Speed and Politics

gangsterism begin in the street where they wander as beggars, as foreigners-the famous Jim Colosimo began as a streetsweeper and, like many of his compatriots, naturally passed over the threshold of the political shop as an electoral agent, a door-to-door salesman

Later, the municipalities remain under the influence of the "brown tro op" of their S .A. for, there as well, the automobile apotheosis of the 1920s, with its kidnappings, its shootings, its street battles, the wild chases of its armored cars, is b ut a technical episode in the dromocratic assault on the city and its wealth by a migrant mass come from Europe or Asia-before it becomes the Assault on the American State itself. But wasn't Al Capone supported on the national scale by the Republican Party? And didn't he owe his "training" to his voluntary service in the U.S. Army?

The unknown troops of gangsters will furthermore be spotlighted during the last war at the time of the Italian liberation, and its men revealed as "good American citizens."

On another level, we can understand how the American government will survive the economic crisis of the 1930s and cure the masses of their "temptation of the streets." Here as well the experience of the gangster-dromocrats is fairly instructive. The stroke of genius will consist in doing away with the direct repression of riots, and the political discourse itself, by unveiling the essence of this discourse: the transportation capacity created by the mass production of automobiles (since 1914 with Ford) can become a social assault, a revolution sufficient and able to modify the citizen's way of life by transforming al the consumer's needs, by totally remodeling a territory that (need we be reminded of it?) at the beginning had no more than 400 kilometers of road.

Doctor Helmut Klotz notes in 1 937 that "the National Socialist Automobile Corps is an organization that, within strict boundaries, could immediately become useful to the motorization of the German Army. " If he thinks that motorization presents only a limited advantage over long distances, he nonetheless recognizes that over a short distance it has the power to increase the Assault Forces' strength to an extraordinary degree.

50 I Speed and Pol itics

On the shores across the way, the perpetual transformation of the barbarous esthetic of the mass-produced American car, the provocative excess of its body, of its ornaments, manifest the permanence of the social revolution (progress toward the "American way of life") . But at the same time, this great aµtomobile body has been emasculated, its road holding is defective and its powerful motor is bridled. Just as for the laws on speed limits, we are talking about acts of government, in other words of the political control of the highway, aiming precisely at limiting the "extraordinary power of assault" that motorization of the masses creates.

This frustration inflicted on the driver (who is suddenly deprived of the "high" of high speeds as he is of alcohol) , this vehicular prohibition is also the constitution by the State of a new beyond: "There were literally millions of youngsters who could drive cars, or repair them, who could build their own radio sets and communicate as 'hams' all over the world (experts in cross-country motorcycle and circulation) , a· whole generation of competent resourceful mechanics and electricians," remarks V. Bush in 1 949 in Modern Arms and Free Men. "Every corner garage, every radio club, was a sort of center of training, training that could be readily transformed in a short time, when the test came, into the ability to operate the complex implements of war."

This permanent exploitation of the ignorant masses' aptitude for movement as a social solution is not peculiar to industrialized nations. The problem of shoes had been posed to civilian industry by the mass armies before that of cars. In 1 792 the Supply Corps are able to furnish the barefoot troops with 200 pairs of shoes, when they would need 80,000.1 Nonetheless, since "walking is a strategic instrument even apart from military engagement," as we saw, this kind of As.sault is, first launched against Time and can be realized _theoretical& _even _when _the _material _means _are _lacking.

From Highway Right to State Right I 51

Currently, the opposition parties are fighting about the "transportation time" of the workers. Here again, it's a question of "time saved," and we return to the origins of social "metamorphosis." We are here at the level of the "revolution of three eights" so dear to the men of 1 848-eight hours of work, eight of sleep, eight of leisure time. A more remarkable fact is that this demand, when it is made, has from the outset had the singular merit of creating unity between all the parties, in every revolutionary movement, from the moderates to the extremists. This "time war" waged by the workers "has all the advantages of a revolutionary demand without any of the drawbacks. "2 Thus the Soviet republic decides to introduce it in autumn 1 9 1 7, and the German republic in 1 9 1 8 .

The French republic, at the end of the war, fears a bloody May 1 . And in fact, for that day in 1 9 1 9, an enormous parade is again being organized, and the government knows that the only watchword will be "eight hours . " But hadn't the Socialist Party heads just distinguished themselves in the responsibilities of power? Hadn't one of them headed the Ministry of Weapons? To grant the "eight hours" was thus to "preserve a definitive seal, to keep in peacetime what had existed in wartime: a sacred bond. "

On May 1 , 1 9 1 9, the proletariat is again demobilized; it has just left the glacis of the trenches and once more finds itself "facing death" in the glacis of the city streets. After the hugs and kisses of the first days, what was taken for civilian "ingratitude" toward the front lines is only a return to normalcy, to the citizen's basic distrust of and disdain for the masses of gyrovagues regaining their freedom of movement, again becoming available for the political batle . . .

52 I Speed and Politics

In 1 936 the true nature of these "eight hours ofleisure," which has until then remained mysterious, is revealed: leisure means paid vacation, and paid vacation means travel�en the "last voyage," as was strangely underlined by a famous song of the so-called euphoric Popular Front. A revolution in transportation, not in happinesstoward campsites, youth hostel/barracks; camps everywhere, the great camp of territory. But isn't the Spanish Civil War· about to be declared, and French non-intervention to become the tomb of the Popular Front that stops dead by refusing the "beyond" of this final voyage?

The abusive manipulation of the dromocratic discourse by the men of the political bourgeoisie should have warned us long ago about their true revolutionary intentions.

The events of 1789 claimed to be a revolt against subjection, that is, against the constraint to immobility symbolized by the ancient feudal serfdom (which furthermore persisted in certain regions)-a revolt against arbitrary confinement and the obligation to reside in one place. But no one yet suspected that the "conquest of the freedom to come and go" so dear to Montaigne could, by a sleight of hand, become an obligation to mobility. The "mass uprising" of 1 793 was the institution of the first dictatorship of movement, subtly replacing the freedom of movement of the early days of the revolution.

The reality of power in this first modern State appears beyond the accumulation of violence as an accumulation of movement. In short, on July 14, 1789, the taking of the Bastille was a truly Foucaldian error on the part of the people of Paris: the famous symbol of imprisonment is already an empty fortress, the rioters discovering with astonishment that there's no one left to "liberate" behind its formidable walls.

From Highway Right to State Right I 53

The strategic schema of the revolution gives the two dominating classes their specific proletariat: the "nation on the march" of the mass army's military proletariat sent out on the "highway territory," and an industrial proletariat, a "worker's army," as it is caled, that remains enclosed.in the vast camp of the national teritory. We can thus clearly distinguish two functions (or rather, functionings) of the thus-mobilized proletarian base, for never were the terms of proletarianization more radically set than by the Convention in its decree of February 1 793: "The young shall go to war," while "married men, women and children will be forced to work in manufacturing" (arms, clothing, tents, bandages, etc.)-in short, logistical provisions. We see, then, that the new commercial bourgeoisie tends to enrich itself by amassing the productive movements (actions) of the industrial proletariat (the bourgeoisie of the Gironde and the war suppliers, the Swiss bank with Perregaux, etc.) , while the military class amasses the destructive act of the mobile masses, and the production of destruction is accomplished by the pr_?letariat's power of assault.

History shows that the decay of the enclosed bourgeoisies necessarily marks the decline of the productive masses and the rise in the State of methods of military proletarianization. In its doings, the Marxist State, for example, first appears as a dictatorship of motor fanctiom, a totalitarianism very carefully programming and exploiting every form of mass movement. According to the rare witnesses, after the fall of Phnom Penh Cambodia becomes a "vast camp," and they rail against Marx and the Soviets as "inventors of the gulag"-whereas in reality it is only an outburst of the movement of military proletarianization. In fact, according to their own expression, the Khmer Rouges see the civilian populations of their own country, its millions of men, women and children, as "prisoners of war." The new leaders of Cambodia apply-to the letter, it seems-a memoir left twenty-five years earlier to the Sorbonne by Kieu Samphan. Thus we know where the virus that is ravaging this unfortunate country comes from: the utopian schema of the Cambodian revolution is only the antithesis of the bourgeois revolution. The large cities were brutaly emptied of their inhabitants, who were massacred or thrown out into the countryside; certain neighborhoods were razed, replaced by rice fields; there is no communication between city and country; the only inhabitants of the depopulated city now are several infantry batalions, the Khmer leaders and certain diplomatic missions. More than a revolution, it's the tragic end of th^� siege on the communal fortress, finally submerged by its assailants.

54 I Speed and Politics

In 'liberated" Vietnam, they discover other kinds of proletarian mobilization: after the fall of Saigon, certainly, a primary concern of the revolutionary armies was to put "unworthy" elements such as prostitutes or the lazy black market dealers of the great Southern city to work on logistical reconstruction (of strategic roads, railroads, bridges, etc.) . But it was also to teach its youth, decked out in new uniforms, to "mime" its j oy at being liberated-thus teaching it the simplicity of a power that comes down to the constraint and housebreaking of bodies. The dictatorship of the proletariat is only this dictatorship of movement (of the act) that is revealed by the great totalitarian holidays · with their immense kinetic crowds. The spartakiades and gymnastic celebrations are always given a place of honor in the Eastern bloc countries, just as they were in the time of fascism: this synchronization integrates thousands of individuals into geometric ensembles as did, once upon a time, the square" of military maneuvers. The crowd's dynamism becomes a kaleidoscopic decoration, voluntarily forming slogans or gigantic portraits of the Party leaders, allowing the revolutionary militant to become for an instant a part of Mao's or Stalin's body.

From Highway Right to State Right I 55

But even more interesting are the rehabilitation camps which the Vietnamese, after the Chinese, are evidently so proud of, since they wil supposedly eliminate from the system bloody repression and brutal punishment. These camps, to which they send men without judgment, should warn us by their very medical designation: rehabilitation ^has to do with the mechanical programming of invalid or handicapped bodies; it claims to repair them. The ideological delinquent or dissident is no longer considered a political opponent; he is not allowed the preferential psychiatric treatment accorded by the Russians or the Americans to their intellectuals. Materialism reaches its absolute form, since even the possiblity of granting importance to an opposing thought, to a difering concept, is totally eliminated. The dissident is a body, his dissidence a postural crime-for example, his indolence, his lasciviousness. Ostensibly, there are hardly any more crimes of opinion, only crimes of gesture. The confession is superceded: bodies are guilty of being out of synch, they have to be put back in the party line, at the speed of an entire population in maneuvers, for whom everything is an opportunity for public physical exercise, from the classic handling of arms to relaxation and gymnastics in the street, in the camps, in the factories, in team sports and dance, telluric and ecological guard duty, etc.3

During the Chinese cultural revolution, one often saw a kind of embarrassment on the faces of Mao and Chou En-lai before those millions of individuals brandishing, like so many robots, the "little red book." Was the revolution of civilization desired by the poet going to be reduced to this gymnastic group doubled by a mass denunciation campaign that was posted on the walls of Peking, like the Paris Commune one hundred years earlier (a police state, Cluseret called it), like the Cambodian revolution with its "kang-Chlop?" Was socialism going to be reduced to a socialization of "intelligence?"

56 I Speed and Politics

It is understandable that the political revolution ends up redistributing police functions (powers) to all the militants as if they were so many agents of the military highway patrol, harnessed under the ancien regime to the establishment of social transparency, to the observation of postures and movements not conforming to the social corpus-but also observation of the territorial body, as in telluric surveillance; a kind of ecological police that revives urban control, and seems for the powers that be to be a solution of the future.

Castro trading in his sloppy guerrilla garb for a uniform d la Pinochet, Brezhnev dressing up as a marshal.1 the massive presence of overdecorated military leaders in every socialist grandstand in the world tell us: the ultimate capitalizers on the productive act, the true dictators of movement-are them. It's from them, and not from vague philosophers or ideologues, that the political idea of natiom on the move was born in 1 789-the masses of the new military proletariat becoming projectiles toward the middle of the nineteenth century with the triumph of industrial artillery and the spread of machine warfare. " Heavy cannons," writes Trotsky in 1 9 1 4, "instill in the working classes the idea that when you cannot get around an obstacle, yo u can still break through it; the static phases of their psychology then give way to the dynamic phases.

After Lenin, Mao will qualify the people as the "motor force of history" when the importance of the conquest of energy sources arises. The political metaphor follows closely behind logistical progress to the extent that it claims a place in History. Military science, like History, is but a persistent perception of the kinetics of vanished bodies; inversely, bodies can appear as vehicles of history, as its dynamic vectors. Napoleon III claimed that "for the man of war, the ability to remember is science itself "

Frcm Highwa11 Right to State Right I 57

DROMOLOGICAL PROGRESS

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