file · web viewthe development, production, and use of weapons are several of the...

Benjamin MeichesWeapons of Another Sort October 2012

The development, production, and use of weapons are several of the central

considerations for many theories of International Relations. From hoplite shields and stirrups to

nuclear weapons, IEDs, and drones, the weapons of a particular time or place provide clues for

understanding the balance of power, the construction of political identity, or the trajectory of

global technological progress.1 However, recent theoretical work on materialism problematizes

how we think about the constitution and efficacy of weaponry.2 Orthodox examinations of

weaponry treat a weapon as an inert object subjected to the whims of human mastery and

manipulation. New materialism, in contrast, requires that we rethink weapons as a complex

amalgamation of minerals, composite elements, monetary flows, war forces and political beliefs.

Taking hints from new materialist theories, this paper advances an ecological

interpretation of weaponry. By this I mean an approach that emphasizes the role of social-

material assemblages in constituting or producing a weapon in a series of functional and

synergistic relationships between differential elements. For example, gunpowder presupposes the

manipulation of a set of chemical properties, institutions capable of refining potassium nitrate

(saltpeter), and the invention of disciplinary tactics of rapid reloading and firing. Once in place,

these three processes fundamentally altered the dynamics of war by vastly increasing the

destructive capacity of sedentary militaries.3 This new strength of sedentary militaries, in turn,

1 For a sense of the scope of these projects see: Jervis, Robert, The Meaning of the Nuclear Revolution: Statecraft and the Prospect of Armageddon, (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1989). Wilson, Clay, “Improved Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Iraq and Afghanistan: Effects and Countermeasures. CRS Report for Congress, August 28, 2007. Singer, P.W., Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). Dolman, Carl Everett, The Warrior State: How Military Organization Structures Politics, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004). 2 New materialism is a diverse field with different assumptions about metaphysics and ontology. A small sampling of new materialist work includes: Latour, Bruno Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, (Durham, Duke University Press, 2009). Morton, Timothy, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). Barad, Karen, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). Meillassoux, Quentin, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans Ray Brassier, (New York: Continuum, 2010). 3 De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 12-13.

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transformed the organization of the state by emphasizing greater centralization of military power.

The ecology of weaponry thus consists of concrete flows of matter-energy, social institutions,

bodily habits, climatic variations, and shifts in the organization of sensation and perception.

In this paper, I examine the emergence of the concentration camp as a form of

biopolitical weaponry. At first glance, this seems like a strange claim because everybody knows

about the destructive legacy of the camps. The existing scholarship on concentration camps is

immense and situates their creation at the intersection of several historical lineages including

colonialism, chemical warfare, bureaucracy, eugenics, and the genesis of biopolitics.4 In the

context of the Holocaust, for instance, a mountain of documentation details the precise

development of the concentration system.5 So, why resituate the camp as a type of weaponry?

Why argue that considering camps would enrich International Relations? First, the use of

detainment camps, refugee camps, and extra-legal incarceration suggests that camps play a

burgeoning role in governance of international life. Existing scholarship tends to either focus on

historical or contemporary camps rather than synthesizing the two. A synthetic approach helps to

explain the persistence of camps as a technology of political control. Second, new materialist

theories illuminate features of the camp that predominantly social or ideological theories ignore.

Third, this perspective challenges the work of Giorgio Agamben whose work on biopolitics

suggests that the concentration camp constitutes the paradigm of the modern. More specifically,

4 Lindvqist, Sven, “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide, (New York: The New Press, 1996). Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and the Holocaust, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). Traverso, Enzo, The Origins of Nazi Violence, trans. Janet Lloyd, (New York: The New Press, 2003). Foucault, Michel, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-1976, trans David Macey, (New York: Picador, 2003). Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).5 For an overview see Browning, Christopher R., The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Friedländer, Saul, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945: The Years of Extermination, (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2007). Bergen, Doris L., War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003).

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it problematizes assumptions in Agamben’s work concerning the continuity of biopolitical

violence, assumptions that creep into critical scholarship in international studies.6

This paper begins by arguing for the transition to an ecological approach to weaponry

and, in particular, how this approach commits us to thinking about camps as a form of weaponry.

Taking a cue from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, I argue that camps emerge as

weapons only within the horizon of biopolitics: where war increasingly coincides with the

management of the population and hinges on technologies that divide and segment political

associations by intervening in the reproduction of a political ecology.7 I demonstrate this point by

introducing three ‘images’ of the camp. Each image charts the genesis of certain aspects or

‘design’ features of the camp. Rather than provide an exhaustive history of concentration camps,

my approach briefly presents the convergence of a series of material, energetic, and synergistic

flows, which generate, stimulate, or alter the process of concentration.8 First, I focus on the

development of camps in the colonial context and examine the contribution of isomorphic

deterritorialization and war to the appearance of camp systems. Second, I explore the catalytic

development of the camps in early Nazi Germany. In this case, I show how the camps generate a

series of self-amplifying tendencies by connecting to the growth of German economic life and

the expansion of Nazi police practices.9 Third, I explore the internal structure of authority in the 6 For an example of work drawing on Agamben’s theory see Edkins, Jenny, and Véronique Pin-Fat, “Through the Wire: Relations of Power and Relations of Violence,” Millennium Journal of International Studies, 34 (1), 2005. Dillon, Michael, “Network Society, Network-centric Warfare and the State of Emergency,” Theory, Culture & Society, 19 (4), 2002.Amoore, Louise, “Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on Terror,” Political Geography, 25 (3), 2006. 7 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).8 In this paper I opt for the language of concentration camps or camps to describe an institution that develops and concentrates, interns, or detains a group of civilians in a camp or barracks. There is a large debate over the precise terminology as the second section of this paper demonstrates my emphasis is on the isomorphic structure of concentration rather than any specific historical actualization of the camp.9 The distinction I draw between self-amplifying and self-organizing systems rests upon viewing the former as dependent on inputs from numerous overlapping systems and sub-systems including the input of human decisions. My claim is not intended to obscure the havoc of camp life for the inhabitants, but simply to explore an effect of the camp on political atmosphere in Germany.

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concentration camp system. Contrary to accounts that emphasize the importance of bureaucratic

rationality, I argue that the camp rests upon a diffuse system of partial control. By examining the

development of the Zyklon-B gas chamber, I explore how this heterogeneous structure

contributed to the invention of some of the infamous aspects of extermination. In each image, I

describe the operations of an abstract machine, which induces transformation in the structure of

the camp.10 At a pragmatic level, if the series of abstract machines that produce the camp are not

a product of the state of exception, as Agamben suggests, but a diffuse series of regimes of

control then they attest to a disturbing plasticity of the camp. This plasticity suggests that camps

lurk as an altogether real if non-actual danger on the horizons of global politics.11 To that end,

resituating the camp as a weapon in a materialist legacy might open up new insights into the rise

of camps in contemporary politics.

Weapons & Assemblages

A weapon is traditionally considered a specific type of tool or instrument for inflicting

harm or destruction upon a person, structure or system. Moreover, regardless of the scale, speed,

or destructive capacity, weapons remain firmly under the control of agents in question. Power, in

most theories of International Relations, derives largely from the number of highly destructive

weapons a state or group possesses. The effect of a weapon is therefore limited to its contribution

to the military capacities of the organization, which functions according to the internal logic of a

determinate power structure. The classic example is the possession of nuclear weapons, which

10For an elaboration of the abstract machine see Deleuze and Guattari, 58.11 I am referring to Deleuze’s distinction between the virtual and the actual. Deleuze argues against the concept of the possible, which merely reflects a particular state of affairs, in favor of the virtual, which is fully real, and the actual. My point is the absence of the concrete actualization of camps into global politics in no way undermines their potential effects on the horizon of political life. For a further discussion see Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and Repetition, trans Paul Patton, (New York: Continuum Books, 1994), p. 263-5.

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contributes to the power or prestige of a state and alters the balance of power while not altering

the functional dynamics of the international system.12

This interpretation of weaponry has a number of problems. First, weapons presuppose a

set of logistical and scientific processes. The use of a rifle, for instance, requires the

manipulation of propulsion, targeting, and explosion mechanisms as well as the mass production

of bullets and mechanical components. It is difficult to describe the ‘power’ of a weapon without

referring to this network of ‘environmental’ conditions. Second, weapons not only enhance

power they change how it functions as different elements or relations within a system develop

new capacities. The rifle reduces the significance of spatial distance in combat, it multiples the

ballistic potential of a single unit, but, more importantly, it reformulates a set of social

relationships. For example, the production of the rifle requires the political reorganization of the

state apparatus in order to supply all of the components of the rifle. This reorganization

transforms the strategic, tactical, and logistical dimensions of war (as states become larger,

armies regularized, etc.). The creation of the rifle thus supplants the coordinates of power, which

made the rifle desirable in the first place. Third, weapons generate effects not only in the form of

their immediate physical consequences on a body or institution, but at the level of affect or

feeling. The ‘effects’ of the rifle included increasing the destructive power of the musket nor

reducing the impact of distance on war, but also causing soldiers to flee the field of combat

because of fear. As a consequence, armies were required to intensify their disciplinary training

procedures and reorganize their tactics. This affective component of weaponry is still wholly

material and affects the organization of sensations and perceptions.13

12 The class example is the work of Kenneth Waltz see Waltz, Kenneth N., Theory of International Politics, (Reading: Mass. Addison-Wesly Publishers, 1979). Waltz, Kenneth N., Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959).13 De Landa, 30-31.

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Deleuze and Guattari offer an interpretation of weapons that compensates for many of the

deficits of other theories by focusing on the development of weapons within what they describe

as a machinic assemblage.14 An assemblage is a series of heterogeneous elements that produce a

‘territory’ by converging around certain points of consistency, processes of flow, and

organization. A house is an assemblage consisting of a floor, doors, a roof, but also the flow of

bodies, foodstuffs, bacteria through it, and variations in climate or temperature that it regulates.

A machine is a set of “cutting edges that insert themselves into the assemblage [ ….] and draw

variations and mutations of it.”15 A machine induces deterritorialization in an assemblage by

freeing elements from the organization or stratification of a territory. The free elements follow

lines of flight or escape only to reterritorialize in new assemblages, stratifications, and

organizations. Lines of flight, processes of deterritorialization as well as stratification,

congealment and reterritorialization, traverse and constitute an assemblage.16 In this sense, the

machine is not a particular or instrument or device, but the conjunction of a series of self-

organizing processes that produce new variation and mutation in the elements that produce a

territorial assemblage.

For Deleuze and Guattari, weapons and tools derive from segmentation, collective

statements of enunciation, and lines of flight that generate an assemblage. As they put it: “it is

always the assemblage that constitutes the weapons system.”17 The development of the stirrup,

for instance, generates a man-horse assemblage, a synergy that reconstitutes the speed of war and

creates new vectors for pillaging sedentary communities, but also for reconstituting a social

assemblage based on an itinerant trajectory rather than a set of points or relays.18 The production

14 Deleuze and Guattari, 332.15 Ibid, 333.16 Ibid, 175.17 Ibid, 399.18 Ibid, 345.

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of the stirrup testifies to the operation of an abstract machine or set of self-organizing processes,

which introduce bifurcations and divergences into the organization of a particular assemblage.19

At certain critical points or singularities, an assemblage undergoes transformation because of a

shift in the intensity (speed, temperature, etc.) of one of its flows. At these singularities, an

assemblage may develop in new and often unforeseen directions.20 A weapon thus appears at a

conjunction of singularities and mutates or reconstitutes the assemblages. The ‘discovery’ of

weapons occurs by what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the nomad war machine. The war

machine, which opposes the state apparatus, is flush with singularities and constantly undergoes

metamorphosis and transformation. In other words, war deterritorializes political assemblages

and presupposes speeds, movements, and distributions of space irreducible to the form of ‘unity

of composition’ required by the sedentary existence of the state apparatus.21 The state apparatus

captures the war machine, stratifying it at particular singularities, and subtracting its mutational

powers. Consequently, the war machine becomes an instrument of the state, which aims

exclusively at the destruction of state enemies. The invention of new weaponry introduces a new

set of singularities (changes in intensity, conjugation of material flows, etc.) into political life

and induces mutation in the constitution of social-material assemblages. The capture of these

energies by the state apparatus subtracts the mutational capacities of the war machine, and gives

it a new limited purpose of war. In summary, weapons emerge at critical points in the

conjunction of flows within a heterogeneous social-material assemblage. These weapons are the

consequence of an abstract machine of war, which induces change and mutation in a political

19 Ibid, 90.20 For a concise explanation of the relation between singularities and mutation in an assemblage see De Landa, A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, (New York: Zone Books, 1997).21 Deleuze and Guattari, 385.

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assemblage via energetic and affective means.22 The state apparatus captures and subjects the

war machine to a new exclusive purpose: war.

If the assemblage constitutes the weapon then the two questions are what assemblage

produces the concentration camps and how do they function within this assemblage? First, as the

next sections will illustrate, the concentration camps emerge at the nexus of a series of

deterritorializing flows: mass movement of people, guerrilla and insurgent warfare, the loss of

food or water, or the rise of pandemics. The camps presuppose, stimulate, and organize the

process of deterritorialization and, ultimately, reterritorialize these flows in the sedentary site of

the camp. The appearance of the camps dampens these flows in two ways. On one hand, it

inhibits lines of flight by prohibiting movement and blocking the possibility of escape. On the

other, the camp actualizes modes of stratification that channel or direct the trajectory of

deterritorization. Second, the camp functions by stratifying, sorting, homogenizing, and

affectively managing these flows. These mechanisms vary considerably from simply restricting

the movement of detainees to the restriction on rations, forced labor, and punitive killing. In each

case, a series of feedback loops, resonances, or connections with economic considerations, war

efforts, state identity, but also gun shortages or excesses of particular chemicals, influence the

specific development of control at the camp in question. Each of these practices, however,

presupposes that power should exert itself to manage the ecological foundations for the

reproduction of life. In short, the institution of the camp operates as a biopolitical technology for

governing the population.

Indeed, Foucault’s work describes the emergence of biopolitics as a new mode of power

that takes the optimization of life as a supreme political value.23 The underside of this power,

22 Ibid, 356.23 Foucault, 243.

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according to Foucault, is the disciplinary management of the body and potentially violent

interventions to needed regulate the health of the populace. A series of divisions operate to

increasingly separate politics into the activity of ‘making live’ and ‘letting die.’24 If the

assemblage producing the camp renders the political intelligible according to the criteria or value

of life then the concentration camps, which directly manage the life and death of threats to the

population, constitute a mode of biopolitical weaponry. This weaponry emerges where the fight

against the enemy and the optimization of the health of the race, species, or population

terminally coincide. It thus displaces the traditional organization of standing armies with the

development of new systems of control, which intervene in the mobility of the population and

generate circuits for displacing 'undesireable' elements to the camp.25 Nonetheless, these

technologies are weapons because they pre-empt or inhibit the emergence of a nomad war

machine by a war machine captured by the state apparatus.26 Indeed, the early statements about

the camps in Cuba, South Africa, and Nazi Germany suggest that they facilitate the rigid

stratification of the population and inhibit the emergence of an insurgency, rout, or social chaos.

This disturbing transformation from concentration to extermination suggests that the camp is

constituted by a divergence between a state apparatus, which dampens or impedes political

contestation, and a state war machine that follows a ‘line of abolition.’ Thus, from the beginning,

the concentration camp hinges on the tenuous distinction between the protection of the

population and the war against an enemy not because of an inner oscillation within biopolitics,

but as a result of the tension between the apparatus of capture, which imposes a unity of

composition within a particular milieu, and the war machine it appropriates. The dramatic

transformation of the Nazi concentration camps into extermination camps testifies to the manner

24 Ibid, 247.25 Bergen, 186-190.26 Deleuze and Guattari, 416.

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in which these two processes of state control and absolute war coexist virtually and actualize

themselves in relation to the emergence of new singularities or intensities. In the case of the

camp, these singularities exist at certain thresholds of density, pressure, and speed, which

generate new processes for managing the life and death of the population.

Image One: Colonial Isomorphism

In 1896, General Valeriano Weyler was sent by the Spanish government to defeat

the growing insurgency in Cuba. Weyler’s appointment signified a shift in the tactics of fighting

the insurgency. Unlike his predecessor, Weyler believed that targeting the Cuban population was

critical to achieving victory. By separating the insurgency from their base of supplies, Weyler

felt that the Spanish could simultaneously consolidate their own military forces and weaken

segments of the Cuban resistance.27 Weyer’s strategy therefore consisted of three parts:

abandoning vulnerable Spanish garrisons and minor outposts; focusing attacks on one

geographic section of the resistance; and relocating agrarian civilians in a policy of

reconcentrado or ‘reconcentration.’28 This strategy was designed to transform the war into a

traditional fight between standing armies rather than a prolonged guerrilla conflict. The

complexity of the Cuban resistance, the significant network of roads and railways, economic

relationships between sugar, mining, tobacco, and exporting industries, the proximity of

cumbersome or mountainous terrain, and the relative mobility of the insurgency frustrated

Weyler’s efforts despite the enhanced coordination of the Spanish army.29 The success of this

27 The professionalization of military forces contributed to this shift in war. Hyslop, Jonathan, “The Invention of the Concentration Camp: Cuba, Southern Africa, and the Philippines,” African Historical Journal, 63 (2), 2011, pp. 251-4.28 Tone, John Lawrence, War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895-1898, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), p. 195.29 Davy, Arthur M., “The Reconcentrados of Cuba,” Histories, 5(3), 1960, pp. 193-205.

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strategy consequently depended on isolating and controlling the flows of supplies (ammunition,

food, medicine, etc.) sustaining the Cuban insurgency. In short, it required reconcentration.

The policy of reconcentration consisted of the forced relocation of nearly half a million

inhabitants of agrarian Cuban communities to urban army barracks. The policy developed as a

scheme for “denying[ing] the insurgents access to civilians and their resources by controlling or

eliminating them.”30 In addition, the reconcentration centers helped the Spanish military resolve

the growing refugee crisis, which was a byproduct of the war and the collapse of Cuban

industries. The reconcentration camps served as little more than pens for confining the Cuban

population. Initially, Weyler planned to use the land surrounding the reconcentration zones to

cultivate the necessary provisions for feeding the inhabitants of the camps. However, the swift

development of the policy meant that this was impossible because of the quick pace of relocation

and the high cost of purchasing arable land.31 Moreover, the Spanish army, which was primarily

committed to defending Spanish investments in sugar and tobacco, provided only a limited

supply of rations to the overcrowded camps. As a result, the reconcentration zones grew quickly

without sustainable flows of food, water, or sufficient oversight to organize life in the camps.

The spread of malnourishment, the rise of epidemics, and the lack of administrative

guidelines produced a jumbled mess of human misery, police brutality, and graphic images of

Spanish cruelty. As a result, only shortly after the adoption of the policy went into effect the

circulation of stories and images of reconcentration incited protest against the conditions of the

camps in both Spain and the United States. The political contestation eventually prompted the

abandonment of reconcentration strategy as it undermined Spanish support for the war and

enhanced the likelihood of American intervention.32 Nonetheless, even after the policy officially

30 Tone, 206.31 Ibid, 20432 Ibid, 209.

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ended, the residue of reconcentration- the destruction of existing townships and malnourishment

of the population- meant that returning the population to their previous homes was all but

impossible.

A few years later, the British instituted the policy of ‘Concentration’ during the Second

Boer War. The British camps were originally developed as sites for holding Boer refugees. In

1900, Herbert Kitchener was made commander of the British forces. Kitchener, like Weyler,

pursued a new war policy directed not only at Boer militias, but Boer townships, businesses

(primarily farming), and civilians.33 At the same time, Kitchener ordered the expansion of the

concentration camp system. The camps consisted of tents or lite barracks confined by a rough

perimeter. The influx of Boer refugees, who were fleeing from the destruction of Kitchener’s

tactics of total war, led to a drastic overcrowding of the camps. Twin epidemics of typhoid and

measles spread quickly to both British troops and Boer detainees. As in Cuba, this expansion of

malnutrition and disease was responsible for the death of a significant portion of the camp’s

inhabitants.34 However, it also prompted the British to experiment with practices of medical,

sanitation, and nutritional management including the construction of new latrines, the

distribution of standardized rations, and the creation of provisional hospitals. The infrastructure

of the camps was thus internally reorganized in order to resolve the unintended byproducts of

urbanizing the Boer population.

The British efforts to reduce the spread of disease, malnutrition, and malfeasance

nonetheless resulted in considerable suffering for the Boer population. The distribution of

resources and concern followed nationalist and racial lines and, consequently, British officials

33 Van Heyningen, E., “Costly Mythologies: The Concentration Camps of the South African War in Afrikaner Historiography,” Journal of South African Studies, 34 (3), 2008, pp. 495-502.34 Van Heyningen, “A Tool for Modernisation? The Boer Concentration Camps of the South African War, 1900-19002,” South African Journal of Science, 106 (5-6), 2010.

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received the largest share of support. The outward distrust of Boer cooking and eating practices,

for instance, coupled with Boer cultural suspicions concerning British army rations led to

conflicts between camp administrators and inhabitants.35 These conflicts influenced the flow and

use of nutrients, minerals, and medicines. The micropolitics of this distribution varied from camp

to camp and was in part constituted by elements ranging from the physical distance of a camp

from the British railway system, to the nationalist tendencies of a camp administer, to the impact

of calorie deficiencies on physical energy. The micropolitical differences between camps

produced considerable heterogeneity in British concentration.

These descriptions provide a rough sketch of the historical-social processes that were

emerging in the camps in Cuba and South Africa. This dynamic is commonplace in the colonial

production of the camp in other places such as the Philippines, German Southwest Africa, and

the American West. However, it is a mistake to attribute this resemblance to a social, ideological,

or juridical identity common to either the camps or the colonial experience. Such an approach

homogenizes the concentration experience and fails to account for the heterogeneity both within

and between concentration systems. Indeed, in both Cuba and South Africa, a series of

singularities-critical points in the fluctuation of a material flow-accounts for the development,

transformation, and demise of concentration.

First, concentration emerges in the expansion of the Spanish and British war efforts. In

the case of the Spanish, the success of the Cuban insurgency, the attenuation of the Spanish

armed forces, and potential rise of American support altered the dynamics of the war. Weyler

thus modified the strategy of war to target the ecological milieu, which supported the Cuban

insurgents.36 Similarly, Kitchener expanded the scope of the British war effort by targeting Boer

35 Curtin, P., Disease and Empire: The Health of European Troops in the Conquest of Africa, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 210-2.36 Hyslop, 256.

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farmland and communities. In both cases, the deterritorialization of the population, which was a

primary objective of the war (although also an unintended consequence in both contexts), created

an emergent, mobile, refugee population.37 The camps served to anchor or reterritorialize this

population in a series of networked confinement stations. In this sense, the camps stimulated

deterritorialization by unsettling existing communities and reterritorialized the inhabitants of

these communities within a highly striated and supervised space.38 The camps develop, in part, in

conjunction with singularities in flows of war, which shift the strategic aim of the war from

destruction of the armed forces to destruction of the political ecology sustaining insurgent

conflict. Paradoxically, this effort to inhibit the insurgency was adopted partly to revive orthodox

warfare by morphing the ecology of Cuba and South Africa into a traditional battlefield.

Second, the camps also develop in connection with the regulation of flows of nutrients,

minerals, and energy. In both British and Spanish contexts, plans were created for sustainably

managing the health of the inhabitants of the concentration camps. However, the rise of

overcrowding, the spread of disease, the destruction of transportation networks, and the

haphazard system of governance (not to mention several explicit efforts to create famine and

disease) disrupted these plans.39 The camps birthed new pandemics of infectious disease,

malnourishment, and malfeasance. The crystallization of these singularities, in turn, augmented

the growth of the more brutal aspects of concentration including forced labor, confined

movement, restricted living quarter and conditions, and the strict control over rations, but also

the experimentation with new medical, sanitary, and nutritional techniques on the camp

inhabitants. The regulation of these flows was thus a product of colonial governance and the

37 The shifts in discourses and networks surrounding war strategy certainly contributed to new practices of war. However, the focus on discourse only explains initial strategic conditions and decisions not the subsequent ripples and changes in concentration. Ibid, 265.38 Deleuze and Guattari, 360.39 For the influence of bottlenecks, delays, and other singularities see De Landa, 30-35.

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emergent dynamics accompanying concentration. In many respects, the appropriation of

starvation and disease for the purpose of controlling the population was a byproduct of material

processes and non-human agencies that were to some extent unanticipated by the military

officials who designed the camps in the first place.40 In each case, the speed of

deterritorialization and reterritorialization, the incipient dangers of disease and famine, the

intensification of concentration, and the tempos of the war and agricultural production influenced

the trajectory of the concentration camp’s emergence.

In many ways, the production of the camp consists in the urbanization of a migrant,

mobile, or rural population. This ‘concentration’ provides a mechanism for organizing the

deterritorialization of flows such as the movement of refugees or the effects of the war. It

simultaneously frees the energy from these communities and captures it in another form.

Consequently, the camp operates by intervening into the constitution of the ecology, which

renders the reproduction of a particular political community possible. The camp targets an

ecology that it deterritorializes and reconstructs a highly stratified ecology for reterritorializing

mobile populations. Nonetheless, the elements that compose each colonial concentration system

vary considerably. Indeed, the camps, as machines that intervene on flows of deterritorialization,

presuppose a heterogeneous set of historical political processes, divergent material pressures

such as food, water, or economic industries, and different types of war and conflict. This variable

composition of the concentration camps conforms to what Deleuze and Guattari describe as an

‘isomorphic structure’ where heterogeneous elements or contents emerge in accordance with the

diagrammatic functions of an abstract machine.41 The redundancy of concentration camps in the

colonial experience thus rests not on the ideological proclivities of Eurocentric elites (although

40 Tone, 208.41 Deleuze and Guattari, 436.

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these play an undeniable role) so much as the convergence of material singularities, which

generate an isomorphic structure of management. The isomorphic structure of concentration

links the camps together as institutions for the stratification of deterritorializing flows while

tolerating the diversification or proliferation of differing control strategies and tactics.42 As a

result, the concentration camp may emerge in many shapes and guises. The isomorphic structure

establishes a set of functions of the camp, dampening the intensity of deterritorializing flows,

and, moreover, provides part of the answer to why the camp must be considered a weapon: it

disrupts the reproduction of the ecology that sustains the flourishing of a population.

Image Two: Self-Generating Camps

The development of the concentration camp in Nazi Germany is often presented as the

culmination of Hitler’s extreme racism, the anti-Semitism of the German people, or as a

byproduct of enlightenment obsession with bureaucratic rationalization.43 Many of these

accounts focus exclusively on the final period of Nazi concentration from 1939-1944 and the

infamous rise of the extermination camps. However, the history of the Nazi camps begins nearly

a decade earlier in 1933, shortly after the Nazi party came to power, with the establishment of

Dachau. The early designs of Dachau served as the prototype for subsequent camps at

Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Ravensbrück.44 While Hitler and Himmler held a large press

conference publicizing the opening of Dachau, the architecture, administration, and organization

of Dachau were the product of local designs and initiatives.45

42 Ibid, 455.43 See Bergen, 1-17 and Bauman, 18-25.44 Sofsky, Wolfgang, The Order of Terror: The Concentration Camp, trans. William Templer, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 30.45 Ibid, 28

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Theodor Eicke, the second administrator of Dachau, introduced new punitive procedures

at Dachau. These included administrative techniques such as Lagerordnung, which gave

exclusive legal jurisdiction of the camp to its commander, disciplinary practices such as

Postenplficht, the order to kill any prisoners who attempted to escape, and new systems of

classification, observing, and recording prisoner activity.46 These procedures differentiated

Dachau from previous temporary camps, like the one at Krema, by formally concentrating

authority while at the same time merging and distributing disciplinary and punitive powers. The

new institutional arrangements coupled with the low cost of administering the camp, the

introduction of new punitive procedures, and the successful regulation of camp life were a

significant part of the success of the Dachau camp. The camps also provided a complement to

the development of the German ‘special court’ system, which tried and imprisoned political

opponents of the Nazi party.47

The success of Dachau prompted Himmler to order the development of additional camps

under the supervision of Eicke. Eicke created plans for six further camps, which were modeled

on Dachau and emphasized small barracks, detailed examination of prisoners, and the

standardization of detention processes.48 Dachau served as both a model and as a training center

for the administrators and guards at other camp and ensured the redundant structure of the early

camps.49 The success of the camps stimulated the expansion of the camp network from 1933-

1936 as well as the detention practices of the Nazi regime. Until the outbreak of the war, the

camps primary function was to intimidate and disrupt political protest. However, over the next

several years, the camps underwent a number of changes. First, as the German war progressed,

46 Ibid, 30-1.47 Allen, Michael Thad, The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), p. 36-48.48 Sofsky, 3249 Ibid, 32.

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the camps suffered from significant cutbacks in rations, water, and other medical supplies and an

influx of foreign prisoners. Second, the expansion of detention practices to include ethnic, racial,

and religious minorities led to dramatic overcrowding of the existing camps. Third, the camps

were linked to the economic demands of the German war economy.50 These points generated

significant changes in the design, administrative, and punitive practices at the camps in the form

of the construction of additional labor camps, the regularization of punitive killing, and the

creation of new partial authorities in the camp.

The development of the early Nazi concentration system rested upon a series of

resonances or feedback loops between a set of imbricated political, economic, and material

processes ongoing within Germany.51 The articulation of these resonances helps to explain the

decline of detention and the birth of extermination. First, the camp resonated with the emergence

and growth of German detention practices and the development of the Nuremberg Laws. The

development of the camps stimulated this growth in several ways: the camps provided the space

for the detention of political opponents; they created a network with the new system of German

‘special courts’; they produced flows of information (stories) about the fearsome character of the

Nazi regime. The additional space also induced the extension of Nazi detention to new minority

groups such as Communists and Jews. The expansion of the detention practices (and the large

number of detainees) likewise propelled the growth of the concentration system. Second, the

connection to the German war economy augmented the flow of prisoners to the camps as the

pressure for greater industrial output enhanced the need for prisoners in the camps. The demand

for slave labor required that the concentration system develop a new group of subcamps or

additional labor camps to accommodate business interests. 52 Third, expanding the concentration

50 Ibid, 33.51 On feedback loops and resonance see Deleuze and Guattari, 40 and De Landa, 28.52 Allen, 58-62.

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system was difficult because of its costly nature and the focus on the war. These delays

generated considerable overcrowding in the existing concentration camps, which were being

fueled by the influx of political prisoners from Germany and abroad.53 The overcrowding of the

camps combined with the rapid rate of Nazi detention reached a singularity or bifurcation point,

which subsequently sparked the reorganization of the concentration system. The drastic

overcrowding (shifts in density) and rate of detention (acceleration) prompted the adoption of

new procedures including the arbitrary killing of prisoners en masse. In short, the catalytic

relationship between the concentration camps, detention practices, and punitive measures

reached a specific threshold or singularity, which transformed the project from one of

disciplinary control to extermination.

This resonance illustrates how a series of material circuits successfully operationalized

Nazi racism. In essence, the camp functioned as a mechanism for sorting German society and the

conquered territories via a group of connections with the railway, police, and bureaucratic

systems. The purpose of the early camp system was simply to detain opponents of the Nazi

regime. The detention of these opponents extracted particular elements from their participation in

the political ecology in Germany. This extraction process was designed to stratify or homogenize

German society along racial, nationalist, and religious lines.54 However, the resonance between

detention and concentration, which facilitated this extraction or sorting process, produced the

self-amplification of the detention-concentration circuit. At a certain point of pressure (the

overcrowding of the camps), speed (the accelerated influx of prisoners), and tension (the war

economy), the camps underwent a drastic transformation into centers for extermination and mass

53 Sofsky, 36.54 My point is not to suggest that Nazi eugenics successfully eliminated biological elements of the population, but rather that these divisions facilitated the sorting or processing of German society according to racist criteria. The camps constitute one dimension or node in this broader extraction process. De Landa, 62, 310, Foucault, 245.

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murder. It is important to note that the expansion of killing at the camps accelerated significantly

prior to the abandonment of the Madagascar Plan at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942.55

At one level, this account fits fairly well within the predominantly ‘social’ explanation of

the camps by highlighting how a combination of economic and political factors produced the

camps. However, several distinctions between this explanation and mine are important. For

instance, a number of Holocaust historians argue that these were the unintended consequences of

the initial Nazi policies.56 The early decisions to create the camps produced a series of

autocatalytic or self-augmenting dynamics as the camp established resonances with other

processes of stratification ongoing in Germany.57 While Hitler or Himmler may have intended

the camps to facilitate an expansion of Nazi control neither could have predicted the precise

influence of the camp system on the growth of Nazi police practices. In addition, the ‘social’

aspect of these policies in no way denies the importance of materials. Flows of foodstuffs,

bodies, and diseases all contribute to the evolution of control in the camps. More importantly, the

friction, bottlenecks, and excesses of materials induced successive transformations in punitive

policy from detention to murder. The system of resonances was critical in the metamorphosis of

the concentration camp into the extermination camp.

The resonances between the concentration camp, Nazi detention practices, the industrial

economy, and the German war effort also operated on an affective level of sensation and

perception. Simply put, the rise of the concentration system produced flows of information,

images, and concerns in the form of stories, newspaper articles, and television coverage that

55 Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 212.56 See for instance Van Creveld, M., “War Lord Hitler: Some Points Reconsidered,” European History Quarterly, 4 (1), 1974, p. 58-67.57 On the debate between functional versus intentionalist histories see Marrus, Michael R. The Holocaust in History, (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1987), p. 34-46.

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coupled the horrors of the camp to the process of arbitrary detentions.58 This link generated a

self-amplifying sense of fear about the dangers of the Nazi police and produced a form of

political control that targeted the populace by placing dissent in a state of continual uncertainty

and insecurity.59 The emergence of a climate of fear thus dampened political protest to the Nazi

regime and facilitated cooperation with the Final Solution as a method of displacing the anxieties

about being arbitrarily arrested by Hitler’s regime. The weaponization of the concentration

system itself depends in large part on the relationship between the camps and the stimulation of

fear. Indeed, weapons “make themselves felt through chemical, neurological processes in the

sense organs and the central nervous system affecting human reactions and even the perceptual

identification and differentiation of objects.”60 The emergence of this climate of fear likewise

formed a resonance with the expansion of the camps as German and other European societies fell

increasingly under the sway of Nazi police. This transformation of the affective milieu not only

diminished the possibility of political resistance it also connected with macro and micro fascism

movements and tendencies throughout Europe. In a sense, the rapid development of the Final

Solution was primed by the coordination and growth of this affective politics.

The expansion of the early concentration camp system was the consequence of a series of

self-generating processes. These processes enabled the construction of a machine for effectuating

the racist sorting of the European populace. This sorting process depended on two linked

dynamics: on one hand, the extraction of individual elements (Jews, Romas, dissidents, etc.) via

a network of detention practices, railway systems, and collaborations between the SS and local

governments; on the other, the emergence of an affective climate of anxiety, which influenced

58 Sofsky, 38.59 Ibid, 38.60 Virilio, Paul, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller, (London: Verso Publishers, 2009), p. 8. My emphasis.

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the possibility of political protest against the Nazi regime and mobilized fascist tendencies in

other states. In this sense, a collection of singularities propelled a series of transformations in the

camp system. What emerged was no longer a weapon that intervening in the reproduction of an

ecology, but an institution for destroying that ecology as such.

Image Three: Gas and Abolition

Many scholars place the camp at the end of a modernist teleology in which technological

development, bureaucratic or calculative rationality, and enlightenment racism perfected the

destructive drives of Western civilization.61 Utilitarian calculus, technocratic engineering, and the

alienation engendered by modernity allegedly culminated in a general complacency with mass

murder. According to this perspective, Nazism depended on the homogeneous relationship to the

coercive structure of bureaucratic authority and political hierarchy.62 In their commentary on

fascism, Deleuze and Guattari offer a different reading of the organization of political authority:

“there is no opposition between the central and the segmentary. The modern political system is a

global whole, unified and unifying, but is so because it implies a constellation of juxtaposed,

imbricated, ordered subsystems; the analysis of decision making brings to light all kinds of

compartmentalizations and partial processes that interconnect, but not without gaps and

displacements.”63 This image of numerous overlapping, quasi-autonomous, supple nodes of

control differs considerably from technocratic interpretation the concentration camps. First, it

emphasizes both the sobering redundancy and considerable inventiveness of bureaucracy.

Second, it treats political hierarchies as capable of producing contingencies that are constitutive

61 Zygmunt Bauman, Bartov, Omar and Enzo Traverso are examples of this trend62 A resonant criticism of this argument is that the aesthetics of bureaucracy were more significant to the Nazi regime than the implementation of efficient administrative structures see Allen, 127.63 Deleuze and Guattari, 210.

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of institutional governance. Third, it connects the arrangement of bureaucratic management to a

series of broader flows of war.

The structure of authority at the concentration camps from 1941-1944 has been a subject

of considerable debate. By that time the organization of the Nazi Genocide had become

immensely complex including the movement of numerous populations, dozens of different labor

and concentration camps, mobile gassing units, and an overlaying war effort.64 From 1939 to late

1942, the primary mode of killing during the genocide consisted primarily of firing squads that

deposited bodies into mass graves.65 The drastic increase in Jewish prisoners, primarily from the

Soviet Union and southern Europe, led to the search for new methods of killing to reduce the

influx of prisoners. At this time, the few existing gas chambers employed the fumes from motor

exhaust, carbon monoxide and expensive chemical weapons. The production of the infamous

Zyklon-B gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau did not begin until the late fall of 1941.

The concentration camp system at Auschwitz was a large, but diffuse network of

subcamps processing thousands of new arrivals on a daily basis. While the classic image of the

Holocaust depicts this as a streamline process, it actually consisted of a large set of intersecting

subsystems ranging from the orchestration of prisoner movement, to the control of extermination

teams, to the oversight of squadrons of capos and sonderkommandos. Deleuze and Guattari

juxtapose two modes of system organization: rigid and supple segmentation, the former

corresponding to a hierarchical distribution of power with uniform oversight and the other to a

network of different functional authorities. In many ways, the camp’s functioning exemplifies

the permutation of these two modes of organization. The consistency of the camp authority, for

64 A historical account of this period cannot treat the political structure of Nazi Germany as static because of the high degree of variation and heterogeneity. Friedländer, 190. 65 Allen, Michael Thad, “Modernity, the Holocaust, and Machines without History,” in Technologies of Power, ed. Michael Thad Allen and Gabrielle Hecht, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001) p. 197.

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instance, was partly a product of loose professional networks amongst careerist members of the

SS that lived nearby the camps and frequently coordinated with one another in a series of

informal meetings.66 Different sections of the concentration camp were run by separate sub-

authorities and, given the continual flow of prisoners and changes in supplies due to the war

effort, these relationships often involved friction and confusion between different factions.

Moreover, Rudolph Höss, commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau, was the one who finally gave

the order to experiment with the use of Zyklon-B on a group of Soviet prisoners in fall of 1941.

However, these experiments took nearly six months to complete and, even then, gas chamber

production was paused during the summer of 1942. The turn to Zyklon-B depended on the relays

between different sections of the Nazi bureaucracy, the chemical industry, and the influx flow of

prisoners to Auschwitz as well as the effects of bottlenecks and accelerations in different parts of

the concentration camp system.67

The selection of prussic acid (hydrogen cyanide), the chemical agent in Zyklon-B, is an

oddity. Unlike chemical agents such as mustard gas or motor exhaust, which were already

employed as weapons, prussic acid was primarily used as a ground fertilizer and fumigation

agent. The rise of epidemics in the camps triggered the weaponization of prussic acid.68 The early

success of the Nazi war effort strengthened the flow of prisoners to Auschwitz from all over

Europe, creating a pool of virulent microbes that quickly spread due to the weakened immune

systems of the vast majority of the camps inhabitants.69 Moreover, the SS officers also picked up

diseases and transmitted them to local cities and German military officers passing through the

66 Orth, Karin, “The Concentration Camp SS as a Functional Elite,” in National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies, ed. Ulrich Herbert, (New York: Berghahn Books, 200), p. 315-321.67 Allen, 198-199.68 Ibid, 198-20069 Ibid, 199-200.

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camps.70 In response, SS engineers developed a group of gas chambers using prussic acid in

order to inhibit the spread of disease by fumigating new arrivals to the camp. The notion of using

prussic acid for the killing process was introduced by Gerhard Peters, the chief executive officer

of the Degesch industrial firm that marketed the fumigation system.71 However, Peters’

suggestion was ignored until the fall of 1941. The process of successfully insulating the gas

chambers and aerosolizing the acid seriously backlogged the construction project and,

consequently, the use of Zyklon-B would not become a regular part of camp operations until the

end of the summer of 1942.72

Two other pressures sustained and galvanized the experiments with prussic acid. First,

the success of the Nazi war in southern Europe vastly increased the number of people entering

the camp system. Camp administrators had to compensate for an influx of nearly half a million

prisoners over the course of several weeks. This created a delay in the processing of prisoners

and redoubled the search for a more efficient mode of killing. Höss was consequently willing to

invest in the expansion of the gas chamber.73 Second, the development of the gas chamber, as

well as other techniques of extermination, coincided with the growing desperation of the Nazi

war effort. The mobilization against the Soviet Union, in particular, stalled to the point that the

‘lightning victory’ necessary to accomplish Hitler’s war aims was all but impossible.74 The

strength of the British navy, the American decision to enter the war, and the inability to deport

the Jews provoked a deterritorialization of Nazi war efforts. Suddenly, “mass murder [was]

simpler than mass deportation.”75 For Deleuze and Guattari, this transformation signifies a shift

70 Ibid, 202. 71 Allen, 199-201.72 Ibid, 202.73 Sofsky, 40.74 Snyder, 214.75 Ibid, 215

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in the intensities of war. Up to this point, the Nazi war machine followed a line of flight or

deterritorialization organized around the expansion German conquests, capturing these territories

and folding them into a new ‘unity of composition.’ Deleuze and Guattari describe these types of

reversals or defeats in war as moments “when the war machine has reached the point that it has

no other object but war, it is when it substitutes destruction for mutation, that it frees the most

catastrophic change.”76 The effects of this intensive failure transformed the war into a “cold line

of abolition,” that exclusively pursued destruction.77 This marks the point of rupture between a

state apparatus, which cultivates a homogeneous ‘unity of composition’ by biopolitically

managing the health of a population, and the release of an abolitional war machine that destroys

this very population. The rift between these assemblages reverberated throughout the Nazi

project, which no longer pursued the deterritorialization of a political ecology, but the

extermination of a political ecology as such. The urgent development of the gas chamber, in its

later, more perfected, form bears witness to the emergence of this disgust, which turned to the

most extreme methods of rapid destruction.

The emergence of the gas chamber was a product of the inventiveness of the bureaucratic

structure, which involved relays between camp administrators, SS engineers, chemical industries,

but also flows of bodies, the circulation of diseases, excess supplies, and the intensities of war. It

is in this sense that the camp constitutes a veritable laboratory for the volatile creation of new

strategies of political control and technologies for killing. The critical point is that even in the

midst of an enormous, tragic, and in many ways unimaginable genocide the contingency of

material flows played a powerful constitutive role in producing the instruments of destruction.

The extreme character of Nazi eugenics cannot be reduced to the development of bureaucratic

76 Deleuze and Guattari, 230.77 Ibid, 230

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rationality and the distance it created between the engineers and victims of the Holocaust.

Rather, the gas chamber emerged in relation to the abstract machines that shaped the

transformation of the camps from sites of concentration into killing, and from processes of

killing into processes of extermination. Eugenic racism, imminent defeat in the war, excesses of

prussic acid, influxes of prisoners, a climate of fear, extended networks of railways, and the

production of a line of abolition, all of these forces laced together, participated in the genesis of

the Zyklon-B gas chamber. The emphasis on the biopolitical racism of the Nazi regime, perhaps

the archetype of violent regimes of the 20th century, needs to be complemented by the

constitutive efficacy of unruly non-human agents and transhuman flows of intensity and affect.

Moreover, this suggests that the transformation of the concentration camp into an extermination

camp depends upon the contribution of a series of supposedly impersonal or inert objects. The

emphasis on dangers of modernity or the deep caesuras of Western politics have obscured these

contributions in a way that inhibits political responsiveness to the appearance of camps in

contemporary politics.

Camps, Biopolitics, Control

Over the past decade considerable attention has been given to the development of

biopolitics in the work of Giorgio Agamben. The force of Agamben’s explanation rests in the

way in which it draws a subtle lineage from the concentration camp to the persistence of

biopolitical violence. For Agamben, the camp serves “as the hidden matrix and nomos of the

political space in which we still live”- a matrix whose principal purpose is the production of

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‘bare life’ or life reduced to its pure biological functioning. 78 Following Carl Schmitt and Walter

Benjamin, Agamben asserts that bare life emerges from the topology of the state of exception,

which subverts the rule of law in a process of ‘inclusive exclusion’ whereby sovereign power

applies to a life insofar as it is excluded from the domain of the political.79 This life, embodied in

the figure of the homo sacer, may be killed by anyone without committing a homocide.

Contemporary biopolitics makes the management of bare life its principal vocation. The

concentration camps, for Agamben, bear witness to the moment when “the state of exception

starts to become the rule” and ‘all men become homines sacri to one another.”80 Agamben goes

so far as declaring that “the essence of the concentration camp consists in the materialization of

the state of exception” and, consequently, we must “be facing a camp virtually every time that

structure is created, regardless of the nature of the crimes committed in it and regardless of the

denomination and specific topography.”81

The force of Agamben’s work has extended to Philosophy, Holocaust and Genocide

Studies, and International Relations. In the latter case, it has served as a template for thinking

about the extension of the state of exception in the war on terror as evidenced in Guantanamo

Bay and Abu Ghraib.82 While Agamben has a large number of critics, few directly interrogate his

assumptions concerning the concentration camp.83 A materialist reading of the camp as a weapon

78 Agamben, Giorgio, Means Without End: Notes On Politics, trans Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 37.79 Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 45-48.80 Agamben, Means Without End, p.37.81 Ibid, 45, my emphasis. It is clear Agamben reduces ‘materialization’ to ‘actualization’ note the importance of this distinction for Deleuze and Guattari as I note in the third section for thinking about insecurity and the camp.82 See Dillon, Michael, “Governing Terror: The State of Emergency of Biopolitical Emergence,” International Political Sociology, 1(1), 2007. De Larrinaga, Miguel and Marc G. Doucet, “Sovereign Power and the Biopolitics of Human Security,” Security Dialogue, 39 (5), 2008. Van Munster, Rens, “The War on Terrorism: When Exception Becomes the Rule,” International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 17 (2), 2004.83 See for example Huysmans, Jef, “The Jargon of Exception-On Schmitt, Agamben, and the Absence of Political Society,” International Political Sociology, 2(2), 2008. Neal, Andrew W. “Foucault in Guantánamo: Towards an Archealogy of the Exception,” Security Dialogue, 37 (1), 2006. Connolly, William, Pluralism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 131-160.

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rejects the basic conceit of Agamben’s project concerning the centrality of the camp to

biopolitical production. Indeed, Agamben’s work rests upon a belief that the topological

structure of the state of exception exhibits a peculiar propinquity with the emergence of camps. I

suggest, in contrast, that this continuity is unstable and unsustainable not because the state of

exception cannot lead to the creation of camps, but because the continuity results from the

adaptation of the juridical apparatus to a series of emergent material phenomenon.84 In short, the

emergency presupposes the emergent. In this case, the control technology operates to

deterritorialize and reterritorialize a population in a catalytic process, which rests upon a relay

system of overlapping and partial authorities including common figures such as the state,

corporations, organizations, families, but also a host of non-human agencies. The figure of the

state of exception acts as a mask covering these diffuse and diverse processes by insisting on the

aporetic logic of identity. Consequently, the camp becomes the terminal product of a biopolitical

machine grinding to a halt as it ceaselessly divides political and bare life. Politics collapses into a

false choice between the cold operation of a biopolitical machine or the opaque potentials of the

Muselmann. Political and critical intervention amount to nothing more than an ‘imperfect

nihilism’ as we wait in the camps for the coming of a Messianic time.

The ecological approach rejects this continuity by situating the camp at the disjuncture of

numerous material flows, intensifications of fear and disgust, and social stratification. Thinking

the camp materially requires describing how camps function in a political assemblage: the ways

intensify control, loose new flows of energy, generate affective atmospheres, or perforate legal

structures. Moreover, it suggests that the appearance of the camp has less to do with the state of

84 In this sense, the functioning of contemporary biopolitics reflects the isomorphic suppression of incipience and emergence. For a more detailed account see Massumi, Brian, “The National Enterprise Emergency: Steps Toward an Ecology of Powers,” in Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough & Craig Willse, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), p. 21-27.

29


exception than the isomorphic character of deterritorializing flows. Fascism rests upon intensities

that license extra-legal exceptionalism rather than exceptionalism passively producing an extra-

legal zone of sovereign power.

As this paper demonstrates, at numerous levels and at different times, the camp

undergoes transformation and restructures itself such as self-augmenting dynamics in play at

Dachau. The ecological approach underscores how unruly social-material flows may produce

incipient dynamics and control strategies such as camps. As a result, camps or camp-like spaces

might develop along new and unforeseen paths. Agamben’s observation that the camp actualizes

with disturbing regularity in contemporary politics is accurate insofar as the camp functions as an

instrument of capture. An institution primed for dampening the intensity of deterritorializing

peoples, squashing a budding social dynamism, and confining the elements that reconstitute a

veritable nomadic war machine.85 Animated by a different series of abstract machines, the camp

may not be the hidden destiny of biopolitics so much as a nodal point in a far more complex

network of divergent flows and control technologies. In this sense, it is important to consider

camps as potentialities probing the limits of biopolitical control of difference while, at the same

time, not overdetermining their value by treating them as constitutive of the contemporary

condition.

Conclusion

If the camp is a weapon then it is a weapon of a different sort. It is not a device, but an

assemblage situated at the convergence of a series of abstract machines. The camp’s status as a

‘weapon’ derives from the way in which it organizes the distribution of life and death in a

political ecology. The camp functions as a sorting machine that homogenizes and stratifies

85 Ibid, 28.

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elements in accordance with a set of biopolitical criteria that are themselves subject to

transformation. In this sense, the weapon works by orchestrating or controlling life at the level of

its participation in an ecology or milieu by confining its inhabitants, subtracting degrees of

relative mobility that characterize urban and rural spaces, inhibiting trajectories of escape, and

regulating everyday life through brutal labor routines, exhaustion, and starvation. The fact that

the camp looses new processes of acceleration, introducing distinct tempos that prolong the life

of the camp, and encourage its connection with other domains (economics, military institutions,

prisons, etc.) confirms Hannah Arendt’s suspicions that the concentration camp operates as a

laboratory. However, this laboratory experiments not only with totalitarian power or human

nature, but also with cutting apart, dividing and redistributing a much more expansive and

complex political ecology.86

The stakes of describing the camp as a weapon extend beyond the scholarly value of

uncovering lineages between war and genocide. Rethinking the camp as a weapon highlights a

set of political commitments that naturalize the use of control technology. A camp may appear as

the temporary solution to a refugee crisis or a famine, but this solution presupposes the exposure

of life to processes of rapid deterritorialization and rigid reterritorialization.. Camps amplify and

normalize structures of global violence by stabilizing the unruly energy and remainders of

incipient deterritorialization and, simultaneously, naturalizing various forms of political and

economic dispossession by undermining the politicization of these processes. Consequently, the

appearance of camps on the thresholds and fringes of global affairs merely suggests that the

networks, loops, and resonances sustaining systems of global violence remain imperceptible. In

this respect, the camp remains a virtual technology, which threatens to detain, restrict, or confine

movement, a mode of dispensing with the underside of the disruptive residues of global rhythms

86 Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (New York: Harcourt, 1994), p. 436.

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such as climate change, currency fluctuation, or the spread of disease and war that displace

peoples, towns, borders, but also citizens of democratic states or the working class. Drawing

attention to the assemblage that constitutes the camp as a weapon stresses the role the camp plays

in reproducing and vitalizing modes of political destruction.

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