AtDDtA1: Permanent Siege

[Dave Monroe]

"'As the ordeal went on, it became clear to certain of these
balloonists, observing from above and poised ever upon a cusp of
mortal danger, how much the modern State depended for its survival on
maintaining a condition of permanent siege--through the systematic
encirclement of populations, the starvation of bodies and spirits, the
relentless degradation of civility until citizen was turned against
citizen, even to the point of committing atrocities like those of the
infamous pétroleurs of Paris.  When the Sieges ended, these
balloonists chose to fly on ...'" (AtD, Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 19f.)


First off, another nominee here for most quotable passage ...

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_quotes.html


"a condition of permanent siege"

Advent of mobile warfare

Siege warfare dominated in Western Europe for most of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. An entire campaign, or longer, could be used
in a single siege .... This resulted in extremely elongated conflicts.
The balance was that while siege warfare was extremely expensive and
very slow, it was very successful—or, at least, more so than
encounters in the field....

However, this pattern was vastly reduced in the French Revolutionary
and Napoleonic Wars. New techniques stressed the division of armies
into all-arms corps that would march separately and only come together
on the battlefield. The less concentrated army could now live off the
country and move more rapidly over a larger number of roads.
Fortresses comanding lines of communication could be bypassed and no
longer stop an invasion. This military revolution was described by
Clausewitz....

Advances in artillery made previously impregnable defenses useless....

Advances in firearms technology without the necessary advances in
battlefield communications gradually led to the defense again gaining
the ascendancy. During the Franco-Prussian War, the battlefield
front-lines moved rapidly through France. However, the Siege of Metz
and the Siege of Paris held up German armies for months at a time due
to the superior firepower of the Chassepot rifle and the principle of
detached or semi-detached forts with heavy-caliber artillery. This
resulted in the construction of fortress works across Europe such as
the massive fortifications at Verdun.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege#Advent_of_mobile_warfare

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege

Paul Virilio

For Virilio, the transition from feudalism to capitalism was driven
not primarily by the politics of wealth and production techniques but
by the mechanics of war. Virilio argues that the traditional feudal
fortified city disappeared because of the increasing sophistication of
weapons and possibilities for warfare. For Virilio, the concept of
siege warfare became rather a war of movement. In Speed and Politics,
he argues that 'history progresses at the speed of its weapons
systems'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Virilio#War_of_movement

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Virilio

'Velocity' is the key word of Virilio's thinking, the post-modernity
treasure, and the modern society capital. Reality is no longer defined
by time and space, but in a virtual world, in which technology allows
the existence of the paradox of being everywhere at the same time
while being nowhere at all. The loss of the site/city/nation in favor
of globalization implies also the loss of rights and of democracy that
is contrary to the immediate and instantaneous nature of information.
In his view, McLuhan's global village is nothing but a 'World Ghetto'.

[...]

The importance of Virilio's theoretical work stems from his central
claim, that in a culture dominated by war, the military-industrial
complex is of crucial significance in debates over the creation of the
city and the spatial organization of cultural life. In Speed &
Politics (1977) for example, Virilio offers a credible 'war model' of
the growth of the modern city and the development of human society.
According to Virilio, the fortified city of the feudal period was a
stationary and generally unassailable 'war machine' coupled to an
attempt to modulate the circulation and the momentum of the movements
of the urban masses. Therefore, the fortified city was a political
space of habitable inertia, the political configuration, and the
physical underpinning of the feudal era. Nevertheless, for Virilio,
the essential question is why did the fortified city disappear? His
rather unconventional answer is that it did so due to the advent of
ever-increasingly transportable and accelerated weapons systems. For
such innovations 'exposed' the fortified city and transformed siege
warfare into a war of movement. Additionally, they undermined the
efforts of the authorities to govern the flow of the urban citizenry
and therefore heralded the arrival of what Virilio calls the
'habitable circulation' of the masses. Unlike Marx, then, Virilio
postulates the transition from feudalism to capitalism was not an
economic transformation but a military, spatial, political, and
technological metamorphosis. Broadly speaking, where Marx wrote of the
materialist conception of history, Virilio writes of the military
conception of history.

[...]

... Virilio is not arguing that the political economy of wealth has
been superseded by the political economy of speed. Rather, he suggests
that 'in addition to the political economy of wealth, there has to be
a political economy of speed.' Hence, in Popular Defense & Ecological
Struggles (1990 [1978]) and Pure War (Virilio and Lotringer, 1997
[1983]), Virilio developed his dromological investigation to include
considerations on pure power — the enforcement of surrender without
engagement. Virilio argues a revolutionary resistance against the
militarization of urban space. The only way to monitor cultural
developments in the war machine is to adopt a critical theoretical
position with regard to the various parallels that exist between war,
cinema, and the logistics of perception. This is a view he develops in
his trenchant critique of The Vision Machine(1994b [1988]).

http://www.egs.edu/resources/virilio.html

Paul Virilio makes a few good points about "the doctrine of security"
in Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles, a short book that was
originally published in French in 1978, translated into English by
Mark Polizzotti, and published by Semiotext(e) in 1990. Noting that
France was already "considering merging police information with
military intelligence," and that "turnstile-hopping is now likened to
much more serious crimes, such as assault and vandalism," Virilio
predicts that the nations of Europe "will try to initiate a new
unanimity of need, a permanent feeling of insecurity which will lead
to a new kind of consumption: the consumption of protection." In such
a situation, he concludes, "we find [...], completely normalized, the
conditions of the state of siege of military security."

Virilio based these predictions -- which have obviously been borne out
by the post-September 11th waging of the "Global War on Terrorism" --
upon the way in which the nations of Europe responded to the emergence
in the early 1970s of so-called Euro-terrorism....

http://www.notbored.org/popular-defense.html

Yeah, I know, this last one eventually calls PD&ES a "shitty little
book," but, not having the bulk of the Monroe College Library @ hand
these days ...


pétroleurs

Pe`tro`leur´
n. m.	1.	One who makes use of petroleum for incendiary purposes.

http://www.webster-dictionary.net/definition/Petroleur

John Leighton, Paris under the Commune (1871)

XCVIII

It is seven in the evening, the circulation has become almost
impossible. The streets are lined with patrols, and the regiments of
the Line camp upon the outer boulevards. They dine, smoke, and
bivouac, and drink with the citizens on the doorsteps of their houses.
In the distance is heard the storm of sounds which tells of the
despairing resistance of Belleville, and along the foot of the houses
are seen square white patches, showing the walled-up cellars, every
hole and crevice being plastered up to prevent insertion of the
diabolical liquid—walled up against pétroleurs and pétroleuses,
strings of prisoners, among whom are furious women and poor children,
their hands tied behind their backs, pass along the boulevards towards
Neuilly. Night comes on, not a lamp is lighted, and the streets become
deserted as by degrees the sky becomes darker. At nine o'clock the
solitude is almost absolute. The sound of a musket striking the
pavement is heard from time to time; a sentinel passes here and there,
and the lights in the houses grow more and more rare.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10861/10861-h/10861-h.htm

Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune of 1871 (1876)

n. 223  General Enterprise of Parisian Sweeping. — The repression must
equal the crime. These are the means by which this result win be
arrived at. The members of the Commune, the chiefs of the
insurrection, the members of the committees, courtsmartial and
revolutionary tribunals, the foreign generals and officers, the
deserters, the assassins of Montmartre, La Roquette, and Mazas, the
pétroleurs and the pétroleuses, the ticket-of-leave men, are to be
shot. Martial law must be applied in all its rigour to the journalists
who have placed the torch and the chassepot in the hands of fanatic
imbeciles. A part of these measures have already been put into
practice. Our soldiers have simplified the work of the courts-martial
of Versailles by shooting on the spot; but it must not be overlooked
that a great many culprits have escaped chastisement.' Le Figaro of
the 8th June.

http://www.marxists.org/history/france/archive/lissagaray/notes.htm

http://www.marxists.org/history/france/archive/lissagaray/index.htm

Gullickson, Gay L.  "La Petroleuse: Representing Revolution"
   Feminist Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer, 1991): 240-265.

http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0046-3663(199122)17%3A2%3C240%3ALPRR%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q

Word to the wise: I don't know about other languages (yet ...), but
diacritical marks can make all the difference when Googling in French
...