Summary
Viewpoint essay
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Extract
Dystopic geographies of empire.
Through an economy of contemporary colonial power, this article examines the twin tropes of discipline and aesthetic representation in order to trace the intimate effects of contemporary colonial power on bodies placed in spaces of exception. KEYWORDS: colonial present; colonized bodies; geographies of dysutopia; spaces of exception
********** In this article I sketch the nature of the economy of what I call contemporary colonial power. I investigate how this power is exercised through twin tropes of discipline and aesthetic representation and argue that the economy of contemporary colonial power is to be traced to its intimate effects on bodies placed in what may, with some qualification, be called spaces of exception. The article begins with a brief analysis of the structure of colonial power in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I suggest that this power was centered on discourses of normalization that discipline bodies and render them governable subjects. The next section develops the idea of the body as the exemplary site for the coming into formation of political forces, making structures of power visible. I then move on to account for the structure of colonial power in contemporary times, locating it genealogically to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonialism, before investigating the exercise of colonial power in common ways in two ostensibly distinct spaces: Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and Semenyih immigration detention camp in Malaysia. I explain colonial power as a process of ordering space and its inhabitants and temporality, suggesting that the nature of colonial power may be understood best in how it becomes fleshed out on the bodies of those most marginal. Thus I attempt to account for a form of power that is both general, in its operative spacing procedures, and specific, in the particularities of its impacts on different types of marginalized people in different spaces. The Economy of Colonial Power Though varying in its specific form across space, European colonial power of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was, broadly speaking, structured by two related strategies of power. One was the structuring or ordering of space through epistemic appropriation and ontological hierarchization, where the colony became a known and delimited space through techniques of mapping, archiving in museums, and census taking. The end result of this imaginative and generative processes was a "totalizing classificatory grid," (1) a flexible semantic structure that not only provided the stable base against which identity, phenomena, and experience in the colony could be understood but also signified the static temporality of the colony (which was perhaps the defining element of colonialism). The force of the classificatory grid lay in its capacity to orient the future, through active (and contested) processes of maintaining and justifying the present in reference to (often codified) memories of the past and of custom or tradition. (2) These temporalizing processes ran hand in glove with spacing processes, where the boundaries and limits of the colonial space were drawn and redrawn at a variety of scales. A number of scholars show that European colonialism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may be read in terms of a heterogeneous discourse of normalization, where an unruly space is transformed or is always undergoing a process of transformation into an orderly dominion populated by more or less knowable identities. (3) The discourses of normalization whereby normal forms of living within the gridded colony are identified and policed are representational practices. Such representational practices evoke complex structures of affect and aesthetics: The known dominion is essentially an imagined one. The discipline of organization is in a relation to the spectacle of representation. The organization of lives and living in the colony signify a greater and enveloping abstraction: that of a more or less metaphysical "framework." (4) The representation of bodies and identities on an orderly grid harks to an absent conceptual frame--in the colony, perhaps notions of "progress, reason, law, discipline, history, colonial authority and order." (5) This order is the form of the colony, taken now as an ...See the full content of this document
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