ABSTRACT
How do we speak about security, this fashionable yet elusive term? This chapter grapples with security by focusing on the post-Cold War instantiation of the term in security bureaucracies, especially in certain contemporary settings, or “scenes,” such as airports. The chapter traces an intellectual line from the King’s Peace to the rise of security through bureaucratic rationality. Security bureaucracies, it is argued, have a deep connection to the politics of fear: some fears are reasonable, real, and demands government action, without being able to specify an end point (is it safe?), thus we find “paranoia within reason” (Marcus 1999). Yet the state, too, can be fearsome. Set against this background, we show how the expectation of safety and security requires the specification of a threat and its cancelation, such that future threats are cancelled before they can occur. But what are threats and have they been adequately addressed? The Security bureaucracy’s obligation to provide security thus becomes a horizon, an infinite regress, an invitation to ceaseless anxious thought, and highly specific forms of anticipatory action.
