PARADIGM AND EXCEPTION
Now after delving into the ways the zonefact may allow for a topological and systemic exploration of the Zone, the question is: what does one see there? Certainly, an intricate network of things, actors, processes will emerge; yet how can one make sense of it in relation to the operations of the Zone? To understand how a Zone operates, it is insightful to read the work of Giorgio Agamben. In his works Homo Sacer[20] and State of Exception,[21] he elaborates on the concept and act of exception, which for him constitutes a foundational element of sovereignty, the judicial order and the Western State. For once, the suspension of laws, in Schmittian terms[22] becomes constitutive to the concept of the sovereign, as someone who wields power beyond the common law. Furthermore, the sovereign exception is bringing about the judicial order in the first place: ‘the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule.’[23]
He then goes on to point out that the state of exception is not some archaic mechanism, but much rather is very intensively used by modern states, both authoritarian and democratic, whereby it produces an ambiguous space where a suspension of laws, through being codified, becomes part of the judicial system itself. Ultimately, he describes the camp as ‘the biopolitical paradigm of the West’.[24] Drawing from Agamben’s discussion of the state of exception as an ambiguous element that defies the ‘normal’ state of things and introduces a bifurcation through a codified alteration of the law itself, one is tempted to understand the Zone in similar terms. Yet while aspects concerning exception as an exercise of sovereignty still apply, Neilson, in his investigation of Asian special economic zones, puts forward an interesting, more profound reading of this question.
For Neilson, [25] the Zone, despite concerning the same issues at stake as the camp for Schmitt and Agamben – i.e. governmentality, sovereignty and biopolitics – functions differently; in fact, in reverse to it. Far from exhibiting a suspension of norms, as it does in the camp, the Zone for Neilson, operates through a perpetuation and over-saturation of them. It is not paradoxical, but paradigmatic, rendering visible and legitimising arrangements that are otherwise often obscured, informal or emergent in wider economic and social domains. He supports this proposition with the example of the infringement on labour rights – a practice intrinsic to many of the Special Economic Zones or Free Trade Zones – which far from being an exception or radical opposition to conditions in the zone’s exterior is rather abundantly found there, yet in less obvious, legitimate or codified forms.[26] The Zone thus functions as some sort of crystallising tool that solidifies processes which outside of it exist only in a dispersed, distributed and gaseous state.
In the discussion of Zones in the context of Panama, namely the Panama Canal Zone and the various Free Trade Zones, it is important to consider their topological framework. The notion of the Zone as a paradigm does not refer to the relationship of the Zone to its immediate surrounding, but rather to the politico-economical apparatus that is employed in its establishment, whose arrangements and processes it crystallises and renders visible. Thus the Panama Canal Zone and the various Free Trade Zones, should be investigated as a paradigm for processes which are obscured, distributed and dispersed against the backdrop of their politico-economical origin — the governmentality of the United States of America, and the inter- and transnational capital flows respectively.