Aporias of Security

Abstract

Maybe [task] nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are. We have to...get rid of political double-bind, which is simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures.... political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of days is not to try to liberate individual from state and from state's institutions, but to liberate us both from state and from type of individualisation which is linked to state. Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power ********** What does it mean to be secure? Should we even need to ask? Surely we know. We know that security is one of most fundamental human needs: an irrefutable guarantee of safety and wellbeing, economic assurance and possibility, sociability and order; of a life lived freely without fear or hardship. That security is a universal good available to all, and a solemn pledge between citizens and their political leaders, to whom their people's security is the first duty, overriding goal of domestic and international policy making. As such it has been able to trace a powerful path between subject and world, state and citizen, to promise simultaneously a solution to inchoate fears and insecurities of everyday life and enormous spatial, cultural, economic, and geopolitical complexities of government. In short, security remains one of modernity's most stubborn and enduring dreams. However, I believe that, more than ever, we do need to ask what it is to be secure. Surely we no longer know what security is--in that Platonic sense. Surely more than ten years after end of Gold War, after Clinton Doctrine and destruction of Twin Towers, after humanitarian and policy disasters in Indochina, Africa, East Timor, Middle East, and Central America, and after a growing body of humanist and critical scholarship has questioned security's unity, discursive structure, and political implications, security no longer possesses a credible wholeness. (1) This article begins from premise that security's claims to universality and wholeness founder on a destructive series of aporias, which derive firstly from growing sense that security no longer has a stable referent object, nor names a common set of needs, means, or ways of being, and secondly, from moral relativism that lies at center of dominant (realist) discourses of security that pretend to universality but insi st that our security always rests on insecurity and suffering of an-other. While this article argues strongly that security has no essential ontological integrity, it also argues that if power and sweep of security are to be understood and challenged, its claims to universality must be taken seriously. They underpin and animate sweeping forms of power, subjectivity, force, and economic circulation and cannot be dismissed out of hand. Nor, in hands of some humanist writers--who have sought to think human and gender security in radical counterpoint to realist images of national and international security--are such claims always pernicious. They have a valuable moral and political force that undermines, perhaps unwittingly, logocentric presuppositions of realist discourses they question. Yet a common assumption that security can be ontologically completed and secured does present a hurdle for kind of ontopolitical critique that we really need. (2) answer is not to seek to close out these aporias; they call to us and their existence presents an important political opening. Rather than seek to resecure security, to make it conform to a new humanist ideal--however laudable--we need to challenge security as a claim to truth, to set its meaning aside. Instead, we should focus on security as a pervasive and complex system of political, social, and economic power, which reaches from most private spaces of being to vast flows and conflicts of geopolitics and global economic circulation. …