Speed and Politics

In all parts ofthe world, social lodgings, the city-dormitory or port of transit, implanted at the edges of cities, highways or railways, the toll systems that the government insists so strongly on instituting at the very entrances to a capital that selection is depopulating, the general police headquarters set up right nearby-this whole apparatus is only the reconstitution of the various parts of the fortress motor, with its flankings, its gorges, its shafts, its trenches, admission to and escape from its portals, the whole primordial control of the masses by the organisms of urban defense.

We also saw, during the German occupation of France, how easy it was for pseudo-social lodgings in the suburbs (Draney, for example) , like the old poorhouse, to be transformed into pivots toward the "beyond" of other voyages, other deportations. Whatever their supposed ideology, the proper role of every totalitarian regime is to bring to the fore the mitigated role of the army and the police (v. their rivalry) vis a vis the unrecognized order of political circulation. We could even say that the rise of totalitarianism goes hand-in-hand with the development of the state's hold over the circulation of the masses . Because of this , from the outset, it is easy to spot in the history of the great administrative bodies of the State: it was Sully, himself a grand master of roads and canals, who brought "the administration of fortifications" out of the rut with the edict of 1 604 and gave it a modern form which continued well into the twentieth century, despite apparent revolutions.

40 I Speed and Politics

As Tocqueville remarks, the quartermasters of fortifcations simultaneously perform, in the most ambiguous fashion, the state's civilian and military duties. Under Louis XIV, Mesrine will be assigned to create permanent companies of miners, sappers and boatmen who will originally be part of the corps of engineers, and who will replace the volunteer engineers-labor inspectors come up from the ranks or civilian public works oficials, such as the famous Tarade, who was also in charge of Parisian sanitary engineering. Thus, on the eve of the bourgeois revolution of ' 8 9 , the Army Corps of Engineers was providentially given a national task: not only the construction/destruction of the urban ramparts, but also the expansion of the logistical glacis over the whole territo ry (Barere's "vast camp of the nation" ) .

Thus we shouldn't wonder about the exceptional vogue of engineers after the seventeenth century, a vogue that in the nineteenth century would become a veritable cult in philosophy and fiction. The engineer is celebrated as the "priest of civilization'' (Saint-Simon) , a perverted image we will come back to, but which appears quite naturally after that of the "castrameter"-the latter really a priest or man of the Church assigned to teach "the art of limiting camps and fortified places by geometrical layouts." (But already, as Colonel Lazard noted, it was no longer a question of a specifcally military art, but rather a kind of reign of descriptive geometry projected onto the sites, over the totality of nature . . . ) 12 The military class is not born of the overpopulated headquarters of the ancien regime, ofices in which one saw marshals and general oficers alternate, almost daily, the command of the traditional armies. Under such conditions-even if they had considerable budgets at their disposal -there was little danger that these armies could demonstrate any kind of unified thought or strategic imagination. The only military activity that requires continuity of ideas, then, is the logistical project of the urban fortress. And it's from this equivocal logistical duty that the mixture of combat planning and territorial layout, christened "National Defense" by the bourgeois revolution, is born.

From Street Fight to State Right I 4 1

Vauban is the precursor here. An avid reader of Vitruvius and obsessed by the Roman colonial model, he thinks that the basis of war is geo-political and universal, that human geography should depend not on chance but on organizational techniques able to control fairly vast spaces, fairly durable empires. Aside from the old highway maintenance, this new military thought incorporated economic forecasts, genetic concerns, problems of food, etc. It is again an engineer and director of fortifications, of course, who in 1 782 will publish one of the first known flowcharts: Charles de Fourcroy and his "Sketch for a poleometric table or the musings of a diagram lover on the magnitude of several cities with a map or chart ofering a comparison of these cities in the same scale." This is the first "two-way" map, a contemporary of the scientific map of France by the Cassinis.

This military thought, that claims by functional planning to eliminate chance (which it considers synonymous with disaster and ruin) , becomes totally confused at the end of the ancien regime with the thinking of the bourgeois political class, its taste for rational nomenclature, its tireless activity of totalitarian scribe (encyclopedist) , the osmosis taking place at the entrance to the cities (permeable membrane between the highway and the street) . The head of the first Parisian municipality was, as we know, the director of the Hanse. 13 The City Hall overlooked the waterfront, and the boat has remained the vehicular emblem of what was no more than a nauta-city. The same preoccupations reappear toward 1 7 49 in the works of police oficer Guillaute, for example: "No more revolts, no more seizures, no more tumults, " he writes. "Public order will reign if we are careful to distribute our human time and space between the city and the country by a severe regulation of transit; if we are attentive to schedules as wel as to alignments and signal systems; if by environmental standardization the entire city is made transparent, that is, familiar to the policeman's eye. "

42 I Speed and Politics

Today many people are discovering, somewhat late in the game, that once the "first public transport" of the revolution has passed, socialism suddenly empties of its contents-except, perhaps, military (national defense) and police (security, incrimination, detention camps) .

The time has come, it seems; to face the facts: revolution is movement, but movement is not a revolution. Politics is only a gear shift, and revolution only its overdrive: war as "continuation of politics by other means" would be instead a police pursuit at greater speed, with other vehicles. The ultima ratio very carefully engraved on pieces of artillery under Louis XIV expressed quite well the procedure for changing speed. The piece of artilery is a mixed vehicle that synthesizes two velocities of displacement: that of the relatively rapid tractor-drawn cannon, and the lightning speed of the projectile toward its explosion as the ultimate argument of reason. In the same way, "political socialism,'' by its political nature (polis), usually fails when the acceleration of civil war toward urban collision stops, itself being nothing other than . . .

From Street Fight to State Right I 43

Some regard unfavorably the current proliferation of parades in the city, a�bulatory manifestations, even a "rally of the unemployed,'' such as in April 1 977 in Thionville. They don't really see, after the sporting grand finale of May '68, the professional or social efectiveness of such performances. Nonetheless, these urban crosscountry races, these obstacle courses, have a precise goal that the classics of western revolutionary culture, such as Pravda, again revealed in the summer of 1 976: " Parading in the streets is a worker's best possible preparation for the battle for power. . . "

Already under the ancien regime-the monarch's physical person being associated with the State-we see disturbances, scenes of revolt as soon as the king's place of residence becomes uncertain. The Parisian populace penetrates the Royal Palace; then, after having been admitted to c�ntemplate the sovereign, leaves feeling calmer. In the same way, for the proletarian masses from the country or the suburbs, the simple fact of penetrating to the heart of Paris, of feeling under their feet its avenues and opulent streets, is a very concrete way of diminishing a real and measurable social and political resistance between the masses and the constructed power of the bourgeois State. In fact, mass movements under the ancien regime, wandering in search of the person of the monarch/State, prefigure the new organization of trafic flows that we arbitrarily call the "French Revolution,'' which is nothing other than the rational organization of a social abduction. The "mass uprising" of 1 793 is the removal of the masses.

The discourse propagated by revolutionary propaganda is like the bourgeois citadel's old religious discourse. It distances and dissuades the mobile masses; it designates a new revolutionary State as not being here in the city, in the streets, but over there, far away, in the excessiveness of a universal and timeless raid. "Embrace," cries Gregoire, "the expansion of the centuries as that of the regions . . . avoid a much-heeded prejudice that would circumscribe the Republic in a very restricted territory! " (November 27, 1 792)-while the bourgeoisie immediately gives itself new properties and estates, and threatens with death all who would question the right to private property (March 1 8 , 1 79 3 ) . What it ofers as territories to its "conscripts" are the roads of Europe. "Where the feet are, there is the fatherland" (ubi pedes, ibi patria) , Roman law had already decreed. With the French Revolution, al the highways became national !

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I Speed and Politics

The movement of the Parisian sans-culotes preceded the "mass uprising" of '93 as, much later, the sinister adventure of Hilter's "Brown Shirts," the Sturmabteilung, would precede the German mobilization for total war. Like them, the sans-culotes are dromomaniacs, "couriers of terror" sent forward before the Revolution onto the Parisian pavement. The decree of March 2 1 , 1 793, legalizes their specific function: these militant political fanatics are only the logistical agents of teror, members of the "police": denunciation of "suspects," surveillance of neighborhoods and buildings, deliverance of certificates of civic merit, arrests, but also provisions, circulation and navigation of commodities, price controls . . .

In May they will be absorbed into the Army of the Interior, sent in infernal columns along the roads of the provinces. One year later their leaders will be executed, like the supreme commander of the Brown Shirts on June 30, 1 934, the "Night of the Long Knives."

Revolution is no more than a rerouting of the old social assault. Carnot, as a good member of the Corps of Engineers, channels his fleet far from the communal fortress, toward the "army zones. " He still prefers to take his contingents from the Parisian popular forces; the soldier of Year II is torn from the s treet that he wanted to conquer and involved in the irrational voyage, the deportation of the long and murderous "forced march. " "The new army," writes Carnot, "is a mass army crushing the adversary under its weight in a permanent ofensive, to the tune of the Marseilaise." The national anthem is only a road song, regulating the mechanics of the march. In his memoirs, Poumies de la Siboutie notes, "Never had we sung so much . . . songs were a powerful revolutionary means, the 'Marseillaise' electrifed the populace . . . "

From Street Fight to State Right I 45

The mathematician Carnot and the doctor Poumies were not mistaken: the revolutionary song is a kinetic energy chat pushes the masses toward the battlefield, toward the kind of Assault that Shakespeare had already described as "Death kiling Death." And that is in fact what it is all about, since one had to charge the enemy artillery, and the only way was for the infantryman to rush toward the cannons, to kil its servants on the spot. But to reach them, he had an extremely limited amount of time: the time it took the enemy artillery to reload. As soon as the shot had been fired, therefore, the infantryman had to rush toward the enemy cannons. His life then depended on his running speed; if he was too slow, he died literally disintegrated point blank by the firing end . . .

Everything in this new warfare becomes a question of time won by man over the fatal projectiles toward which his path throws him. Speed is Time saved in the most absolute sense of the word, since it becomes human Time directly torn from Death-whence those macabre emblems of decimation worn down through history by the Assault troops, in other words the rapid troops (black uniforms and flags, death's heads, by the uhlan, the SS, etc.).

46 I Speed and Politics

But beyond this, what should we think of this revolution that wil soon be entirely reduced to a permanent Assault on Time? The perpetual ofensive of Carnot's mass armies is the reversal of the old "run before you." Salvation is no longer in flight; safety is in "running toward your Death," in "killing your Death." Safety is in Assault simply because the new ballistic vehicles make flight useless; they go faster and farther than the soldier, they catch up with him and pass him. The man on the battlefield has no safety, it seems, other than in a suicidal entrance into the very trajectory of the speed of the engines. It is toward this that he is pitile\_ssly pushed by the new military j urisdiction that takes him literally "between two fires!" From now on, general safety can come only from the masses in their entirety reaching speed. Napoleon expresses it clearly: "Aptitude for war is aptitude for movement, " and he specifies that one must evaluate the strength of the army "as in mechanics, by its mass multiplied by its speed."

Hegel, admiring the French revolutionaries, writes in January 1 807 to a friend: "Every Frenchman has learned to look Death in the face. " In particular, he compares the old institutions to "those children's shoes, become too tight, that hinder the gait, and that the revolutionaries soon got rid of." Always the unconscious dynamic metaphor, the new dialectics of the banlefield transcribed in philosophical and political terms. The under-equipped French soldier, actually looks his Death in the face-in the black, gaping hole of the cannon toward which he throws himself. This "army of dwarves" (Goethe) would need "seven-league boots" : "a troop of dwarves, when we expected to see giants in Germany." But this was understandable, since their probable size had been calculated on the basis of their road speed. The Germans had imagined long strides taken by huge individuals. They hadn't counted on the new factor:

From Street Fight to State Right I 47

the inordinate devekpment of the kinetic energy of the revolutionary masses. This discourse likens the acquisition of high speeds of assault, of invasion, even of explosion, to the "mechanics" of a revolution symbolized primarily by the conquest of the streets, then "liberating" itself on the highway.

Significantly, every totalitarian combat will repeat this procedure . The German National Socialists, enemies of the bourgeoisie-or at least claiming to be in order to mobilize the dromomaniacs of the Brown Shirts-take over the German State, city by city, or rather street by street, before spreading highway by highway toward the neighboring territories, as if the German masses, "set in motion" by their leaders' dynamic declarations, could no longer be stopped.

After the conquest of the streets and the massacre of the Brown Shirts, the National Socialist motor will nonetheless come back to its ordinary drivers: the lower- and middle-class administrators; the big capitalism that, since the 1 920s, had furnished it with important subsidies; the Reichswehr and the vehicles of Rommel and Guderian, carrying the military front far of, "where the tanks are." With the National Socialist lightning-war, the old, outmoded frontier wall disappears, ostensibly replaced by the rapid path. Already, the German nation is no longer exactly where its famous boots-the symbol of its army-fall, but rather under the tracks of its tanks, in the motor fo rce of its "steel front." As Ratzel wrote at the end of the nineteenth century, "War consists in advancing your boundaries over the other's territory. " The front is now no more than a war isobar reviving ancient rites of foundation. But for the dromocrat of total war, the once-so-coveted city is already no longer in the city. Warsaw, archaically declared an "open city," is destroyed in September by air raids.

48 I Speed and Politics

From H ighway R ight to State R ight

The attack changed with the invention o f machines to destroy.

^- Errard, known as Bar le Due

AS SOON AS it takes power, the Nazi government ofers the German proletariat sport and transport. No more riots, no need for much repression; to empty the streets, it's enough to promise everyone the highway. This is the "political" aim of the Volkswagen, a veritable plebiscite, since Hitler convinced 1 70,000 citizens to buy a VW when there still wasn't a single one available. The "NSK" (National Socialistisches Kraftahr Korps: the National Socialist automobile corps) is organized locally, according to the categories of privatelyowned cars. It soon gathers half a million drivers and trains them to drive over every kind of terrain, -to shoot while driving, etc. Every member of these "sporting" clubs thus returns, in this exercise, to the premonitory techniques of Bonnot's and Al Capone's vehicular crimes. But if it is true that in 1 9 4 1 Brecht, in The Resistable Ascent of Arturo Ui, was content to make a gangster Hider's double, the similarities nonetheless go beyond simple parody. The American migrant's race to power is, like the fascist tragedy or the anarchistic adventure of Bonnot in 1 9 1 1 , inseparable from the revolution in transportation. Like Mussolini and Hitler, the great figures of American

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