--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Speed and Politics" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "1584350407" library_document_id: "95af29fb-5c71-443d-9382-1c666228579d" source_sha256: "53c88b24b771d3579225393af405916e3833093a1ffe95146ac7b42401df0467" pdf_physical_page_count: 175 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 100 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/95af29fb-5c71-443d-9382-1c666228579d?start=100&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/95af29fb-5c71-443d-9382-1c666228579d.md?start=100&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/95af29fb-5c71-443d-9382-1c666228579d.md?start=90&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/95af29fb-5c71-443d-9382-1c666228579d.md?start=110&limit=10" --- # Speed and Politics > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=100 | PRINTED_PAGE=1 00 They are forbidden to remain for more than twenty-four hours within the communal fortress, and are driven out of other cities; the citizens themselves are forbidden to shelter them under pain of stif fines. The Hundred Years' War will put an end to these great migrations. Already artillery was revolutionizing the battlefield. But from the twelfth century onward, the influence of monetary media had grown considerably, announcing the end of the medieval status quo, that highly praised equilibrium of political and military organizations. The traditional ost-system is accompanied by remunerations. Knights soon receive wages. For a time, the military personnel is chosen primarily from among the gentry-the youngest son, for example, serving as a private servant and receiving a sizable salaryuntil the necessities of recruitment finally render the origins of the mercenaries rather dubious. Highwaymen and swashbucklers, descendants of Plautus' anti-heroes, "enemies common to al humanity," as Isocrates caled them-these itinerant market objects are like the rest of the peasantry. Since antiquity, their condition has been scarcely better than that of the slave, who, at least, might be freed in wartime and drafted into the armed forces, especially the Navy, which required a large number of coordinated mechanical maneuvers, while land warfare was still considered a thing of "free men." The military proletariat finds itself mixed in with the permanent exodus of the mobile masses; it issues from them as did the migrant worker of the nineteenth century or the ilegal alien of the twentieth. The highwayman circulates; as his name suggests, he roams the highway. This is his class space as he travels in search of uncertain, seasonal employment. Callot will later depict him as a "capitano de baroni," a ragged and mutilated braggart, a fearsome, pitiful vagabond still sporting plume and banner in the interminable procession of the miseries of war. 1 00 I Speed and Politics ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=101 | PRINTED_PAGE=I 1 0 1 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 I 1 0 1 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=102 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Louis XIV one day declares to Colbert, "If you want to know what economy means, go to Flanders; you will see how little it costs to fortify conquered spaces." The King is alluding to the considerable earthworks and masonry undertaken by Louvois. Following the Roman example, he confided the execution of these works directly to the soldiers, all the while paying pitiful wages and maintaining military discipline. Alongside the migrant's trajectory, there is the path of military proletarianization, the two having often been confused ever since Antiquity. Garlan evokes the roads and markets in which this specialized manpower gathered with its tribes and its races-in Cape Matapan south of the Peloponnesus, for example. Later, we will see the creation of an original logistical circuit necessitated by the increased recruitment of anational work forces by the committees or the condotieri-the famous Spanish road, compared by Parker to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Along these trajectories they build temporary barracks. The beds are furnished by the villagers; they install health services similar to those of the hospice, required by the precarious living conditions of these wretches who escape jail or prison only to become soldiers again. Up until the nineteenth century, the barracks will be a kind of clinic in which venereal diseases and epidemics such as typhus will cause more deaths among the soldiers than battles and war wounds. With conflicts of mass and of movement, death by exhaustion among the foot soldiers will take, says Chambray, frightening proportions. At the same time, they will notice a necessary evolution of the hospices that will recreate the unity of the mobile proletariat, as 1 02 I Speed and Politics ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=103 | PRINTED_PAGE=I 1 03 Doctor Wasserthur notes in his report of June I 0, 1 884, on the condition of the Selestat hospital, in which diseased soldiers and warwounded sleep alongside typhus cases, cancer patients and the destitute. The social demands of the military proletariat will long remain the simple, vital requirements of subsistence: salaries, job security, on-the-job assistance to invalids and the wounded. Riots and mutinies take the form of frequent strikes, which are narrow in scope and generally concern delayed payment of wages-delays of up to ten years. The mutineers often form autonomous combat groups, electing a chief (Spanish Electo, German ambosat, etc.) who is assisted by a democratic council. And im�ediately these proletarian troops return to their initial demands. They try to take over and hold a fortification, to the point where their employers are finally obliged to concede, to pay what they owe so that the soldiers will get back on the highway. These limited revolts will nonetheless play an important role in the political evolution. For the satisfaction of the soldiers' demands helps, within the state apparatus, to hasten the development of the laboring and productive populations' material obligation toward those "luxury peoples" who supplant the old provincial masters. Tax, that economic vassalage, is sometimes levied directly by the soldiers, "an expedient means, disapproved of by Colbert who advises the collectors (as they then called those terrible animals) to use violence only as a last resort. " Thus, the public treasury is able to maintain a standing army more decently, to counter frequent desertions by guaranteeing regular salaries. In this mitigated period, as Clausewitz shows, the military objective is accomplished with dificulty using money from the treasury. The vagabond troops are taken wherever they can be found, from one's own home or from the neighbor's, with no care for their past or their origins. Many able men at that time have no choice but to live as raiders, even as brigands, holding the countryside: "couriers riding onward, owing nothing while they are on the fields." The Bearding of Metabolic Vehicles I 1 03 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=104 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED Since Babeuf and Engels, there has been much talk of the bodily mechanics of the proletarian soldier, of the obligation to serve the war machine, to carry out a repeated and invariable number of coordinated maneuvers (in the eighteenth century, for example, each shot fired from a cannon required about ten movements) . Later they began wondering about the living conditions of the laboring proletariat-without, as did Engels, abandoning the disdain and repulsion that have surrounded the mobile mass of willless bodies since time immemorial: the worker granted conditional freedom by the Chapelier Law during the French Revolution; the cloistered body of the woman, put in a harem or brothel (" maison close") , her sex sold or rented, even put under lock and key, as a source of profit for her temporary owner; bodies of the "forlorn hope"-the lost band-as the ideal object of training and discipline. The "janissary" (the new soldier) is torn very young from the families of Christian slaves before undergoing military proletarianization. In the fifteenth century, the battles of Grandson and Morar show the importance the Swiss army attached to the presence of the forlorn hope, sent before the troops to fool the enemy; they are only hoodlums picked up in the city outskirts, miserable couriers doomed to certain death. Vauban, in the seventeenth century, states upon his return from an inspection tour that the Kingdom is put in danger "by those fortifications guarded by garrisons and squadrons of children, poor little wretches who are violently abducted from their homes or stolen in a thousand diferent ways." Abduction, kidnapping-the dromocrat's classic methods. It was therefore understandable that the military revolution of 1 789 should legally put the proletariat of children to work. 1 04 I Speed and Politics ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=105 | PRINTED_PAGE=I 1 05 In 1 846 the Revue des Deux Mondes warns that in one year in France there were 32,000 cases of abandonment, or one child out of thirty deprived of his civil status, in other words of his identity. And Georges Sand, who is moved by this, describes in The Country "Wtif the procedure by which the child is confided to a traveler who takes him in a carriage and leaves him in the middle of a field. The loss of identity remains linked to exclusion from a geographic group, to setting a trajectory in motion, to putting on the road a child "who has not yet reached the age of reason." There remains the diference between the· "liberal" and the "mechanical," pure motivity, which comes from the machine and can thus be performed equally well by an ignoramus or an animal (Equicola 9 5 ) : "manual labor being considered in the (anthropocentric) society of the Renaissance as ignoble as it had been in the Middle Ages," as Anthony Blunt notes in his Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450-1600. In fact, the worker's body cannot be compared to a human model, which is ideally composed. Vitruvian man is essentially reasonable and harmonious, since he is contained in the circles and grids of Euclidean geometry-a symbol of social superiority since it is the geometry of the invader's, the dominator's, trajectory. It is curious to see current debates on the treatment, abandonment, slaughter and vivisection of animals, but also on the blockbuster movies in which a large number of them are sacrificed. In this context, let us quote the response of a stuntman, a "double, " Mr. Dominique Zardi, who had been taken to task in a column entitled "The Martyrdom of the Animals," published in the newspaper France Soir : "Minor actors are in the same boat [as the animals] . They're also lesser members, shaken, bullied, cut of the screen . . . It's true I'm a tough little guy . . . But no animal would have done what I've done, and I've never hurt one animal, woman or child, since as everybody knows that's about the same thing." The Boarding of Metabolic Vehicles I 1 05 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=106 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED The double's body, deprived of reason, is likened to that of other domestics, in the same boat. His work performances are here again absolutely compared to those of the animal by that dictator of movem�nt, the film director. In ancient societies we know the bargains and ceremonies that surrounded the marriage of the "drudge-woman,'' consisting in exchanges of animals between the parties. In the armies and police forces the animal proletariat remains-the recent use of sea mammals being a modern example, a hold-over from the canine regiments trained for infantry combat. The vehicle-bodies of horses are likened in the Middle Ages to projectiles; the bodies of elephants to assault tanks, bulldozers, tractors; those of oxen, camels or mules are like j eeps. As for the pigeons, those predators, they are the media whose ownership is reserved for a social elite, itself predatory. The rapid information furnished by carrier pigeons allows Jacques Coeur to get richer on the stock m'arkets, in particular the merchant marine. And it is striking to see the salt tax scale he kept in his B ourges ho tel, a veritable trough designed to measure the tax on the cattle of "worker-producers" based on the quantity of salt they require as subsisting animal bodies-literally, the price of their sweat, since physical movement necessitates a salt consumption five times greater than that of the body in rest. Gandhi was to lead a farreaching action in India against the English with respect to the salt tax, as an economy of violence and slow death inflicted on the people colonized by the Western invader. But still today, the most widespread conviction with respect to the bodies of those wanderers deprived of their identity, those living dead, is that they must be occupied, inhabited, possessed by wills other than their own, which is the very meaning of Frederick the Second's "Yours is not to reason why!" In the context of this disqualification of will in certain sexual, social or racial categories, it is significant to recall the conditions imposed on the descendants of the American black slaves, their battle for civil rights, particularly the right to vote which is but the "free man's" right to want, and which is not accorded to bodies without souls. In France the law of August 27, 1 79 1 aggravates the tendency still further by requiring the elector to be a landowner: always the wandering body's inability to decide-inability of women, too, who will find it so hard to obtain the right to vote, to become part of this curious republican universalism! 1 06 I Speed and Politics ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=107 | PRINTED_PAGE=I 1 07 We see here the social and political importance of "liberal reason" (of the open sea and open warfare) with respect not only to unreason but to the absence of reason pure and simple in the bodies of the ignorant, a relation faithfully reproduced as much in the Marxist organization chart as in the capitalist one, but at a lesser level . . . at least for the time being. With the coming of democratic power, we see a perversion of primitive transmigration: the soul, by becoming individual, has become Reason, in other words the seat of a prescriptive rule of our actions, our movements, even the totality of our destinies . This reasoning nonetheless encounters resistance from the general confusion between common sense and the geometric hypothesis of superior minds (those of the military men Turenne and Vauban, or of bourgeois such as Colbert) , as Moreau de Jonnes states in his Social and Economic Status of France from 1589 to 1 715. Statistics care little about our long-term habits; and Vauban's derivation of 25,000 cases from one won't always be agreed with. But in the absence of cadastral investigation they still had to rely on inductive methods, arrived at by a rather crude approximation of notions of distribution. Later, Arthur Young, Chaptal and Lavoisier b uilt their statistical tables on Vauban's inductive model, but with the diference that two out of three led to forecast errors. Further on, Moreau notes that Vauban's figures become easily understandable when transformed into metric measurements . . . The Boarding of Metabolic Vehicles I 1 07 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=108 | PRINTED_PAGE=NOT_DETECTED The soul neither preexists nor survives the disappearance of its body-vehicle or machine; but as potential Reason, and especially scientific Reason, it can act on foreign bodies which are distant in time and space. Animal, territorial, vegetable bodies, bodies without will, bodies not yet born become technical bodies or technological obj ects. Here is true social domination, the bestiary of engines. The purebred horse no longer acts, he is acted on by his rider thanks to the drive shaft of the bridle and the gas pedals of the spurs. Or else he takes the bit in his teeth, returns to his uncontrollable, wild state . . . he expresses himself! Reason (as in the Bible) is, for the body, a form of death. Significantly, at the beginning of the Classical Age, the spectacle of the insane or possessed was fashionable, as is that of drug addicts today. We spy on the kinetic disorder of their inexplicable attitudes and their discourses. Even when he cries out, speaks or complains, the possessed one, like the animal, is supposed not to sufer, and thus cannot be an object of pity. Whence the j udicial, then "medical,'' arsenal of treatments inflicted daily on these soulless bodies by their owners, executioners, j udges or doctors: burns, inj ections, ripping out of fingernails and hair, and finally electro-shock. The body is an empty house through which pass disquieting tenants, if one is not careful-a house best made as uncomfortable as possible. Still today, psychoanalysis practically realizes these beliefs by claiming to bring the unconscious back to the expression of a reasonable consciousness. But more than houses, these bodies are metabolic vehicles. 1 08 I Speed and Politics ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=109 | PRINTED_PAGE=/ 1 09 And the pseudo-demons that we try to extract from them are primarily intelligences-themselves in transit-that abusively occupy the "driver's seat, " like a horseman (again) who , controlling the back of his horse, claims to have its "motor at his disposal." Foreign "intelligences" breathe into the vacant body an inhabitual dynamism, commanding it to perform corresponding gestures. Ancient metempsychosis imagined a plethora of intelligences in search of undiferentiated matter. The movement of transmigration supposedly takes place naturally, notably at birth and death, into any body at all, thus creating a kind of physical equality that surpasses social organizations. Another remark: when the landworker is transformed into a conqueror, the population's poetic potential disappears in favor of a military potential, the poetic transmigration of souls disappears in favor of conquest, in other words of the voyage of bodies, and thus of their deterritorialization, of their inequality. With reasonable possession, the boarding of the metabolic vehicle is literally an act of piracy. Doctor Claude Olivenstein speaks of psychoanalysis as "psychism's strongest and most important lever of penetration": always the unconscious reference to violence and to the right of the "power to invade, to its mechanical techniques. After all is said and done, the Russian psychiatrists, accused of -violence by their colleagues during a 1 977 colloquium, might well be the most faithful to the ethics of their arts. Otherwise we get repression and discipline a la Skinner, or Sakol's cures for drug addiction. As Olivenstein notes, "They no longer take drugs, but they wander like shadows"-living dead ever ready to welcome unusual transients. The social staging of human love was perhaps one of the last poetic manifestations of the fluidiform soul, occasionally incarnated. The brutal unveiling of the sexual act-sex education or pornography -as technical revelation is another way of boarding "ignorant" bodies, the logical next step from the gymnasium: the famous physical culture, "Swedish style," is succeeded by the modern mixture of highway and sex, bodies thrown together by chance meetings; sexual collisions soon forgotten; autos, motorcycles stolen; raped and abandoned. 2 The Boarding of Metabolic Vehicles / 1 09 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/95af29fb-5c71-443d-9382-1c666228579d.md?start=110&limit=10)