Speed and Politics

Apaches and other shady populations of the city's outskirts, it will be less a matter, when the time comes, of occupying a given building than of holding the streets. 1 In 1 93 1 , during the National Socialists' struggle against the Marxist parties in Berlin, Joseph Goebbels notes, "Whoever can conquer the streets also conquers the State!"2 •

Can asphalt be a political territory? Is the bourgeois State and its power the street, or in the street? Are its potential force and expanse in the places of intense circulation, on the path of rapid transportation?

As Goebbels again writes about the battles for Berlin, "The ideal militant is the political combatant in the Brown Army as a movement . . . obeying a law that he sometimes doesn't even know, but that he could recite in his sleep . . . Thus we have set these fanatical beings in motion . . .

He then scientifically compares the transcripts of his various speeches, made first in the provinces and then later in Berlin, and notices that the "amorphous sociological conglomerate" of the capital required the invention of a "new language for the masses": "The rhythm of the metropolis with its four million souls throbs like a burning wind through the declarations of propagandists . . . Here a new and modern language was spoken, one that has nothing to do with the archaic forms of so-called popular expression. This is the beginning of an original artistic style, the first form of expression to be truly animated and galvanizing."

Mob riots reform the mob (the original mob of hunter-raiders). To lead the bands of "lost soldiers" of the workers' army-its dromomaniacs3-that is, for the leader, to incite them, "lead them to the attack like a pack of dogs," as Saint-Just said. It means giving rhythm to the mobile mass's trajectory through vulgar stimulation, a polemical symphony, transmitted far and wide, from one to the other, polyphonic and multicolored like the road signals and trafic directions meant to accelerate the telescoping, the shock of the accident. 4 This is the ultimate goal of street demonstrations, of urban disorder. "Propaganda must be made directly by words and images, not by writing, " states Goebbels, who was himself a great promoter of audiovisuals in Germany. Reading implies time for reflection, a slowing down that destroys the mass's dynamic eficiency. If a monument should be penetrated by the mob, it will be rapidly transformed into a place of passage, where everyone enters and exits, brings to and takes away. It's the free-for-all, plunder for plundering's sake, as we saw even in 1975 at the fall of Saigon.

30 I Speed and Politics

All through history there has been an unspoken, unrecognized revolutionary wandering, the organization of a first mass transportation-which is nonetheless revolution itself. Thus the old conviction that "every revolution takes place in the city'' comes from the city; the expression "dictatorship of the Paris Commune," used as far back as the events of 1789, should not suggest so much the classic opposition of city to country as that of stasis to circulation.

Despite convincing examinations of city maps, the city has not been recognized as first and foremost a human dwelling place penetrated by channels of rapid communication (river, road, coastline, railway). It seems we've forgotten that the street is only a road passing through an agglomeration, whereas every day laws on the "speed limit" within the city walls remind us of the continuity of displacement, of movement, that only the speed laws modulate. The city is but a stopover, a point on the synoptic path of a trajectory, the ancient military glacis, ridge road, frontier or riverbank, where the spectator's glance and the vehicle's speed of displacement were instrumentally linked. As I have said in the past, there is only habitable circu/,ation.5

From Street Fight to State Right I 3 1

This is particularly evident today in Japan-for example, in those immense revolutionary battles that come down to simple collision, to the provocation of a clash with the urban police, in which the mass of overtrained militants is armed with audio visual machines: movie cameras, tape recorders, etc. Aware of the kinetic nature of their actions, it's the instantaneousness of their presence (in the next second they have vanished from the street that they film and record); they, the passers-by for whom the ban on loitering goes hand in hand with the ban on gathering. In the same way they evaded the very revelatory slogan of the 1848 insurgents: "Desperate masses," writes Engels, "who demand bread and work, or death."

In fact, the watchword of these "workers' battalions" (as those who would be deported by force to the provinces or drafted into the army were called) was "we're stayin"' . . . we're not moving from here! The socialist utopia of the nineteenth century, like the democratic utopia of the ancient agora, was literally buried under the vast scaffolding of urban construction, obscuring the fundamental anthropological side of revolution, of proletarianization: the migratory phenomenon.

On September 21 , 1 788, Arthur Young notes in his famous journal: " .. . the great commercial city of Nantes! . . . Arrive-go to the theatre, new built of fine white stone. It was Sunday, and therefore full. Mon Dieu! cried I to myself, do all the wastes, the deserts, the heath, ling, furz, broom, and bog, that I have passed for 300 miles, lead to this spectacle? . . . There are no gentle transitions from ease to comfort, from comfort to wealth: you pass at once from beggary to profusion,-from misery in mud cabins to splendid spectacles at 5 00 liv. a night. "

The new city with its riches, its unheard-of technical facilities, its universities and museums, its stores and permanent holidays, its comforts, its knowledge and its security, seemed an ideal spot for the tiring journey to end, the ultimate landing dock for the mass's migrations and hopes after a perilous crossing-so much so that until recently we confused urban and urbane for a place of social and cultural exchanges what was only a highway or railway exchanger. We took the crossroad for the path of socialism.

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I Speed and Politics

If municipalities rent out space at top dollar and slap surcharges on windows and street-side facades, it's because all these architectural details of the bourgeois dwelling traditionally carry the possibility of commerce and information. The display windows of Dutch prostitutes still reproduce today the old "bow windows" whose curvature allowed one a panoramic view of what was coming and going. The spectacle of the street is trafic, the "pilgrim's progress" movement of progression, of procession-at once voyage and improvement, a movement likened to progress toward something better, a pilgrimage that dominated the Middle Ages.6 The street is like a new coastline and the dwelling a sea-port from which one can measure the magnitude of the social flow, predict its overflowings. The doors to the city are its tollbooths and its customs posts are dams, filtering the fluidity of the masses, the penetrating power of the migrating hordes. The old, swampy, unhealthy beaches that surrounded the fortified city, the "congoplains" of the American slave, the old fortifications, the outskirts, the shantytowns and favellas-but also the poorhouse, the barracks, the prisons-solve a problem less of enclosure or exclusion than of trafic. All of them are uncertain places because they are situated between two speeds of transit, acting as brakes against the acceleration of penetration. Located from the outset on paths of terrestrial or fluvial communication, they will later be compared to sewers, to stagnant waters, the end of fluidity (progress), the sudden absence of motivity, ineluctably creating a quasi-organic corruption of the masses.

From Street Fight to State Right I 33

"Neutral spaces, spaces without genre," writes Balzac, "where every vice, every misfortune in Paris takes refuge. " This is the origin of the sub-urb, at once the province of interdiction and a linear and temporal distance-in other words, the depot and "trans-shipment" of the social matter as of the merchandise, provisions and livestock to which the "beery" proletariat has been likened for centuries: essentially wild animals become beasts of burden, warhorses or pack animals. The conditions of the proletarian masses' exploitation, furthermore, illustrate perfectly the definition that Geofroy Saint Hilaire gives of domestication: "To domesticate an animal is to accustom it to living and breeding in or near men's dwellings."

The "right to lodging" is not, as was claimed, the "right to enter the city." Like the inorganic mass of wild animals, the proletarian horde carries a menace, a load of unpredictability and ferocity. It is allowed as "domestic" to gather and reproduce near the dwellings of men, under their watchful eye. The problems of human habitation properly speaking are absolutely diferentiated from those of the proletarian cattle, of its Lodgings in the barnyard of the castle, in the outskirrs of the fortified city. As with the stable or enclosure, the temporary lodging of the migrating masses implies their relative distance from the dwelings of men, in other words from the city. The bourgeoisie will get its initial power and class characteristics (which, of course, were not at all peculiar to them; we al know the capital role played by monasticism, chivalry, etc., in the areas of banking, industry . . . ) less from commerce and industry than from the strategic implantation that establishes the "fixed domicile" as a social and monetary value7-from real estate speculation as the sale and trading of fixed property, the right to reside within the ramparts of fortified cities, the right to security and preservation within the perilous migration of a world of pilgrims, barges, soldiers and exiles moving onward by the millions.

34 I Speed and Politics

Starting in 1 077 with the Commune of Cambrai, the "urban franchises" will spread little by little to every commercial city. We could easily spot them on a map: logically, they are all situated on large waterways or highways, while regions dificult to reach such as Brittany or the Massif Central have few or no communes. The advent of bourgeois power with the revolution of the communes can already be likened to a "national war of libera_�ion" since it sets, on its terrain, a native population against a military occupier come from the East who claims to govern its conquest. The guarantee of urban franchises is first and foremost the reorganization of the old Gallo-Roman site following the layout of the fortified castle, the construction of those impregnable fortresses that had nothing to fear from the war machines then in use, but everything to fear, at every moment, from surprises and strategems come from without, from afar, with the nomadic masses.

If the reorganization of the old villa, its transformation by the feudal colonizer into a castle replete with moat, set up stockades and dirt embankments against every natural danger and scourge without distinction, the architecture of the fortified castle that succeeded it lost this rural character and became purely military. From then on it addressed only one enemy: the man of war. Furthermore, what diferentiates the ancient fortress from that of the Middle Ages in Europe, despite their apparent similarity, is that the latter, thanks to the architectural organization of its internal spaces, alows one to prolong combat indefinitely, with its slits, its projections, its trenches, its high walls . . . 8 The fortified enclosure of the Middle Ages creates an artificial field, makes this field a stage on which physical and psychological constraints can be imposed. After Machiavelli, Vauban will heartily support this means of avoiding carnage and of breaking up the enemy simply by constructing a topological universe made of "a totality of mechanisms able to receive a defined form of energy (in this case, that of the mobile mass of assailants) , to transform it andfinally to return it in a more appropriate form. "

From Street Fight to State Right I 35

Reorganized according to the same principle, the communal fortress remaines a "field of strategems" set for the adversary. But the latter changes character once more, becoming first and foremost a social enemy.

Aside from its military function, the rampart of the fortified place assumes a class function; its poliorcetic conception allows it to prolong the social combat indefinitely. The communal bourgeoisie gives rise to a new phenomenon, like a prolonged and patient war that has all the earmarks of the inertia of peace, and nothing more of the bloody efusions of ancient civil war, the seasonal outbursts and violent movements of the country battlefield. Bourgeois power is military even more than economic, but it relates most directly to the occult permanence of the state of siege, to the appearance of fortified towns, those "great immobile machines made in different ways. "9 In the same way, the decadence of the enclaved bourgeoisie, the loss of its own will, will be linked to the decline of its military technique in the domain of ground warfare. As Montesquieu remarks, "With the invention of gunpowder, the impregnable place ceased to exist."

Clausewitz has admirably shown the mercenaries of the large Italian cities, then of Europe in general, lending their services to powerful economies-the only ones capable of furnishing the military entrepreneur with an increasingly large budget, the goods and transferable holdings that he can take with him at the end of his engagement contract (whence the "evident conjuncture between money and what seems to found it, its military significance"-Marx to Engels, September 25, 1 8 57) . But he doesn't go far enough in designating the latter as technical manufacturer, as engineer (of weapons). In fact, it was the military engineers who, depending on the opportunities aforded, were able to protect or destroy private securities within the bourgeois citadel. And here we have the unspoken conjucture from which the "cannibalistic classes" will come-not only the bourgeoisie, but also the permanent military class. The Marxist definition of capitalism, "consumer of human life and founder of dead labor," is quite apt for the bourgeoisie, but only insofar as it is associated with its military technical adviser, who simultaneously invents the means of producing and of destroying what he produces, a war entrepreneur who will be at the origin of the State armies and later of the military industrial complex. Just as the condotiere had benefited from this system of ruin by leaning on the city's economic orientation, so the communal bourgeoisie already carries within itself the same ambiguous association of wealth and the production of destruction.

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I Speed and Politics

This fatal merger was formed on these grounds like a chance meeting: "The strategic importance of a given proposition is not the result of largely hypothetical combinations, but of the very configuration of the countryside: this will be an important knot of communication lines, the meeting point of numerous roads or the confluence of valleys." As we saw before, wherever these conditions are fulfilled, there are population centers; where there is trafic, there is also the urban area. To recapitulate, the conditions that obtained at the birth of the great cities are always those that make these cities important strategic points. 10 The solution, then, imposed itself, and up until the twentieth century they almost always decided to transform the most populous centers into large fortresses. National Defense continued to mix, in almost medieval fashion, military men with the civilians whose resources (supplies, physical labor, lodgings, arms, etc.) were of no small importance to the army. The very givens of capitalism, the inactivity of its wealth, directly contribute toward maintaining the state of siege!

From Street Fight to State Right I 37

If the fortifi�d town is an immobile machine, the military engineers specific task is to fight against its inertia. "The goal of fortification is not to stop armies, to contain them, but to dominate, even to facilitate their movements. " Around 1 870 Colonel Delair notes: "Every fortress must possess a certain particular state, a certain power of resistance, which in men is called good health. In peacetime, we oficers of the engineering corps are responsible for keeping the fortress in good health. " And a bit further on: "The art of defense must constantly be in transformation; it is not exempt from the general law of this world: stasis is death . " 1 1

The communal fortress is a city machine, so much so that Cormontaigne, Fourcroy and many engineers of the eighteenth century, in their "fictional 'diaries of sieges" or their "moments of fortification," don't even mention the troops assigned to defend it, as if the fortress were capable of functioning by itself. General de Villemoisy in the nineteenth century notes its technical superiority: "Out of 300 sieges conducted by the Europeans since the beginning of this century, there have only been about ten in which the fortification fell first." The military thus seems dependent on the general concept of the fortified place. Carnot praises its division of labor: "It has been proven that bravery and industry-which, taken separately, would not sufice-can, once they are joined, multiply each other." After Vauban, the defenders' presence in the fortified place will not be a mater of chance: the decree of December 28, 1 866, will still name the governors of fortified cities as permanent residents in both peace and war, just as the garrison will be obliged to perform daily tasks, each one being assigned a fixed and invariable function, repeated day after day.

38 I Speed and Politics

The occupants of the Maginot Line, for their part, had gotten into the habit of calling it "the factory. " Long after the dismantling of the old communal city and up until the twentieth century, when large fortified places still exist, the military class continues to find work with its old bourgeois employer, the two slowly becoming "compradores." The interests of the war entrepreneur remain aligned with those of capitalism in permanent strategic schemas: in 1 793, Barere compares the young Republic (the Paris Commune) to a large city under siege and he calls for all of France to be no more than a vast camp. The political triumph of the bourgeois revolution consists in spreading the state of siege of the communal city machine, immobile in the middle of its logistic glacis and domestic lodgings, over the totality of the national territory. And in 1 79 5 , it will entrust to Carnot's new armies the job of pushing as far back as possible the assault by the popular masses come from the suburb, of encircling the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, of forcing the dismayed workers to give up their weapons to its 20,000 soldiers "who had forgotten that they were also of the people" (Babeuf) .

The State's political power, thernfore, is only secondarily "power organized by one class to oppress another. " More materially, it is the polis, the police, in other words highway surveillance, insofar as, since the dawn of the bourgeois revolution, the political discourse has been no more than a series of more or less conscious repetitions of the old communal poliorcetics, confusing social order with the control of traffic (of people, of goods) , and revolution, revolt, with trafic jams, illegal parking, multiple crashes, collisions. The results of the 1 977 French municipal elections were exemplary in this respect, since they reinscribed, on the national territory, Barere's old plan to cut France in two: at the center the decisive knot of the capital where the right triumphs, and all around the vast camp of the suburbs and provinces that voted for the left because they were conscious of becoming a hinterland in which productive activity was on the decline. On ·the other hand, these elections also show how much the opposing party's discourse is dominated by the reactionary schema of bourgeois poliorcetics, confining the mass's ability to move with its ability to attack-the ultreia of pilgrim's progress. But beyond that, this political police schema, accepted until very recently by every ideology, influences both urban and worldwide planning; the passage from the "great immobile machine" to the Statemachine, and finally to the planet machine, is accomplished without dificulty. The words "politics of progress" or "of change" are devoid of meaning if, behind the electric megalopolis, the city knows no rest, if we can't distinguish the obscure silhouette of the old fortress struggling against its inertia, for whom stasis is death.

Frorn Street Fight to State Right I 39