“Don’t Be Scared, Be Prepared”

Abstract

Rather than concerning ourselves with “governing trauma” we should instead be concerned with how trauma has come to govern us. Trauma talk now comes naturally, and the article explores what all this trauma talk might be doing, ideologically and politically, especially in the context of the relationship between security and anxiety. The management of trauma and anxiety has become a way of mediating the demands of an endless security war: a war of security, a war for security, a war through security. The article therefore seeks to understand the concept of trauma and the proliferation of discourses of anxiety as ideological mechanisms deployed for the security crisis of endless war; deployed, that is, as a training in resilience. Trauma is less an issue of memory or the past and more a question of building resilience for the future. The language of trauma and anxiety, and the training in resilience that is associated with these terms, weds us to a deeply conservative mode of thinking.