Harvey Molotch is professor of sociology and metropolitan studies at New York University. His other books include the classic Urban Fortunes and the more recent Where Stuff Comes From.

Against Security

How We Go Wrong at Airports, Subways, and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger

By Harvey Molotch

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2012 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-16358-1

Contents

Preface to the Paperback Edition, ix,
Preface, xvii,
Acknowledgments, xxi,
Chapter 1 Introduction: Colors of Security, 1,
Chapter 2 Bare Life: Restroom Anxiety and the Urge for Control, 22,
Chapter 3 Below the Subway: Taking Care Day In and Day Out with Noah McClain, 50,
Chapter 4 Wrong-Way Flights: Pushing Humans Away, 85,
Chapter 5 Forting Up the Skyline: Rebuilding at Ground Zero, 128,
Chapter 6 Facing Katrina: Illusions of Levee and Compulsion to Build, 154,
Chapter 7 Conclusion: Radical Ambiguity and the Default to Decency, 192,
Notes, 225,
Index, 251,

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Colors of Security

How does anxiety travel into artifacts of life, people's ordinary practices, and public policies—policies that can sometimes engulf the world? This book traces fear, from the soup of indistinct but keenly felt worries over one's own body, to the hard nuts of bombs and bastions. In between, and connecting them up, are smaller-scale sites and responses, like the hardware set up at airports or the barbed wire meant to keep some out or others in. I examine strategies for security against nature as well as against the machinations of human beings and their organizations.

Through various intermediaries of institutions and physical implements, individual angst transmutes into the power of authorities who themselves, of course, come to have an interest in stoking the fears that feed them. Amidst the resulting confusions and ambiguities, we—all of us—are stuck with the goal of distinguishing the sensible from the non-sensible, the potentially constructive from the self-defeating. Bad things do happen, and death is the final outcome no matter what; but the routes to death can be more or less reasonable, more or less decent—a guiding assumption in the chapters that follow. This book is against security as officially practiced, favoring instead meaningful ways to extend lives and provide people with decent experience.

My analytic strategy is threefold. First is the effort to understand this massive social, moral, and political thing called "security," and what goes on in its name. I try to explain where it all comes from, including the shapes and procedures that greet us at a place like the airport. A second goal emerges from the idea that, in the specific and sometimes hell-bent responses to threats, we can see how a particular world works. So studying security is a method, a way to learn how—through people's scramble for survival, capacity, and position—"normal" life operates. A third focus is practical: I assume the role of consultant, the kind who is seldom if ever brought in because I am looking for the benign in a situation that is more often in hunt for the demonic. I recommend, in the form of concluding "what to do" sections in each chapter, alternatives to the command-and-control tactics that so often take hold as public policy. Instead of the resort to surveillance, walls, and hierarchy, I indicate what I take to be more effective—and happier—solutions. I try to be very concrete: I get practical, right to the kind of equipment that should be present and how it should be used. This is a book of analysis and also a book of directions.

I do not shrink from the mundane things, the public and private artifacts routinely consumed in everyday life. They cumulate as pleasures and punishments in the course of a day or lifetime, and they can facilitate safety or danger at critical and unexpected instances. I am drawn to the late Susan Leigh Star's call for an "ethnography of infrastructure." A well-designed lever calls forth the right kind of pressure in just the right spot to make it work and with that a special human satisfaction as well as functional outcome. We can see this by watching closely and talking to people. When a contraption frustrates, individuals will turn their displeasure into random bangs, pushes, and pulls that may well further derange an object's functioning. In happier outcomes, objects seduce with a "technology of enchantment," as the anthropologist Alfred Gell once called it. In my own research of some years ago, I came to appreciate how utility and aesthetics, pleasure and practicality, are never separate spheres. Our lives are the sum total of our interactions with ensembles of artifacts and other people, including the people who are involved in managing the appliances. A misinterpretation of the machine, among workers overlooking telltale cues of malfunction at a nuclear plant, say, or system managers misreading calibrations for a space launch, can generate terrible trouble. And sometimes it can be ordinary people who notice, if they are provided the opportunity, that something has gone awry.

As the micro and macro intertwine, I try to capture something of the meet-up at security. Nothing is more micro than existential threat, the fear that one may cease to be through biological demise, but also through social death by faux pas that goes beyond the pale. Fear of failure, abject failure like messing in one's pants, sticks on biography and sometimes on history. Nothing is more macro than the collective action that could result. As they form businesses, open plays, build cities, or make wars, humans carry their quotidian humblings as continuous companions. You don't have to be whole-hog Freudian to think that our early worries stay with us not only as private trouble but also as public forces. Life continues reinforcing our original vulnerability, with both ridicule and humiliation always in potential play.

The driving force behind all of it is fear that one's taken-for-granted world is being lost—in a fleeting moment or a longer durée. Security, for my purposes, means being able to assume that day-to-day, moment-to-moment human planning can go forward. When the whole welter of personal and collective projects can be thought about and acted on, succeeded in, and failed upon, the normalcy of the human condition is in play. I am not directed toward security in the sense of material satisfaction—a decent house or full belly—however righteous such goals may be. I'm thinking of security as the feeling and reality that such goals are even possible to pursue, that there is a sensible and reliable world in which to act. It is a more-or-less state; no individual and no community can be fully secure either in feeling or in reality, but some are closer than others. Places, offices, bureaucracies, and functionaries that explicitly use the word "security," as on their signs, uniforms, and mastheads, are working this idea as a professional and business practice. I am drawn to such designations in this book as relevant sites for thinking and further examination.

With so much at stake, there is a compulsion among those so charged with responsibility but also among many other people as well, to do something. Some individuals respond to disaster by fielding resources with imaginative generosity. Others may be mesmerized by routine and proceed as irrelevant bystanders. And still, as another alternative, there are scoundrels who revert to selfish power and reinforce their domination. All will be in evidence in the chapters that follow.

Although this book is overwhelmingly oriented to contemporary responses and from a...