security

"In this essay, I treat the airport checkpoint as a discursive space where the state, the airlines, workers, imaging and sensing technologies and travelers converge to orchestrate and reproduce a set of protocols designated to ensure wha the TSA describes as 'freedom of movement'. Rather than confine my analysis to individuals and their private property, however, I treat the checkpoint as a site of biopower that represents the shift from a paradigm of 'national defense' to one of 'national security' described by Hardt and Negri (Multitude: War and Democracy in the age of Empire). 'The notion of security', they explain, 'signals a lack of distinction between inside and outside, between the military and the police. Whereas "defense" involves a protective barrier against external threats, "security" justifies a constant martial activity equally in the homeland and abroad'...


the above is a quotation from an article one of my professors just sent me, the author, Lisa Parks, took all kinds of discreet photographs in airport security checkpoints, and is investigating them through the lenses of labor, the continuities between looking and touching and critiques the structures of surveillance that have emerged post 9/11...