"How should we understand this ‘‘technological apparatus’’ that ‘‘identifies and registers bare life’’? In keeping with Agamben’s earlier work, we might see it as opening a ‘‘zone of indistinction,’’3an ‘‘ambiguous zone,’’4or ‘‘a zone of indifference’’5that produces a form of death. Here, we might recall the prisoner in Kafka's penal colony. Deprived of public speech, language is co-opted by the machine [der Apparat] that violently inscribes the law on his body, simultaneously identifying and registering what Carl Schmitt would call the juridical norm and the sovereign decision.6While the ‘‘technological apparatus’’ renders the body speechless, Agamben suggests that the ‘‘media apparatus’’ effects a similar death, transforming language into bodiless speech, pure spectacle, propaganda''.

Stuart J Murray