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The SST afair, followed by that of the Concorde, illustrate this system of ruin (so ruinous that the advanced States must band together in order to maintain the production of these machines that are subject only to the law of speed) . A5 at the origins of the fleet in being, the upkeep of the monopoly demands that every new engine be immediately superseded by a faster one. Bur the threshold of speed is constantly shrinking, and the faster engine is becoming more and more dificult to conceive of. It is often obsolete even before being used; the product is literally worn out before being operated, thus surpassing "by speed" the entire profit system of industrial obsolescence! When riches, accumulations and modes of production were freed from their enclosure, therefore, it was not to reach free enterprise, their socialization, bur to reach their own vehicular power, their maximum dynamic efficiency. This is the "futility" of wealth that disappeared in the essence of dromological progress. Western man has appeared superior and dominant, despite inferior demographics, because he appeared more rapid. In colonial genocide or ethnocide, he was ^the survivor because he was in fact super-quick (sur vif). The French word vif, "lively," incorporates at least three meanings: swiftness, speed (vitesse) , likened to violence-sudden force, abrupt edge (vive force, arete vive) , etc.-and to life (vie) itself: to be quick means to stay alive (etre vif, c'est etre en vie) !

With the realization of dromocratic type progress, humanity will stop being diverse. It will tend to divide only into hopefal populations (who are allowed the hope that they will reach, in the future, someday, the speed that they are accumulating, which will give them access to the possible-that is, to the project, the decision, the infinite: speed is the hope of the West) and despairing populations, blocked by the inferiority of their technological vehicles, living and subsisting in a finite world.

70 I Speed and Politics

Thus, the related logic of knowing-power, or power-knowledge, is eliminated to the benefit of moving-power-in other words the study of tendencies, of flows . This is so obvious that, in the last five years, they have stopped teaching geography in the French Military Academy and the police have started experimenting with the "criminostat. "7

Empires with colossal territories such as China, despite their attempts at "modernization," have had to submit to this pure, new order without content since the nineteenth century, finding nothing to oppose the penetration with. And toc!.ay, the Chinese and Vietnamese people's armies are undergoing a· difficult revision, by splitting themselves into a technical (rapid) army and an army of the people, represented as "animal value" (slow) , and therefore, more specifically, "survival value" in the event of a nuclear holocaust. As to the latter, we could recall that in 1 932 the Chinese population of Shanghai had already played this role: it was, in fact, among the first in the world to sufer Japanese experiments with massive air attacks aiming at the total destruction of urban centers. The German military command had also scrutinized the social fallout when elaborating their own "security plans" : false alarms, exercises, system of urban shelters , etc., which in the mind of the political leaders must have cpntributed largely to the psychological formation of the German citizenry. By a curious twist of fate, it is now the Chinese who have been greatly inspired by this national socialistic mobilization . . .

In the war ofTime, the social "beyond" of populations has become the "beyond" of the zero-hour, as the revolutionary's last hope.

To extract a purely technological, military element from a population in arms was thus a capital political decision for the Chinese leaders, for nowhere else had armies and populations remained so biologically associated, up to and including in the tools they used. This revolutionary unity is brutally destroyed by the discovery of other evidence. The class struggle is replaced by the struggle of the technological bodies of the armies according to their dynamic efficiency: air force versus navy, ground army versus police/politics, etc. A caricature of this situation has existed in Latin America for some time now.

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Practical War

Hoorah! No more contact

with the vile earth!

\- Marineti, 1905

I N 1 9 1 4, the military high command in Europe was still following Clausewitz or Napoleon. It concentrated on exerting its will in a ground war of rapid penetration, of short and decisive battles. The advantage of this type of conflict was that it skirted around the problems posed by the military distribution of territories, since the logistical efort required would be of little importance, and especially of little constancy-a war, in a sense, with no terrain, or at best having little to do with it!

We are still in the mentality of the Vienna Congress; the European monarchic powers that feel the end coming give a final sign of life. Like Clausewitz in Vom Kriege, they try desperately to draw a line between absolute and total war. Total war is omnipresent; it is first waged on the sea because the naval glacis naturally presents no permanent obstacle to a vehicular movement of planetary dimensions. Nonetheless, this type of totalitarian conflict can be realized on the earth only on condition of setting up infra structures that are durable in ubiquity. As Vauban remarks, we should be able to superimpose war onto all the inhabitable parts of the universe.

2

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"Ubique quo fas et gloria ducunt" : the English engmeers ended up significantly reducing their motto to UBIQUE . . . "everywhere." This means the universe redistributed by the military engineers, the earth "communicating" like a single glacis, as the infra structure of a future battlefield. 1 This is the wo rld that is transformed "from a landscape as workshop into a planned landscape, an imperial space," as Lukacs remarks about German socialism. When Renan welcomed Lesseps into the French Academy, he reproached him "for having sought peace and found war" by making the Suez Canal a new Bosphorus. A century has passed without contradicting Renan's prophecy; the penetration of the Suez isthmus is an old polytechnician's dream for which a number of Saint Simonian engineers died. Its realization was then considered by the military experts a new index of reliability in the totality of international communications, a considerable acceleration point on the network of inferences of worldwide strategy. By "redesigning the map of the world," they opened the way to the "transport of war" toward the East, as well as to the new vertical trusts . With the great geo-strategic revolution of the nineteenth century, social and economic organization begins to depend entirely on that of the space of activity as the place of transference, and the phenomenon of war begins to feed itself by creating the sources of its own conflicts and multiplying them : they are still dying for Suez or Panama.

In 1 9 1 4, however, rural, enclosed France was still scarcely favorable to the development of the military transport's omnipresence; the conflict carried by its heavy mobile engines lost no time in sinking with them. War stopped being a brief, charming promenade, a touristic stroll. The adversaries bury each other and come to know battles without precedent, since they can last, as at Verdun, for an entire year-from February to December, 1 9 1 6. Annies could no longer simply come and go.

7 4 I Speed and Politics

At this point, the French reaction is significant. They first want to maintain political distance, and they still come back to the communal schema as a guarantee of internal order. The country is cut in two by a demarcation line: a "civilian" France, the rear guard, with its democratic government, its economic and industrial activities , its new matriarchy' of.female suppliers (who will give the feminist struggle its dubious nature) ; and a "military" France, the army zones, fortified glacis where, Ferry notes: "The supreme commander is no longer a chief of war, but the administrator of a territory"2-a territory in which civilian power hoped to crystallize the battle and enclose its military proletariat in an absolute war, a war "without limitations in the use of violence," but one that would not spread, could not be brought into the interior.

This is the war of attrition. For the high command, the enormous wear on the troops and material, the modern form of decimation, was still, at the beginning of the war, a gold star in a general's career! It was considered a mark of the military commander's great activity, of his personality, even of the orthodoxy of his art, in the jargon of the schools of war-"absence of goodheartedness," "unlimited use of force," which allow one, according to Clausewitz, not to retreat in the face of bloodshed. But here again, the Prussian general found himself rapidly outmoded, he who thought, along with many of his contemporaries, that the social situation of civilized States would finally render their wars much less cruel and destructive than those of other nations.

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Only several months after the beginning of the hostilities, Ferry shows us how dificult it is-since one of the newest jobs for the personnel assigned the logistical task is the rational evaluation of the army's obsolescence-to calculate the damage inflicted by the new industri� war fast enough to compensate in time for the pure and simple disappearance of the two parties on the battlefield, something that had never been seen before. The voluntary war of attrition was both the first war of disappearance and the first of consumption: disappearance of men, material, cities, landscapes; and unbridled consumption of munitions, material, manpower.

Little by little, the elegant battle plans and orders of attack give way to new considerations: consumption of grenades by trench yard, production programs, balance and evaluation of suppliesduring an attack in 1 9 1 7, for example, they consume 6,947,000 explosive shells on the French side, or 28% of the existing stock . . . But they also speak in terms of "daily consumption of artillery." The theory of the high command disappears in what is henceforth called "practical war" -that which makes war convenient, easier to use; that which keeps it from getting bogged down in its own impossiblities. The French Ministries of War and that of Weapons are separated, the latter headed by the famous Loucheur, who prefigures Bush and Speer, the technocrats of total war.

The war of attrition marks a new threshold: bourgeois society had believed it could enclose absolute violence in the ghetto of the army zone but, deprived of space, war had spread into human Time-the war of attrition was also the war of Time. Like the troops of Year II, the mobile mass of 1 9 1 4 had been thrown into battle with a cry of "ultreia!" But the battle was finally reduced to a series of individual actions, a war of petty oficers, a succession of brief runs toward death succeeding each other day by day, from month to month, at the same place; or else of "long vacations" for the immobile men, waiting for the end where they lay, nailed to the ground by the power of the bombardments. Proletarian lodging in the "army zones" replaces the swamp of the "urban zone." The no man's land has become a suburb, a neutralizing space in which the promise of movement is no longer accomplished, and the loss of movement for the national fortress is first the loss of good health, then death. Revolts and mutinies on the part of soldiers refusing the assault succeed the disorder of the urban riot, the stationing of the masses in the city, before becoming in the debacle "simple civil war," as Engels had predicted to Lassalle-a reroutⁱng toward the interior of the "proletariat's torrent of energy" (Trotsky) . In 1 9 1 7 in France national war lost its old revolutionary prestige in the eyes of the masses, simply because it was no longer able to "advance. " It no longer reached the Assault's superior speed, no longer won the race against death, against the engine of war.

76 I Speed and Politics

The voyage of the masses once more took them from the street to the rail road, the street in which they paraded while singing and counting of steps before a city population applauding the departure of the fearsome armed mob. After that, the military livestock quickly jumped on the cattle wagon, but everything was over very fast. As Captain de Poix notes, "So many times had I seen our infantry leave for battle, magnificent in their enthusiasm, only to be suddenly cut down by an unsuspected machine gun; in the space of several minutes the battlefield was littered with corpses. "

The good captain thus had the stroke o f genius t o remedy the troops' stasis. He conceived of "armored cars going over all kinds of terrain," and, from November 25, 1 9 1 5 , he promoted the large scale manufacture of this new kind of war machine. By January 3 1 , 1 9 1 6, they built 400 assault tanks, and as soon as they appeared on the battlefield their psychological efect was tremendous. The generals were soon screaming by the millions for those "automotive forts," the new technical obj ect that so perfectly realized a strategic philosophy obsessed by Frederick the Great's dictum: "To win is to advance!''. Soon Ferry could write, before he himself was cut down in the attack ofVauxaillon, "French morale has reached an unprecedented degree of exaltation. Last month, the soldiers on leave from Parnay found their leave too long, and they returned to the front as if _they _were _going _on _vacation _{. .} . _They _already _saw _themselves _at _the Meuse or the Rhine! I unleash my every dream . . . "

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Speed is the hope of the West; it is speed that supports the armies' morale. What "makes war convenient" is transportation, and the armored car, able to go over every kind of terrain, erases the obstacles. With it, earth no longer exists. Rather than caling it an "all terrain" _vehicle, _they _should _call _it _"sans _ter_ain"-_it _climbs _embankments, runs over trees, paddles through the mud, rips out shrubs and pieces of wall on its way, breaks down doors. It escapes the old linear trajectory of the road or the railway. It ofers a whole new geometry to speed, to violence. It is already no longer simply an auto-mobile, but also · a projectile and launcher, while waiting to become a radio transmitter as well; it hurls both projectiles and itself With it, once more, Death kills Death, since it victoriously opposes the fearsome German machine gun. Captain de Poix has a prophetic vision of a batlefield literally covered by the mass of these automotive forts. After leaving the street, the military proletariat loses contact with the road. From now on, anything can become a probable trajectory of its Assault. The battlefield has become like the naval glacis, without obstacles, entirely run by the rapid engines, the "battleships of the earth."

The war of attrition had, from lack of space, spread out into Time; duration was survival. All-terrain (or rather, sans-terrain)

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assault extends war over an earth that disappears, crushed under the infinity of possible trajectories. We suddenly find ourselves facing a new "right to the earth. " Just as totalitarian as the right to the sea, it implies for the masses another phenomenology of becoming. The rush of Assault-mobiles prolongs the mad rush of auto-taxis leaving the Parisian pavement in 1 9 1 4 and heading for the Marne, "the last romantic battle, in which the archaic part of the war came to an end" Qean de Pierrefeu) . The speed of military transport is no longer only "a metaphor for a vertigin_�us passage of existential time . " The speedometer of the assault engine is literally, for its passengers, an "existential quantifier," a measure of sur-vival!

It is interesting to note the attitude of the British high command at this capital juncture in dromological progress: from the first continental assaults, this nautical people once more takes to the open sea, unconcerned about enclosing itself in an infrangible continental battle. "He prefers the war of machines" -they should say engines-"to the war of chest beating," goes a popular saying. They have 500,000 men on the sea and 3,000,000 in the arsenals and factories. If they participate with an obvious ill will in the hodge-podge of command, it is nonetheless understandable that they are the first to want to la_�nch on the terrestrial battlefield, to the north of the Somme, the "battleships of the earth"-sans-terrain assault engines for which they will have a lasting afection, as we saw in the desert in 1 942 . . .

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