Permanent emergency is for executive aggrandizement. There is no power without dependancy, and government is using the threat of terrorism to install fear, and consequent dependancy into the electorate. It is a means to manipulate voters into unwittingly providing entrenchment.

It is the same mechanism that the media uses to keep us glued to the screen or paper. Government, instead of using it to sell more advertising, instead uses it to consolidate incumbent power.

I find it disgusting.

I agree. Our exceptional is becoming the norm. And it is very scary stuff.

Here are two of my thoughts:

Perhaps the rise of inhumane governance (there's probably a better description of it, but I don't know it) can be seen as a discourse. Based on my poor knowledge of Foucault, didn't he say that as one discourse emerges, so to do its opposing discourses. See here.

Perhaps inhumane governance, is giving rise to other discourses such as the "Well-being manifesto" and greater interest in political matters?

It is my hope. And my hope that the more humane discourses run longer and have more effect than the inhumane ones.

---
I'm no historian but...

(When you get on to computer programming, I will be able to say: "Well I am a computer programmer" :-) )

If I was a staunch American southern conservative back in the time of slavery, when the slaves were being given rights and being freed, I suspect I too would be feeling that the world had gone topsy-turvy, that everything was falling apart. I would be scared.

I'm thinking that this American conservative would be having the same feelings as I do, as a left-wing individual under an inhumane governance, at this point in time. Totally opposite scenarios - one where human rights are being opened up, the other where they are being closed down - one simliar feeling.

Cameron,
your're right about this. But then the discourse of conservatism in modernity was always structured around fear and war. Hence the concern for order and cohesion.

Agamben says that the state of exception is neither external nor internal to the juridical order and that the suspension of the norm democratic citizenship rights and freedoms) does not mean their abolition.

Tis a paradoxical situation we are living in. To understand it we need to keep our finger on the paradoxes.

Maybe we need to think in terms of the state of exception being founded on necessity, rather than the suspension of a particular law; or a particular case to which the law no longer applies.

Maybe the state of necessity applies within the law of a constitutional order, and is its ground and source? I do not know. I don't have that understanding of law.

Pax,
your Foucault link does not work. It is only a highlight not a link. Can you provide the link?

Though we do have a new form of governance, that of the state of exception arising from 9/11 and the flows of immigration and asylum seekers, we have little by way of a theory of that mode of governance in political philosophy.

So argues Giorgio Agamben. I reckon he is right. We sense that something has changed, but we struggle to figure out what it is.

What we do know is that the 'state of exception' sits on the borderline fringe of public law--at the intersection of the legal and the political---just like 'civil war', 'insurrection' and 'resistance.'

We also know that the law employs the state of exception--the suspension of law itself. So we find ourselves in the odd situation of currently living with juridical measures that cannot be understood in legal terms.

Re-reading the page I linked to, I see I was over reaching - trying to draw little understood things together:

The idea I had latched onto was of the reverse discourse:

"There is no question that the appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and "psychic hermaphrodism" made possible a strong advance of social controls into (the) area of "perversity"; but it also made possible the formation of a "reverse" discourse:"

The link is here

Oh well. Still, I understand more now.

Keep up the great posts.

Pax,

Ali does good work with Foucauldian Reflections doesn't he. It is an excellent resource.

One has to over-reach at times. But linking up to Foucault's idea of a reverse or counter discourse and a counter strategy is a fruitful way of looking at things.

I'm not sure that we have a counter discourse to the state of exception. Maybe there is the beginnings of one forming with the Cornelia Ray case and mandatory detention associated with the refugee advocates and theor concern for human rights.

They do understand that it is the system of mandatory detention that is flawed, rather than Cornelia Rau being a case of a one off mistake. We have the deportation to the Philippines of the Australian citizen Vivien Alvarez and another 200 or so cases of apparent wrongful detention have since surfaced. John Harley, SA's public advocate, sees the systemic flaws in terms of a morally bankrupt policy.

True. But the detention camps are now an integral feature of the political landscape now and they are going to be retained despite the criticism by refugee advocates. That is what we have to hang onto.

Why?

In the 20th century detention camps were seen to be an integral part of the totalitarian political order, not that of liberal democracy. Liberal democracy stood for freedom and rights. Today the camps are an integral part of the liberal democratic political order, and Austrlaian citzens are imprisoned, kept in solitary confinement, denied treatment for their mental illness, and treated as a non-person.

And then we have the camps associated with the war on terror, such as Guantanamo Bay, which are condemned for their denial of human rights and the rule of law.

The tectonic political plates have shifted in the 21st century and Cornelia Rau is a witness to that shift.

Thanks for the lovely reply. Greatfully accepted.

I too feel that the plates seem to be shifting. There's probably huge amounts of thinking and exploration that can be done around the idea of shifting, and change and flux.