Speed and Politics

Just as the revolutionary process of the proletarianization of labor comes from the war of mass and movement, the myth of "the worker of metaphysics" (Biblical image of man's first pain: cursed by God and cursing and killing in turn to replace Him in His creative works) also takes shape on the great battlefields of industrial war. Teilhard de Chardin, for example, believes along with most of his contemporaries that war is one of the principle ferments of technological progress; but the idea of "unfinished man" suddenly strikes him during his "unforgettable experience at the front," as he writes in 1 9 1 7. In 1 94 5 , at the end of the total war, he notes, "War is an organic phenomenon of anthropogenesis that Christianity cannot suppress any more than it can do away with death." He adopts the voice of Tacitus to deplore the international Peace that will cover the world with "the crust of banality, the veil of monotony" (La nostalgie du front, 1 9 1 7) . "Something like a light will go out over the earth." Demobilization will be, for the member of the "Yellow Crusade" (that epic of automotive assault) , immobilization in anti-revolution-evolution.

While preparation for war requires months, even years, the decisive assault lasts only an hour, perhaps only a few minutes. Something of the evolutionary-revolutionary gaze on bodies engaged in historical kineticism is held over from the fatal homosexuality of ancient generals, enlightened despots and sultans, who would force the "militias that are very pleasant to watch, if you are not the one to receive the blows" to repeat their maneuvers endlessly.4 Each is seized by an immoderate desire for the subjected flesh of the proletarian soldier, the powerful mass of "mobile machines . . . blindly obeying the impulses of their drivers" (Babeuf) . The military workforces are obliged not so much to sell themselves as to give themselves to the war entrepreneur. For him they are what the woman, then the mount, was for the knight in battle: they help him move forward, die under him or cause his death. Alexander is nothing without the humors of Bucephalus; Richard the Third at Bosworth loses his life-and his kingdom-along· with his horse. The military, then laboring, proletarian kinetic, infinite, prolifically self-regenerating-carries into time and space the historical guide who straddles him, directs and inspires his movements, and who is also a chief of war: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao.

1 30 I Speed and Politics

In short, the revolutionary figure of the worker, sketched less by the industrial system than by the military one, fills the kinetic disparity between slow war and rapid war. The "full steam ahead through the mud" of the nihilist Nechaiev, apostle of systematized terrorist warfare, is not a rhetorical figure but a serious technological proposition: compensate for the distortion born of the destructive assault's necessary brevity by accelerating the rhythm of attacks. Historical evolution is then kept moving literally by a combustion engine!

German fascism will have the same concerns. With Heidegger it becomes "die Totale Mobil-Machung," "the final stage of the will to power and the realization of the essence of technology: nihilism." The proletarian soldier can in non-war pursue his revolutionary task, assault, which has become an aggression against nature. This is the pan-destruction of the world (Bakunin) , the great geo-political sites that devote the earth to war, keeping its visible surface for the "worker of metaphysics," or giving it to him by educating him. In practice, this begins as a kind of humanitarian aid to the German unemployed, then as a voluntary service to which Heidegger calls the intellectuals, "a service of work, knowledge and arms. " This will become the exemplary development of the history of the camps that, in 1 926, receive their first volunteers, mixing, in the most moving manner possible, workers, peasants and students.

The End of tl1e Proletariat

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The whole thing could have seemed extremely liberal at a time when, everywhere in the Western world, a crushing need for manpower was being felt. The insatiable requirements of industrial warfare, already forgotten after so few years, simultaneously put the populations to work and domesticated them with para-military State bureaucracies in Europe, across the Atlantic and overseas (between the two wars, moreover, the International Labor Ofice in Geneva handled all of the world's manpower problems) .

In the colonies, American "forcing" is answered by the smotig, the organization of penal labor; while in Bulgaria, for example, civilian labor is made obligatory from 1 920 onward, for both sexes, under a general ofice attached to the Ministry of Public Works. But the beneficiaries usually work on construction projects headed by the Ministry of War: strategic roads, railways, airports, factories.

The fascist project as well, in the final account, is no more than a compromise in the conflict that has long opposed, in the heart of the State, the aristocracy, the military class and the bourgeoisie, each one fighting over its proletariat. In Germany, labor service will be made mandatory in 1 928; those who try to avoid it become objects of scorn, social exclusion or denunciation, as the deserter or shirker was in time of war. In 1 934, the completely standardized work camps become detention camps; and they will be transformed into concentration camps, into death camps, in the face of public apathy, without anyone even bothering to remove their original motto: ''Arbeit macht frei."

1 32 I Speed and Politics

The slip from o n e t o the other i s i n fact quite natural; the proletarian worker's flesh is no diferent from that of the proletarian soldier. As Clausewitz writes: "Tools (soldiers) are there to be used, and use will naturally wear them out . . . "

For their part, the Communist countries ostensibly fulfilled Teilhard de Chardin's wish at the very moment he formulated it: die Totale Mobil-Machung. More than the suppression of the bourgeois class, this is the disappearance of its productive proletariat. In China, from 1 964 onward, the revolutionary slo_gan was "Take the army as your model"; and the entire population was forced to wear a similar uniform, a kind of ambiguous, asexual outfit. In France, on the other hand, the soldier was called upon more and more frequently to wear the combat uniform, the outfit of the laborer, even during oficial parades.

Al greatness is in assault!-an inaccurate translation of Plato or a paraphrasing of American forcing?5 Fascism was totalitarian only insofar as it intended to be totally dromocratic. The "vital space" is only the disappearance of European geography, become an area, a desert without qualities, expan·ded by a "social" organization made entirely functional by the hierarchy of speed-the same hierarchy that had produced National Socialism on the streets of Berlin, before returning with total war to its elitist cultural origins. From the beginning, the superb body of the Man of Assault, of the blond and naturalistic Aryan, is willingly exhibited by Nazi propaganda. What the Berlin stadium's celebration of the olympic liturgy shows is a hierarchy of bodies according to speeds of penetration. The athletic body is prytanic-projectile or projector. The excitement of the speed or distance record is that of assault. This countdown in time and space, the very principle of athletic performance, is but the theatricalization of the race toward its "absolute greatness, " of that military charge that begins as a slow and geometric march, and continues as _. an increasingly powerful acceleration of the body meant to giv^e the final surge.

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With total war, the " Totale Mobil-Machung" takes on its full meaning. There is no longer any social comparison between the triumphant body of the proletarian soldier-the superior being who, according to the old expression, possesses the "magnificence of displacement;" the German soldier who rushes headlong into the limitless expanse of the steppe or the desert-and the body of the proletarian worker who is there only to support the logistical efort. A mass of the physically unfit, of forced residents, of prisoners interned in camps, unable bodies, petty criminals . . .

For the Italian fascist passing directly from the athletic record to absolute war, the intoxication of the speed-body is total; it's Mussolini's " Poetry of the bomber." For Marinetti, after d'Annunzio, the "warrior-dandy" is the "only able subject, surviving and savoring in battle the power of the human body's metallic dream"; coupling with technological equipment scarcely more cumbersome than a horse, the old metabolic vehicle of th·e warring elites: rapid launches or "torpedos" straddled under the sea by aristocratic frogmen in search of the British fleet. The Japanese kamikaze will realize in space the military elite's synergistic dream by voluntarily disintegrating with his vehicle-weapon in a pyrotechnical apotheosis; for the ultimate metaphor of the speed-body is its final disappearance in the flames of explosion. The possible rebirth of fascism is a fear shown by many after the revelation of the Nazis crimes against humanity. Whatever the case: since fascism never died, it doesn't need to be reborn . I'm not talking about little sadicomuseographic or commercial trifles, but quite simply the fact that it represented one of the most accomplished cultural, political and social revolutions of the dromocratic West, like the naval empires or the colonial establishments. And it certainly has less to fear from "the future" than does a Communism that no longer has anything Marxist about it but its name, and for which the end of the dictatorship of the proletariat was the admission of its histo rical failure.

1 34 I Speed and Politics

Fascism is alive because total war, then total peace, have engaged the headquarters of the great national bodies (the armies, the forces of production) in a new spatial and temporal process, and the historical universe in a Kantian world. The problem is no longer one of a historiality in (chronological) time or (geographic) space, but in what space-time?

In a recent article, I stressed the necessity of reviewing our physical concept of history, of finally recognizing it for what it has become:

" . . . Which in short would make of war's conductibility (the coherent plan devised in time and space that can, through repetition, be imposed upon the enemy) not the instrument but the origin of a totalitarian language of History. This language is the mutual efort of the European States, then of the world, toward the absolute essence of foreign or civil war (speed) , thus giving it the stature of an absolute takeover of world history by Western military intelligence. Pure history, then, is only the translation of a pure strategic advance over terrain. Its power is to precede and be final, and the historian is but a captain in the war of time. " 6

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The Consumption of Security

Security cannot be divided.

\- Michel Poniatowski, March 4, 1 976

"REVOLUTION GOES FASTER than the people," declared President-General Costa Gomes at the beginning of the Portugese events.

How could such a thing be possible? Simply because in the final account the West's so-called revolutions have never been made by the people, but by the military institution. Economic liberalism has been .only a liberal pluralism of the order of speeds of penetration. To the heavy model of the hemmed in bourgeoisie, to the single schema of the weighty Marxist mobil-machung (ostensibly planned control of the movement of goods, persons, ideas) , the West has long opposed the diversity of its logistical hierarchy, the utopia of a national wealth invested in automobiles, travel, movies, performances . . . A capitalism that has become one of jetsets and instant-information banks, actually a whole social illusion subordinated to the strategy of the cold war. Let's make no mistake: whether it's the drop-outs, the beat generation, automobile drivers, migrant workers, tourists, olympic champions or travel agents, the military-industrial democracies have made every social category, without distinction, into unknown soldiers of the order of speeds-speeds whose hierarchy is controlled more and more each day by the State (headquarters) , from the pedestrian to the rocket, from the metabolic to the technological.

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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.

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With the Palestinian problem, popular war had suddenly taken on global proportions. Indeed, the tactic that consists in embracing in a difuse manner the most widespread territories to escape the powerful nuclei of military repression could have no meaning for them, since the very cause of their struggle was the deprivation of geographic territory. They therefore lost no time in literaly settling into the time zo'nes of international airports. The new unknown combatants, come from nowhere and no longer finding a strategic terrain, fight in strategic time, in the rehtivity of travel time. Since in the final account there is no road that is not strategic, from this moment on there is no longer a truly civilian aviation. It is understandable that supersonics like the American SST, or more recently the Concorde, give rise to heated discussions: their high performances are a problem for the military. They reproduce in the vectors of the nuclear status quo the 1 920s phenomenon of automotive assault in the streets of the bourgeois city.

On March 4, 1 976, France's Michel Poniatowski, then-Minister of the Interior, declared, "Security cannot be divided!" But to be more precise, he should have said: From now on, security can no longer be divided. As then-President Giscard d'Estaing stated three months later in a speech at the Military Academy, ''Alongside the supreme means of ensuring our security, we need the presence of security. In other words, we need to have a social body organized around this need for security. " On August 2 5 , Olivier Stirn, Secretary of State in the Overseas Territories, told the Council of Ministers that "The evacuation of the inhabitants of Basse-Terre Island, who were threatened by the eruption of the Soufriere volcano, demonstrated the possibilities for spontaneous action in a liberal society. " As we saw later, civil and social protection in this type of afair is no longer contemporary with the catastrophe; it precedes and, if need be, invents it. 1

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I Speed and Politics

In fact, the government's deliberately terroristic manipulation of the need for security is the perfect answer to all the new questions now being put to democracies by nuclear strategy-the new isolationism of the nuclear State that, in the U.S . , for example, is totally revamping political strategy. They are trying to recreate Union through a new unanimity of need, j ust as the mass media phantasmatically created a need for cars, refrigerators . . . We will see the creation of a common feeling of insecurity that will lead to a new kind of consumption, the consumption of protection; this latter will progressively come to the fore and become the target of the whole merchandising system. This is essentially what Raymond Aron recently said, when he accused liberal society of having been too optimistic for too long! The indivisible promotion of the need for security already composes a new composite portrait of the citizen-no longer the one who enriches the nation by consuming, but the one who invests first and foremost in security, manages his own protection as best he can, and finally pays more to consume less.

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