Politics of Disappearance: Scanners and (Unobserved) Bodies as Mediators of Security Practices

Abstract

In 2008, debates over the deployment of body scanners in EU airports gave rise to imbroglios of technologies, bodies, law, and policies. Eventually, these entanglements appeared to be undone and resolved by the concealment of bodies from the screens of the machines—which had, meanwhile, been renamed security scanners. Using the concept of setting, this article describes the processes of disappearance operating among a vivid multiplicity of actants and connections and identifies three main paradoxical features characterizing them. Based on this analysis, the article advances the notion of the politics of disappearance, where heterogeneous elements—both material and immaterial, visible as well as invisible—actively contribute to the making of a security practice and, potentially, to the opening of political landscapes.

Inside Checkpoint 300: Checkpoint Regimes as Spatial Political Technologies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

“…plants, cameras and an air bridge that provides soldiers/private security guards an overview of the whole building and allows them to keep everyone at any moment at gunpoint—one passes through the second turnstile and is confronted with a metal detector and an x‐ray machine. These machines allow soldiers to see what everyone is carrying and alert them to the presence of metal objects, in this way replacing any direct contact between Palestinian commuters and Israeli soldiers/security guards with the “ostensibly less intrusive act of seeing” (Braverman :281) (on body scanners at border crossings, see Amoore and Hall ; Bellanova and Fuster ; Martin ; Redden and Terry ). From here, the soldiers/guards are visible, since the control rooms in this part of the checkpoint are well lit and the windows transparent.…”

Security Technologies Versus Citizen Roles?

“…While airport security is not in any obvious way a typical site for (direct) democratization, the observation that airport security works in a depoliticizing way is a bit more than a truism. Indeed, looking at the procedures and the interaction between the AMS and citizens, it appears that the whole practice of airport security is geared towards eliminating the passenger as a present person, and making the passenger into something manageable because personal aspects are made absent (Bellanova and González Fuster, 2013).…”

Humor at the Airport? Visualization, Exposure, and Laughter in the “War on Terror”

“…A procedure in which a machine enacts a gaze at the fleshly, corporeal intimacy that would only ever be exposed in the most intimate contexts, leaves travelers puzzled, wondering “does it cross the lines of decency and their expectations for privacy?” (Tiessen :168) In this double twist of targeting but not showing, of gazing but reconcealing, lies a key element to understanding the unprecedented emergence of humor. Bellanova and González Fuster () have tagged this simultaneous unveiling/re‐veiling of the flesh as “bodies‐scanner setting”—as opposed to the original notion of a scanner that genuinely visualizes the body—and hint at an arrangement that deliberately removes the “naked” image from the checkpoint but leaves the scanning procedure as such openly and intimidatingly on the table. In the crossing of the checkpoint, the body itself clearly remains the center of the screening operation, being a key element of authorization for proceeding to the next stage of air travel by revealing its harmlessness.…”

“…In the crossing of the checkpoint, the body itself clearly remains the center of the screening operation, being a key element of authorization for proceeding to the next stage of air travel by revealing its harmlessness. Yet, in a move of seeing/not seeing, the specter of the flesh overshadows the scenery of the security checkpoint, as “ disappeared elements haunt the stabilization of the setting and remain thus somehow present ” (Bellanova and González Fuster :204; emphasis in original). Introducing a matchstick figure in order to conceal the original image of the “naked” body has been a crafty move to resolve a number of legal issues related to privacy and maybe even possesses the potential to disrupt the “logics of disembodied control at a distance” (Monahan :287) that are so inherent to modern surveillance measures and that enabled security officers in the United States to (secretly) make fun of passengers over their secured radio channel.…”