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Project MUSE - Theory & Event

As Foucault famously laments in The History of Sexuality, in "political thought
and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king."1 For Foucault, th
e figure of the sovereign, whose power is exercised as an exceptional prohibitio
n of freedom, continues to organize the ways we attempt to intervene in the fiel
d of political power. As long as we continue to read power solely in terms of th
e juridical theory of sovereignty, Foucault argues, we will be unable to confron
t the mechanisms of exclusion and regulation that persist in the guise of formal
equality and liberal humanism. But if we are to move our analyses beyond this t
heory that legitimates the institutions of political modernity, how then are we
to conceptualize politics? Foucault suggests that the first task would be to inv
ert Clausewitz's famous aphorism, "War is a continuation of politics by other me
ans."2 That is, what it would mean to think of politics as permanent war?
Of course, as Foucault readily admitted, he was far from the first thinker to po
se the question of the utility of conceiving of history as constituted by the pe
rmanent roar of battles, or whether the language and tactics of war would be mor
e effective in waging political struggle than simply pursuing legislative and no
rmatively "political" institutional channels. However, what Foucault's suggestio
ns bring to light is precisely the idea that rhetoric itself has long been viewe
d as a weapon in the battle. "Permanent war" in this way functions both as a his
torical discourse whose instrumental uses must be interrogated, as well as a pre
sent reality that gives us a way of analyzing, and intervening in, the political
present. Or, as Foucault writes, historical knowledge "becomes an element of th
e struggle; it is both a description of struggles and a weapon in the struggle.
History gave us the idea that we are at war; and we wage war through history."3
The research collective "Public Rhetorics and Permanent War"(PRPW) initially gre
w out of a series of conversations between graduate students at the University o
f Washington over this problematic that Foucault and many others have elaborated
, conversations that tended to shuttle between the language of the academy and o
ur own vernaculars.4 Versed in the traditions of Black British Cultural Studies,
we have attempted to think about how popular cultural formations could serve as
impetus for political activism, sites of commodification, and new methods of ra
cialization that both disrupt and consolidate the social hierarchies of our pres
ent—a moment diagnosed across the political spectrum as one constituted by permane
nt war. Our imaginative geography for these processes of cultural intervention h
as been shaped by the long tradition of efforts to forge effective political for
mations in times of global crisis, efforts with transnational ambitions that hav
e profoundly shaped the history of the 20th century—including, in particular, the
legacies of anti-colonial movements and Black internationalist thought.
Hence the concern of PRPW has been to generate conversations with the work of ar
tists, performers, and activists whose audiences may not be situated within the
confines of the university. If we are conventionally taught to view activists, a
rtists, and scholars as figures doing socially critical work from within distinc
t spaces, we have attempted to stage the possibilities for articulation across t
hese spaces. That is, we ask how different forms of cultural practice can be lin
ked together through the proliferation of opportunities and rhetorical spaces em
ergent in late modernity, even with a complex awareness of the rhetorical and di
sciplinary gaps that normally cordon them off from one another.
To that end, since 2005 PRPW has engaged these questions in a variety of sites a
nd spaces, including graduate and faculty reading groups, undergraduate classes,
a campus research cluster, a conference seminar, a number of works in progress
by members of the collective, and a lecture series involving scholars, activists
, and artists who have in some way been in dialogue with the problematic we had
set forth at the start of this process. These have involved poet Suheir Hammad,
human rights activist Van Jones, American studies scholar Michael Denning, histo
rian Nikhil Singh, geographers Derek Gregory and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and femini
st philosopher Angela Davis.
Below is one instance of these conversations, an interview with Derek Gregory, D
istinguished University Scholar and Professor of Geography at the University of
British Columbia. The interview was conducted on October 27, 2006, by Anoop Mirp
uri, Georgia M. Roberts, and Keith P. Feldman, of the Public Rhetorics and Perma
nent War Research Cluster, at the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanitie
s, Seattle WA, and followed a lecture Gregory delivered at UW entitled "Vanishin
g Points: Law, Violence, and the Exception in the Global War Prison."5 In this w
ork, Gregory offers a compelling analysis of the tortuous formulations, applicat
ions, and interpretations of various regimes of law utilized by the Bush Adminis
tration to provide legal justification to practices at the detention facilities
at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Rather than concentrate solely on the law's susp
ension, Gregory argues that the global war prison can more productively be frame
d as a "dispersed series of sites where sovereign power and bio-power coincide."
While this discussion focuses our critical gaze on Bush-era practices that migh
t seem faded from our political present, it is precisely in the performance of t
he law's malleability that the Obama Administration has sought to "solve the pro
blem" of Guantánamo. Even as, or perhaps precisely because, a new politics is said
to have been inaugurated by Obama's ascendance to the presidency, racialized pr
actices of indefinite detention have become even more closely tied to a thriving
domestic carceral apparatus.6 Hence the continued need we see in engaging the n
exus of affect and ethics hailed below.
Anoop Mirpuri:
Essentially, there are two questions that we've asked all of our participants to
address. One is how each envisions "permanent war" as a concept from their own
particular vantage point, whether it's a scholarly, whether artistic, or whether
it's from their own experience on the ground working in various activist commun
ities. The second is more about rhetorical address, about how various public cul
tural workers see their work in dialogue with broader political realities. We'd
like you to take some time to reflect on these questions. Specifically, where do
you see your intervention lying, and how do you navigate different audiences? Y
ou've obviously been addressing a number of different audiences this week and yo
u prepare your presentations based on your expectations of that audience and the
ir expectations as well. How do you navigate those questions and where do you se
e your intervention not only as a geographer but also as someone that's very inv
ested in providing a critical voice on contemporary concerns in Palestine, Afgha
nistan, and Iraq, and in North American and Europe as well?
Derek Gregory:
Let me start with the second set of questions. And there's a reason for starting
there. It's not to disparage the first set of questions but in the course of th
e work that I've been doing, I've become increasingly impatient with much of the
work in my own field, which I've said on a number of occasions seems to think t
hat the world exists in order to provide examples of our theorizations of it. Th
at doesn't simply blunt the critical edge of intellectual work; it disables any
political engagement worth making. In other words I'm not suggesting for a momen
t that the sort of work that Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault provide us with
is irrelevant. Far from it. It's an enabling condition. But in every case what
I want to do is to work with those ideas rather than simply apply them. I don't
expect them to survive the process intact. How could they? Neither of them provi
des a uniquely privileged vantage point. I've always been influenced by Edward S
aid's views on traveling theory, particularly as they shift and move. In his ear
ly interventions, he complains that while theory emerges in very specific concre
te circumstances—it seeks to make an intervention in those situations—very often as
it travels from one disciplinary site to another and one political conjunction t
o another it loses its radical edge. I think very often the academy does an extr
aordinarily good job at domesticating ideas which erupt from within it, but whic
h then become canonized. But then of course Said in his return to traveling theo
ry concedes that quite the opposite can happen, that traveling theory as it move
s into radically new situations need not be blunted, need not lose its effectivi
ty precisely if it's kept open and can be reworked in extraordinarily productive
ways. It's really that work that draws me on an intellectual path. I think what
we're dealing with is so extraordinarily complex that you do need these navigat
ional devices but they're hardly fully-functioning GPS and they hardly enable yo
u to position yourself accurately at every moment as you try to engage with what
's happening around you.
But I'll return to Foucault and Agamben if you don't mind. That's I think a nece
ssary way of explaining the public engagement you were asking me about.
The first thing I want to say is I do take the academy very seriously and teachi
ng very seriously, so that I'm not impatient to get outside the classroom and se
minar. For the longest time, long before I was working on the present war conjun
cture, I realized that I did research in order to teach, in order to be able to
take my students to places that they wouldn't otherwise go, to see the world in
ways that they wouldn't otherwise contemplate. I see a very important part of th
is political project located within the classroom, that is to say very much spea
king with undergraduates, most of whom I think come to universities in North Ame
rica with an extraordinary willingness to learn and a desire to be engaged and e
xcited. I think that collectively the university in North America has done its d
amnedest to prevent any of that from happening, to turn it into a teaching and e
xamining machine in which we produce not a critical intellectual culture at all
but instead a culture of skimming, memorizing, and repeating. My own experience
is that students will put up with that and they very rapidly learn how to naviga
te their way through it. But it's not what they're here for, and it's soulless a
nd deadening. So I want to do something other than that, and to engage them in t
he formation of a much more collaborative critical culture in which they underst
and that what we do inside the academy speaks to and is responsible to what take
s place outside.
Now in engaging beyond the academy I think it's also important to understand tha
t the academy now is only one site where intellectual work takes place, where kn
owledge is produced and evaluated. I really do see knowledge production as a col
laborative project. I don't see it as something that simply addresses public aud
iences, though I've had to learn to do that. I've had to learn both new ways of
presenting arguments and new ways of responding to questions, because many of th
e polite formulae that we hide behind in the academy simply don't obtain and pro
bably shouldn't obtain once you leave its walls. But it's not simply a matter, a
s I say, of addressing and engaging with public audiences. It's also addressing
and engaging people at all these other sites where intellectual work takes place
, where knowledge is produced and evaluated. That sense of collaborative work, a
dialogue which has stretched me and taken me to places and people I never would
have otherwise been working with has been extraordinarily important. In a sense
, what I seek to do is to bring those conversations back into the academy and ta
ke the academy back out into that world to the point where…
I'm not so blind as to think that the academy is a very special place. In fact I
think that there are times those who run universities don't realize how special
it is, but view universities are simply a corporate institution like any other,
as though it can be run like a vast shoe factory in which one size fits all. Wh
ich becomes at the end of the day not even a very good shoe factory. I do want t
o hang on to some of those special qualities and privileges I suppose, but I don
't think universities have ever been ivory towers. That's an easy jibe. They've
been ivory towers in the sense that for the longest time they've been rather exo
tic, white, and claim to occupy some position of eminence from which they can su
rvey the land below them, but that's simply a conceit. I think in terms of what
we do, we are so intimately involved and invested in what we do. So the politics
of the academy are important, but I think they count for nothing unless you eng
age with the politics beyond.
Georgia M. Roberts:
You speak of your desire to establish a collaborative critical culture among und
ergraduate students and that's really important to me as well. One thing I notic
ed about some of the students' responses to your public lecture was that they se
emed to be coming from an "emotional" place, for lack of a better phrasing. I'm
wondering, as a pedagogical practice, how do you move from that emotionally resp
onsive place (that I think your talk seemed to evoke) to a more critical and col
laborative place? What kinds of teaching methods are useful in this regard? In o
ther words, the affective seems like a very productive way in, but I'm wondering
what you do from there.
Derek Gregory:
What you do in a one-off talk is obviously not what you can do in a course, beca
use as you develop a course, you can begin to develop trust. And that's a very p
recious thing in a modern corporate university where there's been such a compreh
ensive withdrawal of trust across campus after campus after campus. But in a one
-off setting like that, I think there are some things which I take from the regu
lar classroom. The first is that I think it's important to invite and allow that
emotional response, because at least it means that people are coming alive in a
way in which in so many discussions they simply sit back and it's just words wh
ich flow into them and out of them. As I say, the culture of skim, memorize, and
repeat doesn't really allow for any emotional engagement or investment. So I ta
ke affect very seriously. The first thing I've learned is that you have to honor
and respect it even if on occasion your first instinct is to recoil in horror a
t the words that it then triggers.
The second thing is that you then have to step back. That's a learned response;
it's taken me some time to do that. What I mean by that is that you can't meet t
heir passion, their cry of rage, with one of your own. And sometimes in those la
rge audiences where I've had similar reactions from individuals I feel as though
the rest of the audience has just disappeared and I really need to speak to tha
t person, with that person. And sometimes it feels as though we're both standing
on a ledge on a high building and the person who's responded in that way and as
ked that question is threatening to jump and what I need to do is talk to them i
n such a way that the rest of the audience slowly comes into view and focus. And
they're down on the ground in a different place again. That's a conceit, of cou
rse, but it's a workable conceit. Because the last thing you should do I think i
s use the reaction of the audience to nullify or simply trump what they've just
said. I think it's really important to take all those questions seriously.
This goes back to a moment soon after I arrived at UBC. During the lunch hour, t
here was a talk given by John Barrell, brilliant cultural critic and art histori
an. The room was packed and at the very end of this extraordinarily brilliant lu
minous talk, there was a question from an undergraduate in the first or second r
ow. She must have been in her second or third year, I imagine. And on the face o
f it, it was an extraordinarily naïve question, and the audience laughed. Nobody l
aughed more loudly than the faculty and graduate students from the English depar
tment sitting at the very back of the room. I can remember vividly Barrel lookin
g up at them and his eyes just raked them. And then he turned to this kid and he
said, "You know, that's a really interesting question." And he spent the next f
ive minutes showing that in fact it really was an interesting question, and that
we'd all misread it. Even now when I recall that moment it sends shivers up and
 down my spine because it was that extraordinary combination of formidable criti
cal intelligence but an extraordinary humanity and an ability to read the politi
cs and the emotion that was invested in that situation and simply flip it.
Now I'm hardly John Barrell. But in those public fora when I get those kinds of
questions, particularly when they come from individuals like that rather than fr
om some of the organized groups that haunt me as I go from place to place, I thi
nk it's very important to take time and try to respond in a way that reaches the
m. It's all I can do.
Keith P. Feldman:
Would you elaborate on the distinction you make between a question posed by an i
ndividual student versus a question that emerges from a kind of organizational o
r pre-constituted political position, and how you might respond similarly or dif
ferently to these two types of questions?
Derek Gregory:
I think I do respond differently because I think that the emotional response is
very often spontaneous. It's hardly ever rehearsed and manufactured. There are o
f course occasions when I suspect that does happen, but for the most part there'
s a kind of raw honesty to it. Which is to say, no matter how horrified one migh
t be by what's been said, I think you do have to respect that as an honest respo
nse. But some of the other questions are formulaic. And they very often come fro
m people who seem to have listened not at all to what I've said, who arrive with
minds so firmly made up that all I can ever do in what I say is simply confirm
the prejudices that they bring to the meeting. I'm sufficiently close to Gadamer
to believe that prejudices are not the barrier to understanding, they're the co
ndition of it. But that's only if they're malleable, if you recognize them for w
hat they are.
I mean let's be plain. The question that I am asked again and again and again is
whether I believe in the right of the state of Israel to exist. It comes in mul
tiple forms but that's essentially the question that's always asked from the gro
up sitting together in the back row. There, my response is more vigorous. But I
try not to be declamatory, so my response to that question is simply to ask them
to define the borders of the state of Israel and then I'm able to respond to th
e question. They never will. And of course at that point you do have to invoke t
he rest of the audience, a good proportion of whom have no idea what's going on.
So I explain what the options are. Do they mean the state of Israel authorized
by the United Nations in 1947? Do they mean the state that burst its bounds duri
ng the war of 1948, dispossessing 750,000 to 900,000 Palestinians? Do they mean
the state of Israel that has occupied Gaza and the West Bank since 1967? Or do t
hey mean something larger, which would take in for example much of Southern Leba
non and much of Jordan? It's very important that at that point the audience know
s exactly what the question is about, because they can then make up their own mi
nds about where the question is coming from. And they can see there's a range of
possible answers, and I hope they can see why I won't treat that as a metaphysi
cal question. It's a profoundly material and political question.
My view is that those kinds of organized questions are posed by people who know
what they're doing. Whereas I think many of those more individual emotional resp
onses are much more exploratory. They're very often calls for engagement, even w
hen they dismissed what I've said, much more so than that collective pre-package
d question.
Anoop Mirpuri:
Let's build on this discussion about rhetoric, permanent war, and the public in
relation to theoretical work you are engaged in and so move the conversation bac
k to the framework we began with. In your lecture, "Vanishing Points: Law, Viole
nce, and the Exception in the Global War Prison," you start by performing a read
ing of Agamben and his critique of Foucault. You rethink Agamben's analysis of t
he production of bare life and use that as a springboard into your own analysis
and demonstration. At one point, you refer to the prison industrial complex in t
he US that's currently incarcerating over two million people—half of whom are Afri
can American—in order to entertain the idea of a kind of symmetry or analogous rel
ation between it and the war prison. Your own conclusion is that you want to str
ess the importance of retaining a critical distance between the prison industria
l complex and what's happening at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, for example. We as a
group tend to agree, although one could easily make the argument that perhaps th
e prison industrial complex in the US in many ways provides the conditions of po
ssibility for the global war prison, just as the US colonial imaginary can be se
en as structuring the racial tropes that shape the discourse of criminality.
Derek Gregory:
Oh, absolutely.
Anoop Mirpuri:
In fact, they're mutually constitutive.
Derek Gregory:
Yes.
Anoop Mirpuri:
The question then becomes how to think through US imperialism and the forms that
it's taking both historically and today in a way that is attentive to its relat
ionship to the prison industrial complex, criminality, and race in the US One th
ing that struck me about your lecture was that even if we retain that critical a
nalytical distance between them, one might be able to productively return back t
o the prison in the US and the struggles over it in order rethink our responses
to the global war prison. There's a long critical tradition in the US, more rece
ntly in the last 30 to 40 years, that has been very critical of specifically the
law's possibility to secure rights for racialized groups. The prison and its em
ergence in the post civil rights era is kind of proof of that in a way, and has
been the impetus for that critique. In the end of your talk, you return to the q
uestion of human rights law and the Geneva Conventions, and propose that the new
historical conditions require an overall rethinking of the Geneva Conventions s
pecifically and of human rights law in general. So how might we return to the co
nditions of incarceration in the US in order to rethink our responses to human r
ights and international law, and indeed the very possibilities of the Geneva Con
ventions, or even a rethinking of the very potentiality of human rights law to s
ecure what we would think of as the basic kind of—I don't even know what else to s
ay besides the basic human rights of people throughout the world? I don't have t
he language outside of human rights discourse to ask the question, which is the
funny thing. Rather than rights we might usefully say dignity. Can we think abou
t one in order to rethink the other?
Derek Gregory:
I wish I could say something sensible about the prison system in the United Stat
es. What I know is simply as an amateur peering in from the outside and recoilin
g in horror. But I think I can say some things about the more general framing, a
nd perhaps as a way of clarifying what I was trying to say. It certainly wasn't
that all we need is a legal intervention, even allowing for the qualification th
at I made, that the law is a site of political struggle. It's not a deus ex mach
ina which one can invoke and have it solve the situation.
As part of that project, part of what I wanted to say was that I have no quarrel
in principle with the claim made by Bush and Gonzales and others that the Genev
a Conventions inevitably are creatures of their time, that they smuggle into the
m the contingent circumstances of their own formation. But I think there are two
issues which then need to be placed on the table, one of which I did and the ot
her of which I didn't. The first and most obvious is of course that it's an infi
nitely extendable principle, so if Bush and Gonzales and others say that the pro
blem of the Geneva Conventions as they are presently formulated is because they
emerged in a world immediately following the Second World War in 1949, plainly t
he world has turned since then. All kinds of things have happened since then, so
they need to be reworked. If that's true, then it's equally true that the legal
apparatus which enables the United States to continue to lease Guantánamo Bay in
defiance of the wishes of the government of the Republic of Cuba is also somethi
ng which really ought to be open to discussion and negotiation. You can't simply
press one and not the other.
But what I didn't say is that of course the Geneva Conventions have not stood st
ill since 1949. There are additional protocols. It's simply that they haven't be
en ratified by the United States. That motility of law and the way in which inte
rnational law emerges within the global political arena, one which is structured
in all kinds of profoundly important ways, both by what the United States does
through strong-arming other countries and assembling lobbies and coalitions, but
also what it chooses not to do, not to ratify protocols or to withdraw from the
m. It seems to me to be extremely important.
But you see when it comes to thinking through international law, for all the ext
raordinary power and vitality of what both Foucault and Agamben have to say, it'
s where in a sense they desert us. That's simply not the arena which interests t
hem. The sovereign power that is the object of their analysis (but not, in Agamb
en's case, the object of his polemic), is one which is exercised largely within
the borders of the state. That's true I think for Agamben's analysis; it's not t
rue of his polemic, where of course he has a lot to say about the United States
loose in the world. But I think if you then move back into his analytical appara
tus as I try to say, it's consistently framed by the state, by the suspension by
the state of its own laws through the declaration of its own states of emergenc
y.
But even there of course this feeds back into the whole question of public rheto
ric. I made the point that the United States at present endures under far more t
han the two national emergencies declared following 9/11. I can think of nowhere
else in the world where citizens would be unaware of quite so many national eme
rgencies declared in their name and what the consequences of that are. If govern
ments in Britain or Canada or France, for example, routinely repetitively declar
ed national emergencies and through those gave to the executive such extraordina
ry sovereign powers, far reaching powers both nationally and internationally, th
is would be front page news and people would be clamoring to know the circumstan
ces, the probity. But here when I say this kind of thing, people are simply asto
nished. They don't believe it. Now my source for all this is of course the recor
ds of Congress and there are very helpful publications which list the national e
mergencies declared by this and previous presidents. But there seems to be such
an astonishing degree of interest or awareness in the public at large, because t
his has simply become such a routinized form of late modern government.
I'm straying from the question of prisons, but I'm not straying terribly far fro
m it because in so very many ways it seems to me much of the global war prison—for
that matter, too, much of the domestic penal landscape—has been put in place prec
isely through the talk of emergency. "We live in unprecedented times. We are dea
ling with people who are beyond the space of reason, so all we can do is confine
them." Now in the case of the global war prison, it's a much more ambiguous spa
ce. It's ambiguous, as I've written, because nobody knows quite what it is. We k
now it's not a prisoner-of-war camp even though those detained there have for th
e most part been captured during various extensions of the war on terror, during
military conflict. Nonetheless, detained as they are, in many cases Bush denies
them the status of prisoners of war, so that they are not limited to giving the
ir basic biographical details (name, rank, and so on), but can be interrogated i
n the longest term. But nonetheless many of them are visited by the Internationa
l Committee of the Red Cross. The flipside of that is that we know that it's not
a normal prison either because so many of these people are outside any conceiva
ble judicial process and placed there deliberately. But yet if you look at Guantán
amo, there are very good essays which mobilize Foucault rather than Agamben to t
alk about the system of surveillance, the difference between camps 1, 2, 3, 4, a
nd 5, and Camp Delta, and the ways in which people are moved through them depend
ing on their degrees of cooperation and compliance.
But it's even more complicated than that. Last week I was talking about these is
sues in Canada. And the questions from the audience all turned on what could Can
ada possibly do. Well, you see here too it gets very messy because Canadian troo
ps are serving in Afghanistan currently. No one asks any questions about those w
ho are taken prisoner by the Canadian troops. There are questions about rules of
engagement, but there are not questions about the practice of detention and int
errogation. So are they handed over to the United States authorities? And if so,
on what terms? What then happens to them? So this is again one of those kind of
national/international arenas in which the inside folds into the outside and ba
ck again. But it is something that is much more open to, as it were, internation
al scrutiny than for example the prisons in the United States, where internation
al scrutiny comes by and large through novels, through movies, but not through a
ny sustained international scrutiny of the kind which is being brought to bear o
n the global war prison. And not just by writers also obviously by artists, by f
ilmmakers, so the dramatizations of Guantánamo, of Abu Ghraib that have taken stag
e for example are very powerful ways of focusing public attention. As I've tried
to say, in focusing public attention, it focuses on those iconic sites, it focu
ses it on Guantánamo, it focuses it on Abu Ghraib. So what gets lost from view are
firstly what you point to quite rightly which is the carceral landscape within
the United States. But secondly also what gets lost from view are all those othe
r sites, like Belmarsh prison in London or Bagram in Afghanistan.
It seems to me that this global war prison is brought into view by the state ver
y selectively and very artfully. It's no accident that it was the Pentagon that
released those photographs of prisoners arriving at Guantánamo. Because what it do
es is show just a little, and just enough, not simply to satisfy at that time an
American public, but to extend the envelope of fear. The national security stat
e relies on fear, it relies on the proliferation of enemies, so it's extraordina
rily important to bring parts of this global war prison into view while hinting
darkly at all those other sites which remain off limits, where you can only imag
ine what takes place. In my own work on these issues and other issues connected
with the war on terror I'm alternately astonished at what's available in the pub
lic domain, the detail that it's possible to recover, but then of course dismaye
d and frightened because one starts to think that if this is what they're prepar
ed to put out in public, well, paranoia starts to set in about precisely what is
then still hidden, which remains undisclosed, unsaid, unseen. And then of cours
e you realize that that's exactly how the national security state does its work,
its front region and its back region. These are spaces of highly constricted vi
sibility, and it's a very artful staging.
Georgia M. Roberts:
Let me follow up by asking about theoretical approach. In other words, how do we
 approach this kind of scholarship, these kinds of interventions from a critical
vantage point? As Anoop suggests, activists and scholars have continually point
ed out that to argue for a better, more humane prison system actually strengthen
s the functioning of the apparatus itself. If this is true for reform-based crit
iques of US domestic incarceration, what does it mean (as a scholarly practice)
to trace the illegality of the global war prison? Can it actually strengthen the
prison's ability to operate outside of public purview? I hear Anoop asking you
to consider the scholarship of critical race theorists who have suggested (becau
se of the history of racism) that to make these kinds of political interventions
within the realm of the legal, or using the legal as the primary site of strugg
le, may be counterproductive on some level.
Anoop Mirpuri:
Our examples of the outcomes of that kind of specifically legal struggle often t
imes are troubling. Whether it's the eventual granting of human status to coloni
zed subjects in the 20th century, and even the achievement of emancipation befor
e the 20th century, how does the granting of rights to those that have been hist
orically excluded produce for them a system in which they can become, for exampl
e, exploited voluntarily through the contract mechanism rather than purely as un
free labor? Or in granting formal equality to racialized subjects in the US, how
has that secured their domination in different forms that eradicate the history
of their racialization in the first place? Scholars are beginning to ask whethe
r thinking too much through Foucault's paradigms of governmentality and permanen
t war is counterproductive and that we need to rethink human rights. But is this
not what we have been doing for some time now? And can we imagine a situation i
n which rethinking international law, human rights, and the Geneva Conventions c
an in fact secure a domain in which we have these secret prisons and they're tot
ally legitimate, and they can then work more effectively as methods of dominatio
n, while also being transparent?
Derek Gregory:
That's why my work isn't devoted to the global war prison. What I ultimately wis
h to do is to bring down the whole house of cards that is the war on terror. The
refore it's extremely important not to approach it via a single site, or a group
of sites which form a carceral archipelago. Because it extends in every single
domain and direction through multiple dimensions. Of course I'm also sensitive t
o the view that there's only so much one person can do. Nonetheless it's importa
nt that even as an individual one doesn't focus one's energies on a single probl
ematic. So that's why I haven't simply looked at the global war prison, and that
's why for example I think it important to explain just how focal the project of
detention and interrogation is to the war on terror. This isn't an accidental b
iproduct; this is one of its central objectives. It becomes extremely important
to realize that this hasn't happened by accident. It's not as though war is decl
ared and then people think, "My God, what are we going to do with all these peop
le?" Because all of that was established very early on by the White House and by
the Pentagon. This extraordinary obsession with interrogation and torture revea
ls that. What I want to do is place, as it were, the global war prison back on t
he scale of the war itself. So I see that as one point of entry in which my obje
ctive is to bring much more of the landscape into view than Abu Ghraib or Guantána
mo. Because when these are seen as individual sites, or even when they're connec
ted to form some carceral archipelago, what you're still missing is the larger l
andscape of the war and how, in your terms, each provide the condition of possib
ility for the other. Without the war there would be no global war prison, but yo
u wouldn't be conducting the war in this way without the global war prison. It's
absolutely vital to find ways which constantly force you to bounce backwards an
d forwards one from the other. This is one of those ways in which theory is, if
you can release its creative energies effectively, just an extraordinarily power
ful medium.
If we shift gears for moment, I've given public talks to lots of groups to talk
about Israel and Palestine. With some exception, these are groups like Adalah (t
he Canadian Arab Justice League) which meet, I would guess, probably every month
. They have all kinds of activities and organizations. But essentially they have
a speaker meeting once a month in which people are updated on the horror. When
I was first asked to talk to one of these groups I was really at a loss. I'd bee
n to Palestine but these were people so heavily invested in the situation it was
n't clear to me what I could say to them that they didn't already know, what I c
ould possibly say to them that wouldn't make them leave feeling angry and depres
sed. None of that was particularly enabling. So what I decided to do was precise
ly to go in and give them as it were some theoretical tools which enabled them t
o see the situation differently, to make connections where they hadn't otherwise
seen connections, and open up points of vulnerability in that way. But also it
enabled them to communicate to those outside the group a different way of lookin
g at things. Because in so many ways, for many of these groups, the response is
a much more informed version of the general public response. The general public
response is that it's more of the same, what do you expect, there's another cris
is in the Middle East, there's another suicide bombing, the peace talks have cra
shed, etc. Now they don't know any of the details, they don't understand how tha
t's being produced, but their reaction is essentially one of apathy. Apathy is n
ot a million miles away from despair. When you talk to these activist groups, th
ey're really engaged, they really know how this happened, but they can't see any
way out of it. On both sides you get paralysis. If you can open up these other
vantage points, if you can get people to say, "Well I've never thought of that b
efore, I've never seen it that way before"—both those activist groups and the larg
er public—then some kinds of political mobilization become possible. It does invol
ve partly seeing things in different ways, but it also crucially involves seeing
connections which otherwise people are absolutely determined to snap. Because o
nce you start to see those connections, the landscape changes dramatically.
So with the global war prison, it's essential to see it in relation to the war o
n terror, and you can't see the war on terror without seeing the global war pris
on. That's what I seek to do, and that's why I want to mobilize these theories;
but that's exactly why Foucault and Agamben get me so far, and I use them as muc
h as metaphor as I do as theory. As all metaphors, they get you so far and then,
as original Greek tells you, they break down as a kind of transport device. And
they break down partly because neither of them really addresses this colonizing
constellation of power that I want to get at. The emphasis on the metropolitan
is a very serious limitation, and so therefore also the conceptions of space wit
h which they work, suggestive and seductive though they are, are ones which don'
t survive the journey into the transnational intact. That's where you have to op
en up to other scholars and artists to help bringing that in to view.
I'm really acutely aware of the danger of simply making a system of oppression m
ore efficient. Which brings me to two questions, which a focus on analysis would
leave on one side. One is the question of ethics and the other is the question
of affect which is where we began. If you take a purely analytical approach, it
seems to me you really run the very serious danger of simply fine-tuning the mac
hine and exposing the gaps, revealing the sand in the mechanism which enables th
em to simply clean it out. I think it's important to go beyond that.
So for example, in the work I've started to do much more recently on the ways in
which the U.S. military engage with Arab cities and imagine the city, two thing
s have become important. One is that I've come to realize that the U.S. military
is not monolithic, and not creatures of Bush or indeed agents of the devil. The
re are many very really extraordinarily remarkable politically courageous and pe
rceptive people who for some reason are serving in the U.S. military. If we're n
ot going to stereotype Arabs we probably shouldn't stereotype the U.S. Army eith
er. These are people with whom one can engage, but you have to engage not just a
nalytically. You have to engage in terms of ethics and affect. I was talking yes
terday for calls for cultural knowledge and cultural intelligence which the U.S.
Army is now issuing. They've realized they can no longer conceive of Arab citie
s just as targets or as conjurings of buildings and streets and alleys and sewer
s. Because as war has turned into occupation which they can't really distinguish
from war, they have to deal with people in extraordinary diversity, and people
who they know for the most part, and the soldiers who serve under them, simply d
on't understand.
A number of cultural anthropologists have made these claims about the need to co
llaborate with the military. Most of these claims are made by people who are hig
hly—I was going to say critical, but that rather downplays what they have to say—abu
sive of contemporary anthropology, and instead insist that what needs to be prov
ided is a purely technical service in which better information is given so that
the U.S. Army can engage more effectively with the insurgency in Iraq, for examp
le, with patrolling the streets of Baghdad. My great concern has been that anthr
opologists have identified this and chatted amongst themselves about how frighte
ning this development is. But that discussion remains locked within the academy,
where it's a remarkably safe kind of critique. It's much more important to actu
ally go outside the academy and talk to the military and insist that, for exampl
e, the ethical problems that modern anthropology has grappled with can't be set
on one side and that these are issues that are every bit as important for the mi
litary as they are for an anthropologist. If we conceive of theory as a purely a
nalytical project then the dangers of cooption and complicity are extraordinary.
So one needs to think both in terms of ethics and affect, and of course as soon
as you introduce either of those then you've moved beyond a formal theoretical
apparatus and you start to engage with creative artists in all kinds of extraord
inary ways.
But you also engage with something else, it seems to me. I suppose there's still
enough of Marxist critical theory within me to hang on to that argument of Seyl
a Benhabib where she says that there are two theoretical environments which enab
le critical theory to redeem its promise. One she says is the explanatory diagno
stic manner, which is a kind of analytical moment I've been talking about. So I
can expose what happens in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, I can show how those two sit
es which the Bush Administration works so hard to prize apart are intimately con
nected. I can show analytically how the global war prison is folded into the lar
ger project of the war on terror. But Benhabib says the other crucial moment whi
ch we seem to forget about is the anticipatory utopian moment. It seems to me th
at the anticipatory utopian moment is simply inconceivable without either ethics
or affect. I'm using those as kind of simply-minded short-hand, but without peo
ple understanding that theory helps imagine a different world but of actually ex
ploring the ethical implications of these alternative futures., without having p
eople invest in that with a sense of hope and joy rather than simply despair and
horror, then the anticipatory utopian moment is forever deferred. Benhabib make
s the point that it's an essential moment in theory no matter whether it is endl
essly deferred, but presumably the whole point of a political project is that Al
thusser's hour of the last instance will simply come, at least in part.
So that's why I've gotten really very interested in artistic renderings and even
when I give these talks I shamelessly pillage the web for the work of political
artists who are simply extraordinary at the visual. I think that in my own fiel
d of geography we're very good at using the visual in an analytical sense. It's
a world of maps and diagrams, often very sophisticated. They're kind of wiring d
iagrams, circuit diagrams, and you can see how the analysis unfolds. But I've go
tten much more interested in the ways in which the kind of political art that se
izes me, particularly when it's animated art on the web, captures the world of e
thics and this extraordinary recognition of affect in a way that the circuit dia
grams never do, or at any rate, do so partially and in a very pallid way.
Georgia M. Roberts:
Do you ever see yourself starting with art as a theoretical entry point, rather
than say, Agamben?
Derek Gregory:
Oh no, I do. I do, much less in terms of visual art where, in my case, I simply
recoil in awe at the power of visual artists. I can read it, and I think I can m
ake sense of it, but it's different to start creating it. My own efforts are ama
teur, although the new media possibilities have made me edge more in that direct
ion. But I think in terms of drama. I always intended to leave the academy and g
o to drama school. Because that's such a very powerful way it seems to me of cap
turing the three things I want: analysis, ethics, and affect. And I constantly f
ind myself returning to it, not as a metaphor. I talked earlier in the week abou
t conceptions of space and space as a performance, as a doing. But that's not si
mply a metaphor for me. I've become more and more interested in actually collabo
rating with theater groups to actually stage some of this in different places, a
nd to work in a much more kind of mixed media/multimedia kind of way.
And I do for another reason. I am uncomfortable with the ways, for instance, tho
se images from Abu Ghraib came to be aestheticized and used no matter how powerf
ully by guerrilla artists and in some cases canvases of Fernando Botero are exqu
isite in the agony that they reveal. But there's something about the gaze being
arrested by the image that I find really very troubling. In this way I take your
point about Agamben as disabling. That's why I find J.M. Bernstein's lapidary s
ummary of Agamben and Auschwitz so utterly compelling. Your gaze is so directed
at the muselmann that you never see the police roundups, the internment camps, t
he trains making their way across occupied Europe, the watchtowers, the chimneys
, the camp, everyone else in the camp.7 It's this kind of single-minded, determi
ned, unwavering focus on this single wretched figure. That means that the whole
landscape which made that possible disappears. But worse, it makes it seem inevi
table, logical, determined, this sight that then haunts this landscape in which
we live. It's lapidary though I don't think that the camp is the space of politi
cal modernity either. I'm much more interested in the capacity of either drama o
r a kind of mixed media/multi-media presentation. I think to reduce Abu Ghraib t
o a series of still lifes on a wall of a photographic gallery is just deeply dis
turbing. I could not bear to see that. And that's why in the talk the only image
I showed was of the hooded man, who firstly couldn't be identified and who seco
ndly has self-identified, or at least some versions of him have been self-identi
fied. But I could not bring myself to parade those men. But it's for exactly the
same reason that I was determined to show the images of John Yoo and Steven Bib
ey and the authors of the torture memos that should be shown and should be shame
d. I think there you can see ethics and affect being mobilized in both places.
I am impressed by a lot of guerrilla work that's been done. Do you know the cycl
e "Baghdad by the Bay"?8 Well it's a very simple kind of image.
You know how the situationists would play with psycho-geography, and one of thei
r great conceits was to take a map of one city and use it to navigate another ci
ty. So in the 1950s they used this map of London to find their way around Amster
dam, which you'd think would be extraordinarily dangerous. But in any event, wha
t "Baghdad by the Bay" does is take a map of the Bay Area and superimpose over i
t the bombing of Baghdad. And it builds up over time. So you have the map of Bag
hdad and then you see these explosions. And it's a real simple thing, right? But
I've seen people's reactions to this. It is devastating because they will never
conceive of their city as a target city, even in the Bay Area, where of course
there's an extraordinarily strong anti-war movement. The visceral power of that
image—it's a map, but it's not quite used for analysis, you see. It's mobilized th
e other two registers in a most extraordinarily effective way.
There's another artist who produced something which was originally called "All t
he places that America has bombed." She re-titled it because she realized it wou
ld then be a project that would be beyond the reach of anybody to register. But
what it does is take these images of places as targets and work with precisely t
hose images in kind of blood-red ways. It's extraordinarily brilliant work. This
is aesthetics harnessed to politics in some of its most extraordinarily powerfu
l ways.
I just don't think that photographic exhibitions of the Abu Ghraib photographs…. T
here's something sort of acutely distasteful when you think of the chain of evid
ence that was being mobilized that they would eventually end up on the walls of
the Art Institute of Chicago. I can't go there and I won't go there. So my engag
ement with the visual arts is, as anyone's is, is of necessity selective.
Georgia M. Roberts:
You mention "Baghdad by the Bay," and I grew up in the Bay Area; I know how spec
ific the East Bay is from the North Bay, but I also realize how people still con
ceive of the entire geographical location as the "Bay Area." So that kind of mov
e from abstraction to specificity and localized space automatically does somethi
ng to my imagination. It hits home.
Derek Gregory:
I think that's exactly it. I teach this crazy course at UBC on Cities, and we be
gin in Mesopotamia and end in Baghdad, because as I say it's a more revealing pl
ace to end than Los Angeles. I've become acutely aware over the course of develo
ping this that without images of those first cities in Mesopotamia—and there are s
ome exquisite reconstructions using VR and computer simulation—my students have no
conception of what I'm talking about. Because, at least at the start of the cou
rse, they have a very particular sense of what a city is, so as far as they're c
oncerned, that's what a city is "then," that's what a city is "now." Their sense
of it being historically labile and geographically variable is something which
for most of them is profoundly alien. So I've come to realize that I need to cap
ture their visual imagination to get them to be able to say, "I see what you mea
n," in order to capture the past. But I'm also aware doing this work on the War
on Terror that we need it in the now too because so many people really can't see
. But you're absolutely right, you crucially need it to imagine a future. Otherw
ise it's people in bedsheets floating around on clouds with wings on their backs
. I think one needs something a bit more grounded. Images are a really powerful
way of doing that.
Georgia M. Roberts:
Or you're just left with the picture of Abu Ghraib, the hooded man, and that bec
omes the one you're left with. After your talk the other night, even though ther
e were other faces and images, that was the one you ended with and that's the on
e that stayed with me. I'm wondering about that.
Derek Gregory:
Let me give you another example. I have another talk called "Cities of the Deadl
y Night." And it begins by recalling a number of commentators in the U.S. media,
who said, "You know, the U.S. occupation of Iraq has administered a shock to th
e Arab World that they haven't had since Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798." Both T
homas Friedman and Daniel Pipes and a host of others have drawn very favorable p
arallels between Napoleon's occupation of Egypt in 1798 and the American occupat
ion of Iraq. So I begin there, and I say that what we really need to do is explo
re the French occupation of Egypt and specifically the military occupation of Ca
iro in detail. The entire talk does that. And it's based on a lot of archival re
search, sources in French and Arabic. There are two more or less eye-witness acc
ounts not by the French, who wrote everything down in copious detail, letters of
memorandum and whatnot. These are two Arabic sources, one of which is very very
extensive indeed. There's lot's of imagery in there too. So I work my way throu
gh this, but every third or fourth or fifth slide dissolves into a text which is
about Baghdad now and an image which is about Baghdad now, though I never menti
on it. Now the parallels are startling. But the advantages I've discovered of th
is venture into the visual is that in order for the audience to follow me they h
ave to become complicit in my argument, and they have to do it by doing the work
themselves, because I'm providing no commentary on those images. Everything tha
t comes out of my mouth is about Cairo between 1798 and 1801. And then at the ve
ry end, the questions don't know where to go. There are a lot of questions, but
they're forced to confront things. Had I presented an ordered, measured analytic
al comparison, I'd never get the same reaction. I wouldn't get the same degree o
f involvement or investment in the argument, because they have to do the work th
emselves. It's not that it's difficult to do at all. It's simply that it's not b
eing done for them, you see. That's one example in which maybe I can come close
to what you're doing.
But I haven't started with artists as such. Although there's a graduate student
in Geography at Berkeley, which hardly does him justice—he's also a performance ar
tist and graphic artist—called Trevor Paglen whose work I admire enormously. He's
just published a book with an investigative journalist for the San Francisco Bay
Guardian, called Torture Taxi.9 Trevor does some extraordinarily creative work
that serve as artistic interventions which leave me quite gasping in awe and adm
iration. There's a whole network of people who do this, and you can get to it th
rough a blog called "Subtopia" produced by one of his friends which is extraordi
narily good at keeping tabs on this network, those visual registers that can be
mobilized.10
Georgia M. Roberts:
This is not a critique of your talk, but I definitely felt like at the end, the
hooded man on the block couldn't be me. In other words, that move you make to sa
y, "This could be you?" I was like, "No it can't." Because you've just proved th
at it's very specific in a bunch of different ways. But when you say "Baghdad by
the Bay?" That feels like that could be me, you know what I mean? That begins t
o get at the kind of distinction between abstraction and specificity I'm making.
Derek Gregory:
That was one of those things which babbled out of my mouth and I instantly wishe
d I could've crammed the words back in. Because the whole point was that this is
a profoundly racialized other and while I suppose that at the limit it could be
any one of us, a whole series of reductions would have to take place before we
reach that point. On the other hand, I think the proto-fascist tendencies of the
present administration are such that it is not beyond the bounds of reason to i
magine precisely those reductions being applied. The chilling sense of either yo
u're with us or you're against us immediately produces a series of exclusions wh
ich are then evermore refined by the war machine and the present political appar
atus. So that it's not beyond the bounds of possibility that there are so many r
eductions that one has to go through that one hopes that people would be howling
in protest long before. And intervening.
Excerpted from Project MUSE - Theory & Event - Affect, Ethics, and the Imaginati
ve Geographies of Permanent War: An Interview with Derek Gregory
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v012/12.3.feldman.html
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