Vida Bajc and Willem de Lint, eds., Security and Everyday Life

Abstract

Vida Bajc and Williem de Lint, eds., Security and Everyday Life. New York: Routledge, 2011, 312 pp. $ US 44.95 paper (978-0-415-85344-6) $133.00 hardcover (978-0-415-99768-3).F or centuries the issue of security has been one of the central concerns of governing. However, the Foucauldian approach suggests that the role security plays in governing is reformulated with the rise of the liberal art of government, a government whose existence is dependent on the production of freedoms as well as the controlling, constraining, and coercing of such freedoms. Then, what is the cost of manufacturing freedom? What are the implications of the interplay between freedom and security for social control? What are the roles of new surveillance mechanisms in ordering, framing, and constructing appropriate social behavior? Security and Everyday Life presents a perspective through which these questions could be answered.This volume addresses the complexities of the relationship between security and everyday life by formulating a meta-theoretical framework through which the operations of the security dynamics embedded in everyday life can be made visible, and by means of which the rationale behind approaching various "social situations and cultural phenomena" as "a potential threat to security" (p. 1) can be uncovered. In other words, by illustrating the scope of "bureaucratic surveillance" woven into the fabric of everyday practices, this volume seeks to demonstrate how security has become an ordering principle of cultural and social life.The information gathered by the extensive security apparatus serves to generate exclusionary categories where the world is classified on the basis of a binary opposition between "orderly" and "disorderly" by means of which the sovereign power's legitimacy for preemptive action or reaction is guaranteed. However, in order for the activities of the security apparatus to receive acceptance from the public it is necessary to form a specific perception of reality within which the public is made to feel "protected from or -alternatively -of being exposed to, potential harmful irregularities in public life" (p. 3). This becomes possible by communicating to the public the fear of disruptive forces. Only then the conditions are completed for the creation of a context in which the concerns of security can trump all else.