In 1 92 1 , 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 1 920s, the measure of superspeed! In fact, the human body huddling in the "steel alcove" 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 dromomaniac'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 impotence as a dominant dromocratic agent, the motor and producer of speed on the continent. Nonetheless, the world war having sanctioned the high command's intellectual bankruptcy and the triumph of industrial warfare, everyone felt an insatiable need for manpower. The processes of military proletarianization proved more than ever to be indissociable from those of industrial proletarianization for the generals who, despite themselves, had become "territorial administrators. "
Ferry states: "Now everyone knows that the structure of a batlefield exists . . . The greatest possible technical distribution of terrain is necessary, 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 oficial emissary in 1 9 1 6. Governments bargain over and hastily exchange their working-class cattle, bragging abo ut "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 � 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 1 9 1 4, obviously requires a new social project, an original type of proletarianization.
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I Speed and Pol itics