[-empyre-] Bare Life, Ghost Detainees, Exclusion and Performance

[G.H.Hovagimyan <ghh@thing.net>]

The meaning of bare life is a person who is stripped of all their  
rights as a Roman citizen. They are excluded from the community of  
citizens. This is Agamben’s definition of Bare Life.  Furthermore;

'The sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a  
crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him  
will not be condemned for homicide; in the first Tiburtinian law, in  
fact, it is noted that 'if someone kills the one who is sacred  
according to the plebiscite, it will not be considered homicide'. This  
is why it is customary for a bad or impure man to be called sacred.  
[Giorgio Agamben,Homo sacer, 1995, p. 71]

In America, a large part of the political discourse occurs in mass  
media I.E.  television, radio, newspapers, this is a supra-discourse  
and functions as the media-logos (from Regis Debray) of American  
technocracy.   Being included in mass media is a verification of  
citizenship in the society.  It is one of the reasons that reality  
television is so popular. In 1993 I did my first internet piece,  
Terrorist Advertising, http://www.artnetweb.com/gh/terror/, it pointed  
out the media-logos dynamic.
 “We live in a media saturated environment. Family, neighborhood,  
vocation, religion, and ethnic affiliation have been replaced by media  
driven identities. The spectacle created by the television daytime talk  
shows illustrates how media attention changes people.Consider how  
relatively ordinary people are perceived as more important and possibly  
more real than they do in their daily lives, after they appear on  
television for any trivial or far-fetched reason.” -Terrorist  
Advertising, pg.2”

There are several dynamics at work in the human instinct for tribe and  
community on the one hand and exclusion or expulsion on the other.   
There is a coming of age instinct that compels a person to separate  
from their family and tribe to seek a mate and create a new family.   
This is a positive exclusion. This particular instinct has been  
codified in mass media advertising as sexuality and is used to sell  
everything. It also creates a dynamic that associates tribal groups  
with lifestyles and  product logos. Someone who doesn’t have the right  
logos on their clothing and possessions is not one of your tribe and  
must be expelled.

“Agamben argues that the Greek understanding of politics contained two  
conceptions of life: zoe, or bare life, which is distinguished from  
bios, or politically or morally qualified life, the particular form of  
life of a community. The constitution of the political is made possible  
by an exclusion of bare life from political life that simultaneously  
makes bare life a condition of politics.

In contrast to arguments that understand political community as  
essentially a common 'belonging' in a shared national, ethnic,  
religious, or moral identity, Agamben argues that 'the original  
political relation is the ban in which a mode of life is actively and  
continuously excluded or shut out (ex-claudere) from the polis. The  
decision as to what constitutes the life that is thereby taken outside  
of the polis is a sovereign decision. Sovereignty is therefore not a  
historically specific form of political authority that arises with  
modern nation-states and their conceptualization by Hobbes and Bodin,  
but rather the essence of the political.

The sovereign decision as a cut in life, one that separates real life  
from merely existent life, political and human life from the life of  
the non-human. Consequently, there is a difference for Agamben between  
biopolitical life and bare life:----the former being the managed  
political subject of power relations, and the latter being the  
necessary negative referent by which power-relations (through the  
sovereign exception) demarcates what counts as legal life, life that  
matters. So that there is a limit, or an 'outside' to power relations  
in biopolitical life.” –from philosophy.com , Posted by Gary  
Sauer-Thompson at May 4,  
<http://www.sauer-thompson.com/archives/philosophy/2005/05/ 
im_reading_agam.html>

In 2000-2001 Peter Sinclair and I developed an immersive, interactive  
laser and 3D sound art work called Shooter,  
<http://nujus.net/shooter-new-site/index-1.html> the piece allowed the  
viewer to walk into a darkened room laced with red lasers. Passing  
through a laser triggered sounds that were fed to the 3D sound space.   
The sounds included, firearms, guns, explosion, video arcade sounds and  
xenophobic rants.  The piece was about Bush’s buildup to war and video  
games.  When a person walked into the room they became the target.

For our next collaborative piece we did a performance work called,  
Rant/ Rant Back/ Back Rant;
“Peter Sinclair created a special interface to sample voice input,  
manipulate it and send it back into the general audio mix in real time.  
GH projects the ramblings of a borderline schizoid personality type who  
can't tell the difference between media news information, gossip and  
paranoid rumors. The piece is a techno driven word or poetry jam that  
resembles the ranting of a delusional street person. GH prepared the  
content by clipping news articles and posting them on a web in a blog  
called rantblog PTP (power to the people).”
http://nujus.net/gh_04/gallery9.html

The Sacred Man of Agamben’s equation is quite interesting.  This sacred  
man is outside of society.  By the way, he doesn’t say sacred woman. I  
believe in Roman society that sacred women were integrated into the  
culture and had an honored position.  In any case, I believe that the  
sacred man can be equated with the artist, at least in modern times as  
being one who is operating outside the political culture. This sacred  
man can also be equated with the terrorist or perhaps the forces of  
exclusion create the dual impulse for art and terrorism.
As I documented the language being used in the global media-logos for  
my rant performances I was struck by its manipulative and emotive  
power. Such phrases as, ghost detainees and extreme rendition were  
chillingly concise.  The ghost detainee in particular highlights the  
idea of bare life.
Even in a POW camp there is a political society by not registering the  
incoming prisoner he became a sacred man in extreme rendition a  
terrorist suspect is snatched from the street and taken to a secret  
place to be questioned (and tortured).  Agamben also talks about the  
tattoo, the retinal scan and the barcode as tools to create a  global  
techno-identity database similar to the tattooing of prisoners in Nazi  
concentration camps.
With the 21st century global information networks comes a media driven  
polis. The postions’ of bare life and the sacred man are situated in  
this media-polis.  The terrorists use the internet to present their  
message and recruit new members. Artists such as myself use the  
internet to critique the global polis. The question is this; do my  
actions and that of terrorists constitute normal political discourse in  
a global techno society? Furthermore is expulsion or bare life negation  
created by denying access to or recognition of a perso in the web and  
internet and mass media?

homepage -  <http://nujus.net/gh_04>
with Peter Sinclair <http://nujus.net>