Utilitarian appeals to rehabilitate security occlude resisting its foundations

The previous two sections have highlighted a number of ways in which practices of resistance and activism engage the relationship between ethics and security in different ways. In producing subjugated knowledges, revealing the exclusions and power relations of established discourses, and engaging in security practices which seek to more directly respond to the insecurity faced by ordinary people, they invite an ethical response to security and insecurity. However, it limits our engagement with practices of resistance if we only see them as exploring ‘better’ or ‘more ethical’ ways of providing security. The more radical challenge to the politics of security comes when we see activism not simply as refusing particular orders of security, but as resisting the very conceptual and political foundations of security. This final section explores such an interpretation, looking at the ways in which the most substantive way to engage the relationships between ethics, security, resistance and activism comes when we view practices of resistance as (at their best) working to deconstruct security. I begin by outlining some of the arguments which suggest that the concept of security cannot so easily be refashioned in a more ethical form and that thinking in terms of resistance might take us further. I then look at how we might view such a resistance in the context of political activism, looking at some examples from anarchist activist groups.¶ A number of writers have argued that the concept of security is built around a series of images, codes and logics which render it deeply problematic and a dangerous candidate for rehabilitation. They have pointed out the ways in which our contemporary fascination with proliferating images of threat, danger and response, grounded in desperate but impossible fantasies of control and mastery, tends towards authoritarian political formations and the de facto legitimacy of dominant power relations (Edkins 2003; Campbell 1998: Shepherd 2008: 72–75). The pursuit of security serves to contain subjects within the existing order, promising protection in return for some level of compliance or obedience in a manner not dissimilar to a protection racket (Spike Peterson 1992: 50–52). As Mark Neocleous notes, such dynamics serve to neutralise radical political action, ‘encouraging us to surrender ourselves to the state in a thoroughly conservative fashion’ (2008: 4).¶ To understand how the pursuit of security intertwines with political authority, it is important to recognise the dependent relationship between security and insecurity. Institutions and technologies of security can only function in a context of insecurities, which they may identify and seek to pacify, but which they also need (and for which, of course, they are often responsible). In Michael Dillon’s terms, ‘it is only because it is contoured by insecurity, and because in its turn it also insecures, that security can secure’ (1996: 127). The nature and content of security depends on its particular relationship with insecurity, with its exclusions and violences and particular (political) designations of threat. This regulative binary of security/insecurity intersects with others that have similar effects, such as order/chaos, inside/outside and sovereignty/anarchy. All of them regulate politics in a manner which cements the place of political authority. On the latter dichotomy, Richard Ashley’s comments are pertinent:¶ On the one hand, the sign of ‘sovereignty’ betokens a rational identity: a homogeneous and continuous presence that is hierarchically ordered, that has a unique centre of decision presiding over a coherent ‘self’, and that is demarcated from, and in opposition to, an external domain of difference and change that resists assimilation to its identical being. On the other hand, the sign of ‘anarchy’ betokens this residual external domain: an aleatory domain characterised by difference and discontinuity, contingency and ambiguity, that can be known only for its lack of the coherent truth and meaning expressed by a sovereign presence. ‘Anarchy’ signifies a problematic domain yet to be brought under the controlling influence of a sovereign centre … whether it be an individual actor, a group, a class, or a political community.¶ (1988: 230)¶ As he identifies the conservatising regulation at the heart of the sovereignty/anarchy dichotomy, so would I suggest that a similar process is at work in the logic of security, privileging that which is rationally bounded, coherent and compliant, and necessitating the pacification or pathologisation of that which is not.¶ Political imaginaries rooted in binary concepts limit our ethical landscape in a variety of ways. As V. Spike Peterson argues:¶ [a]s long as we remain locked in dichotomies, we cannot accurately understand and are less likely to transform social relations: not only do oppositional constructions distort the contextual complexity of social reality, they set limits on the questions we ask and the alternatives we consider. True to their “origin” (Athenian objectivist metaphysics), the dichotomies most naturalized in Western world views (abstract-concrete, reason-emotion, mind-body, culture-nature, public-private) are both medium and outcome of objectification practices. Retaining them keeps us locked in to their objectifying-reifying-lens on our world(s) and who we are.¶ (1992: 54)¶ In such a context, rather than seeking to rehabilitate security (and remain within this security/insecurity dichotomy), it might be more productive to resist, displace or deconstruct it.¶ This is not a simple prospect; refusing the social fantasy of security would, in Jenny Edkins’ terms, involve ‘facing, on a day-to-day basis, questions many of us prefer to forget, if we can’, and ‘would involve a shift away from the notion of sovereign state and sovereign individual … would entail the development of a new vision of political community, one that was not based on the coming together of discrete participles to produce closed systems’ (2003: 368–369). While the violent politics of security is enacted through social institutions, it is also (as the discussion above shows) embedded in categories of thought. The binaries of security/insecurity, order/chaos, sovereignty/anarchy and more impose a theoretical domination which conditions political possibility in particular authoritarian ways. As such, the task of resistance might be to break down such binaries. This may take place through mocking, subverting or outwardly refusing the closures such binaries enact (Rossdale forthcoming-a; Rossdale forthcoming-b), or through embracing the proliferation of definitions of security as an aporetic space in which ‘to think and create new social, ethical and economic relationships outside the oppressive structures of political and epistemological order’ (Burke 2007: 30–31).¶ What I want to suggest here is that we can interpret many practices of activism and resistance as engaging in precisely this kind of resistance to security/insecurity; that is, not just as affirming ‘more ethical’ securities (though they may also do this), but as mounting a challenge to the conceptual and political order of security more generally. In a sense, this is not surprising, so often is resistance framed as that insecurity, chaos and anarchy which necessitates securing, ordering and sovereign gestures. It is also an unstable series of interventions, liable to recuperation within a set of security discourses which swiftly reposition challenge as threat. Nonetheless, these resistances hold open spaces for an ethical critique not only of particular orders of security, but more generally of the ways in which security orders.