The camp form and the experience infrastructures: A counter-fatal research perspective

Can a cross- sectional reading of the various historical forms in which a specific method – the camp form – of a specific collectivity has taken shape, and what (the people) is to be kept separate from it, be formulated? The difficulties that hinder attempts to present a single reading linking together different places and spaces – refugee camps, concentration camps, transit camps, identification camps – in which such practices take concrete shape (de facto, the building of a boundary), with widely varying purposes, meanings and consequences, should not be underestimated. Far from ignoring such distinctions, they must be used, increasing abstraction by a degree, in order to focus on the ways in which a social configuration functions (this is the underlying hypothesis), a ‘sociation form’ in Georg Simmel’s words. The objective, in other words, is to come up with a social organization logic that bypasses specific subjects’ experiences – however dramatic – of the (diverse) concrete manifestations of the camp form. According to this hypothesis, in fact, the forms of interaction – to use Simmel’s words once again – constitute the visible element in a more complex social logic: a social form is to be analysed as a ‘concept of reality [...] as a network of reciprocal influences between a plurality of elements’.