Questioning security devices: Performativity,resistance,politics

Introduction

In recent years, material objects, technologies and devices have garnered increased analytical attention in the critical study of (in)security. Algorithms, biometrics and body scanners, computers and databases, but also lists, paper files and memos have taken centre stage in critical work on (in)security. This interest is sometimes construed as a continuation of the ‘practice turn’ in international relations or as a foundation of the ‘material turn’ in the discipline.

In order to advance these discussions, this special issue proposes an analytics of security devices. What is at stake when we approach security practices through devices? The aim here is not to foreground devices as a new unit of (security) analysis, but to open new forays in ongoing debates about security politics and practices by asking different research questions and developing new research angles. An analytics of devices, we argue, makes possible the examination of the configuration and reconfiguration of security practices by attending to the equipment or instrumentation that makes these practices possible and temporarily stabilizes them. Although the notion of the device has regularly been used in science and technology studies, actor-network theory or ‘new’ materialism, it is often applied interchangeably to materials, objects, technologies or stuff (see e.g. Marres and Lezaun, 2011). Recalling the etymology and field of meaning of the term ‘device’ helps capture the approach to devices adopted in this introductory article. Derived from the Latin participle of the verb dividere, the term ‘device’ implies division, difference and disposition (Oxford English Dictionary). A device is an artefact, a piece of equipment or an instrument made or adapted for a particular purpose, as well as a plan, method, trick or intrigue, and finally a design or motif. To use the notion of the device is therefore to call for the simultaneous consideration of object, purpose and effect.

With this objective in mind, the special issue works in two ways. First, the contributions unpack some of the theoretical discussions about materiality and practices that may well have been simplified and streamlined by the tendency to label novel research interests as ‘turns’ and the temptation to equate contingent developments – the emergence of digital computing technologies, for instance – with epochal shifts in the practice of security. Attention to devices aims to enrich the thinking tools of critical security research by fostering deeper and more critical engagement with other threads of scholarship rather than running the risk of selective conceptual import or ‘application’.

Second, the contributions to the special issue map these discussions onto varied empirical sites by examining the performative and political effects of security devices. They explore the socio-technical quality of devices and their indispensability for security governance and political action. On the one hand, each device is related to a particular history; it is based on negotiated standards, finalities and functionalities that convey specific representations of the sociopolitical issue(s) at stake. The internal characteristics (technical, logical and cognitive) of devices both constrain and enable the action of their users. On the other hand, security devices are not static: their force of action also depends on processes of production, translation, circulation, appropriation, experimentation or resistance. The dynamic process of ‘dialogue’ between a socio-technical device and a specific context of action can produce unexpected and unintended effects.

This introduction develops a series of conceptual and methodological proposals for deploying an analytics of security practices through devices. We first specify what is at stake when thinking of and analysing security through devices. We examine in particular the implications of focusing on the production and uses of devices in security practices and of shifting from the language of technology and ‘technologies of security’ to security devices. We then outline the way in which an analytics of devices both mobilizes and challenges the understanding of performativity that has been so central in critical studies of (in)security politics. Lastly, we outline ways in which thinking security politics through devices opens possibilities for re-examining issues of agency, appropriation and resistance.

Technology, practice, device

Extensive analyses and theorizations have been developed about the ‘technologization’ of security (Ceyhan, 2008) and the ways in which this process affects or reflects the logics, rationalities or modes of reasoning undergirding security practices. Technology here is often synonymous with digital computing and data, and more generally what is colloquially termed ‘hi-tech’ (Bonelli and Ragazzi, 2014). Work has also been done on identifying the broader contexts in which technology is made relevant for the conduct of security, through the development of social universes dedicated to the management of information (Bigo, 2014) or the unfolding of controversies over the handling of technology in security practices (Schouten, 2014a). Attention to technology and security is also formulated in terms of dispositif or assemblage ‘thinking’ (Acuto and Curtis, 2014: 12), where the emphasis is on the relating of heterogeneously qualified entities (e.g. Abrahamsen and Williams, 2009; Aradau et al., 2014; Bousquet, 2014; Schouten, 2014b).

Working with devices speaks to these different approaches while drawing attention to the different and diverging implications of formulating an analytics of security technologies, dispositifs or assemblages. At times, indeed, these different formulations are taken to work smoothly together, while they often imply different principles of method or different theoretical and political commitments. The concept of technology often implies approaching industrial artefacts and ‘technological society’ in broad, all-encompassing and systematizing terms (Barry, 2001). Technology, however, also has a specific, Foucauldian use that is not necessarily linked with industrialization, engineering or applied sciences. The notion of the dispositif directs attention to articulations of heterogeneous entities ‘that operate within a temporality of longer duration’ (Rabinow, 2003: 55), while that of the assemblage deals with more temporally emergent configurations. As the articles in this special issue make clear, an analytics of devices is not antagonistic to these approaches, as security devices can be technological, are themselves assembled, and can emerge within particular dispositifs of governance. However, an analytics of devices enables three key moves that are identified here and unfold in various ways through the contributions: it (1) sidesteps developmental and epochal renderings of security that can be encouraged by discussions of technology, (2) takes the debate beyond the confrontation between understandings of technology as pure instrumentality for social ends or as an autonomous driving factor for social practice, and (3) recasts recent discussions on ‘materiality’ in international and security studies by extending the attention to ‘things’ to the arrays of equipment and instrumentation through which security is performed.

First, an analytics of devices reaches beyond the focus on contemporary technological artefacts in security practices, which seems to involve a degree of digital computing, and engages with the limits of a developmental view of technology. Security devices need not be digital or computerized. Latour and Woolgar’s laboratory ethnography, for instance, singles out devices of the ‘inscription’ variety, which consist of ‘any item of apparatus or particular configuration of such items which can transform a material substance into a figure or diagram which is directly usable by one of the members of the office space [of the laboratory]’ (Latour and Woolgar, [1979] 1986: 51). In turn, the notion of inscription resonates with Jack Goody’s (1977) discussion of differences in cognitive processes and ‘modes of thought’ across societies (see also Latour, 1986). Goody challenges the anthropological division of societies between advanced and primitive, pointing out that the differences regrouped under this classification ought to be explained by the relation between ‘modes of thought and modes for the production and reproduction of thought’ (Goody, 1977: 43). He outlines the role of inscription, in written, alphabetical and eventually printed form, in generating differences in modes of thought. The ‘technologies of the intellect’ examined by Goody (1977: 151) include a variety and combination of devices, from memorization techniques to the printing press, and from clay tablets to paper. This is also a way to suggest that the discussion on technology in critical approaches to (in)security takes place within a broader intellectual context than the import of theoretical notions deriving from the actor-network theory variant of science and technology studies. While distinct aspects of this approach – including the notions of inscription, the ‘actant’ and ‘translation’ (see e.g. Barry, 2013; Bellanova and Duez, 2012; Walters, 2002) – have gained traction in international and security studies and are also mobilized in this special issue, the analytics of devices we propose also enables an articulation of different approaches to a critical analysis of security. For instance, Samuel Tanner and Michael Meyer (2015) draw on Peter Manning’s Weberian analytics of rationalities and technology, combined with insights from the policy instruments literature, while Sachil Singh (2015) articulates familiar matters of security, surveillance and social sorting with Harold Wolpe’s Marxist conceptualization of social transformation.

Scholars of (security) technology are, of course, aware of the limits of a developmental view of society and technology. When Andrew Barry (2001: 2) writes of ‘technological society’, he promptly specifies that this qualification references the notion that contemporary societies are characterized by ‘a political preoccupation with the problems technology poses’. His analysis of ‘telegraphic politics’ constitutes an effective remedy against the illusion of novelty regarding the impact of ‘new technology’ (Barry, 1996). While the technological dimension as such does not refer to any evolutionary tendency in the art of government, ‘what changes are the forms, combinations and intensities of its deployment’ (Walters, 2012: 99). This view, then, resonates with Foucault-inspired uses of technology to investigate power relations, which ‘refer not to tools, machines, or the application of science to industrial production, but rather to methods and procedures for governing human beings’ (Behrent, 2013: 56). The notion of technology (of government) is used to describe more or less stabilized modes of power in contrast to the spontaneous exercise of power over others (Lemke, 2001). Foucault’s often interchangeable use of ‘technology’ and ‘technique’ refers to a formalized body of knowledge and a codification of processes that contribute to the organization of specific social relations. In this line, technology is understood by students of security and surveillance as ‘a broader matrix of social action’, structured by the tension between techniques of domination and techniques of the self (Aas et al., 2009: 4). An analytics of devices approaches technology as part of such a matrix, rather than as an existing or lacking characteristic in a given social configuration. It thus both continues and nuances the discussion opened up by Foucauldian renderings of technology and/as technique.

The second move enabled in this regard by an analytics of devices is the displacement of the confrontation between instrumental and substantive views of technology (Feenberg, 2002) in relation to social practice. The political sociology of public policy instruments (Lascoumes, 2004) has conjugated Foucauldian governmentality and actor-network theory. As governmentality presupposes ‘rational forms, technical procedures, instrumentations through which to operate’ (Foucault, 1997: 203), instrumentation is addressed as a central activity in the art of government. The sociology of public policy instrumentation also retains from science and technology studies the argument that instruments are less inert intermediaries than partly autonomous actants that contribute to orientating actors’ behaviours. A public policy instrument is not a tool with axiological neutrality, but a socio-technical device that represents a condensed form of governmentality (Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2004).

Each device refers to a particular knowledge about ways of exercising social control and inducing relations between the governing and the governed according to the representations and meanings the device carries. Moreover, socio-technical devices provide grids of analysis to describe and categorize social problems in order to make them actionable. For Nicole Grove (2015), devices such as maps have cognitive effects that impact the policing of urban sociality in Egypt. Maps project ideas, interpretations and representations of space in the material world that reflect the conventions, norms and values underlying these devices. Grove (2015: 350) shows how mapping devices produce gendered and racialized effects that ‘privilege Western international norms and a middle class and consumerist understanding of public space’. In a similar vein, Georges Kelling has discussed the normative foundations of police performance-measuring devices that generate specific ways of presenting police work, mainly if not exclusively through the lens of crime reduction. He argues that ‘measuring police performance solely by crime statistics simply ignores consequential values [such as] justice, integrity, fear reduction, citizen satisfaction, protection and help for those who cannot protect or help themselves, and many others’ (Kelling, 1996: 32).

Devices are not simply tools at actors’ disposal which can match intention and action. Following Simondon (1958), an innovative device is not the pure and simple materialization of an initial idea. Contributions from Govert Valkenburg and Irma van der Ploeg (2015) and Mike Bourne, Heather Johnson and Debbie Lisle (2015) explore how security devices are the non-linear result of struggles, controversies and translations between various actors, heterogeneous conceptions, and myriad interests, goals and values. The process through which devices are designed to be associated with an activity of government is as much normative and political as it is technical, if not more so. The selection, construction/adaptation and articulation of devices matter to the extent that their characteristics contribute to producing knowledge and framing behaviours that structure governmental practices. To paraphrase Halpern et al. (2014: 17), security instrumentation relates to the set of problems posed by the choice and the use of instruments (techniques, methods of operation, devices) that allow governmental action to be made material and operational.

The sociology of public policy instruments, then, contrasts with the instrumental perspective that considers technology as neutral, a pure means unaffected by the sociopolitical contexts in which it is made and deployed. It also moves beyond substantive views found, for instance, in the works of Heidegger (1977) and Ellul (1964) that consider technology as a determinant of social processes. What devices enable us to do is to move beyond the either/or confrontation between instrumental and substantive accounts of technology, as well as the divide between the technological and the social. Devices may play different roles in different circumstances: in some cases they may well be simple intermediaries that do not change the course of a social process, while in other cases they mediate action – in other words, transform it (Latour, 1994). Working with devices makes it possible to ask whether and how they make a difference in the enactment of security.

The third move enabled by an analytics of devices is to probe the limits of the ‘material turn’ in international relations and security studies and the attention to ‘things’ it advocates. Devices are not just ‘things’: they are techniques and instruments embedded in social practices, deployed in configurations of power, and creating new distributions of visibility, modes of thought and subjective dispositions. In the sociology of scientific knowledge, Shapin and Schaffer’s (1985: 76) discussion of the Hobbes–Boyle controversy draws attention to the importance of visual and literary devices, alongside material devices such as the air-pump, to give ‘a vivid impression of the experimental scene’. Recalling the etymology of the word, devices can be methods, metaphors, scenarios, techniques of knowledge accumulation, statistical calculation, planning, measuring, benchmarking or credit scoring (see also Singh, 2015). Therefore, an analytics of devices can be taken as a methodological intervention. To attend to devices entails attention not just to speech acts, routines and habitus, but also to the fact that security professionals are equipped with a whole variety of such devices – they are not, to use Donald MacKenzie’s (2006: 268) expression, ‘unaided human individuals’. An analytics of devices, then, upholds an equally ‘sceptical attitude towards singular, clearly bounded objects and their ability to “embody” or “mediate” … by themselves’ (Marres and Lezaun, 2011: 495) and towards unequipped, unmediated relations between subjects. Locating politics in this mediation, rather than in ‘things’ or ‘people’, requires detailing how an analytics of devices involves a different understanding of performativity, on the one hand, and appropriation and resistance, on the other.

The politics of performativity

An analytics of devices entails a different articulation of performativity. Performativity has been widely invoked across the social sciences, and it has indicated a series of bold moves in critical international relations and security studies, which have challenged the naturalness of security, the state or sovereignty. Following Judith Butler, performativity allowed scholars to attend to processes of emergence, as well as to the complexities and uncertainties that traverse social and political claims for order and stability. Performative speech acts have productive effects in the world; they configure worlds differently and bring something new or different into being. Moreover, the performativity of states (Weber, 1998), of security (Buzan et al., 1998; Bialasiewicz et al., 2007; Campbell, 1998; Huysmans, 2002; McDonald, 2008), of preemption (de Goede et al., 2014) or of resilience (Brassett and Vaughan-Williams, 2015) can also shed light on shifts, failures and even ruptures that emerge through performative iteration, and challenge dominant norms, practices and power relations.

Nonetheless, Butler’s formulations of performativity have met with two important critical objections: on the one hand, from Bourdieu (1991), concerning the distinction between the linguistic and the social; and, on the other, from Callon (2006), Barad (2003) and MacKenzie (2006), regarding the distinction between the linguistic and the material, the human and the non-human. For Bourdieu, Butler’s conceptualization of the productive power of speech acts did not give sufficient due to symbolic power. In different ways, for Callon, MacKenzie and Barad, Butler’s discussion of performativity marginalized ‘things’ even as it gave centre stage to the materiality of bodies. In response to the latest criticisms, Butler has argued that perlocutionary speech acts require renewed conceptual tools to capture the social spaces in which political effects can materialize. Perlocutionary performatives mean that

certain kinds of effects can possibly follow if and only if certain kinds of felicitous conditions are met. There need be no subject who initiates the performative process, only a reiteration of a set of social relations within which a thing emerges with limited performative agency. (Butler, 2010: 152)

While the distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary has informed debates about securitization theory (see e.g. Balzacq, 2011), Butler’s reformulation makes explicit the limits of discussions about audience and securitizing actors. Her reading of performativity allows us to move away from the horizon of the enunciating subject, a ‘preexisting, stable, and perdurable selfhood’ (Miller, 2007: 227) that is implicit in Austin’s theory of speech acts and also haunts critical security studies. Yet the ‘limited performative agency’ that Butler notes has been further explored in science and technology studies by attending to the particular equipment that is needed to bridge the gap between what is said and what is done.

How do devices perform security? For us, devices – mundane, discursive, technical or theoretical – are performative in that they (re)configure social spaces, (re)draw boundaries and (re)distribute meanings. Therefore, security devices are performative in that they not only enact or alter particular realities and categories depending on the successful stabilization of complex socio-technical configurations, but also draw legal, gender, race or class boundaries and lines of exclusion (Leander, 2013; Bourne et al., 2015; Grove, 2015; Singh, 2015). For Valkenburg and Van der Ploeg (2015), gradual translations of ‘privacy and security problems’ into body scanners at the airport redraw the boundaries between the normal and the abnormal, introducing substantive forms of inequality in the process. The performativity of security devices alerts us to the ways in which these realities and categories might come into existence, be altered, reproduced, dismissed or resisted.

An analytics of devices also extends approaches to performativity in critical security studies by specifying possible variations across different social practices. Performativity has often been analysed through a ‘theatrical’ metaphor, where staging, visibility, roles, language and audiences are key. ‘Courts are stages, not laboratories’, noted Cornelia Vismann (2001: 129) in a discussion of law and criminal trials. Security is differentially performed on stage and in laboratories. According to Karin Knorr-Cetina (1999: 44), laboratories bring about ‘new configurations of objects that they match with an appropriately altered social order’. Laboratories involve experimentation and bricolage, the assembling of devices, expertise, human and non-human agencies. In order to attend to the production of security in ‘laboratory’ conditions, Bourne et al. (2015) propose to speak about the ‘laboratization’ of border security as a way of understanding how ‘the laboratory becomes constitutive of the border, and the border is present in the lab’. Therefore, to analyse the effects of security devices means that we need to supplement existing readings of performativity through uncertain outcomes (De Goede et al., 2014), failure, breakdown, surprise and misfiring (Aradau, 2010; Callon, 2010; Adey and Anderson, 2012) with empirical explorations of how security is performed in different sites that are organized as laboratories or theatres. Donald MacKenzie’s (2006) tripartite classification of performativity – as generic performativity of simple use, effective performativity that ‘makes a difference’ and ‘Austinian’ performativity that alters the world – could also be read as an attempt to capture variations of performativity in different sites. Different devices might also entail variations in performativity. For instance, simulation devices in nuclear weapons laboratories enact ‘hyperconstructible’ science, where ‘it can be more difficult to effect closure in scientific disputes as the conduct of those disputes becomes more dependent on simulations as evidence’ (Gusterson, 2001: 426). Moreover, laboratories can develop beyond confined walls, and ‘laboratories’ in the global South have been crucial sites for experimenting with security devices and technologies (Amar, 2013; Jacobsen, 2015; Grove, 2015).

A second specification of the performativity of security devices emerges from their mobility. For Michel Callon, this involves a ‘sociology of translation’, where translation ‘means establishing links, connections, circulations, exchanges of properties, and original distributions’ (Callon, 2009: 25; see also Valkenburg and Van der Ploeg, 2015). As Bourne et al. argue in this special issue with regard to border security, translation is not a linear temporal process, but one that implies imaginations and anticipations of the future already in the present. Alongside translation, the mobility of security devices is also located within a political economy of security, where devices are not just translated between laboratories and the world but are also produced as commodities within capitalist global processes. For example, Sachil Singh’s article examines how credit scoring in South Africa draws links between inherited forms of sociopolitical classifications, domestic consumer experiences and a globalized free-market economy. In this context, the device enacts (in)security in the political economy of finance by reproducing racial distinctions within the context of economic and political efforts to create and manage populations as risks. Adding an analytical vocabulary of production, circulation and consumption addresses Mark Laffey’s (2000: 442) earlier concern that ‘Butler’s model equates reproduction with citationality’. This move also places our analytics of security devices within a political economy of (in)security and raises questions about how translations might be limited or enabled by global circulations of capital, processes of production and social reproduction.

The third move in the politics of the performative entails the supplementation of Butler’s emphasis on citationality and reiteration with analyses of different modes of conceptualizing political agency. Iteration opens up a space in which norms can be reclaimed and their dominant meanings subverted. Yet social studies of science have also drawn attention to how performativity is challenged by the heterogeneity of socio-technical assemblages and the proliferation of devices. In this sense, performativity is ‘declined’ by the complexities of the world and relations between multiple and heterogeneous elements (Bell, 2012). In a retort to Callon, Butler (2010: 154) urges us to ask ‘not merely, how are economic matters made? Or how are certain effects instituted? But also, how do we think about the political value of certain economic effects?’. In Butler’s recent work, the normative and differential effects of neoliberal economic matters are entangled with a politics of the performative that resists precarity and dispossession (see Butler and Athanasiou, 2013).

This is not to downplay the political and critical importance of understanding how particular performative effects come to be in particular historical conditions and how particular political interventions are made possible. An analytics of devices attends to the various forms of equipment that are produced, mobilized and (re)appropriated in order to bring particular effects into being and reconfigure worlds. It also subjects these effects to political interrogation that might not be limited to the controversies of a situation (Grove, 2015; Singh, 2015). Attending to devices takes us beyond the critique of dominant logics of security, which has already been aptly formulated in critical approaches. It allows us to develop a multifaceted account of political agency, to which the final section of this introduction now turns.

Agency, appropriation, resistance

Exploring the performativity of devices is entwined with questions of agency. One way to think of agency is to maintain a ‘humanist’ focus and read it simply through instances where human agency is reaffirmed against technology. This is a move foregrounded by the critical theory of technology (Feenberg, 2002). In line with the discussion on the politics of performativity staged in the previous section, a different option is to adopt what Pickering (1993) calls a ‘post-humanist’ or socio-technical take on agency. A more satisfying rendering of actor-network theory’s commitment to the principle of symmetry, Pickering argues, calls for a refinement of the relation between human and non-human agency, which for him is a matter of temporality. Non-human or ‘material’ agency, Pickering (1993: 564) points out, is best conceived as ‘temporally emergent in practice’ – that is, ‘the contours of material agency are never decisively known in advance, scientists continually have to explore them in their work, problems always arise and have to be solved in the development of … new machines’. Human agency is also temporally emergent, but is characterized by a specific kind of practice involving the determination of temporally enduring goals: ‘practical goals are constructed in a temporally emergent cultural field, and their detailed substance is itself emergently constructed in that field’ (Pickering, 1993: 580). Human agency is temporally more differentiated than non-human agency, insofar as non-human agency does not involve the formulation of goals. In the meantime, human and non-human agency is impure and ‘mangled’ – that is, ‘the trajectories of emergence of human and material agency are constitutively enmeshed in practice by means of a dialectic of resistance and accommodation’ (Pickering, 1993: 567). By unpacking the development process of a detection device, Bourne et al. (2015: 317) hint at this ‘dance of agency’. The temporality of threat detection at borders largely emerges from the co-constitutive modulation and modification of scientists’ ‘intentional actions’ and the ‘agency of materials’.

Furthermore, the goals of policymakers and designers at all levels do not encapsulate the overall effects of socio-technical devices whose ‘autonomous’ force of action is developed in relation to the actors who use them (Lascoumes and Simard, 2011). Although these social actors often have no choice but to make do with compulsory devices, their ‘ways of operating’ are not necessarily passive and entirely guided by established rules. According to Michel de Certeau, usage should be analysed as a creative activity on its own. It is another form of production that ‘insinuates itself everywhere, silently and almost invisibly, because it does not manifest itself through its own products, but rather through its ways of using the products imposed’ (de Certeau, 1984: xii). From this perspective, the relation between a security device and its user(s) determines its terms, not the reverse, as shown, either implicitly or explicitly, by a body of work on CCTV and video-surveillance operators (Norris and Armstrong, 1999; Smith, 2004; Gill and Spriggs, 2005). Social exclusion is never the stated purpose in any implementation of CCTV. However, the relation between the characteristics of a CCTV (sensory limitations of the video screen; distance between observer and observed) and an operator’s dispositions (professional socialization) and organizational position may transform both of them into social-exclusion actants (Lomell et al., 2003). This exclusionary potential varies across sites (open street, department store, shopping mall, public transport, cultural institutions, etc.) in relation to the deployment end of video surveillance. Security devices are inseparably related to situated modes of agency and resistance.

Renaud Crespin and Pierre Lascoumes propose to add the concept of appropriation to further specify agency. For them, appropriation refers to the ‘dynamic process of dialogue and reflection between an object and a space of activities producing usages either routinized or innovative’ (Crespin and Lascoumes, 2000: 134). As shown by Tanner and Meyer (2015), appropriation or reappropriation can be so decisive that several artefacts are used as security devices on a daily basis even if they have not been made and validated for such a purpose, such as personal body-worn cameras and mobile phones. A body of constraints on street-level bureaucrats stimulates the re-use of banal consumer goods as a form of secondary production of security devices in respect to specific social situations and power relationships. In this respect, Tanner and Meyer observe the everyday creativity of street police officers as both consumers and producers of security devices, while Bourne et al. insist on the involvement of end-users, either ‘real’ or ‘phantasmatic’, at every stage of the device conception. Both ethnographic contributions challenge any clearcut, sequential distinction between social spaces of production and use/consumption of security devices.

More- or less-visible modes of appropriation, or domestication (Aas et al., 2009) by producers and users of security devices are often supplemented by various forms of opposition and resistance. Public opposition to the use of security devices such as new police databases and terrorist watch lists is certainly a more visible type of contestation than informal, below-the-radar means of everyday resistance (Gilliom and Monahan, 2012). It generally occurs either through group mobilization or at the initiative of various operators who are rarely the device users (Linhardt, 2005; Bennett, 2008; Amicelle and Favarel-Garrigues, 2012). Nevertheless, users can exert influence for modifying, changing or abandoning a socio-technical device. Their daily acts often relate to less-visible ruses and operations of diversion that compose what Michel de Certeau (1984) calls the network of an antidiscipline. Drawing on Albert O. Hirschman’s (1970) distinction between alternative ways of reacting, practices of device appropriation can be seen to follow uneven paths between ‘exit’ and ‘loyalty’.

On the one hand, antidiscipline may take the form of ‘circumvention’ as a radical avoidance of the device imposed, while ‘neutralization’ constitutes both an ‘exit’ strategy and a form of appropriation that consists of a ‘window dressing’ usage (Lascoumes and Le Bourhis, 2014: 507). Such a simulated or superficial use should not be overinterpreted as a systematic hint of reflexive reluctance towards the goals carried by the socio-technical device. It might reflect a high level of indifference and a more trivial lack of knowledge and training, particularly in the context of increasing digitization of security programmes (Tanner and Meyer, 2015).

On the other hand, formal compliance with security devices should not be seen as full support and ‘loyalty’ without further empirical analysis. Indeed, social actors can subvert security devices ‘not by rejecting or altering them, but by using them with respect to ends and references foreign to the system they had no choice but to accept’ (de Certeau, 1984: xiii). For example, the daily use of financial surveillance devices in the banking industry illustrates the prioritization of legal and reputational protection rather than the internalization of policing aims (Favarel-Garrigues et al., 2012). Numerous scholars also insist on the room for manoeuvre of professionals of social control to make sense of ‘information technologies’ and their ‘embedded constraints and enablements’ (Orlikowski, 1996: 89; Ackroyd et al., 1992; Ericson and Haggerty, 1997; Chantraine and Sallée, 2015). General standards are translated into local needs of ‘auditability’, and surveillance devices are used as procedural self-defence devices that barely correspond to crime-prevention efforts (Amicelle, 2011; Tanner and Meyer, 2015). The multitude of tactics of diversion means that field agents are neither completely subordinated nor independent in relation to devices that serve not only for the policing of citizens, but also for policing security professionals themselves (Chan, 2001). On the one hand, they can conform to mandatory devices in order to ‘evade’ them as much as possible depending on professional socialization, organizational constraints and contexts of action. On the other hand, the way in which these field agents use devices de facto contributes to ‘responsibilizing’ them and making them more accountable in a broader context of reconfiguration regarding state interventionism (Hibou, 2015).

As a result, socio-technical devices do not just contribute to (re)organizing relations between the ‘state’ and the ultimate ‘targets’ of security policies – that is, between the governing and the governed. Their introduction also impacts power relationships within a hierarchically organized body (Tanner and Meyer, 2015), as well as between political authorities and the myriad actors in charge of implementing those policies (Purenne and Aust, 2010). Devices are ‘worked’ by security professionals and social organizations, and vice versa. They (de)stabilize ‘the power balance between organizational segments by altering communication patterns, roles relationships, the division of labor, established formats for organizational communication, and taken-for-granted routines’ (Manning, 1996: 54). Security devices are enmeshed in strategic games through which those ‘who try to control, determine and limit the freedom of others are themselves free individuals who have at their disposal certain instruments they can use to govern others’ (Foucault, 2000: 300). If resistance is a polarity of any power relationship, it is also a permanent component of the ongoing production process (i.e. making and usage) of any security device. Far from any romantic vision of resistance, the analytical focus on appropriation of socio-technical devices makes possible a better understanding of security practices. As a relational concept, appropriation allows us to shed light on hidden forms of resistance while specifying modes of agency that emerge from the relationships between a vast array of equipment and social actors. Policies concretely exist through what field agents do (Lipsky, 1980; Dubois, forthcoming). The appropriation of security devices does not just represent the more or less accurate implementation of pre-existing political decisions. It is also a crucial part of the ongoing process of (in)security production as such.

To conclude, we could use the analytics of devices to propose a unifying and interdisciplinary formula to study security as ‘security practices = actors’ social dispositions + socio-technical characteristics of devices + context’. Many readers will have recognized an amendment of Bourdieu’s (1979) formula for analysing social practices: ‘[(habitus) (capital)] + field = practice’. Let us be clear: the call for an analytics of devices that might enable an articulation of different approaches does not end with the exclusive promotion of an amended Bourdieusian approach to practices with a supplement of actor-network theory. Here, the sense of our formula seeks to be more generic in order to open up the spectrum of theoretical moves while taking systematic account of empirical aspects for critical security studies. Analysing security practices through devices goes hand in hand with the examination of socialization processes and social contexts of action, whether or not these are conceptualized in terms of habitus and fields.