Security stupidity

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis essay proposes that securitization is underwritten by stupidity, defined as a shared social exposure to limits which condition the possibility of thinking, knowing, and communicating about threats and responses. This conceptualization of stupidity depicts security threats not as gaps in information that can be filled by a knowing subject, but encounters with difference arising from persons, communities, or nations which threaten that subject with awareness of its own stupidity. This essay subsequently reads two excesses of public discourse about ‘connecting the dots’ after 9/11, which have re-established US counterterrorism as a reliable source of knowledge. The first excess involves enhanced authorization of US decision-makers, intelligence analysts, and citizen-subjects to reliably discern threats. The second involves the figure of the terrorist threat, who is depicted as too stupid to challenge the authority of US knowledge. I conclude by considering how dubious Westernized security discourses and scholarly practices might be disrupted by placing them in relation to what Avital Ronell calls an ethic of stupidity ‘before the other’.