Zone Of Indistinction Research Articles

Unexpected spaces of confinement: Aversive technologies, intellectual disability, and “bare life”

Giorgio Agamben describes the “camp” as the “zone of indistinction between law and violence” where bodies located in exceptional spaces are stripped of citizenship rights and embody “bare life.” We deploy Agamben’s analysis to the context of the everyday violence of aversive technologies meted out against students living at the dangerous intersections of race, class, gender, and disability and located in unexpected spaces of confinement such as schools, developmental centers, and family homes. We argue here that the logic of the “state of exception” applies to disabled children and adults where acts of violence enacted via disciplinary practices are justified as being outside the realm of the legal and subject to sovereign power. The locus of our study is the Judge Rothenberg Center that over the past 40 years has utilized behavioral techniques that have been investigated as abusive and only very recently has been held accountable for these infractions. We examine the discourses used to justify these forms of inhumane punishment as well as the discourses that oppose them to foreground the real material implications of “how we understand the role of systems and institutions of punishment” in unexpected spaces of confinement of children/adults with intellectual disabilities.

Governing enclaves of informality: Unscrambling the logic of the camp in urban Zimbabwe

The warehousing of informals in designated enclaves is a common strategy for the government of urban informality in the global South. In this article, I unscramble state-operated enclaves of informality in Zimbabwe. The article scrutinises two types of enclave: a flea market and a holding camp. I extend Agamben’s politico-juridical construction to the social and economic realm. I question claims of inclusion in flea markets by juxtaposing a ‘soft’ zone of indistinction (flea market) with a ‘hard’ zone of indistinction (holding camp), arguing that both spaces are dump sites for homo sacer. I draw attention to the construction of bare life in both enclaves and emphasise the condition of rightlessness and the delimiting of the value of informals to bare life. Reflecting on the extent to which these spaces manifest the logic of the camp, I argue that both are spaces of exception.

Recognising hope: US global development discourse and the promise of despair

Practices of global development have been critiqued for reproducing a notion of the suffering poor as bare life; passive, despairing and devoid of both hope and potentiality. In contrast, this article treats the experience of hope not as external to the governance of underdeveloped life but as a biopolitical technology central to its formation. Reading US President Obama’s call to recognise underdeveloped life as inherently hopeful and potential, this article analyses the biopolitics of development at the moment when the separation between lives on the basis of its capacity for hope is explicitly banished. Emerging from this reading is a troubling paradox, one in which hope and despair enter a zone of indistinction. Encouraged to embody this indistinction, it is argued, is a bare and hopeful form of neoliberal life, a potential yet not sovereign being. Hopeful, but without the capacity to conceive of or to act towards a different future.

“Zones of indistinction” and visions of post-reconciliation South Africa in District 9

In this article, I explore the ways in which District 9 reflects South Africa’s current socio-political transition through the problematical representation of the film’s eponymous slum and its impoverished inhabitants as well as its protagonist, Wikus van der Merwe. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s influential ideas of biopolitics, I demonstrate the ways in which the film provides a compelling critique of the effects of neoliberal capitalism on post-apartheid transition and South Africa’s complex geopolitical landscape. In this regard, I analyze how the slum figures as a “zone of indistinction” where political and economic forces combine to produce the paradoxical conditions in which impoverished South Africans are included in a democratic social contract, but are simultaneously excluded from the socioeconomic benefits that it promises.

From Post-colonial to Post-9/11: A Study of the Contemporary Pakistani-American Fiction

Employing Giorgio Agamben's notion of “homo sacer,” I study the protagonists in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), H.M. Naqvi's Home Boy (2009) and Shaila Abdullah's Saffron Dreams (2009) as placed in a “zone of indistinction” where they, as terrorist suspects, reconfigure their ontology under law of exception. Post 9/11 US imperialism stands distinct from British colonization of the Subcontinent. Referring to Du Bois' “double consciousness,” I describe the form of Pakistani-American fiction as introducing a double narrative that resists imperial realism as well as the sovereign violence the protagonists suffer for being Muslims or for resembling Arabs.

We Deportees

This article addresses a critical inflection point in the history of the long War on Terror: Israel’s 1992 deportation of over four hundred Palestinians to the “no-man’s-land” between Israel and Lebanon, and the camp that the deportees fashioned for the better part of one year to contest the legitimacy of Israeli colonialism and demand their return. The deportation—meant to incapacitate Islamic militant resistance to the US-brokered peace process between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization—paradoxically provided the conditions of possibility for conversation and collaboration among attorneys, doctors, professors, university students, and imams, which had heretofore been highly restricted and regulated by Israel’s carceral practices in the West Bank and Gaza. The deportees—those who in Giorgio Agamben’s estimation had been literally abandoned in a zone of indistinction—engaged in a political practice of “habitational resistance,” refusing their conversion into homines sacri by performing instead a mode of life that rendered multiple lines of transterritorial affiliation, self-assertion, and continuity. The deportees’ published archive—poetry, photobooks, autoethnographies—is understood as a technology of mediation that operates beyond the bounds of the prevailing Islamophobic and orientalist frames while also addressing Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. The case of the deportees thus illuminates the articulation of race, religion, and war as it rubs against the linkage between settler colonial dispossession and the Westphalian trinity of nation, state, and territory.

With/Out a State, Kurds Rising: The Un/Stated Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq

Located in northern Iraq, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) rules over an autonomous province in Iraq. Constitutionally, ‘Kurdistan Region’ is not independent, but empirically the KRG behaves as if it is a sovereign entity. With an elected parliament, a president, a prime minister, a cabinet, a flag, a national anthem, schools taught in Kurdish, and a booming economy, the ‘Kurdistan’ embodied by the KRG clearly exists empirically while unrecognized internationally. In this paper, I examine the rise of the KRG as an agent in international relations since the first Gulf War in 1991. I argue that foreign policy as a field of conduct and discourse has been central to the KRG's effective agency. In my analysis, I employ and interrelate Robert Jackson's work on ‘quasi-states’, Doug McAdam's argument on ‘political opportunity structures', and Giorgio Agamben's discussion on ‘indistinct zones of politics’ as in Iraq and the Middle East. Ultimately, I contend that while less than a full state in constitutional legal form, the KRG is more than a quasi-state in substance.1

Forvaltningen af det bestående:

The article investigates Giorgio Agamben’s turn to, and radicalization of, Foucault’s concept of governmentality, which Agamben argues constitutes a ’decisive point’ in the Homo sacer-series. The article shows that in the investigation of the Trinitarian oikonomia, Agamben finds the point of intersection between the ‘totalizing procedures’ of the state and ‘individualizing techniques’ of biopolitics thereby disclosing the ‘zone of indistinction’ between sovereignty and government and politics and economy, which constitutes power in the West. Furthermore, the article argues that Agamben shows how the economy is not something distinct from politics, encroaching on its logic, but rather how the governmental paradigm of the West constitutes the continual administration of the given, the continual and perpetual government of the economy and thereby of the existing economic and political power-relations.

Affecting in Discourse: Communicating uncertainly and communicating uncertainty

We communicate uncertainly, and we communicate uncertainty. This essay argues the ambiguous and indeterminate aspects of everyday talk to be crucial to our felt sense of communication. To make this claim, I bring together an affect- and phenomenology-influenced orientation with close analysis of conversational discourse. Hence, this essay also offers one way in which affect theory can be entangled with language and discourse. Analysis of conversational episodes from fieldwork with teenage music listeners yields three key processes: (i) Patronage describes the experiential ‘distance’ between the ‘I’ and my own utterance or gesture, reflecting the intersubjective and improvised nature of conversation. (ii) Zones of indistinction describe transient pockets of ambiguity, which provide a sense of safety as I navigate uncertain waters conversation. (iii) These affective and reactive journeys through everyday conversation constitute the work of position-taking, through which emerges my style of being in the world, my subjectivity.

Batman Returns

This article explores the aesthetic elements of sovereignty. Building on the anthropological literature on sovereignty and on contemporary work on the politics of aesthetics, the article analyzes contemporary appearances of Batman symbols and figures in Rio de Janeiro. Despite political debate and academic discussion about the Batmen appearing in mafia-like militias and popular street protests in Rio, the question of what these appearances tell us about the relations between popular imagery and political contestation has remained untouched. This article supports the work of writers who argue that superhero comics and movies present fierce figures that operate in the zone of indistinction, at the crossroads of lawful order and its exception. However, it adds to this literature an analysis that shows in what kind of sociopolitical contexts these figures operate and how that plays itself out. To understand the contemporary appearances and force of figures of the entertainment industry better, this article proposes the concept “popular culture of sovereignty.”

A Reasonable Senselessness: Madness, Sovereignty and Neoliberal Reason in Horacio Castellanos Moya's Insensatez

Through a reading of Horacio Castellanos Moya's novel Senselessness and Guatemalan dictator Efrain Ríos Montt's counterinsurgency discourse, I argue in this article that madness, banished from the realm of reason with the rise of capitalism, resurfaces nowadays as a conceptual category able to disrupt the neoliberal manufacturing of bare life. I first examine how subversion was discursively constructed in Guatemala as a mental disease. I then discuss the narrator's behavior in the novel as a reasonable senselessness that by welcoming madness, understood as the moment of extreme doubt, both reveals and reacts against a shift in the locus of sovereignty ensuing from neoliberal reason's tightening grasp of the biopolitical sphere. This shift, I further argue, is increasingly placing most of the population in a relation of exception that resembles the zone of indistinction between life and death in which bare life is caught. I conclude by suggesting that Castellanos Moya's novel ultimately invites us to ponder the possibility of an other reason able to move beyond the extreme moment of certainty that the merging of state and neoliberal reason represents neoliberalism, sovereignty, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala.

In between meeting, digging and eating: six years of hosting the Festival Belluard Bollwerk International

We should be inventing new connections between artistic activity and a range of other human activities through the construction of a democratic public space, outside of the traditional spaces for art; a zone of ‘indistinction’ of life and art, that allows a knowledge exchange, and where collectivity and commitment can be reaffirmed. In this article I analyse my practice as the director of the Festival Belluard Bollwerk International, in Fribourg, Switzerland, from 2007 to 2013. How can an art festival function as an interface between art and everyday life, as an agora? I draw on the work of Jean Rancière to argue that we were thriving in a zone of indistinction of life and art, where the agency of the art projects we produced consisted within their presence and their disturbance of the everyday, rather than in making concrete political or social claims. Furthermore, the subject of community in artistic practice is developed in relation to useful art and the exchange of knowledge in an emancipated way. The ideas presented will be illustrated with different art projects produced at the Belluard Festival.

Id/entity and performance: a new living work of art

Using an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses philosophy, sociology and performance theory, this article examines the ‘performance’ body on the territory where politics and aesthetics overlap and enter a zone where they are indistinguishable; this becomes a useful means for the creation of a critical insight. The analysis proceeds from the Italian Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio's 1999 performance Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep. In its disregard of the speech in favour of condensed images, Genesi sets up a highly formalized inorganic mechanism in which the human body appears in its ‘bare life’, sharing with animals and automata an ontological proximity. Taking into account the specific training regime of the Socìetas and turning to theatre studies for an understanding of the ‘scenic presence’ in Genesi, concepts of ‘identity’, ‘reality’ and ‘corporeality’ are questioned both from an ontological perspective (Heidegger) and within the theoretical framework of ‘social’ and ‘post-humanist’ studies. When aesthetics and politics enter a zone of indistinction, a biopolitical interpretation becomes possible. Following the insights of Foucault and Agamben into ‘biopolitics’, the author comes to see the Socìetas’ rhetoric of dis-human as a resistant approach, via the suspension of the body's organicity displayed on the stage. In disregarding its own organicity, on which power exerts its control, the performance body expresses the loudest ‘gestus’ of liberation from the traps of globalized biopolitics.

Let Identity Happen on the Stage! The ID/Entity of a New Living Work of Art

Based on an interdisciplinary approach, which involves philosophy, sociology and performance theory, the article questions the performative body on the terrain where politics coincides with aesthetics and the latter becomes a useful means for the arising of a critical instance, involving, in a broader sense, themes of politics and power in the globalized Western world. The analysis proceeds from Italian Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s 1999 performance Genesi: From the museum of sleep. In its disregarding the speech in favour of the ‘condensed images’ – where critical discourse and reality are merged in a unique movement – Genesi sets up an high formalized in(organic) mechanisms in which the human body appears in its ‘bare life’, sharing with animals and automata an ontological proximity. Taking account of the specific training regime of Societas and turning to theatrical studies for an understanding of the “scenic presence” in Genesi, concepts of identity, reality and corporeality are questioned either from an ontological perspective (Heidegger) and within the theoretical framework of “queer” and “post-human” (Butler, Deleuze and Guattari). Where aesthetics and politics enter a zone of indistinction, a bio-political interpretation arises. Through a journey in the philosophy of Foucault and Agamben, the author gets to see the Societas’ rhetoric of dis-human as a resistant approach through the performative body, via the suspension of its own organicity displayed on the stage. In its continuous mutations and hybridizations through sexes and genders, in its disregarding its own organicity, on which sovereign power exerts its absolute control, the performative body does express the loudest ‘gestus’ of a liberation from the traps of a globalized bio-politics.

‘It's capitalism on coke!’: From temporary to permanent liminality in organization studies

In recent years, organization studies have become increasingly aware of the concept of liminality. In our review and critique of this reception of liminality in organization studies, we emphasize that liminality involves a fundamental suspension of ordinary social structures. Although the prevailing use of the concept in anthropology as well as in organization studies has conceptualized liminality as a temporary state, we focus on permanent liminality. Yet the idea of permanent liminality leads to an inevitable paradox, because the concept, by definition, is a temporary state. Conceptualizing liminality as a constant state of social limbo, we show that the paradox in permanent liminality stems from the impossibility of drawing clear distinctions between different social spheres, especially as they apply to modern work–life. Examining a case study about a management consultant, we illustrate the paradox of liminality in terms of a zone of indistinction between work and life as it is reflected in an empirical self-narrative about a consultancy ‘lifestyle’. We further link these findings to a possible transition from disciplinary societies to societies of control.

Hating the Ahmadiyya: the place of “heretics” in contemporary Indonesian Muslim society

Religious diversity and pluralism is commonly understood within the context of the relation between various religious traditions, not within a single religious tradition. This limitation of the boundary of religious pluralism could overlook the fact that conflict within a single tradition can be bitterer and more disastrous than conflict with other religions. In the last decade, for instance, the Ahmadis in Indonesia have become victims of constant attacks. This article, therefore, intends to study the place of the Ahmadiyya in the context of religious pluralism in Indonesia by answering the following questions: Why was the treatment of the Ahmadis in recent years by Muslims more vitriolic than their treatment of non-Muslims? What is the nature and quality of life for people who have been excluded from a ‘normal’ religious identity in a time when religious attachment is a necessary fact for that society? Why did the attacks on the Ahmadiyya occur in the present regime, not during the past authoritarian one? This article argues that the charge of heresy issued by Muslim institutions put the Ahmadiyya in liminal status; they are in the zone of indistinction between Muslims and non-Muslims. This makes them vulnerable to persecution since they have been deprived of their rights as Muslims, while their rights as non-Muslims are still suspended. Non-Muslims, particularly ahl al-kitāb (People of the Book), have been accepted theologically in Muslim society, but there is no place of tolerance for heretics. The rise of intolerance in Indonesia parallels the rise of religious conservatism after the fall of Suharto in 1998.

The Training Camp

In this article, we use the theories of Giorgio Agamben to conceptualize the contemporary American football training camp as a material and metaphorical “camp”—a “space of exception” or a zone of indistinction where bare life is produced and the exception becomes the rule. Our aim is not to sportingly trivialize the horrors of those camps about which Agamben has written extensively (i.e., the concentration camps of the Third Reich), nor do we set out to hyperbolize the events, logics, or methods of the football training camp. Instead, we move to answer Agamben’s call to “learn to recognize [the camp] in all its metamorphoses.” In the process, we hope to address some of the criticisms leveled at Agamben’s work and move toward reconceptualizing a biopolitics of human movement, vitality, potentiality, and action. It is our contention that “the camp” provides an important site through which to understand the (corpo)realities of contemporary American football as hyper-physical and hyper-commodified body spectacles defined by protective equipment turned into damaging weapon, players as “hitmen” with bounties on the heads of opponents, and “heterotopias of survival,” which produce exceptional and measurable bodies, silent bodies, broken bodies, bodies that die the most banal, unheroic, and (un)acceptable deaths.

The Interpretative Categorization based on Conventional Disk -Diffusion and MIC Determination for VRSA - A Report

A female child aged about 11 years from rural area got admitted to our hospital with a history of swelling over the dorsum of (R) forearm for the last 10 days and fever for 2 days. A diagnosis of abscess was made and the abscess was incised and drained, sent the pus for culture and sensitivity. On culture Staphylococcus aureus was isolated. The antibiogram showed Vancomycin resistance and indistinct zone of inhibition around the Oxacillin disk on Mueller-Hinton agar. The isolate was tested for purity and tested for CDC algorithm as the report of Vancomycin resistance to clinicians bears significant public health concern. On subjecting the isolate for the same, it was found to be sensitive to Oxacillin (MIC) by E-Test, also Vancomycin sensitive by Stroke's method on Mueller-Hinton agar using ATCC-12600 as Staphylococcus aureus strain as sensitive control. We concluded that zones of inhibition on Mueller-Hinton agar disk diffusion are not fully reliable especially when reporting Vancomycin resistance as evidenced by many studies. The isolate is stored in the Laboratory.

Space and Territoriality

Territorial modernity signifies the transformation of the space of fluidity into territories or geometric grids of permanence. Border in International Relations with its constructed disciplinary gaze performs the role of a spatial unit and a decidable between a set of mutually reinforcing dualisms. In mainstream IR theory encrusted within the Western hegemonic discourse, transformations that exemplify the process of territorialization supplements the grammar of territorial epistemology. However, the ontology of the modern bounded ‘political’ marginalizes and makes invisible alternative mode of being. In post-colonial practices of South Asia, the dispositif of territorial modernity as a universal discourse and the ‘international’ is suggestive of resistance and contestations articulated via certain categories of bodies. This is prominent at the periphery of the post-colonial nation-states, as the actions of certain recalcitrant bodies often problematize the reified international. By taking the case study of the chars or river islands that often shift their location along India–Bangladesh riverine border, the paper also seeks to understand the political in these zones of indistinction and its (dis) association with the normative space that territoriality enacted in the first place.

The Sacrament of Language

The Sacrament of Language