The problem of temporary lodging for these warlike "gyrovagues" was posed like that of passing residence at the hospice or the lazaretto. Military monasticism will answer this problem, just as regular monasticism had answered the fixity of the mystical Gyrovagues, by instituting enclosures. The State will then intervene, substituting revenue systems for public charity and local duties such as the "franc 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 . .j\ 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 riverbed, 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 screaming into the Loire . . .
In the same way, in the seventeenth century, for example, the La Charite de Tours hospice must, like many others, partially renounce its silk industry before the threats of city manufacturers and limit its inmates to spooling and throwing silk threads.
At the same time, the chores imposed on the peasants are significantly broadened by the State, from carrying beggars to the hospice or the j ail, to transporting men of war and criminals, whose fate is now similar. In the same way, this chore, which comes 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.
The Boarding of Metabolic Vehicles
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