Benjamin Meiches
Weapons of Another Sort
1
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 socialmaterial 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
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 21 st 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-NetworkTheory, (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).
Benjamin Meiches
Weapons of Another Sort
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October 2012
destructive capacity of sedentary militaries.3 This new strength of sedentary militaries, in turn,
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
3
De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 12-13.
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).
4
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Weapons of Another Sort
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October 2012
suggests that the concentration camp constitutes the paradigm of the modern. More specifically,
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
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.
Benjamin Meiches
Weapons of Another Sort
4
October 2012
the expansion of Nazi police practices.9 Third, I explore the internal structure of authority in the
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
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.
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.
Benjamin Meiches
Weapons of Another Sort
5
October 2012
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
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
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).
Benjamin Meiches
Weapons of Another Sort
6
October 2012
procedures and reorganize their tactics. This affective component of weaponry is still wholly
material and affects the organization of sensations and perceptions.13
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 selforganizing 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
13
De Landa, 30-31.
Deleuze and Guattari, 332.
15
Ibid, 333.
16
Ibid, 175.
17
Ibid, 399.
14
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Weapons of Another Sort
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October 2012
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
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
18
Ibid, 345.
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.
19
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Weapons of Another Sort
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October 2012
consequence of an abstract machine of war, which induces change and mutation in a political
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.
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Weapons of Another Sort
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October 2012
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
23
Foucault, 243.
Ibid, 247.
25
Bergen, 186-190.
26
Deleuze and Guattari, 416.
24
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transformation of the Nazi concentration camps into extermination camps testifies to the manner
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
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.
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Weyler’s efforts despite the enhanced coordination of the Spanish army.29 The success of this
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
29
Davy, Arthur M., “The Reconcentrados of Cuba,” Histories, 5(3), 1960, pp. 193-205.
Tone, 206.
31
Ibid, 204
30
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enhanced the likelihood of American intervention.32 Nonetheless, even after the policy officially
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
32
Ibid, 209.
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, 190019002,” South African Journal of Science, 106 (5-6), 2010.
33
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resources and concern followed nationalist and racial lines and, consequently, British officials
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
35
Curtin, P., Disease and Empire: The Health of European Troops in the Conquest of Africa, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 210-2.
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insurgents.36 Similarly, Kitchener expanded the scope of the British war effort by targeting Boer
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
36
Hyslop, 256.
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.
37
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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
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
40
Tone, 208.
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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
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
41
Deleuze and Guattari, 436.
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.
42
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conference publicizing the opening of Dachau, the architecture, administration, and organization
of Dachau were the product of local designs and initiatives.45
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-
45
Ibid, 28
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, 32
49
Ibid, 32.
46
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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,
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
50
51
Ibid, 33.
On feedback loops and resonance see Deleuze and Guattari, 40 and De Landa, 28.
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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
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
52
Allen, 58-62.
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.
53
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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
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
55
Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 212.
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.
56
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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
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
58
Sofsky, 38.
Ibid, 38.
60
Virilio, Paul, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller, (London: Verso Publishers,
2009), p. 8. My emphasis.
59
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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
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
61
Zygmunt Bauman, Bartov, Omar and Enzo Traverso are examples of this trend
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.
62
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emphasizes both the sobering redundancy and considerable inventiveness of bureaucracy.
Second, it treats political hierarchies as capable of producing contingencies that are constitutive
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
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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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
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 subauthorities 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
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, 198-200
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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 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
69
Ibid, 199-200.
Ibid, 202.
71
Allen, 199-201.
72
Ibid, 202.
73
Sofsky, 40.
74
Snyder, 214.
70
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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
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
75
Ibid, 215
Deleuze and Guattari, 230.
77
Ibid, 230
76
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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
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
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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
‘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
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.
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assumptions concerning the concentration camp.83 A materialist reading of the camp as a weapon
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
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.
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.
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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
exception than the isomorphic character of deterritorializing flows. Fascism rests upon intensities
that license extra-legal exceptionalism rather than exceptionalism passively producing an extralegal 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
85
Ibid, 28.
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‘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
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
86
Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (New York: Harcourt, 1994), p. 436.
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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
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.