How exceptional is the permanent state of exception that a camp actually imposes? Amélie Nothomb has written a novel, Acide sulfurique (2005), in which the mass-mediated simulation of the camp situation is the frame of a television-program, a successful specimen of reality television. The opening line of the book runs like this: ‘There comes a time when the suffering of others no longer suffices; they want to have its spectacle’.. The line—the book—has a double message. On the one hand, we enjoy the often spectacular images of suffering people. An insidious desire to be informed citizens satisfies an unconscious lust to gaze at potentially dead bodies. It is the dark side of journalism and its commitment to the ideals of Enlightenment. ‘For we do not know what we do’ (Marx): we are not conscious of the unconscious enjoyments that are procured by looking in a safe home at people in unsafe situations. On the other hand, Nothomb’s book describes the bottom line, the degree zero of every kind of reality television: the camp is always already there—in what we enjoy as a fictitious game. Big Brother, undoubtedly the best-known format, simulates the mundane living together of strangers in a house as a situation in which the distinctions that regulate normal human life are consciously bracketed. The net result is, indeed, bare life as mass spectacle, as a series of images that put themselves into the centre of public attention and enjoyment. In Nothomb’s novel, the mass-mediated simulation of the camp results in real dead bodies; Big Brother limits itself to symbolic exclusions of ‘the weak’ for whom there is no longer a room in the transparent, camera-covered house.
*
Is a camp real or simulated? An un/organization, and as such also a topos—literally, a (modern) common place—that may instruct us about what we have in common. It is first and foremost our corporality as potentially naked life, this envelope of bones and flesh that is simultaneously bios and zoé, culture and nature, a way of life and life as such. One eats, in order to reproduce one’s biological capacities, but one does it according to the rules of an always particular food culture. Yet, in a camp or a camp-like situation, one still tries to stick to the interiorized food norms and just wants something to eat. One still is a human being, or at least remembers one is (was), and one is on the border of becoming a quasi-animal, a pure organism.
We are all bodies, and therefore vulnerable combinations of bios and zoé: that is the simple and simultaneously ontologically cardinal lesson that the camp, real or simulated, teaches. It does so by creating a situation of forced intimacy, a forced living together that undoes the difference between private and public. This forced co-corporality brings into appearance in an all too direct way—in reality television: by means of an omnipresent camera—the fact that we all eat, shit, sleep… Yet, in a (simulated) camp, what we have in common becomes the stake of a common struggle not to have it in common: ‘I want my privacy’, ‘I do not want to be seen’. That is, precisely, the point of Nothomb’s novel Acide sulfurique: there is no way out, the body has to appear in reality television as a ‘corporeal common’. This means two things: the body must be shared between the inhabitants of, for instance, the house of Big Brother (therefore, and only therefore, acts of copulation are highlights), and it has to be seen by anonymous others, who take up the position of the guards in a real camp. The communality of corporeality turns out to be, first and foremost, the capacity to perceive the (in)humanity of human bodies, including one’s own body. Yet, this ‘communality of perception’ actually points to the shared capacity to affect/of being affected. One not only looks at bodies, but is affected by their images; one not only makes love, but touches a body and is touched by that very same body. Affections are not emotions, they are rather pure corporeal intensities, pure bodily states.
And yet, they speak. They communicate, the bodies stick to the minimum that Aristotle considered to be the essence of humanness: we are ‘speaking animals’. Perceptions are not only experienced, but uttered, shared, negotiated. Common life only becomes common human life thanks to the shared capacity to communicate. This potential, whose realization marks in every human body the transformation from infant (‘animal’) to human being (‘speaking animal’), is the second ‘commonality’ that characterizes human life, even bare human life. One immediately distinguishes the shout of a human being from one by an animal: one hears an articulation that, even in the most dreadful situation, points to the possibility of ‘saying more’, of giving meaning to that seemingly pure bodily cry, even if one may not understand this meaning because it will be uttered in a language one does not know. A human voice is human because it is formatted by language, and this mark is there for every ear that is habituated to a specific language in even the most exceptional moments, when a human life confesses its impossibility to go on. To become, or to be made, speechless is therefore synonymous with the transformation of human life into an infra- or sub-human life. Reality television consciously aims at this perverse transformation, which is considered to be an unquestionable index of authenticity, of truthfulness, of ‘a corporality that does not lie’. Its supreme moment is, again and again, the close-up of a crying face: a body made speechless, so that it can only express itself by short-circuiting the capacity to articulate itself in a meaningful way.
They struggle, in order to survive—to be. To go on, to endure, to persevere, to stick to life, to desire (in the sense of Spinoza): this is the third thing that naked life, however produced, shows as the force we all have in common, as (a) ‘communality’. In the testimonies on the Nazi camps, the figure of the ‘Muselmann’ referred to the one who had given up desire and, therefore, no longer cared about the difference between life and dead. The ‘Muselmann’ no longer cared about his or her survival, which was regarded as dangerous: s/he had passed the threshold that distinguished humanness from sheer animal life, pure zoé. The ultimate reality that reality television is after is the spectacle of desire and its negation, the capturing of intense moments of life and loss. Its primary format is therefore the quest for survival, the production of a so-called ‘state of nature’ in which the harsh conditions of living hinder the possibility to go on, to affirm desire. We need a new word to define what is at stake in a real/simulated camp: ‘un-desire’. It points to the definitive destruction of human life, its ultimate negation. Nietzsche called it ‘the will of nothing’.
A camp, real or simulated, is a social un/order that regulates the capacity to affect/to be affected, to speak/to be speechless, and to desire/to ‘un-desire’. It has rules (order), but they are constantly broken, transgressed, negated (chaos). This paradoxical social frame determines what actually happens. It shows ‘the social’, on the one hand, as an endeavour to fight contingency by way of rules and, on the other hand, as something that is again and again contingent, even arbitrary and chaotic. The social as ‘nomos’ and ‘anomie’—this combination characterizes the state of exception. It is probably the only conceivable state of nature—not the absence of Law, in the general sense of a symbolic order, but an inability to know whether law will be followed or not. From a social point of view, bare life is a condition in which you do not know if the Other is a friend or enemy, again in the general sense of somebody—‘some body’—who subscribes to general norms, so that you can expect a certain behaviour, or behaves erratic, contingent, unpredictable. The generalization of this condition implies that one has no certainties, except the certainty that what one takes for granted right now may in the next moment be questioned or bracketed, transgressed or negated.
*
It is not evident to link Nazi camps and reality television in order to point out the reality of ‘common-ism’. From a moral point of view, it is anything but evident, even incorrect. This much has to be admitted: it is a dangerous thought exercise. Let’s break it off, and just ask the question: what do we have in common, now and here?
