ABSTRACT
In May 2005, Adam Green published an article entitled “Normalizing Torture on 24” which, among many other articles on the subject, considers the impact of the television series 24, specifically examining its effect on societal perceptions of torture. Green argues that rather than framing torture as the ultimate perversion, in 24 torture represents turning points rather than breaking points; even starting points for social relations. For Green, this is the most compelling aspect of 24, as it is “through this artistic sleight of hand, [that] the show makes torture appear normal” (Green 2005). Along similar lines, contemporary psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Zizek notes: “Reality has now surpassed TV. What 24 still had the decency to present as Jack Bauer’s disturbing and desperate choice is now rendered business as usual” (Zizek 2007). Cynthia Weber, although not in the same psychoanalytic terms as Zizek, argues that this all speaks to the nearly ubiquitous blurring of “real time and reel time” (Weber 2006: 3). In other words, objects of popular culture are not simply treated as mirrors of existing norms, ideas and identities, but as mutually constitutive of those norms. This chapter takes up its argument in precisely such a milieu. Accordingly, I assert that cultural performances and imaginations of what is referred to throughout the book as “the biometric state” are integral to the emerging security dispositif. In much the same way that Green contends 24 has a role to play in contemporary societal perceptions of torture, I consider the role of popular culture and imagination in fostering receptivity for emerging attempts to “govern through risk” and employ a range of technologies of risk, explored throughout the preceding chapters. Moreover, popular culture not only reflects how ubiquitous risk management is becoming as a mode of governance, but these performances and imaginations also play a constitutive role in fostering particular perceptions of these technologies of rule, their limits and (im)possibilities, which together with the discussion of the catastrophic imagination presented in the previous chapter, provides the scaffolding on
which the emerging biometric state emerges. As more than a mirror, these imaginations therefore also have emancipatory potentials and disruptive capacities, as they permit one to re-imagine the (im)possibilities of governing through risk and the emerging biometric state.
