea of violence that no longer comes from direct confrontation and bloodshed, but rather from the unequal properties of bodies, evaluation of the number of movements allowed them in a chosen element, permanent verification of their dynamic efficiency. If Napoloon indicted an army's strength in mechanical terms, Maurice of Prussian theory. On the immense nautical glacis, on the other hand, the home fleet could elude battle almost indefinitely; it was not forced by the adversary into desperate combat as long as it sawed out of reach, all the while remaining present.

Not to be driven to desperate combat, but to provoke a prolonged desperation in the enemy, to inflict permanent moral and material sufferings that diminish him and melt him away. this is the role of indirect strategy, which can make a population give up in despair without recourse to bloodshed. As the old saying goes, "Fear is the cruelest of assassins: it never kills, but keeps you from living." After all, the invention of happiness, that new idea in Europe according to Saint-Just, was perhaps no more for the continentalers than a way of resisting the moral constraint come from the sea, the loss of their substance.

In 1914, it took the Allied blockade two years before the German civilians felt the initial effects, but these effects lasted well after the end of the terrestrial combat and were an indirect factor in Germany's subsequent economic failure. It was this prolonged despair that provided the ground for the hot-headed politics of Naziism, for the fascist domestication of the German people. In the same way, the rapid material and moral collapse that we are now seeing in

surpassing of the old fortified place, which was rendered obsolete and dismantled by the power of the new State armies. This is the answer to the exorbitant economic requirements of the continental military class, to its claim to dominate the flows of terrestrial traffic.

In the final account, economic liberalism is a perfect illustration of Erard de Bar-le-Duc's dicum: "The attack changed with the invention of machines to destroy." The bourgeoisie suddenly resistance to the concept of territorial warfare becomes from then on the guiding principle of a capitalism that, by becoming amphibious, applies total warfare on the sea and in the colonies that jumps literally from "the great immobile machine" into the "mobile machine," making the oceans a vast logistical camp; that drags behind it a proletariat harnessed to the functioning of the naval vehicle, a proletariat of rowers who are the machine's true engine, its accelerator in time of battle.

Henceforth, it is no longer a question of crossing a continent or an ocean from one city to the next, one shore to the next. The fleet in being creates a new democratic idea: the notion of displacement without destination in space and time. It imposes the primordial idea of disappearance in distance, and no longer in the dangerous cataclysm; it rushes non-stop toward the beyond. The danger of cataclysm; it rushes non-stop toward the beyond.

Gordon Pym and Moby Dick are only the anticipated narratives of the nuclear cruise. The strategic submarine has no need to go anywhere in particular; it is content, while controlling the sea, to remain invisible. But its hourly fate is already sealed. Furthermore, as soon as the fleet in being becomes a fundamental given of the Right to the Sea, the explorers, discoverers and raiders of every stripe, while continuing to seek uncharted lands, equally adhere to the invention of passages, in other words to the realization of the absolute, uninterrupted, circular voyage, since it involves neither departure nor arrival. The loop of no-return is traced in advance by the circular or triangular nautical routes of European mercantilism.

Thus a new category of political rights was created on the oceans: the "right to the sea," initially an entity that was more emotional and poetic than rational; they said. It is true that the Mediterranean cities—overpopulated, insular nations poor in goods and surface area, dreaming of "working the sea" by creating a demos—appear unwilling to be subjected to ancient terrestrial law. The open sea was to compensate for every social, religious and moral constraint, for every political and economic oppression, even for the physical laws due to the earth's gravity, to continental crampedness.

But the right to the sea very quickly became the right to crime.

Dutch, after Venice, Spain and Lisbon." And a little further on, he notes: "What is terrifying is that all these powerful nautical organizations were not the doings of States, but almost a spontaneous product of these nations' mercantile engineers, the State having played no further role other than to sanction them; to claim them for its own."

In the final account, it is not so surprising that a trafficker and buccaneer like Laffitte financed the publication of Marx's manifesto. His vision of the international State rising from society like "its product at a given moment in its evolution" rather closely resembles the spontaneous empire of the "sea rovers" from which comes the first industrial nation of the modern world. This totalitarian State is located everywhere and nowhere; it is obsessed by commercial exchanges; it serves only economic interests, and is bent on devouring and destroying its adversaries' goods. Its population has "broken loose from its moorings." Left the earth the first to conform absolutely to Marx's definition of the industrial proletariat: "Workers have no country... we must cut the umbilical cord that holds the worker to the earth."

In England, up until the nineteenth century, they recruit sailors by simply closing the ports under order of the king and rounding

Deported from total war, he must justify his origins; if he is a foreigner, he must be naturalized within five years. Desertion is severely punished and the State practices the social control of families by declaring itself the "protector of women and children," of conscripted workers.

Nonetheless, here again, the expansion of war was such that proletarianization found itself associated with judicial and police repression: they recruited by luck of the draw, and the proletariat saw itself mixed in with the troop of deportees and galley slaves that the courts "manufactured" in large number under governmental pressure.

In the seventeenth century, the naval proletariat is already, literally, a population of convicts, the "damned of the earth." Marx and Engels' new theoretical opposition to the followers of Proudhon is much like Colbert's reflection deploring French inability to create an all-powerful naval empire, their backwardness in the domain of colonization: "No companies, as long as we continue to imitate Marseilles... They would rather give up the best opportunity in the world than lose the pleasure of a country house. Moreover, they don't want great vessels, but only little boats, so that everyone will have his own..." The creation of the right to the sea.

machine, History. In fact, victory (decision) in the world without reference point or accident of the fleet in being requires that one be situated, if nowhere on Earth, then at least in Time—in other words, in planetary mechanics. For this simple reason, the English will long remain the best clockmakers in the world. Mastery over the sea demands that over Time; it requires you to "shoot for the moon," as they used to say.

So it is natural that the modern formula of popular war will take shape—through English influence on islanders (Paoli in Corsica under Louis XV)—in a nation of navigators: Spain versus the French empire. In fact, popular war is already no longer in a given territory. Rather, it advocates the dispersal of the army corps within society itself (the new soldier will be "like a fish in water," and this allusion to the liquid element is hardly coincidental). Like the naval battle, popular war operates on the clash of dynamic bodies. It has to do with "the excesses sanctioned by the very practices of the sea" with absolute violence, with the disappearance of morals and precising laws. Popular war is total.

We have not paid enough attention, in Western History, to the moment when this transfer from the natural vitalism of the marine element (the ease with which one can lift, displace, glide weighty woman with the ancient war vessel and the coupling of Marinetti the fascist with his racercat, "ideal shaft crossing over the earth," whose wheel he controls, emerge from this technological evolution whose realization is more obvious than that of the living world. The right to the sea creates the right to the road of modern States, which through this become totalitarian States.

When Norman Angell states in The Great Illusion that war has become economically futile because it is no longer founded on flight at the expense of the "exterior group," in other words on portable wealth, but rather, henceforth, on credit and the commercial contract, he is mistaken in thinking that this must radically suppress the "conqueror"; his discourse is somewhat lacking in rigor. In fact, what is revealed by this change in the nature of wealth is only a change in the speed of world economy, the passage from the movable unit to the bounty unit: the war of Time. With the fleet in being, England concentrates its efforts on technical innovation in the domain of transportation, and more precisely on the manufacture of rapid engines. It draws from this both its economic superiority and the orientation that made it the first great industrial nation. The model for all the others—ergendering "that primordial feeling of technical superiority that gets confused with a feeling of general superiority."

The SST affair, followed by that of the Concorde, illustrate this system of ruin (so ruinous that the advanced States must band together in order to maintain the production of these machines that are subject only to the law of speed). As at the origins of the fleet in being, the upkeep of the monopoly demands that every new engine be immediately superseded by a faster one. But the threshold of speed is constantly shrinking, and the faster engine is becoming more and more difficult to conceive of. It is often obsolete even before being used; the product is literally worn out before being operated, thus surpassing "by speed" the entire profit system of industrial obsolescence! When riches, accumulations and modes of production were freed from their endosure, therefore, it was not to reach free enterprise, their socialization, but to reach their own vehicular power, their maximum dynamic efficiency. This is the "futility" of wealth that disappeared in the essence of dromological progress. Western man has appeared superior and dominant, despite inferior demographics, because he appeared more rapid. In colonial genocide or ethnicide, he was the survivor because he was in fact super-quick (survif). The French word vif, "lively," incorporates at least three meanings: swiftness, speed (viens), likened to violence—sudden force, abrupt edge (vive bore, arête viv), etc.—and to life (viv) itself to be quick

Thus, the related logic of knowing-power, or power-knowledge is eliminated to the benefit of moving power—in other words the study of tendencies, of flows. This is so obvious that, in the last five years, they have stopped teaching geography in the French Military Academy and the police have started experimenting with the "criminostat."

Empires with colossal territories such as China, despite their attempts at "modenization," have had to submit to this pure, new order without content since the nineteenth century, finding nothing to oppose the penetration with. And today, the Chinese and Vietnamese people's armies are undergoing a difficult revision, by splitting themselves into a technical (rapid) army and an army of the people, represented as "animal value" (slow), and therefore, more specifically, "survival value" in the event of a nuclear holocaust. As to the latter, we could recall that in 1932 the Chinese population of Shanghai had already played this role: it was, in fact, among the first in the world to suffer Japanese experiments with massive air attacks aiming at the total destruction of urban centers. The German military command had also scrutinized the social fallout when elaborating their own "security plans," false alarms, exercises, system of urban shelters, etc., which in the mind of the

biologically associated, up to and including in the tools they used. This revolutionary unity is brutally destroyed by the discovery of other evidence. The class struggle is replaced by the struggle of the technological bodies of the armies according to their dynamic efficiency: air force versus navy, ground army versus police/politics, etc. A caricature of this situation has existed in Latin America for some time now.

IN 1914, the military high command in Europe was still following Clausewitz or Napoleon. It concentrated on exerting its will in a ground war of rapid penetration, of short and decisive battles. The advantage of this type of conflict was that it skirted around the problems posed by the military distribution of territories, since the logistical effort required would be of little importance, and especially of little constancy—a war, in a sense, with no terrain, or at best having little to do with it.

remarks, we should be able to superimpose war onto all the inhabitable parts of the universe.

"Ubique quo fas et gloria duunt": the English engineers ended up significantly reducing their motto to UBIQUE... "everywhere." This means the universe redistributed by the military engineers, the earth "communicating" like a single glacis, as the infra structure of a future battlefield. This is the world that is transformed "from a landscape as workshop into a planned landscape, an imperial space," as Lukas remarks about German landscapes, with its democratic government, its economic and industrial activities, its new matriarchy of female suppliers (who will give the feminist struggle its dubious nature); and a "military" France, the army zones, fortified glacis where. Ferry notes: "The supreme commander is no longer a chief of war, but the administrator of a territory." a territory in which civilian power hoped to crystallize the battle and endose its military proletariat in an absolute war, a war "without limitations in the use of violence," but one that would not spread, could not be brought into the interior.

This is the war of attrition. For the high command, the enormous wear on the troops and material, the modern form of decimation, was still, at the beginning of the war, a gold star in a touristic stroll. The adversaries bury each other and come to know battles without precedent, since they can last, as at Verdun, for an entire year—from February to December, 1916. Armies could no longer simply come and go.

At this point, the French reaction is significant. They first want to maintain political distance, and they still come back to the communal schema as a guarantee of internal order. The country is cut in two by a demarcation line: a "civilian" France, the rear guard, with its democratic government, its economic and industrial activities, its new matriarchy of female suppliers (who will give the feminist struggle its dubious nature); and a "military" France, the army zones, fortified glacis where. Ferry notes: "The supreme commander is no longer a chief of war, but the administrator of a territory." a territory in which civilian power hoped to crystallize the battle and endose its military proletariat in an absolute war, a war "without limitations in the use of violence," but one that would not spread, could not be brought into the interior.

Only several months after the beginning of the hostilities, Ferry shows us how difficult it is—since one of the newest jobs for the personnel assigned the logistical task is the national evaluation of the army's obsoletive—to calculate the damage inflicted by the new industrial war fast enough to compensate in time for the pure and simple disappearance of the two parties on the battlefield, something that had never been seen before. The voluntary war of attrition was both the first war of disappearance and the first of consumption: disappearance of men, material, cities, landscapes; and unbridled consumption of munitions, material, manpower.

Little by little, the elegant battle plans and orders of attack give way to new considerations: consumption of grenades by trench yard, production programs, balance and evaluation of supplies—during an attack in 1917, for example, they consume 6,547,000 explosive shells on the French side, or 28% of the existing stock... But they also speak in terms of "daily consumption of artillery." The theory of the high command disappears in what is henceforth called "practical war"—that which makes war convenient, easier to use, that which keeps it from getting bogged down in its own impossibilities. The French Ministries of War and that of Weapons are separated, the latter headed by the famous Loucheu, who prefigures month to month, at the same place; or else of "long vacations" for the immobile men, waiting for the end where they lay, nailed to the ground by the power of the bombardments. Proletarian lodging in the "army zones" replaces the swamp of the "urban zone." The no man's land has become a suburb, a neutralizing space in which the promise of movement is no longer accomplished, and the loss of movement for the national fortress is first the loss of good health, then death. Revolts and mutinies in the part of soldiers refusing the assault succeed the disorder of the urban riot, the stationing of the masses in the city, before becoming in the debacle "simple civil war," as Engels had predicted to Lassalle—a renouncing toward the interior of the proletariat's torment of energy (Trotsky). In 1917 in France national war lost its old revolutionary prestige in the eyes of the masses, simply because it was no longer able to "advance." It no longer reached the Assault's superior speed, no longer won the race against death, against the engine of war.

The voyage of the masses once more took them from the street to the rail road, the street in which they paraded while singing and counting off steps before a city population applauding the departure of the fearsome armed mob. After that, the military livestock quickly jumped on the cart wagon, but everything was over very fast. As

batfield their psychological effect was tremendous. The generals were soon screaming by the millions for those "automotive forts," the new technical object that so perfectly realized a strategic philosophy obsessed by Frederick the Great's dictum: "To win is to advance." Soon Ferry could write, before he himself was cut down in the attack of Vauxaillon. French morale has reached an unprecedented degree of exaltation. Last month, the soldiers on leave from Paranay found their leave too long, and they returned to the front as if they were going on vacation... They already saw themselves at the Meuse or the Rhine! I unleash my every dream...

Speed is the hope of the West; it is speed that supports the armies' morale. What "makes war convenient" is transportation, and the armored car, able to go over every kind of terrain, erases the obstacles. With it, earth no longer exists. Rather than calling it an "all terrain" vehicle, they should call it "sans terrain." It climbs embankments, runs over trees, paddles through the mud, tips out shrubs and pieces of wall on its way, breaks down doors. It escapes the old linear trajectory of the road or the railway. It offers a whole new geometry to the road or the railway. It offers a whole new geometry to the road or the railway. It is already no longer simply an auto-mobile, but also a projectile and launcher, while waiting to become a radio transmitter. It huts both projects and itself. With it, once more, the assault extends war over an earth that disappears, crushed under the infinity of possible trajectories. We suddenly find ourselves facing a new "right to the sea, it implies for the masses another phenomenology of becoming. The rush of Assault-mobiles prolongs the mad rush of auto-taxis leaving the Parisian pavement in 1914 and heading for the Marne, "the last romantic battle, in which the archic part of the war came to an end" (Jean de Pierre). The speed of military transport is no longer only a metaphor for a vertiginous passage of existential time. The speedometer of the assault engine is literally, for its passengers, an "existential quantifier," a measure of sur-vival.

It is interesting to note the attitude of the British high command at this capital juncture in dramatological progress: from the first continental assaults, this naval people once more takes to the open sea, unconcerned about enclosing itself in an infragible continental battle. He prefers the war of machines—they should say engines—to the war of chest beating." goes a popular saying. They have 500,000 men on the sea and 3,000,000 in the arsenals and factories. If they participate with an obvious ill will in the hodge-podge of command, it is nonetheless understandable that they are the first to want to launch a naval assault.

Part 3
DROMOCRATIC SOCIETY

Unable Bodies

Risk—but in comfort
— Marshal Goering

HERMAN GOERING BECAME a pilot in the First World War because he had a tendency toward rheumatism and thus, as a foot soldier, suffered from the long marches.

In the course of the various battles, especially since the seventeenth century, awareness had grown of the increasing problem of military infirmity. A flourishing industry developed: orthopedics. It was discovered that the damage caused by the war machines to the mechanics of the surviving bodies could be compensated for by other machines—prostheses. While in France the handicapped are

command finally hands the tanks over to personnel other than the "one quarter sick with malaria, the resthabilitated young men who had never seen battle" (Renaudel's report).

In 1921, Marinetti metaphorizes about the armored car: the overman is over-grafted, an inhuman type reduced to a driving—and thus deciding—principle, an animal body that disappears in the superpower of a metallic body able to annihilate time and space through its dynamic performances. Vain attempts have been made to fit Marinetti's works into various artistic and political categories; but Futurism in fact comes from a single art—that of war and its essence, speed, Futurism provides the most accomplished vision of the dromological evolutionism of the 1920s, the measure of super-speed. In fact, the human body huddling in the "steel above" is not that of the bellicose dandy seeking the rare sensations of war, but of the doubly-unable body of the proletarian soldier. Deprived, as he has always been, of will, he now requires physical assistance from a vehicular prosthesis in order to accomplish his historical mission, Assault. The domomaniac's kinetic superpower is suddenly devalued. The war of attrition had already shown the disdain in which a mobile mass reduced to inaction was held, and the nature of the treatment reserved for it. Practical war revealed its importance as a dominant necessity, and if it takes 200,000 men to bring it about, then the government will negotiate with its allies." Countries such as Italy and Portugal have admirable reserves of men... Here you would not even notice the shortages imposed by the war," writes an official emissary in 1916. Governments bargain over and hastily exchange their working-class cattle, bragging about "their resistance to low temperatures, their sobriety and their aptitude for labor." They dip heavily into colonial properties, Creoles or Blacks from Senegal, workers from Morocco, and especially tireless navies from Indochina by the tens of thousands—other natives such as the Madagascans preferably being reserved for combat... If naval warfare, by becoming permanent and total, engendered one of the first mass mobilizations, the perspective of total warfare on the continent, as early as in 1914, obviously requires a new social project, an original type of proletarianization.

Practical war divides the Assault into two phases, the first of which is the creation of the original infrastructure of future battlefields. This infrastructure consists of new railroads and stations, telephone installations, enlargement of roads and tracks, the parallel lines of departure, evacuation routes, shelters, etc. The countryside, the earth is henceforth given over, definitively consecrated to war by the

Dromocratic intelligence is not exercised against a more or less determined military adversary, but as a permanent assault on the world, and through it, on human nature. The disappearance of flora and fauna and the abrogation of natural economies are but the slow preparation for more brutal destructions. They are part of a greater economy, that of the blockade, of the siege strategies, in other words, of depletion.

The economic war currently ravaging the earth is but the show phase of declared war, of a rapid and brief assault to come, for this is what perpetuates, in non-combat, military power as class power. From time immemorial, the cause of hunter-raiders has been unproductive, although it provided the group's food. Along with the science of weapons, it has always fostered methods of depletion—what today we call food power. Thus when Venice, that floating nation, that country in which no one had ever "set foot," stopped being the premier economic and naval power because of the discovery of America and the new Atlantic politics of Europe, it providently turned back to the interior, to agrarian power and terrestrial property, for it knew that the loss of sea power meant an immediate threat of suffering food power, always the law of the two types of humanity.

Timeless dromological methods: in the seventeenth-century, when Colbert launches his economic politics with the idea of promoting "national wealth," a "national product," he prepares the way for Louvois' war-effort by "making sure needs are created," by triggering in his neighbors the prodigious consumption of his so numerous products," as Sir William Temple says.

For his war-sites, Louvois was directly inspired by Roman proletarianization, while Colbert reproduced the Athenian economic system that had finally brought about the collapse of Lacedaemonian power. As Lyautey writes in 1901, "The tactic of economic penetration alone is worth every other taught in the military academy." The dromocratic expansion of Greece had also found itself blocked at every turn by the military status quo. The native barbarians had learned to organize militarily in the West.

The other colonial satellites collaborated in Greek politics. It is at which the U.S. replaced their goo-strategic bombardments on North Vietnam (systematic destruction of flora and fauna in the rural environment) with an impressive abandonment of technological material when they retreated from the terrain, making their enemies their best customers, as General Giap's recent declarations could lead us to believe.

Timeless dromological methods: in the sevente

conservation of the State apparatus by abolishing military and monetary movement.

Aristole wrote the epitaph to Lycurgus’ system: “The essential object of any social system must be to organize the military institution like all the others.”

In Sparta the opposite happened. In the first Hellenic democracy we already find most of the great Western themes, except for the main one: mobility. Whereas everything was sacrificed to make the State a single war machine, the eventuality of its being mobilized in a real conflict seemed fearsome to the Lacedaemonians, as if the hazards and uncertainties of battle would destroy their overly precise military mechanism.

The Spartans have been called a people without history. In reality, by their hostility to every form of constitutional metamorphosis, they refused History as the kinetic reference of their existence. First, by not turning toward the sea and its vehicular empires—thus separating themselves from the torality of Hellenic cities—to go settle in the very heart of Greece and colonize the Messenians. Greeks like themselves. Then, by eluding for almost two centuries after the Lycurgean experiment the consequences of their military might, by fleeing those of their victories. And it will

By the middle of the third century, following the collapse of the Lycurgean immobile machine, there remained only about a hundred Spartans who still owned shares of the State. The rest of the population, says Plutarch, became a miserable crowd without legal status, a social mass that the military State had taught to live only for a war that would never come, and that from now on didn’t know what to do with its existence. When the State itself survived as no more than a dream of the past, a handful of remaining sadistic customs, the Spartan world sank entirely into anomie.

The West persists in repeating Plutarch’s lesson, “obeying a law that it doesn’t even know, but that it could recite in its sleep.” Stati is death really seems to it to be the general law of the World. The democrat constantly stifles the democrat of Lycurgus—and Mao’s—original revolution. It is enough to hear the speeches of today’s Chinese leaders about “consumer goods” to know that the old thinker did no more than delay the institution in China of the West’s fearsome system of intensive growth, and whether it is conveyed by orthodox Marxism or liberalism is of little import. Just as Hitler could only begin lightning warfare through the economic system of Doctor Schaadt, and Roosevelt could only begin total warfare through the New Deal.

themselves to reestablish the notion of legitimate war (or legalistic war), in the Roman manner (Livy, 1, 32, 5–15). The State's historical ideality comes out as soon as war itself is reborn in ideal forms, is technically distinguished (thanks to centralism) from a simple punitive expedition, and tears itself loose from local compromises to approach a rigorous original concept.

In fact, history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems. At the end of the fifteenth century, it is still for Commynes a stable memory, a model to be reproduced. Annals are seasonal, like the war that returns every year in springtime. Linear time is eliminated, as it was from the ancient fortress in which "the enemy Time" was beaten by the static resistance of the construction materials—by duration.

Historical creation also begins to function like the ancient war machines that carried out their destructive movements on the spot even after the invention of the ballista and the catapult (around 405, at the siege of Morza). If Hegel "gets bored seeing Livy repeat for the hundredth time descriptions of battles against the Volckians, occasionally limiting his narrative to: 'In this year, war was successfully waged against the Volscians,'" complaining of the "abstract representations," it is because the historical content is chance and makes the Reason in these stories a war machine that deploys its forces by multiplying them. In the same way, it is understandable that just when artillery and military highway surveillance became part of the State system, especially under Sully, historical language passed literally from the comparative to the positive, in other words, with no comparison of intensify.

Accession to history becomes accession to movement, distant result of the accession to power of those "border provlers, idlers of Apocalypse, living free of material cares at the edge of their domesticated abyss" (Julien Graeco), populations that appear and disappear on the borders of the Roman Empire, "thumbing their noses at war," on whom, as Livy adds, "it clearly cannot be imposed."

In the beginning of our era, the wave of dromocratic elites comes from Germany, from the banks of the Danube or elsewhere, and finally breaks over Western Europe. Suddenly, it is no longer might that makes right, but invasion, the power-to-invade. The hierarchy of the raid, born on the road during the "unbridled exodus of the mob of hunter-raiders, is supervised by the protocol of the stopover and of apportionment." When finally this dromocratic power abusively settles on the European territory, it still doesn't change the nature of its constitutional schema, and in guise

role is semi-colonial, since it perfectly distinguishes the mastery over the earth by the military occupier from its landed ownership by the native. For the democratic State, mastery over the earth is already the mastery over its dimensions.

The ancient cadastral law prolonged nothing else, as Colonel Barrader writes in *Postatum Africae: "Centutiation is the very foundation of mass education, of their civilization...the indelible trace of a possession-taking that divides to conquer." This indelible dichotomy is the one that exists between the nature of the moving-power of invasion and that of the landowner's (or sedentary worker-producer) relative inability to move, to displace himself, attached as he is to his little parcel of land; the dichotomy between the geography of the inhabitant and that of the passer-by. The trace of the Roman path is usually no more than a continuous line, held of the Roman path is usually no more than a continuous line, held of the general schema of centuriation. Thus everything is over from the general schema of centuriation. Thus everything is over from the general schema of centuriation.

Thus everything is over from the general schema of centuriation.

The Carolingian Capitularies advise the "masters of the earth" living in the ancient Roman willas (gradually transformed into command posts) to limit their land-clearing and to set up an alliance between the small and middle-sized native landowners by granting them if need be a certain on-the-spot military defense. Domination of the territorial ensemble by the occupant of the donjon (from the Latin dominus, "lord") is nonetheless tempered by the modest material means of what is still no more than a dispersed and foreign military minority, limited in their control of space and society, in the contributions they can exact from the native social corpus. It was also for security reasons that the Frank nobility had preferred the transparency of a populated countryside (soon over-populated by essentially independent workers, occupied first with clearing the vast expanse of the land, then with maintaining the surrounding environment) to the impenetrable complexity of the original city.

But beyond this, the transparency of the clearing means maintenance of the invader's specific right over a territory in which he claims to settle, of his power to penetrate. The erection of the hillock, then of the donjon, is another answer to the problem of mastery over dimension, the latter becoming perspective, geometry.

The semi-colonial function has always been a protection racket. The semi-colonial function has always been a protection racket.

Litch the productive mass' safety is guaranteed by the tribute.

etc.—to imperious strategic necessities created by the technological insufficiency of the military protector, rather than by those of the gardener or the settler to whom the lord owed assistance and comfort in time of alarm.

Recent accounts have shown the relation between the limits of the clearing and that of human vision from an elevated site. The pioneer is more clearly called a pathfinder by the Anglo-Saxons. Land-clearing, the cultivation of the earth for subsistence, the receding of forest darkness, are in reality the creation of a military glacis as field of vision, of one of those fromier deserts spoken of by Julius Caesar, which, he says, represent the glory of the Empire because they are like a permanent invasion of the land by the democrat's look and, beyond this, because the speed of this vision—ideally without obstacle—causes distance to approach. A well-known photographer writes in his memoirs that his first lens was a luminous slit in the closed shades. In this sense, the original dojonion plays the part of Marey's chrono-photography, the military lookout-post offers the invader a constant view of the social environment, primary information. Social privilege is based on the choice of viewpoint (before attaching itself to accidents of fortune or birth).

famous example is that of the Grimaldis in Monaco. The promontory overlooking the sea has since Prehistory been a privileged place; it will change hands several times throughout Antiquity before landing, by ruse, in the hands of the Grimaldis. From the tenth century onward, this family will not stop extracting honors and privileges from that initial appropriation of a dominant viewpoint. If we can then speak of class societies, we can only do so by designating the classes according to place, as we suggested earlier.

If class struggles develop, they happen openly on the terrain, for the conquest of a dominant place. When the citadel or fortress is besieged, it is not simply a military, or even political, event, but a social one. Serious conflicts erupt, for example, when the protecting mission, the limit of the military scam, is violated by the faunal lords; when the "masters of the earth" claim to become its owners.

In other words, when they try to unite in their hands alone the twin schemas of spatial appropriation of territory, robbing the native populations by trying to reduce their descendants to the level of servi casati, to the fate of tenant slaves—manpower deprived of its right to military defense.

The Boarding of Metabolic Vehicles

Yours is not to reason why
— Frederick the Second to his soldiers

THE EXTENSIVE PHASE OF Assault requires quick deaths; the intensive preparatory phase inflicts slow ones. As Lieutenant-General von Metsch writes in We wurde ein neuer bring ausbenh in the 1930s, "In total war, everything is a front! But along with the new tool front, we would be wise to include the nation's spiritual front... In both the practical matter of preparation for rearmament and theoretical military discussions, the moral question is of primary importance."

Born of the sea, total war, according to Admiral Friedrich Ruge, of two types of soul: one weak, indecisive and vulnerable because it is dependent on its environment; the other powerful because it has put its "mana," its will, out of reach thanks to its deterritorialization, to the sophistication of its economy and viewpoint.

Clausewitz says nothing else when he answers the question, "What is war?" with, "War is an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will." We cannot exclude from war the problem of wills, despite the fact that Clausewitz immediately mutilates and basardizes his definition by hastening to add that there can be no moral violence outside of the concept of State and law. In fact, more than political and intelligent objectives of warfare, more than social or national rivalries, Clausewitz's definition already suggests the creation in the "presence in the world" of bodies without will. More than of an art of war, we think here of "techniques of animal bodies," an indelible dichotomy between the invader's moving-power and his relative inability to free his movements from the herd of workers.

Depending on the time and the latitude, the multitude of bodies with no soul, living dead, zombies, possessed, etc., is imposed all throughout history: a slow-motion destruction of the opponent, the adversary, the prisoner, the slave; an economy of

experiments, the ultimate recuperation of fats, bones, hair... Oi; a happier final solution, as exchange value for other energy sources: fuel, trucks and military vehicles, through the intermediary of neutral countries; a whole classical economy of hostages, abductions and displacements—the preferred forms of domocratic violence.

The precious lesson of the camps and the gulags has not been heeded, because it was erroneously presented not only as an ideological phenomenon, but also as a stricter one, an enclosure. Its absolute "inhumanity" was but the ostensible reintroduction in history of the original social bestiary, of the immense mass of domestic bodies, bodies unknown and unknowable. What else has the proletariat been since antiquity, if not an entirely domesticated category of bodies, a prolific, engine-towing class, the phantom presence in the historical narrative of a floating population linked to the satisfaction of logistical demands?

In the various descriptions of Western Europe in ninth century, they sometimes mention the existence of certain forenses, who never constitute less than 16 percent of the recorded population. These are the migrant workers, going from one populated area to another without being granted their land-clearing occupation, except in Germany and perhaps in Champagne.

Social conflicts arise from rivalries between those who occupy and preserve an eco-system as the place that specifies them as a family or group, and that therefore deserves every sacrifice, including sudden death. For if "to be is to inhabit" (in ancient German, buan), not to inhabit is no longer to exist. Sudden death is preferable to the slow death of he who is no longer welcome of the reject, of the man deprived of a specific place and thus of his identity.

In short, the fortresses of the Middle Ages replaced primitive welcomes and sacred ancient hospitality with the wokings of the war rejection as the primary necessity for the wokings of the war

They are forbidden to remain for more than twenty-four hours within the communal fortress, and are driven out of other cities; the citizens themselves are forbidden to shelter them under pain of stiff fines. The Hundred Years' War will put an end to these great migrations. Already artillery was revolutionizing the battlefield.

But from the twelfth century onward, the influence of monetary media had grown considerably, announcing the end of the medieval status quo, that highly praised equilibrium of political and military organizations. The traditional os-system is accompanied by remunerations. Knights soon receive wages. For a time, the military personnel is chosen primarily from among the genyu—the youngest son, for example, serving as a private servant and receiving a sizable salary—until the necessities of recruitment finally render the origins of the mercenaries rather dubious. Highwaymen and swabbucklers, descendants of Plautus' anti-heroes, "enemies common to all humanity," as isocrates called them—these itinerant market objects are like the rest of the peasantry. Since antiquity, their condition has been scarcely better than that of the slave, who, at least, might be freed in wartime and drafied into the armed forces, especially the Navy, which required a large number of coordinated mechanical maneuvers, while land warfare was still considered a thing of "free men."

The problem of temporary lodging for these warlike "gyrovagues" was posed like that of passing residence at the hospice or the lazaretro. Military monasticism will answer this problem, just as regular monasticism had answered the fixity of the mystical Gyrovagues, by instituting endosures. The State will then intervene, substituting revenue systems for public charity and local duties such as the "Fanc sale" (the right to buy and sell salt tax-free), before the profitability of the social excess as work force becomes the most obvious solution: obligatory labor only slightly foreshadows obligatory military service, at least in France. A very peculiar obligation, since it must never hinder the prerogatives of independent manufacturers. Factory work must not escape the dictatorship of movement. It reproduces the enclosure on the spot, in an obligatory and absurd kinetic cycle, the slow death of the reject. I remember staying, about thirty years ago, on the banks of the Loire river near a state psychiatric hospital and, as a child, being surprised to see hordes of inmates pushing carts in the dry iriver, forced by their guards to fill them with sand and roll them farther on, only to empty them into the water and begin again. This series of aberrant movements under a burning sun continued interminably, while from time to time, one of the wretches threw himself screening

from the pact of feudal semi-colonization, was already a proletarianization, a mobilization of the peasant worker for the benefit of the logistical task—but again, in sub-working-class conditions.

Louis XIV one day declares to Colbert, "If you want to know what economy means, go to Flanders; you will see how little it costs to fortify conquered spaces." The King is alluding to the considerable earthworks and masonry undertaken by Louvois. Following the Roman example, he confided the execution of these works directly to the soldiers, all the while paying pitiful wages and maintaining military discipline.

Alongside the migrant's trajectory, there is the path of military proletarianization, the two having often been confused ever since Antiquity. Garlan evokes the roads and markets in which this specialized manpower gathered with its tribes and its races—in Cape Marapan south of the Peloponnesus, for example. Later, we will see the creation of an original logistical circuit necessitated by the increased recruitment of anational work forces by the committees or the condiiter—the famous Spanish road, compared by Parker to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Along these trajectories they build temporary barracks. The beds are furnished by the villagers; they install health services similar to those of the hospice, required by the pre-

Doctor Wasserthur notes in his report June 10, 1884, on the condition of the selestat hospital, in which diseased soldiers and wounded sleep alongside typhus cases, cancer patients and the destitute.

The social demands of the military proletariat will long remain the simple, vital requirements of subsistence: salaries, job security, on-the-job assistance to invalids and the wounded. Rous and mutinies take the form of frequent strikes, which are narrow in scope and generally concern delayed payment of wages—delays of up to ten years. The mutineers often form autonomous combat groups, electing a chief (Spanish Eleto, German amboat, etc.) who is assisted by a democratic council. And immediately these proletarian troops return to their initial demands. They try to take over and hold a fortification, to the point where their employees are finally obliged to concede, to pay what they owe to that the soldiers will get back on the highway. These limited revolts will nonetheless play an important role in the political evolution. For the satisfaction of the soldiers' demands within the state apparatus, to hasten the development of the laboring and productive populations' material obligation toward those "luxury peoples" who supplant the old provincial masters. Tax that economic vassalage is sometimes levied directly by the soldiers, "an expedient means, disapproved of health services similar to those of the hospice, required by the pre-

as raiders, even as brigands, holding the countryside: "couriers riding onward, owing nothing while they are on the fields."

Since Babeuf and Engels, there has been much talk of the bodily mechanics of the proletarian soldier, of the obligation to serve the machine, to carry out a repeated and invariable number of coordinated maneuvers (in the eighteenth century, for example, each shot fired from a cannon required about ten movements). Later they began wondering about the living conditions of the laboring proletariat—without, as did Engels, abandoning the disdain and repulsion that have surrounded the mobile mass of willless bodies since time immemorial; the worker granted conditional freedom by the Chapelier Law during the French Revolution; the cloistered body of the woman, put in a harem or brothel ("maison close"), her sex sold or rented, even put under lock and key, as a source of profit for her temporary owner; bodies of the "follower hope"—the lost band—as the ideal object of training and discipline.

The "janissary" (the new soldier) is torn very young from the families of Christian slaves before undergoing military proletarianization. In the fifteenth century, the battles of Grandson and Morat show the importance the Swiss army attached to the presence of the follonor's trajectory; they are

In 1846 the Reine des Dux Mondes warns that in one year in France there were 32,000 cases of abandonment, or one child out of thirty deprived of his civil status, in other words of his identity And Georges Sand, who is moved by this describes in The Country Warf he procedure by which the child is confined to a traveler who takes him in a carriage and leaves him in the middle of a field. The loss of identity remains linked to exclusion from a geographic group, to setting a trajectory in motion, to putting on the road a child "who has not yet reached the age of reason."

There remains the difference between the "liberal" and the "mechanical," pure motivity, which comes from the machine and can thus be performed equally well by an ignorant or an animal (Equicola 95); "manual labor being considered in the (anthro-poentric) society of the Renaissance as ignoble as it had been in the Middle Ages," as Anthony Blunt notes in his Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450-1600. In fact, the worker's body cannot be compared to a human model, which is ideally composed. Virtuus man is essentially reasonable and harmonious, since he is contained in the circles and grids of Euclidean geometry—a symbol of social superiority since it is the geometry of the invader's, the dominator's trajectory.

done what I've done, and I've never hurt one animal, woman or child, since as everybody knows that's about the same thing.

The double's body, deprived of reason, is likened to that of other domestics, in the same boat. His work performances are here again absolutely compared to those of the animal by that dictator of movement, the film director. In ancient societies we know the bargains and ceremonies that surrounded the marriage of the "drude-woman," consisting in exchanges of animals between the parties. In the armies and police forces the animal proletariat remains—the recent use of sea mammals being a modern example, a hold-over from the canine regiments trained for infantry combat.

The vehicle-bodies of horses are likened in the Middle Ages to projectiles; the bodies of elephants to assault tanks, bulldozers, tractors; those of oxen, camels or mules like jeeps. As for the pigeons, those predators, they are the media whose ownership is reserved for a social elite, itself predatory. The rapid information furnished by carrier pigeons allows Jacques Coeur to get richer on the stock markets, in particular the merchant marine. And it is striking to see the salt tax scale he kept in his Bourges hotel, a veritable trough designed to measure the tax on the carte of "worker-producers" based on the quantity of salt they require as

is the very meaning of Frederick the Second's "Yours is not to reason why?" In the context of this disqualification of will in certain sexual, social or racial categories, it is significant to recall the conditions imposed on the descendants of the American black slaves, their battle for civil rights, particularly the right to vote which is but the "free man's" right to wannip, and which is not accorded to bodies without souls. In France the law of August 27, 1791 aggravates the tendency still further by requiring the elector to be a landowner; always the wandering body's inability to decide—inability of women, too, who will find it so hard to obtain the right to vote, to become part of this curious republican universalism!

We see here the social and political importance of "liberal reason" (of the open sea and open warfare) with respect not only to unreason but to the absence of reason pure and simple in the bodies of the ignorant, a relation faithfully reproduced as much in the Marxist organization chart as in the capitalist one, but at a lesser level...at least for the time being.

With the coming of democratic power, we see a perversion of primitive transmigration: the soul, by becoming individual, has become Reason. In other words the seat of a prescriptive rule of our actions, our movements, even the totality of our destinies. This

distribution. Later, Arthur Young, Chapal and Lavoisier built their statistical tables on Vauban's inductive model, but with the difference that two out of three led to forecast errors. Further on, Moreau notes that Vauban's figures become easily understandable when transformed into metric measurements.

The soul neither preexists nor survives the disappearance of its body-vehicle or machine; but as potential Reason, and especially scientific Reason, it can act on foreign bodies which are distant in time and space. Animal, territorial, vegetable bodies, bodies without will, bodies not yet born become technical bodies or technological objects. Here is true social domination, the bestiary of engines. The purebed horse no longer acts, he is acted on by his rider thanks to the drive shaft of the bridle and the gas pedals of the spurs. Or else he takes the bit in his teeth, returns to his uncontrollable, wild state...he expresses himself!

Reason (as in the Bible) is, for the body, a form of death. Significantly at the beginning of the Classical Age, the death of the insane or possessed was fashionable, as is that of drug addicts today. We spy on the kinetic disorder of their inexplicable attitudes and their discourses. Even when he cries out, speaks or complains, the possessed one, like the animal, is supposed not to suffer, and thus

And the pseudo-demons that we try to extract from them are primarily intelligences—themselves in transit—that abusively occupy the "driver's seat," like a horseman (again) who, controlling the back of his horse, claims to have its "motor at his disposal."

Foreign "intelligences" breathe into the vacant body an inhabited dynamism, commanding it to perform corresponding gestures. Ancient metempychosis imagined a plethora of intelligences in search of undifferentiated matter. The movement of transmigration supposedly takes place naturally, notably at birth and death, into any body at all, thus creating a kind of physical equality that surpasses social organizations. Another remark when the landworker is transformed into a conqueror, the population's poetic potential disappears in favor of a military potential, the poetic transmigration of souls disappears in favor of conquest, in other words of the voyage of bodies, and thus of their deterritorialization, of their inequality. With reasonable possession, the boarding of the metabolic vehicle is literally an act of piracy. Doctor Claude Olivenstein speaks of psychoanalysis as "psychism's strongest and most important lever of penetration"; always the unconscious reference to violence and to the right of the "power to invade, to its mechanical techniques. After all is said and done, the invade, to its mechanical techniques. After all is said and done, the invade, to its mechanical techniques. After all is said and done, the invade, to its mechanical techniques. After all is said and done, the invade, to its mechanical techniques. After all is said and done, the invade, to its mechanical techniques. After all is said and done, the invade, to its mechanical techniques. After all is said and done, the invade, to its mechanical techniques. After all is said and done, the invade, to its mechanical techniques. After all is said and done, the invade, to its mechanical techniques. After all is said and done, the invade, to its mechanical techniques. After all is said and done, the invade, to its mechanical techniques. After all is said and done, the invade, to its mechanical techniques. After all is said and done

—as technical revelation is another way of boarding "ignorant" bodies, the logical next step from the gymnasium: the famous physical culture, "Swedish style," is succeeded by the modern mixture of highway and sex, bodies thrown together by chance meetings; sexual collisions soon forgotten; autos, motorcycles stolen, raped and abandoned.

"Good conduct" is no longer monials taught in public school, but driver's education, which is becoming an obligatory part of the curriculum. But isn't this already the adventure of military monasticism, transforming the mystical body of Christ into an armed body, into marching orders?

Long before pirates, assault troops or hoodlums, the military monk finds gratification in the arsenal of death and terror. In fact, if the militization of societies henceforth makes every citizen a war machine, the soldier-monk is, in this domain, a model and a precursor. The reform of the great orders, aimed at suppressing the military Gyrovagues, is a considerable revolution, since the monk's "solitude" is now spread to large, anartical armed groups. The institution of monasticism in the very nature, time, space, and social and human organizations that he relinquishes, his remunciation of personal tastes and identity, prefigure the nihilism of the technological Teutonic Order, which was secularized in 1525. It was the car-bonari, with their "cellular" organization, who became a model for other revolutionary groups, the clandestine movements that in Russia were the axes of a systematized terrorist war, of a permanent nihilism comparable both to the permanent war led by the great orders—first against the Muslims, then, in America, against the Asians—and then the guerrilla war led against Napoleon in Spain. Dugeslin, the secret master of the military Temple, had excelled there just as well. In the same way, puritanism and industrialization progress together in Anglo-Saxon countries. With industrial interment, it is redemptive to put the soulless bodies of children and women to work because these bodies are guided by reasonable souls, the souls of engineers assigned to define their attitudes and gestures. Abhisit machi frit: Nazi and Chinese reeducation camps claim this old kinetic belief for themselves.

In these different examples, the conqueror, the warrior claims a function that seems to be a perversion of the priest's. For the Judeo-Christians, everything is said from the very first pages of the Bible: the warrior is a perverted priest. In fact, the first murder revolves around the means of occupying and exploiting productive soil, and especially around the rent received by God in exchange. God will

The importance of the priest (the magician), of the patriarch, comes from his ability to establish and maintain this commerce of exchange with the gods/nature, to temper their whims, their violence. He is the one who, thanks to his scientific empiricism, can make them accept his sacrifice, the rent on the earth (he collects, sets and levies the tax, tithe or—in its current manifestation—church-offering). When, with the advent of the "foreigner," a commerce of transferable goods is instituted on the banks of the Mediterranean, it is curious to see the exchange take place in a similar way (as still happens today with certain nomads): without any physical or even visual contact between the two parties. The merchandise is deposited on the shore or the side of the road, where the stranger will pick it up, put in its place the appointed value, and then leave. He thus passes like a shadow over the other's territory, scarcely setting foot on it, like those souls, those wills that occupy the invisible or uninhabitable parts of the universe. The colonial godowns and free ports still reproduce, in their way, this process of exchange existing outside of military conventions. The warrior, dromocratic killer and organizer of crossroad-cities, has from the dawn of history concentrated all his effort and science on exacting rent for the earth. Armed force is always one of military occupations.

hero—military protector and tax collector—can thus in no way be limited to or even identified with "human commerce," as Clausewitz understands it, for instance. The warrior's or soldier-monk's abuse of the earth's (divine) hospitality is not only the acquisition or accumulation of soil and riches in the name of a State of which he is but the instrument (the lever, as Saint-Just says), but is all of that as the indefinite expansion of the abuse itself. Moreover, we find this clearly mined by the great conquerors: Alexander is content to move forward, worried only about reaching a limit and not to possess. Conquest is reduced to quest; gesture is movement. Napoleon will die poor, like a soldier monk, in the little grey outfit that, on the battlefield, set him apart from his officers and gaudy, mercenary generals, designating the "detached" character he intended for his military art. Pervered priests—Muslim, Christian or otherwise—developing the arsenal of war alongside the inferno, mixing poverty with the "hatred of the world."

Financial politics are exercised around the abduction of persons, ransom systems; social protection leads to the perversion of charity into bodily assistance, of poverty into the power of

combat racecar: an existential measure of the warrior's being, the dizzying flow of time, a rapidfire-tax on the covered meter that ruins the earthly inhabitant, but simultaneously destroys the substance of its conqueror and measures the survivor's remaining hours. In short, as in the turnaround of the topological ring, the survivor's disappearance depends on the answer he can give in space and time to Alexander the Great's question, to the problem of his limits.

The invader's performance resembles that of his athletic counterpart, of those Olympic champions whose records first progressed by hours, then by minutes, then by seconds, then by fractions of seconds. The better they performed (the more rapid they became), the more pitiful were the advances they obtained, until they could only be noticed electronically. One day the champion will disappear in the limits of his own record, as is already suggested by the biological manipulation of which he is the object, and which resembles the methods of artificial medical survival granted the terminally ill. It is remarkable that the first automobiles, Joseph Cugnot's military trolley of 1771, for example, were steam-powered, already situating themselves at the limit of the animal body as metabolic

EVIDENTLY DROMOLOGICAL progress and what we conventionally call human and social progress coincided but did not converge. The development can be summarized as follows:

A society without technological vehicles, in which the woman plays the role of the logistical spouse, mother of war and of the truck.
The indiscriminate boarding of soulless bodies as metabolic

makes for no more than a "poor man's" version of the proletariat soldier. The proletarianization of the working classes is only one form of militarization—a temporary form.

From 1914 onward, the proletariat's motor—and thus political-power was no match for the European battlefields. This power, however, was still indispensable to the worksites of continental warfare. The military class, making sure to keep the proletariat under control, will thus allow it the illusion of being able to dominate, to submerge the bourgeois fortress. The latter is already ruined, pierced at all points by the expressway media (radio, telephone, television), condemned by its former defenders to instant destruction through the anti-city strategy of total war.

Nonetheless, we will soon become familiar with the limits of this military leave, in Prague, Warsaw, Berlin... and in Paris, too, in May '68, when, after the taking of the Olden theatre, the government predicts at any moment the intervention of armored cars against the popular uprising. It is understandable that in the 1920s, while the "Bolshevik threat" spread from Munich to the gates of India, the French government unleashed a new politics of social aid. All this was made necessary by the logistical redeployment of military-industrial nations in Europe and in the world. And yet

In the same way, the French Union of the Left is a trap insofar as it has insisted, in General Clusser's words, on having "the army constitute an unknown quantity in the social equation." In short, its only strength has been its silence on the military question. It is inevitable that its undoing will be the problem of national Defense, and that the Communists, who have always accepted the Marxist model of military proletarianization, will find themselves confronting radicals and socialists who, since May 1968, have invested in a socialism "with a human face," liable to assemble a new, somewhat depoliticized electorate. It was under the auspices of the Portuguese generals of the Armed Forces' Movement that "the end of the dictatorship of the proletariat" was decreed in Southern Europe. We should not see in this, as Georges Marchais will later claim, a cause for rejoicing, a softening of ideological will, "the word 'dictatorship' having an unpleasant sound since the fascist experience." Indeed, we cannot accuse the Portuguese military leaders—returning to their country after a long and bloody campaign of colonial repression—of excessive humanism. In fact, with the Marxist generals courteous by Cunhal, the dictatorship of the proletariat regains its original military significance; and as good technicians of war, they acknowledge that the time when the proletariat is for no more than a "poor man's" version of the proletariat soldier. The proletarianization of the working classes is only one form of militarization—a temporary form.

on the liberal side, by the "Trilateral Commission" on the crisis of democracy. "We have come to recognize that if there are potentially desirable limits to economic growth, there are also potentially desirable limits to the infinite expansion of democracy." The crisis of these liberal democracies is the end of a form of mobilization of the citizenry. The central historical pseudo-figure of the dominating producer is simultaneously removed by the two great ideological blocs, the proletarian worker declared unusable along with the consumer-producer of the capitalist world. The revolutionary experiment of the Armed Forces Movement was in this context exemplary because it claimed to raise the Porugese leftist forces to another level, that of an "army civilization." Thus in 1975, ships captain Correia Jesuino, who had become "Minister of Social Communication" (we are reminded here of the naval proletarianization under Louis XIV by M. de Valbelle, the former captain of the galleries), depicts the "left wing" officers as ethnologists studying a primitive people." For, in his view, the Portugese people is under-developed. Jean Francois Revel, reporting these statements in Express (April 14, 1975), indicated that the average salary of a Portuguese was comparable to that of a Breton or a Welshman, and didn't quite see where the "underdevelopment" was.

Here again, it is not so much the final explosion that counts in deterrence; rather more it is questions such as those posed by Articles 5 and 15 of the French Constitution of 1958 to the solitary decision maker that the Head of State and Supreme Commander of the Armies, the President of the Republic, guaranor of the national territory's integrity, has become. The speed of the political decision depends on the sophistication of the vectors how to transport the bomb? how fast? The bomb is political, we like to repeat—political not because of an explosion that should never happen, but because it is the ultimate form of military surveillance.

The political bourgeoisie, like the "revolutionary" parties, anesthetized by a long period of coexistence and full employment, by the euphoria of continued growth, are proving in Europe that "one can do anything with a bayonet except sit on it." The proletarian revolution now necessarily goes through the revolutions of the military institutions in the heart of the State's constitutional apparatus and, in fact, the principal actors who have taken the initiative these last years are no longer the great political parties, but the army, the unions, and even the unions in the army.

the South American continent. If General Vargas Priero, “considered one of the most capable and progressive leaders in the Peruvian army” (Le Monde, November 4, 1975), declares in an interview that “the true forerunners of the Peruvian revolution are its armed forces, the root and institutional essence of the people because they are born from them,” we must understand that this really means a return to a situation that long precedes political Marxism, to a negation of the State-polis by the proletarian revolutionary forces.

Le Monde reported in August 1977 that General Pinochet had done away with the DINA, his political police, in favor of a military police force. Things are getting simpler… This is truly the end of the reasonable democratic State that engages in a non-partisan process in which the unions and the most disparate, the least “socialized” groups, are called to play the primary role. We are heading toward an explosion of national production systems, toward union individuation as it exists in the United States, for example—human labor depending less on productivity than on the game of interests in the manpower market. This, along with the breakdown of the unity of political action, allows for every imaginable maneuver, even the wildest and most fragmented, on the level of the very survival of the old political States. The end of

as was revealed by a recent scandal that called into question the relations between the Israeli generals and members of international crime. Far from being a military political function that is becoming deterritorialized, losing interest in any form of sedentary fixation, whether national or otherwise, both the parity criminals and the large gangs are seeing their local cottage industry undergo serious revaluation.

The military class, increasingly dismantled from its bourgeois partner, abandons the street, the highway, those outmoded vectors, to the small and middle-sized business of the protection rackets. The city unions in New York are starring to replace their members’ productive activity with simple crisis management, by becoming administrators and bankers.

In Italy assassinations, abductions, crimes and incidents are on the rise. Financial interests are becoming inseparable from those of a multitude of little, so-called “revolutionary,” groups. Justice is in a quandary. They talk about “liberating the people” and extort millions from them. Public opinion is in an upright about the mix, but this criminal power rising from the masses is really only a political demand returning to an uncontrolled condition because the old national ethology—social ideals—has become secondary

Italian solution of Mr. Berlinguier, whose famous "historical compromise" really only means a final, desperate union of the traditional parties before the threat of pure and simple displacement that weighs on them from both within and without.

While in France they try to keep the masses tied to outmoded strategic and social convictions, the army is already deploying its personnel in key points of civilian activity and shadows the police in its surveillance tasks. The military proletariat's job is henceforth to police highways and airports, to collect garbage on public roads (where men like Democrat Abraham Beame, New York's "little mayor," was ridiculed), as well as to provide telecommunications and assistance; to effect certain prestige operations such as the battle against pollution, campaigns for the defense of archeological sites or cancer research, the organization of numerous athletic and cultural displays (Celebration in the Tulleries, the army at the Children's Fair), and to accomplish important international enterprises, such as saving children in Biafra, setting up surgical units in areas devastated by natural cataclysms... even "rescueing" a group of hostages in Entebbe. In a threatening social universe, in which human societies are shown to be rife with criminal elements, the army seems to be a protective force, a refuge from the parade of subverse

inadvertently, to frustrate them in their primary function, the power to invade? Why was it that at that very moment the "friends of the earth" lost contact with their planet, and haven't even demonstrated any resistance? In any case, the terminology used by Jacques Isnard in the September 9, 1977 issue of Le Monde gives us pause: "Between the end of the harvest and the opening of the hunting season, the land army organized, in the Beauce and Perche regions, its first true maneuver in open ground, in other words, away from the highways and roads, in a region of 2,000 square kilometers of farm land and prairies." They put on a "show maneuver" in order to maintain neighborhood relations between the army and the civilian populations. The farmers, who remembered the army's help during the previous year's drought, accepted the Demeter exercise without it, seems, too much grumbling... "Goddess Demeter is with us," recognizes Colonel de Rochegonde, who commands the 2nd Motor Brigade. While another colonel states, "We are but the managers of national Security and, as such, we too are held accountable." "The army takes advantage of these maneuvers in open ground to lead, for example, offensive reconnaissance missions fifty kilometers from its base, along with public relations operations in the Euree-Loire department." You do not enclose dromocrats in

budget for 1977-1982" about "the absence of numerical information on the use of funds"; for this fuzziness allows no appreciation of the shifts in our defense policies. The army insists on regaining its autonomy of action, on redefining itself as a public service able to assume in a safe and orderly fashion the greatest number even the totality—of civil and military defense tasks, again increasing the communal and industrial undertakings of its paralleled initiatives.

We can thus see just how far military unionism, advocated by the Communist League, the Unified Socialist Party or the C.E.D.T. in the name of petty demands, finally enters into the army's social scheme. It is, moreover, revealing to see the creation of the first union branch in the 19th Army Engineering Corps, thus demonstrating that this body still remains at the forefront of military revolutionary thought.

Balzac, visiting the Wagram battlefield after 1830 in hopes of expanding his social analysis, already asked himself the question of the veritable territory of historicality, the strategic theatre that, thanks to the advance of the media (the use of the telegraph, for example), had suddenly become global—external and internal events henceforth able to interact almost immediately. This temporal limitation come from the battlefield had been answered by armed forces of the nation's raw potential (its industrial, economic, demographic, cultural, scientific, political and moral capabilities).

Since then, social penetration has been linked to the dizzying evolution of military penetration techniques; each vehicular advance erases a distinction between the army and civilization.

Fascism, defining itself in Germany as Ortholomisation, in other words the institution of a colonial situation on the European continent that claims to subvert existing socio-political groups, in fact reveals to us the great two-way movement of democratic totalitarianism between metropoles and colonies. Mapped out during the unprecedented logistical effort of the First World War, this movement will bring about the singular unity of Western civilization in the 1920s, "the incorporation of colonial action in national life as a solution to the serious problems that human evolution will later impose on the world," as Albert Sarrat, French colonial minister, declared in 1921.

To understand dramatic society and its establishment, it is no doubt more useful to read The Black Code of the Colonial Pact than any other so-called sociological work. "We must not, worse Colbert," constitute in the colonies a constant civilization." The ancient legislation that will subsist in our colonies until 1848

In fact, from the beginning, the American system has not had a measure of comparison between the value of the messages delivered and the effort necessary for their transmission. More so than with the content of the message, the means of its mediatization appear as instruments of primary necessity in the United States, first of all in their naval relation to metropolitan Europe, to the Africa that supplies its manpower, then for the constitution of a certain State centralism over a vast territory in which, in order to govern, one must first penetrate and then communicate.

The media are the privileged instruments of the Union. They alone are able to control the social chaos of American pan-humanity; they are the guarantors of a certain civic cohesion, and thus of civil security itself. Inversely, as in the ancient colonial model, American democracy will make no real efforts to integrate its ethnic minorities, its factions, into a constant civilization, into a truly community-oriented way of life. For segregation is what sanctions the system's hegemony of the media, on which rests the nature of the American State's authority.

This is one reason for the survival of old racism among the good citizens of the "land of the free," and we will note as well that the great internal and external upheavals in the United States will whatever delivered it. He singlehandedly constituted the most radical critique of Fuller’s and MacLuhans' global theories. This completely desocialized man, who vanished from the earth, who avoided human contact for fear of germs, who was terrified by the very breath of his rare visitors, nonetheless thought only of the media, from the aerospace industry to the cinema, from gasoline to airfields, from casinos to the star system, from the design of Jane Russell’s bba to that of a bomber. His existence could be considered exemplary. Hughes cared only about that which passes in transit. His life rebounded from one vector to another, as has, for two hundred years, the power of the American nation be adored. Nothing else interested him. He died in the open sky, in an airplane.

In the same way, American commercial methods triumphed in Europe in 1914 thanks to the unforeseen logistical dimensions taken by the conflict. The United States was to win on the continent one of the first gasoline wars, putting the French market in the hands of Standard Oil, driving back our army which had gone to the front with 400 tanker trucks while the Americans owned more than 20,000. Once more, the market was created not by the object of consumption but by its vector of delivery.

have difficulty using ideological propaganda, in attaining the perfect logistical efficiency of the American patriotic "short-cut." Later, after total war—in other words after the extensive destruction of the European nations' identity (total war, like colonial war, aiming at the annihilation of constant civilizations)—we see the evasion of American stocks toward Europe. But here again, we haven't sufficiently analyzed this flow of instruments and objects brought over by the liberty ships. We must still apply aesthetic, functional and other meanings to this world of giant cars; to the plethora of household objects in gleaming kitchens in which, significantly, nothing is cooked but sandwiches and canned foods; to the whole spectacle of a "boughtless objectivity" that makes the very concept of consciousness meaningful," to the clandestine interference in the ordinary vectors of exchange and communication by the technological codes that result from production systems.

Technologies of body and soul are thus strangely complexified in American pop-culture. The body without soul is, as we saw, a body assisted by technical prostheses. And since we're talking about America, we would do well to remember that the word "comfort" comes from the old French assistance: a reference to the old social bestiary of bodies seized in motion, left along the road. Unleashed humanitarian comfort civilization will perfectly replace social aid through the technical assistance of bodies, from the household robot to the company psychiatrist or the latest model of car. Not unlike the way this country today nurtures a romantic taste for the revived bionic bodies of fascistic futurism, human bodies in which certain organs have been replaced by technological grafts, enabling these new heroes of surgical science to accomplish superhuman physical exploits.

But the politics of comfort was superseded by that of social standing. Everyone suddenly found himself exposed to the scrutiny of his neighbors, compared with the identikit portrait of the ideal American consumer: a model of civic-mindedness whose gestures, quirks and attitudes toward life were henceforth broadcast without reprise by the radio, the press, television and the cinema, and buried under commercial messages. Its political counterpart is the McCarthy period, a time of blacklisting, of anti-American witch hunts, of artists and intellectuals on trial—the same artists and intellectuals who were again designated in 1975 by the Tilateral Commission as a threat to democracy by their ability to constitute demobilized and irredeemable margins.

In fact, American-style (social) security implies the population's

look of Marx and Engels, who are unable to see the mythic figure of the Worker even in the rich deposit of industrial proletarianization that is England in the nineteenth century. Engels cannot find his specimen, his neanderthal of historical evolution... Only in June 1848 will the image finally take shape, in the streets of Paris, on a theatre of civil war "as populated as that of the Battle of Leipzig where thirty to forty thousand men are thrown into combat.

Just as the revolutionary process of the proletarianization of labor comes from the war of mass and movement, the myth of the worker of metaphysics (Biblical image of man's first pain: cursed by God and cusing and killing in turn to replace Him in his creative works) also takes shape on the great battlefields of industrial war. Teilhard de Chardin, for example, believes along with most of his contemporaries that war is one of the principle elements of technological progress; but the idea of "unfinished man" suddenly strikes him during his unforgettable experience at the front, as he writes in 1917. In 1945, at the end of the total war, he notes, "War is an organic phenomenon of anthropogenesis that Christianity cannot suppress any more than it can do away with death." He adopts the voice of Tacitus to deplore the international Peace that will cover the world with "the crust of bansity, the veil of monotony"

would force the "militias that are very pleasant to watch, if you are not the one to receive the blows to repeat their maneuvers endlessly."

Each is seized by an immoderate desire for the subjected flesh of the proletarian soldier, the powerful mass of "mobile machines... blindly obeying the impulses of their divers" (Babeuf). The military work forces are obliged not so much to sell themselves as to give themselves to the war entrepreneur. For him they are what the woman, then the mount, was for the knight in battle they help him move forward, die under him or cause his death. Alexander is nothing without the humors of Bicephalus; Richard the Third at Bosworth loses his life—and his kingdom—along with his horse. The military, then laboring, proletarian kinetic, infinite, prolifically self-regenerating—carries into time and space the historical guide who straddles him, directs and inspires his movements, and who is also a chief of war: Lenin, Trotsky, Salin, Mao.

In short, the revolutionary figure of the worker, sketched less by the industrial system than by the military one, fill the kinetic dispatche between slow war and rapid war. The "full steam ahead through the mud" of the millist Nechaiev, apostle of systematic terrorist warfare, is not a rhetorical figure but a serious technological proposition: compensate for the distortion born of the

sites that devote the earth to war, keeping its visible surface for the "worker of metaphysics," or giving it to him by educating him. In practice, this begins as a kind of humanitarian aid to the German unemployed, then as a voluntary service to which Heidegger calls the intellectuals, "a service of work, knowledge and arms." This will become the exemplary development of the history of the camps that, in 1926, receive their first volunteers, mixing, in the most moving manner possible, workers, peasants and students.

The whole thing could have seemed extremely liberal at a time when, everywhere in the Western world, a crushing need for manpower was being felt. The insatiable requirements of industrial warfare, already forgotten after so few years, simultaneously put the populations to work and domesticated them with para-military State bureaucracies in Europe, across the Atlantic and overseas (between the two wars moreover, the International Labor Office in Geneva handled all of the world's manpower problems).

In the colonies, American "forcing" is answered by the smoothed organization of penal labor; while in Bulgaria, for example, civilian labor is made obligatory from 1920 onward, for both sexes, under a general office attached to the Ministry of Public Works. But the beneficiaries usually work on construction projects headed into concentration camps, into death camps, in the face of public apathy, without anyone even bothering to remove their original motto: "Arbeit macht frei."

The slip from one to the other is in fact quite natural; the proletarian worker's flesh is no different from that of the proletarian soldier. As Clausewitz writes: "Tools (soldiers) are there to be used, and use will naturally wear them out..."

For their part, the Communist countries ostensibly fulfilled Teilhard de Chardin's wish at the very moment he formulated it: die Tausle Mobilität Machung. More than the suppression of the bourgeois class, this is the disappearance of its productive proletariat. In China, from 1964 onward, the revolutionary slogan was "Take the army as your model," and the entire population was forced to wear a similar uniform, a kind of ambiguous, sexual outfit. In France, on the other hand, the soldier was called upon more and more frequently to wear the combat uniform, the outfit of the laboret, even during official parades.

All greatness is in assault—an inaccurate translation of Plato or a paraphrasing of American forcing? Fascism was totalitarian only as it intended to be totally dromatic. The "viral space" is only the disappearance of European geography, become an area, a

of the speed or distance record is that of assault. This countdown in time and space, the very principle of athletic performance, is but the theatricalization of the race toward its "absolute greatness," of that military charge that begins as a slow and geometric march, and continues as an increasingly powerful acceleration of the body meant to give the final surge.

With total war, the "Totale Mobil-Machung" takes on its full meaning. There is no longer any social comparison between the triumphant body of the proletarian soldier—the superior being who, according to the old expression, possesses the "magnificence of displacement;" the German soldier who rushes headlong into the limeless expanse of the steppe or the desert—and the body of the proletarian worker who is there only to support the logistical effort. A mass of the physically unfit, of forced residents, of prisoners interned in camps, unable bodies, perry criminals.

For the Italian fascist passing directly from the athletic record to absolute war, the intoxication of the speed-body is total; it's Massolina's "Poetry of the bomber," For Marineti, after d'Amunzio, the "warrior-dandy" is the "only able subject, surviving and savoring in battle the power of the human body's metallic dream"; coupling with technological equipment scarcely more cumbersome died, it doesn't need to be reborn. I'm not talking about little sadicomuseographic or commercial trifles, but quite simply the fact that it represented one of the most accomplished cultural, political and social revolutions of the democratic West, like the naval empires or the colonial establishments. And it certainly has less to fear from "the future" than does a Communism that no longer has anything Marxist about it but its name, and for which the end of the dictatorship of the proletariat was the admission of its historical failure.

Fascism is alive because total war, then total peace, have engaged the headquarters of the great national bodies (the armies, the forces of production) in a new spatial and temporal process, and the historical universe in a Kantian world. The problem is no longer one of a historiary in (chronological) time or (geographic) space, but in what space-time?

In a recent article, I stressed the necessity of reviewing our physical concept of history, of finally recognizing it for what it has become:

"... Which in short would make of war's conductibility (the coheteent plan devised in time and space that can, through repetition, be imposed upon the enemy) not the instrument but the coupling with technological equipment scarcely more cumbersome."

The Consumption of Security

Security cannot be divided.

— Michael Poniatowski, March 4, 1976

"REVOLUTION GOES FASTER than the people," declared President General Costa Gomes at the beginning of the Portuguese events. How could such a thing be possible? Simply because in the final account the West's so-called revolutions have never been made by the people, but by the military institution. Economic liberalism has been only a liberal pluralism of the order of speeds of penetration. To the heavy model of the hemmed in bourgeoisie, to the single schema of the weighty Marxist mobil-machung (ostensibly planned control of the movement of goods, persons, ideas), the West has long opposed the diversion of the legal hierarchy, the

speed—speeds whose hierarchy is controlled more and more each day by the State (headquarters), from the pedestrian to the rocket, from the metabolic to the technological.

In the 1960s, when a rich American wanted to prove his social success, he bought not "the biggest American car he could lay his hands on," but a "little European job," faster, less limited. To succeed is to reach the power of greater speed, to have the impression of escaping the unanimity of civic training. Since total war, there have been no foreign, external wars in the strict sense; as the Mayor of Philadelphia so aptly put it during a hot American summer:

"Now the frontiers pass inside the cities." Whether highway or street, everything is part of the single glacis of the frontier desert.

The Berlin wall benefited in the summer of 1977 from the latest advances in mines and video systems—a veritable face-lift! After Beirut showed us the old communal city crushed under the blows of the Palestinian migrants. What they lived through was not the old state of siege, but an aimless and permanent state of emergency. To survive in the city one had to stay informed daily, by radio, about the strategic situation of one's own neighborhood; everyone transformed his car into an assault vehicle, loaded with weapons in order to ensure freedom of movement. Not

social aid is cut back and the city is no longer cleaned, it's the dissolution of the city in its own outskirts, the future popular self-government of civil fear. Popular war had largely contributed to making the means of survival on the battlefield into a means of existence. The modern State takes credit for the formula in its new logistical revolution: when the King of Morocco decides in the fall of 1975 to take back the Spanish Sahara, he sends not his armies, but "peace matchers," a miserable mass picked up in the cities and thrown unarmed into the desert at the front lines of the Moroccan tanks—as if, after all, it was now an ecological matter to be settled more between civilians than between military men.

With the Palestinian problem, popular war had suddenly taken on global proportions. Indeed, the tactic that consists in embracing in a diffuse manner the most widespread territories to escape the powerful nuclei of military repression could have no meaning for them, since the very cause of their struggle was the deprivation of geographic territory. They therefore lost no time in literally settling into the time zones of international airports. The new unknown combatants, come from nowhere and no longer finding a strategic terrain, fight in strategic time, in the relativity of Israel time. Since in the final account there is no road that is not strategic, from this

longer be divided. As then-President Giscard d'Estaing stated three months later in a speech at the Military Academy, "Alongside the supreme means of ensuring our security, we need the presence of security. In other words, we need to have a social body organized around this need for security." On August 25, Olivier Stim, Secretary of State in the Overseas Territories, told the Council of Ministers that "The evacuation of the inhabitants of Basse-Terre Island, who were threatened by the eruption of the Soufriere volcano, demonstrated the possibilities for spontaneous action in a liberal society." As we saw later, civil and social protection in this type of affair is no longer contemporary with the catastrophe; it precedes and, if need be, invents it.

In fact, the government's deliberately terrorist manipulation of the need for security is the perfect answer to all the new questions now being put to democracies by nuclear strategy—the new isolationism of the nuclear State that, in the U.S., for example, is totally revamping political strategy. They are trying to recreate Union through a new unanimity of need, just as the mass media phantasmatically created a need for cars, refrigerators... We will see the creation of a common feeling of insufficiency that will lead to a new kind of consumption, the consumption of protection;

All this is less contradictory than it seems. Capitalist society has always tightly linked politics with freedom from fear, social security with consumption and comfort. But as we saw, the other side of this obligatory movement is assistance since the war of movement, the infirmity of unable bodies has taken on a social consistency through the demands of the military worker. If the Treaty of Versailles is concerned with assistance, it’s because the inevitability of national Defense requires it, and henceforth imposes a plan of social action on the States as part of their general defense. As Gilbert Mury notes, the first true social workers were not neutral because they came from places like Colonel de la Roque’s “French Social Party.” It’s a good thing to remember: the promoters of the new “Social Security” in Great Britain (Sir Beveridge, for example, in 1942) had made it an objective of total war. Furthermore, it was to encounter similar groups of fascist or Petainist inspiration on the European continent, such as the National Aid movement. It is interesting to note the enrollment in these movements of certain members of the fascist denunciation forces (who were formerly occupied with civilian surveillance and repression), their integration into the new personnel of social aid, as we take advantage of the experience of common-law prisoners today.

This is because the activities of these technicians of standardization have always tightly linked politics with freedom from fear, social security with consumption and comfort. But as we saw, the other side of this obligatory movement is assistance since the war of movement, the infirmity of unable bodies has taken on a social consistency through the demands of the military worker. If the Treaty of Versailles is concerned with assistance, it’s because the inevitability of national Defense requires it, and henceforth imposes a plan of social action on the States as part of their general defense. As Gilbert Mury notes, the first true social workers were not neutral because they came from places like Colonel de la Roque’s “French Social Party.” It’s a good thing to remember: the promoters of the new “Social Security” in Great Britain (Sir Beveridge, for example, in 1942) had made it an objective of total war. Furthermore, it was to encounter similar groups of fascist or Petainist inspiration on the European continent, such as the National Aid movement. It is interesting to note the enrollment in these movements of certain members of the fascist denunciation forces (who were formerly occupied with civilian surveillance and repression), their integration into the new personnel of social aid, as we take advantage of the experience of common-law prisoners today.

Several years ago in France, in a period of full economic prosperity, the social workers declared, “We are workers like any other because we repair the socio-productive apparatus.” After 68, they were less sanguine: “The social workers feel very strongly the ambiguity of the notion of social work and are sensitive to the misunderstandings it can generate.” In fact, in the new economy of survival, it is no longer a matter of participating in a society (of more or less fidelity) abundance. Mr. Berlinguer said it in January 1977: “We are the ones who want austerity, in order to change the system and construct a new model of development.” And strangely enough, he immediately refers to the transportation system, “to the revision of the myth of the personal automobile with the reorganization of cities. The solution to the transportation problem should lead to a radical transformation of State mechanisms through a modification of the nature of business.” Thus, everywhere, the mobile mass’s vehicular power is repressed and reduced; from limits on speed or fuel to the pure and simple suppression of the personal auto, the myth of the car is condemned to disappear along with the myth of the worker, the central historical agent of the logistical State.

The austerity preached by Enrico Berlinguer, as we know, had disastrous repercussions even within the Italian Communist Party.

stalemate in which neither side can gain the upper hand, the armies will remain face to face, constantly threatening each other but unable to strike the deciding blow. This is the future; no combat, only famine; no killing, only the bankruptcy of nations and the collapse of any social system."

In a social configuration whose precarious equilibrium is threatened by any ill-considered initiative, security can henceforth be likened to the absence of movement. The extended proletarianization of the suppression of wills can be likened to the suppression of gestures, for which the rise in unemployment is the best and most obvious image. We redistribute social work; we spotlight the performances of the physically and mentally handicapped, their records in Olympics for the disabled; we impose the new belief that a body's inability to move is not really a serious problem.

Struggle enough again, the army can be found behind these philanthropic enterprises. Read the memoirs of Abbo Oziol, the French country priest who created centers for retarded children from nothing, centers designed to tear them away from the psychiatric wards: "A visitor may sometimes be surprised to hear us say that one of our children is 'in the army.' That doesn't mean that our unfortunate little retard was called into the service. We simply mean by this to

denunciation act like auxiliary policemen. The indivisible security discens in the bitter old man, excluded from the economic system by his modest pension and revenue, a last proletarian, a kind of attentive sentinel, immobile in the middle of the frenetic agitation of the social environment. One begins to meet these otherworldly beings in the street, aged persons whose wrists are equipped with an electronic alarm system scarcely larger than a wristwatch and relayed to a monitoring center. Gilbert Corteau is at the origin of this kind of social action with the "Delta 7 Foundation," which is responsible for many things, but which also had recourse, in order to get off the ground, to financial aid from the armed forces (particularly the Air Force). Its beneficiaries were mainly Vietnamese children made deaf by the bombardments, who received hearing aids; or old persons who were given free telephones, complete with an alarm system hooked into the central police computer. Behind this operation we find the National Union of Social Aid Offices and the Ministry of Health, as well as the Ministry of the Interior.

The posters that launched the great campaign for the safety of senior citizens, the audio-visual spots: all this indocrination is widely broadcast in old people's homes, clubs hostels free for the asking.

quo, the reasons that made the Spartan State refuse the use of precious metals as one of the consequences of non-war. (The State, careful to put the people's vigilance in defense to full use, deprived individuals of the means of protecting themselves other than by becoming totally engaged in the Lacedaemonian war machine).

The code of production itself always aims at the "infinite receptacle of consumption." But the latter becomes the consumption of total security; the utopian use of defense refuses leads us to modify esthetics and the nature of production. The meaning of business reform is totally different from the one ascribed to it by the powers that be. Thus, the appearance on the market of "nonbrand name products that are just as good"—which passed more or less unnoticed—seems to me to be a considerable event: merchandise in large demand is presented for reasons of "economy," in anonymous white labels, the company's obtrusive trade mark having disappeared. They are promoted with an immense anti-publicity campaign. They are, so we are told, "free products," in other words they no longer rely on the dubious methods of whorish old marketing techniques. From now on, repulsion sells more than attraction; this is what organizes our new social existence around the objects of protection. If the companies are asked by the

After his failed bid in the Portuguese elections in April 1976, Mario Snares declared: "I don't need to govern with politicians; I can do it just as well with soldiers and specialists." The new Chinese leaders spout the same discourse, "Military socialism" wasn't born in Peru or Portugal in 1976, any more than it first appeared in Berlin in the 1930s or in the last century with Bismarck, Napoleon III and "social imperialism." The elimination of the political bourgeoisie's partner is only the realization of a strategic dream based solely on scientific and technological speculation: militarized nations that can do without armies (General Gallois' minimum vital force).

For Clauswitz, the political State is already a "non-conducting medium," a barrier that prevents full discharge. In such a statement, the nature of the military class's ambition is perfectly revealed and the atomic situation projected... "Under Bonaparte (general/chief of State), war was waged without respite until the enemy succumbed, and the counter-blows were struck with almost equal energy. Surely it is both natural and inescapable that this phenomenon should cause us to turn again to the pure concept of war with all its rigorous implications." Dynamic efficiency is the State machine's primary quality, and the nuclear State, ultimate stage of domological

Part 4
THE STATE OF EMERGENCY

The State of Emergency

Speed is the essence of war.

— Sun Tzu

THE REDUCTION OF distances has become a strategic reality bearing incalculable economic and political consequences, since it corresponds to the negation of space.

The maneuver that once consisted in giving up ground to gain Time loses its meaning; at present, gaining Time is exclusively a matter of vectors. Territory has lost its significance in favor of the projectile. In fact, the strategic value of the non-place of speed has definitively supplanted that of place, and the question of possession of Time has revived that of territorial

adversary, but also, and especially, to the defeat of the world as a field, as distance, as matter.

Immediate penetration, or penetration that is approaching immediacy, becomes identified with the instantaneous destruction of environmental conditions; since after space-distance we now lack time-distance in the increasing acceleration of vehicular performances (precision, distance, speed).

From this point on, the binomial fire-movement exists only to designate a double movement of implosion and explosion; the power of implosion revives the old subsonic vehicles' (means of transportation, projectile) power to penetrate, and the power of explosion revives the destructive power of classical molecular explosives. In this paradoxical object, simultaneously explosive and implusive, the new war machine combines a double disappearance: the disappearance of matter in nuclear disintegration and the disappearance of places in vehicular extermination.

Nonetheless, we should note that the disintegration of matter is constantly deferred in the deterrent equilibrium of peaceful coexistence, but not so the extermination of distances. In less than half a century, geographical spaces have kept shining as speed has increased. And if at the beginning of the 1940s we still can now reach any other, no matter where it may be, in record time and within several meters.

We have to recognize that geographic localization seems to have definitively lost its strategic value and, inversely, that this same value is attributed to the delocalization of the vector, of a vector in permanent movement—no matter if this movement is aerial, spatial, underwater or underground. All that counts is the speed of the moving body and the undetectability of its path.

From the war of movement of mechanized forces, we reach the strategy of Brownian movements, a kind of chronological and pendular war that revives ancient popular and geographic warfare by a geostrategic homogenization of the globe. This homogeneization was already announced in the nineteenth century, notably by the Englishman Mackinder in his theory of the "World-Island," in which Europe, Asia and Africa would compose a single continent to the detention of the Americas—a theory that seems to have come to fruition today with the disqualification of localizations. But we should note that the indifferentiation of geostrategic positions is not the only effect of vectorial performances, for after the homogenization sought and finally acquired by naval and aerial imperialism, strategic spatial

with the drift of land masses, and in Mackinder, with the geopolitical amalgam of lands, has given way to a world wide phenomenon of terrestrial and technological contraction that today makes us penetrate into an artificial topological universe: the direct encounter of every surface on the globe.

The ancient inter-city duel, war between nations, the permanent conflict between naval empires and continental powers have all suddenly disappeared, giving way to an unheard of opposition: the justaposition of every locality, all matter. The planetary mass becomes no more than a "critical mass," a precipitate resulting from the extreme reduction of contact time, a fearsome friction of places and elements that only yesterday were still distinct and separated by a buffer of distances, which have suddenly become anachronistic. In The Origin of Continents and Oceans, published in 1915, Alfred Wegener writes that in the beginning the earth can only have had but one face, which seems likely, given the capacities for interconnection. In the future the earth will have but one interface.

If speed thus appears as the essential fall out of styles of conflicts and cataclysm, the current "arms race" is in fact only "the arming of the race" toward the end of the world as distance, in other words, through space and matter.

words of their ability to reduce geographic space to nothing or almost nothing.

In fact, without the violence of speed, that of weapons would not be so fearsome. In the current context, to disarm would thus mean first and foremost to decelerate, to defuse the race toward the end. Any treaty that does not limit the speed of this race (the speed of means of communicating destruction) will not limit strategic arms, since from now on the essential object of strategy consists in maintaining the non-place of a general delocalization of means that alone still allows us to gain fractions of seconds, which gain is indispensable to any freedom of action. As General Fuller wrote, "When the combatants threw javelins at each other, the weapon's initial speed was such that one could see it on its trajectory and party its effects with one's shield. But when the javelin was replaced by the bullet, the speed was so great that parry became impossible." Impossible to move one's body out of the way, but possible if one moved out of the weapon's range; possible as well through the shelter of the trench, greater than that of the shield—possible, in other words, through space and matter.

Today, the reduction of warning time that results from the

material time to intervene. But these are the "war materials" that disappear in the acceleration of the means of communicating destruction. There remains only a passive defense that consists less in reinforcing itself against the megaon powers of nuclear weapons than in a series of constant, unpredictable, aberrant movements, movements which are thus strategically effective—for at least a little while longer, we hope. In fact, war now rests entirely on the deregulation of time and space. This is why the technical maneuver that consists in complexifying the vector by constantly improving its performances has now totally supplanted tactical maneuvers on the terrain, as we have seen. General Allieret points this out in his history of weapons by stating that the definition of arm programs has become one of the essential elements of strategy. If in ancient conventional warfare we could still talk about army maneuvers in the fields, in the current state of affairs, if this maneuver still exists, it no longer needs a "field." The invasion of the instant succeeds the invasion of the territory. The countdown becomes the scene of battle, the final frontier.

The opposing sides can easily ban bacteriological, geologic or meteorological warfare. In reality, what is currently at stake invaded territories) inaugurates the war of time. In full peaceful coexistence, without any declaration of hostilities, and more surely than by any other kind of conflict, rapidity delivers us from this world. We have to face the facts today, speed is war, the last war.

But let's go back to 1962, to the crucial events of the Cuban missile crisis. At that time, the two superpowers had fifteen minutes' warning time for war. The installation of Russian rockets on Castro's island threatened to reduce the Americans' warning to thirty seconds, which was unacceptable for President Kennedy, whatever the risks of his categorical refusal. We all know what happened: the installation of a direct line—the "hot line"—and the interconnection of the two Heads of State.

Ten years later, in 1972, when the normal warning time was down to several minutes—ten for ballistic missiles, a mere two for satellite weapons—Nixon and Brezhnev signed the first strategic arms limitation agreement in Moscow. In fact, this agreement aims less at the quantitative limitation of weapons (as its adversary/partners claim) than at the preservation of a properly "human" political power, since the constant progress of rapidity threatens from one day to the next to reduce the warfare in the military field.

What will remain, then, of the "political reasons" for deterrence?
Let us recall that in 1962, among the reasons that made General de Gaulle decide to have the populations ratify the decision to elect the President of the Republic by universal suffrage, there was the credibility of deterrence, the legitimacy of the referendum being a fundamental element of this very deterrence. What will remain of all this in the automation of deterrence? in the automation of decision?

The transition from the state of single wars of space to the state of emergency of the war of time only took several decades, during which the political era of the statesman was replaced by the apolitical era of the State apparatus. Facing the advent of such a regime, we would do well to wonder about what is much more than a temporal phenomenon.

At the close of our century, the time of the finite world is coming to an end, we live in the beginnings of a paradoxical miniaturization of action, which others prefer to bapize automation. Andrew Stratton writes, "We commonly believe that automation suppresses the possibility of human error. In fact, it transfers that possibility from the action stage to the conception stage. We are now reaching the point where the possibilities of an accident a situation in which the notions of "before" and "after" designate only the future and the past in a form of war that causes the "present" to disappear in the instantaneousness of decision.

The final power would thus be less one of imagination than of anticipation, so much so that to govern would be no more than to foresee, simulate, memorize the simulations; that the present "Research Institute" could appear to be the blueprint of this final power, the power of utopia.

The loss of material space leads to the government of nothing but time. The Ministry of Time sketched in each vector will finally be accomplished following the dimensions of the biggest vehicle there is, the State-vector. The whole geographic history of the distribution of land and countries would stop in favor of a single regrouping of time, power no longer being comparable to anything but a "meteorology." In this precarious fiction speed would suddenly become a destiny; a form of progress, in other words a "civilization" in which each speed would be something of a "region" of time.

As Mackinder said, forces of pressure are always exerted in the same direction. Now, this single direction of geopolitics is that which leads to the immediate commutation of things and

wartime. Furthermore, during this same period, and despite the Vietnamese exception that proves the rule, war has shrunk from several years to several days, even to several hours.

In the 1960s a mutation occurs: the passage from wartime to the war of peacetime, to that final peace that others still call "peaceful coexistence." The blindness of the speed of means of communicating destruction is not a liberation from geopolitical servitude, but the extermination of space as the field of freedom of political action. We only need refer to the necessary controls and constraints of the railway, airway or highway infrastructure to see the fatal impulse the more speed increases, the faster freedom decreases.

The apparatus' self-propulsion finally entails the self-sufficiency of automation. What happens in the example of the racecar driver, who is no more than a worried lookout for the catastrophic probabilities of his movement, is reproduced on the political level as soon as conditions require an action in real time.

Let us take, for example, a crisis situation: "From the very beginning of the Six Days' War in 1967. President Johnson took control of the White House, one hand guiding the Sixth Fleet, the other on the hot line. The necessity of the link between the two became clearly apparent as soon as an Israeli attack against nature of the people's historical guide gives way to the more prosic and rather banal one of a "test pilot" trying to maneuver his machine in a very narrow margin. Ten years have passed since this "crisis state," and the arms race has caused the margin of political security to narrow still further, bringing us closer to the critical threshold where the possibilities for properly human political action will disappear in a "State of Emergency;" where telephone communication between statesmen will stop, probably in favor of an interconnection of computer systems, modern calculators of strategy and, consequently, of politics. (Let us recall that the computers' first task was to solve simultaneously a series of complex equations aimed at causing the trajectory of the anti-aircraft projectile and that of the airplane to meet.)

Here we have the fearsome telescoping of elements born of the "amphibious generation"; the extreme proximity of parties in which the immediacy of information immediately creates the crisis; the frailty of reasoning power, which is but the effect of a miniaturization of action—the latter resulting from the miniaturization of space as a field of action.

An imperceptible movement on a computer keyboard, or one made by a "skyjacker" brandishing a cookie box covered with a blinding light of fire.

else, and anywhere else is only several minutes away from its end—so much so that the tendency, which still existed several years ago, to advance one's destructive means closer to the enemy territory (as in the Cuban missile crisis) is reversing. The present tendency is toward geographic disengagement, a movement of retreat that is due only to the progress of the vectors and to the extension of their reach (cf. the American submarine Trident, whose new missiles can travel 8 to 10,000 kilometers, as opposed to the Poseidon's 4 to 5,000).

Thus, the different strategic nuclear forces (American and Soviet) will no longer need to patrol the area in the target contiguous; they can henceforth retreat within their territorial limits. This is confirmation that they are abandoning a form of geostrategic conflict. After the reciprocal renunciation of geodesic war, we will possibly see the abandonment of advanced bases, extending to America's extraordinary abandonment of its sovereignty over the Panama Canal... A sign of the times, of the time of the war of time.

Nonetheless, we must note that this strategic retreat no longer has anything in common with the retreat that allowed conventional armies to "gain time by losing ground." In the

strategic forces. In fact, if the adversary/partners didn't pull back their means of communicating destruction while lengthening their reach, the higher speed of these means would already have reduced the time of decision about their use to nothing. Just as in 1972, in Moscow, the partners in this game abandoned plans for an anti-missile missile defense, so five years later they washed the advantage of swifness for the very temporary benefit of a greater extension of their intercontinental missiles. Both seem to fear—all the while seeking—the multiplying effect of speed, of that speed activity so dear to all armies since the Revolution.

In the face of this curious contemporary regression of strategic arms limitation agreements, it is wise to return to the very principle of deterrence. The essential aim of throwing ancient weapons or shooting off new ones has never been to kill the enemy or destroy his means, but to deter him, in other words, to force him to interrupt his movement. Regardless of whether this physical movement is one that allows the assailed to contain the assault or one of invasion, "the aptitude for war is the aptitude for movement," which a Chinese strategist expressed in these words: "An army is always strong enough when it can come and go, spread out and regroup, as it wishes."

order to grasp the present logistical reality. As Sun Tzu said, "Weapons are tools of ill omen." They are first feared and fearsome as threats, long before being used. Their "ominous" character can be split into three components:

The threat of their performance at the moment of their invention, of their production;

The effect of their use against the enemy;

The effect of their use, which is fatal for persons and destructive for their goods.

If these last two components are unfortunately known, and have long been experimented with, the first, on the other hand, have long been experimented with, the first, on the other hand, have long been experimented with, the first, on the other hand, have long been experimented with, the first, on the other hand, have long been experimented with, the first, on the other hand, have long been experimented with, the first, on the other hand, have long been experimented with, the first, on the other hand, have long been experimented with, the first, on the other hand, have long been experimented with, the first, on the other hand, have long been experimented with, the first, on the other hand, have long been experimented with, the first, on the other hand, have long been experimented with, the first, on the other hand,

deterrence, the protagonist henceforth practice the "politics of the worst," or more precisely, the "apolitics of the worst," which necessarily leads to the war machine one day becoming the very decision for war—thus accomplishing the perfection of its self-sufficiency, the automation of deterrence.

The suggestive juxtaposition of the terms deterrence and automation allows us to understand better the structural axis of contemporary military-political events, as H. Wheeler specifies: "Technologically possible, centralization has become politically necessary." This shortcut recalls that of Saint-Just's famous dictum: "When a people can be oppressed, it will be"—the difference being that this techno-logistical oppression no longer concerns only the "people," but the "deciders" as well. If only yesterday the freedom of maneuver (that aptitude for movement which has been equated with the aptitude for war) occasionally required delegations of power up to the secondary echelons, the reduction of the margin of maneuver due to the progress of the means of communicating destruction causes an extreme concentration of responsibilities for the solitary decision-maker that the Chief of State has become. This contraction is, however, far from being complete; it continues according to the arms

If in Frederick the Great's time to win was to advance, for the supporters of deterrence it is to retreat, to leave places, peoples and the individual where they are—to the point where dromonuclear progress closely resembles the jet engine's reaction propulsion, caused by the ejection of a certain quantity of movement (the product of a mass times a velocity) in the direction opposite to the one we wish to take.

In this war of recession between East and West—contemporary not with the illusory limitation of strategic arms, but with the limitation of strategy itself—the power of thermonuclear explosion serves as an artificial horizon for a race that is increasing the power of the vehicular implosion. The impossibility of interrupting the progress of the power of penetration, other than by an act of faith in the enemy, leads us to deny strategy as prior knowledge. The automatic nature not only of arms and means, but also of the command, is the same as denying our ability to reason: Nichir rasonmirent! Frederick the Second's order is perfected by a deterrence that leads us to reduce our freedom not only of action and decision, but also of conception. The logic of arms systems is eluding the military framework more and more, and moving toward the engineer responsible for

limited to attack planes; it is also becoming the logic of the State apparatus. This backwardness is the logistical consequence of producing means to communicate destruction. The danger of the nuclear weapon, and of the arms system it implies, is thus not so much that it will explode, but that it exist and is imploding in our minds.

Let us summarize this phenomenon:

— Two bombs interrupt the war in the Pacific, and several dozen nuclear submarines are enough to ensure peaceful coexistence...
This is its numerical aspect.
— With the appearance of the multiple thermonuclear warhead and the rapid development of tactical nuclear arms, we see the miniaturization of explosive charges...
This is its volumetric aspect.
— After having cleared the planet surface of a cumbersome defensive apparatus by reducing undersea and underground strategic arms, they renounce world expanse by reducing the trouble spots and advanced bases...
This is its geographical aspect.

After the time of the State's political relativity as nonconducting medium, we are faced with the no time of the politics of relativity. The full discharge feared by Clausewitz has come about with the State of Emergency. The violence of speed has become both the location and the law, the world's destiny and its destination.

— September 1977

Notes

Part L. The Democratic Revolution

From Street Fight to Sane Right
1. "The Parisian press popularized the term following an attack on a city vehicle by a band of hoodlums whose mastermind was the famous “Golden Helmet.”
2. Kampfum Berlin, published two years before the national socialists took power in 1931, and dedicated by Joseph Goebbels to the Party’s old guard in Berlin.
3. Dromonaniacs. Name given to deserters under the ancien régime, and in psychiatry to compulsive walkers.
4. Mairneti, with commentary by Giovanni Lisa. "Potes d'Ajupundus" series, Paris.
5. "Circulation Habitable," Architecture Principe, no. 3. April 1966.
6. Cf. Lewis Munford, The City in History (New York, 1961), et al.
7. This the magazine of the city's history.
Vabban by Colonel Lazard, 1934. In Weygand's preface we read: "The author picks up in Vabban's writings the expression 'fortified country,' which he judiciously likens to fortified regions." It art the man of genius always something of a precursor? When Colonel Lazard studies more specifically the engineer in the great man of war, he tries to clear him of the accusation of formalism. He states and proves that the true system of Vabban consulted in applying the fortification to the terrain. We have found no better system in these last years when it came to protecting our own soil.
The Parisian House, those who would have been called 'water merchants' who deal on the use of rivers." (Volume XVIII of the Old French Law).
From Highway Right to State Right
While at the same time, the arms industries are already employing production groups of 5,000 workers.
La Fenne et le bain heuon by André-François Poncez and Emile Mireaux, 1922.
The confession is superceded. In the Middle Ages, the question is put to a body under torture, one that 'knows the truth' and must let it escape in spite of himself. In the nineteenth century, torture is abolished not out of humanitarianism, but because they realized that any ax (every human movement) leaves external traces, an involuntary stamp. From then on, they scientifically make proofs, they make them, in a sense, 'confess' in place of the suspect by arranging these material traces in a coherent discourse path. Because their justice was handed down from earl to earl in the matriarchal form, a dialogue, the Anglo-Saxon moiety owed the foundational term of civil proof to their mutual adherence to the other out by simply changing the order of the elements. Psychanalysis in some cases took up where this life of the ordering of materials should disappear, since with computers they could make the accusating discourse perfectly coherent, or at least approaching perfect coherence, having to do both with the subject and that of the object. At this point, they could do totally without the confession of the accused, who would be less informed about his own crime than the computer, and who, no longer being the one who knows "the truth," would have nothing left to confess.

Part II. The Demonstrative Progress

From Space Right to State Right
F Thiode and E Schmahe, Die Filigrande Nation, Berlin, 1933.
"Since the end of the seventeenth century, the fate in being, a name thought up by Admiral Herbert, had marked the passage from being to becoming in the exercise of constraint on the adversary. It meant the end of the naval apparatus and of war waged at short distances; the number and firepower of the vessels in the front lines became secondary." Paul Vitilio, Linceur du territoire, Paris, 1976.
Administrative correspondence under Louis XIV.
"Materialism is the true son of Great Britain." Marx, Contribution to the History of French Materialism.
C.I. Marmenti, Fumin Mantifo, Tactile Navigation, and Giovanni Lista commentary, Marmenti.
Peace of war peace of exhaustion (Braud) "No one today can still wish to see the international engine of 1939 involved, for in face it that time, it was already no more than the origin of a savvy." Parents of the Society of Nations on the way
1918, left his wife the task of publishing his work "immediately following the total demobilization of the French army and without taking into account the demands of interested parties..." a double lesson from the very first months of war, the necessity for parliamentary control. Many passages commented on here have been taken from this capital work.

Part III. The Democratic Society

Unable Bodies
1. Pierre Nord, Double crime sur la Ligue Maginot.
August 1977: the American Congress allows the World Bank to extend credit to Vietnam, but also to Cambodia and Angola.
Sparta armed itself in view of accomplishing its tour de force. "We could scarcely help but see in this adaptation something other than an automatic evolution. The methodical and tenacious fashion in which everything was oriented toward a single goal objsus to recognize the intervention in concert, it is necessary to posit the existence of one or two men, working in concert, who transformed primitive institutions to make them the agger and the Cosmos." M.P. Nilson. Die grundigen des spartanischen Lebens; Kiiu, volume XII.
"Sparta paid the penalty for having taken his own headstrong course at the pitting of bravery in the night enemy. B.C. Overcoming terror in the ninth century to stand till with manpower preserved like a soldier as a monarch when the other Hellens were just moving forward once again on one of the most signal moves in the whole course of Hellenic history." Arnold J. Tewborne, War and Civilization, Oxford University Press, 1953.
George Duby, The Early Group of the European Economy, Warriors and Peasants; Ethica, 1974.
The Boarding of Metropolitan Vehicles
Taus: Untranslatable pun between enamusement, "the boarding of a ship for inspection," and raisonnement, "reasoning." Virilio will play on this throughout the chapter.
"Man is the passenger of woman, not only birth but also in their sexual relations. The man has found to reproduce himself, in other words to come into the world. In this sense, woman in the species first means of transport, in very first vehicle. The second could be the mounting and coupling of disembarked bodies fitted out for migration, the voyage in common." Paul Virilio, Metropylcône du pauler, May 1977.
Taus: A play on words: bonne conduite means both "good conduct" and "safe driving."
See notably the archives of Morimond (Haute-Marne region) and Clairvaux; the libraries of Besançon and Carpentras: Louvre de Calatran by Francis Gutron, 1955; etc.
Cf. Paul Virilio, Negative Horizon, London: Continuum, 2003.
Here we see perhaps one of the profound causes of Spartan opposition to any form of mobility as the preservation of the Lyceum system.
Cf. Paul Virtillo, Popular Defense and Ecological Struggle, New York: Semio-text(s) Foreign Agents Series, 1986.
The Consumption of Security
The minister was to announce just as joyfully on November 20, 1976, "The Southeastern business is over" According to the press, this "abortive eruption" had already cost—this was not a final figure—the sum of 200,000,000 francs by mid-October.

Part IV. The State of Emergency

Alfred Wegener, The Origin of Continents and Oceans, a theory of continental drift (fifth edition).
In terms of control, the meaning of this time is a function of the temporal field in which perception, decision and action are involved.
The missile-carrying nuclear submarine has in itself the destructive power of all the explosives used in the Second World War.

Other Semiotext(e) Titles by Paul Virilio
Speed & Politics
Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles
Aesthetics of Disappearance