The camp, the zone, and sovereign sediments: Querying paradigms through the politics of Made-in-Italy agribusiness operations

Abstract

The article questions the paradigmatic nature ascribed to “the zone”—and the concomitant dismissal of the camp's—by some analyses of the politics of capital's operations, and problematizes the very notion of the paradigm. Elaborating on previous reflections concerning contemporary agro-industrial zones in Italy, the article rethinks camps against state-centric and exceptionalist readings that consider them purely as sites of exclusion. At the same time, it retains a stress on the symbolic dimension of forms of containment and extraction, going beyond a narrow political-economic approach. The zone and the camp, it is argued, are mutually imbricated “infrastructure spaces” of present-day agro-capital's operations, which, however, result from the sedimentation of spatialized techniques for labor disciplining, reproduction, and containment that have developed alongside capitalist forms of agriculture throughout the contemporary period. The camp is thus defined as a function of the political, sovereign dimensions of extraction, that may operate within but also beyond the state. Furthermore, it is underlain by differential attributions of humanness, and therefore by a specific biopolitical anthropology. Engaging in a genealogy of the (humanitarian and/as labor) camps that today proliferate in agro-industrial zones, I argue that to understand the spatial formations emerging from and sustaining the politics of contemporary capital operations a recursive analytics is necessary, that thus questions the purchase of paradigms on the grounds of their atemporality and complicates the positing of mere historical continuities.