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nor limited to an enclosed space. For
Agamben, ‘the camp is the space that is
opened when the state of exception begins
to become the rule’, and he insists that ‘we
find ourselves virtually in the presence of a
camp every time such a structure is created’
(Agamben, 1988, p. 174). Seen thus, it is by
no means absent from liberal-democratic
societies. Hence Agamben draws formal par-
allels between concentration camps and the
sites where states now hold illegal immigrants
orrefugees(cf. Perera, 2002), and he claims
that the juridico-political structure through
which prisoners taken during the ‘war on
terror’ are held confirms that the global
generalization of the state of exception is
intensifying (cf. Gregory, 2006b, 2007).
‘The normative aspect oflawcan be thus
be obliterated and contradicted with impun-
ity,’ he continues, through a constellation of
sovereign power and state violence that
‘nevertheless still claims to be applying the
law.’ In such a circumstance, he concludes,
the camp has become ‘the new biopolitical
nomosof the planet’ (seebiopolitics) and
‘the juridico-political system [has trans-
formed] itself into a killing machine’
(Agamben, 1988).
That Agamben’s thesis is concerned with
the metaphysicsof power and the logic of
juridico-political structures needs emphasis.
Bernstein (2004) objects that what then
becomes lost from view is the complex of insti-
tutions, practices and people through which
these reductions to bare life are attempted: in
the case of Auschwitz, for example, the gas
chambers, the guards, the huts, the watch-
towers, the railways, the police, the round-
ups – in short, the whole apparatus of
violencethat produced theholocaust. But
this is precisely Agamben’s point: ‘Instead of
deducing the definition of the camp from
the events that took place there, we will ask:
What is a camp, what is its juridico-political
structure, that such events could take place
there?’ In his view, the urgent political task is
to disclose ‘the juridical procedures and
deployments of power by which human beings
could be so completely deprived of theirrights
and prerogatives that no act committed against
them could appear any longer as a crime’
(1998, pp. 166, 171). Even so, it is not at all
clear that Agamben is much interested in the
details of those other ‘deployments of power’
or the spaces that are produced through them,
and nor does he register the ways in which
resistanceto the production and proliferation
of camps is mobilized. dgSuggested reading
Agamben (1998, pp. 166–76); Minca (2004).capital In everyday parlance, capital is an
asset to be mobilized by a group, individual
or institution as wealth. This economic sense
of capital has, according to Raymond Williams
(1983 [1976], p. 51), been present in English
since the seventeenth century and in a fully
developed form since the eighteenth – derived
from its general sense of ‘head’ or ‘chief’.
Capital in this sense might be a stock of money
(invested to secure a rate of return), a pension
fund or a piece of property. In the broadest
sense – often deployed as such by conventional
forms of economics – capital is an asset of
whatever kind capable of yielding a source of
income for its owner (which is typically,
depending on the asset and the legal rights to
it, a claim on interest, onrentor on profits).
In classical economics, capital was assumed to
be one of a trio of factors of production (land
and labour being the others), distinguished by
the fact that it was produced (contraland),
could not be used up in the course of produc-
tion as might aresourceand could be used in
the production of other goods. Both Adam
Smith and David Ricardo referred to a distinc-
tion between fixed and circulating forms of
capital. Capital goods are already produced
durable goods, available for use as a factor of
production. In this classical (and indeed
neo-classical) sense, capital was a stock, in
contradistinction to investment over time (a
flow). Implicit in all of these definitions is a
twofold sense of capital being trans-historical
(it applies to every society) and it posits the
fact of inanimate objects (land) being genera-
tive (of income). Over the past half-century
there have been many efforts to classify capital
beyond its narrow economic meaning. The
list is now very long (see Putnam, 2001;
Bourdieu, 2002): human capital (skills, com-
petences, education), cultural capital (the
symbolic and hermeneutic class powers
deployed in the political and economic realm),
social capital(the social networks and social
agencies deployed in economic development),
political capital (political resources deployed
within different domains of politics – for
example, the state, the family) and finance
capital (originally developed a century ago by
Hilferding to address the increasing integra-
tion of industrial and banking enterprises).
The Marxist conception of capital stands in
sharp contradistinction to these sorts of claims
and to all conventional definitions. Capital is
first a social form that pre-datescapitalismGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_C Final Proof page 58 31.3.2009 9:45pmCAPITAL