Speed and Politics

DROMOCRATIC SOCIETY

3

Unable Bodies

Risk-but in comfort!

^- Marshal Goering

HERMAN GOERING BECAM E a pilot in the First World War because he had a tendency toward rheumatism and thus, as a foot soldier, sufered from the long marches.

In the course of the various battles, especially since the seventeenth century, awareness had grown of the increasing problem of military infirmity. A flourishing industry developed: orthopedics. It was discovered that the damage caused by the war machines to the mechanics of the surviving bodies could be compensated for by other machines-prostheses. While in France the handicapped are exempt from military service,- this is not the case in Germany: in 1 9 14, the German army had few or no exemptions, for it had decided to make physical handicaps fonctional by using each man according to his specific disability: the deaf will serve in heavy artillery, hunchbacks in the automobile corps, etc. Paradoxically, the dictatorship of movement exerted on the masses by the military powers led to the promotion of unable bodies. The use of the technical vehicle is at this point so assimilated to that of the surgical prosthesis that it will be some time before the French military command finally hands the tanks over to personnel other than the "one quarter sick with malaria, the rest rehabilitated young men who had never seen battle" (Renaudel's report) .

83

In 1 92 1 , Marinetti metaphorizes about the armored car: the overman is over-grafted, an inhuman type reduced to a driving-and thus deciding-principle, an animal body that disappears in the superpower of a metallic body able to annihilate time and space through its dynamic performances. Vain attempts have been made to fit Marinetti's works into various artistic and political categories; but Futurism in fact comes from a single art-that of war and its essence, speed. Futurism provides the most accomplished vision of the dromological evolutionism of the 1 920s, the measure of superspeed! In fact, the human body huddling in the "steel alcove" is not that of the bellicose dandy seeking the rare sensations of war, but of the doubly-unable body of the proletarian soldier. Deprived, as he has always been, of will, he now requires physical assistance from a vehicular prosthesis in order to accomplish his historical mission, Assault. The dromomaniac's kinetic superpower is suddenly devalued. The war of attrition had already shown the disdain in which a mobile mass reduced to inaction was held, and the nature of the treatment reserved for it. Practical war revealed its impotence as a dominant dromocratic agent, the motor and producer of speed on the continent. Nonetheless, the world war having sanctioned the high command's intellectual bankruptcy and the triumph of industrial warfare, everyone felt an insatiable need for manpower. The processes of military proletarianization proved more than ever to be indissociable from those of industrial proletarianization for the generals who, despite themselves, had become "territorial administrators. "

Ferry states: "Now everyone knows that the structure of a batlefield exists . . . The greatest possible technical distribution of terrain is necessary, and if it takes 200,000 men to bring it about, then the government will negotiate with its allies. " "Countries such as Italy and Portugal have admirable reserves of men . . . Here you would not even notice the shortages imposed by the war, " writes an oficial emissary in 1 9 1 6. Governments bargain over and hastily exchange their working-class cattle, bragging abo ut "their resistance to low temperatures, their sobriety and their aptitude for labor. " They dip heavily into colonial properties, Creoles or Blacks from Senegal, workers from Morocco, and especially tireless navies from Indochina by the tens of thousands-other natives such � the Madagascans preferably being reserved for combat. . . If naval warfare, by becoming permanent and total, engendered one of the first mass mobilizations, the perspective of total warfare on the continent, as early as in 1 9 1 4, obviously requires a new social project, an original type of proletarianization.

84

I Speed and Pol itics

Practical war divides the Assault into two phases, the first of which is the creation of the original infrastructure of future battlefields. This infrastructure consists of new railroads and stations, telephone installations, enlargement of roads and tracks, the parallel lines of departue, evacuation routes, shelters, etc. The countryside, the earth is henceforth given over, definitively consecrated to war by the cosmopolitan mass of workers, ·an army of laborers speaking every language, the Babel of logistics. 1 Both the arsenal and the war personnel already take on a kind of peaceful, or rather political, air; they return to highway surveillance. Already we find the beginnings of what will become deterrence: reduction of power in favor of a better trajectory, life traded for survival. The starus quo is the depletion of the earth. In 1 924, the military monk Teilhard de Chardin writes in Mon univers: "We still need mightier and mightier cannons, bigger and biger batleships, to materialize our agression on the worU."

Unable Bodies

I 85

Dromocratic intelligence is not exercised against a more or less determined military adversary, but as a permanent assault on the world, and through it, on human nature. The disappearance of flora and fauna and the abrogation of natural economies are but the slow preparation for more brutal destructions. They are part of a greater e^�onomy, that of the blockade, of the siege; strategies, in other words, of depletion.

The economic war currently ravaging the earth is but the slow phase of declared war, of a rapid and brief assault to come, for this is what perpetuates, in non-combat, military power as class power. From time immemorial, the caste of hunter-raiders has been unproductive, although it provided the group's food. Along with the science of weapons, it has always fostered methods of depletion-what today we call food power. Thus when Venice, that floating nation, that country in which no one had ever "set foot," stopped being the premier economic and naval power because of the discovery of America and the new Atlantic politics of Europe, it providently turned back to the interior, to agrarian power and terrestrial property, for it knew that the loss of sea power meant an immediate threat of sufering food power, always the law of the two types of humanity.

In the same way, the United States, after their first failure at intensive conquest in the 1 930s ("declare peace in the world") , today lead a war without mercy against Green Europe (campaign against the peasants, control of food industries, grain embargoes, etc.) . It is precisely the "futility of wealth" that provides the ground for conquest. American dollar-policies is only one sign of the intensive growth of American military might, momentarily robbed of its extensive growth by the failure in Vietnam and the nuclear standof. But here again we muse admire che speed with which the U.S. replaced their geo-strategic bombardments on North Vietnam (systematic destruction of flora and fauna in the rural environment) with an impressive abandonment of technological material when they retreated from the terrain, making their enemies their best customers, as General Giap's recent declarations could lead us to believe. 2

86 I Speed and Politics

Timeless dromological methods: in the seventeenth-century, when Colbert launches his economic politics with the idea of promoting "national wealth," a "national product," he prepares the way for Louvois' war-effort by "making sure needs are created," by triggering in his neighbors "the prodigious consumption of his so numerous products, " as Sir William Temple says.

For his war-sites, Louvois was directly inspired by Roman proletarianization, while Colbert reproduced the Athenian economic system that had finally brought about the collapse of Lacedaemonian power. As Lyautey writes in 1 90 1 , "The tactic of economic penetration alone is worth every other taught in the military academy." The dromocratic expansion of Greece had also found itself blocked at every turn by the military status quo. The native barbarians had learned to organize militarily in the West. The other colonial satellites collaborated in Greek politics . It is at this point that Athens renounced its system of extensive (rapid) penetration to adopt a system of intensive (slow) penetration; external military engagements were replaced by the abrogation of natural economies in the interior (agrarian reform, urbanization, creation of workshops and factories, etc.) .

Athenian curren_cy, spread over the entire Mediterranean basin, pouncing on the economies of the big cities, created such an inflation of exchanges that it became fatal-notably to Sparta's equilibrium, which for its part had chosen the opposite solution:

Unable Bodies

I 87

conservation of the State apparatus by abolishing military and monetary movement.3

Aristotle wrote the epitaph to Lycurgus' system: "The essential object of any social system must be to organize the military institution like al the others. "

In Sparta the opposite happened. In the first Hellenic democracy we already find most of the great Western themes, except for the main one: mobility. Whereas everything was sacrificed to make the State a single war machine, the eventuality of its being mobilized in a real conflict seemed fearsome to the Lacedaemonians, as if the hazards and uncertainties of battle would destroy their overly precise military mechanism.4

The Spartans have been called a people without history. In reality, by their hostility to every form of constitutional metamorphosis, they refused History as the kinetic reference of their existence. First, by not turning toward the sea and its vehicular empires-thus separating themselves from the totality of Hellenic cities-to go settle in the very heart of Greece and colonize the Messenians, Greeks like themselves. Then, by eluding for almost two centuries after the Lycurgean experiment the consequences of their military might, by fleeing those of their victories. And it will be precisely the Spartan military State's victory over Athens that will subvert its perfection: "The Lacedaemonians might date the beginning of their corruption from their conquest of Athens, and the influx of gold and silver among them that thence ensued" (Plutarch, "Life of Agis") .

What the armies couldn't do was accomplished by economic warfare. The dilemma of the status quo, of military non-intervention, was resolved once and for all, not only for the Mediterraneans, but for the Western world to come.

88

I Speed and Politics

By the middle of the third century, following the collapse of the Lycurgean immobile machine, there remained only about a hundred Spartans who still owned shares of the State. The rest of the population, says Plutarch, became a miserable crowd without legal status, a social mass that the military State had taught to live only for a war that would never come, and that from now on didn't know what to do with its existence. When the State itself survived as no more than a dream of the past, a handful of remaining sadistic customs, the Spartan world sank entirely into anomie.

The West persists in repeating Plutarch's lesson, "obeying a law that it doesn't even know, but that it could re^cite in its sleep." Stasis is death really seems to it to be the general law of the World. The dromocrat constantly stifles the democrat of Lycurgus'-and Mao's-original revolution. It is enough to hear the speeches of today's Chinese leaders about "consumer goods" to know that the old thinker did no more than delay the institution in China of the West's fearsome system of intensive growth, and whether it is conveyed by orthodox Marxism or liberalism is of little import! Just as Hitler could only begin lightning warfare through the economic system of Doctor Schacht, and Roosevelt could only begin total warfare through the New Deal.

Stasis is death, the general-law of the world. The State-fortress, its power, its laws exist in places of intense circulation. In a recent work, Georges Huppert attacks the common notion that the general and positive sense of history appeared in the eighteenth century and gave rise to important works only in the nineteenth.5 He cites the example of a group of erudites, mostly of the legal profession, who, toward the middle of the sixteenth century, proposed (in the words of one of them, La Popeliniere) "an idea of perfect history." At the same time, the new European States were tending among themselves to reestablish the notion of legitimate war (or legalistic war) , in the Roman manner (Livy, I, 32, 5- 1 5) . The State's historical ideality comes out as soon as war itself is reborn in ideal forms, is technically distinguished (thanks to centralism) from a simple punitive expedition, and tears itself loose from local compromises to approa�h a rigorous original concept.

Unable Bodies

I 89