Speed and Politics

From Space R ight to State R ight

The creature bound by water is a creature in vertigo. I t dies at

each instant; something of its substance is constantly colapsing.

^- Bachelard

AN ENGLISH CARTOON from the nineteenth century shows Bonaparte and Pitt cutting chunks out of an enormous globe-shaped pudding with their sabers, the Frenchman taking the continents while the Englishman claims the sea. This is another way of parceling out the universe: rather than confronting each other on the same terrain, within the limits of the battlefield, the adversaries choose to create a fundamental physical struggle between two rypes of humanity, one populating the land, the other the oceans. They invent nations that are no longer terrestrial, homelands in which no one could set foot; homelands that are no longer countries. The sea is open, the joining of the demos and the element of freedom (of movement) . The "right to the sea," it seems, is a particularly Western creation, just as, later, the "right to air space" will be the element in which Air Force Marshall Goering dreams of installing die fliegende nation, the Nazi demos.1 "Every German must learn to fly . . . Wings hang dormant under men's skins." Watching the launch of the first rockets, Hider, who feels military defeat coming, tells Dornberger,

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"If I had believed in your work, there would have been no need for war . . . " -or at least there woukl have been no need for combat!

To defeat, without fighting, a continental adversary who constantly exhausts himself by rushing into the spatial and temporal limits o(the terrestrial battlefield is, as we know, what England will manage to do. Hider, like Napoleon, will be defeated by the fleet in being,2 which will constantly draw its victory from its inaccessibility to combat, from its abandonment of the harmful principle that we must attack as soon as the enemy is in sight, that we must shorten the distance between them and us . The fleet in being is logistics taking strategy to its absolute point, as the art of movement of unseen bodies; it is the permanent presence in the sea of an invisible fleet able to strike no matter where and no matter when, annihilating the enemy's will to power by creating a global zone of insecurity in which it will no longer be able to "decide" with certainty, to want-in other words, to win. Thus, it is above all a new idea of violence ,that no longer comes from direct confrontation and bloodshed, b ut rather from the unequal properties of bodies, evaluation of the number of movements allowed them in a chosen element, permanent verification of their dynamic eficiency. If Napoleon judged an army's strength in mechanical terms, Maurice de Saxe, one of the first on the European continent, understood that violence can be reduced to nothing but movement". "I am not in favor of battle," he states. "I am persuaded that an able general can wage war his whole life long without being forced to do battle. " Nonetheless, in Western Europe, in a restricted and uneven terrain, one could not claim to "melt away the enemy" without eventually being driven to direct confrontation between ever larger military masses. German incarceration is the best example of this historical territorial constraint, which created the brief and bloody war-mongering of Prussian theory. On the immense nautical glacis, on the other hand, the home fleet could elude battle almost indefinitely; it was not forced by the adversary into desperate combat as long as it stayed out of reach, all the while remaining present.

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Not to be driven to desperate combat, but to provoke a prolonged desperation in the enemy, to inflict permanent moral and material suferings that diminish him and melt him away: this is the role of indirect strategy, which can make a population give up in despair without recourse to bloodshed. As the old saying goes, "Fear is the cruelest of assassins: it never kills, . but keeps you from living." After all, the invention of happiness, that new idea in Europe according to Saint-Just, was perhaps no more for the continentals than a way of resisting the moral constraint come from the sea, the loss of their substance.

In 1 9 1 4, it took the Allied blockade two years before the German civilians felt the initial efects, but these efects lasted well after the end of the terrestrial combat and were an indirect factor in Germany's subsequent economic failure. It was this prolonged despair that provided the ground for the hot-headed politics of Nazism, for the fascist domestication of the German people. In the same way, the rapid material and moral collapse that we are now seeing in Western Europe is the long-range result of the American geo-strategic turnaround, creating on our continent, from afar, a new economic and physiological crisis.

Favored by the merchant populations, indirect strategy reproduced in another element the efects of the old communal poliorcetics. Like the ancient "state of siege," it allowed one to "indefinitely prolong the hostilities" against the totality of populations that are no longer "civilian" but "continental . " It represents the revival of capitalism because it is none other than the technical surpassing of the old fortified place, which was rendered obsolete and dismantled by the power of the new State armies. This is the answer to the exorbitant economic requirements of the continental military class, to its claim to dominate the flows of terrestrial trafic.

From Space Right to State Right I 63

In the final account, economic liberalism is a perfect illustration of Errard de Bar-le-Due's dictum: "The attack changed with the invention of machines to destroy." The bourgeoisie's sudden resistance to the concept of territorial warfare becomes from then on the guiding principle of a capitalism that, by becoming amphibious, applies total warfare on the sea and in the colonies; that jumps literally from "the great immobile machine" into the "mobile machine," making the oceans a "vast logistical camp"; that drags behind it a proletariat harnessed to the functioning of the naval vehicle, a proletariat of rowers who are the machine's true engine, its accelerator in time of battle.

Henceforth, it is no longer a question of crossing a continent or an o�ean from one city to the next, one shore to the next. The fleet in being creates a new dromocratic idea: the notion of displacement without destination in space and time. It imposes the primordial idea of disappearance in distance, and no longer in the danger of cataclysm; it rushes non-stop toward the beyond. The end of the engine here becomes, necessarily and no matter how, the point of no return, the standard fate of the floating machine lost lock, stock and barrel, or simulating its own wreck, like those submarines that jettison fake debris and fuel to escape their pursuers, thus anticipating their actual disappearance; like those old warships hauled out to sea one last time to be sunk in the apotheosis of an ultimate explosion, the staging of great naval funerals where the vessel is sucked into the liquid funnel of the maelstrom-sucked in by its own rush toward the point of no return.

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Gordon Pym and Moby Dick are only the anticipated narratives of the nuclear cruise. The strategic submarine has no need to go anywhere in particular; it is content, while controlling the sea, to remain invisible. But its hourly fate is already sealed. Furthermore, as soon as the fleet in being becomes a fundamental given of the Right to the Sea, the explorers, discoverers and raiders of every stripe, while continuing to seek uncharted lands, equally adhere to the invention of passages, in other words to the realization of the absolute, uninterrupted, circular voyage, since it involves neither departure nor arrival. The loop of no-return is traced in advance by the circular or triangular nautical routes of European mercantilism.

Thus a new category of political rights was created on the oceans: the "right to the sea," initially "an entity that was more emotional and poetic than rational," they said. It is true that the Mediterranean cities-overpopulated, insular nations poor in goods and surface area, dreaming of "working the sea" by creating a nautical demosappear unwilling to be subjected to ancient terrestrial law. The open sea was to compensate for every social, religious and moral constraint, for every political and economic oppression, even for the physical laws due to the earth's gravity, to continental crampedness.

But the right to the sea very quickly became the right to crime, to a violence that was also freed from every constraint . . . Soon, the "empire of the seas" replaces the open sea. The seventeenth-century chronicler can see its fruits even from the shore, where reigns "the horrible industry of shipwreckers massacring and pillaging the survivors of shipwrecks that they provoke with their misleading fires . . . " On the high seas, he sees but "the excesses sanctioned by the very practices of the sea. . . The monstrous despotism that, in the name of commercial monopolies, aspires toward exclusive domination of the oceans . . . a kind of right to conquest exercised by the

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Dutch, after Venice, Spain and Lisbon." And a little further on, he notes: "What is terrifying is that all these powerful nautical organizations were not the doings of States, but almost a spontaneous product of these nations' mercantile engineers, the State having played no further role other than to sanction them, to claim them for it^� own . "

In the final account, it is n o t so surprising that a traficker and buccaneer like Laffitte financed the publication of Marx's manifesto. His vision of the international State rising from society like "its product at a given moment in its evolution'' rather closely resembles the spontaneous empire of the "sea rovers" from which comes the first industrial nation of the modern world. This totalitarian State is located everywhere and nowhere; it is obsessed by commercial exchanges; it serves only economic interests, and is bent on devouring and destroying its adversaries' goods. Its population has "broken loose from its moorings," left the earth; the first to con�orm absolutely to Marx's definition of the industrial proletariat: "Workers have no country . . . we must cut the umbilical cord that holds the worker to the earth. "

In England, up until the nineteenth century, they recruit sailors by simply closing the ports under order of the king and rounding up the seamen. In seventeenth-century France, with the industrialization of naval warfare demanding an increasingly large personnel, they number and register the entire coastal population, declaring it "available and enrolled in a single, great army, serving by turns in war, in trade, and in land-development activities . " This is called the class system. This first operation of State-instigated military proletarianization, which only barely precedes the French Revolution, is like the masses' first accession to public transport. There is also concern (rare for the time) about the new proletarian's "nationality."

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Deported from total war, he must j ustify his origins; if he is a foreigner, he must be naturalized within five years. Desertion is severely punished and the State practices the social control of families by declaring itself the "protector of women and children," of conscripted workers.

Nonetheless, here again, the expansion of war was such that proletarianization found itself associated with j udicial and police repression: they recruited by luck of the draw, and the proletariat saw itself mixed in with the troop of deportees and galley slaves that the courts "manufactured" in large number under governmental pressure.

In the seventeenth century, the naval proletariat is already, literally, a population of convicts, the "damned of the earth." Marx and Engels' new theoretical opposition to the followers of Proudhon is much like Colbert's reflection deploring French inability to create an all-powerful naval empire, their backwardness in the domain of colonization: "No companies, as long as we continue to imitate Marseilles . . . They would rather give up the best opportunity in the world than lose the pleasure of a country house. Moreover, they don't want great vessels, but only little boats, so that everyone will have his own . . . "3 The creation of the right to the sea, as they conceive of it at the time, is ill compatible with the aptitude for terrestrial happiness, made of simplicity and independence, that is found in the South. In the same way, the social utopia will come less from class antagonism than from the hatred of the Earth, and we could make comparisons ad infinitum between the utopian project and the plans of the naval empire where Marx is buried.4

But it seems more interesting to consider the chronometric aspect of this empire that displaces its violence in the invisibility of the nautical glacis, a floating nation that resembles that other Time machine, History. In fact, victory (decision) in the world without reference point or accident of the fleet in being requires that one be situated, if nowhere on Earth, then at least in Time-in other words, in planetary mechanics. For this simple reason, the English will long remain the best clockmakers in the world. Mastery over the sea ^demands that over Time; it requires you to "shoot for the moon," as they used to say.

From Space Right to Staie Right I 67

So it is natural that the modern formula of popular war will take shape-through English influence on islanders (Paoli in Corsica under Louis XV)-in a nation of navigators: Spain versus the French empire. In fact, popular war is already no longer in a given territory. Rather, it advocates the dispersal of the army corps within society itself (the new soldier will be "like a fish in water, " and this allusion to the liquid element is hardly coincidental) . Like the naval battle, popular war operates on the clash of dynamic bodies. It has to do with "the excesses sanctioned by the very practices of the sea," with absolute violence, with the disappearance of morals and preexisting laws . Popular war is total.

We have not paid enough attention, in Western History, to the moment when this transfer from the natural vitalism of the marine element (the ease with which one can lift, displace, glide weighty engines) to an inevitable technological vitalism5 took place; the moment when the technical transport body left the sea like the unfinished living body of evolutionism, crawling out of its original environment and becoming amphibious. Speed as a pure idea without content comes from the sea like Venus, and when Marinetti cries that the universe has been enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed, and opposes the racecar to the Winged Victory of Samothrace, he forgets that he is really talking about the same esthetic: the esthetic of the transport engine. The coupling of the winged woman with the ancient war vessel and the coupling of Marinetti the fascist with his racecar, "ideal shaft crossing over the earth," whose wheel he controls, emerge from this technological evolutionism whose realization is more obvious than that of the living world. The right to the sea creates the right to the road of modern States, which through this become totalitarian States.

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When Norman Angell states in The Great Illusion that war has become economically fatile because it is no longer founded on flight at the expense of the "exterior group, " in other words on portable wealth, but rather, henceforth, on credit ahd \_the commercial contract, he is mistaken in thinking that this must radically suppress the "conqueror"; his discourse is somewhat lacking in rigor. In fact, what is revealed by this change in the nature of wealth is only a change in the speed of world economy, the passage from the movable unit to the hourly unit: the war a/ Time. With the fleet in being, England concentrates its eforts on technical innovation in the domain of transportation, and more precisely on the manufacture of rapid engines. It draws from this both its economic superiority and the orientation that made it the first great industrial nation, the model for all the others-engendering "that primordial feeling of technical superiority that gets confused with a feeling of general superiority." In fact, there was no "industriai revolution," but only a "dromocratic revolution;" there is no democracy, only dromocracy; there is no strategy, only dromology. It is precisely at the moment when Western technological evolutionism leaves the sea that the substance of wealth begins to crumble, that the ruin of the most powerful peoples and nations gets under way-viz. Carter's declarations about the end of the American dream. It is speed as the nature of dromological progress that ruins progress; it is the permanence of the war of Time that creates total peace, the peace of exhaustion. 6

From Space Rigl1t to State Right I 69