Homeland Security? No, thanks!

Here is an excerpt from the article I've been working on on homeland security. I'm frustrated because it is too long. I actually hadn't known the word count and did quite a bit of work on it. Oh well. The full version is here.Download anticipating_homeland_security.doc

Anticipating Homeland Security

At first glance, the term “homeland security” seems the product of the Bush administration’s proverbial “department that names things the opposite of what they are department.” Does not “homeland security” evoke a longing for what was lost in the attacks of September 11^th, a fantasized return to the land, the forests, mountains, and prairies, to the values of the heartland, a return home, back to the safe haven of an America secure in itself? And, does not the very longing to return to a secure homeland rest uneasily against the accompanying rhetoric of America’s wake-up call, of a fat, ungainly America that has to pull itself up out of its self-absorbed complacency and confront the challenges of a new global order? One’s immediate reaction to the term “homeland security” is thus that it exemplifies perfectly the Bush administration’s infamous Orwellian doublespeak: in the name of a lost security, the administration proffers a mighty bureaucracy, an information super-center that will combine widely dispersed police and surveillance apparatuses into an invasive machinery straight out of Alphaville.

Critics of the Bush administration—from those concerned with the threats to civil liberties posed by the new cabinet-level department to those too-often dismissed as “conspiracy theorists” who question the official narrative of September 11^th as they trace the consolidations of power and privilege that have followed the attacks—emphasize these dark dimensions of homeland security. For them, the department names more than a lost fantasy: it denotes the drive to produce a globally dominant police state. Built around FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (which some argue was created extra-constitutionally and exists as the heart of “this nation's ‘secret government,’ with powers to suspend laws, move entire populations, arrest and detain citizens without a warrant, hold citizens without a trial, seize control of all transportation and communication systems and – suspend the US Constitution”), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is the visible face of pernicious, invisible state power. Both the mission denoted in the new department’s name as well as its extensive range (it incorporated twenty-two previously separate agencies, including the Transportation Security Administration, Secret Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Coast Guard, elements of the Justice Department, and FEMA; it also created a directorate for overseeing computing and communications systems—Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection) indicate a vast governmental expansion. More dramatically, this expansion is inward—into the lives and communicative interactions of Americans at home.

Associated with the Bush administration’s reaction to September 11^th, homeland security is ambiguous and invasive, seeping nto any and every aspect of American life. Writing in The New Yorker in 2002, Hendrick Hertzberg linked the term to the Information Awareness Office (IAO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the Department of Defense, “The phrase ‘total information awareness’ is creepy enough to merit a place alongside ‘USA Patriot Act’ and ‘Department of Homeland Security.’”  The logo for the office is the stuff conspiracy theories are made of—the all-seeing eye on top of a pyramid associated with Freemasonry and the Illuminati. Its slogan was Scientia est potentia—knowledge is power.

 Slavoj Zizek’s discussion of the fantasy gaze draws out the underpinnings of Hertzberg’s articulation of homeland security and total information awareness. Not only do we encounter in the IAO logo the self-duplication of the gaze in the all-seeing eye, but we find as well a combination of the loss of support in the symbolic network (the trauma of 9/11) and the fantasy gaze: “after losing all my effective predicates, I am nothing but a gaze paradoxically entitled to observe the world in which I do not exist.” In the confusion of the initial months following the attacks, in other words, a confusion wherein Americans confronted fundamental changes in their sense of themselves and their country in the world, they encounter but a gaze, a looking and surveilling disarticulated from any previous sense of identity and mission.