The political technology of the ‘Camp’ in historical capitalism

We ought to establish the basic socio-technological principles of control mechanisms as their age dawns, and describe in these terms what is already taking the place of the disciplinary sites of confinement that everyone says are breaking down. It may be that older means of control, borrowed from the old sovereign societies, will come back into play, adapted as necessary. The key thing is that we’re at the beginning of something new (Deleuze, 1995, p. 182).

Abstract

So much of what we experience in neoliberal capitalism resembles the operation of the camp. How then can we understand the camp as a political technology of labour control recurrent in historical capitalism, and why would we want to? Driven by the perennial imperatives to govern (Foucault) and to accumulate (Marx), the camp as a modulation of social control allows us to explore the role of ‘meta-disciplinary’ technique in the ‘real subsumption of labour’. The aims here are (1) to question the sanguine expectations of a liberal pastorate that is inextricable from the needs of capital; (2) to articulate the ‘techniques of domination’ experienced in the idiom of neoliberal capitalism; and (3) to find inspiration for corresponding counter-conducts and ‘techniques of the self’. This article offers a kind of historical archaeology of ‘meta-disciplinary’ technique by resuscitating Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a surprisingly rich source of insight into the operations of the camp modulation and the counter-conducts it engenders. The analysis to follow works in the space between Marxian and Foucauldian political thought opened up by the new materialisms, and draws upon the recent works of Lordon, Lazzarato, Negri, inter alia, that are currently enriching critical theory.