The empire of camps - Feature - September 11, technology, civilization, and culture - Critical Essay

Afterimage, Sept-Oct, 2002 by Nick Mirzoeff

On September 11, I was on the South Pacific island of Moorea en route to Australia. It was not until September 12 that I first learned of the attack on the World Trade Center, alerted by my confused daughter's unsuccessful efforts to find French cartoons on television. As I stared at the instantly unforgettable images, I kept turning to look out of the window at what was for my British eyes the almost equally unreal sight of palm trees and white sand beaches. Caught between the exoticism of the Orientalist holiday-of-a-lifetime and the anti-modern spectacle of September 11, I experienced the full vertiginous affect of the visual subject in the empire of camps. By the visual subject, I mean a person who is both constituted as an agent of sight (regardless of his or her biological capacity to see) and as the effect of a series of categories of visual subjectivity. The term "empire" is appropriated from Michael Hart and Antonio Negri's instant classic Empire (2000) that analyzes the new geo-politics of globaliza tion. The camps in question are the internment camps for migrants and refugees that are the true symbol of the new world order, suggesting at a metaphorical level the redivision of geo-politics into an apparently simple system of opposed camps. As it turned out, Australia and Britain, where I have happened to spend the last year, were excellent locations to develop my understanding of the empire of camps. This is my postcard home, wherever that is now, and it is as provisional and sketchy as all postcards.

The camp is the panopticon for our time, at once the site of deployment of new visual technologies, a model institution for global culture and a powerful symbol of the renewed desire of nation states to restrict global freedom of movement to capital. Michel Foucault used the panopticon as his model for the society of surveillance created in the west in the century after He derived its principle from the all-seeing machine, invented by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1786. The panopticon was an inspection house for the reformation of morals, whether of prisoners, workers or prostitutes, by means of constant surveillance that the inmates could not perceive, a system summed up by Foucault in the aphorism "visibility is a trap." Bentham copied a system his brother had used in Russia, in order to persuade the British government to adopt his system of moral discipline derived from the Jesuit plantations in Paraguay and the slave plantations of the Caribbean. When the British instead opted for penal deport ation to the new colony of Australia, Bentham simply asserted that panopticons should be built there, and the prison at Port Arthur, Van Diemens Land (now Tasmania) did indeed come very close to his specifications. Panoptic modernity was always a global system that affected different parts of the world unevenly. It was also always already a failure, from the basic level of technology to its more refined moral goals. Unable to devise technical means to ensure the permanent visibility of the prisoners, and unsuccessful in persuading governments to formally adopt his scheme, Bentham came to despair of the panopticon. Writing of his papers on the subject, he declared: "it is like opening a drawer where devils are locked up--it is breaking into a haunted house." (1) Those ghosts are all around us now.

Nonetheless the panoptic prison appeared to be a success. By 1877 the number of prisons in Britain was only 56, down from 113 in Bentham's day. After 1918 a further 29 prisons were closed and by 1952 the total number of prisons in the U.K. was 29. In 1992, the prison population in Britain was 40,600, down from 51,000 in 1988. In the subsequent decade the number of prisoners have risen by 50% and are anticipated to hit 92,000 in 2005. (2) The prison population in the United States, where approximately two million people are incarcerated in the penal system, dwarfs such numbers. Led by a political reaction epitomized in the "three strikes and you're out" laws, global capital has abandoned any belief in the reforming character of incarceration in favor of a simple and profitable strategy of mass detention.

The overcrowded prisons of the last two centuries are relics, all too visually obvious, subject to riot and reform. The empire of camps has no scruples, no moral agenda and no desire to be seen or to make its prisoners visible, although surveillance is everywhere. The grand architectural sweep of the panoptic prison, the department store and the military barracks has been replaced by the low-rise internment camp, the strip mall and the anonymous delivery of "smart" weapons. Strikingly this policy has been led by the two countries most directly affected by the prison crisis of the 1780s that generated both Bentham's prison and colonial deportation, namely Britain and Australia. Although Britain has a self-declared reforming administration and Australia a right-wing coalition, their policy in this regard has been identical. Britain has even returned to the eighteenth-century strategy of using prison ships. With HMP Weare moored in Portland Harbour, Dorset, without controversy, plans call for a second such ship in Scotland.