The Sublime Object of Militarism

Abstract

Slavoj Žižek's analysis of ideology helps us to see that, far from hosting the end of ideology, the contemporary world is ideologically saturated. Ideology has come into its own via the development of doubling strategies that simultaneously articulate and hide the workings of ideologies. This is not a simple process of socialization or “brainwashing,” but a complex double move that facilitates identification and disidentification at the same time. Contemporary militarism performs the first move by separating regular life from the war, establishing the war to be “over there,” big but distant, not here. It enacts the second move by saturating our daily lives with war-ness, in the form of securitizing practices such as surveillance cameras, wire tapping, electronic locking systems, sign-in sheets, guards with clipboards and often guns; but the terms of the saturation reinforce the prior belief in the separation of the war from our lives. Today's wars carry on alongside “normal” life without seeming to interrupt it, pretending to separate it completely while it in fact saturates our lives.

Introduction

“The power which presents itself as being under threat all the time, living in mortal danger, and thus merely defending itself, is the most dangerous kind of power, the very model of Nietzschean ressentiment and moralistic hypocrisy.”

                  Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, p. 373

In a March 15, 2009, Doonsebury comic strip, two US soldiers deployed to Iraq watch in disgust, but not surprise, as fictional Jeopardy contestants, working in the category “US Wars for $400,” are unable to respond to the prompt, “As of this week, the US has been fighting in this country for six years.”1 The cartoon's creator, Garry Trudeau, is marking the distance he satirizes, the distance between “over there” and “over here.” Despite significant opposition to, or at least lack of enthusiasm for, the war in Iraq, public attention to the war in the US has been episodic and difficult to sustain.2

A second, older political cartoon from The Progressive supplements the soldiers' dismay. A gnarled representation of the first President Bush as Uncle Sam points at the viewer and enjoins her to “Forget failing banks, education, drugs, AIDS, poor health care, unemployment, crime, racism, corruption … and have a good war.” While Stephen Kroninger created this cartoon at the time of the first US invasion of Iraq in 1991, a much more popular and far briefer military operation, Uncle Sam's injunction continues to flag relevant ideological labour in the second Iraq war as well.

How do these things work? How is it that a largely unpopular war is nonetheless tolerated, ignored, or forgotten, and what implicit operations are suggested by this practice of public inattention? What hidden enjoyments are Americans expected to reap from our global military presence? How might critics intervene in these processes of enjoying and forgetting?

This essay looks to Slavoj Žižek's analysis of ideology to understand the contemporary ideology of militarism, along with the accompanying structural practices of militarization and securitization. By militarism, I refer to the ideological field that articulates, justifies, defends, and helps to create a certain kind of order, a way of organizing social flows around military practices and identities. The practices of creating and sustaining this kind of order over time, I call militarization. As Cynthia Enloe has explained, “Militarization is a step-by-step process by which a person or thing gradually comes to be controlled by the military or comes to depend for its well-being on militaristic ideas.”3 The traits of a militarized order include: organizations based on hierarchy and top-down flows of authority; economies that invest a preponderance of a society's wealth in weapons and war-making capacities; political institutions that draw their leadership largely from military ranks and define security largely or exclusively in military terms; entertainment that features and romanticizes war-related fashions, toys, games, and movies; cultures that feature bellicose cultural imaginaries, construing the world as a hostile place where enemies abound and differences are coded as dangerous; and relationships in which people are prepared to solve problems with violence and to think of negotiation as naïve or “sissy.” Militarization is a process, an ongoing and uneven flow of events and relationships that generates frictions, requires maintenance, and can be contested.

Militarization's younger cousin is securitization, also an ongoing process of making order, this time focused more tightly on the control of flows of meaning and bodies in space. Securitization happens when pre-9/11 militarization interbreeds with the inward-looking gaze implied by the image of “homeland security,” birthing an endlessly self-repeating web of command and control practices. Securitization includes militarization while going beyond it to include the intense border-policing, information-controlling, Other-erasing practices of post-9/11 America. Securitizing practices extend through civil society, erasing distinctions between civilians and enemies, terrorists and criminals, weapons and civilian technologies (a.k.a. “dual-use technologies”), domestic and foreign, war and peace, leaving us in a permanent in-between space that James Der Derian and others have called the “interwar.”4 Nick Mansfield sketches the shift in conceptualization that attends the emergence of “the peace-war complex”:

We will no longer have war and peace in the future, but ever more complex entanglements of one in the other, where social policy, diplomatic manipulation and military strategy exchange characteristics, contriving enemies at home, representing political antagonists abroad as criminals, and abolishing not only the idea of a military frontier, but of warfare itself as simply a matter of liberal or possible armed conflict. In the future, the question will be not ‘Why did we choose war instead of peace?’ but ‘What configuration of the peace-war complex embroils us now?’5

The particular kind of militarism both producing and being produced by contemporary militarization/securitization is part and parcel of globalization. While analyses of globalization often sideline war as an artifact of nation states rather than extra-national global flows, wars and their accompanying/enabling flows of weapons, soldiers, commodities, refugees, technologies, and ideologies are themselves manifestations of global interconnections. Militarization/securitization is global in its economic arrangements, connecting private security firms such as Blackwater or CACI to state militaries in opaque yet highly lucrative private contracts. It is global in its technologies, inventing and employing sophisticated electronic communications, control, and robotics technologies to fight net-centric wars. It is even global in its state arrangements, connecting national governments in international treaties and organizations such as NATO or the “Coalition of the Willing.”

In the post-9/11 US, official pronouncements about the “war on terror” position the country as the global good guy, protecting “our way of life” from irrational fundamentalist violence. As Tarak Barkawi explains,

elements of the West and of Islam are now locked in an embrace that is transforming and radicalizing both sides through the medium of armed conflict. A renewed and virulent American nationalism feeds on a modernist Islamic fundamentalism, and vice versa in a violent spiral. In and through war, people on both sides come to intensified awareness of one another, reconstruct images of self and other, initiate and react to each other's moves. To be at war is to be interconnected with the enemy.6

Following Žižek, we can see that, far from hosting the end of ideology, the contemporary world is ideologically saturated. Ideology has “come into its own” via the development of doubling strategies that simultaneously articulate and hide the workings of ideologies. A doubling strategy is a way of making sense of things that doubles back on itself, allowing movement in contradictory directions while camouflaging the contradictions. This is not a simple process of socialization or “brainwashing,” but a complex double move that facilitates identification and disidentification at the same time. Successful ideologies establish a relation between what is “inside” and what is “outside,” while simultaneously allowing subjects to articulate a conscious distance from that which they continue to embrace. Ideologies organize us around the useful vagueness of “master signifiers,” big ideas that necessarily both draw us in and evade our grasp; in fact, it is the ability to evade our grasp, to be bigger than what we can apprehend, that keeps pulling us in.

Drawing upon Kant's analysis of the sublime in The Critique of Judgment, Žižek sketches a process by which we encounter a “big idea” such as the Nation, God, or the People; it exceeds us, and we can't take it in; we see ourselves not taking it in, and our failure becomes evidence for its significance. The “big idea” is usefully empty and thus endlessly recruitable; it is “the supreme Cause worth dying for, the highest density of meaning.”7 Master signifiers designate an endless potentiality that threatens or beckons precisely because it can never be fully actualized.8

The malleability and protean qualities of the “big idea” make it difficult to tap with empirical arguments: critics cannot effectively use evidence to falsify ideological claims because the believer responds, impatiently, that the critic “just doesn't understand.” Opponents disqualify themselves as soon as they appear on the ideological terrain; the believer says, in effect, “you see how tricky they are—it is their nature to look ordinary and thus hide their nature.”9 For example, when media commentators offer public criticism of right-wing spokespersons such as Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh, the immediate Coulter/Limbaugh response is to accuse “the media” of being controlled by liberals; the articulation of the critique becomes itself “evidence” that the critique is wrong and the (other) media controlled by enemies of the true America.10 In Žižek's succinct words, “An ideology really succeeds when even the facts which at first sight contradict it start to function as arguments in its favour.”11

Contemporary militarization and securitization perform a similar double move to that which Žižek finds in other sublime political operations. The first move separates regular life from the war by establishing the war to be “over there,” big but distant, not here. The second move saturates our daily lives with war-ness, in the form of securitizing practices such as surveillance cameras, wire tapping, electronic locking systems, biometric scanners, facial and optical recognition technologies, secret records, sign-in sheets, guards with clipboards and often guns; but the terms of the saturation reinforce the prior belief in the separation of the war from our lives. We see ourselves making that first move, separation, and to keep the war “over there” we make the second move, saturation, which brings the war here. Thus today's wars carry on alongside “normal” life without seeming to interrupt it, pretending to separate it completely while our lives become imbued with its practices.

In focusing on this double move of militarizing ideologies, I do not mean to slight other vital approaches to analysing militarization and securitization. Political economies of war-making and weapons-manufacturing; cultural romanticizations of violence; hegemonic masculinities as recruitment strategies; the global demands of maintaining an empire—these and other dimensions of militarization are equally worthy of study. My goal is to supplement such analyses by probing the seeming contradiction between exporting war while importing war-grounded practices and relationships, between protecting ourselves and coming to resemble the thing from which we seek protection, and asking how that contradiction becomes managed at an ideological level. Nick Mansfield has noted that “Western publics only tolerate a war that can be co-ordinated seamlessly with peace.”12 Americans and others from Western societies generally expect our wars to carry on alongside “normal” life, not to interrupt it: we are not so much hiding the war, but pretending to sequester it completely while it in fact saturates our lives. “In the end,” Mansfield concludes, “this is what allows the complete saturation of society by war: the ability to represent the normal unfolding of social life as relatively undisturbed.”13

Because ideologies organize human relationships as much as they organized claims to truth, the workings of ideology are often more legible in the practices that authorize or erode relationships than in the accuracy or inaccuracy of claims regarding political affairs. Ideologies, Žižek and others insist, are performative—they orient our lived relations to one another, doing the things they call on us to see. Žižek argues that “belief, far from being an ‘intimate,’ purely mental state, is always materialized in our effective social activity: belief supports the fantasy which regulates social reality.”14

Numerous material and ideological practices enable the double move of militarism. In the US, the elimination of conscription is a key factor in this separation of “regular life” from the space and time of war. Absent a legal draft, yet with sustained economic pressure on working class and minority youth to join the military for employment, education, and health care, the wealthier and better educated classes do indeed live from day to day without much prompting to recall our foreign wars. Importantly, there are no public bodies to attend, no daily pictures of body bags or coffins, little front-page coverage of war's hideous price. Under the Bush administration, the expenses of the war were themselves sequestered, not included in the Pentagon budget.15 President Bush famously encouraged Americans to respond to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 by going shopping, re-establishing consumer normality rather than attending to current or pending losses. The distant places of unrest are vague markers of danger, troubling venues requiring vigilance but asking for little sacrifice from the classes that matter.

Yet the two spaces, “there” and “here,” meet in multiple ways. We fight “over there” so that we don't have to fight “here,” so the terrorists cannot bring the fight to our shores again. We keep the terrorists at bay by fixing borders and constricting the flow of people and ideas. To separate ourselves from the terrorists, we fill our spaces with militarized, securitized arrangements. To keep the war over there, we bring the arrangements of war home. War and militarization actually saturate our society; but the terms of the saturation reinforce the prior belief in the separation of the war from our lives. There is no resolution available to this shifting cycle because the point is not to resolve the tension, but to continue the process of repeatedly making the circuit.

Analogies and Supplements

Let's step back from this cycle of separation and saturation to ask what sorts of insights into ideology can be gleaned from the doubled operation of militarization/securitization. The belief that our world is post-ideological, that there has been a profound rupture with past formulations, demanding a whole new beginning, gives rise to what Žižek calls the “archideological fantasy.” Ideologies become things that other people have, while what we believe is simply true and right, obvious to any reasonable person. We sustain this distinction with what Žižek calls sacralizing gestures: national security, say, or the American Way of Life, is framed as too important to be left to politics. “National security” or “America” function as the sublime, the Big Thing, the thing too great to fully comprehend, and thus even more awesome, the thing we can never get enough of. After all, we can never be too American or too secure; it is difficult to narrate a positive valence for “un-American” or “insecure,” thus difficult to articulate an attractive outside to these sublime values. Claiming to lift the sacred Big Thing out of the realm of politics and ideology, we in fact embed it more deeply in a dense political and ideological thicket, allowing ideology to be declared dead or politics to be “set aside” at precisely those points where politics and ideology are doing their most intense work.

Militarization and securitization are sustained by, among other things, governing analogies of danger that are put into circulation by states, armies, corporations, churches, mainstream media, and anxious citizens looking for direction. After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a proliferation of commentators instructed Americans that “we are all Israelis now,” tapping one readily available narrative of innocence and victimization to produce another.16 The terrorist attack was likened to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, conflating a formally armed and uniformed state military with a terrorist network, pushing our understanding away from the possibility of defining the murders as crime rather than as war.17 President Bush called on cowboy images of the Wild West to heroicize Americans as law-abiding and law-enforcing agents, resolutely apprehending barbaric others who were “wanted dead or alive.” As Bush boasted, “Bring ‘em on.”18

These prevalent analogies do the work of metaphor, telling us both what to look for and how to feel about what becomes see-able. Hayden White gives an apt characterization of metaphor:

The metaphor does not image the thing it seeks to characterize, it gives directions for finding the set of images that are intended to be associated with that thing. It functions as a symbol rather than a sign: which is to say that it does not give us either a description or an icon of the thing it represents, but tells us what images to look for in our culturally encoded experience in order to determine how we should feel about the thing represented.19

The prevailing analogies give Americans directions to find an implacable, recalcitrant enemy, an enemy that is mad, outside the boundaries of civilization; an enemy with whom we cannot negotiate; an absolute Other, nothing like us; someone dark while we are light, mysterious and impenetrable while we are open and reasonable; someone who causes the violence to which we must merely, and regrettably, respond. We are supposed to feel selectively vulnerable, fearful enough to accept authoritarian measures, to acquiesce in the brutality done in our name, but not so fearful that we doubt the state's ability to protect us. Fearful enough to support the Patriot Act without reading it too closely; but not so fearful that we can never get on another airplane. We are supposed to feel morally superior, setting our moral compass by that tried and true formula for the slave morality: “they” are bad, and “we” are not them, so “we” must be good. Directed by our self-congratulatory national analogies, we must work hard at seeing only the suffering inflicted on us, while cultivating a consistent blindness toward the damage our nation inflicts on others. Americans must labour at not apprehending any relationship between world poverty and Western standards of living, between impoverished farmers in the global south and protective farm legislation in the US and Japan, between corporate investments and authoritarian third world regimes. We must sustain our bewilderment over “why they hate us,” so that we can conclude that “they envy our freedoms.” We must work hard at cultivating the approved manner of seeing and of feeling.

Militarism's ideological framework materializes itself on numerous levels. It corrals events and organizes data so that meaning is tied down within militarized narratives, where their “sense” can make an appearance within the unified ideological field. Žižek, building on Laclau and Mouffe's arguments in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, calls this the “ideological quilt,” in which the “multitude of ‘floating signifiers,’ of proto-elements, is structured into a unified field through the intervention of a certain ‘nodal point’ (the Lacanian point de caption) which ‘quilts’ them, stops their sliding and fixes their meaning.”20 The nodal point of intervention in a discursive field can change over time, as the opportunities for making meaning shift and recompose. An effective nodal point, as Jacob Torfing explains, “creates and sustains the identity of a certain discourse by constructing a knot of definite meanings.”21 Nodal points stabilize, at least for a time, fields of meaning that nonetheless continue to harbour undisciplined surplus which must constantly be brought to order within the hegemonic frame.

For example, in September 2004, Chechen rebels took more than one thousand parents and children hostage in a school in Beslan, North Ossetia; an explosion followed by a firefight resulted in the deaths of over 300 hostages and injuries to many hundreds more. This violent event could have become intelligible in more than one way: it could have been seen as a particularly bloody moment in a local insurgency; or it could have been linked to the many thousands of children killed in the prior Russian bombardment of Chechnya, and understood as a continuation of barbaric violence by both state and rebels. But then Russian President Vladimir Putin and then US Vice President Dick Cheney quickly intervened in this potential surplus of meaning to “quilt” the field together around the mandates of the global War on Terror. Putin used the crisis to centralize more power in the Russian Federation, to increase funding for security, and to suggest that “Arabs” were to blame.22 Cheney used it to solidify the ominous image of a world-wide, unified terrorist enemy, ready to lash out irrationally and viciously at anyone, anywhere: “I think what happened in Russia now demonstrates pretty conclusively that everybody is a target, that Russia, of course, did not support us in Iraq … They've gotten hit anyway.”23 Quick to echo Cheney, then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon commented that the Russians “understand now that what they have is not a local terror problem but part of the global Islamic terror threat.”24 Stilling the possibilities for multiple meanings, these spokesmen for militarism “quilted” the chain of signifiers around the meanings and desires produced and required by their most useful nodal point, the War on Terror. This small moment in what Žižek calls “the global American ideological offensive” relieved us of any need to try and understand the Chechen rebels, to imagine them as people with grievances that might compel us or histories that require study.25 Nor are we required to reflect on our own or our leaders’ fantasies of engulfment or desires for revenge. Instead, the potential meaning of the event has been nailed down within global militarism's ideological edifice.

“Moving the Underground”

Žižek suggests that critical work can be done by stepping aside from the prevailing opposition between democracy and terror in order to look inside liberal democracy for its own displaced shadow, its disavowed Other. Žižek writes:

Apropos of the ‘official’ ideologico-political opposition between liberal democracy and religious fundamentalism, we should also perform the Hegelian gesture of displacing the external antinomy between the hegemonic liberal democracy and its fundamentalist opponent into a tension inherent to the hegemonic ideologico-political edifice itself: the true Other of liberal democracy is not its fundamentalist enemy, but its own disavowed underside, its own obscene supplement.26

Žižek's examples of this “obscene supplement” are drawn from his analyses of the torture of prisoners at Abu Graib and the practices of military homophobia and priestly paedophilia. In these instances, he calls our attention to “the obscene underground practices that sustain an ideological edifice.”27 The Abu Graib tortures, he argues, did not issue from direct written orders commanded through the military hierarchy, nor from the isolated actions of “a few bad apples,” but rather from the implicit, unwritten, but quietly spoken and widely shared practices of meaning-making in military circles.

Žižek argues for an intervention in the sustaining underground practices:

This is what “acheronto movebo” (moving the underground) as a critique of ideology means: not directly changing the explicit text of the Law but, rather, intervening in its obscene virtual supplement. Think of the relationship toward homosexuality in a soldiers' community, which operates at two clearly distinct levels: explicit homosexuality is brutally attacked, those identified as gays are ostracized, beaten up every night, and so on; this explicit homophobia, however, is accompanied by an excessive implicit web of homosexual innuendos, inside jokes, obscene practices, and so on. The truly radical intervention in military homophobia should therefore not focus primarily on the explicit repression of homosexuality; rather, it should “move the underground,” disturb the implicit homosexual practices which sustain the explicit homophobia.28

The “underground” of an ideological edifice may be the place where its pleasures reside. One of Žižek's key contributions to the analysis of ideology is his insistence, following Lacan, that we confront and take responsibility for our enjoyments. Commenting on Žižek's contributions, Jodi Dean observes:

For political theorists, then, his work is indispensable to understanding the deep libidinal attraction of domination, that is, the passion of our attachments to the objects constitutive of our subjectivities, however contingent these objects may be, and hence to the challenge of freedom under communicative capitalism.29

It is “ideology's underlying fantasy” that Žižek insists we confront. These fantasies can do their political work because they are grounded on what Žižek, following Lacan, calls object petit a—the “remainder and reminder” of original bliss and unity of the infant with the mother. This remaining “little nugget” of primary connection and fantasy of oneness, he argues, transfers our libidinal investments to the political processes around us. Ideologies are not just about what we think, or even what we fail to think; they are about what we love. Since, if Žižek is right, all ideological formulations rest on this “nonideological kernel,” secured by “utopian longings for something more,” critics of militarism cannot take refuge in analysing the irrational desires permeating the War on Terror from a calm, dispassionate place outside the tumult of desire.30 Instead, we have to grapple with libidinal displacements as we critique them, learning to recognize them in ourselves as well as in others and trying to affect how we live with their disturbing and seductive demands.

Within the ideological edifice of militarism, I have argued, the double move of ideology separates us from war in order to saturate us with war-ness. Doonesbury's portrait of resigned, disgusted soldiers in Iraq whose situation is unrecollectable by earnest game show contestants back home marks the first, never-fully-successful move of separation. These soldiers, if they survive, will return to the US, largely neglected by the state apparatus that is supposed to help them, displacing the lingering, perhaps violent, costs of their military service onto their partners and families.31 Militarism's fantasy encourages us not only to fear, hate, or be puzzled by terrorism these soldiers are intended to subdue, but to blame and resent the terrorists, to see them as stealing the enjoyments that we would otherwise have had, “the prosperity, security, and freedom Americans would be enjoying had it not been stolen by fanatical Islamic fundamentalists.”32 We can then take our place with other similarly threatened, similarly resentful Americans whose “way of life” would have delivered the goods, had not the jealous terrorists intervened. “Fantasies,” Dean explains, “cover over the gaps in the ideological formation as they promise enjoyment (the enjoyment that has been stolen, sacrificed, or barred to the subject) and in so doing, attach the subject to the group or community supposed by the ideology.”33 Our attachment to the relevant imagined communities, our “fellow Americans” or “civilized allies,” allows us to perform ourselves as proper Americans, properly civilized, in contrast to the excessive barbaric Other. Militarism's fantasy requires strong, manly soldiers, ready to kill the terrorist “bad guys” to reclaim our rightful enjoyments, “our way of life.” This fantasy is not well-fed by wounded, broken soldiers, needy veterans, dependent, feminized bodies; these are a massive inconvenience to the harsh contours of militarism's fantasy life. Even more unintelligible are ways of thinking about terrorism that refocus the blame onto the very “way of life” that Americans are supposed to embrace: it becomes very difficult to imagine “our way of life” as the source, rather than the victim, of terrorism, difficult to understand ourselves as producing the thing we claim to oppose. With the Uncle Sam cartoon, we are invited to forget the economic and social problems created by siphoning public monies toward war, away from schools, hospitals, and other domestic arenas, and “have a good war.”

Critics who think we are in on the scam, able to see the vicious game clearly, Dean argues, need to take seriously Žižek's arguments about pleasure and ask about our own implication in those murky waters. We are not excused from the circulation of enjoyment and indignation. Like other subjects of ideology, the critical thinker “finds [herself] in a place not of [her] choosing, attached to fantasies of which [she] remains unaware that nevertheless structure [her] relation to enjoyment, thereby fastening [her] to the existing framework of domination.”34 Dean tells the story of her own response to President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address, in which he alluded, with a characteristic smirk, to torture. Then-President Bush said, “All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.”35 Dean sketches two agendas of enjoyment available in response to this Presidential hubris: supporters of the war on terrorism might enjoy “the transference of a desire for revenge onto the President.”36 He tortures and kills our enemies, in violation of our laws, because we want to and cannot; “he acts, so that we can remain passive.”37 Or, more problematically for Dean (and for myself), a different agenda of enjoyment is available: “Bush's speech enables me to be self-righteously horrified, to write letters to the editor, talk with friends and colleagues, and send money to Move On, all while denying the way that I am nonetheless trapped, unable actually to change a thing.”38

I am not convinced that these two options exhaust the possible responses—one could, for example, oppose the president at that moment with the suggested letters, conversations, and donations, while at the same time seeing those small events as constitutive of a longer, larger struggle, rather than merely a doomed effort from which one can at least wring out the pleasure of being right. Yet I take Žižek's and Dean's larger point: if to be a subject is to be subjected to the available circulations of prohibitions and enjoyments, then sustained analysis of the workings of desire is fundamental to political thinking and has to be done from the inside, so to speak, from the compromised, complicit position of the subject at least partially enframed by the ideology she contests.

To respond to Žižek's challenge that we put pressure on the obscene underground scaffolding of prevailing ideologies, we have to ask, what is the obscene underside of militarization/securitization? What are the quiet norms, unwritten rules, desiring investments? What do we want from our wars?

I do not know the full answer to these questions, but I have a hunch about a partial response. A legitimate need for physical security, I speculate, mutates readily into a fantasy of total control. Our desire for bodily safety is pretty much a non-negotiable desire—many people do not live in minimally safe surroundings, but they are unlikely to cease longing for them. Procedures that promise safety, then, seem “obviously” attractive: better safe than sorry, after all. It feels reckless, even ungrateful, to question the procedures meant to protect us, or the consequences of that protection. Better to be over-protected, we might think, than vulnerable; who wants to be the foolish one caught criticizing security arrangements today, then needing them tomorrow? Who wants to be the naïve critic who must be saved from herself by the competent, patient authorities who knew all along it was not safe?

For example, university campuses are often unsafe places, especially for women students. While the murderous rampage of a troubled individual with a gun is the image that commands headlines, far more common is the danger of sexual assault, a common occurrence in dorms, libraries, and other areas. The Clery Act has forced universities to be more forthcoming to parents and students about these dangers, thus more in need of an acceptable response. Administrators often adopt a militarized approach to security: surveillance cameras, electronic monitors and authorization cards, stricter policies regarding after-hours use of buildings, tasers for campus security forces, guards at campus entrances, confinement of potentially rowdy interactions to “free speech zones,” and more. However, the changes that make women students more secure, in the sense of physically safer, are the old-fashioned kind—better construction and maintenance of dormitories, frequent foot patrols by security guards, and better lighting of buildings and grounds.39 These are not high tech, not sexy, and likely not subsidized by homeland security budgets. We are supposed to be afraid of the hypothetical armed maniac who might take over the campus, rather than the actual rapists who already regularly assault women. We are supposed to be grateful for the securitization of the campus, to feel protected from the lurking dangers “out there,” rather than look critically at the losses that securitization entails: funds not spent on more useful options; residents habituated to unthinking conformity to the micro-habits of tightly ordered spaces; free flows of ideas and bodies curtailed; public space strangled.

Faculty and students could contest the officially required feelings of relief and gratitude, could do the labour of distinguishing legitimate safety from the surplus-control of the securitizing dream of mastery. We could refuse the deal by which a permanent state of emergency legitimates the practices that endanger the way of life it is supposed to protect. We could refuse the desire to avoid feminized humiliation. We might, for example, insist that the entire campus (or city or state or nation) is actually a “free speech zone,” that designating a particular “free speech zone” may initially look like a freedom-promoting rule (“Look at how much we support your right to freedom of speech,” the authorities might say. “We set aside a whole big area just for talking.”). Yet of course the authorities have done the opposite—they have implicitly declared the rest of the campus to be a closed zone, not available for public speech, while simultaneously declaring that they have the right to establish and revoke such areas in the first place.

Militarization and securitization shape how it is possible to live in the world, while at the same time provoking resistances that can imagine living differently or imagine different worlds. Militarism collapses militarized order into order per se, configuring different kinds of order, those imagined and to some extent enacted by various critics including feminists, indigenous peoples, peace activists, anarchists, alter-globalization activists, and environmentalists as messy, effeminate, lacking in practicality or competence. Naming and refusing the contempt reserved for dreamers, we could problematize some small aspects of the obscene underside of securitization and contribute to contesting militarism's nightmares of mastery.

Notes

¹ Slate, March 15, 2009, available at: < http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.html?uc_full_date = 20090315> (accessed March 30, 2009).

² See Karlyn Bowman, “Public Opinion on the War in Iraq,” for an extensive overview, plus a conservative interpretation, of relevant polling data, in American Enterprise Institute Studies in Public Opinion, March 19, 2009, available at: < http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.22142/pub_detail.asp> (accessed March 30, 2009).

³ Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), p. 3.

⁵ Nick Mansfield, “War and Its Other: Between Bataille and Derrida,” Theory & Event 9:4 (2006), para. 4.

⁴ James Der Derian, “The War of Networks,” Theory & Event 5:4 (2002), par. 33.

⁶ Tarak Barkawi, Globalization and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), p. xiii.

⁷ Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2006), p. 373.

⁸ My thanks to Jodi Dean for her clarification of this and other points regarding Žižek's analysis of ideology.

⁹ This is my paraphrase of Žižek's argument in The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso), pp. 48–49.

¹⁰ See Sam Chambers and Alan Finlayson, “Ann Coulter and the Problem of Pluralism: From Values to Politics,” Borderlands 7:1 (2008), available at: < http://www.borderlands.net.au/vol7no1_2008/chambersfinlay_pluralism.htm> (accessed November 19, 2008).

¹¹ Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, op. cit., p. 49.

¹² Mansfield, “War and Its Other,” op. cit., para. 4.

¹³ Mansfield, “War and Its Other,” op. cit., para. 4

¹⁴ Žižek, Sublime Object, op. cit., p. 36.

¹⁵ President Obama has promised to end some of these practices.

¹⁶ See, for example, Martin Peretz, “Israel, the United States, and Evil,” The Israel Report, The New Republic, September 14, 2001, available at: < http://christianactionforisrael.org/isreport/sept01/counting.html>; Robert Tracinki, “We Are All Israelis Now,” The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, September 18, 2001, available at: < http://www.aynrand.org/site/News2?page = NewsArticle&id = 5179&news_iv_ctrl = 1021>. More recently, Larry Kudlow, “Israel's Moment, the Free World's Gain,” National Review Online, July 17, 2006, available at: < http://article.nationalreview.com/?q = ZjM1OGMxZWU0YzQ4MTQwZGU5NGRkMzQzM2MzNzdiNDc = >. For critical reflections on the parallel, see Mark Le Vine, “We Are All Israelis Now,” Roundup: Historians Take, November 5, 2004, History News Network, available at: < http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/8399.html> (all accessed April 3, 2009).

¹⁷ See, for example, Donna Mills, “Pearl Harbor Parallels 9/11,” Today in the Military December 7, 2006, Military.com, available at: < http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,120133,00.html>; Jeb Phillips, “Will 9/11 Become This Generation's Pearl Harbor?” Columbus Dispatch, December 7, 2008, available at: < http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2008/12/07/pearl_day.ART_ART_12-07-08_A1_S4C4GIE.html?sid = 101> (both accessed April 3, 2009).

¹⁸ See Michael J. Shapiro, “Wanted Dead or Alive,” Theory & Event 5:4 (2002).

¹⁹ Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 91.

²⁰ Žižek, Sublime Object, op. cit., p. 87.

²¹ Jacob Torfing, New Theories of Discourse (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), p. 98.

²² Barkawi, op. cit., pp. 147–148.

²³ Quoted in Barkawi, op. cit., p. 150.

²⁴ Quoted in Barkawi, op. cit., p. 150.

²⁵ Žižek, The Parallax View, op. cit., p. 344.

²⁶ Žižek, The Parallax View, op. cit., p. 365.

²⁷ Žižek, The Parallax View, op. cit., p. 368.

²⁸ Žižek, The Parallax View, op. cit., p. 366.

²⁹ Jodi Dean, Žižek's Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 2.

³⁰ Žižek, The Parallax View, op. cit., p. 70.

³¹ See the week-long series in Salon called “Coming Home,” beginning with Mark Benjamin and Michael de Yoanna, “Death in the USA: The Army's Fatal Neglect,” February 9, 2009, available at: < http://www.salon.com/news/special/coming_home/2009/02/09/coming_home_intro/?source = newsletter> (accessed April 3, 2009). The new head of the Veterans Administration, Eric Shinseki, has promised to improve treatment of veterans.

³² Dean, Žižek's Politics, op. cit., p. 16.

³³ Dean, Žižek's Politics, op. cit., p. 16

³⁴ Dean, Žižek's Politics, op. cit., p. 16, p. 20.

³⁵ Quoted in Dean, Žižek's Politics, op. cit., p. 28.

³⁶ Quoted in Dean, Žižek's Politics, op. cit., p. 28

³⁷ Quoted in Dean, Žižek's Politics, op. cit., p. 28, p. 29.

³⁸ Quoted in Dean, Žižek's Politics, op. cit., p. 28

³⁹ Suzanne Tiapula, Prosecuting Attorney, City and County of Honolulu, personal communication.