The Culture of Exception

Sociology Facing the Camp

Bulent Diken, Carsten B. Laustsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN:
  9780415351232
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134266456
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

We live in an ever-fragmenting society, in which distinctions between culture and nature, biology and politics, law and transgression, mobility and immobility, reality and representation, seem to be disappearing. This book demonstrates the hidden logic beneath this process, which is also the logic of 'the camp'. Social theory has traditionally interpreted the camp as an anomaly, as an exceptional site situated on the margins of society, aiming to neutralize its 'failed citizens' and 'enemies'. However, in contemporary society, 'the camp' has now become the rule and consequently a new interrogation of its logic is necessary. In this exceptional volume, the authors explore the paradox of the camp, as representing both an old fear of enclosure and a new dream of belonging. They illustrate their arguments by drawing on contemporary sites of exemption - such as refugee camps, rape camps and favelas - as well as sites of self-exemption including gated communities, party tourism and celebrity cultures.

Part I
APPROACHING THE CAMP

1
NAKED LIFE

“camp\’kamp\ n 1a: ground on which tents or buildings for temporary residence are erected b: a group of buildings or tents erected on such ground c: a temporary shelter (as a cabin or tent) d: an open-air location where persons camp e: a new lumbering or mining town 2a: a body of persons encamped b: (1): a group of persons promoting a theory or doctrine (liberal or conservative camps) (2): an ideological position 3: military service or life [Middle French, derived from Latin campus “plain, field”].

(Webster’s New Encyclopedic Dictionary 1993: 140)

The camp is, first of all, a temporary site, a spatially delimited location that exists only for a limited period. This definition is confirmed by the first camps set up by the Spaniards in Cuba in the 1890s and by the British during the Boer War in South Africa. These were followed by the development of homelands: Bantustans, those large ‘camps’ within white South Africa, by the Soviet Gulag, and by the Nazi concentration and death camps. As such, the story of the camps is part and parcel of European history and cultural identity. However, the (hi)story has not ended yet. The recent refugee camps, the camp at Guantanamo Bay and the ‘low cost – maximum pain’ prisons in the Texan deserts attest to this unsettling fact. Further, and even more disturbingly, there seems to be an affinity between the temporary and transitory logic of the camp and today’s modernity. Thus, as we argue later, a decisive amount of contemporary urban structures, e.g. gated communities, shopping malls, theme parks, campuses, and so on, repeat in their organization and spatial ideology the logic of the camp.

Second, the camp signifies a position or a doctrine, which is why the difference between the insiders in a camp is often less important and less consequential than the difference between its insiders and outsiders. In other words, the camp is a machine of ordering. Hence Gilroy is justified in claiming that racism demonstrates a ‘camp mentality’ because it relentlessly translates heterogeneity into homogeneity (1999: 188). However, as a machine of ordering, whose logic is intertwined with that of sovereignty, the camp produces as much disorder as order. Like every order, the camp has to refer to a negativity, a disorder, to be able to constitute itself, and it is crucial to bear in mind that this negativity is a ‘product of order’s self-constitution: its side-effect, its waste, and yet the condition sine qua non of its (reflective) possibility’ (Bauman 1991: 7). Consequently, it is always, as a rule, difficult to decide whether the camp produces order or disorder, norm bound regularity or extralegal exceptions.

These two definitions, the camp as a temporary site and as an ordering machine, are of course not unrelated: in order to be identified as a location, the camp must distinguish an inside and an outside, and this takes place through installing a specific principle of order. Which brings us to the third definition, that is, the camp identified with a particular life form. Camps are not only spatio-temporal entities but also social and (bio)political orders producing subjectivities. Different camps posit different life styles, markers, identities and social roles, different ways of acting and thinking.

Interestingly, these three definitions of the camp correspond to the three most central concepts of a theorist who never wrote a word about camps: Carl Schmitt. Let’s start with the second definition related to order. For Schmitt the question of order is the question of politics, that is, how to install, maintain or question order. Schmitt identifies order with a nomos, a principle of ordering, rather than the law. His core concept in this respect is sovereignty. The sovereign is, as he states in Political Theology, the one who decides over the exception, that is, who decides when to declare and to end a state of emergency (Schmitt 1985a: 5). The sovereign can, in a perceived state of emergency, suspend the very laws which he is otherwise meant to protect. That is, who incarnates order stands above it. What emerges through this process in which the law no longer applies is the camp as an exceptional space. If, at this point, we link the installment of a nomos to the production of subjectivities, we can claim that the camp is a space in which ‘bare life’ is produced (Agamben 1998). However, the production of naked body also took place before the camp was invented; there was, so to speak, ‘camp life’ before the camp could be identified in the form of specific locations. Thus, in this chapter, we describe the camp as harbouring mechanisms found long before the camp existed as a location. The focus is, in other words, on the production of naked life.

The sovereign

Schmitt’s concept of sovereignty is a ‘borderline concept’ through which the essence of the political can be uncovered. The concept operates via negativa, that is to say, the norm can only be understood through an investigation of the exception. Thus, sovereignty is not to be identified with the presence of a monopoly of violence, the existence of a people, etc., that is, as internal sovereignty. But nor is it to be identified with other states’ recognition of a state, as ‘external’ sovereignty. The ‘root’ of sovereignty is to be found elsewhere and only to be unmasked in those situations characterized by extreme danger. And the ‘root’ at issue here is in quotation marks because it cannot be firmly established. Sovereignty manifests itself as an abyssal decision; for Schmitt, all positive systems, be it law, nations or international systems, rest on a decision. And so does the camp. The camp is the exception incarnated. However, as an exception or an anomaly, the camp also allows for an in-depth understanding of ‘the political’ and ‘the social’.

Schmitt’s thesis must be read in a non-etatist manner: we do not begin with the sovereign who decides on the state of exception; on the contrary, the one who can declare a state of exception is sovereign. Nuances are important here. The suspension of the law is not illegal but extralegal, hence it cannot be judged according to the distinction between legal and illegal. All legal systems are based on an extralegal and decisionist element, or, in Schmitt’s terminology, a ‘material kernel’; every legal order ‘rests on a decision and not on a norm’ (Schmitt 1985a: 10). Following this, because it depends on something external to itself, that is, sovereignty, law cannot be, as most legal positivists think, a self-enclosed and self-referential system. In a sense, therefore, Schmitt posits a paradoxical situation in which the sovereign has the right to suspend the law. It is as if sovereignty is the ‘law beyond the law’ (Agamben 1998: 59). Likewise, at another level, Schmitt argues that the law depends on the existence of a normality, an everyday frame of life, which provides the interpretative schemes necessary for its functioning and which assures the monopoly of violence that guarantees the implementation of legal decisions (Schmitt 1985a: 13). Every norm or law ‘presupposes a normal situation, and no norm can be valid in an entirely abnormal situation’ (Schmitt 1996: 46).

Against the background of this normality, the state of exception is limited in space and time: in time, through the declaration of a state of war and by the signing of a peace treaty, and in space, through the indication of its sphere of validity. In this period and within this space it is as if the statue of liberty has been veiled. Law is, however, not suspended in toto, or, the state of exception is not a chaos. Rather, in the state of exception the distinction between a transgression of the law and its execution is blurred (Agamben 1998: 57). The violence exercised ‘neither preserves nor simply posits law, but rather conserves it in suspending it and posits it in excepting itself from it’ (ibid.: 64). Consequently, there emerges a zone of indistinction between law and nature, outside and inside, violence and law. And yet the sovereign is precisely ‘the one who maintains the possibility of deciding on the two to the very degree that he renders them indistinguishable from each other’ (ibid.). In the state of exception the distinction between friends and enemies is blurred: the state starts treating its own citizens as potential enemies, as outsiders. The distinction is blurred in that suddenly one’s status as a citizen ceases to remain taken for granted and becomes something to be decided upon. In this, what is outside is included not simply by means of an interdiction or an internment, but rather by means of the suspension of the juridical order’s validity. The exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception. The particular ‘force’ of law consists in this capacity of law to maintain itself in relation to an exteriority (ibid.: 18).

In Roman law this exceptional act was called ‘ban’. Those who were banned from the Empire were treated like an enemy and could be killed without sanctions of any sort. Everybody was entitled to harm, or, in other words, everybody was sovereign in relation to these individuals (ibid.: 104–5). Indeed, the banned individual, or homo sacer, seemed to live in a state of exception and as such he was friedlos, a ‘man without peace’ (ibid.: 104). What is crucial here, however, is that such abandonment was not merely a marginal or exotic phenomenon within the Empire. It was, much more significantly, the way biological life was included within the realm of power. Subjects are subjected to the sovereign’s will because of his capacity to kill:

The crimes that, according to the original sources, merit sacratio… do not, therefore, have the character of a transgression of a rule that is then followed by the appropriate sanction. They constitute instead the originary exception in which human life is included in the political order in being exposed to an unconditional capacity to be killed.

(ibid.: 85)

The term ‘sacer’ does not, for this reason, refer to the religious domain. To compare and contrast, the sacred in Bataille’s sense, for instance, involves the distinction between the sacrificeable and unsacrificeable, a principle according to which what is useful is destined to be sacrificed. Homo sacer, on the other hand, can be treated violently but not in the form of religious sacrifice; he can be killed but not sacrificed (Agamben 1998: 111–15). Homo sacer is excluded from both the ius humanum and the ius divinum, from both the sphere of the profane and the religious (ibid.: 82). The bare life of homo sacer belongs to the domain of (bio)politics, not religion. If the formal structure of sovereignty is untying, or exception, the production of untying is bare life (zoē), biological life stripped of (life) forms and political rights and thus located outside the polis (ibid.: 1). Through the act of abandonment, the biological (zoē) and the social/political (bios) are separated.

Homo sacer and the sovereign are two symmetrical figures: ‘the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns’ (ibid.: 84). Usually, scholars focus on the first part of the formulation (‘the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri’). The obvious reason why is the misguided identification of sovereignty as the state, that is, as a centre, as a certain oneness and indivisibility. This identification is not only wrong; it also blocks the insight expressed in the second part of the formulation (‘homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns’). To clarify this point, Girard’s philosophy might be useful. As is well known, his ‘scapegoat’ is a victim treated as homo sacer. As an object of an irrational rage, the scapegoat is not protected by norms and rules, which apply to others, and being considered of no worth, even as an obstacle, he is not worthy of being sacrificed. But, in contrast to Schmitt, Girard understands the archaic form of sovereignty as an exercise of sovereignty by the many over a single individual.

Man is for Girard driven by a desire to imitate his fellow beings, that is, by mimesis. Desire is the other’s desire. What is critical here is that the objects of desire are not desired because they are of inherent value but because they belong to the other, or, in other words, one desires what belongs to the neighbour. Thus objects can become a matter of envy, which, further, can develop into outright enmity, that is, ‘acquisitive mimesis’ can turn into ‘conflictual mimesis’ (Girard 1977: 1–38). The significance of the scapegoat emerges at this point because, unlike objects, which can only be possessed individually, hatred towards a scapegoat can be shared. Thanks to the scapegoat, people can mimic the other’s hatred, which often culminates in violence. Through this projection, the problem of conflict and difference is resolved and unity is reestablished. Therefore Girard sees scapegoating as the foundation of all cultures, as a collective deed fueled by unconscious and unacknowledged desires.

What is significant to us is the Hobbesian aspect of Girard’s model. Both Hobbes’s state of nature and Girard’s origin of culture are characterized by envy, hostility and mimesis. But the way the conflict is overcome is different. Thus, instead of Hobbes’s well-ordered state, Leviathan, we have in Girard a lynching mob; the conflict is resolved through the sacrifice of the scapegoat. Or, in our terminology, the scapegoat is abandoned by the community. However, this similarity between sacrifice and abandonment, between the scapegoat and homo sacer, must be qualified. Importantly in this context, Girard conflates guilt and innocence in the victim to be able to explain the identity of the sacrifice with the scapegoat. However, since the Bible, the two have been strictly separated:

The scapegoat, which symbolizes guilt, is not killed but sent out into the wilderness to illustrate that the inability to accept losses for the good of the community signifies the disintegration of the community and its own banishment into the wilderness. Those who refuse to make sacrifices are the scapegoats because they are not willing to make concessions for the good of the community. The proper punishment for such people is the same as for the scapegoat – not death, but banishment. Whereas Girard sees sacrifice as a controlled outlet for violence, the Bible, in differentiating a killing which is not a sacrifice from a killing which is, demonstrates that the significance of the sacrifice is not in release of violence but in the offering of the sacrifice to God according to the laws of the community rather than keeping it for oneself. The man who does not offer the killed animal as a sacrifice becomes guilty of a sin against the community and is cut off from the community, banished like the scapegoat. He is considered guilty of murder because killing must be maintained as a community decision rather than as an individual one… The function of the sacrificial goat and of the scapegoat is not to provide a vent for built up aggression but to continually remind individuals of their obligations to the community.

(Pan 1992: 86)

In short, the scapegoat is not merely somebody sacrificed to prevent the community from dissolving. Rather, the scapegoat is really the one who disrupts the mechanism of sacrifice, which is why he or she is banished (abandoned) from the community. In fact, seen in this perspective, Girard’s theory shares something in common with Schmitt’s: the focus on the negative. In both perspectives, the relation between the exception and the rule is in the forefront. In both, decision (to identify the scapegoat/enemy) is the basis of society. Just as the sovereign exception is the core of law, the scapegoat is what holds culture together (see Palaver 1992).

This is not the whole story, though. Another equally significant parallel exists between the sovereign pardoning and sacrificial forgiveness. Sovereignty can be exercised by granting a pardon. And true sacrifice is sacrificing the sacrifice itself, that is, forgiving the scapegoat. Girard himself finds this motif in Christianity (in the innocence of Christ) and generalizes it to all scapegoats. The scapegoat can be forgiven or pardoned instead of lynching but precisely as such remains under the sway of sovereignty. Sovereignty is both manifested in the decision to wield or rest the executioner’s axe (Fiskesjö 2003: 53). This coincidence of pardoning and killing means that sovereign power is per definition arbitrary, that it does not abide rules. If it did, sovereignty would become a form, albeit a perverted form, of justice. But sovereignty is intimately bound to the exception.

Witches and werewolves

Who was homo sacer, then? Let us continue with an example from medieval times. In this period witches are one of the recurring groups of people who were treated as homines sacri. The witch was seen as a person suffering from an insatiable carnal lust only satisfied through incubus with the devil; we hear about nocturnal gatherings, conspiracies, child sacrifice and other ritual murders, about cannibalism, and more generally about secret plots of malevolence against ‘man’ (Denike 2003: 18). These women were essentially deemed weak or feeble; however, their weakness was exactly what made them the prime target of devilish seduction. Weak they were but at the same time they were extremely powerful and dangerous: they were seen to be capable of causing death, destroying corps and introducing plagues (ibid.: 14). They were, and that might have been their greatest asset, even capable of transmuting into other shapes and forms, which is why one could never be sure whether one encountered an exemplar of this devilish pack or not (ibid.: 35). Their ‘ability’ to disguise themselves was, in turn, what made witches a vulnerable target in social and political contexts. Even their normality was thus seen as a proof of their wicked abnormality in the expectation that those who seem most innocent might in fact be the most dangerous witches. The use of torture against these women was thus likened to the activity of peeling an onion, an activity of unmasking or digging to the essential core of identity.

In Malleus Maleficarum, perhaps the most important medieval demonology, we are told that ‘witchcraft is high Treason against God’s majesty’ (quoted in ibid.: 25). The person who is accused of high treason is, of course, not an ordinary criminal but somebody who attacks the king in his capacity of being the arbiter of the law. By punishing an ordinary criminal the integrity of law can be sustained, perhaps even strengthened. In the case of high treason, on the other han...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• THE CULTURE OF EXCEPTION
• INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY OF SOCIOLOGY
• FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: APPROACHING THE CAMP
• PART II: A TALE OF TWO CAMPS
• PART III: CONSEQUENCES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY