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# Speed and Politics
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In fact, history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems. At the end of the fifteenth century, it is still for Commynes a stable memory, a model to be reproduced. Annals are seasonal, like the war that returns every year in springtime. Linear time is eliminated, as it was from the ancient fortress in which "the enemy Time" was beaten by the static resistance of the construction materialsby duration.
Historical creation also begins to function like the ancient war machines that carried out their destructive movements on the spot even after the invention of the ballista and the catapult (around 405 , at the siege of Motza) . If Hegel "gets bored seeing Livy repeat for the hun'dredth time descriptions of battles against the Volscians, occasionally limiting his narrative to : 'In this year, war was successfully waged against the Volscians, "' complaining of the "abstract representations , " it is because the historical content is literally that of a communique (the first ephemeris of projected societies, comparable to what, in the nineteenth century, the monotonous detail of secret police reports represents for a sociology that becomes more widespread) . Here we are dealing with works that are practical in ways that Hegel could not imagine.
And if Livy endlessly resumes the litany of his commentary, it is because repetition is then the means of reaching vaster fields, a work-in-progress.6 The narrative material can only function by being repeated one hundred times. Through repetition, it eliminates chance and makes the Reason in these stories a war machine that deploys its forces by multiplying them. In the same way, it is understandable that j ust when artillery and military highway surveillance became part of the State system, especially under Sully, historical language passed literally from the comparative to the positive; in other words, with no comparison of intensity!
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Accession to history becomes accession to movement, distant result of the accession to power of those "border prowlers, idlers of Apocalypse, living free of material cares at the edge of their domesticated abyss" Qulien Gracq), populations that appear and disappear on the borders of the Roman Empire, "thumbing their noses at war," on whom, as Livy adds, "it clearly cannot be imposed "
In the beginning of our era, the wave of dromocratic elites comes from Germany, from the banks of the Danube or elsewhere, and finally breaks over Western Europe. Suddenly, it is no longer might that makes right, but invasion, the power-to-invade. The hierarchy of the raid, born on the road during the "unbridled exodus of the mob of hunter-raiders, is superseded by the protocol of the stopover and of apportionment." When finally this dromocratic power abusively settles on the European territory, it still doesn't change the nature of its constitutional schema and, in guise of being dispersed, the organi�tion of feudal society will remain that of troops on the march.
"The relations between the various lords were exactly defined, and despite haggling and petty bickering, when an important war or a crusade regrouped this ever-armed milieu, every knight knew exactly where his place was." The hierarchic distribution is already a marching order, the layout of territory a theater of operations. The architecture of command posts plays the same part as that of the pelagic acropolis or of the Algerian blockhouse. The feudal role is semi-colonial, since it perfectly distinguishes the mastery over the earth by the military occupier from its landed ownership by the native.
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For the dromocratic State, mastery over the earth is already the mastery over its dimensions.
The ancient cadastral law prolonged nothing else, as Colonel Barrader writes in Fossatum Africae: "Centuriation is the very foundation of mass education, of their civilization . . . the indelible trace of a possession-taking that divides to conquer. " This indelible dichotomy is the one that exists between the nature of the movingpower of invasion and that of the landowner's (or sedentary worker-producer's) relative inability to move, to displace himself, attached as he is to his little parcel of land; the dichotomy between the geography of the inhabitant and that of the passer-by. The trace of the Roman path is usually no more than a continuous line, held over from the general schema of centuriation. Thus everything is simple: the military State is on the road, the payment of the cadastral tax is evaluated by the meter coverable, and thus defendable, we could say, by the army, the troop of horsemen, "that luxury-people."
The semi-colonial function has always been a protection racket in which the productive mass' safety is guaranteed by the tribute, remuneration for efective technological surveillance of the territory. In the same way, the Carolingian administration will be one that "straddles" for the benefit of a dromocratic State, which is careful not to demolish its internal constitution by founding hereditary land laws, or even by enlarging the royal domains (except for those that lie along the great vectors-the Meuse, for example-where its morphology "naturally" resides) in an attempt to lay its hands on all media, religious ideologies, money, knowledge, external commerce, modes of transportation and information, etc.
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The Carolingian Capitularies advise the "masters of the earth" living in the ancient Roman villas (gradually transformed into command posts) to limit their land-clearing and to set up an alliance between the small and middle-sized native landowners by granting them if need be a certain on-the-spot military defense. Domination of the territorial ensemble by the occupant of the donjon (from the Latin dominus, "lord") is nonetheless tempered by the modest material means of what is still no more than a dispersed and foreign military minority, limited in their control of space and society, in the contributions they can exact f�om the native social corpus . It was also for security reasons that the Frank nobility had preferred the transparency of a populated countryside (soon overpopulated by essentially independent workers, occupied first with clearing the vast expanse of the fand, then with maintaining the surrounding environment) to the impenetrable complexity of the original city.
But beyond this, the transparency of the clearing means maintenance of the invader's specific right over a territory in which he claims to settle, of his power to penetrate. The erection of the hillock, then of the donj on, is another answer to the problem of mastery over dimension, the latter becoming perspective, geometry of the gaze from an omnipresent fixed point-and no longer, as it was before, from the synoptic route of the horseman.
At this point, it is significant to see the cultivation of the earth restricted to an intensive exploitation of the cleared parcels, instead of spreading to the nearby wilderness through a new forward leap of the pioneering adventure.7 The phenomenon of retention has been explained by an insufficiency of agricultural technology. But I think that we must look beyond the obvious material necessitieshunting, picking, gathering of building lumber in a nearby forest, etc.-to imperious strategic necessities created by the technological insuficiencies of the military protector, rather than by those of the gardener or the settler to whom the lord owed assistance and comfort in time of alarm.
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Recent accounts have shown the relation between the limits of the clearing and that of human vision from an elevated site. The pioneer is more clearly called a pathfinder by the Anglo-Saxons. Land-clearing, the cultivation of the earth for subsistence, the receding of forest darkness, are in reality the creation of a military glacis as field of vision, of one of those frontier deserts spoken of by Julius Caesar, which, he says, represent the glory of the Empire because they are like a permanent invasion of the land by the dromocrat' s look and, beyond this, because the speed of this vision-ideally without obstacles-causes distances to approach. A well-known photographer writes in his memoirs that his first darkroom was his childhood bedroom, that his first lens was a luminous slit in the closed shades . In this sense, the original donjon plays the part of Marey's chrono-photography; the military lookout-post ofers the invader a constant view of the social environment, primary information. Social privilege is based on the choice of viewpoint (before attaching itself to accidents of fortune or birth) , on the relative position that one manages to occupy, then organize, in a space dominating the trajectories of movement, keys to communication, river, sea, road, or bridge. Whence the extraordinary diversity of social treatments in the Middle Ages, a diversity that simply represents the variety of geographical views over a "realm" that, until the nineteenth century, doesn't appear in the texts as a formal territorial entity. The hereditary right reluctantly granted in 877 by Charles the Bald (Kiersy Capitulary) will transform possession of the dominant place into permanent social domination. A famous example is that of the Grimaldis in Monaco. The promontory overlooking the sea has since Prehistory been a privileged place; it will change hands several times throughout Antiquity before landing, by ruse, in the hands of the Grimaldis. From the q;enth century onward, this family will not stop extracting honors trnd privileges from that initial appropriation of a dominant viewpoint. If we can then speak of class societies, we can only do so by designating the classes according to place, as we suggested earlier. If class struggles develop, they happen openly on the terrain, for r;he conquest of a dominant place. When the citadel or fortress is besieged, it is not simply a military, or even political, event, but a wcial one. Serious conflicts erupt, for example, when the protecting mission, the limit of the military scam, is violated by the feudal lords; when the "masters of the earth" claim to become its owners. ln other words, when they try to unite in their hands alone the twin schemas of spatial appropriation of territory, robbing the native populations by trying to reduce their descendants to the level of servi casati, to the fate of tenant slaves-manpower deprived of its right to military defense.
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The Boarding of Metabolic Vehicles1
Yours is not to reason why!
\- Frederick the Second to his soldiers
THE EXTENSIVE PHASE of Assault reqmres quick deaths; the intensive preparatory phase inflicts slow ones. As Lieutenant-General von Metsch writes in Wie wurde ein neuer krieg aussehen? in the 1 930s, "In total war, everything is a front! But along with the new total front, we would be wise to include the nation's spiritual front . . . In both the practical matter of preparation for rearmament and theo retical military discussions, the mo ral question is of primary importance. "
Born o f the sea, total war, according to Admiral Friedrich Ruge, aims "at destroying the honor, the identity, the very soul of the enemy." By striking populations with slow death through the destruction of their environment, the ultimate forms of modern ecological war curiously restore the "soul" in its primitive, "ethnological" definitions: "mana," potential substance indistinguishable from its environment, not individual but plural, multiform, fluidiform, coagulated here and there in social, animal or territorial bodies.
Dromological progress, by imposing the idea of two types of body, dependent on their situation in space, also imposes the idea
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of two types of soul: one weak, indecisive and vulnerable because it is dependent on its environment; the other powerful because it has put its "mana, '' its will, out of reach thanks to its deterritorialization, to the sophistication of its economy and viewpoint.
Clausewitz says nothing else when he answers the question, "What is war?" with, "War is an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will." We cannot exclude from war the problem of wills, despite the fact that Clausewitz immediately mutilates and bastardizes his definition by hastening to add that there can be no moral violence outside of the concepts , of State and law. In fact, more than political and intelligent objectives of warfare, more than social or national rivalries, Clausewitz's definition already suggests the creation of the "presence in the wo rld" of bodies without will. More than of an art of war, we think here of "techniques of animal bodies," an indelible dichotomy between the invader's moving-power and his relative inability to free his movements from the herd of workers.
Depending on the time and the latitude, the multitude of bodies with no soul, living dead, zombies, possessed, etc. , is imposed all throughout history: a slow-motion destruction of the opponent, the adversary, the prisoner, the slave; an economy of military violence likening the human cattle to the ancient stolen herd of the hunter-raiders, and by extension, in modernized and militarized European societies, to the soulless bodies of children, women, men of color and proletarians.
In total war, the Nazis will do nothing diferent when they create an internal social front against the foreign bodies of Jews, gypsies and Slays. The deportation camps are but the laboratories in which the cattle are treated industrially-put to work in the mines, on logistical worksites, subj ected to medical or social experiments, the ultimate recuperation of fats, bones, hair . . . Or, a happier final solution, as exchange value for other energy sources: fuel, trucks and military vehicles, through the intermediary of neutral countries; a whole classical economy of hostages, abductions and displacements-the preferred forms of dromocratic violence.
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The precious lesson of the camps and the gulags has not been heeded, because it was erroneously presented not only as an ideological phenomenon, but also as a static one, an enclosure. Its absolute "inhumanity" was bur the ostensible reintroduction in history of the original social bestiary, of the immense mass of domestic bodies, bodies unknown and unknowable. What else has the proletariat been since antiquity, if not an entirely domesticated category of bodies, a prolific, engine-towing class, the phantom presence in the historical narrative of a floating population linked to the satisfaction of logistical demands?
In the various descriptions of Western Europe in the ninth century, they sometimes mention the existence of certain forenses, who never constitute less than 1 6 percent of the recorded population. These are the migrant workers, going from one populated area to another without being granted their land-clearing occupation, except in Germany and perhaps in Champagne.
This social surplus, so similar to the "fourth world" of contemporary urban ghettos, comes directly from the phenomenon of strategic retention mentioned above; from feudal, then communal, social control.
In fact, the fortress's organic function could only be maintained by setting its limits , as well as those of the size of pop ulations and the areas of extension. Strategic calculation is likened to statistical calculation. The fortress, with its entrances and exits, is a primary schema of the strategic calculator. The settling of armed society in the Middle Ages thus implied the disappearance of a habitat that until then had been considered common: the disappearance of civilian space, of the common man's right to space, to its qualification.
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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").
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