... this blog is an ongoing investigation into modes of suspension that started as a research project in Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths College in 2011 ...
Einstein has said: “Space is nothing in itself; there is no absolute space. It exists merely by way of the bodies and energies contained in it. Time is too nothing. It persists merely as a consequence of the events taking place in it. There is no absolute time, and no absolute simultaneity either.”
Time is that within which events take place. But as time itself is not movement, it must somehow have to do with movement. Time is within which things/ entities change. Measuring the time by clock – a physical system in which an identical temporal sequence is constantly repeated – we learn about a now-point. Each earlier and later can be only determined in terms of now.
That law can be suspended is not a novelty in politics and history. What is novel is that the specter of the suspension of the law becomes a measure of global dominance and control. The law can be suspended not because there is a state of emergency requiring exceptional measures, but because such emergency COULD arise. Thus the suspension of law acts in the realm of potential. Accordingly, when the law is suspended, one could enter the paradox of regime of a permanent state of exception.
Commitments are binding because they rest on natural law; but in emergencies the tie to general natural principles ceases. But to what extent is the sovereign bound to laws, and to what extent is he responsible to estates? And who is supposed to have unlimited power? Who is competent to act when the legal system fails to answer the question of competence? It is precisely the exception that makes relevant the subject of sovereignty – who decides in a situation of conflict what constitutes the public interest of the state, public safety and order.
According to article 48 of the German constitution of 1919, the exception is declared by the president of the Reich but is under the control of parliament, the Reichstag, which can at any time demand its suspension. Article 48 grants unlimited power. If the individual states no longer have the power to declare the exception, then they no longer enjoy the status of states.
If measures undertaken in an exception could be circumscribed by mutual control, by imposing a time limit or by enumerating extraordinary powers, the question of sovereignty would be less significant but would not be eliminated. What characterizes an exception is principally unlimited authority, which means the suspension of the entire existing order. The exception is different from anarchy and chaos – the state remains, whereas the law recedes. Unlike the normal situation the norm is destroyed in the exception. There exists no norm that is applicable to chaos. For a legal order to makes sense, a normal situation must exist. (Notes from Carl Schmitt Political Theology)
The US Patriot Act issued by the U.S Senate in 2001 allows the attorney general to “take into custody” any alien suspected of activities that endanger “the national security of the United States,” but within seven days the alien has to be either released or charged with the violation of immigration laws or some other criminal offense. What is new about Bush’s order is that it erases any legal status of the individual, thus producing a legally unnamable and unclassifiable being. Neither prisoner nor person accused, but simply “detainee” – the object of a pure de facto rule of a detention that is not indefinite as it is entirely removed from judicial oversight – the state of exception. But the state of exception is not a special kind of law, rather is a suspension of the juridical order itself.
The first idea of a suspension of the constitution reads: “In the case of armed revolt of disturbances that would threaten the security of the State, the law can, in the places and for the time that it determines, suspend the rule of the constitution. In such cases, this suspension can be provisionally declared by a decree of the government if the legislative body is in recess, provided that this body be convened as soon as possible”.
In 1942 Benjamin argues that the state of exception has already become the rule. It not only appears increasingly as a technique of government rather than an exceptional measure, but it also lets its own nature as the constitutive paradigm of the juridical order come to light.
The problem of the state of exception presents analogies to the right of resistance. If resistance were to become a right or even a duty, what is ultimately at issue is the question of the juridical significance. If the state of exception’s characteristic property is a total or partial suspension of the juridical power, how can a suspension be contained within it? In fact, the state of exception is neither external nor internal to juridical order. The problem of defining it concerns a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other. The suspension of the norm does not mean its abolition. To understand the problem of exception, one must determine its localization (or illocalization).
