Guantanamo Bay is certainly the most spectacular and most-discussed example of the contemporary ex-territorial camp. Here, a »state of exception« can suddenly become the rule, as was once the case with fascism. Now it is permissible to murder and torture in the name of human rights instead of in the name of a nationalist idea or socialist class hatred, using sovereign power to establish the very state of law that is based on the division of law and power. Giorgio Agamben has referred several times to this paradoxical relationship between constituting power and constitutive law.

Today, in the light of how repressive measures by police and military are on the increase in »post-democratic« states like the USA, his elaborate meditations on »states of exception« (following on from Foucault’s studies in governmentality and his thoughts on the bio-political invention of a population in need of administration), published back in the nineties, are turning out to be sombre prophecies on the establishment of grey zones between law and lawlessness. What is at stake, both in Agamben’s theoretical concept of inclusive exclusion and in the very concrete, post-Nazi and pre-fascist camp at Guantanamo Bay, is »bare life«: the form of existence without rights that the Italian described as the negativity a citizen’s life in the middle, as the constant threat of an exclusion that has as its precondition the production of limiting inclusion. Moreover, the rhetoric of »bare«, »naked« or »wasted« life is also relevant today because the other side of globalised, networked capitalism is the political and social segmentation of society: the integrative power of the empire creates different zones of exclusion in the zone of inclusion; the bio-power creates spaces of powerlessness within its sphere of influence. Thus, the included-excluded are outside the privileged »gated communities«. The »superfluous people« (Zygmunt Bauman) populate the Third World enclaves in Paris, New Orleans, Liberia, Skopje and São Paulo. They fight in no-go areas, slums and ghettos for a better life or sheer survival. But in contrast to optimised conditions of compulsion and exploitation, today’s emergency administration is often concerned only with locking people away or in, with leaving a biological existence to its own devices, an existence that is to remain unnoticed as long as it does not disturb the value chains. Incidentally, this form of segregation represents a sharp contrast to the rhetoric about misguided humanity, whose evocation as a biological species amid concerns over climate change is suddenly attracting great attention.

How is this fashionable critical life concept translated into today’s media formats? In dystopian films about a reproduction-less society, like »Children of Men« (2006) or the zombie remake »Land of the Dead« (2005), bare life takes revenge for its biopolitical repression by threatening death. TV formats like »24« depict Agamben’s »zone of indistinction« between rule and exception in a hyper-stressful, chronically over-the-top realtime drama that follows a process of blackmail brought about by a reality that is best countered by paranoia. Jack Bauer constantly has to betray good, democratic, constitutional America to rescue it perhaps at some time; he has to torture a little to avert the great big conspiracy.

This film, in its version both as a full-length movie and an advertising clip in the Internet, was given a privileged place at a January conference at the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts, as part of an exploration of the connection between a theory of modern forms of life and the way they are reflected in the arts. »Film, Avant-garde and Politics« aimed at an up-to-date assessment of a question often posed by avant-garde movements in the past: that of the distance between art and life and their points of overlap. A kind of life, however, that is here barely allowed any chance to develop any kind of obstinate resolution and to see its own marginalisation as a chance for self-organisation (as, for example, Helmut Weber and Sabine Bitter have shown in their work »Living Megastructures« (2003) about squatting in Caracas).

In the talks at the Vienna conference, this »wasted« life was however presented as something that, having been left to itself, can be primarily injured and destroyed or be trained as subjectivity within the power structure. This is what was suggested by Foucault’s conception of modern biopolitics, mediating between politics and economy, which relies both on statistically calculated control of the population and self-guidance by the subjects. Against the background of fascism and National Socialism, which attempted in their administration of people to scientifically justify racism and created murderous hierarchies between »desirable« and »worthless« life, biopolitics seem to be hopelessly discredited. However, the dark and yet enormously productive history of this imperative of optimisation, ranging from birth control and fitness plans to euthanasia, still leads to today’s manipulated forms of life. Clones and avatars in Life 2.0 are gradually blurring the border between nature and technology, materiality and immateriality, the real and simulation. A situation that the film scholar Thomas Elsässer, among others, took into account. Reversing the view of historical avant-gardes, Elsässer noted not an alienation, but a tendential convergence, between art and life. While post-human life becomes a plaything of technology and science, he said, post-human, digitally animated media art is simulating vitalist criteria like repetition and reproduction. The positive aspect of this avant-garde that has been salvaged into the present day would then be the formation of new production intelligences, of animated things that possess an element of instability or even of fragile unpredictability. Such very technologically-inspired reanimations of the avant-garde like these against the background of biopolitical regulations cannot draw attention away from the fact that Foucault’s master concepts of governmentality and biopolitics can be used to describe all kinds of present-day life scenarios. The cultural theorist Tom Holert demonstrated the flexibility of these concepts while – very pertinently - examining the films by Gus van Sants that deal with the clichéd figure of a highly talented, misunderstood young hero who can cross class borders owing to his genius.

More political controversy was caused by a debate that arose briefly about late Foucault and his hopes with regard to neo-liberalism. According to the media theorist Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, Foucault believed that neo-liberalism had potential as a rationality that could weaken the state and that possibly »is always reflecting on limiting governance and thus could be more bearable than the totalitarian governmentality of the state.« The Berlin philosopher Katja Diefenbach immediately picked up on the incipient astonishment and commented on Foucault’s understanding of neo-liberalism by pointing out that it could of course be both low-government and disciplining at the same time.

However that may be: in his last years, Foucault look for ways out of the snares set by the biopower he himself had so brilliantly described. A recently published selection of his last texts on the »aesthetics of existence«¹ explores the scope offered by a life beyond present-day norms and seems to want to rehabilitate more than just the utopianism of the avant-gardes. There are other familiar and yet strangely old-fashioned-seeming ideas that Foucault tries to revitalise with the ancient care of the self: the praise of varied friendship as a form of life, the value of intellectual exercises like writing or memorising, and the concept of active sensitisation, which seems to place Foucault’s »art of living« in the proximity of the aestheticism of the dandy. But in contrast with the aristocratic arrogance of the dandy, here it is a matter of countering the state administration of bodies and desires with a concept that itself has effects on the lives of others: like the case of Alexina B., a person with an ambiguous gender. Foucault profited from reading the story of her suffering in his practice of a homosexuality that did not define identity. For: »The main aim today is doubtless not to find out, but to reject, what we are.«

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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