Читать книгу Towards the City of Thresholds - Stavros Stavrides - Страница 20

When the state of exception becomes the rule, the mechanism turns into a “killing machine” (Agamben 2005, 86). We could say that in this case the mechanism is immobilized. The constant passing through opposing elements (spatial as well as juridical) comes to a halt. Instead of being an area of active comparisons, the zone of indistinction becomes an area where opposing elements coincide.

What Agamben wants to describe is exactly this “permanent” coincidence of law and anomie: suspension no longer needs to offer any justification. What the camp represents is the final obliteration of a crucial distinction: the distinction between exception and rule. Exception becomes normal. “The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule … a permanent spatial arrangement which as such nevertheless remains outside the normal order” (Agamben 1998, 169).

That the camp is a “permanent spatial arrangement” essentially means that it is no longer a zone of indistinction, given that the comparison between outside and inside (spatially as well as juridically) is no longer possible. “The camp is a hybrid of law and fact in which the two terms have become indistinguishable” (ibid., 170). There is a slight difference in expression that actually reveals a qualitative leap. If the two terms “have become indistinguishable” then the zone of indistinction as a zone where opposites pass through one another is stiffened in a state where the opposites cannot be differentiated any more. “Have become” describes a state rather than a process.

The camp is not a threshold state. Following Agamben’s symbolism, the camp should not be characterized as a space of exception (as Agamben himself explicitly states) but rather as a space of normalized exception. The paradox of the camp is different from the paradox of the state of exception. The camp remains “outside normal order” (ibid., 169), but at the same time it constitutes and contains a localized “normality”; it is an exceptional law that holds only inside this gigantic enclave.

What is so terrible about the Nazi camps is that they were functionally organized as lethal machines. Administrative reason in its terrifying efficiency defined the logic of this enclave of mass murder. The Nazi camps were neither the first nor the cruelest machines of mass murder involved in civil wars, genocides or imperialist expeditions, but they can nevertheless help us to understand a specific urban-administrative mechanism through which “exception becomes normal.”

When exception loses its threshold character, and becomes the rule, it also becomes a secluded enclave. For those spatiotemporally contained in the enclave, the law “outside” simply does not exist. For those outside this enclave, the enclave can be either fatal trap (if this enclave takes the form of camp) or a zone of protection (if this enclave takes the form of a secluded area of privilege).

The camp can be taken to represent the limit towards which the city evolves only if we accept as a crucial characteristic of contemporary urban life the inhabiting of disconnected and enclosed enclaves. Otherwise, the camp—considered as a model arrangement for defining and confining people without rights (“bare life”)—has a concrete history that can indeed include today’s detention centers for “illegal” immigrants (those treated as non-citizens). What we can gain from understanding the camp as a model is necessarily connected to our ability to distinguish between these two levels in the use of such an analytical model.

An urban enclave is a clearly defined area where general law is partially suspended and a distinct set of administrative rules apply. The force of the law is present in an enclave as a protocol of use. Experienced from the outside, i.e., experienced as an outside, every urban enclave appears as an exception. Exception is made apparent in all the forms by which access to the enclave is regulated: general rules or common rights do not apply; upon entrance one must accept specific conditions of use, specific obligations, and forms of behavior. It is as if the city, considered as the uniform locus of sovereign law, is replaced by an urban archipelago comprised of enclaves where exceptional measures define different forms of suspension of law.

Experienced from the inside, i.e., experienced as an inside, the urban enclave is a secluded world. It is defined by rules created especially for its inhabitants. Exception, to continue the comparison with the camp, is thus normalized.

An urban enclave is usually a carefully planned system of human relations regulated by protocols of use. While such protocols have the appearance of administrative or functional directions for use, they essentially constitute a localized legal system in place of a suspended general law.⁴ Accordingly, urban enclaves are not simply places where general laws do not apply, but places where localized rules, having the form of functional decrees, normalize an exceptional status that becomes permanent.

Is there a specific urban order from which enclaves depart? First of all, urban order has not ceased to be a project to govern the contemporary city. Legal acts in support of zero tolerance politics are exemplary of such a project based on the reinstitution of a general law defining the status of urban citizenship. It is interesting, however, that this project is inspired by the regulating efficiency of protocols for the use of the enclaves. The city itself can thus be legally and administratively fantasized as a gigantic enclave. Order can also be projected as a system of delimiting obligations, as a restraint for those inhabiting privileged enclaves. Exception can be welcome to inhabitants as a defining mark of their privilege.⁵

Generally speaking, the construction of spatial as well as legal orders is always a process open to social antagonism. What seems to be a crucial characteristic of current administrative practices and logic is the acceptance of a dynamic condition of ordering. This is based on two premises: the localized order of urban-island enclaves and the regulating power of metastatic checkpoints which impose a partial and precarious order on the urban sea surrounding those enclaves.

Indeed, refugee and immigrant detention centers constitute a kind of containment that marks “a radical crisis of the concept [of human rights]” (Agamben 2000, 19). Perhaps what is more important is the fact that the camp as a model enclave of normalized exception metastasizes in every aspect of city life. We don’t have to be refugees reduced to bare life to be treated as enclave-confined users. We are trained to accept as legitimate “site-specific” protocols of use without reference to general (or universal) rights. We tend to consider it normal that exception is organized in spatial terms as an area where specific rules apply.

We learn to adapt to exception without even considering what we live as exception. This is how “red zones” become normal: routine control procedures and limited access rules tend to characterize access to the city center or to specified areas guarded as potential “terrorist” (whatever the word is taken to mean) targets. Checkpoints and surveillance systems in shops have become normal. Body searches at athletic events have become normal as well. It is in this direction that the state of exception becomes a rule. It is not that we generally live in a state of emergency (even though lots of people do, as for example the Palestinians and the Israeli people). Rather, it is that we are constantly deprived of a crucial characteristic of urban space which also happens to be a crucial characteristic of any legal culture: the ability and the opportunity to compare, to dispute by comparing, and to investigate the ways limits are imposed. Thresholds can be both spatiotemporal urban experiences and areas of actively experiencing spatial and juridico-political indistinctions alike.

If we are to investigate the liberating potential of the experience and conceptualization of thresholds, then we should clearly understand thresholds as always being crossed. A dynamic image of threshold crossing can help to locate the potential of change in the mechanism (and not in the state) of exception. If Agamben’s use of the threshold image can only be taken to describe a state, then exception can only be understood as a trap. Exception, in this case, describes “a passage that cannot be completed, a distinction that can be neither maintained nor eliminated” (Norris 2005, 4).

It is important to understand the state of exception as a dynamic mechanism, which only once it’s immobilized can be transformed to the setting of an exclusive inclusion (Agamben 1998, 177). In this context, Walter Benjamin’s thought that “our task [is] to bring about a real state of emergency” (Benjamin 1992, 248), acquires an interesting meaning. Taken not simply as a historically specific appeal for anti-Nazi mobilization, Benjamin summarizes the task of creating thresholds in history. On those thresholds past and present are not connected in a linear way. The present is just one of the possible futures the past contained. Discovering hope in the past is the ability to locate ourselves in the past’s unrealized potentialities. “Being aware of historical discontinuity is the defining characteristic of revolutionary classes in the moment of their action” (Benjamin 1980, 1236). Thresholds in history are created out of this awareness.

In this understanding of historical thresholds, the exception triggers a transformative disruption of normality. Exception, thus, can be the spatiotemporal condition of change, of difference. In place of the state of emergency’s cyclical sequence of normality-exception-return to normality, in Benjamin’s “real” state of emergency, normality is replaced by exception leading to possibility. Exception thus destroys normality instead of becoming its supporting mechanism.