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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

the camp as 'the nomos of the modern' « Previous | |Next »
June 17, 2006

A review essay of B. Diken, and C.B. Laustsen's The Culture of Exception: Sociology Facing the Camp, by Daniel McLoughlin in Borderlands.

McLoughlin says that the departure point of The Culture of Exception is the recent work of Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer. For Diken and Laustsen, Agamben's diagnosis of modernity is devastatingly accurate, their work following Homo Sacer's claim that the camp has become the "nomos of the modern". The camp, once constituted at the margins of the city as its exception, has now become the rule.

TolesA.jpg
Toles

I willing to grant that the logic of the camp trangresses the discourses of Islamist terrorism and the security policy of the War on Terror because of the detention camps for aslyum seekers and illegal immigrants established by Fortress Australia as part of the Pacific Solution.

However, I'm unwilling to go along with Diken and Laustsen argument that camps "come in twins".By this they mean that the 'logic of the camp' is to be found, not only in spaces we traditionally associate with camps, such as concentration or refugee camps, but in spaces understood as 'liberatory'. On this basis they draw what might be seen as controversial analogies between refugee camps and gated communities (Chapter 4), rape camps and party islands such as Ibiza (Chapter 5).

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:37 PM | | Comments (7)
Comments

Comments

Agamben is definitely on to something. There are too many parables that quickly and easily recognized. I guess the problem is wider meaning and more persistent meaning of what it all entails.

Usually books like that are written well and persuasively, so you have to take a step back from the book to run a critical eye at it and make sure the writing isn't what is helping you to make your mind up.

Agamben's books aren't. They are in a clunky style and the translation are in clunky english. Yet when I read it there are a lot of 'click, click, click' moments.

13. Terror emerges in this sense as a utopia specific to control society, as its line of escape. It invests in insecurity, uncertainty and unsafety, turning citizens into hostages, to homini sacri. the fantasy generated by terror is, in other words, based on the promise of security, certainty and safety. Which brings us back to disciplinary entrenchment as a protection against terror

heh

Is the camp really becoming the "nomos of the modern"? Wouldn't a more plausible figure be the shantytown?

John, Good point. The bulldozing of shanty-towns in Zimbabwe and the eminent domain decision in favour of New London, Connecticut could be seen as further proof of arbitrary executive power which the state of emergency is part of.

The rebuilding a downtown (CBD) can be seen as a softer form of the state of exception.

I recall reading a WaPo op-ed where the argument was made that a city which is not secure is a failed city. Handing over private property to developers al-la New London can be viewed as part of increasing security through upscaling the city via gentrification and/or increased tax revenues.

John,
yeah I struggle with the Agamben's thesis of the camp becoming the "nomos of the modern". So I'm taking it in steps --hence the postings on it.

In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben locates the camp as part of his reworking of Schmitt's 'the state of exception.'

Agamben defines 'the state of exception' as the condition of that which is taken outside of the normal juridical order. This state is not defined by a simple absence of law. What is excluded from the juridical order is still held in relation to the law in the act of the law?s suspension ? in limning its own boundaries, the law constitutes situations where it is no longer in force and where anything is possible.

That is an accurate description of Guantanamo Bay and Australia's detention camps is it not.In this aspect of contemporary politics, the state of exception identified by Schmitt in which the law is suspended by the sovereign, has in fact become the rule.

Agamben links this theses on the exception to the these of the production of bare life and then argues that this conjuncture of these two theses is the camp.

That's about as far as I've got. I understand the significance of the camp today in terms of national security. The camp's inhabitants are those deemed to have no claim on the nation but, paradoxically, are brought even more firmly under its control by virtue of their exclusion from its laws.

Cameron,
yeah Agamben's texts are difficult to read and to grasp. I sort of hang onto to a key new category and work it. The key category in Homo Sacer is the category of 'bare life'.

The Internet Encyclopedia is good on this. It states that:

Agamben develops [this category] from the Ancient Greek distinction between natural life---'zoe'---and a particular form of life--'bios'---especially as it is articulated in Aristotle?s account of the origins of the polis... for Agamben, this [distinction] indicates the fact that Western politics is founded upon that which it excludes from politics---the natural life that is simultaneously set outside the domain of the political but nevertheless implicated in bios politicos.

The Encyclopedia goes on to say that the question arises, then, of how life itself or natural life is politicized. The answer to this question is through abandonment to an unconditional power of death, that is, the power of sovereignty:
It is in this abandonment of natural life to sovereign violence---and Agamben sees the relation of abandonment that obtains between life and the law as "originary"---that "bare life" makes its appearance. For bare life is not natural life per se---though it often confused with it in critical readings of Agamben, partly as a consequence of Agamben's own inconsistency---but rather, it is the politicized form of natural life: neither. Neither bios nor zoe, bare life emerges from within this distinction and can be defined as "life exposed to death," especially in the form of sovereign violence.

This life exposed to death from sovereign violence takes place in the camp with the state of exception.

John,
one way to come at the camp as the nomos of the modern is to ask what is the ethical and political significance of the camp --that is, what it means for us today (Agamben, 'Remnants of Auschwitz'). What can the camps teach us about who, what, and where we are today?

Agamben argues that the camp is constitutive of contemporary life in the west. He argues that examining the juridical and political structure of the camp

'will lead us to regard the camp, not as an historical fact and an anomaly belonging to the past ... but in some way as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living

That is from an essay 'The camp as nomos of the modern.In the same essay Agamben goes on to say:
The birth of the camp in our time appears as an event which decisively signals the political space of modernity itself. It is produced at the point at which the political system of the modern nation-state (which was founded on the functional nexus between a determinate localization (land) and a determinate order (the State) and mediated by automatic rules for the inscription of life (birth or the nation) enters into a lasting crisis, and the State decides to assume directly the care of the nation's biological life as one of its proper tasks. If the structure of the nation-state is, in other words, defined by the three elements of land, order, birth, the rupture of the old nomos is produced ... in the point marking the inscription of bare life (the birth which thus becomes nation) within two of them. Something can no longer function within the traditional mechanisms that regulated this inscription, and the camp is the new, hidden regulator of the inscription of life in the order - or rather the sign of the system's inability to function without being transformed into a lethal machine.

Gary:

The Schmittian "state of exception" always exists, insofar as there are always gaps in the system of law, which "must" be filled in through surrounding political exigencies. The "state of emergency" indicates the failure of the system of law to preserve itself, i.e., its political efficacy, in the face of such exigencies.

Throughout the world, there is a mass migration to cities, such that the majority of the world's seriously deprived,- "poor",- population will be overwhelmingly urban. (Cameron referred to the recent depredation in Zimbabwe, which is to the point, though I don't think that New London, CT makes the cut). It is outside the "gates" of the city, where the dead bury their dead, that the "state of exception" declares its "emergency".
Mike Davis has turned his recent work in that direction.