The camp extends everywhere
comprising the exceptional jouissance
of suffering’s hyper-visibility, and general
dishonorment, and natal alienation
and gratuitous violence, but also en-
compassing what we do everyday
without interruption
while our wills
to this public sentiment called progress
and participation and democracy
survive the president being cooler than
any who preceded him, this coolness
being precisely what should have worried us
while I.C.E. was being built-up.
The camp is a function of constitutionality
and not giving a fuck really except when
it concerns us to do so.
It is otherwise un-
concerned with freedom, except the freedom
to not be fucked with by others and to critique
identity selectively (Locke 101).
It views our freedom in other words negatively,
freedom being the denial of others' capacity to
fuck with us but it also views our freedom
positively,
retaining notions such as universal
human rights and the public sphere when
we know quite well (or we only pretend not to)
whose interests these conceptions serve and
who gets excluded by the practice of law.
Like the Black Codes did not endure, or the
flesh, or we did not know exactly where the
detainees were interned,
though they transmit no
sound and how can you listen anyway to some-
thing no one wants to hear because it would take
more than ears to hear it,
by which I mean, one
would have to act in the world as though they
had registered social death as fundamental, as
though they had ears with which to see the musique
concrete of forced feeding.
As if one’s conscience itself were on mute—that’s
what it feels like to live in the camp which is
everywhere and yet no place in particular,
sensing only our differential places within it,
distinguished by the whiteness of mobility, and
wealth,
and history—by the capacity of art, of poesy.
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