Description
It is now commonplace to argue that our concepts and practices of security are not fit for purpose in conditions of the Anthropocene. This of course denotes a situation in which fundamental and purportedly universal distinctions are increasingly called into question (nature and culture etc) and reworked through relational ontologies, indigenous cosmologies, and so forth. Such fundamental challenges are not new to security studies, from nuclear weapons to contemporary debates on AI, technological changes are also often said to demand similar radical rethinkings – though such demands are often sidestepped with the erasures, occlusions, denials and deferrals that critical scholarship attempts to foreground. Lurking within this, though, is a possibility of reinforcing the same techno-political imaginations that these developments posit and profit from.
In this paper I seek to think through the sense that security politics is out of phase with its problems by drawing on different (though related) strands of STS and Philosophy of Technology. While there is now a mature set of debates about STS and security studies, the role of technical and non-human agencies and infrastructures in security practices etc, I seek here to think more deeply about what Security means when it is conceived as operating – as Simondon might have said – Among the Machines. What understanding of systems, processes and practices does this require? What might thinking through modes of technicity (as system, world and cosmos) as creative, transductive, and pluriversal require of and offer the study of security? Thinking particularly from notions of technosystems (Feenberg), automatic societies (Stiegler), and Cosmotechnics (Hui) I seek the frictions and potentials of thinking security as, with and through technics. In particular I do this through the challenges of sensory, calculative and lethal processes and their pharmacological consequences and inheritances.
