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Security Dialogue
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Securing the Political Imagination: Popular Culture, the Security Dispositif and the Biometric State

Benjamin J. Muller

Department of Political Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada, bmuller{at}sfu.ca

What is the relationship between popular culture and the reliance on risk management as a framework for governance in the emerging security dispositif? Furthermore, how is one to understand the influence of culture and cultural forces in relation to the emerging biometric state and the alleged security imperatives therein? This article contends that the emerging security dispositif, and the associated imaginations and cultural performances that sustain and shape it, are vital to the production of what is referred to here as the `biometric state'. Motivated by an obsession with technologies of risk and practices of risk management, the biometric state is defined by the prevalence of virtual borders and reliance on biometric identifiers such as passports, trusted-traveller programmes and national ID cards, as well as the forms of social sorting that accompany these manoeuvres. Raising the marriage of convenience that connects two related dispositifs of security — geopolitics and biopolitics — the article considers the relationship between their referent objects: the state and everyday life, respectively. More specifically, popular culture integral to sustaining the emerging security dispositif forms the core of the analysis, as the article asserts the constitutive possibilities of popular culture.

Key Words: Biometrics • political imagination • technologies of risk • culture • dispositif • biopolitics

Security Dialogue, Vol. 39, No. 2-3, 199-220 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0967010608088775
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[Abstract] [PDF]