Schools as Exceptional Spaces-libre

THE SCHOOL AS AN EXCEPTIONAL SPACE: RETHINKINGEDUCATION FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE BIOPEDAGOGICAL

Tyson E. Lewis

School of Education

University of California, Los Angeles

ABSTRACT. In this essay, Tyson Lewis theorizes current lockdown practices, zero-tolerance policies, andNo Child Left Behind initiatives in U.S. schooling by drawing on Italian philosopher Giorgio Agambensanalysis of the concentration camp and the state of exception. Agambens theory of the camp provides achallenging, critical vantage point for looking at the ambiguities that emerge from the complex field ofdisciplinary procedures now prevalent in inner-city, low-income, minority schools, and helps to clarifywhat exactly is at stake in the symbolic and sometimes physical violence of schooling. Key to under-standing the primary relation between camp and classroom is Agambens framework of the biopolitical,which paradoxically includes life as a political concern through its exclusion from the political sphere.Here Lewis appropriates Agambens terminology in order to theorize the biopedagogical, wherein educa-tional life is included in schooling through its abandonment. For Lewis, the theory of the camp is neces-sary to recognizing how schools function and, in turn, how they could function differently.

In his critical reflections on postWorld War II German education, Theodor

Adorno argued that the school has become a primary site for encountering the bru-

tality of fascism.1 Fascism is for Adorno not simply an external invasion of the

school by political or economic forces. Rather, a violent surplus at the heart of West-

ern schooling creates the preconditions necessary for fascism to take hold. Through

his examination of the educational archive, Adorno revealed that the notion of the

teacher emerges alongside the image of the flogger. In the novel The Trial, Franz

Kafka presents the teacher as the physically stronger who beats the weaker.2 In-

stead of a mere literary trope, this observation actually reveals the true core of edu-

cation, according to Adorno. Thus, in his genealogy, pervasive taboos against the

teacher have ancient roots in the terror of corporal punishment. As Adorno omi-

nously warned, The image of the teacher repeats, no matter how dimly, the ex-

tremely affect-laden image of the executioner.3 In the classroom, the violence of the

executioner is lived through the student-teacher dialectic, transforming learning

into punishment rather than a process for developing autonomy, self-responsibility,

and critical consciousness-raising. Because of this disavowed kernel that connects

liberal democratic teaching to premodern execution, the classroom itself, according

to Adorno, can be all too easily transformed from a space of learning into the space

that gestures toward the exceptional space of the fascist concentration camp.

In evaluating this apparently outlandish comparison, it is important to consider

these comments in relation to the analysis provided by one of the foremost

1. Theodor Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1998).

2. Ibid., 182.

3. Ibid., 183.

EDUCATIONAL THEORY j Volume 56 j Number 2 j 2006 2006 Board of Trustees j University of Illinois

159

contemporary theorists of the camp, Giorgio Agamben. According to him, the

structure of the camp has become the new nomos of the planet, expanding be-

yond fixed boundaries into everyday spaces such as the hospital and the airport.4 In

this light, it is curious that Agamben does not include the school in his analysis. If

the camp has in fact become the principal political space of late capitalism, then

how have schools been affected? We must read Adorno and Agamben together in

order to address the question, How are the structure of contemporary schools, par-

ticularly many urban schools, in the United States and the structure of the camp

interrelated?

In this essay I will attempt to map this intersection through an analysis of

zero-tolerance policies in the United States. At stake is redefining the underlying

political structure that informs the spatiotemporal mapping of the school. Draw-

ing on Agambens analysis of the camp, I will challenge current interpretations of

the school as a Foucauldian panopticon or as an Althusserian Institutional State

Apparatus. Key to understanding the primary relation between the camp and the

classroom is Agambens framework of biopower, which paradoxically includes life

as a political concern as a result of its exclusion from the political sphere. Here I

will appropriate Agambens terminology in order to theorize the biopedagogical el-

ement of educational life, which is a crucial factor in schooling precisely in that it

is ignored and neglected. This analysis is not meant to create a monolithic view of

urban education in light of zero tolerance one that treats all actions simply as

representations of violence but, rather, I hope to expose a dimension of

schooling that has thus far remained largely unexplored and give it analytical dis-

tinction. Absent from the Foucauldian and Althusserian models is the logic of

abandonment, which Agamben clearly articulates in relation to the spatial config-

uration of the camp. Agambens theory of the camp enables us finally to under-

stand the ambiguities emerging from the complex field of disciplinary procedures

now prevalent in inner-city, low-income, minority schools and helps to clarify

what exactly is at stake in the symbolic and often physical violence of lockdowns,

searches, suspensions, and punishment. In conclusion, I question the current call

for a return to the utopian imagination in educational theory: while a utopian turn

in educational theory and practice might be necessary at this arguably anti-uto-

pian moment,5 without an understanding of the pervasive if not ubiquitous fold-

ing of pedagogical space into the model of the camp, such utopianism is bound to

fail. Thus a conceptual grounding of the sociology of education in a theory of the

TYSON LEWIS is a Doctoral Candidate in the School of Education at the University of California, LosAngeles; e-mail \[email protected][. His primary areas of scholarship are educational philosophy, crit-ical theory, and utopian studies.

4. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 1998), 176. This work will be cited as HS in the text for all subsequent references. See also GiorgioAgamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

5. See Fredric Jameson, Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); and, in the field ofeducation, Henry Giroux, Public Spaces, Private Lives: Beyond the Culture of Cynicism (Lanham, Mary-land: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001).

E D U C A T I O N A L T H E O R Y VOLUME 56 j NUMBER 2 j 2006160

camp is a necessary and urgent step toward recognizing how schools function and,

in turn, how they might function differently.

DEFINING THE STATE OF EXCEPTION AND THE CAMP

Drawing on Greek philosophy, Agamben articulates the question of politics in

Western culture as the unstable relation between zoe (life common to all creatures)

and bios (political life). As Michel Foucault argued, modern society is characterized

by the fact that zoe has entered the polis, resulting in a politicization of life or bio-

politics. In his bookHomo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben both cri-

tiques and furthers Foucaults project by articulating biopolitics with Carl Schmitts

theory of the state of exception. In brief, for Schmitt the state of exception is de-

fined as a space outside of, yet paradoxically serving as the foundation for, the nor-

mative social order.6 Quoting Agamben, the resulting zone of indistinction is not a

dictatorship (whether constitutional or unconstitutional, commissarial or sovereign)

but a space devoid of law, a zone of anomie in which all legal determinations and

above all the very distinction between public and private are deactivated.7 The

state of exception is therefore a peculiar form of exclusion in which law applies by

its very absence. In other words, the state of exception becomes a part of politics

through its very exclusion from the everyday concerns of the nation-state.

In the zone of indistinction (both inside yet outside the law simultaneously),

the sovereign is capable of defining which life is worthy of living and which life war-

rants death without reference to juridical norms. In other words, the sovereigns au-

thority demarcates the body of the homo sacer, or the sacred individual who can be

killed without trial for the crime of homicide. Exposed directly to the sovereigns de-

cision, bare life (zoe) becomes mediated through the violence of the sovereigns right.

Here Agamben draws from Jean-Luc Nancy in order to specify how sovereignty pro-

duces bare life. In particular, Agamben articulates the sovereigns decision with the

concept of the ban or abandonment. Abandonment of the homo sacer as bare life re-

veals the true nature of sovereignty, which is not to kill as in the Foucauldian model

of sovereign force so much as to include life through its exclusion. In other words,

life is held in suspension, neither inside nor outside the polis, neither fully alive nor

dead. Stated differently, life is made to survive in a legal limbo.8 The totalitarian na-

ture of the state of exception can therefore be defined as a state in which all life be-

comes sacred [meaning bare life] and all politics becomes the exception [meaning

the sovereigns decision] (HS, 148). As such, the bare life produced through the sov-

ereigns authority marks the principal moment of biopolitics, which always at its

heart has the anomie of the ban. The state, in other words, is sustained by an ob-

scenely excessive display of force enacted upon the figure of homo sacer. Disturb-

ingly, the secret of democracy (of modern power relations) thus lies in the

6. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (1932; repr., Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1996).

7. Agamben, State of Exception, 50.

8. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books,2002), 155.

LEWIS School as an Exceptional Space 161

production of bare life as the object of biopower. Here, we see how Agamben moves

Foucaults project forward. First, biopolitics is not so much a modern phenomenon;

rather, biopower is located in the most ancient form of the sovereigns decision over

the fate of homo sacer, defining the good life of the polis by what it is not: bare

life. Second, zoe is not included into biopower so much as it is included in politics

through its very exclusion (stripped of citizenship, rights, and social privileges).

For Agamben the camp is the absolute yet disavowed spatial inscription of this

state of exception. It is a space where the state of exception permanently holds the

norms of the polis in suspension thus enabling life to be captured by sovereignty.

While exhibiting roots in ancient Roman legal documents, festivals, and funerals,

the state of exception is most terrifyingly witnessed in Nazi death camps such as

Auschwitz. Here the Jewish prisoners as bare life, or as homo sacer, were exposed

directly to the sovereign right over death. Like Adorno, Agamben sees the Nazi

death camps as the bleakest manifestation of the dialectic of the modern state, ex-

posing the truth of human rights and biopower that is, the fact that there is no

room for zoe in bios except as an exception. Other examples such as the Japanese

internment camps in the United States and, more recently, prisoner of war camps

in Cuba are also founded on a sovereign decision to suspend the law in the face of a

perceived threat to the national well-being. Furthermore, refugee camps speak to

the widespread global state of war where citizens are forced to flee their homelands

and enter zones of indistinction between nation-states. In all cases, a state of emer-

gency brought about by the declaration of war necessitated the creation of an ex-

ceptional space inside yet outside the polis which touches the very limit of the

juridical order. It is important to bear in mind that these extraordinary zones

known as camps do not annihilate the law but rather apply the law through its

very suspension to bodies that can be killed without being murdered.

Moving beyond Schmitt, Agamben turns toward Walter Benjamin, who argued

that the state of emergency is always in effect for the oppressed. Agamben gives

historical specificity to Benjamins claims by asserting that since World War II, the

state of exception has transgressed its spatiotemporal boundaries and now, over-

flowing outside them, is starting to coincide with the normal order, in which

everything again becomes possible (HS, 38). Stated bluntly, the model of the camp

has become increasingly pervasive, erupting in a variety of locations ranging from

hospitals (where coma victims are made to survive in a state between life and

death) to airports (where refugees are held in detention for extended periods of

time). In such an environment homo sacer and the citizen collide, as do the author-

ity of the sovereign and the norms of the law. In his most recent work concerning

the state of exception and the camp, Agamben argues that the USA Patriot Act and

the authorization of indefinite detention of suspected terrorists produces a le-

gally unnamable and unclassifiable being who is included in the social order pre-

cisely by being the state of exception where law and fact collapse in a state of

indeterminacy.9 These bodies have been stripped of their rights and their duties

9. Agamben, State of Exception.


and thus are exposed as bare life subject to the sovereigns decision to kill or grant

pardon. Summarizing, he writes, In all cases, an apparently innocuous space.

actually delimits a space in which the normal order is de facto suspended and in

which whether or not atrocities are committed depends not on law but on the civi-

lity and ethical sense of the police who temporarily act as sovereign (HS, 174). In

other words, sovereignty has become vertically integrated and immanent rather

than hierarchical and transcendent, allowing the operation of the ban to function

within the mechanisms and the institutions of biopower.

The important point is that Agamben identifies the camp as the premier spa-

tial location supporting the contemporary biopolitical state. Thus we can read his

work as a critique of two other important social theorists: Michel Foucault and

Louis Althusser. For Foucault, Jeremy Benthams prison blueprint of the panopti-

con is the crystallized incarnation of the underlying set of power relations that de-

fine modern Western civilization.10 In the panopticon, a ring of inwardly facing cell

blocks surround a tower located at the hub of the architectural wheel. From this

tower, guards can monitor the activities in each cell with absolute authority. Due to

the constant threat of surveillance, the prisoners ultimately become self-regulating,

internalizing the external guards as a kind of overbearing super-ego. Or to use

Judith Butlers language, the external grip of the panopticon is internalized by the

subject through the psychic life of disciplinary power as a passionate attachment.11

With the expansion of disciplinary mechanisms throughout society including

schools, clinics, and the like Western civilization became a generally punitive

society concerned with regulating a homogenized public through training the body

on a micro level, through examinations, and through hierarchical surveillance. The

key to Foucaults description of Western punitive society is that power becomes

modest, functioning within a permanent economy that is subtle and quiet.12 In

this sense power, through its own ubiquity, becomes transparent, operating to

maximize effects with the least expenditure of force. While overt physical or public

punishment still has its place in this economy of power relations, it becomes in-

creasingly peripheral. Furthermore, the very logic underlying the use of punish-

ment changes from confining individuals for infractions to the correcting of

subjects according to their unique potentials.13 Yet, in the state of exception, the

force of the sovereign is directly expressed on the body in the form of the ban.

Here, there is not an economy of forces operating to construct docile and self-regu-

lating citizens but only force itself justified by the exceptional language of war that

falls outside the grid of normality. Thus Agamben questions the underlying spatial

metaphor of Foucaults work, emphasizing the centrality of the camp over the now

peripheral model of the panopticon.

10. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

11. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

12. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 170.

13. For the most comprehensive overview of Foucaults theory of educational power, see Roger Deacon,Moral Orthopedics: A Foucauldian Account of Schooling as Discipline, Telos 130 (2005): 84102.


Agamben also amends Althussers original bifurcation of the state into Repres-

sive State Apparatuses (army, prison, police, courts) and Ideological State Appara-

tus (school, church, trade unions, communications/media, and the arts).14

According to Althussers Marxist conception of the state, Repressive State Appara-

tuses (RSAs) sustain the law through violence or intimidation, and the Ideological

State Apparatus (ISA) functions largely through interpellation or ideological hail-

ing. The ISA effectively promotes a form of voluntary servitude, as one defines

ones freedom through ones subjugation. Through a set of practices, the ideology of

the ISA is inscribed on the bodily level itself. Thus, in relation to subject for-

mation, Althusser argued, his ideas are his material actions inserted into material

practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the

material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject.15 Like

Foucaults theory of the disciplinary institution, Althussers notion of the ISA

makes subjects through their subjugation (without force), but, unlike Foucault,

Althusser saw this project as determined by the mode of production.

The camp is neither a repressive nor an ideological state apparatus. It is lo-

cated outside yet inside the sphere of the state. The violence of the camp is not

the violence sanctioned within and by the law through due process but, rather,

sovereign violence that exists in the hazy realm of indistinction between law and

nature, violence and right, and is frequently justified by the rhetoric of war. Thus,

in relation to the exception, the sovereign removes him- or herself from state re-

strictions, and as such, the rupture of the state always already adheres to the very

center of the state itself. On Agambens view, Althussers depiction of the state is

incomplete, for the state includes its own exclusion the camp within its inte-

rior. Commenting on the presumed externality of the state of nature as the oppo-

site to the state of law and civilization, Agamben argues,

The state of nature and the state of exception are nothing but two sides of a single topologicalprocess in which what was presupposed as external (the state of nature) now reappears, as in aMobius strip or a Leyden jar, in the inside (as state of exception), and the sovereign power isthis very impossibility of distinguishing between outside and inside, nature and exception.(HS, 37)

Thus the state of exception cannot be accounted for by state apparatuses and, as a

result, remains a paradoxical spatiotemporal location.

Furthermore, the camp does not function to produce docile bodies or subjects

of the law. In fact, the camp strips the subject of his or her subjectivity. The pri-

mary individual of the camp is, according to Agamben, the enigmatic figure of der

Muselmann who is defined as a being from whom humiliation, horror, and fear

had so taken away all consciousness and all personality as to make him absolutely

apathetic (HS, 185). Der Muselmann is a subject minus the supplement of social

recognizability and as such exemplifies bare life itself. The camp exposes life

to the sovereigns decision and reduces life to pure survival. The camp does not

14. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001).

15. Ibid., 114.


simply make individual subjects according to a grid of specifications determined by

their hierarchical ranking, as in Foucaults panopticon. Nor does the camp hail the

individual into the symbolic order of the state (granting him or her a mandate). If a

subject is made, it is made through its undoing that is, through its reduction to

bare life as the limit case of the human. This reduction, in turn, produces the pre-

mier surface through which the biopolitical functions: bare life. In fact, the camp

embodies a model of power that constructs the subject through exclusion, dis-

qualification, exile, rejection, deprivation, refusal, and incomprehension rather

than through normalization, intervention, administration, and examination.16 This

subject is not a productive, docile body but rather a traumatized, paradoxical body

that does not seem to belong in the political or social life of the polis.

This is not to suggest that Agambens theory is above criticism. First, the dis-

ciplinary mechanisms Foucault identified are certainly still in operation through-

out society, forcing us to temper Agambens claims.17 Second, Agambens theory

cannot simply be read as a juridical problem. His theory of sovereignty must be

rearticulated with a theory of Empire as a supranational sovereign force through

which bellum justum, or just war, creates the justification for both the banaliza-

tion of exceptionality and its conflation with moralizing police action.18 Fur-

thermore, if Hardt and Negri are correct and there is no longer a constitutive order

outside of Empire, then the camp truly becomes a paradigm of this new global re-

gime, for in the state of exception the outside is dramatically revealed as the ex-

cluded interior of political space. Finally, Agambens theory of the camp and the

state of exception must be read in conjunction with theories of racism in U.S. his-

tory. Joy James has argued that the subject of Foucaults disciplinary apparatus is

the body of a white, propertied male and that he thus excludes the continued vio-

lence of the sovereign against African Americans in particular.19 The black body

cannot be fully normalized due to the overriding epidermal fetishism of U.S. cap-

italism;20 instead, it is exposed to direct violence hence the excessive surplus vi-

olence of lynching or, more recently, prison abuse scandals. While Agambens

model might be analytically correct (in the sense that we are all potentially homo

sacer), in the particular historical context of U.S. racism, some suffer more than

others from the exposure to sovereign violence. Read together, Agamben provides

Jamess racial analysis of the disavowed sovereign violence inside/outside the state

with the analytic concept of exceptionality through which the spectacle of the

16. Michel Foucault, Abnormal (New York: Picador, 2003), 44.

17. See Tyson Lewis, Critical Surveillance Literacy, Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies 6, no. 2(2006) for an overview of the complexities of understanding Foucaults panoptic model of disciplinarypower in the present case of schooling and society in general.

18. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).

19. See Joy James, Resisting State Violence: Racism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1996). See also Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lecturesat the College de France, 19751976 (New York: Picador, 2003). This later work by Foucault addressesJamess concerns.

20. Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, Psychoanalytic-Marxism Groundwork (New York: Guilford Press), 329.


sovereign scaffold is rearticulated in the form of the camp. In fact, using James as a

new point of departure, we could argue that prison farms such as Parchman

Farm in Mississippi rather than Auschwitz formed the principal model of the

racist/capitalist state of exception in the United States. Such farms existed inside

yet outside the limits of the law, collapsing labor and punishment, everyday life

and imprisonment, norms and sovereign violence all within the framework of a

war on emancipated slaves who posed a threat to white, property owning society.21

Thus Agambens work, like Foucaults and Althussers, has to be placed squarely in

relation to ongoing forms of U.S. racism if it is to have explanatory power.

In sum, the camp seriously complicates both Foucaults emphasis on panoptic

institutions as well as Althussers theory of repressive and ideological state appara-

tuses. Both of these models in the end deny what Jacques Lacan referred to as the

Real of the political order22 the trauma of the state of exception, which is the

void around which juridical discourse swirls.23 The state in this view is supported

by its obscene supplement, which is the ultimate politically ex-timate object, an

object that remains veiled in both Althussers and Foucaults analyses.24 For all of

these theorists, the traumatic, strange, extraordinary, and hostile state of exception

remains the kernel of political life that cannot be articulated but is nevertheless

the grounding sovereign sphere a sphere implicated in the force of transnational

capitalism itself. State apparatuses or disciplinary mechanisms are therefore sup-

plemented by an underbelly that exists only as a disavowed external aberration and

that, according to Agamben, has now become the rule of law itself. As we shall see,

the views of Foucault and Althusser are inadequate to describe the contemporary

state of emergency experienced in many U.S. schools precisely because their theo-

ries fail to account for this supplemental exceptionality and its spatiotemporal

coding in the camp.

What follows is not a complete history of the camp in education. Such a narra-

tive would amount to a new archeology of schooling in the United States, which

in itself would be an extensive historical project. Instead, I provide an outline of

educational disciplinary policy spanning the past twenty years as a cursory intro-

duction to the problematics of the camp and of the biopedagogical. Central to this

analysis is the understanding that in the camp, life is reduced to bare life that is

held in a state of suspension or abandonment. As we shall see, the contemporary

crisis related to safety in U.S. urban schools all too easily collapses into its own

state of exception wherein educational life is captured in a liminal zone of

21. David Oshinsky, Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (NewYork: Free Press, 1997).

22. For an early articulation of the notion of the Real, see Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,Book VII (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997).

23. See Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2001).

24. The ex-timate is an object that is so radically interior that it is mis-recognized as that which isexternal and horrifying.


indistinction. As a result the biopedagogical reveals its internal complicity with an

underlying state of exception.

SCHOOLING AND THE LOGIC OF THE CAMP

Education in the inner city is intimately linked with biopower in that its pri-

mary function no longer seems to be creating a productive, docile, industrially

competent worker subject but rather simply childrens survival itself. Thus provid-

ing shelter to students without shelter, providing food in the form of free lunch

programs, and providing medical care have supplanted education as the major

goals of many schools serving poor populations. Here schools and refugee camps

merge as spaces of biopower where survival takes precedence and bare life be-

comes the political and pedagogical issue. In this fragile zone, the negative poten-

tial of biopower through which sovereign force operates returns in the form of

zero-tolerance laws. One can witness this preoccupation in the recent rise in

school raids, lockdowns, and suspensions which I regard as a bellum justum

being waged against urban youth. I will then frame these various phenomena in re-

lation to the U.S. legal theory of childhood and to students rights in schools.

Through this analysis, I hope to demonstrate the validity of Adornos warnings by

viewing them through the analytical language of Agambens theory of the state of

exception.

The zero-tolerance approach to U.S. education can be traced to the 1980s,

when government and military officials adopted zero-tolerance policies to set pen-

alties for adult drug offenders. By the early 1990s, national zero-tolerance policies

trickled down to school systems where the punishment procedures and the lingo

used in the war against drugs were rapidly adopted. While originally imple-

mented to eliminate weapons and narcotics from schools, these policies became

the blanket response to an array of school violations and have thus come to repre-

sent the educational equivalent of the mandatory three strikes criminal policy.

The intensification of zero-tolerance policies in urban schools serving low-income,

minority students has in many cases yielded inexplicable and excessive effects. As

Ronnie Casella reports, harsh punishments to prevent possible school violence

leads to a police-state-like atmosphere in which even public displays of affec-

tion are outlawed and subject to reprimand.25 For instance, in one case five Afri-

can American boys at a Mississippi school were arrested for felony assault for

accidentally hitting their white bus driver in the head with a peanut.26 The war

against drugs, crime, and poverty has become a permanent and extended war

against youth of color, and schools have become contested battlegrounds where

everyday behaviors are interpreted as extreme and where extreme responses to

such behaviors have become everyday occurrences. Thus, in New Yorks urban

schools students have been handcuffed simply for dress-code infringements;

25. Ronnie Casella, At Zero Tolerance (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 27, 21.

26. Ibid.


unsurprisingly, suspension rates in these schools have exceeded fifty percent of the

student body.27

A further example of this state of siege occurred in 2003 at Charlestown High

School in Boston. After a 15-year-old student was shot in the leg close to the

schools campus, police inaugurated Operation Clean Slate. As a result of this

action (which was doubtless facilitated by the environment created by the schools

zero-tolerance policy), seventeen students were arrested, their lockers were raided,

the school was placed in lockdown, and the suspects were detained and interro-

gated in the principals office. Mariellen Burns, a spokesperson for the police, said

that this war was done for the safety of the students and the faculty and to send a

message at the beginning of the school year that anyone who has issues like this

[related to school violence] needs to deal with them immediately.28 Here Fou-

cauldian technologies of disciplinarity (such as interrogation) are implemented not

to train, normalize, or rehabilitate so much as to punish students through police

action and shock and awe tactics. If disciplinary schools in the modern era fo-

cused on capturing and training the potentials of students, then with zero tolerance

we see a return of the logic of the Great Confinement (16001750) wherein schools

served the negative function of containing social disorder. The return of this nega-

tive functionality signals that the break pinpointed by Foucault in Discipline and

Punish is not so clean-cut and that the sovereign ban operates as the expression

of the inner logic of pedagogy. In other words, the lockdown of Charlestown High

School constituted a state of exception wherein students were subjected to a

battery of surveillance examinations and physical harassment legitimated by the

pervasive and moralizing language of war. This process opens a terrain between the

panoptic, disciplinary model and the logic of the exception, where discipline is sup-

plemented by a state of forced containment and educational arrested development.

Another alarming example of the school as a state of exception occurred on

November 5, 2003, at Goose Creek High School in South Carolina. That morning,

the school was raided and militarily secured by a fully armed SWAT team. Soldiers

wielding loaded weapons physically thrust students to the ground and slammed

them against lockers; anyone who did not immediately respond to orders was

handcuffed. The commando team proceeded to search the premises but in the end

found neither drugs nor weapons of any kind.29 In the name of security, education

as the normative practice of schooling was suspended, initiating a lockdown sce-

nario in which students were subjected directly to force that in its implementation

exceeded due cause. In fact, during this violent raid, some students actually

thought that the school was under attack by terrorists rather than being infiltrated

27. See Henry Giroux, Proto-Fascism in America: Neoliberalism and the Demise of Democracy (Bloo-mington, Indiana: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, 2004); and Michelle Fine, Framing Dropouts(Buffalo: SUNY Press, 1991).

28. Megan Tench, Police Conduct Sweep of Several Schools, Boston Globe, B3, September 11, 2003.

29. Marianne Hurst, Drug Sweep Sparks Lawsuits, Investigations, Educational Week on the Web, Jan-uary 7, 2004.


by the military. Such reactions speak to the unnecessary measures of zero toler-

ance that blur the line between safety and anomie and public and private spaces

and ultimately produce an atmosphere of terror not captured in Foucaults narra-

tive of disciplinary normalization or in Althussers theory of interpellation. The

sovereign force of Empire as a global policing agent reapplies itself to the very heart

of the United States in the form of an inner-city civil war on drugs, poverty, and

youth. If in the global state of exception described by both Agamben and Michael

Hardt and Antonio Negri politics and war become inseparable, then so too does ed-

ucation become war by other means. Low-intensity warfare in the form of high-in-

tensity police action comes to organize social relations and in turn acts as a proxy

for safety in schools. Rather than microrelations of power (dispersed and invisible),

we see the use of force over and against bodies in the form of restraint, punish-

ment, and ultimately exile. If the school as opposed to the camp is classically

thought of as a safe haven from the terrors of the outside world, here in the state

of exception that which encloses to protect folds back on itself to become a space

wherein safety and terror can become indistinguishable.

As Annette Fuentes reports, in contemporary America, George W. Bushs No

Child Left Behind Act (2001) has given new life to the old ideology of zero toler-

ance: Zero tolerance critics believe the current emphasis on standardized testing

is one reason harsh policies continue even as school crime plummets.30 The Bush

Administrations fixation with standardized test scores has led to the overuse of ex-

clusionary practices (for example, suspension or expulsion) against those students

perceived as potential low-scorers.

These in-school suspensions are a further indication of how biopedagogy has

collapsed educational life into bare life. In the Denver Public School district, where

suspension rates are on the rise, over half of all suspensions occurring between

2003 and 2004 were for subjective, nonviolent acts of disobedience by male

students of color (predominantly African American and Latino).31 This escalating

use of in-school suspension brings about a limbo state between inclusion and

exclusion in other words, educational life is included by its very exclusion in the

school. It is here that educational life becomes interchangeable with bare life (a life

devoid of pedagogical supplement), and the student is reduced to nothing more

than a body that must be policed. In other words, pedagogy comes to concern

itself with the unpedagogical (the monitoring of bare life at the expense of learn-

ing). If, as Foucault contended, schooling is a form of disciplinary investment, then

the increased use of suspensions represents a return to the sovereign force of aban-

donment where students are seen as deficits. Daniel Cho has recently argued that

knowledge of the student has become abject, transformed into an excluded object

barred from being recognized in current standardization; it follows that students

30. Annette Fuentes, Discipline and Punish, The Nation, December 26, 2003, p. 20.

31. Advancement Project, Education on Lockdown: The Schoolhouse to Jailhouse Track (Washington,D.C.: Advancement Project, 2005); available at http://advancementproject.org/publications.html.


very bodies have become abject under zero-tolerance policies, rendering educa-

tional life inoperable.32

Here children must be left behind, or abandoned by the sovereigns decision, in

order (paradoxically) to sustain the No Child Left Behind law. Schools must suspend

the mandate of the state in order to ensure school funding. They maintain their abil-

ity to continue to educate the nations poor precisely by no longer educating them.

Stated differently, documents such as A Nation at Risk and No Child Left Behind

usher in a state of educational emergency in failing schools, thus forcing the im-

plementation of a ban over educational life in order to maintain school funding. This

application of the ban might seem at first to be antithetical to No Child Left Behind,

yet it is in reality the unstated inner paradox of biopower inherent in the law itself.

If in-school suspension represents the abandonment of educational life within

the biopedagogical, then out-of-school expulsion represents the educational death

penalty. Expulsion in the Denver public schools rose from 9,846 in the 20002001

school year to 13,423 in 20032004 (an increase of over thirty-six percent in three

years). Eighty-six percent of these expulsions were for nonviolent offences, includ-

ing such acts as interferes with schools ability to provide educational opportuni-

ties to other students or has a personal appearance or lack of hygiene that is

disruptive.33 Even more disturbing is that students of color were seventy percent

more likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers.34 Substantial evi-

dence suggests that, once expelled, many students are likely to follow a path from

the streets to juvenile detention and ultimately to prison.35 Even if students are

able to return to school post-incarceration, they are often stigmatized by peers and

teachers, tracked by hallway guards, and denied access to the educational materials

and help needed to remain at their grade level. Such conditions greatly increase the

likelihood that the student will simply drop out, and so the student, while physi-

cally present, is virtually dead as far as the school is concerned: biopedagogy trans-

forms into thanatopedagogy, a pedagogy whose goal is not to facilitate learning but

rather to enforce the end of educational life.

As Foucault reminded us in describing the persistent life of sovereign force

within the biopolitical, When I say killing, I obviously do not mean simply mur-

der as such, but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone

to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political

death, expulsion, rejection, and so on.36 Thus thanatopedagogy as the enactment

32. Daniel Cho, Teaching Abjection: A Response to the War on Terror, Teaching Education 16, no. 2(2005): 103115.

33. Advancement Project, Education on Lockdown, 25.

34. Ibid.

35. See Johanna Wald and Daniel Losen, eds., Deconstructing the School to Prison Pipeline, specialissue of New Directions for Youth Development 99 (Fall 2003). See also the publication jointly producedby the Advancement Project and the Civil Rights Project, Opportunities Suspended: The DevastatingConsequences of Zero Tolerance and School Discipline Policies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,2000); available at http://advancementproject.org/publications.html.

36. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 256.


of a ban on educational life constitutes what James would call social death.37

Here students are not given a mandate (be cool, stay in school or just say no) as

in Althussers model of the ISA. If they are hailed, they are not interpellated and,

therefore, the message remains external. Individual students do not recognize

themselves as students; the hailing does not recruit them as subjects of education

but rather as anti-educative subjects. While Althusser did admit that the ISA con-

tains within it repressive elements (such as punishment, expulsion, and the like),

he saw these punishments as standard practices to aid in the process of ideological

integration, not as violent actions justified by war. Furthermore, the most extreme

examples of current zero-tolerance policies lack the necessary supplement of edu-

cational ideological interpellation and instead lead to exclusion through expulsion

and high drop-out rates. This kind of violence does not easily fit Althussers model

and instead speaks to an excessive moment where repressive possibilities are not

simply realized but rather extended beyond their own proper limits and legiti-

mated by the disciplinary restrictions of the ISA. Here we see the return of a re-

pressed violent and traumatic kernel of education in which the dark supplement to

normalizing discourses and disciplinary power relations is re-animated by means of

the new wars on drugs, crime, and, ultimately, poor youth of color. As Michelle

Fine writes, In urban areas, especially for low-income African-American and Lat-

ino youths, public schools may offer everyone access in, but once inside the doors

of public schools, many low-income urban youths are virtually disappeared.38

Consequently, access has not resulted in disciplinary inclusion or ideological inter-

pellation but rather in an internal exiling of the least privileged in a state of indis-

tinction between the outside and the inside of school life.

This argument gives further credence to the claim, by Ivan Eugene Watts and

Nirmala Erevelles, that poor inner-city schools are not so much prisons as they are

internal colonies of a global system of Empire. Describing the plight of Latino/a

and African American students attending ghetto schools, Watts and Erevelles in-

voke the notion of internal colonization where spatial locations are conquered and

sealed off from the rest of society by tangible or intangible (symbolic) spatiotempo-

ral boundaries, producing reservations or barrios that lack economic mobility or

political voice.39 What Watts and Erevelles describe as the colony is very close to

Agambens notion of the camp, since both operate through included exclusion, the

state of exception by which a sovereign decision imposes itself directly on people

under threat of siege. In this state of emergency, the school comes to function like

a refugee camp (where life persists, but in an otherwise intolerable state) or even

like a concentration camp (where educational life as bare life hangs in the balance

37. See James, Resisting State Violence.

38. Fine, Framing Dropouts, 24.

39. Ivan Eugene Watts and Nirmala Erevelles, These Deadly Times: Reconceptualizing School Violenceby Using Critical Race Theory and Disability Studies, American Educational Research Journal 41, no. 2(2004): 271299. See also Jean Anyon, Ghetto Schooling: A Political Economy of Urban EducationalReform (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997).


of the sovereigns decision). The dramatic image of the camp serves as a powerful

spatial model for describing the deterioration of schooling in urban areas.

The conditions that are transforming schools into protocamps and, in turn,

educational life into bare life are inscribed directly into the U.S. legal apparatus.

Although it is often thought that children lack certain adult freedoms (agency

rights), they benefit from extended protection by the state (welfare rights). How-

ever, the use of the term protection here is an ideological mystification that ob-

scures the continued construction of childhood as a determination of sovereign

right. Children are denied many legal rights granted to adults, including the right

to decide where they want to live, the school they will attend, the religion they

will practice, and the type of medical treatment they might receive. As Nanette

Davis has argued, The moral, social, and legal subordination of children to family

and various authority systems without rights of appeal mark the historical record,

and provide the social conditions for the oppression of children and adolescents.40

Because they lack the rights of full citizens, children are exposed to the sovereigns

ban in a much more immediate way than are adults; the life of childhood in-

nocence is easily reduced to bare life through force.

If one thinks that equating childhood life with bare life overstates the case,

think of the abuses against children at so-called wilderness-therapy camps dur-

ing the mid 1990s. After several childrens deaths, it was exposed that such camps

starved children to break their wills, exposed them to harsh elements, and even

had professional kidnappers (equipped with pepper spray) abduct the children

from their homes.41 In such cases, parents and the state implicitly agreed that chil-

dren could be forcibly held against their will without due process and without state

supervision. Here protection of children results in a camp in the strongest

sense of the term: a zone of indistinction between law and violence where life is

held in suspension before a sovereigns force.

The inferior legal status of children thus explains why students in schools can

be subjected to searches, violations of free speech, and corporal punishment much

more frequently than adults are. Simply put, students are not seen as citizen sub-

jects but only as bearers of bare life, thus childhood emerges as the missing con-

cept in Agambens work for understanding the ambiguities of a state between the

human and the nonhuman. A brief history of Supreme Court decisions concerning

the paradoxical location of children in relation to schooling exposes this point.

Parham v. J.R. (1979) revealed the difficulty of granting children due process rights;

Bethel School District No. 403 v. Fraser (1986) restricted rights of free speech in

schools; New Jersey v. T.L.O. (1985) restricted childrens Fourth Amendment rights

for freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, removing requirements for

search warrants while also lowering probable cause thresholds; and Ingraham v.

Wright (1977) did not require schools to use procedural safeguards before inflicting

40. Nanette Davis, Youth Crisis: Growing Up in the Risk Society (London: Praeger, 1999), 47.

41. Hodgson, Raised in Captivity, 33.


corporal punishment.42 This last case is most disturbing, especially when we con-

sider that as of 2000, twenty-two states still permitted corporal punishment in

schools, most of which is inflicted on youth of color. In fact, according to the Na-

tional Coalition to Abolish Corporal Punishment in Schools, African American

students are hit at a rate two times higher than their relative population size.43

Those procedural rights juvenile courts do grant children are either watered

down (for example, they are not entitled to jury trials) or are being revoked at a

surprising rate.44

As Agamben reminds us, the life worth living and the abandoned life are

linked within the biopolitical one supplements the other: Every gesture, every

event in the camp, from the most ordinary to the most exceptional, enacts the de-

cision on bare life by which the German biopolitical body is made actual (HS,

174). Thus in Germany the Jew as bare life became the necessary prop against

which the German body could define itself. Could we not argue that the bare life of

the poor, minority student exposed to the sovereigns ban is intimately related to

the overly commercialized body of the white, middle-class student? Are these bod-

ies not intimately related to one another within a society divided along race and

class lines? In the context of the state of exception, the two movements within bio-

pedagogy toward normalization and commodification and, conversely, toward

immanent educational extermination expose themselves as two sides of the

pedagogical coin within Empire.

As a result, the state of exception in education increasingly reveals its internal

contradictions and the paradoxes issuing from the heart of biopedagogy itself: the

tenuous relation between educational life and life in general. Education becomes a

camp-like space where police and pedagogy enter a zone of indistinction sustained

by the rhetoric of a just war. In this state of exception the contradiction reaches its

climax, and the educational life of the student becomes indistinguishable from bare

life: a state in which subjects are made to survive or subjected to social death in the

form of abandonment. As John Devine has suggested, docile, autonomous, and pro-

ductive subjects are not the end result of such exceptional circumstances in school-

ing.45 In fact, evidence suggests that the militarized implementation of zero-tolerance

policies actually reinforces the behaviors that these policies are intended to pre-

vent.46 Here surveillance panopticism is not meant simply to reform the soul or nor-

malize conduct; rather, it acts as the gaze of the sovereign ban, leading to increased

42. Nancy Walker, Catherine Brooks, and Lawrence Wrightsman, Childrens Rights in the United States(London: Sage, 1999).

43. See National Coalition to Abolish Corporal Punishment in Schools, http://www.stophitting.com/disatschool.

44. Gary Smith, Remorseless Young Predators: The Bottom Line of Caging Children, in GrowingUp Postmodern: Neoliberalism and the War on the Young, ed. Ronald Strickland (Lanham, Maryland:Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).

45. John Devine, Maximum Security: The Culture of Violence in Inner-City Schools (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1996).

46. See the conclusions of the Advancement Project report, Education on Lockdown.


raids, confiscation of property, interrogations, and zero-tolerance suspensions. In

sum, the state of war I have been outlining produces a disjunction that prevents the

close alignment of schools with either the prison which, according to Foucault,

produces self-regulating and productive citizen subjects or an ISA which pro-

duces educated worker subjects through the process of ideological interpellation.

Once the structure of the camp is exposed, then the school becomes an increasingly

contested terrain where the stakes against educational death are clearly articulated.

THE UTOPIAN TURN: TOWARD PURE EDUCATION

At the outset of this essay, I argued that Adorno located the principal space of

the camp within education itself. But Adorno, the master of dialectical thinking,

also realized that from within this very space of exceptionality there could equally

rise the preconditions for a world beyond the logic of the camp and thus beyond

genocide: School today, its moral import, is that in the midst of the status quo it

alone has the ability, if it is conscious of it, to work directly toward the debarbari-

zation of humanity and thus strive for democracy.47 But how can the camp be

overcome? What are the alternatives that elude the perpetual repetition of the sov-

ereigns ban? Bearing in mind Agambens problematic of biopower the para-

doxical relation between life as such and political life we can articulate three

educational situations that must be avoided in order to secure a fourth, utopian,

turn in education:48

1. One approach to solving the riddle of the relation between zoe and bios,

and thus to articulating the natural life with the political life, is through

hedonistic consumerism.49 Liberal democracies of late capitalism co-opt

the body and transform it into a site of market logics. Here the function of

the sovereign is not so much to make die (Foucault) or to make survive

(Agamben) but rather to make survive in a radical state of enjoyment

(Zizek).50 In the context of education, Henry Girouxs work has explored

this topic in great depth, demonstrating the commodification of student

bodies and of school hallways.51 In relation to Agamben, we could argue

that such strategies incorporate zoe into bios to the exclusion of bios

47. Adorno, Critical Models, 190.

48. The typology presented here is not simply a formal characterization of ideal types. Once insertedinto an overall critique of the social relations of capitalism, such a semiotic schematic locates the con-cept of life within the prison house of contemporary ideology and its implied beyond. Nor is this typologymeant to deny the complex interaction between each mode of inclusion/exclusion. For instance, a hybridform of consumerist laborer (most often attributed to the work of women in particular) has not been dis-cussed in this essay but could be one of many permutations of the simple schema that I outline. The finalmove of this analysis is necessarily utopian in the sense that the solution to the problem of life in schoolsmust be separated from the violence of sovereignty and the normalization of discipline.

49. Adorno, Critical Models, 11.

50. Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999).

51. See Henry Giroux, Disturbing Pleasures: Learning Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994);The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield,1999); and Stealing Innocence: Youth, Corporate Power, and the Politics of Culture (New York: St.Martins Press, 2000).


altogether the exclusion of politics as the cultivation of deliberative,

democratic processes. Here zoe, as the site of private pleasure, supersedes

the public interests and commitments of the citizen to the point where

pleasure becomes the only political issue at hand. Hedonistic consumer-

ism is the result. Rearticulated in terms of education, zoe comes to domi-

nate educational life, and the school becomes a marketplace for selling

desires. Formalized, this relationship becomes zoe . bios (zoe is greater

than bios).

2. The second option is the possible domination of bios over zoe, which

amounts to the inverse of the last formula. I would argue that in this case

we have a process of normalization in which disciplinary power functions

to ban zoe as natural life and to make it subservient to bios, or political ex-

istence. This formula articulates a classic Foucauldian narrative concern-

ing the body in education, which is trained, homogenized, and ultimately

normalized into citizenship according to the efficiency and productivity of

the mode of production. In terms of schooling, scholars employing a broad-

ly Foucauldian lens have repeatedly established the power of normal-

ization in relation to the body coded as abnormal.52 Here education is

not concerned with creating a consuming body of pleasure so much as it is

with creating a normalized body capable of labor and production in the

name of state efficiency and standardization.53 Formalized, this relation-

ship could be read as bios . zoe (bios is greater than zoe).

3. The third option is the one detailed in this essay. In this scenario bios

and zoe collapse into a state of indistinction through which zoe is included

into politics through its exclusion as bare life. The location of this oper-

ation is the state of exception, or the camp, where politics transforms into

the extra-political decision of the sovereign. In this case, the norm operates

through its suspension, and the might of sovereign force marks the body

directly. For education, the camp is, as we have seen, a possibility within

schooling precisely because of the current war on drugs and crime in poor

urban areas and because of the ambiguous legal status of the child. For-

malized, this relationship would read (bios 4 zoe) / bare life.

4. The fourth possibility is the utopian turn, a not-yet conceptualized rela-

tion between zoe and bios where they do not merely supersede one another,

nor collapse into a state of indistinction. Instead, zoe becomes its own bios

and bios its own zoe.

52. See, for example, Ian Copeland, The Making of the Dull, Deficient and Backward Pupil in British El-ementary Education, 18701914, British Journal of Educational Studies 44, no. 4 (1996): 377394.

53. See, for example, the notion of positive eugenics in the work of Fiona Campbell, Eugenics in a Dif-ferent Key? New Technologies and the Conundrum of Disability, in A Race for a Place: Eugenics,Darwinism, and Social Thought and Practice in Australia, eds. Martin Crotty, John Germov, and GrantRodwell (Newcastle, Australia: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, 2000).


Yet, as Agamben writes, Western politics has not succeeded in constructing

the link between zoe and bios.that would have healed the fracture. Bare life re-

mains included in politics in the form of the exception, that is, as something which

is included solely through an exclusion (HS, 11). It is my contention that in con-

temporary society, the urban school no longer a pure ISA or a mere disciplinary

apparatus but rather a spatial location subsumed by the logic of the camp is a

central terrain for rethinking this link between life and political existence. Cur-

rently, the commodification, normalization, or abandonment of educational life

are not so much solutions as illustrations of the corruption of Empire that, as

Hardt and Negri argue, denies the generative possibilities of life itself.54 Opposing

these trends by including children fully into the realm of citizen rights is not an

adequate solution either, for this simply capitulates to the power of sovereignty

rather than disrupting its logic. Educational philosophy must articulate a new

educational ontology that does not simply reinforce the decision of the sovereign

(in which life is reduced to questions of consumption, labor power, abandonment,

or survival) over the desires of naked life as inherently creative and productive.

Drawing on Agambens theory of a pure law, the utopian moment in education is

precisely when we reach a pure education in which pedagogy draws a line be-

tween itself and the logic of the ban. But is pure education a radical break a

miraculous leap into absolute difference or is it a Hegelian determinate negation

in which the potential for transformation already exists inside the protocamp? And

if the latter is correct, then who are to be the agents of such a transformation? If, as

Agamben argues, bare life is in the end not simply a passive victim but an active

protagonist against sovereign force, then perhaps this new educational philosophy

must identify with those who have been most affected by educational ex-

ceptionality: the students who have thus far only been included through their

exclusion.

54. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 2000.


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