Atrocity Exhibition. Brad Evans

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СКАЧАТЬ out of the ordinary for us despite its schizophrenic (dis)orientation. We have learned to fear what we actually produce. One only has to track the various terrorist elevation systems still in background use to discern this paradox. The more significant the public occasion — the more spectacular celebration — the more the risk of something catastrophic happening is heightened. Color-coded systems of anxiety management have become the fear heartbeat of nations. Compulsive securitization invariably becomes the allied response.

      While many in the post-9/11 moment questioned the abandonment of democratic principles and the violent excesses of the Global War on Terror, the privately-driven securitization of all aspects of life has continued unabated. Indeed, as Walter Benjamin understood all too well, what previously appeared “exceptional” (especially the abuse of power) quickly comes to reside in the normalized fabric of the everyday. Although the “War on Terror,” for instance, is perhaps notable by its sudden absence from the discursive arena of political polemics, its militarized logic has been sophisticatedly incorporated within an expansive strategic framework that connects all things endangering.

      Stephen Graham has pointed out how this security terrain is embodied in the Olympic Mascot, “Wenlock.” As Graham wrote,

      For £10.25 you, too, can own the ultimate symbol of the Games: a member of by far the biggest and most expensive security operation in recent British history packaged as tourist commodity. Eerily, his single panoptic-style eye, peering out from beneath the police helmet, is reminiscent of the all-seeing eye of God so commonly depicted at the top of Enlightenment paintings.

      For Graham, this represents the onset of a new type of surveillance society, one which openly declares its strategic priorities:

      The Olympics are society on steroids. They exaggerate wider trends. Far removed from their notional or founding ideals, these events dramatically embody changes in the wider world: fast-increasing inequality, growing corporate power, the rise of the homeland security complex and the shift toward much more authoritarian styles of governance utterly obsessed by the global gaze and prestige of media spectacles.

      Underwriting this security effort is the catastrophic imaginary that defines contemporary liberal governance. The Games have produced their own novel and fitting headline — “Olympic-geddon” — to account for all potential disasters that could erupt and force the capital’s vital networks to break down. This shift toward an all-hazard continuum of threat is the real legacy of the militaristic vision of full-spectrum domination. Threats have become indistinguishable from the general environment. Every petty anxiety can become the source of our deepest fears. And all potential racial prejudices are waiting to be resurrected as the nature of the threat offers no clear profile in advance.

      But what actually is “security”? Our problem here lies in the question. Ever since Thomas Hobbes wrote his landmark text The Leviathan, security has become the foundation stone of modern politics. Security is not, however, a “what” – it is a “how.” While Hobbes wrote of the anarchical war of all against all to prevent the masses from resisting the injustices of feudal exploitation, beneath the veil of his sovereign deceit was the arrangement of society into hierarchies. Liberal security uses this same inner logic, which is less about showing some allegiance to the principal object needing security (i.e., the State, the People, the Games), than it is with guaranteeing access to resources deemed essential to contested ways of living.

      Like Sauron, the all-seeing eye in J.R.R. Tolkien’s wonderful trilogy, the controlling gaze nevertheless has its weak points — it is insecure by design. This, however, is not a source for lament or dismay. It is a further condition of possibility. That the system cannot be made totally secure only serves to ratchet up securitization all the more. Resilience thus becomes a new term of art for a security-conscious society that has all but abandoned the dream of final security in exchange for a profitable existence. Those attuned to global risk-taking are, after all, the real moneymakers.

      Any informed critical theorist knows that the political depends upon the ability to bring into question what is not seen as problematic. This drives us to question why something is not on the public agenda. How does power operate to prevent us from critiquing its most visible traces? Questioning the unquestionable requires making the implicit explicit. When we do so, it allows us to really open up the functioning of power as it impacts everyday lives. This is not about abstract esotericism but about the desire to question power — especially liberal power — on the basis of its effects.

      So, what still remains largely unquestioned? Many of us will now be familiar with the G4S security debacle that led its director, Nick Buckles, to apologize for the “humiliating shambles.” But who are G4S? And, more importantly still, what are the political implications of this shift toward private security? The company is the world’s largest private security provider with marquee statistics: some 657,000 employees and a “unique global footprint” that covers 125 countries. It provides a range of global security details, including safe passage for the global financial elite and for high-end leisure tourism, airport and embassy security, and managing asylum centers, prisons, and other detention facilities.

      While politicians have taken G4S to task over its contractual failures, any critique of private security provision is absent from the debate. It is left to us to raise the questions of public accountability and political legitimacy. Private contractors invariably work for the private interest. They service particular constituencies. They are allegiant to the flag of currency exchange and profit making. While such organizations claim to be professional and socially responsible, it is a mistake to see them as apolitical. Embodying the (neo)liberal pursuit of power and its will to planetary rule, they represent a profound change in liberal security governance — the political sphere and the very nature of sovereignty itself are replaced by a technocratic ensemble of private/public, military/policing, local/global contractors. As G4S’s social responsibility statement proclaims: “Our size and scale mean we touch the lives of millions of people across the globe and we have a duty and desire to ensure the influence we have makes a positive impact on the people and communities in which we work.”

      The distinction between private security contractors and the military has become a false dichotomy (the lines between the private and the public long since abandoned), but the British soldier has nevertheless returned as the reliable face of civic protection. The British soldier embodies the freedom that society is said to enjoy, freedom that is understood as a result of soldiers’ sacrifice and commitment: making the streets safe from Kabul to Islington so we are left in no doubt that our protection cannot be otherwise.

      But what does it mean politically to have trained killers on the capital’s streets? Should this have happened in North Korea or Iran, politicians would have undoubtedly lambasted the despotic state of military affairs. We, however, reason it to be an efficient use of resources to maintain the democratic peace. In the process, we fail to question what it means to live in a time when the distinctions between war and peace, global and local, private and public, soldier and citizen, once again blur.

      We are invariably left to ponder here the perceived source of threat. One hundred thousand soldiers on the streets of Manhattan would not have prevented 9/11. The horrifying violence of that day illustrated the futility of conventional force. And yet, conventional force is the only illusion of power that liberal societies can hope to maintain now that the ability to wage war has become one of its most profitable and dependable exports. On the social aside, the psychological brinkmanship of full militarization, the brazen show of potential force, echoes Susan Sontag’s famous paraphrase “shocking and awful.” Whether the intended audience for such a performance is external or internal, it is clear that militaristic posturing — as both a symptom and defense of the emerging carceral state — demands a more serious discussion than is currently being entertained.

      It is well documented that President George W. Bush tried to instill a military spirit into the civilian bodies of American citizens. As he once famously declared, “Every American СКАЧАТЬ