Sep 16, 2016

Setting Any Mood for Walls

From the four winds we flow. As we arrive scattered under the guise of so many influences, un-commonalities of destination are rather ill equipped to deal with the T word.

Ordinary uncertainties no longer tolerable, we suddenly crave for a life devoid of uncertainty. Seamless surveillance portrays the end of ambiguity. We are set to declare a priori non-hostility. Far too high a bar for interconnected relations. By feigning non-conflict, we halt Zygmunt Bauman’s coexistence on its tracks. In a chilling account of Anthony Giddens’ world of strangers, fences separate expectations, rather than actual animosity. Arjun Appadurai’s imagescapes turn into sketches of Roger Bacon. A cheap bogeyman from abroad — and we getting no shit in frontier-lands.

What terrorism does is each and every day going nuts.

This is way scarier than North Korean nukes of the double parody of an “Islamic state”. Close to the edge of interwoven probabilities, lurking behind the mirrors: risk assessment down the rabbit hole.

Trains must arrive in time. Planes shall follow the plan. Trucks have to walk the line. We miss safety nets.

The violences of terror do not challenge an ideal image of a sanctimonious polity — this we already know from the harsh palette of states’ responses. From wiretapping citizens to illegal detentions, from torture-like treatment of alleged suspects to containment of refugee populations, states respond to terrorist violence with an array of other violences; sovereignty is re-enacted as compulsive obeyance through protection. States and the varying sum of their efforts map the globe as a space of compulsive protection — one that blurs many bounds of social exclusion and prejudice.

15 years on, the anxiety-surveillance cycle seems the new game in town. Imbalances in human insecurities imbued statecraft with a volatile combustion. Disarrays in everyday life authorize interventions in the corps politique. By keeping sovereign scars open wide, such disturbances portray an afterimage of the corps politique, virtualities the likes of Donald Trump delve in, setting any mood for walls. Untouchable figureheads let loose certainty as a political prima facie. As a wall touches the ground, we ship strangers without a sound. The more we walk into the trap, the less we feel the next step: recolonized societies.

Compulsive protection is a technique adequate for sovereign states. It reiterates modern parameters at the cost of new medievalisms and old cosmopolitanisms. By breaking the law in order to reinstate security, states organize their crimes as the governance of international spaces. At the palms of those hands, what otherwise remains a puzzling array of levels of social activity turn into concentric circles. As practical reason remains at the gates of sovereign facilities, Carl Schmitt and Charles Tilly are vindicated.

This desire for security — the manifest absence of something else — drips with symbolic excess. Security moves detract from sovereign scripts, at the same time making possible new sovereign inscriptions, bringing the obscene into scene. An array of discriminations, inequality and domination becomes tolerable enough we may even desire it (hoping that it will arrive only eventually). As it becomes desire, human-made processes are cast into shadows and new mythologies take place. Security desires let loose walls and fences. Improbable extraordinary violent events legitimate everyday fear-mongering and provide a scarecrow of coherence to our desires.

Supranationality vanishes from sight, yet sovereign moves look fit filtered through those aspirations. The optics of an anarchical society crystallize under the eyes of the new untouchable — conversely, a bunch of shallow guests. Competition for security provision by states and others turns people into assets and liabilities. The body count and bodies that count go hand in hand. In the glassy kaleidoscopes of post-2008 economic contingencies, the camera eye falls in Ground Zero and demands walls against the same set of statistics. As Al Qaeda delves in unfettered nostalgia, the afterlife of crisis unveils Trump and Hillary — up the walls and down in Ground Zero — as birds of a feather flock. Peter Sloterdijk’s urges remain at the gates of new human zoos. Those about to the feared could arguably be welcomed.

Among 9–11 flashbacks, in the fog of “war on Terror” we lost sight of our current shortcomings. Even though Osama Bin Laden and George W Bush can unequivocally be called responsible for our situation, without the mythologies we breed into our hearts and minds, without our voluntary servitude Étienne de La Boétie spoke so eloquently of, it would be already over. Silences are overtly violent protocols.

Carlos Frederico Pereira da Silva Gama is Director of the International Affairs Office (DAI) and Professor of International Relations in Universidade Federal do Tocantins (Federal University of Tocantins / UFT), Brazil