Speed and Politics

Al this is less contradictory than it seems. Capitalist society has always tightly linked politics with freedom from fear, social security with consumption and comfort. But as we saw, the other side of this obligatory movement is assistance; since the war of movement, the infirmity of unable bodies has taken on a social consistency through the demands ·of the military worker. If the Treaty of Versailles is concerned with assistance, it's because the inevitability of national Defense requires it, and henceforth imposes a plan of social action on the States as part of their general defense. As Gilbert Mury notes, the first true social workers were not neutral because they came from places like Colonel de la Roque's "French Social Parry." It's a good thing to remember: the promoters of the new "Social Security'' in Great Britain (Sir Beveridge, for example, in 1 942) had made it an objective of total war. Furthermore, it was to encounter similar groups of fascist or Petainist inspiration on the European continent, such as the National Aid movement. It is interesting to note the enrollment in these movements of certain members of the fascist denunciation forces (who were formerly occupied with civilian surveillance and repression), their integration into the new personnel of social aid, as we take advantage of the experience of common-law prisoners today. This is because the activities of these technicians of standardization are inseparable from the hegemonic aims of the State administration.

The tasks of the "social worker" increase and change with the opportunities aforded. Currently known as a tutor, educator or group leader, he also performs other functions: after decolonization, the department of "native afairs" becomes the department of "social afairs" ; in their own country the Portugese colonial troops establish a "ministry of social communication." And General Pinochet, who doesn't mince words, very simply creates in Chile a department of "civilian afairs!"

1 40 I Speed and Politics

Several years ago in France, in a period of full economic prosperity, the social workers declared, "We are workers like any other because we repair the socio-productive apparatus." After '68, they were less sanguine: "The social workers feel very strongly the ambiguity of the notion of social work and are sensitive to the misunderstandings it can generate." In fact, in the new economy of survival, it is no longer a matter of participating in a society of (more or less futile) abundance. Mr. Berlinguer said it in January 1 977: " ™' are the ones who want austerity, in order to change the system and construct a new model of development." And s'trai:gely enough, he immediately refers to the transportation system, "to the revision of the myth of the personal automobile with the reorganization of cities. The solution to the transportation problem should lead to a radical transformation of State mechanisms through a modification of the nature of business." Thus, everywhere, the mobile mass's vehicular power is repressed and reduced; from limits on speed or fuel to the pure and simple suppression of the personal auto, the myth of the car is condemned to disappear along with the myth of the worker, the central historical agent of the logistical State.

The austerity preached by Enrico Berlinguer, as we know, had disastrous repercussions even within the Italian Communist Party, and many comparisons were made to the Spartan regime. But doubtless it would have been more correct to speak only of the end of the Lycurgean system, of the decomposition into anomie of a "society" whose members had been trained for centuries only to launch an attack, and who no longer knew what to do with their existence when this occupation was suddenly denied them. If you take away the Westerner's car or motorcycle, what will be left for him to do?-if not completely fulfill the prophecy of M.l.S. Bloch, who, in 1 897, announced: "War having become a kind of stalemate in which neither side can gam the upper hand, the armies will remain face to face, constantly threatening each other but unable to strike the deciding blow. This is the future: no combat, only famine; no killing, only the bankruptcy of nations and the collapse of any social system."

The Consumption of Security

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In a focial configuration whose precarious equilibrium is threatened by any ill-considered initiative, security can henceforth be likened to the absence of movement. The extended proletarianization of the suppression of wills can be likened to the suppression of gestures, for which the rise in unemployment is the best and most obvious image. We redistribute social work; we spotlight the performances of the physically and mentally handicapped, their records in olympics for the disabled; we impose the new belief that a body's inability to move is not really a serious problem. Strangely enough again, the army can be found behind these philanthropic enterprises. Read the memoirs of Abbot Oziol, the French country priest who created centers for retarded children from nothing, centers designed to tear them away from the psychiatric wards: "A visitor may sometimes be surprised to hear us say that one of our children is 'in the army.' That doesn't mean that our unfortunate little retard was called into the service. We simply mean by this to designate the building that was given us by the Military Treasury, which since then has given us so much other help." And it was General Malbec, director of the same National Military Treasury, who uttered the terrible slogan of these centers: "From the cradle to the grave!" But the army has never been anything else . . .

The redistribution of social aid finally aims at making the handicap functional, as the old Prussian State did in 1 9 14. Financial aid takes on the appearance of a remuneration, a salary, at a time when the government insists on rewarding citizens who by denunciation act like auxilliary policemen. The indivisible security discerns in the bitter old man, excluded from the economic system by his modest pension and revenue, a last proletarian, a kind of attentive sentinel, immobile in the middle of the frenetic agitation of the social environment. One begins to meet these otherworldly beings in the street, aged persons whose wrists are equipped with an electronic alarm system scarcely larger than a wristwatch and relayed to a monitoring center. Gilbert Cotteau is at the origin of this kind of social action with the "Delta 7 Foundation," which is responsible for many things, but which also. had recourse, in order to get of the ground, to financial aid from the. armed forces (particularly the Air Force) . Its beneficiaries were mainly Vietnamese children made deaf by the bombardments, who received hearing aids; or old persons who were given free telephones, complete with an alarm system hooked into the central police computer. Behind this operation we find the National Union of Social Aid Ofices and the Ministry of Health, as well as the Ministry of the Interior.

1 42 I Speed and Politics

The posters that launched the great campaign for the safety of senior citizens, the audio-visual spots: all this indoctrination is widely broadcast in old people's homes, clubs, hostels like so many orders for police mobilization, all of it furnished free for the asking.

For other social strata, manipulation of the need for security takes diferent forms. Since antiquity, precious metals, the gold standard, has been a "refuge value," a remedy for anxiety, and thus a symbol of individual security-this "insurance" value having been, as we know, freely transferred to a multitude of exchange systems. Nonetheless, the current questioning of the gold refuge as basic standard of the monetary system is quite reminiscent of the events of the Law Bank shortly before the French Revolution. It contributes to the collapse of social "security;" and we find here, in the midst of the nuclear status quo, the reasons that made the Spartan State refuse the use of precious metals as one of the consequences of non-war. (The State, careful to put the people's vigilance in defense to full use, deprived individuals of the means of protecting themselves other than by becoming totally engaged in the Lacedaemonian war machine.)

The Consumption of Security

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The code o.f production itself always aims at the "infinite receptacle of consumption." But the latter becomes the consumption of total security; the utopian use of defense reflexes leads us to modify esthetics and the nature of production. The meaning of business reform is totally diferent from the one ascribed to it by the powers that be. Thus, the appearance on the market of "nonbrand name products that are just as good" -which passed more or less unnoticed-seems to me to be a considerable event: merchandise in large demand is presented for reasons of "economy, " in "anonymous" white labels, the company's obtrusive trade mark having disappeared. They are promoted with an immense anti-publicity campaign. They are, so we are told, "free products;" in other words they no lein·ger rely on the dubious methods of whorish old marketing techniques. From now on, repulsion sells more than attraction; this is what organizes our new social existence around the objects of protection. If the companies are asked by the consumer protection agencies to moderate their advertising campaigns, it's because other forces of production seek to develop theirs in the area of information, like the members of the abovementioned National Defense institute.

After the war of the domestic market, the war of the military market. It is no longer a system of consumption/production aiming at a democratic alliance, but the system of objects seeking to directly elect the military class or, more accurately, a technological and industrial development in the area of weaponry.

1 44 I Speed and Po!itics

After his failed bid in the Porrugese elections in April 1 976, Mario Snares declared: "I don't need to govern with politicians; I can do it j ust as well with soldiers and specialists. " The new Chinese leaders spout the same discourse. "Military socialism" wasn't born in Peru or Portugal in 1 976, any more than it first appeared 1n Berlin in the 1 930s or in the last century with Bismarck, Napoleon III and "social imperialism." The elimination of the political bourgeoisie's partner is only the realization of a strategic dream based solely on scientific and technological speculation: mili:tarized nations that can do without armies (General Gallois' minimum vital force) .

For Clausewitz, the political State is already a "non-conducting medium, a barrier that prevents ful discharge. " In such a statement, the nature of the military class's ambition is perfectly revealed and the atomic situation projected . . . "Under Bonaparte (general/chief of State) , war was waged without respite until the enemy succumbed, :md the counter-blows were struck with almost equal energy. Surely it is both natural and inescapable that this phenomenon should cause us to turn again to the pure concept of war with all its rigorous Implications. " Dynamic efficiency is the State machine's primary quality, and the nuclear State, ultimate stage of dromological progress, ensures the concept's coh€sion thanks to the strategic cali;:ulator. Faced with and boarded by this ultimate war machine �tands the last military proletarian, the henceforth will-less body l'.1f the President of the Republic, supreme commander of a vanished army. The President's body resembles those of the ancient conscripts i;:aught between two fires. His final act will once again be Assault.

The Consumption of Security

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Pa rt

THE STATE OF EMERGENCY

The State of Emergency

Speed is the essence of ^war.

^- Sun Tzu

THE REDUCTION OF distances has become a strategic reality bearing incalculable economic and political consequences, since it corresponds to the negation of space.

The maneuver that once consisted in giving up ground to gain Tim e loses its meaning: at present, gaining Time is exclus ively a matter of vectors . Territory has lost its significance in favor of the p roj ectile. In fact, the strategic value of the non-place of speed has definitively supplanted that of place, and the question of possession of Time has revived that of territorial appropriation.

In this geographic contraction, which resembles the terrestrial movement described by Alfred Wegener, the binomial "fire movement" takes on a new meaning: the distinction between fire's power to destroy and the power to penetrate of movement, of the vehicle, is losing its "validity. " 1

With the supersonic vector (airplane, rocket, airwaves) , penetration and destruction become one. The instantaneousness of action at a distance corresponds to the defeat of the unprepared adversary, but also, and especially, to the defeat of the world as a field, as distance, as matter.

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