Exceptional Bodies: Performance and Law
There are not first life as a natural biological given and anomie as the state of nature, and then their implication in law through the state of exception. On the contrary, the very possibility of distinguishing life and law […] coincides with their articulation in the biopolitical machine.
—Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception1
In their brief history of modern sovereignty, political anthropologists Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat raise two keen insights on the relation of performance to the law. Their anthology, Sovereign Bodies, questions foregoing assumptions that sovereignty resides "in" states or institutions empowered by states. They argue instead that sovereignty is an effect—and the primary aspiration—of state formation. "Sovereign power," they write, "whether exercised by a state, in the name of the nation, or by a local despotic power or community court, is always a tentative and unstable project whose efficacy and legitimacy depend on repeated performances of violence and a 'will to rule.'"2 Like Judith Butler's rendering of gender, state sovereignty is a performative, an ontologically empty category that only gains coherence through its repeated enactment in performance. Tracing a genealogy of political philosophy that ends with the innovative writings of Giorgio Agamben, Hansen and Stepputat note that while modern sovereignty often uses the discourse of law to organize and constitute "the people" subject to its rule, the key performance that lends ontological "truth" to state sovereignty is the violence, or threat of violence, that the state visits on human bodies, typically those whose suffering—and sometimes death—articulates the juridical, social, or political boundaries of the state itself. This kind of violence is named by Agamben the sovereign "exception"—the suspension of law in order to safeguard law—and names these bodies "bare life," those whose exclusion is constitutive of political community.
The elemental performance of the sovereign, then, is precisely this: the exclusion of some human beings from full humanity and political life, consigning them to "bare life." (Agamben puts it simply: "the production of the biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power."3) Thus, Hansen and Stepputat conclude, modern sovereignty not only enacts itself through performance, but bodies—actual bodies, "bare life"—are the primary site on which such performances are staged. For this very reason, those bodies—normally disciplined and pliant—have the capacity to contest the state's performance of sovereign violence: "the civil disobedience campaigner," for example, "who willingly submits his/her body to be beaten or put in prison and thus renders state power both excessively brutal and strangely impotent at the same time."4
These insights—that state sovereignty performs on and through bodies, and that bodies can at times meaningfully resist such sovereign violence—have been engaged by critical studies of performance in the Americas in recent years. To name just a few: Michael Taussig, in The Magic of the State, traces the circulation of power across bodies, sites, and material objects as a complex form of ritual spirit possession whereby the state constitutes its authority.5 In Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War," Diana Taylor examines the theatricality of state terror enacted in the relation between spectacular public discourse and private acts of torture and bodily disappearance.6 Dance theorist Susan Foster, in turn, in her essay "Choreographies of Protest," approaches the activist body as "an articulate signifying agent" in order to analyze well known episodes of nonviolent direct action in the United States. In her rendering, activists strategically use learned "techniques of the body," making articulate movement choices in relation to the embodied contexts of power.7
I rehearse these insights again here to underscore their renewed relevance in our post-9/11 times: a time in which sovereign violence every day asserts itself with renewed force in the name of the U.S. "war on terror," at the same time that the sovereignty of states is increasingly contested by other regimes of institutional power under global capital. As Paul Kahn puts it in his editorial in this issue, today "the strains on the legal imagination come from both directions—markets and war." Through these changes, as Agamben and others have suggested, new forms of "bare life" are produced,8 most notably the increased numbers of "undocumented" migrants that exist physically within but juridically outside the bounds of citizenship across the globe, particularly in Europe and the United States, as well as the nameless "detainees" that populate the seemingly permanent sites of sovereign "exception" like Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta at the Guantánamo naval base, or the clandestine "black sites" that purportedly dot the map of Western Asia and Europe.
The scholarship and performance in this special issue of e-misférica illustrates the keen insights and critique that performance may lend to this shifting territory of sovereign law and violence and the bodies on which these are enacted, particularly in the Americas.
A number of artists and scholars represented here engage the gendered dimensions of the new "states of exception," exploring the consequences for women's bodies and their capacity for meaningful action. Focusing on the de facto regime of impunity surrounding the horrific feminicidios that have cost hundreds of young women their lives in the border region of Chihuahua, Alicia Schmidt Camacho's essay traces the path by which young Mexican women have been evacuated from the sphere of rights and literally transformed into expendable bare life for the neoliberal state. Performance artist Coco Fusco, in turn, leads us to U.S. military interrogations as new sites of intercultural encounter between the sovereign state and bare life, and explores the new protagonizing role that military women have been allowed to play in that context. For their part, the Bolivian feminist collective Mujeres Creando uses street action, particularly grafitti, to contest the gendered and racial inequities of the neoliberal state, demanding, as they put it, "todo el paraíso, no el 30% del infierno neoliberal."
The relation between law and performance can be seen to draw the contested limits of the public sphere itself: bodies that move in and beyond the reach of legal regulation mark the limits of what can be spoken and enacted in an existing public sphere. As Joseph Roach writes of the complex relation between carnival and the law, the law creates "on its margins a space for play, a liminal zone" in which embodied cultural performance can "act out that which [is] otherwise unspeakable." While Roach focuses on New Orleans Carnival, his insights might be generalized to a range of performance that intentionally contests the normative use of public space and its regulation. Performance and the law, from this view, "conspire together to craft a contingent margin of behavior that remains easily within the laws' reach, if need be, but hovers provisionally outside their grasp."9
A number of artists and activists represented in this issue focus specifically on this liminal "margin" within and beyond the law that performance may open for critique or play. Caught between fierce narratives of national or municipal security on the one hand, and the relentless pressures of the market on the other, these artists and activists find themselves in an evaporating public sphere. As Urbomaquia writes of Córdoba, Argentina, where they staged their action "Hay mundo por poco tiempo" using public garbage cans, "No hay en toda la ciudad espacios de manifestación que no estén normatizados, reglados, y/o privatizados: para poder estar hay que pagar o explicar (que a veces es lo mismo)." Their public art actions, which often insert evocative words in the remaining interstices of public space—the handle of a garbage bin, a gutter under the cornice of a bridge—illuminate this vanishing public sphere, and the forms of speech and expression that vanish with it. Performance activist Bill Talen, working in New York City under the pseudonym "Reverend Billy," laments the daily assault on what he calls the "public commons": "the Commons," he writes, "has been tortured into boxes, into pixels, into share-price, […] the parks are over-policed, the community gardens bulldozed, and anything not tied down purchased by the transnationals." His answer to the privatization of the public sphere is not (or not simply) to defend the small margin of public space that remains, but to enter and claim privatized space itself as the site of a newly charged "Commons."
For Gustavo Buntinx, reflecting on the Colectivo Sociedad Civil in Lima, Perú, and for the artists of Grupo de Arte Callejero (GAC) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the struggle for a public sphere is staked in questions of the legitimacy of the nation itself. Buntinx focuses on what he calls "zonas ultraperiféricas," where histories of colonial and neocolonial violence and exploitation have produced "el nacionalismo sin nación de repúblicas sin ciudadanos." Both arts collectives aim at creating and rehearsing viable forms of civil society and citizenship against the radical negligence of the state—whether the aggressive dismantling of the democratic state in Fujimori's de facto dictatorship or the impassive erasures in public memory of genocide and colonial violence in contemporary Argentina. For both groups, art is the site of a new form of civic engagement: both use performance to make claims against the sovereign state, to illustrate its corruption, and to stake new forms of political agency.
Sarah Kozinn, Mirta Antonelli, and Esteban Rodriguez, in turn, focus on the ways that performance and law—and the performance of law in its different forms—may conspire to produce the sovereign and the normative social body itself. Analyzing several key legal cases in the United States that focused on the teaching and speaking of "standard" English, Kozinn illustrates how the law participates in processes of racialization—the processes by which race itself comes to have ontological meaning—and, in these cases, how law enables the markers of race to be transferred from the visual register of physiognomy to the aural register of voice. Further, Kozinn looks to the innovative theatre of solo performer Anna Deavere Smith, known for her exploration of race politics and "American character" through a distinctive aural mimesis, as an alternative conjugation of performance, race, and voice in the public sphere. Mirta Antonelli, in turn, focusing on the highly visible "Blumberg case" in Argentina, examines the production and protection of a normative social body associated with a white, privileged class, when ostensibly "popular" mobilizations and televisual media conspire to demand more power for the state and its security apparatus. Also focused on legal culture in Argentina, Esteban Rodríguez draws our attention to the "carpetas modus operandi" or the photo books maintained by Buenos Aires police for use in the identification of criminals, tracing the production of criminal identity through the production, circulation, and use of the photographs themselves. Because the police require minimal legal pretext to detain and take a photograph of "suspect" individuals, those included in the book often reflect the racial and social profiling of the police. The act of taking the photograph functions as the performative enactment of criminality, unrelated to the act of any crime; once included in the book, the photographed subject literally becomes a suspect, available for identification (often false) for any future crime. Between the memorialized images of the murdered Axel Blumberg—young, white, blonde, handsome— circulating on public banners and on endless television reels and the static photographs of potential "suspects" filed away in the offices of the police, we encounter the two sides of Agamben's "state of exception" as the model for contemporary governmentality: in death, the young Blumberg enters political life as the sacrificial citizen whose loss requires "exceptional" changes to the law; while those profiled "suspects" on the other side of the camera enter an ominous "bestiary" in which their political subjectivity threatens to dissolve into bare life.
Together these essays illustrate how performance studies is specially suited to address the constitutive relationships between articulate bodies and the dimensions of law. To show "law in its nonrelation to life," Agamben writes, "and life in its nonrelation to law means to open a space between them for human action."10 We hope these essays fully illustrate the political stakes and value of such human action in our "exceptional" times.
1. Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 87.
2. Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat, "Introduction," Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants, and States in the Postcolonial World (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003) pp. 2–3. Thank you to Lisa Brooks for bringing this volume to my attention.
3. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 6.
4. Hansen and Stepputat, 13.
5. Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).
6. Diana Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's "Dirty War" (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997).
7. Susan Foster, "Choreographies of Protest," Theatre Journal 55 (2003): pp. 396–97, 408.
8. See Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004).
9. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 252.
10. Agamben, The State of Exception, p. 88.
