Zones of Representation of Anthropological Machine/ Biopolitics
or Camp Society!


What do we think when we say 'I am going camping'? Well, we usually mean some kind of 'nature' activity. Camping is what we do for recreation purposes. it is a hobby, weekend, entertainment...sports..whatever. And 'we' are western. We go shopping, schooling, working, driving, watching [tv], and CAmping. It sounds redundant, but I want to emphasize the role of action-interaction-living in these taken for granted activities.
Hey, camping is natural...some may say. Or rather, it is good for us as it involves 'nature'. Hehe...I would say that 'camping' as an idea, as a political tool, as a larger instrument of biopolitics or Anthropological machine (both are interchangeable) has been naturalized and neutralized. And as a product of a long sociocultural construction, camping gets embedded into our psyche.
Camping as a way to get away from the city is one of the examples of "the camp politics". The basic idea is to set up boundaries, to sharpen edges, to zone natural and cultural spaces. Reading Athena we see how biopolitics needs camps to promote its discourse. Taken to its extremes, camp as a way to dehumanize and destroy those who are Others stands out as a blank spot in the western history. We think of such events as something that had passed...away..in a sense. It is a dead matter. WE become comfortably numb to such events as it is history, and history is the past. We look for the future and go camping.
"Concentration Camp is a technology of giving birth to the nation's cleansed and pure future...It is also a means for the inscription of calculable and quantifiable life in the nation-state and its attendant biopolitical regimes of the normal" (Athena 148)

So..let's not look at camps. let's look at cities, at countryside..at everything we see around us..There are spaces within spaces, places and areas:streets, parking lots, highways, malls, residential areas, suburbs, airports..what have you. Naming them is easy as they are spatially segregated in accordance to their social, economic, political purposes. And when we look at such spaces, we should think of Zones...Recreational zone is one of the examples.
Zones of exclusion, exception, acceptance, resistance [resistance is imaginary abstract zone of psychic space where language becomes the only instrument;as Athena says the language of the other is archaic]. Biopolitics needs zones: they become institutionalized (as refugee camps, prisons, airport transition zones etc]; ideologized (going camping as natural]...Zoo is a perfect example of an incarnated, ideologized, civilized, "humane" concentration camp.
And once we start looking at politics of space as something that has its roots way back in the days of nazi regimes, colonialism, inquisition....we start to see the other side of it. Incarnated society of camps celebrates power over the Other, over standing reserve nature with all its species, over time and space...Yes, we do not have concentration camps...but what we have is a camp society. The former was very destructive in a short term. The latter is a lasting process of mass annihilation..and mass here is not only human but planetary...:
"If there is anything new about the technoscience of western postmodern biopolitics, it would be that it complicates, decentralizes, proliferates, and intensifies the differentiation of power involved in the definitions, images, fantasies, and representations of humanity...Biopolitical discipline tends to be less visible, more subtly dispersed and systematically integrated in the discrete banality of cultural fabric...This dispresion does not imply that contemporary biopolitics entails necessaryly less authoritative violence, but rather it involves a multitude of recognized ..techniques of violence through which ...conditions...are confirmed" (Athena 145)

Instead of going camping let us just go..away...out...or inside out...to the very edge, to the margins and periphery of constructed realities...to the very limits of humanness...Because "it is the limit that creates the event of life..." (Athena 127). And by limits I mean art as expression (I think it's Anny's idea). Instead of camps, let's take what is already there and live in it (Hobbits society living in natural houses-caves)...And yes, I am dreaming, hallucinating, imagining...It is utopia, but it is necessary to question our participation in biopolitics.