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STATEMENTFlorian Schneider
My starting point is a series of images taken by surveillance cameras
of the Spanish border police in the night of the 29th September 2005.
Animated in fast motion the images show how hundreds of immigrants
are climbing with self-made leddars across the three meter high
fences that sorround the spanish enclave of Ceuta. In the following
days the news around the globe were gabbling on a "storm on fortress
europe".
Both, the self-authorized and self-organized transgression of the
border as well as its subsequent scandalization in the mainstream
media reveal a notion of the border that is no longer a just a
demarcation line representing the separation of two distinct
territories. It is a a notion of the border as performativity: A
border that manages its violations rather than ignoring, let alone
preventing, them.
Camp
Camps are the symptoms of a postmodernized border regime where the
exception becomes a rule. According to Giorgio Agamben, "the camp is
the space that opens up when the state of exception turns into a
normality." He sees the camp as a hybrid of law and fact in which
both have become indistinguishable. Hannah Arendt has suggested that
"the camp was itself a vast laboratory in which the Nazis proved that
there is no limit to human depravity."
But is it possible to think the camp also as a counter-laboratory?
The question posed by Agamben at the "Archipelago" conference in
November 2005 reveals a series of theoretical implications and
challenges that can be sorted out only in an experimental setup or a
laboratory environment by itself.
For instance, what could "counter" mean in that context? Who runs
counter to what? How can one read the various notions of the camp
against the grain? Does, paradoxically, the camp even open up the
potentiality to reshape the political in the way i tried to
conceptualize it above?
From its origins in colonialism through the appearance of
concentration camps in Europe after the First World War and during
fascism to the current system of detention camps for illegalized
migrants, camps have been characterized by denying the right of
mobility or freedom of movement to men and women who are not
suspected to have committed any crime.
In a first step I suggest to reverse-engineer such current notion of
the camp from the logics of inclusion and exclusion back to the idea
of the open field, in latin: "campus". Originally the camp was the
place where an army lodges temporarily. Thus, rather than refusing
mobility the camp has been rendering mobility possible.
In this respect "bare life" may appear in deed as labour power, as
defined by Marx as a form of potentiality, like Paolo Virno suggested
polemically. Illegalized immigrant workforce as it is gathered,
filtered, back- and forwarded in the camps in and around the European
Union is the crystallization of bare labor power ready made for the
super-exploitation on the informal labor market that drives
postmodern service economies and affect industries.
Image
Another meaning of the camp is: open space for military exercise.
Initially this may relate in interesting ways to the laboratory as a
place for practical research where experiments are conducted. But it
also refers to an architectural structure that represents a spatial
strategy: The roman camp was a mobile city as well as the blueprint
for the city as such, arranged as a square, organized in homogenous
units, walling off entities of the same.
By artificially creating a border, that stamps out a symmetrical
space from the open field, the camp was designed to prevent surprise
attacks. Such notion of "cadrage" may lead to a second experimental
operation: I would like to counter the concept of the camp with what
is called "hors-champ" in film theory: The out-of-field as an event
outside of the closed system of the framed image, something that is
neither seen nor understood, but nevertheless perfectly present.
Gilles Deleuze distinguishes two qualitatively different aspects of
"hors-champ": In one case, the "hors-champ" designates that which
exists elsewhere, to one side or around; in the other case, the out-
of-field testifies to a more disturbing presence, one which cannot
even be said to exist, but rather to 'insist' or 'subsist', a more
radical elsewhere, outside homogenous space and time.
Is it then possible to translate the notion of the postmodern border
towards an image production that as well manages its violations
rather than purifying its content?
The image is defined by what is not visible, but perfectly present.
Machinic assemblages of a production of images in polyphonic,
uncalculable, unprecedent ways...
Copy
The copy preceeds the original. In ethical respect, this perspective
opens a radically different approach: Not only that the substance
does not have priority over the attributes, nor the cause over the
effect, nor the whole over its parts, nor the unity over its division
-- the substance of image production today is its unlimited variety
and multitude; it is realized in in such multitude and it is nothing
else but the process of its production by the infinity of its
attributes, expressions, remixes or pirate copies
The ethical, esthetical and political consequences is what i would
suggest to call: Hypervisuality. A mode of the visual as a practical
critique of the political economy of image production, and imaginary
property -- in the era of digital reproduction and networked
distribution.
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