Speed Apocrypha.
Descartes sticks out to Us, you find his influence both in a book of math (and thus physics) and you will find him hiding in every corner of Western philosophy. Perhaps We could see the shadow of these physics in the air around us. Virilio the poet of the sea marred by war did see ghosts of pure speed, now We must ask to look at these ghosts and craft an Apocrypha from them.
Apocrypha Fragment Number I
As civilization has entered hyper light speed (some call it globalization, We call it bullshit) it has had to get rid of mass, one of those masses being that of culture. As it speeds up the less culture exists, it hollows anything that exists. Everything that could be considered a cultural idea or item is displaced away from our experience, we are moving too fast to experience anything in any true sense of the word. Reality has been reduced to a minimalist portrayal of itself. Things exist only now as arrows, straight lines, numbers in simple font, the modern city is nothing but a circuit. look at the roadways, they have become (or always have been) wires, Americans are unable to take a country drive as the English can because that would require a slowness (and therefore a death). If Virilio is to be believed then "Stasis is death really seems to it to be the general law of the World." if the flow along the road wires stops then it is the death of it all. This is why you cannot stop a highway, it decimates all that exists in front of it. We proclaim again a city is a circuit, or perhaps better understood as a slime mold circuit. After all, have we not seen those molds model roads on Mini-America? The circuit cities have overtaken man in that regard, much as when a man enters a car the car transcends him, he is reduced to a mere motor. The state transcends us all in that way. In fact the state has been displaced away from the city. It now exists only in the sky, above us as it were. We do mean that in a very literal sense, wires and satellites informing state agents where to race off to. This state in the sky allows parts of the Machine-Beast of government to speak to each other faster than light. The city is small now, reduced by the state to almost nothing. How do those who stand against the state take back what was once theirs? The common areas where one can merely exist and does not have to speed. We are not speaking of public parks either, those are a transposing of the naval glacis onto the city and an artificial thing. We speak of spaces that none have seen before, when We say commons We do not mean another council run park, We mean a space that takes the wilds of the soul and places into the open.
Apocrypha Fragment Number II
"During my trips along European coasts, I grew more and more selective, picking up only traces of the defensive system. Everyday life at the seaside had disappeared. The space I was charting with surveys and measurements of different types of casemates was the space of a different historical time than that of the moment of my trip; the conflict I perceived between the summer of seaside bathing and the summer of combat would never again cease. For me the organization of space would now go hand in hand with the manifestations of time." - Bunker Archaeology, Paul Virilio.
Time slides around, chunks of Time move throughout the city, Cubes of Time in psychic space fly around and engulf individuals, this is a war of Time. A fetishizion of a Cube of Time is a fetishizion of architecture and aesthetics more than anything. A fetishizion of a Cube changes it, thins it out, flattens it, left to have historians mourn over its mutilation. This is a process of making Time Myths, these Myths whizz around a city. Boston is an archetype of a city engulfed in Time Myth Cubes. The traditionalist is a man obsessed with Time Myths, an Aryan Fucker on steroids ready to make a city a pile of stone that will crush him but leave a faux historical marble statue of him in its place.
The world is modular now, EPCOT Center took cities and murdered them to do cultural necromancy mixed with illusion and made permanent Time Myth Cubes, yee-haw the cowboy ransacking time itself to turn it into Time. EPCOT'S Future World is pure speed ("speed is the hope of the West" - Speed and Poltics, pg 70), it is the complete and utter fetishizion of speed, a speed that tries to bring a Cube from the Future into the Now. Those who wish to speak of some great return have a complete fetishizion of a false past, Time Cube Myths entering into reactionary space.
9/11 was a destruction of the hopeful Future, the city seems permanent so to have a spike of Solid Time struck down is the great unthinkable. The end of the world in American Movie Theater is only an end of cities, metropolic centers like Tokyo, Paris, New York, and London have become the world. Necromancers of desire of Futures from yesteryear appear in media all the time now, people wishing for a return to a time when the Time Cube ahead was bright. No Hopeful Time Cubes of Futures have been made since 2001, the Media Machine-Beast reusing Time Myth Cubes and their Futures. Nostalgiculture kicked into high gear, Ten Billion Funko Pops Of Dead Time Myth Cubes burst from the stomach of a dead youth.
If you wander the city for a day you shall find yourself in old town, new town, relics of the past. A city is never completely in the now, its terrain is one made of Time.
Apocrypha Fragment Number III
"At the same time, this model was no longer archored in the glorious periods of the battles on the barricades, the Revolution, but rather in the everyday life of the factory and the difficulties of production." - A Thousand Machines, Raunig.
Despite the respect We have for Raunig We do disagree with him. The actual focus of Gas Mask not having ever shifted from the conception of Revolution, it was still an art piece about war, the factory workers remain soldiers, it glorified the effect of Revolution and spoke about how the Revolution transformed the proletariat into the soldier proletariat. It shows them with the same glory as the soldiers of Revolution, in this way the Soviet State made all of Russia a terrain of Revolution. The soldier proletariat is a celebrated subject and Gas Mask celebrates the actor parts of the factory machine for their bravery in fixing the gas leak, Gas Mask gave them Glory. The Soviet terrain of Revolution made it so all workers were on the frontline, and thus afforded the Glory of the classic revolution soldier.
Thus did We see in 2020 this old theater of a front in every factory return. Media pumping out images to convince the working army to rush onto the killing floor. The theater of Glory made its return, with conversation that everyone was in this together. In England the cheering on of the NHS brings to mind the old image of the English scene of the country bidding farewell to those who shall not grow old if We are to quote that poet. The theater of Gas Mask would be mirrored in the new theater of the new war, as in Gas Mask there is a push for sacrifice. The uniform of the nurse and worker deemed essential reminds one of the military outfit. It seems war has turned the world into pure theater.
Apocrypha Fragment Number IV
The only purpose of cops is to conduct mass warfare on minority populations, the cops will never lose guns because that would require they lose an advantage of speed and capitalism only speeds up, never slows down. Speed and force is much the same thing. The highway patrol of the police wish more to have a hold on speed and to control the flow of traffic, that is why they hold a right of way. The same reason a cop never loses their gun is the same reason the USA doesn't get rid of its nukes. With greater speed of manufacturing there came a greater ability to employ force, ability to transport troops faster was an improvement on employment of force, faster communication leads to much more force, the greatest speed of globalization allows force to kill the soul of humanity and to kill culture, speed allows force to be better carried out. It becomes speed-force then.
Apocrypha Fragment Number V
"Stasis is death, the general-law of the world. The State-fortress, its power, its laws exist in places of intense circulation." - Speed And Politics, Paul Virilio.
Much of American culture is a culture of speed. People go out to deserts and salt flats to go quick, to see how fast they can go, speed for speed's own sake. The men who go out to those flat places wish to go fast enough to find themselves having emerged from a tunnel that didn't exist before they started their solitary race against themselves and Time. They end up finding at the end there is nothing there awaiting them, the dromo-junkie finds himself again unable to speed up into stasis.
Is America not the country of speed and military? The great racetrack of America, its highway system is named after Eisenhower, the General of Military turned General of Management of population. A constant movement, law is stricter on the highway rather than the back roads. Same in the common plaza where the people walk, a Maoist party putting on a public theater (the only theater worth anything anymore, that house of performance should be avoided at all costs) would be more of a disruption to the law than any current Maoist action in America.
This speedway creates a Metropole that surpasses the local law, there is no single city in America anymore, just the single Metropole that follows the law of speed. This Metropole is where America is, that is to declare that America is a nation always on the march, on the move, America does not exist in the slow places, that is the place the Metropole fears. Every urban center, another organ of the Metropole slowly becomes like every other, the only places that could be said to have souls is Chicago and New York City, but those two will too be victims of the speed of the Metropole soon enough. Cities steal souls, manufacturing soulless bodies, the person in the city is merely a part of them, people speak of cities as if they are empty and function by themselves, the human element melts into the background.
Apocrypha Fragment Number VI
"Once, during the first day we ran into a group of pacifists. They were blocking our escape route after we bumed the banks by the sea. Nearby, there was a big social democrat march, and in front of us was a stairway. It was the only way out to avoid getting caught between the police and the demonstrators. But it was blocked by these pacifists from LILLIPUT who started to interrogate us and our friends, saying: Why do you go on doing this? There's already been one death, do you want to cause another? And then we told them: What the fuck are you saying? It's not our fault that someone died. It was an act of repression. Something we must react against, and not hide at home under the bed. If it comes to that, it means that THEY have already won. We kept running into this same kind of logic, one that's completely perverse and has to be stopped. Their aggressiveness was so delirious.. standing there, breathing tear gas, with the cops advancing, blocking our way saying: Yeah, but anyway. You've understood nothing. Because you rise up it's your fault." - Get Rid Of Yourself, Bernadette Corporation.
A pacifist is a fool who has tricked herself into thinking that there is no war going on right now that has engulfed everything. In modern war the act of being truly hidden is impossible, the tele-eye scans all and projects it back for all to see, she, the fool tries to hide. Thus the old strategy of becoming that hidden thing is gone, you cannot flee forever, in the modern war, you must choose to find which side you wish to win. The pacifist chooses to side with that which is, The INSIDE.
The pacifist, despite believing she is stopping violence merely lets it flow more freely, a reversal of Violence is not a Violence, if anything it is a beautiful image. The icon of the pacifist, Gandhi, famously said of the Jews that they should load themselves onto the trains, there is no better image to how vile the pacifist can be.
Never bring a pacifist to an action, a protest, a riot, the purpose of the action is to rid a space of law, the pacifist, she brings the law with her. Of course this is not to say bring only militants, that would be worse, they wish to install new law in the space. The militant is alienated, full of a lust for speed-statis, that is to say a lust for death.
The pacifist does not understand that a reversal of Violence is not a Violence, fighting the thing that kills you cannot be regarded as the same type of violent act as the mass acts that a civilization uses to keep itself alive. She believes there is a single type of violent action, this allows her to continue the violent action of everyday life. She buys eggs and pays no mind to the Violence that makes that possible, the death of hens, the wars fought to power the trucks that bring the eggs to the store, all the Violences of logistics. If the pacifist was to look at the world truly then she would know that the action is tiny compared to what civilization needs to run.
Apocrypha Fragment Number VII
"All is reversible" is a lesson that despite staring one in the face many do not understand. The road that the enemy uses can be used by you, and that anything you use can be used by the enemy. Of course there is a question about how much energy, resources it takes to reverse something and if it is worth it.
Apocrypha Fragment Number VIII
The modern war creates a lust for speed-statis, a lust for death. The veteran finds that fae cannot put down faer gun once the war is done. This lust recreates what the warrior fought to destroy. This will turn you into a corpse before any fight even begins, doomed to die wishing to die and cause die. A corpse who has fallen in love with the idea that they can kill, it no longer is a fight for creation but to be known for horrors. Was there not a writer in Australia who at age nineteen sought to destroy a politician simply so he could be known? The lust to die and kill, a horrid thing.