T_p

POLITICAL

The politics of camp situation is practiced through different levels of isolation and exclusion. Isolation is voluntary imprisonment, exclusion is forced limitation of access. It is not by chance that spaces and regulations of isolation/exclusion are conceptualised with terms which contain strong historical connotations: camp, capsule and ghetto.

Camp - Agamben
- The camp as a space of exception is more than a piece of land placed outside the normal juridical order. It is the site or structure in which the state of exception is realized normally. (Whereby a sovereign power decides for a mode of life which is to be actively and continuously excluded or shut out of political life)
It is in the camp where human beings are reduced to bare life (a life exposed to death) and it is the camp that marks the exclusion of such mode of life from the polity as a distinctively human life.

Capsule - De Cauter
– The capsule is a device that creates an artificial ambiente, which minimizes the communication with the outside by forming its space-time millieu, an enclosed artificial environment. All means of transport beyond certain level of speed - and here lies the metaphor - become capsules: the train, the automobile, the aeroplane and, obviously, the space capsule. These are real capsules. Apart from the latter there are also virtual capsules, such as screen, Walkman, mobile phone... Indeed, architecture and urban design can be capsular as well: the airport, the shopping mall, the theme park, the gated community. The hype surrounding mobility, the network, boundlessness and smoothness functions on the basis of these capsules. Capsules are also engines of simulations: they generate a simulation of public sphere.
(De Cauter, The Capsular Civilization, 44-45)

Michel Foucault calls this other places heterotopias, "a sort of effectively realized Utopia in which the other places of society are represented, contested and distorted at the same time, places which lie outside all the other places, although they are effectively localizable." (Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias", quoted in De Cauter, 60).
These other places are constructing ecology of fantasy through ecology of fear, ecology of freedom through ecology of threatening. Heterotopias are places of simulation of a total environment. They develop ecology of control through ideology of self-sustaining capsule. They develop their own regulation which is based on enclosing, isolation and inclusion via exclusion. They are the stage where biopolitics is performed at its utmost level.

Voluntary Ghetto - Bauman
- “The inhabitants (in voluntary ghettos) find to their dismay that the safer they feel inside the enclosure, the less familiar and more threatening appears the wilderness outside, and more and more courage is needed to venture past the armed guards and beyond the reach of the electronic surveillance network. Voluntary ghettos share with the genuine ones an awesome capacity for letting their isolation self-perpetuate and self-exacerbate.” (Zygmunt Bauman, Community. Seeking Safety in an Insecure World, Polity 2001, p. 117).