Sight Unseen: Our Neoliberal Vision of Insecurity

Abstract

Is security seen? Is security seen in images of peace and safety, or is it perceived in the troubled images of the horrors of violence and suffering? Vision has played a crucial role in shaping the modern Western preoccupation with, and prioritisation of security. Historically, security has been visually represented in a variety of ways, typically involving the depiction of its absence. In Medieval and Early Modern Europe especially, security and insecurity were presented as coterminous insofar as each represented separate conditions – their shared boundary envisioned in representations of the temporal threshold separating human mortality from divine salvation. This ocular demonstration of thresholds has been heightened by the ‘war on terror’ conducted by neo-liberal states since 2003. Neoliberalism operates as a discourse of constant global circulations (of money, goods and people) premised on a perpetual anticipation and pre-emption of insecurity. In the neoliberal scheme, security and insecurity are no longer coterminous, but mutually sustaining in perpetuity. In that sense, neoliberal security is ‘sight unseen’ - an uncanny presence that is not there. In the reiterated troubled images of horror amplified by the seemingly endless 'war on terror', neoliberal security operates as a terrifying visual reflex: we cannot see it but in new horrors.

Violence, crime dystopia and the dialectics of (dis)order inThe Purgefilms

“…The visual imaginary of these perpetual wars is fed ritualistically to audiences (through film, newsreels, police footage, social media, etc.) along with the persistent dread of violence – ‘framing a field of vision in which security becomes inseparable from insecurity’ (Buchan, 2018: 134).…”

“…The films double down on this by shifting the polarity of the state from sole non-intervention to the full-on slaughter of its lower classes. The personal liberty that defines the (neo)liberal order, it has been pointed out, is defined between those zones delineated as spaces for freedom (typically imagined as the open arena of the market) and those warranting invasive control for those not unable to be free (Buchan, 2018). The 'war on terror' and 'war on drugs' are examples that illustrate the interventionist logic of invading global and domestic spaces populated by subjects deemed incapable of exerting reason and freedom (Linnemann, 2016).…”