In the 1 960s, 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 J\rnerican 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 1 977 from the latest advances in mines and video systems-a veritable face-lift! After Belfast, 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 only didn't the violence distinguish between uniforms, but the combatants themselves veiled their faces, like members of a holdup. They didn't want to be recognized even by their neighbors or social partners. They return to the state of the native combatant, to "open warfare"; a reappropriation of a certain technological underdevelopment of the masses in the realm of weapons; a new progress of the disinformation of citizens, parallel to de-urbanization.
When the American State refuses to help New York in a time of crisis, when hospitals and schools have to shut down, when social aid is cut b ack and the city is no longer cleaned, it's the dissolution of the city in its own outskirts, the future popular selfgovernment 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 revoll.ition: when the King of Morocco decides in the fall of 1 975 to take back the Spanish Sahara, he sends not his armies, but "peace marchers," 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 al, it was now an ecological matter to be settled more between civilians than between military men.
The Consumption of Security
I 1 37