The masses are not a population, a society, but the multitude of passers-by. The revolutionary contingent attains its deal form not in the place of production, but in the street, where for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a motor (machine of attack), in other words a producer of speed. (3)
Mob riots reform the mob (the original mob of hunter-raiders). To lead the bands of “lost soldiers” of the workers’ army - its dromomaniacs - that is, for the leader, to incite them, “lead them to the attack like a pack of dogs,” as Saint-Just said. It means giving rhythm to the mobile mass’s trajectory through vulgar stimulation, a polemical symphony, transmitted far and wide, from one to the other, polyphonic and multicolored like the roa signals and traffic directions meant to accelerate the telescoping, the shock of the accident. This is the ultimate goal of street demonstrations, of urban disorder. (4-5)
The Marxist definition of capitalism, “consumer of human life and founder of dead labor,” is quite apt for the bourgeoisie, but only insofar as it is associated with its military technical adviser, who simultaneously invents the means of producing and of destroying what he produces, a war entrepreneur who will be at the origin of the State armies and later of the military-industrial complex. Just as the condottiere had benefitted from this system of ruin by leaning on the city’s economic orientation, so the communal bourgeoisie already carries within itself the same ambiguous association of wealth and the production of destruction. (11-12)
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. (16)
The time has come, it seems, to face the facts: revolution is movement, but movement is not 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. (18)
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… (19)
Revolution is no more than a rerouting of the old social assault. (21)
Everything in this new warfare becomes a question of time won by man over 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.) (22)
But beyond this, what should we think of this revolution that will soon be entirely reduced to a permanent Assault on Time? The perpetual offensive 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. (22)
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.” (34)
Henceforth, it is no longer a question of crossing a continent or an ocean 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 maelstroem - sucked in by its own rush toward the point of not return. (41)
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. (44)
Like the naval battle, popular war operates on the clash of dynamic bodies. It has to do with “the excess sanctioned by the very practices of the sea,” with absolute violence, with the disappearance of morals and preexisting laws. Popular war is total. (45)
In fact, there was no “industrial 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. (46)
With the realization of dromocratic-type progress, humanity will stop being diverse. it will tend to divide only into hopeful populations (who are not 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. (47)
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. (47)
In the war of Time, the social “beyond” of populations has become the “beyond” of the zero-hour, as the revolutionary’s last hope. (48)
The war of attrition marks a new threshhold: bourgeois society had believed it could enclose absolute violence in the ghetto of the army zone but, deprived of space, war had spread to human Time - the war of attrition was also the war of Time. (53)
In fact, history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems. (68)
For the dromocratic State, mastery over the earth is already the mastery over its dimensions. (70)
Depending on the time and the latitude, the multitude of bodies with no soul, living dead, zombies, possessed, etc., is imposed all throughout history: a slow-motion destruction of the opponent, the adversary, the prisoner, the slave; an economy of military violence likening the human cattle to the ancient stolen herd of the hunter-raiders, and by extension, in modernized and militarized European societies, to the soulless bodies of children, women, men of color and proletarians. (76)
What else as the proletariat been since antiquity, if not an entirely domesticated category of bodies, a prolific, engine-towing class, the phantom presence in the historical narrative of a floating population linked to the satisfaction of logistical demands? (77)
With the coming of democratic power, we see a perversion of primitive transmigration: the soul, by becoming individual, has become Reason, in other words the seat of a prescriptive rule of our actions, our movements, even the totality of our destinies. (87)
Evidently, dromological progress and what we conventionally call human and social progress coincided but did not converge. The development can be summarized as follows:
1. A society without technological vehicles, in which the woman plays the role of the logistical spouse, mother of war and of the truck.
2. The indiscriminate boarding of soulless bodies as metabolic vehicles.
3. The empire of speed and technological vehicles.
4. The metabolic vehicle competing with, then defeated by, the earthly technological vehicle.
We could logically conclude with a last paragraph:
5. The end of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of History in the war of Time. (96)
In a threatening social universe, in which human societies are shown to be rife with criminal elements, the army seems to be a protective force, a refuge from the parade of subversive enterprises. The army continues to be greatly amused by the “anti-militarists”‘ lack of information about, and static analysis of, its dynamic power. (104)
Balzav, visiting the Wagram battlefield after 1830 in hopes of expanding his social analysis, already asked himself the question of the veritable territory of historiality, the strategic theatre that, thanks to the advance of the media (the use of the telegraph, for example), had suddenly become global - external and internal events henceforth able to interact almost immediately. This temporal limitation come from the battlefield had been answered by the new “secret police,” which Balzac considers the most important social revolution of his time - the moment when, after the long period of ostensible and bloody repression exerted against the civilian populations by the Revolution’s “army of the interior,” military violence stops being necessarily visible only from afar, by the soldier’s uniform, and comes to rest on refined systems of surveillance and denunciation. (106)
These first attempts at penetration, clandestine “invasion” of the social corpus, had, as we saw, a specific aim: exploitation by the armed forces of the nation’s raw potential (its industrial, economic, demographic, cultural, scientific, political and moral capabilities). Since then, social penetration has been linked to the dizzying evolution of military penetration techniques; each vehicular advance erases a distinction between the army and civilization. (106)
In fact, from the beginning, the American system has not had a measure of comparison between the value of the messages delivered and the effort necessary for their transmission. More so than with the content of the message, the means of its mediatization appear instruments of primary necessity in the United States, first of all in their naval relation to the metropolitain Europe, to the Africa that supplies its manpower, then for the constitution of a certain State centralism over a vast territory in which, in order to govern, one must first penetrate and then communicate. (107)
The media are the privileged instruments of the Union. They alone are able to control the social chaos of American panhumanity; they are the guarantors of a certain civic cohesion, and thus of civil security itself. Inversely, as in the ancient colonial model, American democracy will make no real efforts to integrate its ethnic minorities, its factions, into a constant civilization, into a truly community-oriented way of life. For segregation is what sanctions the system’s hegemony of the media, in which rests the nature of the American State’s authority. (107-108)
We must still apply esthetic, functional and other meanings to this world of giant cars; to the plethora of household objects in gleaming kitchens in which, significantly, nothing is cooked but sandwiches and canned foods; to the whole spectacle of a “thoughtless objectivity that makes the very concept of consciousness meaningless”; to the clandestine interference in the ordinary vectors of exchange and communication by the technological codes that result from production systems. (110)
Technologies of body and soul are thus strangely complexified in American pop-culture. The body without soul is, as we saw, a body assisted by technical prostheses. And since we’re talking about America
, we would do well to remember that the word “comfort” comes from from the old French assistance: a reference to the old social bestiary of bodies seized in motion, left along the road. Unleashed in the 1920s, the de-neutralization of the media paves the way for what has been called “the war of the domestic market,” a massive ideological campaign addressed directly to the family puzzle that it claims to put together, even to reinvent, as an “infinite receptacle for consumer goods.” This campaign will very quickly become a veritable animal domestication of the American citizen. (110)
Significantly, the American government will not deem it necessary to establish a veritable welfare system on its own territory. It is convinced at the time that the promotion of a paternalistic and humanitarian comfort civilization will perfectly replace social aid through the technical assistance of bodies, from the household robot to the company psychiatrist or the latest model of car. Not unlike the way this country today nurtures a romantic taste for the revived bionic bodies of fascistic futurism, human bodies in which certain organs have been replaced by technological grafts, enabling these new heroes of surgical science to accomplish superhuman physical exploits. (110-111)
Each is seized by an immoderate desire for the subjected flesh of the proletarian soldier, the powerful mass of “mobile machines… blindly obeying the impulses of their drivers”. (113)
Fascism is alive because total war, then total peace, have engaged the headquarters of the great national bodies (the armies, the forces of production) in a new spatial and temporal process, and the historical universe in a Kantian world. The problem is no longer one of a historicality in (chronological) time or (geographic) space, but in what space-time? (117)
“… Which in short would make of war’s conductability (the coherent plan devised in time and space that can, through repetition, be imposed upon the enemy) not the instrument but the origin of a totalitarian language of History. This language is the mutual effort of the European States, then of the world, toward the absolute essence of foreign or civil war (speed), thus giving it the stature of an absolute takeover of world history by Western military intelligence. Pure history, then, is only the translation of pure strategic advance over terrain. Its power is to precede and be final, and the historian is but a captain in the war of time.” (118)
“Revolution goes faster than the people,” declared President-General Costa-Gomes at the beginning of the Portugese events. How could such a ting be possible? Simply because in the final account the West’s so-called revolutions have never been made by the people, but by the military institution. Economic liberalism has been only a liberal pluralism of the order of speeds of penetration. To the heavy model of the hemmed-in bourgeoisie, to the single schema of the weighty Marxist mobil-maching (ostensibly planned control of the movement of goods, persons, ideas), the West has long opposed the diversity of its logistical hierarchy, the utopia of a national wealth invested in automobiles, travel, movies, performances… A capitalsim that has become one of jet-sets and instant-information banks, actually a whole social illusion subordinated to the strategy of the cold war. Let’s make no mistake: whether its the drop-outs, the beat generation, automobile drivers, migrant workers, tourists, olympic champions or travel agents, the military-industrial democracies have made every social category, without distinction, into unknown soldiers of the order of speeds – speeds whose hierarchy is controlled more and more each day by the State (headquarters), from the pedestrian to the rocket, from the metabolic to the technological. (119-120)
In the 1960s, when a rich American wanted to prove his social success, he bought not “the biggest American car he could lay his hands on,” but a “little European job,” faster, less limited. To succeed is to reach the power of greater speed, to have the impression of escaping the unanimity of civic training. Since total war, there have been no foreign, external wars in the strict sense: as the Mayor of Philadelphia so aptly put it during a hot American summer: “Now the frontiers pass inside the cities.” Whether highway or street, everything is part of the single glacis of the frontier desert. (120)
We will see the creation of a common feeling of insecurity that will lead to a new kind of consumption, the consumption of protection; this latter will progressively come to the fore and become the target of the whole merchandising system. This is essentially what Raymond Aron recently said, when he accused liberal society of having been too optimistic for too long! The indivisible promotion of the need for security already composes a new composite portrait of the citizen – no longer the one who enriches the nation by consuming, but the one who invests first and foremost in security, manages his own protection as best he can, and finally pays more to consume less. (122-123)
The reduction of distances has become a strategic reality bearing incalculable economic and political consequences, since it corresponds to the negation of space. (133)
The maneuver that once consisted in giving up ground to gain Time loses its meaning: at present, gaining Time is exclusively a matter of vectors. Territory has lost its significance in favor of the projectile. In fact, the strategic value of the non-place of speed has definitively supplanted that of place, and the question of possession of Time has revived that of territorial appropriation. (133)
At the close of our century, the time of the finite world is coming to an end; we live in the beginnings of a paradoxical minituarization of action, which others prefer to baptize automation. Andrew Stratton writes, “We commonly believe that automation suppresses the possibility of human error. In fact, it transfers that possibility from the action stage to the conception stage. We are now reaching the point where the possibilities of an accident during the critical minutes of a plane landing, if guided automatically, are fewer than if a pilot is controlling it. We might wonder if we will ever reach the stage of automatically controlled nuclear weapons, in which the margin of error would be less than with human decision. But the possibility of this progress threatens to reduce to little or nothing the time for human decision to intervene in the system.” (140)
This is brilliant. Contraction in time, the disappearance of the territorial space, after that of the fortified city and armor, leads to a situation in which the notions of “before” and “after” designate only the future and the past in a form of war that causes the “present” to disappear in the instantaneousness of decision. (140-141)
The final power would thus be less one of imagination than of anticipation, so much so that to govern would be no more than to foresee, simulate, memorize the simulations; that the present “Research Institute” could appear to be the blueprint of this final power, the power of utopia. (141)
