of “exceptional times,” it does not account for the more normalized practices of militarism we witness in our liberal societies today. George Chesterton observed some time before the Olympics buildup: “The only place you could be sure of seeing a British soldier used to be outside a pub in a garrison town at chucking-out time. Now there are soldiers on talent shows, parading in sports stadiums and singing on daytime television.” Soldiers are rewarded with on-television spots and garrison towns with royal patronage. We are left with the militarization of the public realm that we witness on the streets of London today: “We have turned the reality of war into an emotionally nourishing theater ... [that] serves an ideological and financial function.”
Some will invariably counter here that the militarization of the public realm simply reflects the dangerous world in which we now live. After all, none of us would wish to be blown up by a suicide bomber. Where is the freedom in that?
While the high-profile nature and location of the Games undoubtedly makes it a target, what is required is a more somber and considered response. It was common after 9/11 and 7/7 to question why these people hated us. Many politicians and embedded academics insisted that we were endangered simply because of who we were and have been — the simple laws of physics tell us that we need to account for our actions and our histories of violence. Only then can we deal with the problem at the level of power and, hence, political contestation.
Michel Foucault put forward the idea of the biopolitical in order to critically assess the racial-, gender- and class-based dimensions of securitization practices.1 Foucault was acutely aware that making life secure was not about setting limits, as if everything stemmed from legal declaration, but about creating conditions that benefited particular constituencies. The regime of determining what needed protection by means of risk assessment, conceals the disposability of others behind an objective mask of scientific verification. This brings us to one of the most sinister dimensions to Olympiad security.
The placing of rapier missiles on the Fred Wiggs Tower block in Leytonstone, along with five additional sites across the city, brings into critical question the very meaning of the term “Terror.” Not only have the tenants living in marginal social conditions expressed their concerns that the missiles actually make them more of a target, they have identified the somewhat obvious point that sleeping with a high-velocity missile system on your rooftop is truly terrifying. While the residents have famously protested with banners proclaiming, “THIS IS NOT A WAR ZONE,” their opposition was overruled by High Court Judge Charles Haddon-Cave, who stated that missile deployment was lawful and proportionate to the level of threat faced. He did, however, note that the residents’ concerns demonstrated “something of a misapprehension” about the equipment.
This is not a critique of the tremendous effort and dedication of the athletes, of course. Neither is it a challenge to major sporting events and their genuine ability to have a marked impact upon the emotional well-being of people. It is to question who benefits financially and politically from Olympiad security in the longer run. While it is too early to tell the lasting effects, if the previous experience of the Games in Athens is anything to go by (when private contractors feasted on a security bill of some $1.5 billion), the weight of austerity to follow will be similarly selective in its target audience.
Major sporting events will always be deeply political. For too long, we have placed politics in a neatly defined box, owned by a distinct political class, which has benefited only a select few. This, despite the fact that some of the most significant political moments in the history of human struggles asked a blessing neither of politicians nor universal moral theorists. Nor do we wish to banish from memory the victory of Jessie Owens from the 1936 Olympics or the dignity showed by Tommie Smith and John Carlos as the idea of global revolt entered the political lexicon during the troubled year of 1968. And just as Diego Maradona claimed some divine intervention against the forces of British colonial oppression in 1986, so the terrain seems ripe for a further act of Argentinean political defiance as the Falklands question refuses to go away. We should not, however, be blinded to the wider political project at work here. As Will Self critically explains:
The modern Olympics is a fatuous exercise in internationalism through limbering up and then running down to entropy. The modern Olympics have always been a political football — nothing more and nothing less — endlessly traduced and manipulated by the regimes that “host” them. This one is no different, presenting a fine opportunity for the British security state apparatus and its private security firm hangers-on to deploy the mass-suppression and urban paranoiac technologies in the service of export-earning. Some Peace. Some Freedom.
Olympiad security provides us with a glimpse into a possible future. It is a bit like the airport experience where the idea of perfect regulation of life is played out — albeit with lifestyle benefits more seductive than the latest perfumes. Overtly militarized enclaves deploy the most advanced security technologies to ensure the frictionless (i.e., resistance-free) circulation of all things commodifiable, so that, as with airports, once you enter “the zone,” you begin to realize that you have no political rights. Our choice is straightforward. Either we accept this manufactured simulacrum of experience or we demand the return of the political into social discussion. This requires us to start questioning that which is concealed within the vacuous politics of normative deliberation. It is not to accept the privileged boundaries of the debate. It is to question the framing of the question such that we expose the power and violence of its discursive framing.
Originally published in somewhat different form in TruthOut.
1 Between 1971 and 1984 Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures dealing with his research at the Collège de France. Those relevant to this study are the following (the last of which his seminal notion of biopolitics emerges): “Society Must be Defended” (1976-1976), “Security, Territory and Population” (1977-1978), and “The Birth of Bio-Politics” (1978-1979).
Public Intellectuals Resisting Global Violence
Grace Pollock & Brad Evans
Sunday, 27 January 2013
GRACE POLLOCK: The Histories of Violence Project began, I believe, as a cultural and intellectual intervention to address the escalation of global violence in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. In your work, you’ve stated that our collective response to 9/11 represented nothing short of “a profound failure of the political and philosophical imagination.” I’m wondering if you could elaborate on what you meant by that, and what kind of trends emerged from 9/11 which led you to that conclusion?
BRAD EVANS: One of the impetuses for doing the film 10 Years of Terror was to make sense of what was taking place in the post-9/11 moment, particularly in the UK, around the July 7, 2005, bombings in London. At the time, I was living in the city of Leeds, and I was also living in the Hyde Park area, which was where a number of the suicide bombers had a particular association, so it was quite literally the War on Terror coming home. And what you found in the UK, which was similar to the whole discourse around 9/11, was very much a sort of “we have no complicity in this whatsoever, these people just simply hate us” and “this is an exceptional moment which demands an exceptional response.” There was no understanding that there was a history prior to 9/11. Of course, now we’re in a moment a decade on from 9/11 — which allows for much broader political and philosophical reflection.
A number of academics, sometimes with the best intentions, were caught by this politics of the exception — and this happened on the right and on the left. The discourse on the right was “this is profoundly exceptional, let’s have an exceptional response” such that “shock and awe” became the natural outcome. The left equally — particularly those familiar with the work of Giorgio Agamben — followed this idea of “we are living in a state of exception, there’s the abandonment of morals,” and so forth.
