The Performance of Security as a Site of Biopolitical Struggle

Introduction

There are many different types of advertisements that exist in the New York City transit system. On any given day, at any given time, as people walk through the corridors of subway stations, down steps, onto subway platforms, and, eventually, onto trains, they come in contact with a host of advertisements that seek to grab their attention. Some of these advertisements are successful in that goal, but many are not. In late 2002, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) implemented its “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign. Coined by advertising veteran Allen Kay of the MTA’s long-standing advertising firm Korey Kay, the campaign consists of advertisements on trains, on train station kiosks, on bulletin boards, on the backs of metro cards, and in the latest installment, on subway steps connecting subway platforms to subway corridors or entrances in and out of train stations (Sylvia, 2013).

In his book Against Security: How We Go Wrong at Airports, Subways, and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger, Harvey Molotch (2012) reviews this campaign and other examples of security measures to provide an overall critique of what he refers to as “security theater” and to also offer up some suggestions for good governance within the New York City subway system. His research is an important reflection on the actual goals and actions of governance, and a nice introduction to the idea of good governance. Molotch’s work is a testament to studies that are attempting to critique the “command-and-control” procedures that developed as a response to September 11, 2001, and my research on this campaign situates itself within this type of literature.

Ironically, this particular campaign never really stood out to me as a commuter (but why, I might ask . . . ) until my advisor suggested that I make it a case study for my research, which was attempting to understand the relationship between the greater “war on terrorism” and the utility of a politics of fear. Between 2002 and 2008, the years in which I studied this campaign, there were several generations of advertisements—the first consisted of the campaign slogan itself and the last generation of advertisements thanked New Yorkers and reminded them of the necessity of their continued support in these matters. Through this research project, I wanted to comprehend the connection this local advertising campaign had with the greater Bush administration initiated “war on terrorism” (Sylvia, 2013). My research considered how this advertising campaign affects individuals on the train or how it attempts to brand sense perception through its messages. Inevitably, I wanted to understand the relationship this particular campaign had with the politics of fear as a mechanism of social control; I wanted to understand how this campaign sought to discipline a population into “seeing and saying” and the consequences that exist within this effort. I focused my research on the trains themselves rather than the subway system as a whole, primarily because that is where most of the advertisements were located, but also because it is a closed space, and there is something about the potential for affect in a closed space that mattered to my research and to what I was attempting to understand at that time.

Approaching this advertising campaign through the lens of examining the discursive practice of terrorism brought me to a number of questions regarding what constitutes terrorism itself, and how something like terrorism comes to be defined, which in itself is an illustration of discursive practice. As a result of this research, I understood that this campaign, and possibly the greater “war on terrorism” as well, was a reflection of the practice of security in American society or perhaps, more honestly, it was a reflection of the concern over security that society had come to assume. For Michel Foucault, the norm of security that unfolds in society, and the meaning that is attached to this norm, is not only a discursive practice; it is also a regulatory control. This norm of security is thus something that is governed or, more specifically, it is one technique through which a population can be governed. He referred to the “normalizing” society as one where the norm of discipline and the norm of regulation meet:

. . . there is one element that will circulate between the disciplinary and the regulatory, which will also be applied to body and population alike, which will make it possible to control both the disciplinary order of the body and the aleatory events that occur in the biological multiplicity. The elements that circulate between the two is the norm. The norm is something that can be applied to the body one wishes to discipline and a population one wishes to regularize. (Foucault, 2003, p. 252)

If the normalizing society is one in which the disciplinary and regulatory meet, we can consider the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign as an example of this process of normalization. Imagine an advertisement that consists of a yellow background with the words “If You See Something, Say Something: Be Suspicious of Anything Unattended.” Above these words, there is a picture of an empty train car with a sole black bag underneath a seat. And then, consider the moment when bags in the subway system become suspicious objects: a moment in which the response to these bags is both regulated in terms of how this object is seen and then disciplined in terms of how individuals are supposed to respond. This campaign is one mechanism through which the perception of security is altered; but, more importantly, for Foucault, campaigns like this would be considered a technique of social control.

In thinking of techniques of security and the normalization process through which they unfold, it is important to distinguish that in these discussions Foucault is more often referencing bodies themselves rather than individuals and/or specific populations. This is not to say that the individual is necessarily separate from the body, but in preferring a discussion of the body over the individual, Foucault (2003) was attempting to move beyond theories of sovereignty and to situate his study of governmentality in understanding how power mechanisms actually move and/or, in this case, how they control. The body itself was the location for these disciplinary mechanisms and regulatory controls. The body itself was something that came to be acted on, disciplined, habituated, regularized, altered, arranged, and also potentially employed. It is what made his thesis on power so illuminating: that he could understand that social control is actually something that works through individual bodies not necessarily on them. Whereas this advertising campaign acts as a potential security technique informing and altering a population’s response to objects and events, the body is the mechanism through which this security technique moves.

Still, it becomes a question of the types of responses that individuals have to campaigns like this. Though there may be an implicit or explicit attempt to discipline a population into seeing and saying, there are a number of ways that people can respond (or not respond) to this campaign. The subway system, like any open space, is a place where the negotiation of culture occurs. It is a place where meanings of security and the workings of techniques of security and surveillance initiated by governing institutions are negotiated as well. In what follows below, I consider the process of normalization that unfolds in the subway system and the relationship this process has to Foucault’s understanding of biopolitics. I also consider Foucault’s arguments on the utility of governmental intervention within a neoliberal form of government to understand how this intervention is a useful mechanism of governance. I conclude by suggesting that although governing institutions may seek to utilize certain disciplinary mechanisms and regulatory controls to govern a population, the power of these forms of social control actually reside within the population.

Normalizing the Performance of Security

In his lecture series, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France 1977-1978, Foucault (2007) negotiates his theory of governmentality and argues “the general economy of power in our societies is becoming a domain of security” (p. 11). Interestingly, when he introduced the idea of security and the type of understanding of security this lecture series would assume, he used the example of legal punishment to tease out the implications of what he referred to as an age of security. He then considered mechanisms or techniques of security that governance utilizes to maintain control, where punishment operates as one of these techniques. In his review of criminality, Foucault (2007) reflects on the shifting time periods of these mechanisms of control from a form of criminality which focused on laying down the law and punishing individuals, to a form of law which focused on surveillance and correction, and, finally, to a mechanism of control not typical to the legal code or discipline but rather one of an overall apparatus of security, which is the focus of these lectures. But to be clear, it is not as if there is a distinct and mutually exclusive legal age and then a disciplinary age and then an age of security; rather, these various stages and/or techniques overlap, though there is a chronological order to which they unfold.

He thus uses these lectures to tease out the implications of an age of security and to consider examples through which security mechanisms, which are directed toward a population, function. However, he argued that these security measures are different from disciplinary mechanisms that are directed toward individuals. He suggests examples such as urban planning, the question of scarcity, and epidemics to think through the relationship of government to a particular event to demonstrate these security mechanisms and their relationship to his idea of population. When studying the advertising campaign in the subway system, I was more interested in applying Foucault’s thoughts on the process of the normalization of security and how, as a mechanism of this normalizing process, this one small campaign in the subway system could act as a technique of social control. In this respect, I focused more on the disciplinary mechanisms of this campaign, as these mechanisms provided an example for the type of inquiry into what Foucault referred to as the “art of governmentality,” or the art of governing, which for Foucault was very much connected to the question of security (Foucault, 2007). As I read through the Birth of Biopolitics lectures of 1978 to 1979, I was reminded of his argument that a top-down control really does proceed from the bottom-up: that as he understood it, the art of governing meant a control that seizes populations and renders them subject to its will and control, rather than a government that exists through the general will itself.

In his review of definitions of liberalism, Foucault suggests that within a liberal form of government there is an inherent limit to what government can do. And in these lectures, he attempts to trace the history of the art of liberal governing, but not in terms of what governments actually do; rather, he traces the rationalization they use to legitimize their “exercise of political sovereignty” (Foucault, 2008, p. 2). He does want to consider governmental practices, but at the level at which they are reflected on and rationalized within this art of governing. In considering his discussions of the state, ¹ he seeks to understand how the state imposes limitations on itself, rather than consider those limitations that are imposed externally. He admits that in this lecture series, he had hoped to discuss his ideas on biopolitics more extensively, but that to understand biopolitics he first needed to understand the “general regime of this government reason,” which for Foucault was liberalism, as it was liberalism that provided the framework or foundation for biopolitics to emerge.

This reflects an important discussion regarding the mechanisms of the security campaign in the subway system as they too exist in and through mechanisms of liberal governance. His understanding of a security age which is inevitably tied to a disciplinary age and a legal age where the boundaries of where one age begins and another one ends is not always so clear is indicative of the complexity and difficulty of the political world that we live in. This campaign thus reflects the negotiation of liberalism that Foucault spoke to. In the History of Sexuality, Vol 1: An Introduction, Foucault articulates that “the disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population constituted the two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed” (1978, p. 139). And here, in this definition of Biopolitics, he suggests that biopower begins with the “explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” (Foucault, 1978, p. 140). This subjugation is the second pole to which Foucault referred: the regulation of the population.

In their edited volume, Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death, Clough and Willse (2011) suggest that biopolitics “gives the ground for today’s reformulation of governance, the platform for the extension of biopolitics beyond itself” (p. 3). They consider the capacity to which the life and death of a population is invested in and/or calculated, and the essays in this volume attest to this calibration of life and death. But this calibration takes place in the transition from liberal forms of governing to what Foucault referred to as neoliberalism, which actually calls for the intervention of governance on the behalf of current political economic structures, rather than the laissez-faire approach reminiscent of earlier forms of liberalism. Here, Clough and Willse (2011) suggest that with the advent of neoliberalism, a crises-oriented sociality is actually welcomed and potentially lucrative:

. . . unlike liberalism, neoliberalism does not eschew interventions into the market, but rather seeks to secure its conditions of possibility, both by assisting in the calibration of the market’s indeterminate and nontotalizable features to risk assessment and by inviting a crisis-oriented sociality. (p. 3)

The question becomes whether or not this security campaign in the subway system reflects this moment of a crises-oriented sociality that is both welcomed and potentially lucrative. As the discussion proceeds throughout this article, I turn to these considerations to reflect on the moment of seeing and saying and to consider what this particular moment tells us about governmentality.

In his article “Governing Terror: The State of Emergency of Biopolitical Emergence,” Michael Dillon (2007) reminds us that, for Foucault, the discourse of security includes “a certain set of mechanisms through which species life is regulated” (p. 8). He argues that modernity has two great apparatuses of security: one revolves around the question of sovereign territory and the other around the problematics of life—or biopolitics. In this discussion of biopolitics, he assumes that when “life is made the principle of formation around which the problematization of security, fear, and danger revolves, then the politics of security are transformed” (Dillon, 2007, p. 11). This problematization is similar to what Clough and Willse suggested in considering a crises-oriented sociality. But here, Dillon considers that this transformation has everything to do with the approach to governing individual bodies and the attempt to control these bodies. Even though the insecurity and uncertainty that surrounds the governing or preventing of terror is the heart of the security apparatus regarding terrorism, Dillon surmises that “the logic of threat installed by liberal biopolitics of security is ultimately not that of an externalized enemy” (Dillon, 2007, p. 12), but rather one of life itself—and what the body can do and/or what it allows, biologically speaking. However, Brian Massumi (2009) reminds us that biopower is about the actual control of life, perhaps due to the threat that Dillon describes here. In other words, it is not about disciplining bodies; it is literally about the power to make live or to let die.

In this consideration of biopower, I would argue that the campaign in the subway system acted more as a disciplinary technique of normalizing the “seeing and saying” capabilities of a commuting population, rather than a technique of biopolitical control. It is one that asked this population to be the eyes and ears of a surveillant assemblage geared toward population control, but this control, although not completely separate from biopolitics, is not connected to the question of governing life or death as Massumi here suggests. However, it is an intervention nonetheless.

The Body Politic as a Site of Social Control

To approach the security campaign in the subway system as a governmental intervention that seeks to be more inclusive—or, rather, seeks to define and decide what is in and out or what is seen and said—allows us to consider Foucault’s ideas concerning neoliberal governance and the art of government that would situate itself on this greater intervention but less government. It then allows us to consider if this intervention focuses on making liberties more productive, as Senellart suggests (Foucault, 2008). It also allows us to consider the role that individuals have within this intervention.

In an informative introduction into the historical relationship between biopolitical controls and the body politic, Eugene Thacker (2011) reminds us to consider populations as a particular body or entity; one in which the politics of a community is solidified through the population itself. This is useful, as my research on the subway system attempted to understand how individual bodies are the mechanism through which the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign moves in an attempt to understand the on-going, unfolding discursive practice of security, but I understood this in terms of the disciplinary mechanisms used to control populations or the body politic, rather than those biopolitical mechanisms that are an attempt to manage the well-being or the “life” of bodies themselves. I understood this in terms of the attempt by governing authorities to manage the movement of commuters in and out of the subway system, and how the messages and surveillance techniques of “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign sought to influence or affect this population. This is the point at which individuals are incorporated into the attempt to resocialize norms concerning security by governing institutions. It is the moment where their liberties and what they choose to do with these liberties turn into the mechanism through which these attempts at social control take hold. It is as if we can actually envision that the power of this campaign resides in what individuals choose to see and say. But it is a choice. And there is a place for agency in and through this act of seeing and saying.

Considering governmental intervention as a mechanism of politics and biopolitics as the power to make live or to let die, or as the power to calibrate life and death, Carl Schmitt envisioned, or attempted to construct, a nonideological conception of “the political,” which ultimately justified Hitler’s Regime and thus designated Schmitt as the major ideologue of the Nazi party (Schmitt, 1996). Schmitt’s political philosophy was influenced by his overall critique of liberal democracy and the pluralist politics he believed weakened the Weimar Republic. For Schmitt, political liberalism’s reliance on procedure and the corruption of the Republic itself led to depoliticalization. He thus set out to theorize a concept of “the political” to “elaborate on his conception of sovereignty or the making of decisions, which concern the exception” (Schmitt, 1996). Notions of “the political” are hard to define, and even Schmitt himself commented on the fluidity of the concept, but as a basic definition he regarded the political as the “arena of authority rather than general law that requires decisions which are singular, absolute and final” ³ (Schmitt, 1996, p. XIV). For Schmitt, “the political” rests on its own ultimate decision and the fact that it literally asserts itself as “the political,” particularly through notions of exceptionality. So here, a “state of exception” comes into play simply because it designates itself as one. In this sense, in moments of exception—or in politics in general—it is almost as if the negotiation that takes place in and through democratic practice was the problem of liberal democracy. And although this campaign is an attempt to regulate what commuters see and say, it still leaves this power to act in their hands, which according to this understanding of Schmitt is part of the problem.

Schmitt’s notion of friend/enemy became the distinction through which “the political” and the assertion of exceptionality were defined. For instance, in thinking of the realm of ethics he saw this as situated mostly around conceptualizations of good/evil but in the realm of the political, these distinctions actualized themselves through the State declaring notions of friends and enemies. It is in times when a clear enemy is defined (and thus a clear identity formed) that “the political” is most intense and productive; as Schmitt remarked: “defining the enemy clearly defines oneself and what one is to do” (Schmitt, 1996). The implications on Nazi ideology and the cultural production of this ideology, particularly as it designated race as one form of this distinction, become quite hauntingly evident. From this theoretical perspective, influenced to some degree by both Hobbes and Machiavelli, a strong state must secure a clear identity and a clear course of action. And for Schmitt, it is through the declaring of one’s enemies that this identity becomes secured.

Considering the lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics, and his arguments concerning the question of sovereignty and the question of the governing of subjects, Foucault did not speak of an explicit state of exception; rather, his lectures sought to focus on the “rationalization of governmental practice in the exercise of political sovereignty” (Foucault, 2008, p. 2) and the emergence of the principle of the self-limitation of government within and through liberalism. For Foucault, the development of neoliberalism was not concerned with direct government intervention per se, but an intervention through investing in human interest. However, for Schmitt, the question of sovereignty, which includes an explicit critique of liberalism, rests distinctly in the power of decision within the state of exception. In his book titled The State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben (2005) searches for the biopolitical significance of the state of exception through various legal traditions of Western states. He assumes the arguments posited by Carl Schmitt and suggests that the essential relationship between sovereignty and the state of exception was established by Schmitt himself (Agamben, 2005). Here he argues,

The state of exception is neither external or internal to the juridical order, and the problem of defining it concerns precisely a threshold, or a zone of indifference, where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other. (p. 23)

The issue for Agamben is not to clarify whether or not the state of exception has a juridical nature, but rather to explore its relationship to the law itself. For Agamben, it is not the declaring of friends and enemies that is the most crucial distinction in the state of exception, but the power to make live or let die as a form of decision. He also disagrees with Schmitt that the state of exception is established through dictatorship, as it is the suspension of law that is necessary for a state of exception; not a particular form of government. He maintains that the state of exception is a space “devoid of law” but one that is actually essential to law as well and that it is the space of negotiation that the decision allows which constitutes its exceptional qualities (Agamben, 2005). And he paraphrases Foucault as he states, “a society’s threshold of biological modernity is situated at the point in which the species and the individual as a simple living body become what is at stake in a society’s political strategies” (Agamben, 1998, p. 3). In his discussion of bios as the qualified life of a citizen, and zoe as bare life or natural life, Agamben designates biopolitics as the entry of zoe into the political sphere. But, here, he specifies that it is not just that bare life has entered into the political sphere, as it may have always been there, but that through the exception bare life is something that can be “included solely through an exclusion” (Agamben, 1998, p. 11).

In this text, Agamben argues that the exception is a kind of exclusion, though it acts as a way of including as well, as it attempts to decide or define what is in and what is out; he uses the example of Homo Sacer—that which can be killed but not sacrificed—as a way of making this distinction of the power of the sovereign to decide between life and death. But, more importantly, in this exploration of biopolitics, he designates the overall “growing inclusion of man’s natural life in the mechanisms and calculations of power” (Agamben, 1998, p. 119). Although it may be the power of exception that is used to justify the political or the sovereign decisions on various issues of life and death, it is the incorporation of individual lives into the calculations of power that are most illuminating for theories attempting to understand biopolitics, particularly if this politics is one of greater intervention but less government.

The campaign in the subway system is an attempt by a governing institution to redefine notions of terrorism and security through this process of intervention. It seeks to influence a population in and through their ability to see and say, but it also acts as a mechanism of inclusion, where any and all eyes are asked to see and to say. The very inclusion of the population into the idea of the exception becomes quite apparent. Considering this negotiation of seeing and saying as a site of the negotiation of exception, Laura Martin (2010) analyzes the United States Transportation Security Administration’s regulation of bomb jokes in airports as an example of the greater surveillance techniques utilized by transportation authorities. However, this regulation also provides a way for Martin to explore why it may or may not be appropriate for travelers to make bomb jokes in an airport; or rather, it provides an example of why making these jokes becomes a problematic for the discursive practice of security and for governing institutions like the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

Although Martin views the regulation of these jokes through a biopolitical lens, and as an illustration of exploring the performance of security to discursively understand what potentially exists beneath these jokes, and in the response to these jokes as well, she uses this example to suggest that it may not be that disciplinary techniques have been replaced by biopolitical controls, but that perhaps they work alongside biopolitical controls, particularly at a time when the “securitized subject” is in a state of flux. In her article, Martin (2010, p. 18) articulates,

The airport represents, therefore, a site in which “flows” of information and capital are facilitated against a background condensed and highly regulated surveillance practices. The airport epitomizes, in short, how the problems of mobility and state power, capital and security, geo-politics and geo-economics congeal as a problem of security, addressed through combined surveillance and disciplinary practices.

And, in this sense, this space which witnesses a constant flow of information is a space that is ever open and one that is regulated through surveillance practices perhaps as a result of this state of flux. She suggests that this social space is thus also a space where the exception can assert itself, and as she focuses on the negotiation of the acceptance of bomb jokes in the airport, she touches on the importance of language in the formation of subjects, or the formation of discourse, that is critical to the performance of security that governance seeks to control. However, this performance is always potentially an emergence, which can evade, alter, or agree to these notions and practices of security.

The same type of process unfolds in the subway system. These advertisements, and the meaning of these advertisements, are a negotiation as well. Although this advertising campaign is an attempt by governing authorities to assert itself into defining the discourse of threat and security, it is something through which the population ultimately decides. In the consideration of the relationship of this campaign to disciplinary mechanisms and biopolitical controls, discussions of emergence become critical. Within a biopolitical or neoliberal framework, there seems to be a general understanding that certain types of uncertainty or emergency are lucrative, particularly in the shift to the biopolitical management of life; though, paradoxically, this uncertainty is a site of insecurity and control as well. This insecurity has led to the use of preemptive tactics, which seek to minimize or counter certain forms of emergence (Dillon, 2007; Massumi, 2009). But what it all comes down to, and what Foucault perhaps best explained, is how these forms of emergence are interpreted and how discursive practices inform these understandings.

In an article published in 2007, Michael Dillon (2007) posits an argument on governing terror that suggests

Governing terror first references the massive global security effort that is now devoted to the war on terror. Its primary purpose is to bring terror within the political and calculative control of western security technologies with the aim of destroying, or reducing it to manageable proportions. In that sense, the aim is to eliminate terror through the advance of good government or make terror at least governable through the advance of security technologies. (p. 8)

If, as Foucault (2008) suggested, neoliberalism is about more intervention but less government—but at the same time, uncertainty and emergency can be seen as lucrative economically or otherwise—there is only a certain level of control governing institutions can achieve in these conditions, perhaps there is only a certain level of security that they can achieve as well. In the midst of these negotiations, the campaign in the subway system reflects the moment in which a governing institution attempts to intervene or assert itself as a decision over what security means or, perhaps, it is through this form of intervention that it attempts to establish a limit to uncertainty and attempt to reinstitute its hold on social control.

However, if security truly is a performance that the body politic must assert in and through itself, even if governing institutions attempt to intervene in this performance, it is still something that is left for the body politic to decide. And in this respect, it would seem that the ultimate decision rests within the body politic. The state of exception does exist in this type of framework just not in the way that Schmitt had originally envisioned it.

Conclusion

Though biopolitics may be the framework to understand the shifts in regulatory controls that exist in and through neoliberalism, the performance of security is a framework that provides an understanding of the disciplinary mechanisms that exist alongside these biopolitical controls. The performance of security that exists within the subway system becomes an important space for governmental intervention, one where this campaign acts as a mechanism of intervention and potential control. However, the campaign itself is also a performance of security. And it is one that is left to negotiation. My offerings for debates and theories regarding biopolitics are limited as I have come to the conclusion that this campaign does not reflect a biopolitical control, at least not in the way that Foucault had originally intended; but rather this campaign acts as a disciplinary normative technique of social control. Clearly, this is a performance of security, but the performance of security becomes biopolitical when it decides, determines, or calibrates life and/or death. And this is not the case with this particular campaign.

In his lectures on biopolitics, Foucault suggests that with the shift to neoliberalism there is a greater investment in human capital (Clough & Willse, 2011; Foucault, 2008). He suggests that human capital includes “innate elements and other acquired elements” like education (Foucault, 2008, p. 227), but he is also referring to the investment in genetic human capital and the reproduction of this capital as well. Considering this investment in human capital, Brett Neilson (2012) highlights the interactions between two various biopolitical developments, which he refers to as the capital investment of molecular life and the social disinvestment toward the well-being of the body. Here he is focusing on the question of aging, including the idea that society once thought the body would not need care, but that now the aging body is seen as an economic burden on society. It is a nice illustration of how the body becomes a site or concern of biopolitical control: emphasizing how governance needs to care for the aging body and/or take it into consideration. But in this sense, I no longer think that the security campaign in the subway system represents this type of biopolitical control. I do think this campaign represents an investment in the governing technique of asking individuals to see and say, and that it attempts to influence the perception of this population, but I do not think it is a point of biopolitical control in the same way that Neilson highlights.

However, this campaign does reflect Foucault, Clough and Willse, and others’ arguments concerning governmental intervention within the framework of neoliberal governance as the attempt to govern through intervention but perhaps by governing less. Advertising is a useful mechanism through which governing institutions can influence and/or reach a population through more indirect measures. It is the thought that liberties might be something that governing institutions invest in that I am left with. Could it be that this campaign actually offers liberties, rather than acts as a mechanism that merely takes them away? What does that suggest about this campaign if it is true? Is it an attempt by governing institutions to be more inclusive or to redefine what or whom it includes (and by extension, what or whom it excludes)? And if so, what are the implications of this attempt?

The power to see and say in a democratic form of government, or perhaps in any form of government, is quite powerful. And something of this campaign speaks to that form of power and to the ways in which the liberty to see and say can be politically useful for governing institutions. If this is in fact a moment of a crises-oriented sociality that is lucrative, but one where a governing institution seeks certain forms of social control, it can only achieve these controls through a body politic that remains complicit and/or in agreement. The brilliance of the negotiation of this moment is reflected in the case of this one campaign in the subway system. It demonstrates that meanings of security are an emergence through which the population ultimately decides. And in this sense, security is thus something that a population negotiates as well. Inevitably, regardless of governmental intervention, disciplinary techniques, and biopolitical controls, what we are left with is this on-going negotiation.