From this point on, we can no longer speak of a "class society" without questioning the poliorcetic schema of medieval society. This return to the old dike, this selective Reason, replaces civil rights with political rights, as in the Aristotelian reflection: "Aristocrats seek the plurality of fortified positions, oligarchic regimes prefer acropoles, and democrats like flat spaces. " Since politics is a matter of terrain, we then see a veritable carving of human time and space that puts an end to the nation of civil peace.
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 permanent social rejection as the primary necessity for the workings of the war machine. For this enclosed-society, legal repression can only be a constraint to departure, to exodus, in other words, to deterritorialization as a loss of identity.
Surplus populations disappear in the obligatory movement of the voyage. The increasingly numerous bodies rejected by the poliorcetic order become physical forces moving nowhere, unseen zones, the immeasurable interstices of the strategic schema, the tolerated movement of perilous pilgrimages, of children's crusades, of the poor ("vagabonds without work, every able-bodied mendicant").
The Boarding of Metabolic Vehicles
I 99