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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

security « Previous | |Next »
October 9, 2005

I used to think that economics (prosperity through economic growth) was the basic principle of state politics. Not any more. It is security.

LeunigA.2.jpg

At the dawn of modernity Hobbes mentions security as the opposite of the fear which compels human beings to unite and form a society together. We form a nation state for reasons of security. During modernity, with the rise of the market security was displaced by economic growth and the free market. Today, as Giorgio Agamben observes, security comes to the fore:

In the course of a gradual neutralisation of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security imposes itself as the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several decisive measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterion of political legitimation.

Maybe not the sole critieria. Certainly a central one though. Agamben adds:
Today, there are plans for all kinds of emergencies (ecological, medical, military), but there is no politics to prevent them. On the contrary, we can say that politics secretly works towards the production of emergencies. It is the task of democratic politics to prevent the development of conditions which lead to hatred, terror, and destruction -- and not to reduce itself to attempts to control them once they occur.

This kind of thinking is not noticeable amongst social democrats considering new agendas. They accept the state of emergency as a given and try to outdo the conservatives in the politics of control.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 5:21 PM | | Comments (2)
Comments

Comments

Gary, The dependancy thing again. The US and Au governments have been using the rhetoric of the government being the people's agent in "everything" as an electoral device. The rhetoric didnt meet reality in the Katrina Hurricane when the state failed.

It is being used as a cheap political election device. It is also easy to whip up fear when there is no concrete enemy, and the "intelligence" is part of the shadow state and doesnt have to be justified to the public.

Cameron
more is happening here around security than the political rhetoric and the cheap political electoral devices.

We can think in terms of the camp, states of exception and bare life.

On the former Agamben says that the camp is constitutive of contemporary life in the west. It is not an historical fact, or an anomaly belonging to the past ... 'but in some way as the hidden matrix and nomos of the political space in which we are still living.'