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 Vitruvius 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 of their breaching) , made to his king the unusual recommendation that in order to secure a less permeable border with France's neighbors he should voluntarily cede contested land deemed "indefensible. " The plan realized Richelieu's earlier image to France as "le pre carre," or the "squared field," and in fact this same phrase was later used to describe Vauban's parallel lines of fortifications up and down the now consolidated national enclosure. In 1 782, Charles de Fourcroy's tableau poliometrique appeared. This "first known flowchart" is a diagram of the relative sizes of European metropoles, and in it, as geographer Gilles Palsky notes, "We see the passage to abstract, to fictitious features. By these proportional triangles, [de Fourcroy] constructs an image that does not return or relate to [the] original existence . " 5 De Fourcroy'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 diference in the population. This inscription produces another virtual space with which to order the natural territory of the polis as a proj ected image of an enclosed, administrative totality.
Introduction: Logistics of Habitable Circulation
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