The micropolitical act of rejecting the 1AC in favor of desecuritization creates a rupture that solves and spills over, no matter how infinitesal or momentary it could seem.

Yet, the notion of ‘act’ is central for understanding the political investment made in moving towards studying security as a speech act. The concept of ‘act’ conditions the political critique of security practice that is possible within this approach. Let’s start from two short quotes that express the political dimensions of the security speech act: ‘By uttering “security” a state representative

moves a particular development into a specific area, and thereby claims a special right to use whatever means are necessary to block it.’ (Wæver, 1995: 55) ‘Thereby the actor has claimed a right to handle the issue through extraordinary means to break the normal political rules of the game...’ (Buzan et al., 1998: 24) The key political quality of the speech act of security is a break in the normal political rules of the game. When security becomes an act it is not a routine practice, an acting out of given procedures and institutionalised conditions of felicity, a habitual practice, but it creates a scene in which actors and things are brought into a relation that challenges a given way of doing things. It sets something in motion by enacting the unexpected, unknown, unpredictable (Isin, 2008: 27). A break in instituted normality is what makes securitisation – a state representative moving a particular development into a [security] area – political. Following Isin’s work on ‘acts,’ let’s use the term ‘rupture’ to express this central quality of an act. (Isin, 2008) An act creates ‘a scene’ that ruptures a given order. The idea of rupture does not refer to replacing one order with another or one conception of order challenging another, however. Rather it refers to practices that create boundary conditions, however infinitesimal and momentary, through enacting limits of a given order. Enacting refers to both expressing limits and bringing the limits into being as an issue of contestation. They ‘raise the bet’ and create ‘a test case.’ ‘The point of my argument, however, is not that to speak “security” means simply to talk in a higher-pitched voice. It is slightly more complex than that: “security” is a specific move that entails consequences which involve risking oneself and offering a specific issue as a test case. Doing this may have a price and, in that sense, it could be regarded as a way to “raise the bet”.’ (Wæver, 1995: 75) At issue is not if an audience accepts the speech act of security – if the intentionality of securitising by those speaking security is realised through an audience agreeing with them or not. Neither is it whether security practices and technologies become institutionalised in routines and technologies one encounters at airports or embassies. The ‘realisation’ of an act consists of the creation of a rupturing scene itself, irrespective of its acceptance and institutionalisation. ‘To act, then, is neither arriving at a scene nor fleeing from it, but actually engaging in its creation.’ (Isin, 2008: 27) What matters is that the scene brought into existence as ‘an assemblage of acts, actions and actors in a historically and geographically concrete situation’ (Isin, 2008: 24) by actors remaining at the rupturing scene rather than fleeing from it.

Speech acts rupture a given situation in a decision to create. The concept of decision is another central element of the politicality of acts, as used in the securitisation literature. When a state representative moves a particular development into a [security] area, when they offer a specific issue as a test case, they make a decision. Decision here does not simply refer to an expression of volition – the will to create, to decide – or of choice between given options. As a political category it implies what Isin, following Bakhtin, calls answerability (Isin, 2008: 28-35). Answerability has different dimensions. An act actualised in a decision introduces responsibility towards others. One cannot hide behind necessity, routine, habits in the act of security creation. Speaking security is a decision to rupture a situation with certain calculable consequences for others. Power holders can then be made responsible and procedures of accountability can be applied. Combined with instituted demands for and mechanisms of transparency and accountability of decisions, rendering responsible is a central element of political criticism of security practice, especially since the latter often seeks special status by claiming to be under the spell of necessity – no choices when survival is at stake – and by instituting an imperative of secrecy – revealing intelligence will help enemies and criminals in countering intelligence gathering (e.g. Wood and Dupont, 2006). This is the first way in which the concept of act introduces a condition of political critique of securitisation.

Answerability to others also refers to the authorisation of authority. What authorises decisions to rupture the given? The security speech act legitimates authority to move from the normal procedures of democratic politics to exceptional political measures by referring to existential threats that cannot be met within the confines of the ‘usual’ procedures and repertoire of actions. Answerability to others here brings the process of securitising to political judgement in public debate around the legitimacy of transgressive authority moving matters into a terrain of exceptional politics. Political critique often mobilises the priority of constitutional and fundamental rights, institutional checks and balances, the relation between security and freedom to enact this answerability of speech acts of security. Both forms of answerability fold the rupture somehow back into an existing order – into instituted practices of political legitimisation and political responsibilisation. While transgressing an existing situation, the politics of rupture are connected back to normative and political orders that provide the basis for evaluating and contesting the acceptability of transgressions in terms of calculable consequences of the act – translated back into responsibility of the actors for their decisions – and norms of authorisation.

Yet, the security speech act in Wæver’s and Buzan’s formulation cannot be fully folded back into given orders. As a move that entails consequences which involve risking oneself and offering a specific issue as a test case, it retains traces of a more excessive conception of act. As Isin argues, the concept of act refers to rupturing actions that somehow are always also a move into the unexpected and unknown. Arguably, this dimension of the conception of act takes it outside of the Austinian framing of speech act, which is heavily embedded in instituted structures of meaning. It is important, however, to include this dimension to understand the paradoxical notion of politics that is invested in the concept of act. The politicality of the act cannot be exhausted by process of legitimisation and accountability. It implies a third answerability; answerability as the affirmation of undecidability, the radical openness and the creativity of being, the possibility of the unexpected; actions that cannot be fully folded back into calculability and instituted normativity. This answerability implies the possibility for a political critique that demands that the rupture – i.e., security emergencies – enacted through the speech acts of security are not immediately politically closed by mobilising security institutions and routines that are embedded in the existing order. In this conception, the security speech act creates a gravitational moment in which political critique does not simply depend on bringing into play instituted practices of accountability and legitimacy to hold the claim to transgressive power to account but also thrives in the rupture of the given order that the security speech act constitutes. This paradoxical condition of politicality (Isin, 2008: 29) that is invested in the security speech act has often remained unexplored. The political critique of the speaking of security usually folds the act back into a given order. Without reference to an order one cannot say much about the speech act and the immediate political answerability implied by the decision requires referencing back to an order. Yet, as act it also retains a radical distance from normative and causal orders; its politicality resides in its rupturing quality. While the former answerability is often deployed to demonstrate the undemocratic, and in Wæver and Buzan’s terminology depoliticizing, qualities, the latter answerability points in the opposite direction of the speech act of security being radically politicising.

Wæver and Buzan politically substantiate this paradoxical quality of the act by folding it into political exceptionalism. As argued elsewhere (Huysmans, 2006, Huysmans, 1998), when they say that by declaring security the power holders claim special rights they do not simply mean that they rupture but also that rupturing through calling upon existential situations brings exceptionalist politics into play. Exceptionalism authorises transgressive authority and enacts limits of a given order by calling upon existential threats. In doing so however, it does not simply enact a given legal and political order that sanctions transgressive power in emergency situations. The exceptionalist actualisation of the decision also posits a politics of creating ex nihilo. Declaring that the existing normative order cannot cope with an existentially threatening situation then implies a claim to enact new possibilities of what is right and wrong. This conception links the security speech act to the recent revival of conceptions of sovereignty as the expression of a politics that is placed both inside and outside an existing normative order.

More directly important for the discussion here is that it links the act to moments of political gravity and a split between political exceptionality and normality. Exceptionalist acts are not ephemeral disruptions but key events which put the existing order in the balance; they posit politics as moments with decisional gravity – sovereign moments. Declaring an existential condition pulls forces towards a decisive scene, an assembly of actions and actors that carry weight both in terms of producing cracks in a given order and making issues into a test case. Exceptionalist politics also draws a sharp distinction between the routine, alienation, reiteration of the everyday and the decisiveness and creativity of the moments of exception – the moments of existential threat. Speech acts of security enact a sharp distinction between the exceptional and the banal, the political and the everyday, the routine and creative. This implies an elitist vision of politics. Securitising analysis mostly focuses on leaders or politicians – ‘statesmen’ – who speak security with sufficient clout while ordinary people continue their everyday life.